The Five Women in Matthew's Genealogy of Jesus

The opening verses of the Gospel of Matthew trace the ancestry of Jesus back to the patriarch Abraham. Not surprisingly, Jesus’ genealogy is an illustrious one, including Jacob, Judah, David, Solomon and Hezekiah. Somewhat unusually, however, the list includes four women from the Hebrew Bible. 

In Matthew’s Jewish world, genealogies typically mentioned only men.  Even more surprisingly, the four women—Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and “the wife of Uriah” (that is, Bathsheba)—have somewhat spotty reputations. What prompted Matthew to include a prostitute (Rahab), a woman who pretended to be a prostitute (Tamar), a sexually forward widow (Ruth), and a woman taken in adultery (Bathsheba) in his “account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham”?