Genesis 38

All right, welcome back.
So we finished the week in Genesis
and I’m gonna be honest with you,
kind of a doozy of a way to finish the week.
We have been looking at Joseph’s story yesterday,
probably the worst part of the Joseph story
when his brothers thought about ending his life,
but instead decided to throw him in a pit and then sell him
and the grief that that creates for Jacob.
Now,
as I mentioned yesterday,
the Bible lets us sort of live
with that cliffhanger a little bit.
The last thing we get told in chapter 37
is that he’s taken to Egypt and he works for an official,
a captain of the guard.
And now we have to kind of wait
in order to preserve that suspense a little bit,
the Bible inserts another story.
Part of that, I think, is to give us a break
and build the suspense.
I think part of that is also that once we get
to the next cycle of Joseph’s stories,
it’s a little bit harder to get a breath in.
And so this is the place.
We get the story of Judah and Tamar,
not an uplifting kind of story, a strange story,
but in some ways a unique
or at least an unusual story.
There are not a ton of stories
about strong women working the system.
We’ve seen that from Jacob.
We’ve seen that in some of the Genesis stories,
but those have always been men.
And here we have a woman who sort of grabs her own destiny
and moves forward in a very maybe troubling way,
but it is an interesting story.
So remember, Judah is one of the older children of Jacob.
And we won’t read all of this,
but I’ll read enough of it
to get into the story here, chapter 38.
It happened at that time Judah went down from his brothers.
He settled near a certain place.
Verse two,
Judah saw the daughter of a certain Canaanite
whose name was Shua.
He married her.
She conceived and bore a son and he named him Ur.
Again, she conceived and bore a son who she named Onan.
Again, she named,
bore a son and named him Sheila.
She was in Chesbib when she bore him.
Doesn’t matter, that doesn’t matter.
So verse six,
Judah took a wife for Ur, his firstborn,
and her name was Tamar.
But Ur,
Judah’s firstborn was wicked
in the sight of the Lord and the Lord put him to death.
Then Judah said to Onan,
go to your brother’s wife
and perform the duty of a brother-in-law.
Raise up her offspring for your brother.
But since Onan knew that the offspring would not be his,
he spilled his semen on the ground whenever he was with her
so that he would not give offspring to his brother.
What he did was displeasing in the sight of the Lord
and the Lord put him to death.
Then Judah said to his daughter Tamar,
remain a widow in your father’s house
until my son Sheila grows.
But he feared that he too would die like his brothers.
So Tamar went to live in her father’s house.
So a very strange story for a lot of reasons.
One of which is that there is this custom in ancient Israel
that when an older brother or a brother dies, a husband dies,
the wife essentially becomes the care
and property of the family.
And so having not produced children as the older son
as he is deceased,
then it becomes the job.
She essentially becomes the younger brother’s concubine
and it becomes his task then to produce children
for his family in his brother’s name.
This seems very odd to us.
It was a way to protect women of sorts.
That way, since they had very little options in the world
and having been married once,
they may not be likely to be married again.
This kept them within a family
and kept oversight of them within that family.
As strange as that is,
I think what is most interesting
about this text, Michael, is that I think this is really the first time
we’ve seen God’s justice delivered instantly.
So we get no real commentary on this
other than he was wicked.
And unlike some of the chapters we’ve seen
where God sort of stands by watching and observing,
here God interacts very explicitly and puts him to death.
Yeah, so there’s a lot of strange details here
as you’ve already mentioned here,
Clint.
Just a couple more to point out.
Notice that
Judah is marrying a Canaanite
and that is not in this text given any negative connotation,
though we see the Canaanites listed as being a negative thing
over and over and over again in the Old Testament.
That is not here,
so we shouldn’t put it in there.
The text is not making some sort of moral judgment
about there being marriages to foreign women here.
What we do see,
and to your point here,
this odd thing that happens where these people
are determined explicitly in the text,
these sons are determined to be evil.
It just says outright,
they were evil.
Doesn’t say why they were evil.
There’s no accounting for what they did.
There’s some action that made them that way.
I can’t think of another character
that we’ve just been told explicitly in those terms
was evil,
and then to take it to the next step
where it just says they received the capital punishment
that God put them to death for that action.
I mean, it’s almost perfunctory.
It’s so simple and it’s just laid out in the narrative.
So this is strange.
We’ve not seen absolutely anything like this
because we don’t have the sense
that there’s some form of judgment
for that original choice to marry a Canaanite woman.
We don’t really have a sense that these sons
have done something in particular to get on the wrong side,
that they just were told were evil.
What that does, Clint, is set up the story
and interestingly sets up the woman character of this story
to really play a pivotal role as the story goes on.
The men in some ways just right at the front end
sort of get placed in positions or roles
and the story’s going to carry forward the choices,
the very few choices that remain ahead
as the story proceeds.
Right, and the feminist,
take on this story I think is helpful in reminding us that
this woman, Tamar, has very few options.
She doesn’t have a path that,
she’s property.
She’s handed to the next brother.
It’s assumed that she has to be okay with that.
They clearly sort of live as husband and wife
and yet the younger brother does what he can
not to get her pregnant.
And I want to point out explicitly that his motivation is
that he does not want,
he knew that the offspring would not be his.
So he doesn’t want his brother,
he sort of doesn’t want to participate in this.
Whether this is tension between the brothers,
whatever this is,
it’s not relationship with her, that’s happening.
But he is avoiding the duty that he has to get her pregnant
and he’s doing so evidently because he doesn’t want
to fulfill his brother’s calling.
He’s having sex with her
but he’s not,
he’s trying to prevent the thing
that he is supposed to be doing.
And so it’s a very strange story.
And we probably have to mention here,
Michael, this story has
had a weird history in the church.
This story has been used in conversations about fornication
and masturbation and it’s not about any of those things.
It’s about a man breaking the law of God
by not fulfilling his duty to his family.
It’s,
you just have to be,
when you take this story in those kinds of turns,
you are, I think you’re leaving the path.
So I think that’s a helpful word.
We need to remember our context here
that we’ve been in Genesis this whole time.
The idea of the heir or the next generation coming
has always been framed.
Person and generation time and time again,
it’s been framed from the lens of passing the baton
to the next person who will receive the blessing of God,
who will experience God’s faithfulness.
What is happening here is we have
a covenantal family relationship
where promises has been made,
where there’s real expectations
for what the next step should and needs to be.
And we see successively first the unwillingness
of the brother to meet that next familial expectation
to keep this generation from one to the next going.
But then we’re going to see that in fear,
so this is the same with Judah himself,
that he fearing for his youngest son’s life,
sort of does not sort of,
he does deceive this woman
and says to her,
when the son is old enough,
then Tamar, then you’re going to have this promise made, this promise fulfilled.
And it seems,
I mean, at least the text leaves open,
it seems that Judah did not ever plan
on that actually following through.
He intended for her to go to live in her own father’s house
and to sort of let her life just sort of go into a dead end.
And that is unto itself,
sort of the next level of,
you know, really the breaking of the system,
the breaking of the code of what should happen
is not happening at all of these different layers of the story.
Yeah, and we tend to emotionalize children
and rightly so, but keep in mind that for a woman
in this day and age,
children are a future,
they’re income producers,
they can secure for her a home, a place,
I mean, a widow without children
is a very, very vulnerable position in ancient Israel.
And so anyway,
Judah does put her off,
his wife dies,
she hears,
Tamar hears that he is traveling,
and so she dresses up,
she puts on a veil.
And I’m in about verse 15 here,
as he travels,
when Judah saw her,
he thought her to be a prostitute
for her face was covered.
He went to her on the roadside and said,
“Let me come to you,” for he did not know
that it was his daughter-in-law.
She said, “What will you give me?”
He answered, “I will send you a kid from my flock.”
And she said, “Only if you give me a pledge until then.”
He said, “What could I give you?”
And she said, “Your signet and your cord
and the staff in your hand.”
So he gave them to her and went to her,
and she conceived by him.
Then she got up and went away and taking off her veil,
she put on the garments of widowhood.
So Tamar makes it a point to know where Judah’s going to be.
She disguises herself.
She sits on the steps of what is known to be a place
where prostitutes would be.
He sees her with a veiled face,
which is some indication to him
that she may be a prostitute.
They strike a bargain,
and he is with her.
And again,
very interesting that this is a story
told in Genesis with no moral insight,
no,
that was a good thing,
that was a bad thing.
No, she’s not commended for this.
She’s not
condemned for this.
It’s simply the story that the Bible is telling us.
Yeah, this is narrative.
This is telling us this is how it goes.
What you might miss for a story like this,
if you do bring some of those moral judgments
right from the start,
you might miss how much agency
she’s taking in this.
She has had her agency stripped away,
step by step by step,
by those who should have been taking action on her behalf,
not taking it.
So now here she takes whatever small
strand of agency she has left, and she takes it,
and in doing so,
this is the amazing deceptive turn of the story,
because we’ve had this theme of deception, particularly within
families all throughout Genesis.
Here it comes again.
She deceives her father-in-law into laying with her,
and in doing so,
conceives by him, therefore him fulfilling the commitment
that he was directly not taking
by this deception he had leveled against her.
So she has,
through this very strange turn in the story,
righted a wrong that he had committed
by taking this action,
which most of us wouldn’t consider
an action of positive force,
she successfully takes and moves forward
in what the text almost shows us
to be a constructive way forward.
She has established the lineage or the air
of Judah’s family, and she’s done so through this deception.
Right, and so as the plot unfolds here,
Judah sends his servant back with a goat, with a kid,
and says, “Go find her, give this to her,
“get my stuff back.”
He goes to do that,
and he can’t find her.
And he says, “There’s nobody there.” And Judah replies,
“Let her keep what she has,
“otherwise we will be laughed at.
“I sent the kid and you could not find her.” Now,
that is not the end of the story.
Verse 24,
about three months later,
Judah was told, “Your daughter-in-law Tamar
“has played the whore.” Literally true,
but he doesn’t know that yet.
This is sort of almost the Bible’s version
of maybe a little bit of a dark humor here.
Your daughter Tamar, daughter-in-law Tamar
has played the whore.
Moreover, she is pregnant as a result.
And Judah said,
“Bring her out and let her be burned.”
As she was being brought,
she sent word to her father-in-law.
It was the owner of these things that made me pregnant.
And she said, “Take note, please, whose they are,
“the signet,
the cord,
and the staff.”
Then Jacob acknowledged them and said,
“She is more in the right than I,
“since I did not give to her my son,
Shayla.” And he did not lie with her again.
So,
she ends up being pregnant.
They find out Judah is outraged.
Perhaps he also sees an end to his dilemma,
a way out for his son.
He says, “Put her to death,”
which is standard practice for that,
or at least that was the expectation.
And she says, “Well,
just so you know,
“this is the father,
and it’s his stuff.”
So, she springs the trap on him.
He’s backed into the corner.
He now knows what she’s done.
He probably could have still followed through with it.
It’s not exactly a threat.
It’s more like a reminder to do the right thing,
but to Judah’s credit,
she is more in the right than I am.
He acknowledges his wrongdoing.
Oddly enough, God doesn’t seem to strike him dead anything.
He remains in the covenant and remains in the tribes
of Israel, but she
has outmaneuvered him.
And again,
there aren’t many places
where Scripture celebrates a female doing that.
Or if celebrate is a strong word
where Scripture even tells a story of that happening,
there are a few,
but this is one of a rare collection of those.
Yeah, I think what’s interesting about this story,
Clint, is that we find a woman who is making a way
in a very difficult circumstance,
which I would argue we’ve seen Genesis characters
doing over and over again,
particularly in the Jacob generations
and everything that follows.
What we find here particularly
is a woman finding a way
where so many of the women thus far
have really just sort of been pushed
and pulled by the forces that were.
Here,
Tamar not only stands up to the injustice,
she finds a way,
but when she pulls out the signant staff at the end,
you have what is in the case of Genesis,
the gotcha moment.
This is the best of narrative here
because we can imagine that moment
where Judah has this sense that he’s performing justice
by having her meet her end because of this action.
And on the way to do it,
she proves that he is the father.
This is the text way of inverting all of our expectations,
showing us that she has indeed deceived the deceiver
and reminds us that God has through
the deception of the deceiver,
somehow yet continued to work.
It’s remarkable how cleaned up the version of Genesis
is in our children’s Bibles.
If you’ve ever read children’s Bibles,
lots of these stories aren’t included
and it’s because they’re difficult stories obviously
and I’m not arguing that they should be included,
but it is to say as adults,
we can begin to see that the Bible,
particularly Genesis is not afraid of our messy lives.
It’s not afraid of the struggles that we have.
It’s aware that people make choices
and sometimes those choices are at the expense
of their own interests or expense of those who love them.
Somehow God is still at work in it
and what I think is striking about this story
is we’re gonna have many stories of women
who perform actions, not the same as this,
but the women who find themselves in this circumstance
and they are not nearly as in power
as Tamara is in this story.
She’s able to invert the order
and to assert a thing that should have been done,
that the thing that would have been legal and just,
she gets through these means
and Genesis doesn’t say that’s a good thing,
but simultaneously it doesn’t call her out
and it certainly doesn’t lead to the end
that Judah had intended.
So it’s a fascinating turn for a story in Genesis
and especially fascinating, last word,
especially fascinating bookend between these Joseph stories.
I mean, this comes out of left field
and here it is plopped in Genesis
and we try to process it.
We’ve told you that Middle Eastern literature
has a kind of soft spot for shrewdness.
Maybe the character of trickster would be too far,
but the closest thing I think we’ve seen to this is Jacob.
And so for a story told about a female
to mirror in some way the stories told
about the patriarch of Israel is interesting
and it is empowering.
And just as a final note here,
the importance of this story is not yet known.
So let me finish it here.
When the time came for her delivery,
there were twins in her womb.
While she was in labor,
one put out a hand
and the midwife bound on his hand a crimson thread
saying this one was first.
But just then he drew back his hand
and out came his brother.
And she said, “What a breach you’ve made for yourself.” Therefore,
he was named Perez.
Afterward,
his brother came out
with the crimson thread on his hand
and he was named Zara.
Now,
you would have to be a little bit
of a Bible student to know this,
but Perez,
as it turns out,
through Judah is in the lineage of David.
And then therefore in the lineage of Christ.
So this very messy story gives way to characters
that in later story are accounted in the genealogy
of both the great King of Israel and ultimately the Messiah.
And the fact that that story has this origin
is really interesting,
that it is celebrated.
Probably why it is told.
Probably why it is at some level remembered and maybe celebrated.
Because of this woman’s courage,
her shrewdness,
her desperation, whatever combination of things
led her to do what she did,
we get a character who produces the lineage
of both King David and Jesus Christ.
And so very, very interesting finish.
It’s hard to put this story in a box,
Clint.
I mean, it is not in a template of a story
that we’ve seen throughout the story thus far.
And in some ways,
I think you would say
that this is an aside that will later become meaningful
as the larger story of Israel goes on.
So it’s important that it’s in Genesis.
What maybe makes it unique is the fact
that this story is not particularly relevant
to either the story that preceded it nor follows it.
It’s here
and it will serve larger functions
down the road being in these genealogies.
But what we see in this story is very much inherently built
into the story itself.
You have what you have here.
And that is maybe what makes these characters
particularly interesting.
And I do think to your point,
in Genesis, there’s probably not a character who’s received
as much feminist scholarship as this particular character has.
So we engage in this story,
we see what’s in it,
we recognize that the text doesn’t moralize it,
and so nor do we.
We just seek to learn and see how God works
even through the actions of those who otherwise
have no other power when they find ways to take power
and God makes something of it.
Yeah, interesting characters all the way around,
a lot to think about in that text.
That will bring us back to the Joseph stories next week.
We will cover a lot of ground with Joseph,
some very fascinating ground.
Hope you can be with us.
Thank you for your time today,
and we hope to see you again.