1. Frick Begat Frack

Have you learned your Greek letters? If not, go back and do so before you proceed. There's nothing for it but to do some memory work. Don't just learn to recite a list of them; learn the sounds they properly make, practice writing them, and perhaps make flash cards and quiz yourself until you can recognize them.

Let's start with Matthew 1:1-17. Why? Because it's easy-peasy. Mostly. It doesn't require you to master much unique vocabulary, or too many forms of the noun or verb. It's pretty repetitive, too. That's a good way to learn. For starters, look at the first verse (Fig. 1-1). If the illustrations give you eye-strain, click on them to open a super-sized version.

Figure 1-1Here is a sentence without a verb. It's really more of a heading for what follows, though whether it applies to the entire gospel "according to Matthew" or only to this section is a matter of interpretation. I'm inclined to let the ambiguity stand.

The first word, Biblos, is where we get the word "Bible" from. It means book. Greek nouns decline; that is, they have endings that tell you what role they play in the structure of the sentence. The ending of this noun, -os, tells us that it is nominative in case. The nominative case is used to name things; so in the sentence "The winner is Carl," where you are naming Carl as the winner, Carl (predicate nominative) would be in the nominative case. Also, the subject of most sentences is nominative. Is "Book" the subject or the predicate nominative here? Let's check back later on that.

Next you get geneseōs, also ends on -os, but with a long ō instead of the short o of the nominative ending. This noun is actually in the genitive case, which is used (among other things) to stick the word "of" in front of a noun. The nominative case of this verb is genesis, so in a funky way Matthew's opening words could be read as "Book of Genesis." Perhaps this is an intentional throw-back to the first book of the Bible, and the beginning of creation. It's as if Matthew is subtly telling us that God's revelation is turning over a new leaf, a New Testament, a new beginning within the continuity of Sacred Scripture, and that the story he is going to tell is about the coming of a new creation, or the restoration of the old one.

The next two words are easy. Iēsou Christou is Jesus Christ, genitive case. So: "Book of genesis of Jesus Christ." Even as we move past the idea that geneseos is a reference to the first book of the Bible, this phrase should tickle the memory of anyone who has read Genesis. This phrase, which could also be translated "Book of the generation of Jesus Christ," of His beginning, origin, birth, etc., harks back to Genesis 5:1, "This is the book of the generations of Adam." This, in turn, reflects a formula repeated at several structurally significant points in Genesis: "These are the generations of..." This is sacred history that Matthew is writing.

Matthew wraps up the sentence with a couple of apposite phrases concerning Jesus Christ. Huiou (son) is in the genitive case, but don't be in a hurry to stick "of" in front of it; everything after geneseōs is genitive because it all explains whose "generation" the book concerns. The names David & Abraham are easy to spot, particularly since they do not decline like other Greek words, and thus look the same whether they are nominative, genitive, or whatever. Full sentence: "Book of generation of Jesus Christ son of David son of Abraham." It's a very laconic style of writing. No definite article ("the"), no conjunction ("and"), the author expects the reader to fit it together himself. It's not really that hard.

It isn't fair to expect you to know this, at this stage in your Greek studies, but this sentence seems to carry a Hebrew form of thought. This should not surprise students of this gospel, given Matthew's apparent bias toward a Jewish audience. In Hebrew, the words "book-of" and "generation-of" would be construct forms depending on "Jesus Christ," the absolute form, to give them definition. So one could argue for peppering the phrase with definite articles, thus: "The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham." If you're desperate to have a "complete sentence," with a subject and predicate, feel free to stick "This is" at the beginning, making Biblos a predicate nominative.

Of course, Jesus is not Abraham's and David's "son" in the most literal sense of the word; both men were rather distant ancestors of His. He is their "son" in the sense of being their heir. Abraham is given greater emphasis than David by being placed last, but both ancestors are singled out because they bear a certain significance relevant to what Matthew intends to prove about Jesus Christ. To call him "Christ" (the Anointed, the Messiah) is itself a striking assertion. As evidence of this, Matthew presents the upcoming royal genealogy. But he first mentions David and Abraham as keynotes in his argument that Jesus is Heir both to the king (David) and to the patriarch of all Hebrew people (Abraham), and it might also be inferred, the fulfillment of what was promised to each of them concerning his offspring.

Figure 1-2This could get tediously repetitive. You're going to see a lot of sentences just like this in the next few verses. The name Abraham you have already seen. Hopefully you don't need much help spotting the name Isaac, which is also indeclinable; that is, you can't tell what case it's in by looking at the end of the word. Instead, you have to back up one word to the left, where ton ("the") tells us that Isaac is in the accusative case. This case is often used to mark the direct object of a verb. So "Abraham ____ Isaac."

What verb is that? Egennēsen comes from the stem gennaō, meaning "to bear children." We translate it as "beget" when the subject is a male, the father rather than the mother. The e- at the beginning of the verb indicates that the time of the begetting is in the past. The -s- toward the end is the sign of the aorist, an aspect of the Greek verb that describes action completed at one point in time. The -en at the end simply confirms that the subject of the verb is 3rd-person singular, e.g. Abraham. Abraham subject, begat verb, Isaac object: "Abraham begat Isaac." Q.E.D. Since this exact statement is repeated umpty-two times in the following verses, only with the names shuffled around, we can apply a bit of inductive reasoning and interpret the rest of the family tree by analogy to this line.

Figure 1-3After "Abraham begat Isaac," the name Isaac is repeated, only this time as the subject of the self-same verb. In between the subject and the verb, however, is a new word for you: de. This simply means "and," and it joins this new sentence to the one before it. Does it seem strange that this "and" comes after the first word of the new sentence? Sorry, dude. You're just going to have to get used to it. De is "postpositive"--which is to say, it politely insists on coming second in the word order, even though it comes first in your translation. So the second sentence of verse 2 is: "And Isaac begat Jacob."

Following the analogy of this sentence, you can then make easy work of the next one: "And Jacob begat Judah..." Notice that "Judah" is literally "Ioudas" in Greek (accusative: Ioudan). Each language has its own way of transliterating Hebrew names, and "Judah" is how that character's name comes over into English from the O.T. Hebrew. But what on earth is kai tous adelphous autou? This is one of a handful of distinctive marks that stand out amid the uniformity of Matthew's genealogy of Christ. You may remember that Judah was one of twelve brothers; we single him out because he belongs to the direct line between Abraham and Christ, but we do not fail to mention his brothers.

Kai is a very different Greek word for "and." Unlike de (which coordinates between clauses or sentences), kai connects items in a list: Judah and his brothers. The Greek word for "brother" is adelphos, hence Philadelphia is the city of "brotherly love." Tous adelphous, "the brothers," accusative plural, are in the same case as Judah because they share his role in the sentence as the direct object of begat. The third-person pronoun autou, genitive case, "of him," points back to Judah as the one whose brothers his brothers are. A crassly literal translation might say: "and the brothers of same." What we're really saying here is: "Jacob begat Judah and his brothers."

Figure 1-4Continuing to operate by analogy to the previous verses: "And Judah begat Phares and Zara" ek tēs Thamar. Tamar was the mother of Judah's twin sons Perez and Zerah (cf. Genesis 38). So let's work out what ek tēs might mean. The preposition ek crossed over into English as the prefix of such words as "explode," "excite," and "express." Tēs is simply the feminine genitive singular form of "the"--making Tamar the object of ek, which requires its object to be in the genitive case. Judah begat Perez and Zerah "out of" or, perhaps better, "by" Tamar. And Perez begat Hezron (lit. Hesrom), and Hezron begat Ram (Aram), and Ram begat Amminadab (Aminadab), and Amminadab begat Nahshon (Naasson), and Nahshon begat Salmon.

Figure 1-5And Salmon begat Boaz (Boes) by Rahab, and Boaz begat Obed (Jobed) by Ruth, and Obed begat Jesse (Jessai), and Jesse begat David ton basilea, which is accusative for ho basileus, the king. (Not "the basilisk," silly!) And David begat Solomon by tēs tou Ouriou. Here's another weird thing about Greek that you're just going to have to get used to: two forms of "the" in a row! The first "the" (tēs) is the feminine genitive singular article which causes what comes after "the" to be the object of the preposition ek. Here we would expect to find the name of the woman by whom David begat Solomon, but instead Matthew slips sideways into masculine genitive singular "the" (tou), which goes with Ouriou (Uriah; see 2 Samuel 11). The closest we can come to a literal translation would be "And David begat Solomon by her (who was) of Uriah," that is, by the wife of Uriah, whose name (Bathsheba) is so infamous that one dare not utter it in connection with Christ, even after boldly naming the sometime harlots Tamar and Rahab.

We've now had two examples where something was said about a brother, or brothers, besides the members of Jesus' strict line of descent; four instances where the name of the mother is dropped; and so far only one thing said about an ancestor himself ("the king"). Why does Matthew weave these details, and only these, into his tight-knit account of Jesus' bloodline? We could speculate on a number of reasons. Most obviously, these just happen to be the characters whose names evoke interesting and memorable stories, signposts along the way. Second, it might somehow serve Matthew's purpose to draw attention to them. David being "the king" is important because that is part and parcel with the case he is building for Jesus. And the mother of Solomon is called the wife not of David but Uriah, as though to show that whatever of real value lies in "the king" comes from God, not from man, a gracious bounty bestowed in spite of a monstrous sin (made to seem all the more monstrous by this mention of its innocent victim).

The brothers of Judah may be important because this is a matter of significance for all of Israel, all twelve tribes. Ruth may be significant because hers is a poignant story of love and redemption--though it may also be significant that she came from Moab, the race decended from Abraham's nephew Lot, rather than from among the Hebrews themselves. Tamar and Rahab were both women of low character (the latter a Gentile woman) who nevertheless, by the grace of God, became part of the Christ's royal bloodline. And Zerah, the twin brother of Perez, may merit a mention because of the story of their birth (Genesis 38:28-30), which illustrates how the one you expect to be first may turn out to be last. An act of loving redemption, a reversal of the expected order, an accounting that bears no regard for a person's past sins or blood status, a disinterested, non-preferential grace offered to all--Jews and non-Jews alike... all of these are keynotes in the Gospel of this King.

Figure 1-6And Solomon begat Rehoboam (Roboam), and Rehoboam begat Abijah (Abia), and Abijah begat Asa (Asaph), and Asa begat Jehoshaphat (Josaphat), and Jehoshaphat begat Joram, and Joram begat Uzziah (Ozias), and Uzziah begat Jotham (Joatham), and Jotham begat Ahaz (Achaz), and Ahaz begat Hezekiah (Hezekias), and Hezekias begat Manasseh (Manasses), and Manasseh begat Amon (Amos), and Amon begat Josiah (Josias), and Josiah begat Jeconiah (Jechonias, a.k.a. Jehoiachin) and his brothers. (Here, for his own peculiar reasons, Matthew skips over Jehoiakim, who comes between Josiah and Jeconiah according to 1 Chronicles 3:16). Notice that some of these names (e.g. Ozias, Hezekias, and Jechonias) are actually declinable, which is why they have a different ending (-an) in the accusative case.

The sentence ends with epi tēs metoikesias Babylōnos, of which you can probably already guess the last word. Epi (upon) is another preposition that requires a genitive object, hence the case of the article and noun tēs metoikesias. Notice the -oik- stem in the middle of that long noun: it is related to the Greek work oikos, meaning "house," by way of the verb oikeo, "to dwell." Together with the prefix met- (suggesting a sense of change) and the ending -ias (signifying a verbal noun), this gives us metoikesias: moving houses, changing one's dwelling-place, or in many instances such as this, deportation.

Finally, Babylōnos is in the genitive case. I know! The -os ending looks just like the nominative ending you learned earlier! But there are three different "declensions," or sets of case-endings, for Greek nouns and adjectives, and the one that Babylon belongs to has -os in the genitive singular. You'll get a feel for this as we go along. Plus, instead of the meaning "of Babylon," this sentence suggests a different use of the genitive: "concerning Babylon." So epi tēs metoikias Babylōnos literally means "upon the deportation concerning Babylon," and could very easily be interpreted as "at the time of the deportation to Babylon."

Figure 1-7Meta, as a preposition followed by an accusative object, means "after." "And after the deportation to Babylon Jeconiah begat Shealtiel (Salathiel), and Shealtiel begat Zerubbabel (Zorobabel), and Zerubbabel begat Abihud (Abioud), and Abihud begat Eliakim, and Eliakim begat Azor, and Azor begat Zadok (Sadok), and Zadok begat Achim, and Achim begat Eliud (Elioud), and Eliud begat Eleazar, and Eleazar begat Matthan, and Matthan begat Jacob..." You might find out as you read NT Greek that the name "James" is spelled "Jacob" in Greek.

Figure 1-8And Jacob begat Joseph ton andra Marias. Again, the article ton clues us in that the next word is accusative, masculine, and singular. Ton andra, "the man," is accusative because it is apposite to, or another name for, the object of the sentence, i.e. Joseph. The -as ending for Mary's name is the genitive singular ending for that declension. So Joseph is literally described as "the man of Mary," which is to say, Mary's husband. Here again Matthew breaks the pattern of his long string of begats. He does not assert that Joseph begat Jesus, but only that he is the husband of Mary, ex hēs egennēthe Iēsous.

You have already seen the preposition ek used in the sense of "by," as in "Judah begat Perez by Tamar." Here ek takes the form ex because it is followed by a rough breathing, one of several ways ek changes to accommodate the word that follows it. Hes is a relative pronoun, like the word "who" in the phrase "the man who knew too much." Relative pronouns serve as the pivot between the main clause and a type of subordinate clause known, naturally, as a relative clause. I say "pivot" because the relative pronoun serves double duty. As a feminine genitive singular pronoun, hes serves first of all as the object of the proposition ex (which, remember, takes a genitive object), and also points back toward Mary, the obvious antecedent of the pronoun (which is why it has to be feminine). Ex hes then also serves as the "by whom..." in the relative clause "by whom Jesus was begotten."

Egennēthē shows you another form of the verb gennaō: again with the e- prefix indicating action in the past. The -thē ending, however, tells us that the verb is in the aorist aspect, passive voice, with a 3rd-person singular subject: not "begat," but "was begotten." Who was begotten? Here you see the nominative ending for Jesus (Iesous), with the added detail ho legomenos Christos. All three of these words are masculine, nominative, singular. Ho is your basic article "the." Christos should be obvious. This leaves legomenos, which comes form the verb legō, "to say." It is a present participle, i.e. a verbal adjective like the word "saying," only in the passive voice, like "being said." When such a participle comes after a definite article, it becomes substantive, like "the one being said." Stick Christos on as a predicate nominative and you get "the one being called Christ," or more idiomatically, "Jesus who is called Christ."

Figure 1-9Today's assignment climaxes with this especially challenging verse. Let's start with the second word, oun, which is another one of those pesky postpositives--remember? First position in meaning, second position in word order. Oun means "therefore," a conjunction that logically connects this verse to the genealogical list Matthew has just given us. Pasai is the feminine nominative plural form of pas, "every, all." You see the same -ai ending in hai (the definite article, "the") and geneai (plural of genea, which not surprisingly means "generation"), so these three words, notwithstanding oun, form one grammatical unit: the subject of the sentence, "all the generations."

We saw Abraham and David back in verse 1, but this time they appear as objects of the prepositions apo and heōs respectively. Both prepositions take a genitive object. Together these little words mean "from...until." And then you get geneai again--a predicate nominative, followed dekatessares, "fourteen," which in spite of the word-order serves as an adjective pointing at "generations." To find a verb in this nominal sentence, you have to use your imagination. "Therefore all the generations from Abraham until David [are] fourteen generations, and from David until the deportation to Babylon fourteen generations, and from the deportation to Babylon until the Christ fourteen generations."

Whether or not these statistics conform literally to the historical record is an open question. If you compare the genealogy in Luke, you get a lot of different names because Luke provides Jesus' flesh-and-blood line of descent, through Mary, by father and son all the way back to Adam, and David turns out to be the most recent ancestor Mary and Joseph had in common. Matthew skips a few ancestors named elsewhere in Scripture, such as Jehoiakim (who ought to be between Josiah and Jeconiah) and Admin (whom Luke 3:33 inserts between Ram and Amminadab, though no such person is listed in either Ruth 4:19 or 1 Chronicles 2:10).

Luke's Admin might be a copyist's error, a slip whose very preservation in manuscript after manuscript bears witness to the faithfulness of the transmission of the NT text. We may never know what prompted Matthew to omit Jehoiakim, except that it served his purpose to use the threefold interval of twice-seven generations to point up the themes he wanted to bring out of the genealogy. Does this make Matthew guilty of fudging the facts to suit his argument? Don't be so quick to lose faith in the integrity of the God-breathed Scriptures! Bear in mind that in the same way Jesus can be called "son of David, son of Abraham," Josiah can be said to have begotten Jeconiah, the intermediate Jehoiakim notwithstanding. A lot of apparent difficulties in harmonizing biblical genealogies could be resolved if we all kept this in mind.

Through Luke we see that Jesus was indeed a descendent of David by direct father-son lineage, given that He had no human father and so Mary's father is his nearest male DNA donor; and by counting back to Adam, Luke places the person and work of Jesus in a worldwide context. Matthew, on the other hand, emphasizes Joseph as the heir of the entire line of kings of Judah, from David through Solomon, Rehoboam, and so on until the Babylonian captivity; and thus, by acknowledging Jesus as his son, Joseph furnishes Jesus with a legitimate claim to the throne of David. Then Matthew makes this royal claim but one side of a logical triangle comprising not only the Messianic King promised to David, but also the "Seed" through whom God promised Abraham that all the world would be blessed, and the Restorer of the captive remnant to the promised land.

It may seem that Matthew is making an obscure point in an obscure way, but if he is indeed aiming his gospel at the Jews--whose leaders were willing to shed blood to squelch the notion that Jesus is the Messiah--then this seemingly monotonous, pompous string of begats is actually an explosively controversial, defiant claim, and those who proclaimed it probably risked their lives. In these seventeen verses, before the story even begins, Matthew lays the footings for the case he will try to build. Come whatever follows, you must read between the lines what Matthew asserts here: that Jesus is the Christ, the heir to the Jewish kingship, the deliverer of God's captive people, and Savior of all nations, whose coming without regard to anyone's works or blood status heralds a new aeon in God's forgiving grace.

WRAP-UP
OK, so this was more than just an elementary lesson in Greek. It was also kind of a sketch for a Bible-class lesson plan on Matthew 1:1-17. But you learned a little about three noun cases:

• Nominative, like the pronoun "he," used as a predicate nominative and as the subject of most verbs.
• Accusative, like the pronoun "him," used as the direct object of most verbs and as the object of some prepositions.
• Genitive, sometimes like the pronoun "his," can express a sense of possession, or like "of him" or "from him," a sense of belonging to, pertaining to, relating to, or originating with someone or something; and, of course, it is also used for the object of many prepositions.

In addition, there are two more cases that you haven't seen yet:

• Dative, sometimes like the phrase "to him" or "for him," often used as an indirect object and, for some verbs, the direct object, as well as the object of some prepositions.
• Vocative, frequently identical to the nominative form, and used to call on someone or something in direct address, as in "Friends, Romans, countrymen," or "O Lord..."
  

Besides these noun-related discoveries, you also met a few verbs. We'll worry about mastering them later. For now, perhaps it is enough if you remember to spot the e- prefix, known among grammarians as the "temporal augment," an indication of action taking place in the past.

Also try to keep in mind that an "aorist" is a verb describing an action completed at one point in time. Many aorists are easy to spot because, in the active voice, they tend to have an s embedded in their ending, while in the passive voice it's a th you should look for. When it's a finite verb (i.e., not an imperative, infinitive, or participle), the aorist always has a temporal augment (e-), so you can think of it as a "simple past tense." The only hitch is that when it isn't finite, the aorist doesn't imply a past tense, but only a sense of a specific, one-time act. Weird, huh? That's foreign languages for you!

HOMEWORK
Your assignment, before you move on to the next lesson, will be to commit the following table to memory.Recite the Greek forms of "the" aloud, column by column, until you have them cold. Use flash cards to learn to recognize them. Practice writing them, accent marks and all. This exercise will help you in more ways than you care to read about right now.