I am back in 1 Chronicles these days, working my way through passages that once inspired a post entitled “Does God Need An Editor?” (Spoiler: my answer was a hard no.)
For those unfamiliar, the first nine chapters of 1 Chronicles are almost entirely composed of Hebrew genealogies: descendants of Adam, Abraham, David, twelve of the thirteen tribes of Israel (mysteriously, not including Dan, none of whose progeny appear in Chronicles prior to chapter 27), Israel’s first king Saul, and a number of the returned exiles from the Babylonian captivity.
That’s a whole lot of Hebrew names one after another with very little intervening detail or editorial commentary. The modern Christian reader quite reasonably asks, “Er … what’s in this for me, if anything at all?”
Good question.
Tough Sledding
Now, those first nine chapters of Chronicles are not the only genealogies in scripture, but the ones that appear in Genesis, Ezra, Nehemiah, Matthew and Luke all have more obvious purposes and relevance to someone, mostly Jews.
The New Testament genealogies showed to the satisfaction of the most skeptical first century Jew that the Lord Jesus was legally qualified to be David’s heir and king of Israel. That’s important, critical even. The genealogies in Ezra and Nehemiah were proof of ethnic purity for large numbers of returned Jewish exiles, qualifying them to assert their right to their ancestral property in Palestine. That was both practical and urgent in its day. The Genesis genealogies give us priceless information about antediluvian (i.e., pre-Israelite) man and the beginnings of the nations, among other things. As a Gentile interested in reality, I would not want to be without them.
The Chronicles genealogies, on the other hand, are often fragmentary and occasionally redundant, not to mention that they run on far longer than any others in scripture. I mean, who really needs not one but two versions of Saul’s ancestors and offspring? That flawed king forfeited his throne to David and became a footnote in Israel’s history, making his double inclusion in the genealogies of Chronicles a mystery even I won’t try to solve.
Let’s just say much about these nine chapters is tough sledding.
A Fascinating Study
Well, four or five centuries after the books of Chronicles were finalized and generally accepted as holy writ, some folks in Ephesus suddenly found genealogies a fascinating study, to the point where Paul had to tell Timothy it was time to curtail their obsession with an area of scriptural scrutiny that had become less than entirely profitable. He wrote:
“Remain at Ephesus so that you may charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine, nor to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies, which promote speculations rather than the stewardship from God that is by faith.”
“Endless genealogies.” Hmm. In my book, that’s almost surely a reference to 1 Chronicles. In Greek, “endless” is aperantos, meaning impossible to pass through, or without perimeter. If any series of genealogies in scripture meets that daunting standard, it is surely that of Chronicles. Nothing else even comes close. Apparently, there were “certain persons” in the Ephesian church who thought Jewish heredity was hugely important.
The Church in Ephesus
The church at Ephesus is an interesting case. Founded by the apostle John, or so it is thought, it was made up of both Jews and Gentiles. Paul spent about 2-1/2 years working with that group of new believers, most likely between AD53 and 56. You can find the story in Acts 18 and 19. When the Jews in the local synagogue rebuffed him, he began to teach daily in the hall of Tyrannus, until a riot provoked by local craftsmen brought his visit to an abrupt end. Later, he would ask the elders of the Ephesian church to meet him in Miletus, before setting in motion the events that would result in his first Roman imprisonment.
So then, at the time Paul wrote to Timothy about the shortcomings among the teachers in Ephesus, the church there was almost a decade old, and “certain persons”, inevitably Jews or Judaizers, had come to sufficient prominence there that they were instructing the believers on a regular basis. They loved myths and genealogies, and they were giving the Christians at Ephesus a regular diet of them.
Now, why Jews in Ephesus would feel compelled to inflict their own little OT hobby-horses on Gentiles — especially well after the Jerusalem council of Acts 15 established unequivocally that no such practice was either necessary or desirable — is another mystery I can only ascribe to the vagaries of the sinful nature or the patriotic, pseudo-religious fervor of the chronic zealot. It is even less obvious to the modern Christian reader how these Jewish obsessives were making use of genealogies. No, they were not promoting Gentile interest in Israel’s history. That would have been marginally useful, as well as specific and literal; there’s not a great deal of imaginative leeway in statements like “So-and-so fathered so-and-so.” But somehow these folks were using genealogies as a basis from which to spin fictions that threatened to become unprofitable, a time sink that would divert the church at Ephesus from the spiritual issues that really mattered to the Lord.
Why Genealogies?
Understanding what this sort of teaching may have looked like requires a little background in the traditional rabbinical handling of the Old Testament text. Jews interpreted their scripture on five different levels, which you can read about here if you’re interested. The first or most literal level is called pshat, and is the closest we can come to our Western mode of interpretation. We generally refer to any use we make of scripture beyond the obvious, literal meaning as application rather than interpretation.
However, Jews of prior generations viewed these other levels of exegesis as perfectly valid, and that made them open to readings of the text that Western believers would not generally consider, provided they were acceptable to the rabbis. The fourth and fifth levels of Jewish exegesis are called sod and sod of sod, and these modes of interpretation are increasingly esoteric, involving the search for secret meanings in the text. To aid in this, the letters of the Jewish alphabet all have specific numbers assigned to them. Thus, each word of the OT text has a numerical value based on its Hebrew letters, and these totals may be recalculated as the product of smaller numbers, many of which were assigned deep spiritual significance by the rabbis. This practice is called gematria.
What is the most fertile possible source of unique Hebrew words? Why, that would be a lengthy list of names. An “endless” genealogy? Even better.
Spiritual Gem-nastics
You can get an idea how it works here, but let’s just say this exceedingly flexible interpretive device enables the creative Bible teacher to make the scripture say literally any wildly speculative thing that might pop into his head and ascribe to it some sort of biblical authority, however dubious that authority might be. A good, lengthy genealogy could enable the budding numerologist to teach the craziest of notions, and to drive home the product of his fevered imagination with a hearty “God says.”
That’s a seriously bad idea, and Paul was determined to put a stop to it in Ephesus. While ancient Jews may have enjoyed these math exercises, they did not lead anywhere concrete or profitable. For Christians, and especially for Gentile Christians, such things were a complete waste of time. Paul wanted Timothy to encourage the Ephesians to stick to the plain meaning of the text, which promoted “the stewardship from God which is by faith”.
The Stewardship from God
Numerology is rarely a hot topic in Western churches these days, but it does come around from time to time. Several weeks back, I sat through a Lord’s Supper during which one enthusiastic brother in Christ used the total number of Israelite deaths resulting from Korah’s rebellion (250 + 14,700 = 14,950) as a springboard to speculating about the allegorical meaning of each of several numbers, the product of which was 14,950. He actually assigned a spiritual significance to the number 23, an impressive feat considering that even the Jews themselves do not.
If you’ve never heard that in church before, there’s a good reason. Nothing short of modern Disney movie morality or the Canadian federal budget could be more conjectural, or less likely to generate deep, fervent worship of Christ in the minds and hearts of a Gentile audience.
Speculations and Certainties
The church at Ephesus later abandoned the love it had at first, putting them in danger of having their “lampstand” removed. So says Revelation 2. Perhaps those good folks were distracted from their “first works” by teachings of lesser importance. But that too is only speculation.
Genealogies are great when used by the audience for which the Lord intended them. Genealogies are great when used for the purpose the Lord intended. But the Lord never meant for his people to promote or accept speculations, whether generated by genealogies, myths or creative math.
If speculation is what you are looking for, Judaism still has plenty. Christianity has certainties. When we gather to worship, the Lord wants us spending our time together considering the rock-solid truths founded in the person and work of his precious Son. Anything else is a comparative waste of our time — and, more importantly, his.
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