Bible Review

Philo, Legum Allegoriae 3.74; Quod Deus 137.

E.g., Testament of Judah 10:6; b. Sota 10b; b. Horayot. 10b; y. Sota 1:4 (16d, 5a); Genesis Rabbah 85.

Johnson, Purpose, pp. 154, 271.

Brevard S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979), p. 157. In a way, Judah performed the levirate duty for his son without intending to, because of Tamar’s initiative. But Leviticus 18:15 forbids sexual intercourse between a man and his daughter-in-law.

On the likelihood that Matthew himself included the women in the genealogy, see Marshall D. Johnson, The Purpose of Biblical Genealogies (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ., 1969), pp. 154–159; and Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977).

Exceptions occur only in the case of irregularity of descent or where there is something noteworthy about the woman’s name. Strack-Billerbeck 1.15; compare Mary in the New Testament, ed. Raymond E. Brown et al. (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1978), p. 78.

Nolland, Luke 1–9:20, p. 97. The Greek here refers to not merely storing up ideas, but valuing and evaluating them, ruminating on them because their meaning is not immediately apparent. This would be the opposite of someone who is hard-hearted and immediately rejects the message. See the discussion in Ben Witherington III, Women in the Ministry of Jesus (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987).

Much of their work is summarized with abundant illustrations in Othmar Keel and Christoph Uehlinger, Gods, Goddesses, and Images of God in Ancient Israel (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1998). The subject also comes up in Philip J. King and Lawrence E. Stager, Life in Biblical Israel (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 2001), p. 84.

Gary A. Anderson explores this and other Jewish and Christian interpretations of the Adam and Eve story in The Genesis of Perfection: Adam and Eve in Jewish and Christian Imagination (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 2001); for the serpent, see pp. 91–92.