The Scandalous Skeletons In Jesus' Genealogy - Tamar Series

Each of these women are beautiful Old Covenant illustrations of what God would later say to Peter when clarifying that his grace is extended to all peoples: “What God has made clean, do not call common” (Acts 10:15).

And that’s His word to you and me. The amazingly good news of Christmas is that Jesus came to make notorious unclean sinners like us — people with disgraceful pasts who believe in His name (John 1:12) — clean and righteous.

Why did Matthew include these women in all male timeline? Matthew intended his readers to think of something other than sexual scandal when they heard the names Tamar (v. 3), Rehab (v. 5), Ruth (v. 5), “the wife of Uriah” (v. 7), and Mary (v. 16). So what did Matthew’s readers hear?

The first four women named in Jesus' genealogy—Tamar, Rehab, Ruth, and “the wife of Uriah”— were, in fact, gentiles. And while the fifth woman, Mary, was Jewish, she couldn’t be gentile, because Jesus was the biological son of Mary alone, not of Joseph’s lineage. Matthew could have chosen those with whom his readers were most familiar—Sarah, Rebecca, or Leah, for example. But this was not his point. Indeed, the message of the women in Jesus' genealogy is this: Jesus is the all-inclusive Messiah for all the earth’s peoples, not only to the Jew, but also to the gentile.

We go a little further and consider the overall argument of Matthew’s Gospel, and it’s this: Jesus is King. With the first four, Matthew demonstrated that Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham that through the Messiah all nations of the earth would be blessed (Gen. 22:18). And by including Mary, Matthew demonstrated that Jesus Christ is the promised son of the Davidic line.

For Jesus to be the all-inclusive Jew-Gentile Messiah, Mary had to be Jewish, but Jesus also had to have Gentiles in his pedigree.

Matthew could not have made the case for gentile inclusion—which was of prime importance to his argument—with any of the men, because the Messiah had to be from the male bloodline going back to Abraham, meaning all the men had to be descendants of Abraham. So the only way to include Gentiles in Jesus royal pedigree was to include his Gentile women ancestors.

In this study we shall be focusing only on one of these ladies. Subsequent studies will focus on each of the others.

But how do we know Tamar, Rehab, Ruth, and “the wife of Uriah,” as Matthew calls her, were actually all gentiles?

We begin with the first two women, who were Canaanites. Of Tamar, the biblical text says simply that Judah got her as a wife for his son, Er (Gen. 38:6). So nothing in Genesis would indicate that Tamar was a gentile. But Philo, a Jew who lived at the time of Matthew, wrote this about her: “Tamar was a woman from Syria -Palestine who had been bred up in her own native city, which was devoted to the worship of many gods, being full of statues, and images, and, in short, of idols of every kind and description. But when she, emerging, as it were, out of profound darkness, was able to see a slight beam of truth, she then, at the risk of her life, exerted all her energies to arrive at piety…living for the service of and in constant supplication to the one true God” (Virt. 220–22). To Philo’s readers, and to those of his contemporary, Matthew, “Syria Palestina” was unequivocally gentile- so Tamar was a Canaanite.