Immoral Foreign Women in the Messiah's Genealogy
Is this how Jesus told his own story?
For most of the week I’ve been preoccupied by this thought: I wonder if Matthew includes several immoral foreign women in his genealogy of Jesus because that’s how Jesus explained his own human heritage, as he walked with his disciples along the roads and shores of Galilee.
I’m just speculating, but hang with me.
Any other Israelite would almost certainly leave these women out. For one thing, when it came to family lineages in the ancient world, women were considered too insignificant to mention. More important, these women, women of this sort, would have brought shame—not honor—to a typical family line.
Paul’s (albeit rhetorical) defense of his own pedigree is a more typical example:
“If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless.” (Philippians 3:5-6)
The tone in Matthew’s genealogy couldn’t be more different, as it defines the Savior of the World as the son of
Tamar: a childless Canaanite widow who buried two husbands and posed as a prostitute to seduce her father-in-law (Genesis 38)
Rahab: a prostitute (and maybe—hopefully!—an innkeeper?) from Israel’s wartime neighbor, Jericho (Joshua 2)
Ruth: a Moabite, which was enough to ban her from Israel’s temple (Deuteronomy 23:3) and generally mark her for disdain
“Uriah’s wife” (Bathsheba): perhaps a Hittite like her husband, and more likely a victim of sexual assault than a willing adulteress, though her contemporaries may have viewed her with contempt just the same (2 Samuel 11)
Even Mary’s story is complicated. She wasn’t foreign. And we know she wasn’t guilty of adultery. But she was an unwed mother. At some point the bump would show. As my friend Randy likes to point out, ancient people knew how to count to nine. They would have known Jesus was born too soon after the wedding. They would have found the story about the angel and the immaculate conception hard to swallow.
And it wasn’t only ancient sensibilities that rendered these women problematic. We struggle to know what sense to make out of them, too. Only Ruth and Mary show up in any of the children’s Bibles at our house. Thousands of years later, we fumble to extract morals from the stories of Tamar and Rahab and Bathsheba. We don’t heap scorn. We just ignore them, forget them, and look for other role models for our daughters.
And yet here’s Matthew’s genealogy insisting, Don’t forget them! Honor them! Remember them not as the motherless widow, the prostitute, the victim. Remember them as “the mother of … Jesus the Messiah.” For all generations, they are highly esteemed and honored by God. At some level, Elizabeth’s words to Mary apply to all of them: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear!” (Luke 1:42).
The question, of course, is Why? I don’t know for sure. But the thing that makes me wonder if Jesus highlighted these women when he reflected on his family line is that they are just the sort of people he called “close to the Kingdom” during his ministry. Each of them demonstrated greater faith and faithfulness than the other characters in their stories:
Tamar was “more righteous” than the patriarch Judah, because of her commitment to her family, however odd that devotion looks from the 21st century (Gen 38:26)
Rahab was more confident in the God of Israel than the Israelites were (Josh 2:9)
Ruth was more devoted to her mother-in-law and her mother-in-law’s God, land, and people than either custom or reason required (Ruth 1:16)
Bathsheba was more faithful to both her religious observance and her marriage than was the king of Israel (2 Sam 11:4, 27)
These women, who may have seemed far from God from the outside looking in, were close to God in their faith. That’s how it happens in God’s Kingdom. As Jesus put it to the Pharisees, much to their surprise, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you” (Matthew 21:31). Look past the worst thing they’ve ever done and you’ll see in this list women who were close to the Kingdom of God.
It wasn’t just immoral people Jesus considered close to the Kingdom. He loved to celebrate the faith of foreigners, too. A Roman Centurion asked Jesus to heal his servant. He told Jesus not to bother coming to his house: “But just say the word, and my servant will be healed. Jesus was “amazed” by this statement and told everyone standing nearby, “Truly I tell you, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith” (Matthew 8:10). God’s covenant family is not diluted by “immoral” foreign women or men. It is enriched by their faith and fidelity and courage.
Maybe the way it happened was like this—
Maybe Jesus heard echoes of Tamar when he spoke to the Samaritan woman at the well (“The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband”) and so he told Tamar’s story when his disciples asked, “Why are you talking to her?” (John 4:27). Maybe he heard echoes of Rahab in the “sinful woman” who washed his feet with her tears (Luke 7:36-50). Maybe he heard echoes of Ruth’s gleanings in the faith of the Syrophoenican woman, when she said “even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs” (Mark 7:28). Maybe he heard echoes of Bathsheba in the cries of the woman caught in adultery (John 8:1-11).
Maybe when he explained these situations to his disciples afterwards, he explained that he carried in his body the DNA of Tamar and Ruth and Rahab and Bathsheba—that he was carried in the wombs of “immoral” foreign women.
I don’t know. I can’t help but wonder.
The wondering makes me grateful that our nearness to the Kingdom of God isn’t determined by our good behavior or derailed by the worst thing we’ve ever done. It makes me grateful that Jesus can see and author faith where others may miss it or write it off. As we head into a new year, it inspires me to pray for eyes to see people how Jesus sees them and a heart that makes space for them.