times said that the laws of Moses had by this time fallen into desuetude. This might have been often the case, but Ave believe that a conscientious observance of the still unrepealed Mosaic institu tions was precisely that which distinguished from their laxer countrymen such worthy characters as the n3embers of the Holy Family,' from whom was so soon to spring He whose delight it was to fulfil all righteousness' (comp. Matt. i. ; Luke i. 6, 28, 3o ; Matt. iii. 15). We cease to wonder, then, with this view of Hebrew law, at the ap pearance of Joseph's name as Me son of Bell, as well as the putative father of Yeszts, for he was thus the legal link between Jesus and Heli, and all his ancestry (Luke iii. 23). In every respect but one the register is drawn up with legal precision ; and the one exception does not vitiate the usage, but arises ex abuna'anti cauteld, and from the special nature of a unique case. We refer to the inserted parenthesis Ws emo,t4ero. The sacred writer thereby leaves room for the miraculous con ception of our Lord, which it is veiy remarkable the Evangelists of the genealogies alone describe, thus stultifying emphatically the objection of Cel sus and Strauss, Avho asked tauntingly, in the unity of the same unbelief, how Christ could be both the son of Joseph and the object of an im maculate conception? The same clause, (In evo iti?-67o, serves (as it seems to us) another import ant purpose. As the i-yippncr6 of St. Matthew gave us the clue of our interpretation there, and assured us of Joseph's natural connection with that ancestry, so here the ths gpoi.t4-67-o colours, as it were, the entire pedigree, and gives to Joseph nothing but a legal relation both to Jesus and the long line which follows. And this suggests an argument, which in our view is irresistible, in proof that St. Luke gives us, in fact, the Virgin's lineage, although under the name of her husband. For as the parenthesis sets forth our Lord to be merely the reputed and not the actual son of Joseph, it thereby clearly implies that the genea ' logy which ensues cannot be the natural genealogy of both Jesus and Joseph ; in other words, if it , be a real genealogy in respect of either of them, it can only be an imputed one in respect of the other. But the clause (In d'uoktikero impresses a putative character on Joseph's place in it. Christ's, then, must be a real one, i.e., the genealogy must be his, connecting him naturally with all the names (except the single expressly putative one), which compose the stem. Now, how this natural connection with His ancestors is effected, no reader of St. Luke's two preceding chaptcrs can fail at a glance to see. The real link is Mary, and her genealogy in chap. iii. is, in fact, nothing else than a document strictly correlative with the foregoing record of the immaculate conception.
Convergence of the two Genealogies.—The fifth of Lord A. Hervey's theses given above We ac• cept in its conclusion, though of course not in its premiss. 'In point of fact' [he says],. though not of form, both the genealogies are as much Mary's as her husband's.' Only, instead of inferring this from conjecture, we would conclude it from the facts of the genealogies themselves. In all the great names of the Lord's ancestry, the two lines converge—in Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all the Fathers down to David, and again very remark ably in Salathiel and Zorobabel, and ultimately in Christ. The case of Salathiel we regard to be
similar to that of Joseph. The son of Jechonias by birth (I Chron. iii. 17 ; Matt. i. 12), he is yet called the son of Ned by St. Luke (iii. 27), in a leg-al sense, as having married the daughter of Neri. The two Evangelists represent Zorobabel as the son of Salathiel. They herein are agreed with Ezra iii. 2 ; IIagg. i. 14, and ii. 2. An un necessaiy difficulty, as it seems to us, has arisen from the fact that in Chron. iii. a Zerubbabel is mentioned as the son of Pedaiah, and conse quently nephew of Salathiel, who was Pedaiah's elder brother. Lord A. Hervey supposes Salathiel had no S071, but adopted his nephew (Genealogies, p. too) ; others apply the expedient of a levirate marriage, as if Pedaiah `raised up seed' to his deceased elder brother (Dr. W. H. Mill, p. 165). But what need is there of any such indirect inter pretation ? It cannot be unreasonable to take the literal scriptures concerned, and to assign, as they do, sons of the same name to the brothers Salathiel and Pedaiah. Surely you will not dim the lustre of the great governor of Judah' by entertaining the very simple and natural supposition that he had a first cousin called aftcr his own name! How often family names run alike in proximate branches of a family is clear to any student of the genealo gies, both of the Chronicles and the Gospels [the cases of the two Jehoram's and the two Ahaziah's, of the allied families of Ahab and Jehoshaphat, are some illustration of the tendency to repeat family names among near connections]. But a convincing evidence that two Zerubbabel's do oc cur in these passages arises from the completely different names, not only of their fathers, but also of the children, attributed to them (comp. Chron. iii. 19, 20, with Matt. i. 13 and Luke iii. 27), and again of the remoter descendants (comp. Chron. iii. 21-24 with Matt. i. 13-15, and Luke iii. 24 26).* St. Jerome (Quost. Hebr. in lib. Paralip), resorts to the expedient, which is as violent as it is unnecessary, of making Salathiel and Pedaiah one and the same person—a vir binominis. The di verg,ence of the descent into the lines of Abiud (in St. Matt. i. 13), and of Rhesa (in St. Luke iii. 27), carries with it, to our mind, greater difficulty than the last point. Lord A. Hervey (Genealogies, p. lit), supposes that Rhesa is not a proper name, but a designation of Zorobabel as head,' or prince of the captivity [Nn6r1 z,N-1], and thus, by iden tifying the Abind of Matt. i. 13 with the 7uda of Luke iii. 26, and by supposing Joanna to be omitted in the list of the first gospel, he effects a converaence of four generations [in Salathiel, Zorobabel, Joanna, Juda, or Abiud], in the two lines. There is no ground for this but the in genuity of the wiiter, which is fond of making ex cursions among the Scripture genealogies. His characteristic weakness, in our judginent, is the readiness with which he seizes on like or identical names (or even elements of names), and thence concludes the identity of persons,- forgetful of a fact, strongly attested in the genealogies, that similarity or sameness of names by no means implies identity, but only family relationship in those that bear them. Rhesa was always regarded as a man's name by such of the ancient Zriters as treated of the details of this subject. It occurs in St. Jerome's version (Opera, ed. Bened., vol. x.), and in St. Greg,ory Nazianzen (Carmina, vol.