Genealogical Notes on the ‘House of David’ and the ‘House of Zadok’

Genealogical data about the kings of Judah serve as organizational devices in the historiographical literature of the Hebrew Bible. The most conspicuous is there presentation of the ‘House of David’ as a continuous father-to-son succession from David b. Jesse to Jehoiachin b. Jehoiakim for 18 generations (excluding Jehoiakim and Zedekiah who came to the throne irregularly due to foreign intervention, and Athaliah). D.V. Etz has shown this number of consecutive father-to-son successions to be ‘exceptional, if not unique’ (‘The Genealogical Relationships of Jehoram and Ahaziah, and of Ahaz and Hezekiah, Kings of Judah’, JSOT 71 [1996], pp. 39-53 [41]). Deepening the suspicion that something is amiss with this representation are the individual discrepancies in the data available for some of the kings, several of which Etzexamines. This article re-examines the data for these and other reigns to establish a more historically accurate genealogical sequence of kings (the ‘House of David’), and then employs that sequence as a benchmark for advancing a defensible genealogical sequence of high priests (the ‘House of Zadok’) for which the relevant data are much sparser and much more resistant to analysis.