Four Women

Four Women

Article by brother Gordon Wilson

Each of the four Gospels begins its presentation of Jesus’ life and teaching in its own distinct way. Mark, the earliest of the four, bypasses the birth and infancy of our Lord, and jumps right into the action: John the Baptist is baptizing and Jesus comes to him to be baptized, where He is identified as the Son of God. Mark mentions the temptations in a single verse, then puts Jesus to work healing and teaching. Luke, with his careful historical approach, tells the whole background story of John the Baptist, the annunciation to Mary, the imperial decree that took Joseph and Mary from Nazareth to Bethlehem, the angelic announcement to shepherds of a Savior’s birth and their visit to the stable, the circumcision of the Infant and His presentation to God in the temple, and a single incident about Him at age 12. That is it till Jesus, at about age 30, was baptized and began His public ministry. John starts his Gospel account with a description of the pre-existent Word who was with God and was God,  who became flesh and lived among men. He does not specifically tell of Jesus’ baptism, but records the testimony of John the Baptist following the baptism, then proceeds to tell about an early Judean ministry not mentioned in the other Gospels. Each of the inspired writings presents the Good News in credible ways. Their differences help us to have a more rounded view of our Lord.

It is Matthew’s opening that I want to study briefly; especially one feature of that opening. Matthew begins with the words, “The book  of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” He then gives the genealogy starting with “Abraham was the father of Isaac” all the way down to “Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus who is called Christ.” Starting with a genealogy should not surprise us, when we consider that one of Matthew’s main themes was the kingship of Christ. Most of us would be unable to name our great-great grandparents. I know who one set of my great grandparents were, and in fact have met my great grandmother, but that’s the limit. And it is just about the limit for most people unless, out of curiosity or a need for genetic information, they research their family history. But the case is different for royalty. It is reported that the King of England can trace his family back over 30 generations. There are a lot of Georges, Charleses, Jameses, and Henrys in the lineage. There are, alas, no Gordons. Matthew was interested in establishing that Jesus was not only of the nation of Israel, descended from Abraham, but also of the royal lineage entitled to the throne of David. David was Israel’s greatest king, and God had made an eternal covenant with him that his throne would always be occupied by one of his seed.

The unusual thing about the list of ancestors given by Matthew is the inclusion of references to four women. Each man is said to be the father of …and the son who continues the line is named. But in four cases the man is said to be the father of …and then names the mother. We are told that Judah was the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar. Salmon was the father of Boaz by Rahab. Boaz was the father of Obed by Ruth. David was the father of Solomon by her who had been the wife of Uriah [Bathsheba]. Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba. Why these four in a genealogy that names no other women? One might recognize the connection of two of the women with the theme of kingship. The dying prophecy of Jacob was that “the scepter will not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, until he comes to whom it belongs, and the obedience of the nations becomes his” (Gen 49:10). All Jews regarded this, quite rightly, as a Messianic prophecy. So when Tamar gave birth to Judah’s son, Perez, this was a continuation of the royal line. Then, David’s union with Bathsheba, as sinful as it was, did result in the birth of Solomon who, in succeeding David, sat on the throne of the LORD (1 Chron 29:23). These facts, though important, do not account for the special mention of these two women more than the other two, who were likewise in the royal succession. For that matter, an entire section of the genealogy includes 14 kings of David’s descent. Clearly, then, the kingship theme, while the main purpose of the genealogy as a whole, is not the reason for special mention of the four women. We need to look for another explanation.

A goodly number of expositors have found the reason for the inclusion of these women’s names in the fact that they were especially involved in sinful conduct; at least three of them were, and the fourth may have been considered to have a stain against her in that she came into the lineage as a foreigner, a Gentile. I do not intend in this article to describe in detail the sordid and shameful stories of these women. One can read those for themselves in the Scriptures. Tamar’s story is in Gen 38; Rahab’s in Joshua 2, with later follow-up. An entire book of four short chapters is devoted to the story of Ruth; and you can read about David and Bahsheba in 2 Sam 11 –but please read also David’s expression of deep heart-felt repentance in Psalm 51. The inclusion of these women in the genealogy of the Savior,  pure and holy as He was, does tell us something about God who foresaw and arranged the whole history. He is a God of love and forgiveness, and the story of Christ’s ancestry is a story of grace. Not only so, it teaches us that God’s will is always done. He can use the most adverse circumstances and the most fallen people to accomplish His purposes. It is a very attractive theory that holds that this is the reason for these women to be specially named. Yet, there are reasons to look elsewhere for the explanation.

In the first place, Matthew did not need to name these women to prove that God’s  love and power were effective in the descent of Christ from Abraham through David. Some of the men in the list were notorious for their wickedness. And of course the sinful women were no more guilty than the men with whom they committed their recorded transgressions. The important thing to notice here is that, in fact, in Jewish tradition these women were not considered examples of sinfulness at all! Numerous references to them in later parts of the Bible, in the apocryphal works, and in the stories told by Israelite writers of the first Christian century (e.g. Philo and Josephus) portrayed them as forgiven, redeemed, and numbered among the holy women of old. And it is certain that not one of them was wicked and vicious in the class with someone like Jezebel or Delilah.

Tamar’s sinful behavior was occasioned by her desperation to obtain the inheritance due to her because of the death of her husband. Judah was violating both the law of the society in which he lived and the promise he had made to Tamar to let her marry his remaining son; something he had no intention of doing. In the end, Judah himself acknowledged, “She has been more righteous than I.” In later Biblical mention Tamar is simply accepted as a legitimate  member of the royal lineage (Ruth 4:12; 1 Chron 2:4).

Rahab lived in Jericho, the city that had to be conquered first after the children of Israel crossed into the promised land. Her house was on the city wall.Rahab was a prostitute, but we are not to suppose that the two spies sent by Joshua went to her house for that reason. Evidently her house was known to be available as an inn or lodging house. When an informer went to the king of Jericho and told him that two Israelites had come to the city, searching out the land, the king sent immediately to Rahab to ask where the two men were. The informant, so far as the report goes, did not tell the king that the men were at Rahab’s house. So it must have been the natural and expected place for strangers to stop. We do not know for sure whether Rahab was still practicing her immoral trade. We only know that both in Josh 2, and in both places in the NT where she is mentioned (Heb. 11:31; Jas 2:25), the words “the prostitute” are attached to her name. But that may mean only that was the way she was known in Jericho. In any case, she repented somewhere along the line, because she gained a good reputation in Israel, and both NT writers who name her give her a good report, one commenting on her faith, and the other on her justification. She hid the spies because she had heard and believed the reports of Yahweh’s power and what He had done in bringing Israel to the promised land. She was confident Israel would be able to conquer the land, because God, the only God, would empower them. When  the walls of Jericho fell, on the side where the Israelites were camped, she was brought out safely and lived with the people of God thereafter. She married Salmon, the great-great grandfather of David, thus entering the list of Christ’s ancestors.

Not much need be said about Ruth. The short book named for her was attached to the book of Judges in the Jewish canon. The main purpose of the book seems to be to serve as a bridge between the period of the Judges and the monarchy under David, God’s chosen king. It ends with a shortened genealogy from Judah and Tamar through Salmon and Rahab, to the latter’s son, who married Ruth, making her the great-grandmother of king David.  During a famine in the region of Bethlehem, territory of Judah, a family there migrated to the country of Moab. In Moab the husband died, leaving his wife Naomi with two sons. The sons married Moabite women. Both sons died in Moab. One of Naomi’s daughters-in-law was Ruth. When Naomi returned to Bethlehem of Judah, the other daughter-in-law reluctantly remained in Moab, but Ruth refused. She spoke to Naomi the words that have become immortalized and often read in wedding ceremonies, applying them as from bride to groom. “Wherever you go, I will go, And wherever you lodge, I will lodge; Your people shall be my people, And your God, my God.” She named Yahweh as her God. In Bethlehem, due to Naomi’s wise directions Ruth ended up marrying a successful and righteous man, Boaz. How this came about is a beautiful story that must be read in full to be appreciated. Everything written about Ruth pictures her as a pure and modest young woman –though it does appear that she (on Naomi’s advice) sort of “set her cap” for Boaz. She fit well into Israelite society and into the royal lineage of Christ.

Concerning Bathsheba, we do not know whether she was complicit in David’s adultery with her. She was very beautiful, and must have known it. Whether she knew she could be viewed from the roof of David’s palace and that David often walked there, we just are not told. Certainly when a servant of David came to take her to the king’s house she had no choice but to go, nor any reason not to want to go. Perhaps she willingly consented to David’s expressed desire for her, or maybe she feared for the safety of her husband if she refused. There are a lot  of maybes here. There is no indication that she in any way protested or resisted the king’s advances. The child born of the adultery died in infancy, which Bathsheba must have considered as much a punishment for her wrongdoing as it was for David, who grieved deeply over it. In any case, David was far more guilty than Bathsheba. He had wives of his own, at least one of whom was also very beautiful. He knew Bathsheba was married; knew and held in high esteem her husband, her father, and her grandfather. Nevertheless, because of David’s sincere sorrow and repentance (and one supposes Bathsheba’s as well) God chose Bathsheba to continue the line of David, leading to the Messiah. Her request to David that her son, Solomon, be chosen to succeed him on the throne instead of the natural successor was granted. She was David’s counselor and comforter when he was on his deathbed.

These, then, are the four women named by Matthew, and their stories hardly fit the idea that their inclusion in the genealogical account is due to their special sinfulness. This does truly show how God, in His providence, showed mercy where mercy was needed. He took human beings with all their sins and frailties, and through them brought into the world the one Man who never sinned at all, and who now sits on the throne of His father David forever; which is also the throne of His Father, the Eternal God.

But now we must look at the one thing all four women had in common, and we will see how their inclusion in the genealogy Matthew recorded was appropriate. All of the women were Gentiles, of races other than Jewish. Tamar was a Canaanite. Unlike his Patriarchal forebears, Isaac and Jacob, Judah did not hesitate to marry a woman of the land of Canaan. Therefore, he had no objection, even encouraged, his own son to marry a Canaanite woman. That is how Tamar became his daughter-in-law. Rahab, of course, was a woman of Jericho who had only heard about God and His people. Ruth came from Moab and is referred to as “the Moabite.”We are not told in Scripture anything about the national origin of Bathsheba but she was married to a Hittite and under Israelite law would have shared her husband’s identity. And in fact Matthew mentions her only as “her who had been the wife of Uriah”.All Jewish literature of later centuries, especially the targums, refer to her as a “foreigner.” What is the significance of these four women all being of Gentile background?

There is some disagreement among scholars about the date when the Gospel of Matthew was written. Almost certainly the original Gospel by the apostle Matthew was written shortly after Mark’s Gospel began to circulate, and the need for a much fuller record of the teaching of Jesus was felt. Matthew wrote the most Jewish of the four Gospels, though it must have been intended from the beginning to be for all Christians. At that time, and through all the apostolic age, the most widely discussed matter in the church was whether Gentiles were to be admitted simply on the basis of their faith in Christ, or whether they had to enter the church through the door of Judaism. One of the most visible themes in the Gospel According to Matthew is the acceptance of Gentiles, and the preparation by Jesus for the Gentile mission.

Immediately after the birth of Jesus, Matthew tells of the visit of the Magi from the east. He records John the Baptist’s statement that “God is able to raise up children of Abraham from these stones”. He tells of Jesus’ commending the faith of the centurion and the Syro-Phoenician woman as greater than any he had found in Israel. He has Jesus speaking of people coming from the east and the west to recline at table with Abraham. Several other such things are mentioned, climaxing with the Great Commission to “make disciples of all nations (ethne, same word as “Gentiles”). Matthew wanted to show, and did show, through the naming of four women of heathen background that Jesus Christ, though the descendant of Abraham, is not the patriarch’s only seed, but his seed includes all who believe on Him, whether Jew or Gentile.

God chose Israel to be a witness to all the world of the one true God. He sent His Son because He loves the world. He established His church to include all the saved, to add believing Gentiles to the remnant of Jewish believers. Matthew’s Gospel shows this just as much as does the Gospel of Luke, the Acts, or the letters of Paul. God was the Savior of women as well as men in old times when they believed on Him and identified themselves with His people. He still is.