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Mat_1:2-3. Κ . τ . ἀδελφοὺς αὐτ .] “Promissiones fuere in familia Israelis,” Bengel.
Mat_1:3. These twin sons of Judah were illegitimate, Gen_38:16-30. The Jews were inclined to find a good side to the transgressions of their ancestors, and alleged here, e.g., that Thamar entertained the idea of becoming an ancestress of kings and prophets. See Wetstein and Fritzsche. The reason why Thamar is here brought forward, as well as Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba in Mat_1:5-6 (for οὐκ ἦν ἔθος γενεαλογεῖσθαι γυναῖκας , Euth. Zigabenus), is not “ut tacitae Judaeorum objectioni occurreretur,” Wetstein; for the reproach of illegitimate birth was not raised against Jesus in the apostolic age, nor probably before the second century (see Thilo, ad Cod. Apocr. I. p. 526 f.), and would be very indelicately referred to by the naming of these women; nor the point of view of exactness (Fritzsche), which would not explain why these women and no others were mentioned; least of all the tendency to cast into the shade the Jewish genealogical tree (Hilgenfeld). In keeping with the whole design of the genealogical register, which must terminate in the wonderful one who is born of woman, that reason cannot, without arbitrariness, be found save in this, that the women named entered in an extraordinary manner into the mission of continuing the genealogy onwards to the future Messiah, and might thereby appear to the genealogist and the evangelist as typi Mariae (Paulus, de Wette, Ebrard; comp. Grotius on Mat_1:3), and in so doing the historical stains which cleaved to them (to Ruth also, in so far as she was a Moabitess) were not merely fully compensated by the glorious approval which they found precisely in the light in which their history was regarded by the nation (Heb_11:31; Jam_2:25), but far outweighed and even exalted to extraordinary honours. See the numerous Rabbinical passages, relating especially to Thamar, Rahab, and Ruth, in Wetstein in loc., and on Heb_11:31. Olshausen is too indefinite: “in order to point to the marvellous gracious leading of God in the ordering of the line of the Messiah.” Luther and some of the Fathers drag in here what lies very remote: because Christ interested Himself in sinners; Lange, more remote still, “in order to point to the righteousness which comes, not from external holiness, but from faith;” and Delitzsch (in Rudelbach and Guericke’s Zeitschrift, 1850, p. 575 f.), “because the sinless birth of Mary was prepared throughout by sin.”