Does Genesis present us with a fake family tree for Moses? Not everyone accepts that only four generations elapsed between the Patriarchs arriving in Egypt and their descendants leaving with Moses. Those who do not accept a short stay in Egypt contend that Moses’s genealogy is telescoped.
What is a “telescoped genealogy?” A genealogy is telescoped when the author intentionally leaves out some names so as to highlight certain important people in a family tree. For example, Matthew does this with Jesus’s genealogy. This allows him to group Jesus’s ancestors into blocks of fourteen generations (Mt 1:1-17). We know Matthew left out some names because we can compare his genealogy of Jesus with Old Testament genealogies of Jesus’s ancestors.
Continue reading →