And Aram begat Aminadab; and Aminadab begat Naasson; and Naasson begat Salmon;
The verse records Aram, Aminadab, Naasson and Salmon in succession as plain history, establishing the reality of those ancestors and presenting Jesus as a real person in history. It belongs to the complete genealogy that presents Christ as the Son of David and establishes His royal lineage, showing He is the Messiah born King of the Jews and as Joseph's reputed son entitled to David's throne. Matthew traces that legal and royal lineage through Joseph in the male line from Abraham and David through Solomon, counted as Joseph's descendant and heir under Jewish law. Luke traces His literal blood and human descent through Mary from Adam in Nathan's line, with Joseph named in place of Mary because genealogies listed males and a son-in-law was counted as a son. As part of that genealogy the verse shows He truly became a member of the human race by birth into the human family, accepting a weakened human inheritance after four thousand years of sin yet remaining without sin as a sympathetic brother and High Priest.
Wording and Historic Record
The wording turns on the term for a man fathering a child, and the same Greek term can also carry the sense of bringing forth or giving birth and is used in a figurative sense for being born of God. The verse sets Aram, Aminadab, Naasson, and Salmon in succession as a plain historical record rather than a text for fanciful or spiritualized interpretation. That succession places Aminadab, Naasson, and Salmon within the literal lineage of Jesus through the history of Israel, linking Him to Abraham. By naming these ancestors it establishes their historical reality and the reality of the events belonging to their times, and by its place in Matthew it presents Jesus as a real person in history.
The gospel genealogical records stand as original contemporary documents, raw material for history rather than digested systematic history. They are spread before readers with simplicity and guileless confidence, without editorial explanation to harmonize parallel accounts of Christ's birth. Like the two narratives of creation, the two copies of the Decalogue, and the repeated records of the kings, they tell their own story in rawness, incompleteness, and redundancy, fitted to no system or theory. Their discrepancies are inevitable in such a mass of material, and their value lies in proving the materials to be primitive facts and original data bearing contemporary authorship and the artlessness of conscious truth rather than secondary formation or mythical imagining.
The genealogy is given by Matthew, the faithful man, one of the twelve apostles also called Levi. He was a publican or tax collector under the Romans, from a class especially hated by the Jews and often dishonest and oppressive. The Gospel containing it was written about A.D. 50 to 60, nineteen to twenty-nine years after the crucifixion. The kingdom of heaven is one of its great key words, and it records the Sermon on the Mount and other matters not found in the other Gospels.
Arrangement of Generations
Matthew 1:4 belongs to the human genealogy of Christ from Abraham to the birth of Jesus, in which generation marks the steps in family descent such as father, son, and grandson, with each generation traced from father to son. Counted together it establishes Christ as Abraham's direct descendant through forty-two generations from Abraham to Christ. The genealogy is summed up as three periods of fourteen generations: from Abraham to David, from David until the carrying away into Babylon, and from the carrying away into Babylon unto Christ.
Matthew arranges the genealogy in three groups of fourteen, or double sevens, to aid memory and mark three stages of Hebrew history. To form those three sections of fourteen generations each, the genealogy omits some generations. The list is therefore a selected lineage, not necessarily a complete list of every generation or an unbroken father-to-son descent.
As elsewhere in the Bible an ancestor may be called a descendant or son of a more remote ancestor. Three generations are omitted by design to preserve this symmetry, not through ignorance of the known history. What is recorded is succession to the royal claim and royal inheritance from David to Joseph, establishing Jesus as entitled to David's throne as Joseph's reputed son.
Those forty-two generations from Abraham to Christ span periods of very different lengths, so the genealogy does not establish a fixed number of years for a generation or a timetable for Christ's return. Dividing the time from Abraham to Jesus by those forty-two generations gives about forty or more years to a generation, which some figure at somewhere around forty years, but that figure cannot be depended upon to fix the length of a generation. God has given no definite time allotted to a generation, and has not designed to fix that time in the last generation.
Generation sometimes means race, people, or nation, and sometimes means the people living on the earth at one time. It would probably be considered longer in the days of the antediluvian patriarchs than at the present time. Matthew 1:4 shows one father-to-son generation in the Bible rule for counting generations.
Counted together with Genesis 11 and Luke 3:23-38, it shows six thousand years from creation hold fewer than two hundred such generations. So a thousand generations means more than a thousand and requires at least twenty-four thousand years yet future from 1868, meaning unlimited time from generation to generation. This proves keeping of the ten commandments is perpetuated forever.
Matthew and Luke Compared
Matthew's list containing Aram, Aminadab, Naasson, and Salmon is the legal and royal lineage of Jesus through Joseph, His legal and reputed father, carried in the male line from Abraham to David and through Solomon to Joseph. It is not given as Jesus' literal blood descent, but under Jewish law Jesus was counted as Joseph's descendant and heir, and through Joseph He held legal royal heirship and claim as heir to David's throne. Luke's list is distinct from it, tracing Christ's literal blood and human descent through Mary from Adam to Mary in the line of Nathan, Solomon's brother. Joseph is there called the son of Heli because a son-in-law was counted as a son, Heli being Mary's father, Joseph's father-in-law, and Jesus' grandfather, and Joseph is named in place of Mary because genealogies customarily listed males through whom inheritance passed. Jesus' fleshly descent came through Mary, who was treated as her father's child because she was Joseph's wife.
The two lines from David are separate, the one through Solomon to Joseph as legal father and the other through Nathan on Mary's side, yet they meet in the course of time at different points among David's descendants. That meeting is in Salathiel and Zorobabel, so that the blood of both Solomon and Nathan was in Joseph and Mary. The two genealogies therefore do not contradict each other. One explanation is that one traces descent through Mary and the other through Joseph, or that Heli is another name for Joseph.
Another account sets forth one theory that Matthew's list is Joseph's royal genealogy and Luke's is Joseph's private genealogy, with Mary and Joseph as first cousins. The more widely accepted account identifies Matthew's as Joseph's and Luke's as Mary's, with Joseph as Heli's son-in-law and Jesus as Heli's grandson, Heli being identified as Mary's father by the Talmud. In this account Christ belongs to David's royal family legally through Mary's marriage to Joseph and naturally through Mary herself. Matthew traces this royal line and royal inheritance only as far back as Abraham, from David to Joseph, through David, Solomon, Rehoboam and the royal family, with Jacob in verse 16 being the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, distinct from Luke's literal descent from Adam to Mary.
Royal Line to Messiah
Matthew 1:4 belongs to the complete genealogy that presents Christ as the Son of David and establishes His royal lineage through Joseph, His legal and reputed father. It is the kingly line from Abraham through David to Joseph, recording Aminadab, Naasson, and Salmon in succession, by which Jesus as Joseph's regarded son was heir to David's throne. In this reckoning He is shown to be the Messiah, born King of the Jews, the rightful King and Heir of Abraham. The list is arranged in three groups of fourteen generations, and as elsewhere in Scripture it may omit generations by design while still conveying legal succession.
His ancestry shows His parents were Jews and His family was of David's line and the tribe of Judah. His pedigree is traced through David's royal line from Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Judah, and ultimately from Jesse and David. It is the carefully preserved genealogy of Judah, the tribe through which Christ came, presenting Him as the perfect Jew. The genealogy traces His earthly lineage through the line of promise, showing the promised seed was preserved through the generations from Abraham and Judah so that His lineage could be traced back to David and the earlier family line. Israel was set apart and kept separate from surrounding nations so this descent could be established and not obscured. Through Abraham's Seed, Christ, all nations would be blessed.
The verse is part of the preserved genealogy of Judah the ruling tribe, while the other tribes were scattered and their genealogies lost and Levi was preserved as the priesthood tribe. Matthew 1 with Luke 3 traces the lineage through both His mother's side and His father's side, showing Jesus descended from Judah. This proves He is Shiloh to whom the gathering of the people belongs, the tribe being held together until Jesus came, from which time He became the center of the gathering of God's people. As part of Matthew's first chapter naming Aram, Aminadab, Naasson, and Salmon, the genealogy connects God's promises to Abraham with the birth of Christ. Traced from Abraham through David to Joseph the reputed father of Jesus, it establishes Christ's family connection to Abraham and David as the promised Messiah and heir of the covenant made with Abraham and renewed to David.
That heirship carries claim to Abraham's promised inheritance, which includes the whole world, and to the blessing believers receive through faith in Christ. Natural descent from Abraham was privilege and opportunity but did not by itself guarantee heirship in the promises. Believers share in Abraham's inheritance through faith in Christ and are joint heirs with Christ in the throne of David. The genealogical record supports the account of His birth as a landmark in the fulfillment of the Gospel promises of the Old Testament. It is reckoned among the passages supporting the prophecy that Christ would be the Son of David, and the lineage from Abraham to Joseph guards against doubt about His Messiahship.
Human Lineage and Salvation
Matthew 1:4 forms part of the distinct tracing of Christ's ancestry from Adam that proves He had a pedigree and entered this world by birth into the human family. It shows He had human ancestors and truly became a member of the human race, with a beginning of days as an infant and an end of life in death, not merely God dwelling in a human body. This birth and death prove He and the Melchizedek of Genesis were distinct individuals, since Melchizedek has no pedigree, no beginning of days and no end of life, though both are priests after the same Melchizedek order. His human ancestors belonged to a race subject to the iniquities common to humanity, the line including ancestors with both good and evil lives, and the Messiah truly came in human flesh through David's line. After four thousand years of sin its history shows the effects of heredity in a weakened human inheritance which Jesus accepted like every child of Adam, sharing human flesh with its inherited liability to sin. His shared human lineage and experience make Him a brother who understands human sorrow, temptation, and need, while remaining without sin, grounding confidence in His sympathy as High Priest and in His ability to provide needed salvation, sharing humanity's sorrows and temptations and giving the example of a sinless life.
His ancestry bears on the temptations He faced throughout His life. He came to save sinners and did not refuse to be born of sinners in order to save sinners, taking upon Himself the nature of man. He was tempted in all points as humans are, yet lived a perfect life, proving that human beings can live a holy life here in the world. The genealogy exceptionally includes Ruth, a Moabitess, and includes bad men and women and people of another race than the Jews. It traces Jesus through Ruth's family, Ruth becoming the mother of Obed, David's grandfather, her marriage bringing her into the line through which Jesus was shown to be a descendant of Abraham, and shows Christ's brotherhood with aliens and Gentiles.
Matthew 1:4 records part of Jesus' royal genealogy, tracing the line through Aram, Aminadab, Naasson, and Salmon. The genealogy contributes to the scriptural witness to Jesus and to the importance of the Word. Its long pedigree was considered worthy of attention and led one reader to study Jesus' life and give himself to Christ.
Providence and Doctrinal Witness
The genealogy in Matthew 1:1-17 was deliberately preserved by God choosing one family when all nations had become corrupt, planting them as a separate people, removing idolatry from their land, and acquainting them with truth, so the world might be assured that the promises and prophecies were fulfilled in Messiah. The keeping of this family line shows divine wisdom in the gradual development of the plan of salvation to make it plain to human reason and impress it deeply on the human heart. God's overthrow of the Egyptians and extermination of the idolatrous and sensual nations of Canaan in mercy to His people and to the race served that preserving and revealing work and unfolded the doctrines and facts of the Messiah's future kingdom. The preserved record of Abraham's family line leading to Christ connects the promised seed of Abraham to the divine Seed, Jesus, and was kept as a necessary preface to the Gospel.
The distinct tracing of Christ's ancestry from Adam proves Christ had a pedigree, for He entered this world by birth into the human family, with a beginning of days as an infant and an end of life in death. This birth and death prove Christ and the Melchizedek of Genesis were distinct individuals, since Melchizedek has no pedigree, no beginning of days and no end of life, though both are priests after the same Melchizedek order. The Gospel genealogy is traced through Genesis to the beginning and cannot be verified without Genesis.
The verse records Aram, Aminadab, Naasson and Salmon in succession as plain history, establishing the reality of those ancestors and presenting Jesus as a real person in history. It belongs to the complete genealogy that presents Christ as the Son of David and establishes His royal lineage, showing He is the Messiah born King of the Jews and as Joseph's reputed son entitled to David's throne. Matthew traces that legal and royal lineage through Joseph in the male line from Abraham and David through Solomon, counted as Joseph's descendant and heir under Jewish law. Luke traces His literal blood and human descent through Mary from Adam in Nathan's line, with Joseph named in place of Mary because genealogies listed males and a son-in-law was counted as a son. As part of that genealogy the verse shows He truly became a member of the human race by birth into the human family, accepting a weakened human inheritance after four thousand years of sin yet remaining without sin as a sympathetic brother and High Priest.
Wording and Historic Record
The wording turns on the term for a man fathering a child, and the same Greek term can also carry the sense of bringing forth or giving birth and is used in a figurative sense for being born of God. The verse sets Aram, Aminadab, Naasson, and Salmon in succession as a plain historical record rather than a text for fanciful or spiritualized interpretation. That succession places Aminadab, Naasson, and Salmon within the literal lineage of Jesus through the history of Israel, linking Him to Abraham. By naming these ancestors it establishes their historical reality and the reality of the events belonging to their times, and by its place in Matthew it presents Jesus as a real person in history.
The gospel genealogical records stand as original contemporary documents, raw material for history rather than digested systematic history. They are spread before readers with simplicity and guileless confidence, without editorial explanation to harmonize parallel accounts of Christ's birth. Like the two narratives of creation, the two copies of the Decalogue, and the repeated records of the kings, they tell their own story in rawness, incompleteness, and redundancy, fitted to no system or theory. Their discrepancies are inevitable in such a mass of material, and their value lies in proving the materials to be primitive facts and original data bearing contemporary authorship and the artlessness of conscious truth rather than secondary formation or mythical imagining.
The genealogy is given by Matthew, the faithful man, one of the twelve apostles also called Levi. He was a publican or tax collector under the Romans, from a class especially hated by the Jews and often dishonest and oppressive. The Gospel containing it was written about A.D. 50 to 60, nineteen to twenty-nine years after the crucifixion. The kingdom of heaven is one of its great key words, and it records the Sermon on the Mount and other matters not found in the other Gospels.
Arrangement of Generations
Matthew 1:4 belongs to the human genealogy of Christ from Abraham to the birth of Jesus, in which generation marks the steps in family descent such as father, son, and grandson, with each generation traced from father to son. Counted together it establishes Christ as Abraham's direct descendant through forty-two generations from Abraham to Christ. The genealogy is summed up as three periods of fourteen generations: from Abraham to David, from David until the carrying away into Babylon, and from the carrying away into Babylon unto Christ.
Matthew arranges the genealogy in three groups of fourteen, or double sevens, to aid memory and mark three stages of Hebrew history. To form those three sections of fourteen generations each, the genealogy omits some generations. The list is therefore a selected lineage, not necessarily a complete list of every generation or an unbroken father-to-son descent.
As elsewhere in the Bible an ancestor may be called a descendant or son of a more remote ancestor. Three generations are omitted by design to preserve this symmetry, not through ignorance of the known history. What is recorded is succession to the royal claim and royal inheritance from David to Joseph, establishing Jesus as entitled to David's throne as Joseph's reputed son.
Those forty-two generations from Abraham to Christ span periods of very different lengths, so the genealogy does not establish a fixed number of years for a generation or a timetable for Christ's return. Dividing the time from Abraham to Jesus by those forty-two generations gives about forty or more years to a generation, which some figure at somewhere around forty years, but that figure cannot be depended upon to fix the length of a generation. God has given no definite time allotted to a generation, and has not designed to fix that time in the last generation.
Generation sometimes means race, people, or nation, and sometimes means the people living on the earth at one time. It would probably be considered longer in the days of the antediluvian patriarchs than at the present time. Matthew 1:4 shows one father-to-son generation in the Bible rule for counting generations.
Counted together with Genesis 11 and Luke 3:23-38, it shows six thousand years from creation hold fewer than two hundred such generations. So a thousand generations means more than a thousand and requires at least twenty-four thousand years yet future from 1868, meaning unlimited time from generation to generation. This proves keeping of the ten commandments is perpetuated forever.
Matthew and Luke Compared
Matthew's list containing Aram, Aminadab, Naasson, and Salmon is the legal and royal lineage of Jesus through Joseph, His legal and reputed father, carried in the male line from Abraham to David and through Solomon to Joseph. It is not given as Jesus' literal blood descent, but under Jewish law Jesus was counted as Joseph's descendant and heir, and through Joseph He held legal royal heirship and claim as heir to David's throne. Luke's list is distinct from it, tracing Christ's literal blood and human descent through Mary from Adam to Mary in the line of Nathan, Solomon's brother. Joseph is there called the son of Heli because a son-in-law was counted as a son, Heli being Mary's father, Joseph's father-in-law, and Jesus' grandfather, and Joseph is named in place of Mary because genealogies customarily listed males through whom inheritance passed. Jesus' fleshly descent came through Mary, who was treated as her father's child because she was Joseph's wife.
The two lines from David are separate, the one through Solomon to Joseph as legal father and the other through Nathan on Mary's side, yet they meet in the course of time at different points among David's descendants. That meeting is in Salathiel and Zorobabel, so that the blood of both Solomon and Nathan was in Joseph and Mary. The two genealogies therefore do not contradict each other. One explanation is that one traces descent through Mary and the other through Joseph, or that Heli is another name for Joseph.
Another account sets forth one theory that Matthew's list is Joseph's royal genealogy and Luke's is Joseph's private genealogy, with Mary and Joseph as first cousins. The more widely accepted account identifies Matthew's as Joseph's and Luke's as Mary's, with Joseph as Heli's son-in-law and Jesus as Heli's grandson, Heli being identified as Mary's father by the Talmud. In this account Christ belongs to David's royal family legally through Mary's marriage to Joseph and naturally through Mary herself. Matthew traces this royal line and royal inheritance only as far back as Abraham, from David to Joseph, through David, Solomon, Rehoboam and the royal family, with Jacob in verse 16 being the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, distinct from Luke's literal descent from Adam to Mary.
Royal Line to Messiah
Matthew 1:4 belongs to the complete genealogy that presents Christ as the Son of David and establishes His royal lineage through Joseph, His legal and reputed father. It is the kingly line from Abraham through David to Joseph, recording Aminadab, Naasson, and Salmon in succession, by which Jesus as Joseph's regarded son was heir to David's throne. In this reckoning He is shown to be the Messiah, born King of the Jews, the rightful King and Heir of Abraham. The list is arranged in three groups of fourteen generations, and as elsewhere in Scripture it may omit generations by design while still conveying legal succession.
His ancestry shows His parents were Jews and His family was of David's line and the tribe of Judah. His pedigree is traced through David's royal line from Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Judah, and ultimately from Jesse and David. It is the carefully preserved genealogy of Judah, the tribe through which Christ came, presenting Him as the perfect Jew. The genealogy traces His earthly lineage through the line of promise, showing the promised seed was preserved through the generations from Abraham and Judah so that His lineage could be traced back to David and the earlier family line. Israel was set apart and kept separate from surrounding nations so this descent could be established and not obscured. Through Abraham's Seed, Christ, all nations would be blessed.
The verse is part of the preserved genealogy of Judah the ruling tribe, while the other tribes were scattered and their genealogies lost and Levi was preserved as the priesthood tribe. Matthew 1 with Luke 3 traces the lineage through both His mother's side and His father's side, showing Jesus descended from Judah. This proves He is Shiloh to whom the gathering of the people belongs, the tribe being held together until Jesus came, from which time He became the center of the gathering of God's people. As part of Matthew's first chapter naming Aram, Aminadab, Naasson, and Salmon, the genealogy connects God's promises to Abraham with the birth of Christ. Traced from Abraham through David to Joseph the reputed father of Jesus, it establishes Christ's family connection to Abraham and David as the promised Messiah and heir of the covenant made with Abraham and renewed to David.
That heirship carries claim to Abraham's promised inheritance, which includes the whole world, and to the blessing believers receive through faith in Christ. Natural descent from Abraham was privilege and opportunity but did not by itself guarantee heirship in the promises. Believers share in Abraham's inheritance through faith in Christ and are joint heirs with Christ in the throne of David. The genealogical record supports the account of His birth as a landmark in the fulfillment of the Gospel promises of the Old Testament. It is reckoned among the passages supporting the prophecy that Christ would be the Son of David, and the lineage from Abraham to Joseph guards against doubt about His Messiahship.
Human Lineage and Salvation
Matthew 1:4 forms part of the distinct tracing of Christ's ancestry from Adam that proves He had a pedigree and entered this world by birth into the human family. It shows He had human ancestors and truly became a member of the human race, with a beginning of days as an infant and an end of life in death, not merely God dwelling in a human body. This birth and death prove He and the Melchizedek of Genesis were distinct individuals, since Melchizedek has no pedigree, no beginning of days and no end of life, though both are priests after the same Melchizedek order. His human ancestors belonged to a race subject to the iniquities common to humanity, the line including ancestors with both good and evil lives, and the Messiah truly came in human flesh through David's line. After four thousand years of sin its history shows the effects of heredity in a weakened human inheritance which Jesus accepted like every child of Adam, sharing human flesh with its inherited liability to sin. His shared human lineage and experience make Him a brother who understands human sorrow, temptation, and need, while remaining without sin, grounding confidence in His sympathy as High Priest and in His ability to provide needed salvation, sharing humanity's sorrows and temptations and giving the example of a sinless life.
His ancestry bears on the temptations He faced throughout His life. He came to save sinners and did not refuse to be born of sinners in order to save sinners, taking upon Himself the nature of man. He was tempted in all points as humans are, yet lived a perfect life, proving that human beings can live a holy life here in the world. The genealogy exceptionally includes Ruth, a Moabitess, and includes bad men and women and people of another race than the Jews. It traces Jesus through Ruth's family, Ruth becoming the mother of Obed, David's grandfather, her marriage bringing her into the line through which Jesus was shown to be a descendant of Abraham, and shows Christ's brotherhood with aliens and Gentiles.
Matthew 1:4 records part of Jesus' royal genealogy, tracing the line through Aram, Aminadab, Naasson, and Salmon. The genealogy contributes to the scriptural witness to Jesus and to the importance of the Word. Its long pedigree was considered worthy of attention and led one reader to study Jesus' life and give himself to Christ.
Providence and Doctrinal Witness
The genealogy in Matthew 1:1-17 was deliberately preserved by God choosing one family when all nations had become corrupt, planting them as a separate people, removing idolatry from their land, and acquainting them with truth, so the world might be assured that the promises and prophecies were fulfilled in Messiah. The keeping of this family line shows divine wisdom in the gradual development of the plan of salvation to make it plain to human reason and impress it deeply on the human heart. God's overthrow of the Egyptians and extermination of the idolatrous and sensual nations of Canaan in mercy to His people and to the race served that preserving and revealing work and unfolded the doctrines and facts of the Messiah's future kingdom. The preserved record of Abraham's family line leading to Christ connects the promised seed of Abraham to the divine Seed, Jesus, and was kept as a necessary preface to the Gospel.
The distinct tracing of Christ's ancestry from Adam proves Christ had a pedigree, for He entered this world by birth into the human family, with a beginning of days as an infant and an end of life in death. This birth and death prove Christ and the Melchizedek of Genesis were distinct individuals, since Melchizedek has no pedigree, no beginning of days and no end of life, though both are priests after the same Melchizedek order. The Gospel genealogy is traced through Genesis to the beginning and cannot be verified without Genesis.