Matthew's genealogy departs from its pattern in reference to Solomon in Matthew 1:6 by adding the words "by her who had been Uriah's wife."1 The name Uriah is found in biblical Hebrew as אוּרִיָּה (uriyyah) and אוּרִיָּהוּ (uriyyahu), and is the name of five or six persons in the Old Testament.2 Within this number is Uriah, the husband of Bathsheba (daughter of Eliam 2 Sam 11:3, and possibly granddaughter of Ahithophel, 2 Sam 23:34). He also bears the name "the Hittite," though this does not mean that he descended from the Hittites of Anatolia (with capital in northwestern Asia Minor at Hattusa). Rather, he may be from the Neo-Hittites found in northern Syria, who are survivors of the collapse of the Hittite empire.
The late professor of Hittite at the University of Chicago, Harry Hoffner, argues regarding the term Hittite that this
designation need not mark him as descended from the Anatolian Hittites of the second millennium bc. It may merely mean that he—or less likely, an ancestor—came from one of the Neo-Hittite states in northern Syria, where vestiges of Hittite civilization survived the collapse of the empire. Uriah was one of the warriors in David’s elite force of the “Thirty” (2 Sam 23:39; 1 Chr 11:41).3
Attention will be given to the escapade between David and Bathsheba, and the murder of Uriah in 2 Samuel 11. ↩︎
Harry Hoffner, 1 & 2 Samuel, Evangelical Exegetical Commentary, H. Wayne House, Gen. Ed. ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎