Christ as David

All of this is stolen from Leithart (you can use my link to browse his site).

The genealology in Matthew is vastly different from the somewhat more literal one in Luke, and and one of the reasons is that it is showing Christ as the new David: the name "David" in Hebrew has three letters, daleth, vav, and daleth again, which adds up to a total numerical value of fourteen (Jews didn't use our Hindu-Arabic numeral system, or Roman numerals. To them, Alef was one, Bet was two, Gimmel was three, Daleth four, and so on, so any word was also a string of numbers). The genealogy has three sections (the three letters) of fourteen generations each (the numerical value of the name): fourteen generations from Abraham to David, from David to the captivity, and from the captivity to Christ (note that it is a genealogy of kings, and that the entire family of Ahab is missing, to the third generation).