The Genealogy and Joseph the Just Man (1 of 4)

The list everyone skips is doing something, and the man everyone treats as a minor character makes a decision that saves two lives.

Why Are There Women in the Genealogy?

Because a first-century reader expected none, and Matthew put in four.

Genealogies traced men. That was the form. The appearance of women in it is not a modern editorial gesture, it is a break in a convention the original audience knew.

Bailey’s first observation about the effect is simple. This Messiah comes to save all of humankind rather than half of it, and the list says so before the narrative starts.

Which Women Are They?

Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and the wife of Uriah, and the selection is pointed.

Gentiles are in that list. Rahab was a Canaanite in Jericho. Ruth was a Moabite. So Gentile blood is affirmed as part of Joseph’s line, and by implication Mary’s.

That matters for how Matthew’s Gospel is built. It opens with Gentiles in the family tree and ends with a commission to all nations, and the frame is deliberate.

Saints and sinners are both in it too. Tamar posed as a prostitute to get justice from her father-in-law. Rahab ran a house in a city under sentence. Bathsheba is named obliquely, as the wife of Uriah, which keeps David’s crime in view rather than tidying it away.

And Bailey adds a fourth note that is easy to miss. These particular women exhibited courage, intelligence and initiative, and those are not qualities lacking in the man at the end of the list.

What Was Joseph’s Actual Problem?

A pregnant fiancée and a legal framework with two exits, both bad.

Betrothal in that setting was binding. Breaking it required divorce, and the pregnancy was evidence of adultery.

The public route was to expose her, which was the honourable course by the standards of the day and would very likely have ended in her death or in something close to it.

The private route was a quiet divorce with two witnesses, which is what Matthew says he resolved to do before the angel came.

Notice that the text calls him just, and then describes him choosing the merciful option. Most treatments treat that as a tension, as though he was just but also kind.

What Did Joseph Think Justice Was?

Something he had worked out from Isaiah, and Bailey’s reading of it is the most interesting thing in the chapter.

He describes Joseph as a theologian whose concept of justice grew out of the Servant Songs. On that account the decision to spare Mary was not softness overriding principle. It was principle, arrived at from a particular reading of what God is like and what the righteous do.

And that theology saved the life of Mary and her unborn child.

Which reframes the sentence in Matthew. He was just, therefore he decided not to expose her. Not despite being just. Because of it.

What Did It Cost Him?

His standing, and he had to keep paying it.

After the angel he takes her home, which means every neighbour draws the obvious conclusion about a child born too soon. Bailey notes that he had the courage to withstand the culture of his day in order to live out what he had been told.

There is a second cost that is easier to overlook. Bailey says he was able to reprocess his anger into grace, which is the same movement identified in the great banquet and in the tenants.

The anger was real. He had every social permission to act on it and he did not, and what he did with it instead is the reason there is a story at all.

Why Does Joseph Disappear?

The Gospels do not say, and the silence is total.

He is present at the temple when Jesus is twelve and absent from every later scene. Mary appears at Cana, during the ministry, and at the cross. Joseph does not.

The natural inference is that he died before the ministry began, which would also account for Jesus being called the son of Mary in Mark 6:3, an unusual way to identify a man in that culture.

He gets four scenes, all of them in Matthew, all of them decisions made on the strength of dreams, and then he is gone.

Part of a series on the nativity, following Bailey’s treatment. See also what the nativity accounts actually record.

Footnotes2

1. Bathsheba being named as the wife of Uriah rather than by her own name is the sharpest editorial choice in the list. It keeps the husband in view, which keeps the murder in view, in a genealogy that could easily have moved past it.
2. That Joseph is called just in the same sentence that describes him choosing mercy is a translation problem as much as a theological one. Some versions render it as though the two are in tension, with a but between them. The Greek does not require that, and Bailey's reading removes the need for it entirely.

Sources

Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels (IVP Academic, 2008), chapter 2. Supports the significance of women appearing in the genealogy, the affirmation of Gentile ancestry, the mix of saints and sinners, the qualities the four women share, the reading of Joseph's justice as derived from the Servant Songs, and the account of his courage and of anger reprocessed into grace. Supplied in full.

The biblical texts cited: Matt 1:1-25, Matt 28:19, Gen 38, Josh 2, the book of Ruth, 2 Sam 11, Mark 6:3, and the Servant Songs in Isaiah.

Where the sourcing stops: the identification of Joseph's reasoning with the Servant Songs specifically is Bailey's reconstruction of an inner deliberation the text does not narrate, and it is offered as a reading rather than as a stated fact.