in church history, two main suggestions have been offered. One is that Mary was also of Davidic descent, given that Jews tended to marry within tribal lineage, so that Heli was Joseph’s father-in-law.19 After all, the Greek merely reads, “Joseph, of Heli, of Matthat, of Levi, and so forth. Referring to Joseph, Jesus’s adoptive father, would still carry more weight in a patriarchal world, even if the lineage biologically passed through Mary. The second option is that levirate marriages at one or