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The following is an excerpt from the book Does the Bible Have Contradictions? by Matthew Elton, copyright 2009 Matthew Elton.

Question:

Was Joram (Matthew 1:8) or Amaziah (2 Chronicles 26:1) the father of Uzziah?

Answer:

In Hebrew, the word “son” can refer to any descendants in general, not just literal sons. For example, the Hebrew people are called the “sons of Jacob” in Malachi 3:6 despite the fact that Jacob was their ancestor but not their literal father. Similarly, the Jewish Pharisees tell Jesus that Abraham is their “father” (John 8:39) even though Abraham is their ancestor but not their literal father. In another example of this phenomenon, Matthew 1:1 calls Jesus Christ “the son of David” and David “the son of Abraham” despite the fact that David was only an ancestor of Jesus and not his literal father (God is Christ’s literal Father), and Abraham was only an ancestor of David, and not his literal father.

Calling an ancestor “father” and a distant descendant “son” may seem strange in English, but the Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew, and in Hebrew it is grammatically correct for the word “son” (ben in Hebrew) to apply to any descendant, not just literal sons. The Jewish writers of the New Testament applied this same Hebrew concept to the Greek language when they penned the gospels.

Therefore, there is no contradiction because Amaziah was Uzziah’s literal father, while Joram (short for Jehoram) was a more distant ancestor of Uzziah, called “father” only in figurative Jewish language.

To be precise, we see from 1 Chronicles 3:10-12 that Joram was the father of Ahaziah, the father of Joash, the father of Amaziah, the father of Uzziah (“Uzziah” is Azariah in Hebrew and Ozias in the Greek of Matthew 1:8), and Uzziah himself was the father of Jotham (Joatham in the Greek), which is further verified not only by Matthew 1:8 but also 2 Chronicles 26:23. We therefore conclude that we find no contradiction between the accounts of Matthew 1:8 and 2 Chronicles 26:1.