Chapter 13

¹ For the Scripture says: “And there was a man dwelling in Babylon, and his name was Jehoiakim; and he took a wife whose name was Susanna, the daughter of Hilkiah, exceedingly beautiful and fearing the Lord.” Of him we spoke earlier—the man who, having become a sojourner in Babylon, took Susanna for his wife.

² And she was the daughter of Hilkiah the priest, the one who found the book of the law in the house of the Lord, at the time when Josiah the king commanded him to cleanse the holy of holies.

³ Her brother was Jeremiah the prophet, who together with the rest, after the captivity of the people that had taken place in Babylon, was carried off into Egypt and sojourned in Tahpanhes; and there, while prophesying, he was stoned by them and put to death.

⁴ These, then, being of the priestly stock, of the tribe of Levi, were intermingled with the tribe of Judah, so that through the two righteous tribes coming together into one the righteous seed of Christ according to the flesh might be displayed, and that the one born of them in Bethlehem might be shown forth as king and priest of God.

⁵ For indeed Matthew, wishing to trace down the lineage of Christ according to the flesh as pure and spotless as far as Joseph, when he came to Josiah passed over his five sons and named Jeconiah, the one born in Babylon of Susanna, shifting from righteous seed to righteous seed. For he says: “Josiah begot Jeconiah and his brothers at the time of the deportation to Babylon.”

⁶ How, then, shall this be demonstrated? For Josiah, having reigned in the land of Judah thirty-one years, died there. How then, having died there, could he beget Jeconiah in Babylon?

⁷ From this one must understand that Matthew traced the genealogy of this man, born of Jehoiakim and of Susanna, as being the son of Eliakim, who is also Jehoiakim, the son of Josiah. For Matthew could not have been giving the genealogy of that Jeconiah who had been declared accursed by the Holy Spirit, as certain ones in their error suppose; for that man, led maimed into Babylon and there shut up as a prisoner in a mill, died childless. So it is not idly that the Scripture teaches us, saying: “And there was a man dwelling in Babylon, and his name was Jehoiakim; and he took a wife whose name was Susanna, the daughter of Hilkiah, exceedingly beautiful and fearing the Lord.”

⁸ So from her is born Jeconiah, and Jeconiah begets Shealtiel, and Shealtiel begets Zerubbabel. He, together with Ezra the scribe and Jeshua the son of Jozadak, goes up to Jerusalem by the command of Cyrus the Persian; and thus the lineage of the fathers remained pure until the birth of Jesus Christ.