Quote Originally Posted by YorkNecromancer View Post
Zombies, Klendathu and The Absurdly Violent Intergalactic Space Fungus.

I remember the first time I tried to properly read the Bible. I lay down in bed, cracked open Genesis, and just ploughed in there. The stories seemed fun enough, and a lot of the ideas are certainly interesting. ([url=http://biblehub.com/genesis/3-22.htm]Genesis 3:22[/url] has always been a favourite little curiosity of mine...)

But the genealogies…

I can never manage the genealogies. Where Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob, Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, Judah the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar, Perez the father of Hezron, Hezron the father of Ram…

Pages and pages of them! When I was young, I could never work out why they’d stop the stories and parables in favour of a really long list of names. And not names of interesting characters. Names of people we’re never really interested in, whose stories we never hear, and who aren’t ever really mentioned again. It’s like those double page spreads in special issues of the ‘Avengers’ comics where you’ve got two pages filled with all the heroes, and you know Iron Man, Thor and Black Widow, but you’ve got no idea who the other nine hundred tits in tights are in the background, and you never get to find out, because they never show up again.

‘Who are these people?’ I wondered. ‘What is the point of mentioned them if they don’t do anything else?’

I didn’t realise that there were only three names on the list that mattered: Abraham, David, and, of course, Yeshua.

Years of Nativity plays have taught us that Jesus was the son of a carpenter. We’ve all been there, sat in a hall as scared children in fibre-glass beards stand next to cardboard cows with rubber gloves for udders, praying that the sick-looking girl vomits on the smug-looking boy playing the third King from the left. As a result, we all know that Jesus was born so absurdly humble, his family couldn’t find any room at an inn, and had to stay in a barn with the animals. It’s a charming story; a narrative designed to show us that God doesn’t really like the rich.

The problem, of course, is that people have always hated the poor. And an impoverished son of God… Well, it’s a solid moral lesson, but it doesn’t bring legitimacy.

Hence the geneaologies. See, Jesus has to have credibility. He has to be royalty. The same way Aragorn can’t just be some guy who’s strong and brave and fundamentally decent, Jesus can’t just be himself, oh no. He has to be a king, too, even if he never mentions it. So the Bible interrupts a set of entertaining tales with a series of people’s names in order to prove that Yeshua, son of Joseph, who would later be named Jesus, The Anointed One, was in fact, descended from a line of kings.

Which means, despite the Nativity, he wasn’t just some working class dole-scum, out to steal the jobs from hard-working locals. No, he was a king, descended from kings.

[url=http://www.herinst.org/BusinessManagedDemocracy/culture/wealth/fear.html]We’ve always hated the poor.[/url]
There is two other reasons for those genealogies. First, there is the fact that God cares about the insignificant people to list a bunch of them people in a book so that we know about them. Yes, we don't know what they did in their lives, but God does and he finds importance in even that which we do not find important. Secondly, those names mean something in Hebrew. Unlike in the 21st Century western world, where we have names that sound nice or names that our parents had (junior, the III, etc), a name in Hebrew had a specific meaning. For example, Yeshua is a form of Yahoshua, which means "Yahovah saves". Let's take the first one in Genesis as an example. In Genesis 5, we are introduced to Adam's lineage to Noah. Adam is the father of Seth etc. Well, if you look at the names' meanings, something is revealed.

Adam = Man
Seth = Appointed
Enos = Mortal
Cainan = Sorrow
Mahalaleel = The Blessed God
Jared = Descends
Enoch = Teacher
Methuselah = Death brings
Lamech = Despairing
Noah = Comfort

So when read in order as presented: Adam Seth Enos Cainan Mahalaleel Jared Enoch Methuselah Lamech Noah or Man is Appointed Mortal Sorrow. The Blessed God Descends as a Teacher. His Death Brings the Despairing Comfort. In short, the Gospel message in Genesis 5.

As far the lineage of Jesus in Matthew, Jesus also has a separate lineage in Luke that diverges after David. Joseph, Jesus' foster father, was descended from David through his son Solomon and eventually Jeconiah (aka Jehoiachin or Coniah). Jeconiah was placed under a blood curse by God that affected his descendents as well. Mary was also descended from David, but through his son Nathan. Since Jesus was not Joseph's biological son, that blood curse did not affect him. The Jews would have wanted to see Jesus' tie to David patriarchally, so that is seen in Matthew 1, but what matters is the matriarchal line found in Luke 3. As to why it says "Joseph" in the matriarchal line: in Jewish law, if a man had no male children, but only daughter(s), his inheritance would pass to his daughter(s). The daughter(s) would have to marry within the tribe of their father (Judah or Benjamin or Simeon, etc) and the husband(s) would become their father's son(s) as far as legal inheritance went. Legal genealogies would then show the son-in-law as a son. If Heli only had a daughter, Mary, with her marriage to Joseph, Joseph would have been adopted into Heli's family as his son.