Matthew/Luke Generations missing between Rahab and David

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My study bible (The NIV Study Bible by Zondervan) notes that it was a common ancient practice to "telescope" a genealogy -- i.e. to skip over generations when building the list. In the introduction to 1 Chronicles (where you'll also find a number of "missing" generations in its numerous genealogies), it states:

The most common type of fluidity in Biblical materials is telescoping, the omission of names from the list. Unimportant names are left out in order to relate an individual to a prominent ancestor, or possibly to achieve the desired number of names in the genealogy.

Another point to note is that the Hebrew and Greek words commonly rendered in English as "father" & "mother" and "son" & "daughter" did not always refer to the direct parent or the direct offspring of an individual. Based on context they could and did refer to more distant ancestors or descendants.

In our own time, lacking knowledge of these ancient historical and literary conventions, we have a tendency to be overzealous in our literalism and create difficulties or contradictions where they don't exist. It's similar to the way we assume an ancient history is presenting a purely sequential chronology of events, when in fact ancient authors would often organize their material out of time sequence to put interrelated or thematically-similar events together in the account.

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It is possible to comprehend without presuming any hidden generations by averaging them out to 150 years old each, for example, and assuming that Rahab was very old when she begat Boaz(e.g. Rahab(70) + Boaz(150) + Obed(150) + Jesse(150) = David).

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I'm with JDM-GBG and yourself: the genealogy here is telescoped, i.e. generations have been omitted, and this is common practice in the Scriptures. Rather than repeat the work of Dr John Millam I will just refer you to his online article "The Genesis Genealogies - are they complete?" which looks at many genealogies in Scripture. An especially interesting verse in this respect is Exodus 6:20, which can be compared with Numbers 3:27,28. See also 1 Chronicles 6:1-3.

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