Genesis 49 is naked politics dressed as prophecy: Jacob’s “blessing” is an investiture speech for the Judahite project, retrofitted to make one tribe’s hegemony look like fate. “Lion’s whelp” isn’t zoology; it’s brand management—royal violence made majestic. The juicy phrase is the bureaucratic one: “sceptre” and “legislative power.” That’s not mysticism; that’s state capacity. The accompanying gloss you’ve pasted (very Douay-ish) then weaponizes the text against “modern Jews” with a crude syllogism: if Judah’s rule persists until Messiah, and Judah’s rule is gone, then Messiah came. It’s rhetorically clever and historically sloppy: it equivocates “sceptre” between dynastic kingship, judicial authority, and ethnic persistence, then picks whichever definition yields a clean Christian proof. It also quietly admits the real anxiety: legitimacy is a paperwork problem. Matthew 1 answers that anxiety with more paperwork. The genealogy is a legal fiction in the technical sense: a truth-claim carried by a recognized social form. It is not trying to be neutral history; it is trying to be a title deed. The move is Straussian in the obvious way: the exoteric surface is boring—“begot begot begot”—while the esoteric content is a polemic about who counts as Israel, what kind of king is being announced, and how impurity is smuggled into holiness. Three things dominate if you read it as deliberately composed rather than merely inherited. First, the numerology: 14-14-14 is not “accounting,” it’s David coded (DVD = 4+6+4). Matthew is compressing, skipping, and sanding names to force the pattern. That tells you the priority: not exhaustive memory but a Davidic signature. The genealogy is an icon, not an archive. Second, the women: the note claims “Hebrews took no notice of women,” which is half-true at best and misses Matthew’s point. He notices women when it serves the scandal. Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, “her that had been the wife of Urias”—each is a breach in the boundary system: incest-adjacent deception, Canaanite prostitute, Moabite outsider, adultery plus murder. This is not accidental garnish; it is a thesis: the messianic line advances through juridical irregularity and Gentile contamination. The Law is being fulfilled by being outplayed. If you want a darker reading: the “pure lineage” obsession is bait, and Matthew shows you, in four names, that the bloodline has always been compromised—therefore grace can claim the bastard, the foreigner, and the shamed without apologizing. Third, the hinge at v.16: the grammar swerves. Everyone “begot” until Jacob “begot Joseph,” and then Joseph is carefully demoted to “husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus.” Matthew gives Joseph the legal line and then refuses him the biological act. That is a surgical way to keep the Davidic title while asserting a rupture in ordinary generation. The line is both continuous (legally) and discontinuous (miraculously), which is precisely what a sect needs when it is claiming the throne while denying the bedroom. Now juxtapose Genesis 49 with Matthew 1 and you get the same obsession expressed in two registers: sovereignty. Genesis says: Judah will rule until the One arrives. Matthew says: the One has arrived and here is the receipt, stamped “David.” The lion becomes a ledger. But there’s an uncomfortable seam: Genesis’ promise is about enduring Judahite governance—sceptre, law—while Matthew’s Christ arrives under foreign rule, in an age of client kings and imperial taxation. So Matthew’s genealogy is also a redefinition of “sceptre.” Power is being transposed from the public to the hidden: from throne to womb, from statute to “fulfillment,” from polity to person. That’s either theological genius or political defeat sublimated into metaphysics. Probably both. If you want the blunt critique: the Christian proof-texting move in the Genesis gloss is too eager and too confident about what “sceptre” means historically; it reads like a lawyer who already knows the verdict. Matthew is subtler: he doesn’t argue that Judah visibly rules; he argues that Davidic legitimacy persists as an invisible legal-mystical right, even when Rome owns the street. That’s the real continuity: not Jewish sovereignty, but Jewish categories repurposed. And the final ironical twist: Matthew’s painstaking patrimony culminates in a man who is not the biological father. The genealogy exists to establish a kingship that, in the story’s own terms, cannot be grounded in ordinary seed. The text both fetishizes descent and detonates it. That’s not a bug; it’s the point: the messiah is heir by Law, not by lust—an austere coup against the entire pagan logic of divine blood. So the pairing is coherent: Genesis supplies the royal myth (“lion,” “sceptre,” “expectation of nations”); Matthew supplies the administrative mechanism by which a marginal Galilean can be said to fulfill it. Myth plus memo. The sceptre becomes a sentence.