Son who is most David

The texts from the Roman Catholic Lectionary today provide an opportunity to see Jesus in the context of the Jewish expectations for the Son of David. Friar Jude Winkler instructs that the passage from the Book of Genesis in which Jacob blesses his sons and particularly identifies the ‘lion of Judah’ with the prophesy (Genesis 49.10) that the sceptre shall not depart from Judah was written down during the time of the reign of David. The period of nearly four centuries (961-587 BCE) is presented by some Jewish scholars as the reign of the House of David. The prophets of Israel looking to the future saw a Davidic Messiah rather than the return of Moses. The expectation that a Son of David would restore Israel was the religious expectation at the time of Jesus. Friar Jude comments on some of the Hebrew numerology which is contained in the passage from the Gospel of Matthew which presents a genealogy of Jesus as a son of both Abraham and David.( Every Hebrew letter has a number value. The name דוד (david) has 3 letters. Add up the 3 letters it equals 14). The three periods of time from Genesis to David, David to the Babylonian exile and the Babylonian exile to the birth of Jesus are 14 or “David” generations long. The repetition of something three times is the Hebrew way of expressing the superlative. Jesus therefore is, according to Friar Jude, the most David. The apparent discord between the literal and symbolic nature of the text from the Gospel today is explained in literal interpretations through a differentunderstanding of “son” in Hebrew culture. Modern journalistic minds seem to gravitate toward news article approaches to Scripture. We are enriched by the Scripture Scholarship which helps us piece together how the authors of the Bible sought to use many tools to explain the unexplained in words which cannot contain the Word.