group is pre-monarchical, and culminates in David the King.  Israel’s history is regarded as all tending towards that consummation.  He is thought of as the first King, for Saul was a Benjamite, and had been deposed by divine authority.  The second group is monarchical, and it, too, has a drift, as it were, which is tragically marked by the way in which its last stage is described:  ’Josias begat Jechonias and his brethren, about the time that they were carried away to Babylon.’  Josiah had four successors, all of them phantom kings;—­Jehoahaz, who reigned for three months and was taken captive to Egypt; his brother Jehoiakim, a puppet set up by Egypt, knocked down by Babylon; his son Jehoiachin, who reigned eleven years and was carried captive to Babylon; and last, Zedekiah, Josiah’s son, under whom the ruin of the kingdom was completed.  The genealogy does not mention the names of these ill-starred ‘brethren,’ partly because it traces the line of descent through ‘Jeconias’ or Jehoiachin, partly because it despises them too much.  A line that begins with David and ends with such a quartet!  This was what the monarchy had run out to:  David at the one end and Zedekiah at the other, a bright fountain pouring out a stream that darkened as it flowed through the ages, and crept at last into a stagnant pond, foul and evil-smelling.  Then comes the third group, and it too has a drift.  Unknown as the names in it are, it is the epoch of restoration, and its ‘bright consummate flower’ is ‘Jesus who is called the Christ.’  He will be a better David, will burnish again the tarnished lustre of the monarchy, will be all that earlier kings were meant to be and failed of being, and will more than bring the day which Abraham desired to see, and realise the ideal to which ‘prophets and righteous men’ unconsciously were tending, when as yet there was no king in Israel.

A very significant feature of this genealogical table is the insertion in it, in four cases, of the names of the mothers.  The four women mentioned are Thamar a harlot, Rachab another, Ruth the Moabitess, and Bathsheba; three of them tainted in regard to womanly purity, and the fourth, though morally sweet and noble, yet mingling alien blood in the stream.  Why are pains taken to show these ‘blots in the scutcheon’?  May we not reasonably answer—­in order to suggest Christ’s relation to the stained and sinful, and to all who are ’strangers from the covenants of promise.’  He is to be a King with pity and pardon for harlots, with a heart and arms open to welcome all those who were afar off among the Gentiles.  The shadowy forms of these four dead women beckon, as it were, to all their sisters, be they stained however darkly or distant however remotely, and assure them of welcome into the kingdom of the king who, by Jewish custom, could claim to be their descendant.