And Jesse the father of David the king. And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah. David the king — the title marks the genealogy's pivot point, the moment the royal promise of 2 Samuel 7 enters the list. But the mother named is not Bathsheba but the wife of Uriah — a description that keeps the adultery and murder behind the birth of Solomon permanently visible. The covenant does not erase the sin through which the royal line was extended; it carries forward through it. The fifth woman in the genealogy is the most uncomfortable: a woman obtained through the abuse of royal power, the wife of a man her husband arranged to have killed. Matthew is not sanitizing the ancestry of Jesus but showing the depths from which grace reaches.

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