The chapter
Simply Matthew opens not with a birth but with a list: forty-odd names running from Abraham down to Joseph, the husband of Mary. Only then does he tell how Jesus was born, and most of that account is about what Joseph decided to do.
Context The list is the argument. Matthew's first sentence calls Jesus son of David and son of Abraham, and the fourteen generations that follow are how he shows it. The birth account then does something the list cannot: it says the child is not Joseph's, which breaks the very line the chapter has just drawn.
Verses 1-17
Simply The genealogy runs in three stretches: Abraham to King David, David to the deportation to Babylon, and Babylon to the Christ. It is a family line and a political history at once, since most of the middle stretch are kings.
Context The oldest part of it is quoted rather than composed. The run from Salmon through Boaz and Obed to Jesse and David stands word for word at the end of the book of Ruth, which closes with the same list.
Verses 3-6
Simply Four women are named in a list that otherwise names only fathers: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and one who is not given a name at all but called the wife of Uriah.
Context Three are named and the fourth is identified by her husband, and Matthew keeps that husband in the sentence: Solomon's mother appears as her who had been Uriah's wife. Ruth's own book calls her a Moabitess, from outside Israel. The text records who these people were without commenting on it, and this file does not comment either.
Verses 8-11
Simply The list is shorter than the history it covers. Between two of its names, other books of the Bible put three kings that Matthew does not mention.
Context Matthew goes straight from Joram to Uzziah. First Chronicles puts Ahaziah, Joash and Amaziah between them, and it is the same Uzziah on both sides: Second Kings calls him Azariah, son of Amaziah, made king at sixteen, and Second Chronicles gives the same age and the same father under the name Uzziah. A generation is left out at the other end too, where Matthew has Josiah father Jechoniah and Chronicles puts Jehoiakim between them.
Verse 17
Simply Matthew stops and counts for the reader: fourteen generations, then fourteen, then fourteen.
Context Counting the names as they stand gives fourteen from Abraham to David, and fourteen from Solomon to Jechoniah. The third stretch, from Shealtiel to Jesus, gives thirteen, unless Jechoniah is counted twice, ending one stretch and opening the next, which is how the verse's own wording reads: from David to the deportation, and from the deportation to the Christ. The arithmetic is worth noticing rather than hiding, and the chapter's structure is a claim Matthew makes out loud in this verse.
Verses 18-25
Simply Mary is engaged to Joseph and is found to be pregnant before they live together. Joseph, unwilling to shame her publicly, plans to end it quietly; a dream stops him, and he takes her home and names the child Jesus.
Context Almost all of it is Joseph's, and the text is careful about him twice. It calls him a righteous man in the same breath as his decision not to expose her, and it addresses him as son of David, the title the genealogy spent seventeen verses earning, and he is given it at the moment he is told the child is not his. The name he is told to give means what the verse says it means: he shall save his people from their sins.
Verses 22-23
Simply Matthew stops the story to say that this fulfils something a prophet said, and quotes it: a child will be born and called Immanuel, which means God with us.
Context The sentence he quotes stands at Isaiah 7:14, and the two editions this app serves do not render it the same way. The World English Bible has the virgin at both places, in Matthew and in Isaiah. Segond 1910 has la vierge in Matthew and la jeune fille, the young girl, in Isaiah, so a French reader who follows the citation back finds a different word at the other end. Which word belongs there is a question about Hebrew and Greek that this file does not settle; that the two editions differ is something a reader can check in the app, and is worth saying rather than smoothing over.