If you look far enough up into King David’s family tree (ten generations), you will see that he came from the tribe of Judah. And as we look through his family tree, we see that some of his relatives are still very well known, even 3,000 years later. Some of his famous relatives include:
- King Solomon was his son
- Rahab the prostitute was his great-great-grandmother
- Ruth the Moabitess was his great-grandmother
- Joab, the commander of his army, was his nephew
- Abishai, often second in command of his army, was another nephew
- Asahel, one of his mighty men, was yet another of his nephews
- Absalom, who led an uprising against David, was his son
- Amasa, who commanded Absalom’s army when it fought against David, was still another nephew
- All the kings of Judah were descendants of David
- Mary, Joseph and Jesus were all descendants of David
There are also quite a few surprising connections in David’s family tree:
- David’s son Jerimoth married David’s brother Eliab’s daughter Abihail. That’s right, these first cousins got married and together, they had a daughter called Mahalath, who was both David’s granddaughter and his great-niece.
- But that’s not all: Mahalath then married one of David’s grandsons, Rehoboam (the son of Solomon), who was her first cousin (through her father and Solomon) as well as her second cousin (through her maternal grandfather Eliab).
- If that seems complicated, you can note that Rehoboam also married another of his first cousins, Maacah, who was the daughter of Absalom, another of Solomon’s half-brothers.
David had seven brothers and two sisters as well as at least eight wives and ten concubines: it was a massive family, and some of the complicated relationships are confusing.
However, a family tree helps to make some of these relationships crystal clear. For example, the dot points above are easily traced on the family tree below.
An extra bonus on the website
This family tree is also available on the Bible Tales website, in
SVG format. If you wish to use or edit the family tree you are free to do so: it is released into the public domain.
Tooltips
If you are viewing the SVG file on a computer that will display tooltips (eg. a desktop computer or laptop), hovering your mouse pointer over any of the names or links in the family tree will show the references in the Bible that describe that person or relationship.
Note:
If you try hovering over a link or name and nothing seems to happen, keep waiting for a while – it can take up to 10 seconds or even more for the first tooltip to display.
The tooltips are not yet complete: they stop with Amaziah the son of Joash (Jehoash) as you go down the page. This is still a work in progress. Please let me know if you find any errors in the passages or believe that extra references would be worth adding.
Getting a little more technical…
I don’t often get technical in this newsletter, but this is one of those occasions. If
“SVG” means nothing to you, then you will probably not be interested in this section.
This family tree which is available on the Bible Tales website in
SVG format is also intended to be useful for those who want a resource they can edit or resize. The “S” in SVG stands for “Scalable”, which means that you can zoom in and the curves will still be smooth curves – they don’t turn into little blocks. All of the text in the diagram uses the free “
Roboto Condensed” font, and the font has been embedded in the SVG file so that it will display properly on almost any browser.
If you are interested in SVG files, the font embedding and SVG optimisation were both done with
svg-buddy.
