June 3, 2012 – Ruth 3 – 4

These two genealogies match up pretty well.  They are just a smaller sample I guess.  Look at the one in Luke.  Luke’s goes in reverse order.  In Luke’s there is no Ram, but is replaced by Admin and Arni.  I called into Catholic Answers once and asked about this difference in the genealogies of Luke and Matthew and here is a couple of the things he said.  First, with so many different generations and tribal inter-marriage, it is possible to get a line from A to F by going along different routes.  I am not sure if I completely understood it, but it seemed to have something to do with the rule that if your brother died, you were to marry his widow and raise the family as under your brother’s name.  Some might do the genealogy based on the Legal father (dead brother) and some on the bio father.  Over generations of this, two different lives could be drawn from one person to the next. 

There is also the idea that father, or at least our translation of father, did not have a perfect form in the Hebrew language.  Much like the confusion with brother being translated, there was no term from grandfather or great grandfather or so on.  The genealogy could skip a generation and still use the term father.  Below, you could say that Boaz was the father of David, even though he is (in our terms) his great grandfather.  This would account for the different number of generations between Abraham and Jesus in the two genealogies in the Gospels.     

Matthew 1:3-6 - Perez became the father of Hezron,

Hezron the father of Ram,

Ram the father of Amminadab.

Amminadab became the father of Nahshon,

Nahshon the father of Salmon,

Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab.

Boaz became the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth.

Obed became the father of Jesse,

Jesse the father of David the king.

4:18-22 - These are the descendants of Perez:

Perez was the father of Hezron,

Hezron was the father of Ram,

Ram was the father of Amminadab,

Amminadab was the father of Nahshon,

Nahshon was the father of Salma,

Salma was the father of Boaz,

Boaz was the father of Obed,

Obed was the father of Jesse, and

Jesse became the father of David

Luke 3:31-33 - David, the son of

Jesse, the son of

Obed, the son of

Boaz, the son of

Sala, the son of

Nahshon, the son of

Amminadab, the son of

Admin, the son of

Arni, the son of

Hezron, the son of

Perez,