Matthew opens his gospel with a genealogy of Jesus. He presents three lists, representing three periods of time, each comprising 14 generations. The first list goes from Abraham to King David. The second goes from David to the Babylonian exile. The third goes from the exile to Joseph, the father of Jesus. Throughout Matthew’s gospel there seems to be an emphasis on certain numerological principles. Many of his stories of miracles found in the other synoptic gospels double the participants. Here, in the genealogy, he compresses generations to achieve three groupings of twice seven generations. Seven was regarded as a divine number signifying completeness because God finished creation in six days and rested on the seventh. Matthew’s doubling of the sevens, as well as his doubling of other events in the life of Christ, seems to reflect an interest in making clear that his message is for both Jews and Gentiles.
In the same vein, Matthew does something else unusual, especially in a culture as heavily patriarchal as his. He mentions women in the genealogy. He mentions three in the first of his three lists and one more in the second. The first woman, Tamar, was the daughter-in-law of Judah. She had been twice widowed, and Judah had promised her his third son, but he didn’t keep his promised for fear his third son would die as the two older ones had. So Tamar disguised herself as a prostitute and Judah slept with her. Perez, a son from that union, entered the genealogy of Christ.
The second woman, Rahab, was a prostitute (or possibly an innkeeper) in Jericho. She protected the spies who came into Jericho to gain military intelligence prior to the Israelites’ attack on the city. She extracted a promise from the spies that she and her family and household would be saved during the subsequent attack, a promise which Joshua honored. So Rahab, a Gentile woman, entered the community of Israel and the genealogy of Jesus.
The third woman, Ruth. was also a Gentile, from the neighboring country of Moab, which was often at war with Israel. Her story is told in the book that bears her name. Like Tamar, she was a widow, but instead of returning to her father’s house in hopes of getting a new husband, she accompanied her mother-in-law Naomi back to Israel, where she met and married Boaz.
The fourth woman is not referred to by name, but rather as the wife of Uriah. This was Bathsheba, whom King David had raped and whose husband, Uriah, he had had killed during a battle with the Ammonites. It’s not clear whether she, like her husband, was a foreigner in Israel, but the entire affair involving her was the greatest scandal of David’s life. Yet she also appears in the genealogy of Christ.
These four women, each scandalous in her own way, and each representing an ethnic impurity in the blood line, Matthew mentions in his genealogy. At the outset Matthew assures his readers that he is going to be inclusive in his treatment of the stories about Jesus. He will include women. He will include Gentiles. He will include outcasts. Because the gospel is not good news for Jews only, nor for men only, nor only for those accepted by society, but for the whole world.