mikem

Making numerological points was part of Jewish theological practice. It was knownas "GEMATRIA". Matthew's readers would have been alerted to his intention by his three references to 14 generations. Using genealogy to make a religious point was a known practice.

For example, in the Jewish tractate Pirqe Avoth the author uses genealogy to illustrate God's patience:

From Adam to Noah there were ten generations, which shows how longsuffering God was to them, as they all grumbled against him -- and there were ten generations from Noah to Abraham, which shows how longsuffering God was with them, as they all grumbled against him."16

Ten is a number of some signifcance in numerology.

As for sloppiness - writers did not always record every link. For example in Ezra 7 vss 1 - 5, Ezra provides his own genalogy going back to Aaron, in order to emphasise his credentials. However his list is an abbreviated one, if compared with 1 Chronicles 6. Was he being sloppy? No, he had made his point, he did not need to repeat every name in his genealogical tree. Neither did Matthew. His intention is clearly theological, he adapted the genealogical to conform to his purposes, in accordance with the conventions of the time. If modern readers find that difficult to comprehend that is hardly Matthew's fault.

spin

You would need to establish a case that gematria was practised by the writers of some part of the Hebrew bible, before introducing an apparently later idea which, it seems, you can only evince in the Pirqe Avot.

Where the Pirqe Avot is correct about the number of generations, Matt is not. It omits three names from the genealogy and the most probable cause was a scribal error known as haplography (the omission of something repeated) before the time of the writing of Matt: Ahaziah son of Jehoram, mistakenly called Azariah son of Jehoram in 2 Chr 22:6, The scribe inadvertantly jumps from the first mention of Azariah to the second while copying and we lose the three generations.

Wrong conclusion. Which was written first, Chronicles or Ezra?? What was the state of the high priestly genealogy at any given time? You'll note that the version in 1 Esdras is shorter again from that of Ezra, while that at the beginning of 2 Esdras is longer.

You'll note that the indications about high priests in the book of Chronicles are incompatible with the high priestly genealogy in 1 Chr 6: try to fit Amariah at the time of Jehoshaphat (2 Chr 19:11) with an Azariah in 2 Chr 26:20 followed by Hilkiah in 2 Chr 34:9. This Azariah doesn't fit, yet he was also chief priest under Hezekiah (2 Chr 31:10). According of 1 Chr 6, Amariah's father was called Azariah and Hilkiah's son was called Azariah, but between Amariah and Hilkiah, nada.

Now in the 222 years between the end of Jehoshaphat's reign and the tenth year of Josiah's reign, there were inclusively five high priests, making their reigns on average 44 years a pop at the very least, quite an unreal set of consecutive high priestly reigns. Obviously the high priestly genealogy as we have it today is incomplete to cover the time it should, so it isn't based on history. The signs from the books of Ezra is that the genealogy was not stable and was in continuous evolution. If you look at 1 Chr 9:11 there is another spanner in the works, because it presents another fragment of the genealogy which differs from 1 Chr 6. This last fragment is closely related to Neh 11:11 which differs from the former because instead of Azariah as Hilkiah's son it gives his grandsom Seraiah as his son. The high priestly genealogy is a quagmire and one cannot go on the indications from 1 Chr 6 as to the original state of the list. It is almost certainly one of the last developments of the geneaology after 1 Esdras and Ezra.

I don't think the writer falsified the data. (Remember that the Pirqe Avot didn't need to falsify the data to get two sets of ten generations.) I have already suggested that a well-known scribal error caused a shortened list.


spin

Stacey Melissa

My OP has links to posts where Gematria was discussed, and where I refuted the notion as it supposedly applies to the genealogy in Matthew.

mikem

From Stacey Melissa's post:

Even though I think numerology is a crackpot belief, and even though I can find nothing in Matthew 1 to indicate an application of numerology, I'll grant you the notion that that was really what the author of Matthew was trying to communicate with his sets of fourteen generations.

Your post accepts for the sake of argument that Matthew was using Gematria, and then goes on to say that Matthew twisted the genealogy in Chronicles for his own ends. I assume that you are taking your opponent's ground in order to show that if Matthew was not being sloppy, he was being dishonest. One thing your post does not do is to refute the notion that Matthew was using Gematria. You could only do that by demonstrating that Gematria was a later development, and unknown at the time of Matthew's writing. And if Matthew was twisting the genealogy of Chronicles to squeeze it into sets of 14, then why was 14 so significant?

mikem

[QUOTE]I only need to show that Gematria was a known practice at the time, and earlier. There is an interesting article on Biblioteca Arcana at http://www.cs.utk.edu/~mclennan/BA/index.html that describes the development.

I referred to the Pirque Avot to illustrate the point that genealogies were not just historical records, but were used to make theological points. It may well be accurate, in that it has accurately copied an earlier work, however, I don't believe that you are saying it is historically accurate, unless you think that Genesis is recording sober history. The author of PA no doubt believed that he was copying a factually accurate record. However, his intention was clearly theological. This goes for the genealogies recorded in Chronicles, and in Matthew too. Of course this of itself does not prove numerology in Matthew, but that was not my point in citing PA.

There is disagreement between scholars as to whether 1/2 Chronicles, and Ezra and Nehemiah were separate works, or whether they came from the same hand. It was the mainstream consensus up until about the 1970s that they were written by different hands, but the view has gained ground that they are not, but that the writer may have utilised separate genealogical lists, and the dates are disputed too, but sometime in the 4th to 3rd century BCE, though some scholars think even earlier. So I was wrong to say that Ezra wrote the work named after him, and though of course I cannot prove that names were deliberately omitted, since there may have been several variant genealogies, my main point, which is that where such lists are cited in the Bible, there is usually a theological motive involved.

I have only cited the last couple of sentences from your interesting comments about the High Priestly lists, since it seems to be your summary of that part of your reply. Since the only lists we have are those contained in the Hebrew Bible, we don't know how many there originally were, and I am quite happy to accept that their may be discrepancies. Nothing in my argument hangs on any of the lists being complete and accurate.

Whether Ezra comes after Chronicles historically...as stated earlier, some scholars think they came from the same hand, others don't, and the dates cannot be established with any degree of certainty, so your argument that Ezra did not have a fuller genealogy to hand cannot be established, and in fairness, neither can my argument that he was abbreviating a longer list.

Scribal error is an interesting suggestion. I am not convinced that Matthew has made an unintentional scribal error. In 2 Chronicles 22;1, which is a repeat of 2 Kings 8: 24 - 29 there is "Ahaziah, son of Jehoram" The same person is called "Azariah son of Jehoram" in verse 6 in the KJV, although not in the RSV, so perhaps there are variant manuscript versions. What we have here is not a jump from one identical name to another, since it is not a genealogy, but either the same person identifed by two variations of the same name, or a scribal error, either by the author or a later copyist. Either way, this is a poor example to illustrate your point that Matthew made an unintentional jump from Ahaziah to Azariah.

If Matthew was going to squeeze a 14 name list out of an 18 name one, he would have had to omit names from somewhere. If Ahaziah and Azariah were variations on the same name, (Uzziah) then he could do it here, since although his list was shortened, it would still be the case that you had a son (Jotham), with Azariah as a father.

However one speculates, it is clear that Matthew wanted his genealogy to conform to a 3 x 14 scheme. This seems evident from the fact that he says this IN SPITE OF having only 13 links in the final third section of his genealogy. That this is intentional artifice on Matthew's part is all of a piece with the rest of his gospel which is highly schematic.

To say that Matthew has falsified the data is a value judgement. To falsify something is to do something to a document in order to mislead or to decieve as to the true meaning of something. Matthew has not done that. His orignal readers would have been well aware of what he was doing here as in the rest of the gospel.

This is my final word on this subject. i need to catch up on other things. However feel free to respond to my post.

Stacey Melissa

IF the author of Matthew was purposely twisting the facts to fit a series of 14s, then he may very well have been trying to make a numerological point, and David=14 fits the ploy as well as anything. I don't have the background to dispute whether Gematria was a concept invoked by others at the time the book was written.

But I wasn't trying to prove that the author of Matthew wasn't using Gematria. I was trying to prove that he couldn't have invoked it with any sort of legitimacy in this particular case. That lack of legitimacy casts a great deal of doubt on the idea that he was even trying to use Gematria.

Stacey Melissa

It's not clear in my speculation that the author of Matthew was trying to squeeze the genealogy into a 3x14 pattern. Here's my speculation:

A Christian scribe goes to the temple and looks over the genealogy in 1 Chronicles. He copies it down, except a few names that he accidently misses. Then he counts generations between Abraham, David, the deportation, and Jesus, but he gets a little sloppy here, too, and isn't fully consistent with where he starts and stops counting each set. So he mistakenly thought there were 14 generations in each set. Hmmm, that's a neat coincidence he thinks to himself, and then makes note of it.

I certainly wouldn't claim the author of Matthew purposely falsified the genealogy, but I do think it contains some accidental errors.

And you know this, how? Have you any idea how often I introduce new lines from the Sermon on the Mount to life-long, practicing, adult Christians who supposedly read their Bibles every day? These people are hardly an informed or skeptical bunch. I can't imagine the lack of printing presses would have made people any better informed 2000 years ago.

spin

You have to show also that it was used in the culture of the literature we are examining. The article doesn't do that. In fact it relies on Georges Ifrah who says that the use of Hebrew letters for numbers didn't take place until the 1st C. BCE. When after that was Jewish use of Gematria first put into practice??

The important difference as I pointed out was that Pirqe Avot was relying on what already existed, whereas you were trying to justify three names omitted by Matt because of a desire to make some statement based on gematria.

There have been wars fought in scholarship on the issue. I have a very different approach to the dating of these texts from that scholarship. The relationship between them is less straightforward. My dating works on the fact that these texts favour the Levites over the priests, suggesting a time when the priesthood no longer had a monopoly over scribal institutions, which was after the fall of the Oniad dynasty of high priests in c.175 BCE.

While the figure of Nehemiah was known Ben Sira, the text that Josephus had of the book about Nehemiah was extremely different from that which we now have, so there has been development between the time of the text that Josephus had access to and the final version which tied Ezra to Nehemiah by relocating Ezra's celebration of Sukkot into Nehemiah, thus causing a chronological conundrum as to when each of the figures, Ezra and Nehemiah, were in operation. However these two books were still in development at the time of Josephus, who uses not the modern Ezra, but a version which was extremely similar to 1 Esdras, which has Ezra's celebration at the end of that book, as Josephus does.

We have a chronological development from 1 Esdras to Ezra to Chronicles with regard to the evolution of the high priestly genealogy. That should reflect the chronological order of those books as well.

I wonder though is that saying anything other than the contents of the literature usually reflect some theological motive?

Actually there are lists outside the Hebrew bible. I've cited 1 Esdras and 2 Esdras, but I should also mention Josephus who has numerous snippets as well.

I understood your comments about the state of the genealogy found in Ezra was that names were omitted for some purpose, supplying you with a case that such manipulations of lists were done. I didn't think this idea was reflective of the evidence I've seen, so I asked you to show how you would date Ezra after Chronicles in order for you to have the starting conditions for the hypothesis you were suggesting, which you amend here:.

OK, that's clear.

No, I wasn't implying that it was the Matthean writer who made the scribal error, but someone on whom he depends.

Neither the Hebrew text I usually use nor that in the JPS version has a footnote to the issue. They simply have Azariah. The RSV has normalised the text, as obviously it should have been Ahaziah. The matter is that there was a confusion betwen Ahaziah and Azariah and it is this confusion that I put forward as the reason for the haplography, which neatly accounts for the omission of specifically those three names and requires no untoward manipulation of the genealogy by the writer of Matt. I'm am thus at a loss to understand this:

Sorry, I don't follow the logic. If the name Ahaziah and Azariah can be confused as 2 Chr 22:6 plainly shows, and it may have been that the name Azariah had replaced Ahaziah in the form of the genealogy we are dealing with, then a haplography seems to me to be the most economical way to explain the manifestation.

The Pirqe Avot didn't squeeze ten names, what makes you think that our writer squeezed 14 names? Why wouldn't have been the observation that there were fourteen names that stimulated the passage?

A haplography is a "careless" scribal error, not an intentional omission. You are imputing motive without grounds.

Yet nothing is made of the scheme of three fourteens.

If you deliberately leave out information you falsify the results. I'm not interested in motives: I don't think that a manipulation of the list by our writer is necessary to explain the evidence.

You simply can't expect anyone to take this conjecture seriously: you know nothing about what "His orignal readers would have been well aware of".


spin

aa5874

Mikem, you have made a grave error. The facts before us show two genealogies that are contradictory. You infer that the author of Matthew may have used 'gematria', but then it could have been the author of Chronicles who used 'gematria'. You do not have any way of knowning if one or both are incorrect.

Mikem, you claim David is 4-6-4 which is fourteen when added, however when multiplied we get 96, we can play with numbers all day long if you want .

I am going to give you the names of my son, my father and grand- father and myself. I will be called Sam. Bob's son is Jack, Jack's son is Sam and Sam's son is Harry. My brother says I have it wrong. He says Jack's son is Harry, Harry's son is Sam and Sam's son is Bob.

Mikem, can you tell which one is correct? The authors of the Christian Bible without doubt suffered from Dementia.

Chris Weimer

Actually, David isn't always 4-6-4, but very often 4-6-10-4. As I note here: