Biblical Genealogies: Who begat them?

Great Debates
1

Ah, the begats.

If you didn’t know, the Old Testament contains genealogies connecting Adam to King David, and then the New Testament contains genealogies connecting Jesus to King David (and on back to Abraham and Adam). Genealogy of the Bible.

(These genealogies are the basis for the calculation among young-Earth creationists that Earth is only a few thousand years old.)

So where did these genealogies come from?

Were there some (half-assed) genealogical records to which the authors referred? Where would such records have been kept? Were there obsessive family genealogists back then as there are today? How would that have even been possible in a mostly pre-literate society? Were there blind guys on street corners spouting off genealogies from memory the way Homer recited the Odyssey? Were the authors just pulling names out of thin air?

Anyone have the straight dope on this stuff?

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subscribing to follow this thread.

3

I suspect the origin is, ultimately, king lists. There are extensive lists of the names of successive kings for both Egypt and Mesopotamia. And, since the kingship tends to be hereditary (although every now and again you get a usurper), these are effectively lists of “begats”. Of course, this long predates the Biblical record. But the King Lists probably gave people the idea.

As for where they were kept, who knows? We certainly don’t have all of the existing records. Probably a lot of the lists were written on papyrus and long ago disappeared. Or pot sherds or clay tablets or incised in leather, or even on stone. A lot of stuff gets lost. And, of course, in people’s memories.

You’ll notice a lot of patriarchs and kings in the New Testament lists. That’s not surprising – these are the people who tend to get remembered. But that doesn’t mean the lists are trustworthy. as has been noted, the lists in Luke and Matthew aren’t completely identical. And several of the names appear in no other extant record.

While I was researching local history in a local New Jersey historical society library I came across a family genealogy that traced its family all the way back to Adam. They were completely serious – they thought that they found a link to these Biblical Genealogies and could literally trace their own descent straight from God. Hubris is a wonderful thing.

4

I’ve always taken it that the geneologies of the Bible were, like the lists of the Kings of Gondor, Rohan, and Numenor, made up out of whole cloth, though not by a single author. But I will be talking to a Biblical scholar I know later this afternoon, so I’ll get her take on it and post again.

5

There were genealogical records, kept “in the Temple” (probably actually in an adjunct building). The later lineages, from about David’s time, found in Chronicles and to a lesser extent in Kings, are excerpts from them. (It’s possible Matthew or Luke made reference to these as well.)

However, to answer the more general question, it becomes necessary to discuss “higher criticism” of the Bible. And this is something that a consensus of serious Bible scholars agree on, but which is strongly disagreed with by the evangelical and fundamentalist Christian conservatives. So: note the status is consensus reconstruction of original texts, not proven facts, with a strong objection from those who consider the Bible as inspired verbatim and inerrant.

Most of Genesis is story – call it myths and legends in the anthropological sense. Specifically: Adam and Eve; Cain and Abel; short snipped about Lamech; Noah; Abraham; Isaac; Jacob and Esau; Jacob and his children; Judah; Joseph. These stories were handed down in three traditions or sources: the Yahwist, the Elohist, and the Priestly. Each can be identified by internal clues and a characteristic style of storytelling.

At some point, probably after the Babylonian Exile, they were consolidated into the Book of Genesis, and the rest of the Torah, w3hich we have today (the Deuteronomist source is responsible for Deuteronomy and a few later books, but doesn’t enter into the Genesis accounts).

At that time, the various stories seem to have been joined together by the “toledoth” passages, with the characteristic opening phrase “These are the generations of…” So we have Cain and Abel, whose story presupposes a population around them, identified as Adam and Eve’s first two sons; we have Noah as the great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson of Adam; we have the catalog of nations descended from Noah’s three ons, and we have Abraham identified as the descendant of Noah’s son Shem by an identified genealogy. These appear to have been adopted and included by an editor in the Priestly tradition to provide a “frame story” in which the individual stories listed above are incorporated.

Accuracy? You could spend pages debating it, but the consensus is, not very.

6

It’s all make believe with intent to deceive.

7

*"Funny, they don’t **look *Jewish…"

Also - as we get technology, other abilities atrophy and we forget they are even possible. Before literacy made the talent irrelevant, some people were capable of fantastic feats of memory; the Illiad and the Oddessy, for example, were oral poems recited verbatim by the Greek bards for centuries before someone wrote them down. There are still people who can recite most of the Bible or the Quoran.

Nowadays I can’t remember 8 things I have to get at the grocery store unless I write them down (but probably can recite the Parrot Sketch or whole sections of The Holy Grail verbatim). How did people manage before writing?

The fascinating thing is how much detail in the Bible or other ancient writings (copied from oral tradition) are acccurate; this shows the accuracy by which these stories were repeated without too much alteration over generations.

8

Please don’t open that can of worms. :slight_smile: Let’s just stick to the question: Where did the genealogies come from?

9

You’re kidding, right? this is GQ, not GD. That is the place for witnessing. Modern archeological, anthropological and other historical studies point to the high level of inaccuracies and down right fictions in much of the old testament. Not completely unexpected, since first, these were oral traditions filled with folklore, and secondly they were written down with a political and religious slant.

10

That is almost as fascinating as the level of engineering sophistication shown in the origin of Spider-Man.

11

Heck, no. I’m athiest.

On thing I read about once was that many of the ancient oral-to-written traditions have details - the springs in Jerusalem, some details of the neighbouring civilizations long disappeared, the location of Troy from the Illiad - that are not far off what archaeologists are finding today. Native American oral traditions have some similar characteristics.

My point being - don’t assume because a story is repeated from generation to generation that it’s a game of post office and the final result is garbled pure fantasy. The details - names, places, incidents - are likely very close to real except when the actual original story is made up. Then it is repeated word-for-word like a poem for generations.

So odds are the biblical lists of kings / tribal leaders is pretty accurate as far back as when it started, when someone decided it was important enough to start reciting a list of back to their great-grandparents. The first guy to plant a crop in their tribe probably became “invented agriculture”, but was probably named Tubal (or was it his brother?)

12

In the case of Matthew’s geneology of Jesus, most of it is literally a kings list. That is, the Kings of Judah from David down to the destruction of the kingdom. It’s presumably at least vaguely historically accurate, as the House of David is suspected to have been a real royal family. David’s immediate ancestors were also given in the Bible, most memorably Ruth, and again, since David was probably real its at least not inconceivable that someone recorded his immediate ancestors and passed the information along (of course, its not inconceivable that someone just passed on a bunch of folk tales about his ancestry either).

13

Folklorist chiming in re: accuracy of oral tradition. The skeptics are correct here. Oral tradition certainly can preserve information over hundreds or even thousands of years, but it is rarely unvarnished truth. Usually, it’s a kernel of truth adjusted over the generations to fit accepted cultural expectations, even down to linguistic patterns in the names. Sometimes it’s zero percent truth content. We like the idea of ignorant people secretly carrying deep truth in their simple traditions, but it’s just not the way it usually works. I don’t know much about the Genesis genealogies, but have a look at the medieval European genealogies: this, for example (if the link works!). m. is an abbreviation for “mab,” son of. The historical part is earlier, and as far as we can tell accurate until it gets into figures of Welsh legendary / mythic tradition. They claim descent in a direct line from Brutus, Aeneas, Troy, Jupiter, Saturn, Japheth, Noah, Adam, and, at the head of the line, God. I imagine if we had the information the Genesis material would be comparable.

14

I doubt the geneologies were “made up” in the sense that the author of our current source (Matthew, or Chronicles, or Genesis) invented the names and relationships out of whole cloth. Genealogy was important to the Jews from ancient times (see how important tribal affiliation was) and was passed down orally through families. These authors most likely transcribed genealogies as tradition held them, with their origins lost in time. Some were recorded at the Temple (esp. for the royal families). Other authors “adjusted” the lists for specific reasons (such as the author of Matthew).

15

I assume it goes something like this: Someone clever makes up the story “MY boss is a direct descendant of X, great hero in our land, whose great exploits we know.” This is repeated around the campfires weekly. Since the repertiore is limited, the bards repeat this verbatim and everyone knows it. If someone tries to embellish it, either (a) they yell “you’re not telling it right” or (b) they like it and it becomes the new version. I suspect (b) is difficult to pull off in a traditional society, but not impossible. More likely it’s a scenario like telling fairy tales and the kids say “I like it better when they survive and live happily ever after” and that changes the story.

Even in Huckleberry Finn, people are claiming to be the true king of France and descended from Charlemagne, IIRC.

But basically you agree with me - the acuracy of the begat list starting from when it was first recited about a real person is most likely fairly accurate. There’s a limit to how fanciful you can be about naming kings and kingdoms in say, the Iiliad, when they are all around you and will likely remember if the guy you talk about from say, 300 or 400 years ago matches their oral tradition too.

I suppose the other problem is naming. In medieval times people liked to “latinize” their names to make them sound more important. I imagine the same happened to these lists as the language / pronunciation / vowel shifts / invasions and imposed language happened?

Plus, people had a habit of attributing things to the mythical heroes. Nobody cares if Fred chopped down a cherry tree and confesses, but when hero George Washington does it, wow! Moral guidance! There are, I understand, numerous books of crap written by someone in the Roman Empire and preserved for posterity because the author attributed it as a work of one of the great Greek philosophers.

(The George Washington Principle: “It’s easy to tell the truth when you’re the one holding the axe…”)

So oral tradition can contain nuggets of truth but yes, it is stories tailored to entertain and educate in the days when that was all a tribe had.

16

The mythical characters were obviously made up, though some of it may reflect the syncretization of variant, prehistoric tribal traditions. Then there are kings’ lists (to whatever accurate extent remains in the Hebrew Bible). Then, in the case of Matthew and Luke (who composed completely different genealogies for Jesus after David) they were just making stuff up. They did not have a shared source for Jesus’ alleged bloodline outside the Hebrew Bible (it’s not in Mark or Q, the other material they shared), so where the OT leaves off, they just start improvising. Even within the OT sources, they choose (probably for differing theological reasons) different paths after David.

Even the era of David and Solomon is legendary, so really, the short answer is that the genealogies are made up, but they probably incorporate some historical material with regards to monarchal generations.

17

On a side note, it’s kind of interesting that the authors of Matthew and Luke, thinking it important to connect Jesus to David, did so not through Mary’s genealogy, but that of Joseph. Poor guy wasn’t even a blood relative if you believe the stories. :wink:

18

For a side-by-side comparison: Luke’s genealogy Matthew’s genealogy

Near total disagreement. It is obvious they weren’t working from the same source (if they used any source at all).

19

Amusingly, I once saw (in the Tower of Londin gift shop of all places) an "offical’ geneology of the current royal family, which traces its ultimate origin to “Wotan”.

Not even the same mythos as is currently belived today …

As for the OT, I suspect many of the lists originated in various attempts by disparate Hebrew tribes to trace their common kinship, partly real and partly fictive. Many of the Bible legends are of course “just-so” stories designed to justify “current” (that is, when the myth originated) relationships between existing tribes, both Hebrew and non-Hebrew; a current feud or emnity can be traced back to an ancient wrong allegedly done to ancestors, which requires an explaination of how these ancestors were related.

This is hardly uncommon or remarkable - the very first part of The Histories by Herodotus uses the exact same methodology (saying, essentially, ‘here is why the Greeks and Persians always hated each other’ and then listing off a series of myths).

In pre-state societies, one’s ancestry was extremely important for determining who you where and where you stood in relation to others, and that is the real point of those 'begats". Given that these relationships were partly fictive - that is, if the (current) relationship adjusted, so did the alleged ancestry - there is obvioulsy no possibility of determing the “truth” as to the actual ancestry; OTOH, the story can tell us lots about the folks at the time the mythology cristalized into its current form - probably earlier than when it was written down.

20

Actually, and you’re the perfect person to ask, I recall from about 30 years ago finding out that the House of Powys claimed descent from Vortigern, and he in turn from a British tradesman who, while on a trading trip to the Middle East, married a sister of the Virgin Mary. I don’t have the lineage now, of course – but I found that fascinating.