What Tribe Was Jesus From? Judah, the Tribe of King David

Jesus was from the tribe of Judah, the royal tribe of King David. Hebrews calls it plain: “it is evident that our Lord sprang out of Juda” (Hebrews 7:14). Matthew and Luke both trace his family through David back to Judah, one of Jacob’s twelve sons, and Matthew calls him “the son of David” in his first verse.

It is a tribe named for praise. Judah’s mother gave him his name with thanks to God on her lips, and from his line came the king. “He chose David also his servant, and took him from the sheepfolds,” the psalm remembers (Psalm 78:70), and to David came the promise of a throne established “for ever” (2 Samuel 7:13). When we call Jesus the son of David, we stand at the end of that long line of praise and promise.

Three kinds of evidence point the same way. The plainest is one sentence in the Letter to the Hebrews, in a passage on how Jesus could be a priest: “For it is evident that our Lord sprang out of Juda; of which tribe Moses spake nothing concerning priesthood” (Hebrews 7:14). The King James New Testament spells the name Juda or Judas; it is the same Judah, the son of Jacob. The writer does not argue the point. He calls it evident and builds on it.

The second is the pair of family trees in the Gospels. Matthew opens with “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham” and runs forward: “Jacob begat Judas and his brethren; And Judas begat Phares and Zara of Thamar” (Matthew 1:1–3). The line goes on through “Jesse begat David the king” (Matthew 1:6) and ends with “Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ” (Matthew 1:16). Luke runs the other way, from Jesus back to Adam, and passes the same ancestors: “the son of David, Which was the son of Jesse … which was the son of Phares, which was the son of Juda” (Luke 3:31–33).

	Matthew 1	Luke 3
Direction	Abraham down to Jesus	Jesus up to Adam
Judah’s son	Phares, by Thamar (1:3)	Phares (3:33)
David’s son	Solomon, the king (1:6)	Nathan (3:31)
Joseph’s father	Jacob (1:16)	Heli (3:23)

Both lines agree that Jesus descends from David and, through David, from Judah. They part after David and name different fathers for Joseph. Christians have offered explanations for that since early times, and they are set out in the genealogy from Noah to Jesus.

The third is how others spoke of him. Gabriel told Mary that “the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David” (Luke 1:32). When Jesus rode into Jerusalem, the crowds cried, “Hosanna to the son of David” (Matthew 21:9). Paul writes of “Jesus Christ of the seed of David” (2 Timothy 2:8). In Israel, a son of David was a son of Judah.

Because God had tied the kingship to Judah centuries before Jesus, and then to David’s family within it. When Jacob called his twelve sons together to tell them “that which shall befall you in the last days” (Genesis 49:1), he promised Judah the rule. Jacob died when he had finished speaking to them (Genesis 49:33). His words to Judah included this:

The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be.

Genesis 49:10

A sceptre is a king’s staff, so the promise is that rule would stay with Judah’s line. Judah was not the firstborn. That was Reuben, who lost his birthright, and First Chronicles explains what passed to whom: “For Judah prevailed above his brethren, and of him came the chief ruler; but the birthright was Joseph’s” (1 Chronicles 5:2). Psalm 78 tells the story the same way: God “chose the tribe of Judah, the mount Zion which he loved,” and “He chose David also his servant, and took him from the sheepfolds” (Psalm 78:68, 70).

To David came a promise about his descendants: “I will set up thy seed after thee … and I will stablish the throne of his kingdom for ever” (2 Samuel 7:12–13). The prophets kept that promise in view. Isaiah foresaw “a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots” (Isaiah 11:1), Jesse being David’s father. Jeremiah wrote, “I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper” (Jeremiah 23:5). Micah named the town: “But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel” (Micah 5:2). A Messiah from any other tribe could not have been David’s heir.

Jacob’s blessing also calls Judah “a lion’s whelp” (Genesis 49:9). Revelation uses both pictures, the lion and David’s family, when it names Jesus “the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David” (Revelation 5:5). How that picture became one of his titles is explained in why Jesus is called the Lion of Judah.

Yes. Luke says Joseph went up to Bethlehem “because he was of the house and lineage of David” (Luke 2:4), and both genealogies end with him. In Israel a man’s tribe came through his father. When Moses counted the people, they “declared their pedigrees after their families, by the house of their fathers” (Numbers 1:18).

Joseph was not Jesus’s natural father, and both Gospels signal it in the genealogies themselves. In Matthew every man “begat” his son until the last link, where Joseph is “the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus” (Matthew 1:16). Luke calls Jesus “the son of Joseph” only “as was supposed” (Luke 3:23). Joseph’s line still counted. The notes of the Catholic New American Bible put it this way: “through Joseph’s adoption the child belongs to the family of David.” Augustine said the same about the title “son of David”: even if Mary had no descent from David, Christians would have “warrant enough to hold Christ to be the son of David, on the ground of that same mode of reckoning by which also Joseph is called His father.”

Scripture does not name Mary’s tribe, and both genealogies are given in Joseph’s name. From very early on, Christian writers held that she too belonged to David’s family, and so to Judah. Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch, who died in Rome between 98 and 117, wrote that Jesus “was, according to the appointment of God, conceived in the womb by Mary, of the seed of David, but by the Holy Ghost.” The Protevangelium of James, a story of Mary’s childhood from the end of the second century, says a priest “remembered the child Mary, that she was of the family of David.” The book is not part of the Bible; the Catholic Encyclopedia calls it “an apocryphal Gospel”.

The New Testament gives grounds for it. Peter said God had sworn to David “that of the fruit of his loins, according to the flesh, he would raise up Christ to sit on his throne” (Acts 2:30), and Paul calls Jesus “made of the seed of David according to the flesh” (Romans 1:3). Since Jesus had no human father, Augustine argued, those words point to his mother: “how much more ought we to accept without any hesitation the position that Mary herself also was descended in some way, according to the laws of blood, from the lineage of David?” The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1912 adds that some commentators take the words “of the house of David” in Luke 1:27 to describe Mary rather than Joseph.

Christians have traced her descent in three main ways.

• By the marriage law. Eusebius, the church historian, reasoned that “Mary also is virtually shown to be of the same tribe with him, since, according to the law of Moses, intermarriages between different tribes were not permitted.” John of Damascus made the same argument in his Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. Since “it was not the custom of the Hebrews nor of the divine Scripture to give genealogies of women”, he wrote, Joseph’s line was enough: “the law was to prevent one tribe seeking wives from another”, and Joseph “would not have taken her unless she had been of the same tribe.” The law they had in mind, Numbers 36:8, applied to daughters who inherited land, and Scripture does not say whether Mary was one.
• Through her father Joachim. John of Damascus also named Mary’s father as Joachim, of the line of David’s son Nathan. The names Joachim and Anna for her parents come from the Protevangelium, and the Catholic Encyclopedia lists John among several early writers who repeat that tradition.
• Through Luke’s list. Some read Luke’s genealogy as Mary’s own, with Heli as her father, so that Jesus is “the Son of Heli through Mary.” The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1912 says Augustine had already alluded to this reading and names the scholars Lightfoot and Bengel among those who explain Luke 3:23 this way. It notes that “few commentators adhere to this view”, but adds that the name Heli agrees with the Joachim tradition, since Joachim “is only a variation of Heli or Eliachim.” Liz Abrams of Answers in Genesis calls the reading “one solution that seems very likely.”

The three answers rest on different evidence, but each places Mary in the tribe of Judah.

No, though he may have had relatives who were. Luke introduces the priest Zacharias and says “his wife was of the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elisabeth” (Luke 1:5). Aaron was “the Levite” (Exodus 4:14), so Elizabeth came from the priestly family of the tribe of Levi. Gabriel then tells Mary, “thy cousin Elisabeth, she hath also conceived a son in her old age” (Luke 1:36). The Greek word behind “cousin” means a kinswoman, a relative, without saying how close. Whether that makes John the Baptist Jesus’s cousin in today’s sense is answered in were Jesus and John the Baptist cousins?

A family of Judah could have relatives in the tribe of Levi. The law that Eusebius and John of Damascus relied on kept an heiress inside her father’s tribe: “every daughter, that possesseth an inheritance in any tribe of the children of Israel, shall be wife unto one of the family of the tribe of her father” (Numbers 36:8). That rule bound daughters who inherited land, and Aaron himself married into Judah: he “took him Elisheba, daughter of Amminadab, sister of Naashon, to wife” (Exodus 6:23). Naashon was “captain of the children of Judah” (Numbers 2:3), and Matthew lists him among Jesus’s ancestors: “Aminadab begat Naasson” (Matthew 1:4).

Augustine saw meaning in the tie. Because Elizabeth was Mary’s kinswoman, he wrote, “we ought most firmly to hold by the fact that the flesh of Christ sprang from both lines; to wit, from the line of the kings, and from that of the priests.” A later tradition, reported by the Catholic Encyclopedia, made Mary’s mother Anna “a descendant of the priestly family of Aaron.” Neither changes Jesus’s tribe. Hebrews says plainly that he “pertaineth to another tribe, of which no man gave attendance at the altar” (Hebrews 7:13), and it grounds his priesthood elsewhere, in the words of Psalm 110: “Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchisedec” (Hebrews 7:17).

Jesus was a Jew, born in Judaea and raised in Galilee; the Samaritan woman at the well calls him “a Jew” (John 4:9). Matthew says he “was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king” (Matthew 2:1), and Luke calls Bethlehem “the city of David” (Luke 2:4). He grew up in Nazareth, which Luke describes as “a city of Galilee” (Luke 1:26). When Joseph brought the family back to the land of Israel, he “came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth” (Matthew 2:21–23), and Jesus was known by that town.

The two places confused some of the people who heard him. “Shall Christ come out of Galilee?” they asked. “Hath not the scripture said, That Christ cometh of the seed of David, and out of the town of Bethlehem, where David was?” (John 7:41–42). They knew the prophecy and the family it required, and took him for a Galilean.

The word “Jew” also goes back to Judah’s name. It came into English through Old French, Latin, Greek and Aramaic from a Hebrew word formed from the name Judah. The Jewish Encyclopedia notes that the Hebrew word was “seemingly never applied to members of the tribe”, but to the people living in the south of the land, and that it was later extended to Israelites in the north; in the Old Testament it “appears to be applied” to those who worshipped the God of Israel at Jerusalem after the Exile. So when the woman at the well called Jesus “a Jew”, she carried Judah’s name on her lips without knowing it. And Judah’s name is a word of praise. When Leah bore her fourth son, she said, “Now will I praise the Lord,” and she “called his name Judah” (Genesis 29:35).

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• Why is Jesus called the Lion of Judah?
• Where was Jesus born: Bethlehem or Nazareth?
• Who was Melchizedek?
• Israel and Judah: are they the same?
• Who was King David?
• Elizabeth in the Bible, the mother of John the Baptist