Matthan: One Verse, One Name, One Link in Matthew's Genealogy

A man known by one verse

Matthan is a man of the tribe of Judah who lived, by the era assigned to him, around 606 BC to 536 BC (era placed on Ussher's chronology, 1650). That places him in the time of exile and return. Scripture records his name exactly once, in Matthew 1:15. He is the son of Eleazar and the father of Jacob. That is the whole of his biblical record: one verse, one book, one line of text.

For a reader used to following a life through chapters, this is a strange kind of subject. There is no dialogue, no journey, no moment of decision. There is a name, a father, and a son. Yet the name was kept, written down, and carried into the New Testament. That fact alone is worth sitting with before we ask for more than the text gives.

What Scripture actually says

The verse reads: "Eliud became the father of Eleazar. Eleazar became the father of Matthan. Matthan became the father of Jacob" (Matthew 1:15).

Three generations pass in one sentence. Matthan stands in the middle of them. He receives life from Eleazar and gives life to Jacob, and the verse says nothing else about him. He is not described as good or bad, faithful or faithless, rich or poor. He is not given a home town, a wife, an occupation or an age. The verb that carries him is simply that he "became the father of" the next man in the list.

It is important to be honest about what kind of mention this is. There is no scene here. Nothing is narrated, nothing is dramatized, and there is no episode to reconstruct. Every appearance of Matthan in the Bible is a genealogical entry (Matthew 1:15). Any attempt to give him a personality, a crisis or a character arc would be invention, not exposition.

The generation he belonged to

The era attached to Matthan is the exile, around 606 BC to 536 BC (era placed on Ussher's chronology, 1650), and his tribe is Judah. So this is a man of Judah living in the period of exile and return. The record does not tell us what he saw of it, where he lived through it, or what he suffered. It tells us only that in that period the line did not break. Eleazar's son lived, and Matthan's son Jacob was born (Matthew 1:15).

That is not a small thing to notice, though it must be stated carefully. The text does not praise Matthan for preserving the line, and we should not either. It simply records that the chain of fathers held at the point where his name stands.

Failures

The dossier records no sin, no failure and no fault of Matthan, because Scripture records none. This is not a testimony to his righteousness; it is the silence of a genealogy. A list that gives no praise also gives no blame. Where the Bible names a man's wrongdoing, we must say so plainly; where it says nothing at all, we must say that too, and stop there.

What we do not know

Everything Scripture records about Matthan fits inside a single verse (Matthew 1:15). We do not know his mother's name, his wife's name, whether he had other children besides Jacob, how long he lived, where he lived, or what he did with his life. We do not know his experience of exile or return. We do not know how he was remembered by those who kept the record. Not one of these gaps is filled by another passage, because there is no other passage. His name is written once, and then the list moves on.

The line that runs to Christ

The single New Testament reference for Matthan is Matthew 1:15, and it is that reference which gives him his place. His name is preserved in the opening genealogy of the Gospel of Matthew, the record of fathers and sons that the Gospel sets down before anything else. Matthan is there because his son Jacob is there, and Jacob is there because the list continues past him (Matthew 1:15).

So a man about whom we know almost nothing is written into the first chapter of the first Gospel. He is not remembered for what he did. He is remembered because of where he stood, between the father he received and the son he gave. For most readers of Scripture, that is a more familiar position than the heroic one, and it is not beneath the notice of the God who kept the list.