“Amram married his father’s sister Jochebed, and she bore him Aaron and Moses. Amram lived 137 years. . .It was this Aaron and Moses whom the Lord told, “Bring the Israelites out of the land of Egypt according to their military divisions.” Moses and Aaron were the ones who spoke to Pharaoh king of Egypt in order to bring the Israelites out of Egypt.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Every culture has ways of identifying who its elite members are. Today we give preference to graduates of certain universities. People who are publicly known for embracing certain social positions and who are also graduates of those same schools (although it’s hard to imagine many of their graduates come out not embracing those positions given how hard they work to indoctrinate their students into their worldview) can establish themselves even more firmly. But the most consistent way we have historically identified the best and brightest is by their family name. Names like Clinton, Bush, and Kennedy carry a lot of cultural clout. Just before we get into the real action of our story, the author stops to give us Moses’ credentials. Let’s talk about what’s going on here and why it matters.

I’ll admit, I usually skip over the genealogies in the Scriptures when I come to them. It’s really hard to see them as anything more than boring lists of names that are hard to pronounce, and which mostly don’t have any stories associated with them that would give reason for me to remember them. In other words, they seem pretty worthless to have. Why would God have preserved so many of them for us? They often feel more like they take away from the larger narrative flow in the stories in which they appear rather than adding anything particularly helpful.

And yet, there are lots of them scattered across the pages of the Scriptures. There is hardly a narrative in the Old or New Testament that does not include at least one genealogical break. God obviously considered them of sufficient importance for someone engaging with Him through the text for them to all be preserved like they are. That’s actually a perspective we need to make sure we are cultivating when it comes to engaging with the Scriptures more generally. If our starting assumption is shaped by Paul’s observation to Timothy that every word of the Scriptures is directly inspired by God and useful for shaping us into the kind of people He made us to be, then everything in them is there for a reason. Just because we don’t understand the reason in a given season doesn’t mean it is worthless or can (much less should) be ignored. A lack of understanding indicates a problem in us, not God.

With that being said, here are a couple of thoughts on what we can do with this genealogy that breaks up the flow of Moses’ story here. First, we have to keep in mind that Moses was writing all of this sometime during the journey from Egypt to the Promised Land. What’s more, it wasn’t the first part of the journey that happened smoothly and fairly easily. It was probably on the second part of the journey, after they had refused to enter the Promised Land and were stuck wandering through the wilderness for an entire generation. Most notably, Moses was writing this after God had established the tribe of Levi as His special servants from among the tribes of Israel because of their faithfulness after the golden calf incident. For future Israelite readers wondering whether or not this Moses guy they had been introduced to really had the credentials to be doing what he was doing, a genealogy like this would have potentially mattered a great deal.

In other words, this part of the story may not directly be for us. That’s another thing to consider when we engage with the Scriptures. While God preserved all of it as it is for the benefit of His people, parts of it may not necessarily be for the benefit of all of His people in every single season. You’ve experienced some of this. If you are someone who has spent many years engaging with the Scriptures, there have been seasons in your life when certain parts were particularly meaningful to you, and you gleaned many significant applications that were directly relevant to your situation. There were other parts, though, that might as well have been a desert for all the help they gave you. In a different season of life, though, the desert sections suddenly bloomed with life, while the previously fertile fields seemed to turn fallow on you, yielding nothing until a later season when they began producing rich harvests of grace yet again.

We live in a season in which the genealogies of the Scriptures don’t necessarily mean a whole lot to us. The introduce more questions and challenges than anything especially helpful for our spiritual growth and development. This doesn’t mean we should totally ignore them because we never know when God’s Spirit is going to move to reveal deep and abiding truth to us as we engage with every part of His word, but it also doesn’t mean we need to continue plowing ground that stubbornly refuses to be broken up while another field’s rich loam is generate a bountiful harvest at the moment.

Second, in spite of the difficulty of passages like this one, a bit of careful study can reveal some interesting things that cast the whole story in a new and challenging light. Here are a couple of them. This genealogy includes the names of more than one woman. That was highly unusual for an ancient genealogy. This suggests that these women all played a significant enough role in the story of the people of Israel that learning of their connection to Moses and Aaron was worthwhile for later readers. Just because their stories have been lost to us doesn’t mean they were lost to ancient readers.

As much as this genealogy is to help establish Moses’ credibility, it does a great deal more to establish Aaron as a priest in the line of Levi. Moses gets mentioned, but only by name once and his family is ignored entirely. Both Moses and Aaron married outside the tribe of Levi meaning their children had impure bloodlines. Yet at least Aaron’s sons served anyway. Our conventions for determining who matters and who doesn’t don’t matter to God at all. He calls whomever He will. Another scandal here is that the relationship between Moses and Aaron’s mom and dad was later explicitly forbidden in the law. Most notably, their dad married his paternal aunt. Just like Jesus, their background would actually seem to disqualify them from doing what they did. God used them anyway.

Let’s wrap this up on that point. While this genealogy at first would seem to lend credibility to Moses and Aaron’s claims to leadership, a closer look suggests it may have done the opposite. We can’t know for sure how Moses’ contemporaries would have reacted to this. What we can see, though, is that God took two people with backgrounds that on the surface looked great, but behind the curtain were a bit of a mess, and used them to advance His kingdom in powerful ways. Whatever exactly lies in your background, whatever your family history happens to be, God can still use you to advance His kingdom in powerful ways if you will only submit yourself to Him and faithfully do what He says. The power that makes a difference will be God’s, not yours.