That we may thoroughly know great and outstanding heroes, it is worth the effort to look also at their ancestors; and this the divine letters [the Scriptures] teach — not only as the school of the Rhetoricians [does], but also by their own act and example. For to what end, otherwise, [are there] so many genealogies in Genesis, in Exodus, and especially in the Paralipomena themselves? To what end the book of the generation of JESUS CHRIST in St. Matthew and in Luke? For St. Paul (1 Timothy 1, verse 4) does not speak of these [sacred] genealogies — as Beza ineptly hands down in his Annotations — but of those which certain vain men among the Jews daily wove and boasted of with full cheeks; or which the Gentiles [made] concerning the lineages of their empty gods, of the kind Hesiod supplies in his Theogony, as St. Chrysostom notes on that passage. And therefore, on St. Luke chapter 1, St. Ambrose [says]: “Divine Scripture teaches that not only the character in those who are praiseworthy, but also [their] parents, ought to be praised, so that, as it were, a transmitted inheritance of unstained purity may stand pre-eminent in those whom we wish to praise.” Sidonius (book 7, Epistle to Perpetuus): “Reverence is to be kept for [good] birth, since the Evangelist too showed that these [ancestries] are not to be omitted; for Luke, undertaking the praise of John, reckoned it most excellent that he came of a priestly stock.”
Our hero JOSHUA, then, was [one] of the descendants of the most holy and most chaste Joseph. For since Joseph had two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim — to whom his father Jacob, now about to die, willed to give origin and name for two tribes (Genesis 48, verse 5) — JOSHUA arose from the tribe of Ephraim (Numbers 13, verse 9); and he had as forefather Elisama, who (Numbers chapter 2, verse 18) was Prince of all the Ephraimites, and as father Nun, the successor of his own father in the same dignity. And for that reason JOSHUA is so often called “son of Nun,” as [the son] of a very outstanding and much-praised man (Exodus 33; Numbers 11, 13, 14, 27, 32, 34; Deuteronomy 23, 32; Judges 2; 3 Kings [1 Kings] 16; Nehemiah 8; and elsewhere). But that the other ancestors of JOSHUA too may be known, and that the difficulties concerning them may be resolved, I shall set down here the sacred words themselves from Paralipomenon chapter 7, verse 20 and following; then several little questions. They stand thus:
[1 Paralipomenon (Chronicles) 7:20–27:] Now the sons of Ephraim [were]: Suthala, Bared his son, Thalath his son, Elada his son, Thalath his son, whose son [was] Zabad, and whose son [was] Suthala, and whose son [was] Ezer and Elad. And the men of Geth, born [in the land], slew them, because they had come down to invade their possessions. Ephraim therefore, their father, mourned [for] many days; and his brethren came to comfort him. And he went in to his wife, who conceived and bore a son, and he called his name Beria, because he had arisen amid the evils of his house. And his daughter was Sara, who built lower and upper Beth-horon, and Ozensara. Moreover his son [was] Rapha, and Reseph, and Thale, of whom was born Thaan, who begot Laadan; whose son also [was] Ammiud, who begot Elisama, of whom was born Nun, who had a son, JOSHUA.
(col. 7)