12 MRS. A. S. LEWIS, ON THE GENEALOGIES OF OUR LORD. 



that Herod the Great (son of Antipater) caused most of these 

 registers to be burnt, because he was hhnself of a plebeian 

 family, and wished to conceal from the Eoman Emperor that he 

 had no blood relationship with either the royal line of David or 

 the priestly one of Levi. The private family registers would 

 not, however, all disappear in this catastrophe. Some of them 

 were rewritten from memory, and duplicates may have been 

 preserved in more than one household. 



The custom of the damnatio memoriae was practised also in 

 Imperial Eome and was carried out in a striking manner 

 against the Emperor Commodus. He, or rather his memory, 

 was condemned in a night sitting of the Senate within twenty- 

 four hours of his death, the same sitting in which Pertinax was 

 nominated as Emperor. It was decreed, amidst the acclama- 

 tions of the people, that his body was to be throw^n into the 

 Tiber, the statues of him were to be destroyed, his name was 

 to be abolished, and erased from every private and public 

 monument. 



The Athenians pronounced a like doom on the memory of 

 Alcibiades, and of Philip Y. of Macedon, in the year 200 B.C.* 



In a far more remote antiquity, about 1450 B.C. under the 

 18th Dynasty, quite near to the time of Moses, the Egyptian 

 priests cursed the memory of Amenhotep IV., the heretic king, 

 whose strange behaviour appears to have been responsible for 

 both the building of Tell-el-Amarna and for its ruin.f 



But what have these stories to do with the omission of three 

 kingly names from our Lord's genealogy in Matthew's Gospel ? 



We have allusions to this practice in the Old Testament. It 

 cannot, therefore, have been non-existent among the Hebrews. 

 At the time when the Golden Calf was made, " Whoso hath 

 sinned against me, him will I blot out of my book " : Exodus 

 xxxii, 35 (see also Deuteronomy ix, 14 ; xxv, 19 ; xxix, 20 ; 

 II Kings xiv, 27). 



Psalm ix, 5, "Thou hast rebuked the nations, Thou hast 

 destroyed the wicked. Thou hast blotted out their name for ever 

 and ever." 



Psalm Ixix, 28, " Let them be blotted out of the Book of 

 Life." 



Kevelation iii, 5, " I will in no wise blot out his name out of 

 ^he Book of Life." 



* See Livy, Book xxxi, cap. 44. 



t See New Light on Ancient Egypt, pp. 63 ff. 



