Matthew 1: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Matthew opens by tracing the family line of Jesus from Abraham, through King David, down to Joseph, the husband of Mary, and counts it out as three sets of fourteen generations broken by the exile to Babylon. The list includes several women, among them Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and the woman who had been Uriah's wife. The chapter then tells how Jesus was born: Mary, pledged in marriage to Joseph, is found to be pregnant by the Holy Spirit, and Joseph plans a quiet divorce until an angel tells him in a dream to take her as his wife and to name the child Jesus. Matthew says this happened to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet about a virgin who would bear a son called Immanuel.

Claim by Claim

1. 1:1
   • This is the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ.
   • Jesus Christ is the son of David.
   • Jesus Christ is the son of Abraham.
2. 1:2
   • Abraham fathered Isaac.
   • Isaac fathered Jacob.
   • Jacob fathered Judah and Judah's brothers.
3. 1:3
   • Judah fathered Perez and Zerah.
   • Tamar was the mother of Perez and Zerah.
   • Perez fathered Hezron.
   • Hezron fathered Ram.
4. 1:4
   • Ram fathered Amminadab.
   • Amminadab fathered Nahshon.
   • Nahshon fathered Salmon.
5. 1:5
   • Salmon fathered Boaz.
   • Rahab was the mother of Boaz.
   • Boaz fathered Obed.
   • Ruth was the mother of Obed.
   • Obed fathered Jesse.
6. 1:6
   • Jesse fathered David.
   • David was king.
   • David the king fathered Solomon.
   • Solomon's mother had been the wife of Uriah.
7. 1:7
   • Solomon fathered Rehoboam.
   • Rehoboam fathered Abijah.
   • Abijah fathered Asa.
8. 1:8
   • Asa fathered Jehoshaphat.
   • Jehoshaphat fathered Joram.
   • Joram fathered Uzziah.
9. 1:9
   • Uzziah fathered Jotham.
   • Jotham fathered Ahaz.
   • Ahaz fathered Hezekiah.
10. 1:10
    • Hezekiah fathered Manasseh.
    • Manasseh fathered Amon.
    • Amon fathered Josiah.
11. 1:11
    • Josiah fathered Jeconiah and Jeconiah's brothers.
    • This was at the time of the deportation to Babylon.
12. 1:12
    • After the deportation to Babylon, Jeconiah fathered Shealtiel.
    • Shealtiel fathered Zerubbabel.
13. 1:13
    • Zerubbabel fathered Abiud.
    • Abiud fathered Eliakim.
    • Eliakim fathered Azor.
14. 1:14
    • Azor fathered Zadok.
    • Zadok fathered Achim.
    • Achim fathered Eliud.
15. 1:15
    • Eliud fathered Eleazar.
    • Eleazar fathered Matthan.
    • Matthan fathered Jacob.
16. 1:16
    • Jacob fathered Joseph.
    • Joseph was the husband of Mary.
    • Jesus was born of Mary.
    • Jesus is called Christ.
17. 1:17
    • From Abraham to David there are fourteen generations.
    • From David to the deportation to Babylon there are fourteen generations.
    • From the deportation to Babylon to the Christ there are fourteen generations.
18. 1:18
    • The birth of Jesus Christ happened in the following way.
    • Mary was the mother of Jesus.
    • Mary was betrothed to Joseph.
    • Before Mary and Joseph came together, she was found to be pregnant.
    • Her pregnancy was from the Holy Spirit.
19. 1:19
    • Joseph was Mary's husband.
    • Joseph was a righteous man.
    • Joseph was unwilling to expose Mary publicly.
    • Joseph decided to divorce her secretly.
20. 1:20
    • While Joseph was considering these things, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream.
    • The angel called Joseph son of David.
    • The angel told Joseph not to be afraid to take Mary as his wife.
    • The angel said that what was conceived in Mary is from the Holy Spirit.
21. 1:21
    • The angel said Mary will give birth to a son.
    • The angel told Joseph to name the child Jesus.
    • The angel said that he will save his people from their sins.
22. 1:22
    • All this happened so that what the Lord spoke through the prophet would be fulfilled.
23. 1:23
    • The prophet said a virgin will be with child.
    • The prophet said she will give birth to a son.
    • The prophet said they will call his name Emmanuel.
    • Emmanuel translated means 'God with us'.
24. 1:24
    • Joseph awoke from sleep.
    • Joseph did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him.
    • Joseph took Mary as his wife.
25. 1:25
    • Joseph did not have sexual relations with Mary until she gave birth to a son.
    • The son she bore was her firstborn.
    • Joseph named him Jesus.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

1:1

The King James "the book of the generation" translates a Greek phrase that could mean "record of the origin" or "record of the family line," and it echoes the wording used for the family lists in Genesis. "Christ" is not a surname but a title: the Greek word christos translates the Hebrew mashiach, "anointed one," the king promised to Israel. "Son of" here means descendant, not immediate child.

1:2

"Begat" is simply the old past tense of "beget," to father a child. Note also that the King James gives these Hebrew names in the Greek forms Matthew wrote them in, so familiar figures appear under unfamiliar spellings: Judas is Judah, Thamar is Tamar, Booz is Boaz, Ezekias is Hezekiah, Josias is Josiah. "Judah and his brethren" means the twelve sons of Jacob, from whom the twelve tribes of Israel took their names.

1:3

Jewish family lists normally named only fathers. Matthew breaks that pattern four times, naming Tamar here, Rahab and Ruth in verse 5, and Uriah's wife in verse 6. Tamar was Judah's widowed daughter-in-law; her twins were conceived when she disguised herself as a prostitute after Judah failed to provide for her (Genesis 38).

1:5

Rahab ran a house in Jericho and sheltered Israelite spies there (Joshua 2). Ruth was from Moab, a foreign nation; the book named after her tells how she married Boaz. Both women were outsiders to Israel.

1:6

Matthew does not give Bathsheba's name, calling her instead "her that had been the wife of Urias." Uriah was a soldier in David's army whose death David arranged after taking his wife (2 Samuel 11). The phrasing keeps that episode in view.

1:7

These are kings who ruled Judah, the southern part of Israel, after David and Solomon. Roboam is Rehoboam, Abia is Abijah.

1:8

Ancient family lists commonly skipped generations, and Matthew does so here: the Old Testament records three kings between Joram and Uzziah (Ahaziah, Joash and Amaziah). "Begat" in such a list can mean "was the ancestor of."

1:10

Ezekias is Hezekiah and Josias is Josiah. The Old Testament tells long stories about both of these kings.

1:11

The "carrying away to Babylon" is the exile: in 597 and again in 586 BC the Babylonian empire captured Jerusalem, destroyed the temple, and deported the king, the nobility and the skilled classes to Babylon, ending the line of reigning kings descended from David. It was the defining catastrophe of Israel's history, and Matthew uses it here as the hinge of his list.

1:12

Zerubbabel was the governor who led a group of exiles back from Babylon to Jerusalem about fifty years later and started rebuilding the temple. He is the last person in this list who is well known from the Old Testament; the names after him come from records Matthew had but we no longer do.

1:16

The wording shifts here. Through the whole list each man "begat" the next; at Joseph the chain stops, and the Greek relative pronoun in "of whom was born Jesus" is feminine singular, referring to Mary alone rather than to Joseph or to the couple.

1:17

Fourteen is a deliberate arrangement, not a count that falls out naturally; Matthew has left names out to reach it. In Hebrew, letters double as numerals, and the three letters of David's name add up to fourteen, which may be the point of the pattern. Counted strictly, the third group as Matthew gives it contains thirteen names.

1:18

"Espoused" describes a betrothal, which was far stronger than a modern engagement: the couple were legally husband and wife from that moment, though the bride stayed in her father's house until the marriage was completed, and the arrangement could only be ended by a formal divorce. This is why verse 19 calls Joseph "her husband" and speaks of putting her away. "Holy Ghost" is not a spook; in 1611 "ghost" simply meant spirit, and the phrase means the Holy Spirit.

1:19

"A just man" translates a word meaning upright, one who keeps the law. "Make her a publick example" refers to the open legal proceeding a charge of unfaithfulness would require, which carried lasting disgrace and could in principle be far worse. "Put her away privily" means divorce her quietly, before the minimum two witnesses the law required rather than in a public hearing.

1:20

The angel addresses Joseph as "thou son of David," the same title used of Jesus in verse 1. It marks Joseph as a descendant of the royal line, which matters because naming the child (verse 21) is what legally makes Jesus Joseph's son and heir. "Take unto thee Mary thy wife" means complete the marriage by bringing her into his home.

1:21

The name explains the sentence. "Jesus" is the Greek form of the Hebrew name Yeshua or Joshua, which means "the LORD saves." "For he shall save his people" is a play on the name that is plain in Hebrew and invisible in English.

1:22

"The prophet" is Isaiah; the quotation in the next verse is Isaiah 7:14. The King James "spoken of the Lord by the prophet" means spoken by the Lord through the prophet.

1:23

The Greek word Matthew uses, parthenos, means virgin. The Hebrew word in Isaiah, almah, means a young woman of marriageable age and does not by itself specify whether she is a virgin; the Greek translation of Isaiah in circulation in Matthew's day had already rendered it parthenos. "Emmanuel" is Hebrew for "God with us," which Matthew stops to translate for readers who did not know the language.

1:24

Taking a wife home meant something special then. The bride left her family and moved into her husband's house.

1:25

"Knew her not" is a Hebrew way of speaking about sexual relations, carried straight into English by the King James translators. The Greek word for "till" states when something began to be true without saying anything about what followed, so the sentence tells the reader nothing either way about the period after the birth. "Firstborn" is partly a legal term: the firstborn son held particular rights and duties under the law.