Biblical Genealogies, J. Richard Middleton

"Middleton's" (actually someone else's) Reasons Against Genesis 5 and 11 Genealogies · Biblical Genealogies, J. Richard Middleton · Princeton to Middleton · Middleton's Blogs Continue

Linking to what he actually said (himself, in an interview podcast) on the matter on the site of Biologos:

Biologos : Richard Middleton | Interpreting Biblical Genealogies
https://biologos.org/podcast-episodes/richard-middleton-interpreting-biblical-genealogies

Even as far back as the 19th century, Christians who studied the genealogies realized when you compare them, there are generations missing from genealogies that cover the same time period. So we can’t accept that they’re literally this one became the father of this one. It’s an ancestor of. And we’re not sure how many generations are missing.

Here is Haydock on the matter:

Ver. 8. Joram begot Ozias, three generations are omitted, as we find 2 Paralip. xxii; for there, Joram begot Ochozias, and Ochozias begot Joas, and Joas begot Amazias, and Amazias begot Ozias. This omission is not material, the design of S. Matthew being only to shew the Jews that Jesus, their Messias, was of the family of David; and he is equally the son, or the descendent of David, though the said three generations be left out: for Ozias may be called the son of Joram, though Joram was his great-grandfather. Wi. [Wi = Witham]

It is thought that S. Matt. omitted these three kings, Ochozias, Joas, and Amazias, to preserve the distribution of his genealogy into three parts, each of fourteen generations; and, perhaps, also on account of their impiety, or rather on account of the sentence pronounced against the house of Achab, from which they were descended by their mother Athalia. 3 Kings xxi. 21. C. [C. is, I think, Challoner]

While Haydock edited his Bible in the very early 19th C., Witham (certainly he) and Challoner (probably he) lived earlier than that.

George Witham (16 May 1655 – 16 April 1725) was an English Roman Catholic bishop who served as the Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District, and, later, as the Vicar Apostolic of the Northern District.[1]

and:

Richard Challoner (29 September 1691 – 12 January 1781) was an English Roman Catholic bishop, a leading figure of English Catholicism during the greater part of the 18th century. The titular Bishop of Doberus, he is perhaps most famous for his revision of the Douay–Rheims translation of the Bible.

Unlike Richard Middleton, these Catholic bishops were sure of how many generations were missing.

If impiety of Ahab personally is the cause of the omission, count male generations : 1) Ahab, (skip Athalia, as she's a woman), 2) Ochozias, 3) Joas, and 4) Amazias.

The Lord is patient and full of mercy, taking away iniquity and wickedness, and leaving no man clear, who visitest the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation. Numbers 14:18

Again, if the impiety of Ahab is not the cause, but rather that of Athalia herself, 1) Athalia (the fourth somehow bad woman in the ancestry of our Lord, the one not mentioned, unlike harlot Rahab, Moabite Ruth, adulterous Bathsheba), 2) Ochozias, 3) Joas, and 4) Amazias.

I am not sure if there is yet another generation omitted later on or not. One argument given in Haydock from Witham to verse 11, namely that there are more generations from Salathiel to Christ in St. Luke than in St. Matthew is unimportant. People can be same age and yet be different generations from a common ancestor, as Marie Antoinette had Henry IV two generations closer to herself, than Lewis XVI to himself, or the daughter of James VI & I and husband of the Winter King one generation closer to herself than Lewis XVI to himself. Same observation for Gonzaga princes of Mantua to them.

The genealogies might also fall into this category. In most of our English translations, the genealogies in Genesis and Matthew and Luke appear to be pretty straightforward family trees.

Not really. A Sosa-Stradonitz will give ancestors 2 and 3, 4 to 7, 8 to 15, 16 to 31. Fathers have twice the number of their son or daughter, and mothers twice plus one more. The most typical move in a Biblical one is giving ancestors 2, 4, 8, 16, fathers of fathers only, skipping mothers and maternal grandparents totally. I said "most typical" because the relations between the genealogies in Matthew and Luke show there are exceptions to this rule. Indeed, while Stradonitz was concerned to serve the nobility and its somewhat vain preoccupation with ancestry, Sosa was a Franciscan who dealt with the genealogies of ... you guessed it : Matthew and Luke. If we go to family trees starting from one ancestor, you have them branch out into different branches. The one genealogy looking like this is table of nations in Genesis 10. All others differ from this model.

I think that when we in the modern world use a genealogy, we’re thinking of an accurate accounting of all the generations tracing back from as far back as we can go to where we are today. So we understand our heritage. Before the modern period, people were not interested in the precision of genealogies the way we are. So genealogies had other functions. And you can look at the literature on genealogies in various cultures by anthropologists, and they have all sorts of ideas about what the functions were.

Er, no. We did not invent pre-occupation with fact in the modern world. We do not go to a hotchpotch of different ideas from anthropology to "invent" an explanation of what genealogies were before this pretendedly modern invention. I sense Middleton is fairly unfamiliar with the genuinely pre-modern since he was apparently not aware the "omitted generations" were noticed well before the 19th C. And I sense anthropologists are more concerned with modern savages and subcultures (say, lower than Western Bourgeoisie) than with the genuine pre-modern. If they are what Middleton is looking to for guidance ... too bad for him.

But one of the functions in the Bible is to make a theological point that would cohere with what the narrative is about. So that the entire story is telling us something about God and humanity and God’s purposes for salvation. And the genealogies function within that narrative context. That’s very general at the moment.

As CMI basically already answered - this does not in any way, shape or form take away a fairly general concern with actual genealogical fact. Yes, some can be omitted, and if so, it is arguably because of some kind of damnatio memoriae.

So as far as I understand, what Usher did was he took the genealogies as if when he says so and so begat so and so that’s quite literally the father to the son, and there’s no gaps in between.

That is a fairly traditional approach, well before Usher. George Syncellus who died after 810 AD had done that with a standard LXX text, and Usher's difference from him is the choice of text version. Before Syncellus, St. Jerome had made a chronology partly based on Julius Africanus, where the Genesis 5 material is normal LXX (adding up to 2242 years, but 2262 in Julius' version), and Genesis 11 is LXX without II Cainan (a text version that exists, and that also matches the Samaritan version). It was incorporated into Historia scholastica (a Biblical history, with some glimpses of extra-Biblical ancient history too) and from there into the martyrology for December 25.

So just say that they have theological points they’re trying to make says there’s a similarity of function. But what the theological points are would be very different depending on where they’re located, in what book in the Bible, because the different books of the Bible are saying different things. So the genealogies in Genesis have to do more with what I was saying about the integration of God’s ordered creation and our fracture of that creation through sin. Whereas the genealogies in Matthew and then also in Luke, which I didn’t really address in my blog posts, they have to do with what is the point that Matthew is trying to make or Luke is trying to make about who Jesus is, his identity in the context of Israel’s story. So that’s a little different theological point.

None of the theological points warrants a wholesale farewell from genealogical accuracy. Punctually departing from it is one thing, skipping it is a totally different story.

So you know the genealogy in chapter four, Genesis, starts with Adam and Adam having his sons, Cain and Abel, and ending with Adam having a replacement for Abel, who was killed,Seth. And then Seth’s genealogy right to Enosh. But in between that you have a long narrative, the Cain and Abel story. And many people who would read Genesis four, and ignore the genealogical notes at the beginning and at the end, and just read the story in between. But the story is really an interruption in a little genealogy that says, you know, so Adam and Eve have children, one of them kills the other one.

Sleep lag? Too little coffee? There are two genealogies in Genesis 4 and 5. One comes after Cain has killed Abel and known his wife in the land of Nod, and another comes after Adam and Eve appoint Seth as replacement for the Abel who was killed.

Also, the fact remains, while Moses is the historian who finalised Genesis as one book, we cannot treat him as one single narrator with an idea and subdividing his texts according to the subdivisions in that idea. He was very arguably heir of different short texts. One of them being Genesis 4 (to end or to verse 25), one of them being Genesis 5. And each of them starting out shorter than now, bnut expanded to include genealogical information from later on. He stringed them together while the break between them is going back in time.

Alright, among the other names in the genealogies not specifically in Genesis 4, but in Genesis 5 and so forth, would be you have Noah.

Which means comfort. In fact, people who do take Genesis 5 literally (I think Chuck Missler did) give the string of names the meaning of a near English sentence: "Man appointed mortal sorrow (but) the praised God shall descend, teaching (that) His death shall bring the despairing comfort" - well, God is master of history and it is also possible that the patriarchs knowing of the future redemption were instructed to hint at it through name choices.

For example, my name is only called brave ruler because of Richard the Lionheart.

In fact, while he may have been your father's reason, Richard meant brave or hard king before that. In his case, the name turned out to be prophetic. As, obviously, the names in Genesis 5 are on a different level.

And that got put back into the name, but the name originally didn’t mean that.

Yes, it did! You really were two cups of coffee short of full presence of mind, weren't you? Rik = king. Hard = brave or hard or strong. This was so with the very first Richard ever, way before Richard the Lionheart.

And it seems to me that Genesis 1 to 11, what we call the primeval history, or the universal history for Abraham, is clearly, has a quality of the legendary about it. So it just feels different.

Now, this brings up : what do we do with legend? To me, it is simply history told succinctly, and sometimes with blunders. There is a local legend in the area of Dürnstein that Richard the Lionheart was prisoner there, since the Duke of Austria had been insulted by him before St. Jean d'Acre. The historic facts are, Richard had come into a quarrel with the Duke of Austria before St. Jean d'Acre, and he was made a prisoner by the squire of the duke and he was put into custody in - precisely - Dürnstein.

I can pinpoint a probable cause why this would be in some sense a trasscript of oral legend - whatever books Sarug may have had, Nachor and Thare would have dilapidated in their service of fake gods. Hence, Abraham knew this matter (up to his own call at 75, which he added to it) from stories he had heard by Sarug who died when his great-grandson was 50. The way in which to preserve oral legend from error in transmission is, either verse or very short texts. And the texts composing Genesis 2 to 11 (chapter 1 was later added by Moses) are indeed very short and also so few, no problem for Abraham to have learned all of them by heart. After chapter 11, it seems Abraham's tribe could preserve writing material, and so the things added after that could be more prolix texts. The tribal unity was certainly split up in more than one unit, but never broken in temporal continuity, between Abraham and Joseph in Egypt. And in Egypt, Abraham would have seen writing practised.

And the name Shem, for example, I think is really interesting, in that it’s never explained that the word Shem means name.

Are you suggesting that his real name was Yeshua, as ha-Shem is a standin for The Lord?

But the word Shem is the name that begins the genealogy following the Tower of Babel and ends the genealogy before the Tower of Babel. And the Tower of Babel is about people trying to make a name for themselves, a shem.

Indeed, thank you, excellent point. Some people (arguably around Nimrod, named in previous chapter) try to make a name for themselves ... and the one name that finally stands out is the one of a tribe where part refused to participate in the building of the tower and the city.

It comes after the genealogy of Genesis 10, which describes the proliferation of people over the face of the earth, they’re spreading out or scattering. One point uses the same verb for scatter. And there are linguistic diversification. So it’s clearly out of order.

Like things tend to become, if the final redactor strings together very short texts. I would argue, while the word may be identic in chapter 10 and chapter 11, the events are different, and in chapter 10 we have geographic spread of mankind (before neolithic) while in chapter 11 we have linguistic and political split. However, the events in chapter 11 are retroactively integrated into the family tree of chapter 10, when it mentions "languages" as well.

And no, you are wrong in saying the Babel event were not the origin of language multiplicity. So soon after the Flood, it would be impossible to have languages in Abraham's time as different as Sumerian from Old Egyptian from Elamitic and so on, unless there had been a supernatural language split between. Unless you want to argue, the language split was agreed on by skilled conlangers, who had the opposite end in view to Zamenhof.

It’s one of the many cities in a complex world of many languages and cultures and peoples, but it’s one city in which they said, “let’s resist diversification. Let’s bring homogenization of a powerful empire which is going to be called Babylon. We’re going to impose our language on the world.’ We know the Assyrians imposed their language on conquered peoples, whether the Babylonians did, we don’t have that evidence yet. But it’s the same culture.

Assyrians and Babylonians as empires come way later than Babel, close on Abraham's time (like, in Sarug's time). Babylon had two languages, namely Akkadian and Sumerian. And it was founded by Amorrhaeans, arguably in the time of the Israelite stay in Egypt. In memory of, but not identic to, Nimrod's original.

And in fact, the building of the tower, we know from history, would have been done by slave labor. Even though the text has ‘let us,’ It really means ‘let them,’ which is just the way that you know people in power where ‘we built this tower,‘ ‘we built this city.’ Well really you didn’t build it, you got other people to build it for you.

I agree Nimrod was skilled as a slave hunter, but I think the slavery came, not as a class distinction below freemen, but as a civic duty, like military service or taxes. Because I think we have, in Göbekli Tepe, traces of his punishment for shirkers - beheading.

Skipping some, for now.

My guess is that they would have picked that up pretty easily, the 14-14-14, and they were David.

Certainly. Christian writers in Epistle of Barnabas and Jews were able to pick up gematric points on Abraham's 318 men. 318 as "Eliezer" or 318 as TIH, T IHCOY? Or both. Gematria was well spread in the Roman and Greek culture.

Well, the name Abraham or in Hebrew, Avraham, the gematria of that name is 41. That’s the first name on the list. And the last name of the list is David, Dawid, which is 14. Well, when you multiply 41 by 14, what do you get? 574. So Matthew is being very intentional about this. That’s why he changed the spelling of some names. It wouldn’t have come out that way if he hadn’t changed the spelling, whether or not all readers would have got that? I don’t know. But some would have.

Two things:

• prove the spellings were not changed on the Jewish side to avoid this!
• I'll give you leeway with spelling on the following exercise (see below).

So, when you read the blog post, you understand all the details of the gematria but to sum up the first 14 names that he has, add up the 574. We talked about that. The next 14 out of the 560 and the next 14 out of the 588. That’s 1722. It turns out that when you multiply Abraham, which is 41, with a messiah, mushiya, which is 42, you get 1722. That’s the beginning and the end. So at multiple levels, Matthew’s having fun and making a point. Israel’s history culminates in Jesus the Messiah.

I'd like to know how "mushiya" could be 42. Mem = 40, shin = 300, yod = 10, possibly ayin for 70? Is the point that 420 can be represented by 42?

Now, Matthew used real names of real people, with very few omissions. Here is the exercise. US has now its 46th president, and I'd like you to leave out maximally 4 people, and try to contrive a sum that's divisible by 14. You can use Hebrew or Greek or ASCII numeric values for the letters, but consistently. You can use spelling variants (in ASCII it would make a difference if you wrote "Alexander" or "Aleksandr" for Hamilton). You can use either first names, or last names, or first and last but not middle names or complete names with middle names, but consistently. I don't think any pick of 42 or any subdivision of them into 14-14-14 would make a sum divisible by 14.

Speaking of gematria - Nero Caesar in itself adds up to 100 (C is only Roman numeral) and its Greek transscription also not to 666. However, transscribe them to Hebrew, and Hebrew letter values will give 616 for Nero Caesar, 666 for the Greek version which has an extra nun. This fact doesn't make the Apocalypse a preterist book. It makes Nero a type for the Antichrist.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Vigil of Sts Simon and Jude
27.X.2021

I was arguably three cups of java short of full presence of mind, since I gave the exercise on US Presidents without stating the objective. Here it is, next day : since getting such a gematric match is a rare feat, the genealogies of St. Matthew show God in control and capable of getting some things really contrived, not just by omnipotence, but also by taste for that sort of things. Which means the genealogies in Genesis 5 and 11 may be as contrived as you like, but that doesn't make them a contrivance by a human author sidestepping historic facts./HGL