How YHWH @Élöhîm (LORD God) Kept His Promise to David
The Promise (2 Sam 7:12-17)
12When your days are fulfilled, and you lie with your fathers, then I shall raise up your seed after you, who shall come out from your bowels, and I shall establish his kingdom. 13He shall build a house for My Name, and I shall establish the throne of his kingdom forever. 14I shall be a father to him, and he shall be a son to Me. When he sins, then I will chasten him with a rod of men, and with strokes of the sons of men. 15But My mercy shall not be taken from him, as I took it from Saul, whom I put away from before you. 16And your house shall be established, and your kingdom before you forever. Your throne shall be established forever. 17According to all these words, and according to all this vision, so Näthän spoke to David.
The Obstacle (Jeremiah) 22:28-30)
28Is this man Coniah a despised, broken jar, or a vessel in which is no pleasure? Why are they hurled, he and his seed, and are cast into the land which they do not know? 29O earth, earth, earth! Hear the Word of YHWH! 30So says YHWH, Write this man childless, a man who will not prosper in his days. For not one from his seed will succeed, a man sitting on the throne of David and ruling any more in Judah.
YHWH promised David that a son of his loins would sit on the throne of the kingdom forever. The legal claim to the throne ran through Solomon’s line, and that line ran through Jeconiah son of Jehoikim, the last living king of Judah. This is the same Coniah whose line YHWH debarred from the throne, as He decreed through Jeremiah. So, how could a son of David legally sit on the throne without being descended from Coniah?
YHWH Elohim follows His own rules, and His pronouncement against Coniah presented a genuine legal obstacle to keeping His promise to David. So, how did He fulfill His legal requirements while keeping His promise to David that one of His blood would sit on the throne forever?
The Claimant
I believe Jesus of Nazareth is who He claims to be – the uniquely generated Son of God, the Messiah, the Son of David who will sit on the throne forever, a high priest according to the order of Melchizedek. I believe the Gospels truly record His life and the genealogy of His mother Mary and His supposed father Joseph. It is in the genealogies of Jesus as recorded by Matthew and Luke that one finds the answer to this conundrum.
The Solution, Part 1: The Blood Claim
Now Jesus, making His appearance at about age thirty – being, as was supposed, a son of Joseph – was Himself descended of Heli, of Matthat . . . of Nathan, of David . . . of Judah . . . (Luke 3:23,31,33) [JM Cheney, The Life of Christ in Stereo], pp.18[1]
In his Gospel, Luke records the genealogy of Jesus, showing his descent from Heli of the tribe of Judah. So, who was Heli? Heli was the father of Mary, Jesus’ mother. Thus Jesus was descended from him.
Heli was descended from the collateral line of Nathan, a son of David who was a full brother of Solomon’s (their mother was Bathsheba [1 Chronicles 3.5]). Not being descended from Solomon, Heli had no legal claim to the throne, but he did have a blood claim. He passed this blood claim on to his children, including his daughter Mary, who, in turn, passed it on to her sons, including her firstborn, Jesus.
So, Jesus had a blood claim to the throne of David through His mother Mary. Through her, He was descended from the seed of David, from the bloodline of David. However, He was hardly unique in that. After a thousand years, probably many families would have had a blood claim to the throne of David, but only one line had the legal claim—the line of Solomon.
The Solution, Part 2: The Legal Claim
The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, Son of David, Son of Abraham. . . And Jacob fathered Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom (Greek pronoun ‘es’, clearly refers to Mary) was born Jesus, the One called Christ. (Matt 1:1,16)
Matthew records the genealogy of Jesus as the Son of David, the Messiah, the One with a legal claim to the throne of David. However, the last line of the genealogy clearly lists Joseph, the husband of Mary who bore Jesus, but not Jesus directly as his son. It does not list Joseph as fathering Jesus because, of course, he didn’t. So, how then is this the genealogy of Jesus if Joseph was not His birth father?
It’s the genealogy of Jesus because He was the eldest acknowledged son of Joseph, even though He was not fathered by Joseph. Therefore, Jesus legally inherited the claims of the eldest son, which in this case included Joseph’s legal claim to the throne. But then again, after a thousand years, others probably also had a legal claim to the throne.
But here is where Jesus might differ from all the other legal claimants: did Joseph have a unique claim to the throne, in that he was the legal heir to the throne of David, descended from father to son down through the generations?
In Joseph’s dream (Matthew 1), the angel addresses him as ‘Joseph, son of David.’ There doesn’t seem to be discussion in mainstream scholarship of ‘son of David’ as a commonly used title for any man descended from David. By the first century, ‘son of David’ had become a Messianic title.[2] Did the angel refer to Joseph as ‘son of David’ just to remind him of his heritage? Or, might Joseph have had a unique claim to the title? Not a Messianic claim, but rather a claim as the legal heir to the throne of Solomon, descended father to son from Jeconiah.
However, even if Joseph was the legal heir to the throne of David, he could not sit on the throne because he was descended from Jeconiah and thus debarred from that position. If this is the case, then Joseph passed on to Jesus not merely a legal claim, but THE legal heirship to the throne of David through the line of Solomon.
None of the sons that Joseph and Mary had together could have sat on the throne because they were descended from Jeconiah through Joseph. Only Jesus, not being physically descended from Joseph, was not debarred from legally claiming the position held by His legal father—a position to which He also had a blood claim through His mother Mary. Thus He was declared King of the Jews from His birth.
It’s also possible that all Joseph had was a simple legal claim to the throne because he was descended from the line of Solomon through Jeconiah (the same as possibly several others). However, all of the descendants of Jeconiah were debarred from the throne and none of their blood descendants could ever claim the throne of David. So, either way, when Joseph passed on his legal claim to Jesus as his eldest acknowledged son but not his blood son, and Jesus had a blood claim through his mother Mary, Jesus became the King of the Jews from His birth.
A Question
Did YHWH @Élöhîm keep His promise to David by arranging for the legal heir to the throne of David, Joseph, to marry Mary, the daughter of a collateral bloodline of David (and one descended from a full brother of Solomon’s)? Given how YHWH works in His Story, that is a distinct probability.
How wonderful is the plan of YHWH in setting up the circumstances leading 
to Mary’s firstborn Son Jesus being declared ‘King of the Jews’ from the moment of His birth, the only son of David who fulfilled both the legal claim (but bypassing the debarment) and the blood claim to the throne of David.
Grace and peace to you,
Dori
[1] Cheney, Johnston M. The Life of Christ in Stereo. Portland, OR: Western Conservative Baptist Seminary. 1969, 275pp.
Note 16a: This rendering departs from the traditional but inconsistent “Joseph, the son of Heli.” Though never before proposed to our knowledge, this rendering is grammatically sound and clarifies the true intent of the passage. It only involves the addition of two commas in the Greek, (which had no punctuation in the original) and a proper recognition of the significance of the initial pronoun, which stands in the place of emphasis. Using English punctuation for modern clarity, the literal rendering would be: “Now Himself was Jesus, beginning at about age thirty–being a son, as was supposed, of Joseph–descended from Heli, son of Matthat, . . . “ His point is that Jesus descended, not from Joseph but from Heli through Mary. That Luke intended this meaning is suggested by the arrangement in the two oldest extant authorities, where Heli, not Joseph, heads the single-column listing of Jesus’ human forbears back to Adam. [This rendering was presented to and well received by the Evangelical Theological Society, as well as by other competent Greek scholars–Ed.]
[2] Bromiley, Geoffrey W., et.al. The International Standard Bible Encylopedia, vol. 1 (A-D), revised 1956. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. “Messiah.”
To God be the glory!
I ran into a lot of interesting information and questions in doing research for the Internal Chronology of the Bible, as well as in just plain Bible study. Sometimes I would read something or hear a podcast, and, in thinking about it, come to my own conclusions. This led to what I call ‘Side Trips.’