Ancient family trees did not bother to list women. Matthew's genealogy of Jesus lists four — and every one of them arrives with a scandal attached. That is not carelessness. It is the whole point. Open the first page of the New Testament, and you find a long chain of fathers and sons marching from Abraham to Christ. Into that chain Matthew inserts four women, and he could not have chosen four more surprising ones.
There is Tamar, who tricked her own father-in-law by disguising herself as a roadside prostitute. There is Rahab, an actual prostitute in the doomed city of Jericho. There is Ruth, a foreigner from Moab, a people Israel was taught to despise. And there is “the wife of Uriah” — Bathsheba — whom Matthew will not even dignify with her name, choosing instead to name the loyal soldier her king betrayed.
This is supposed to be the royal pedigree that proves Jesus is the Messiah. And Matthew deliberately hangs four skeletons in the closet where everyone can see them. The usual explanation is true as far as it goes.
These are outsiders and sinners — Gentiles and scandal — and by naming them Matthew announces from the very first page that this Messiah has come for the disreputable and the foreign, that grace is planted at the root of the family tree. All of that is right. But there is a deeper thread running through these four, and the people Matthew wrote for would have felt it at once. The thread leads back to the Watchers.
Genesis 6 tells of the “sons of God” — heavenly beings — who crossed a boundary they were never meant to cross, took human wives, and fathered the giants, the Nephilim, the “mighty men of old.” The ancient Jewish writings