The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be.
Binding his foal unto the vine, and his ass’s colt unto the choice vine; he washed his garments in wine, and his clothes in the blood of grapes.
His eyes shall be red with wine, and his teeth white with milk.
GENESIS 49:8–12
In the end, Judah came out pretty well. His name was even given to Jesus—the “lion of Judah.” But before that he proved himself to be as complex and flawed as all the major scriptural characters.
Judah, for pragmatic reasons, stopped his brothers from killing Joseph, but was perfectly willing to sell him into Egypt. Joseph, betrayed by his brothers, by his own flesh and blood—Joseph, the spoiled, pampered boy, moved from being a boy to a man on the journey down to Egypt—what “culture shock” for the young Hebrew! The Egyptians were dark of skin, they were not nomads, and they spoke an unfamiliar language.
The Ishmaelites sold Joseph to Potiphar, who was an officer of the ruling Pharaoh of Egypt, and captain of the guard. He was an important man who would be careful of what—or who—he bought. But Joseph, sold and then resold, must have felt like a mere marketplace commodity, sold as casually as an animal is sold. This dehumanization has been the fate of slaves throughout the centuries.
About that time, Scripture says, Judah left his brothers and went south and pitched his tent in company with an Adullamite named Hirah. There he saw Bathshua the daughter of a Canaanite and married her.
And now follows a story which, like the story of Dinah, many people have found convenient to forget because it reminds us of our human fallibility. But because it is there, part of Scripture, we are unwise to ignore it, troublesome though it may be.
Judah, Leah’s fourth son, is to become important in Hebrew history. When Jacob blesses his sons it is Judah whom he appoints as ruler and progenitor of a royal line rather than the firstborn son, Reuben. In the New Testament in the seventh chapter of Hebrews, the fourteenth verse reads:
For it is evident that our Lord sprang out of Judah.
In the Psalm 78 we read,
He rejected the tent of Joseph and did not choose the tribe of Ephraim. He chose instead the tribe of Judah, and Mount Zion, which he loved.
And in the seventh chapter of John’s Revelation we read,
From all the tribes of Israel there were a hundred and forty-four thousand: twelve thousand from the tribe of Judah,
the tribe of Judah being the first mentioned. And Judaism is known as the religion of the Jewish people who, according to my research, believe in one eternal, asexual, caring God.
Why Judah and not Reuben, the firstborn? Was it only because Reuben had broken the ancient taboo that he lost his place as head of the family, the firstborn? What was so special about Judah?
The first story about Judah is a strange one for a man who is to become as important as this fourth son of Jacob.
Judah married Shuah, as she was called, and went in to her. So she conceived and bore a son, and called his name Er. She conceived again and bore a son, and she called his name Onan. And she conceived again and bore a son, and called his name Shelah.
Judah, according to the custom, took a wife for his first son, Er, a young woman called Tamar. And then what happens?
Er, Judah’s firstborn, was wicked in the sight of the Lord, and the Lord slew him.
Despite the bloody god Dinah’s brothers had shown her, the true God of Scripture never killed casually, or without reason. What do you suppose Er did that was so terrible that the Maker of the Universe had to wipe him out? We are not told. Nor are we told whether or not Tamar loved her husband, Er.
In scriptural times it was the custom that when a man died, childless, the brother should then marry the widow and have children by her for his dead brother. This was the custom (known as “levirate marriage”) that was referred to when the Sadducees were trying to trap Jesus, and he was asked about the man who had died without issue, and whose six brothers, one after the other, had married the widow, and all died without issue. Who, in heaven, asked the Sadducees, would her husband be?
They were missing the point, Jesus said. For the Sadducees did not believe in the Resurrection at the coming of the Messiah, as did the Pharisees, and as did Martha of Bethany when she said of her dead brother,
“I know that he shall rise again at the resurrection at the last day.”
So, when Er died, Judah told his second son, Onan, to marry Tamar and beget children for his brother. But Onan knew that the children would not really belong to him, and he was jealous that his seed would belong to his dead brother, so when he went in to Tamar he spilled his seed on the ground,
lest he should give seed to his brother.
And the Lord considered this a travesty of marriage, and destroyed Onan as well as Er. At least we know why Onan displeased the Lord—onanism, it is called—“the spilling of the seed.” The names of many sexual deviations (“sodomy” is another) come from someone or someplace in Scripture, though sometimes the words have changed their meanings through history. But the seed, as it were, arose in the Old Testament.
Judah told Tamar to return to her father’s house and to remain a widow there until Shelah, his youngest son, was an adult old enough to marry her. So Tamar did as Judah bade her and went to her father’s house to wait for Shelah to be grown. And waited. And waited.
Time passed, and Judah’s wife died, and after he had finished mourning Judah went up with his friend Hirah to check on his sheepshearers. And Tamar was told,
“Your father-in-law is going to Timnath to shear his sheep.”
Although Shelah was grown, Judah had not given him Tamar to be his wife. Was it that he was afraid that God was going to kill anyone who married Tamar?
But Tamar knew that the time was overdue for Shelah to marry her. She took off her widow’s clothes, put on a veil to cover her face and, according to some translations, perfumed herself and dressed like a prostitute, then sat at a fork in the road on the way to Timnath. Some of the prostitutes at that time and place were temple prostitutes, an integral part of local fertility cults. In any case, Judah saw Tamar, took her for a harlot, and asked her to lie with him, having, of course, no idea that she was his daughter-in-law. And she asked him what he would pay her for her services. He told her,
“I’ll give you a kid from my flock.”
“Will you give me a pledge until you send me the kid?” she requested.
“What pledge shall I give you?” he asked.
And she asked him for his signet ring, and his bracelets, and the staff that was in his hand.
When he had given them to her he lay with her, and she conceived by him.
Harlotry. The oldest profession. Prostitutes, while accepted, were considered an underclass, because they took money for what should be given for love. However, when Dinah’s brothers complained that Dinah had been treated as a harlot by Shechem, they were talking about a violation of the proprieties, not about selling their sister’s body.
Judah hadn’t kept his promise to Tamar when Shelah was grown. Therefore, to Tamar, anything she did to get children for Er was justified.
There is a lot to be wondered about here. Had Tamar loved Er so deeply, that she was willing to go to such lengths to get children for him? Did she feel that Er had been stricken down unjustly? Was she angry at God as well as Judah? Not much is told us in these early Scriptures about the feelings of the women. I wonder if Tamar and Dinah ever met and talked about the men they loved, both cut down young and seemingly without good reason.
In those days an unmarried or childless woman was stigmatized. Shelah would have been remedy for both of these problems. So Tamar went away and put back on her widow’s clothes.
Judah kept his promise and sent a kid by his friend, Hirah, who had gone with him to the sheep shearing. But Hirah’s search was fruitless. He asked,
“Where is t
he prostitute who sat here?”
And he was told,
“There was no prostitute in this place.”
And so he had to tell Judah that he had not found the prostitute.
About three months later Judah was told,
“Your daughter-in-law Tamar has played the harlot, and she is pregnant.”
Judah, adhering to the law, asked that Tamar be brought to him and be punished by being burned to death.
But when she was brought to her father-in-law she said,
“The father of my child is the one whose ring and bracelets and staff these are.”
When he saw them, Judah recognized what she showed him, acknowledged them, and admitted,
“She is more in the right than I am, because I did not give Shelah, my son, to her.”
The primitive thinking of a primitive people, perhaps. But it does show that Judah was willing to admit a fault.
And he did not sleep with her again, but as a result of their earlier liaison Tamar had twins in her womb.
As she was giving birth, one infant put out his hand, and the midwife tied a scarlet thread around it, saying, “This one came out first.”
But in fact it was the other baby who was the firstborn, so he was called Perez, which means breaking out; the other baby’s name was Zerah, which means redness, because of the scarlet cord, or, according to another source it can mean east, or brightness. Was Perez the first breech birth? From him came the Perezite branch of the tribe of Judah; David was a Perezite, and since Tamar is reckoned to be the ancestor of King David (as in the genealogy in 1 Chronicles and in the story of Ruth, as well as in the genealogy at the beginning of Matthew), she is also considered to be the ancestor of Jesus.
What a strange story, interpolated between the selling of Joseph into Egypt, and his early years there. And yet there are no stories in Scripture that do not have a purpose, a proper place. The story of Judah and Tamar tells us something of the customs of the time when the twelve sons of Jacob lived, and something of Judah. Human, as all scriptural characters are human, he was also pragmatic. He was the one who felt that killing Joseph wouldn’t accomplish anything. He didn’t want blood on his hands, not from any particular compassion for the boy, but because it was not expedient. Better to sell Joseph and at least get some money from the transaction.
When Tamar was accused of harlotry, Judah immediately accepted the customary penalty; she was to be killed; burned, in those days; stoned, later on at the time that Mary was pregnant with Jesus. An odd contradiction, since prostitution was an accepted practice; you just avoided getting caught.
But when Judah discovered that he was the father of Tamar’s child, he immediately accepted the responsibility. Yes, he had been tempted by the beauty of the prostitute, and if she was pretending to be a temple prostitute, Tamar represented a religion which was disapproved of by the Hebrews and which they wanted to wipe out. Judah did not try to deny what he had done. Granted, the evidence was laid out before him, his ring and bracelets and staff, but he did not try to rationalize or excuse himself, but said immediately that he was more to blame than Tamar, because he had not given Shelah to her to be her husband.
The judgments of what we consider ordinary morality simply do not work when they are applied to the characters of Scripture. In A Mixture of Frailties Robertson Davies writes,
Moral judgments belong to God, and it is part of God’s mercy that we do not have to undertake that heavy part of his work, even when the judgment concerns ourselves.
And what happened to Tamar and Shelah? That we are not told. Did they eventually marry? Did she have a full life as woman, wife, mother?
And what, again, about Er? What about Tamar’s grief for the loss of a husband? How long had they been married before Er was struck down? Not very long, it would seem. Certainly nowhere near the forty years I was married to Hugh, so that my life with him has been far longer than my life before our marriage. But what a shocking grief for Tamar to have her husband wiped out by God!
Our God is a consuming fire, we read. God is like a refiner’s fire. Moses saw God in a burning bush, a bush which burned and yet was not consumed. We are to be refined in the fire like silver. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego walked through the flames. Jesus promised a baptism “with the Spirit and with fire.” The Spirit descended and descends in tongues of fire.
Satan has tried to take fire over as his own image, teasing, tormenting us with the idea of the flames of hell. Dante understood the wrongness of the metaphor; in his Inferno, the most terrible circle of fire is cold. The purifying fire comes not from Satan, but from God.
T. S. Eliot writes of the Holy Spirit,
The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror…
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
The purifying fire of God, or the deadly cold fire of Satan. Tamar, a woman of great courage, went through the fire of suffering. I wish we had been told more of her story.
But through Tamar the genealogy of David is traced, and then, Jesus.
And here is an interesting thing: Jesus’ genealogy is traced through his adoptive father, Joseph, who was of the tribe of David, emphasizing that to the Hebrew an adopted child is a real child and part of the bloodline.
The earlier Joseph, having been sold into Egypt, knew nothing of all this.
JUDAH
Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who hast not made me a woman.
Trouble. That’s all that women have brought us. Trouble. My mother was not loved by my father, though she gave him six sons. It was our Aunt Rachel he loved, and that brought trouble to us all. Rachel, so sure of herself and her beauty. So sure that she was loved. Is still loved, for she still troubles my father’s heart, so that he cannot see straight, not even as straight as my mother. He has eyes only for Joseph, who lords it over us all from his pedestal of favouritism.
Enough of Joseph. May we never again hear from Joseph. May we never again hear of Joseph.
My wife. She was my wife, but she brought me nothing but trouble. My sons, the children of my loins, are dead because of a woman. Tamar. Beautiful. Oh, yes, though while Shuah was alive she saw to it that I noticed nobody but Shuah. But Tamar was death to my sons. How could I give her Shelah, when she had killed Er and Onan?
And then she tricked me, dressing like a temple prostitute, serving alien gods—gods who are women, tricksters, with their moon playing tricks on our hearts, so that I fell for the tricksters’ wiles.
It is taboo to lie with your son’s wife, but because I was tricked into it God was not displeased with me, nor with these two new sons.
Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe. I do not understand your ways. I am only grateful that you accept me as I am, without tricks, and bless me with two young sons.
Dan shall judge his people, as one of the tribes of Israel.
Dan shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path, that biteth the horse heels, so that his rider shall fall backward.
GENESIS 49:16–17
We don’t know much about Dan, except that he was Jacob’s fifth son, Bilhah’s first child, and that he was the head of the tribe of Dan, one of the twelve tribes of Israel. He conspired with his brothers to sell Joseph into Egypt. Dan was blessed by his father, and blessed by Moses, and his children took in battle a place called Laish,
a people that were quiet and secure, and they smote them with the edge of the sword and burned the city with fire.
Once again land was simply taken from the people who lived there.
And they called the name of the city Dan, after Dan, their father.
Then, as we read on, in Judges, they set up a graven image (
though of what, we do not know), and in doing that, alas, they were not unusual.
In Joseph’s eyes Egypt must have been full of graven images, for the Pharaohs, with the exception of Ikhnaton, worshipped a pantheon of gods, and the temples were painted with their likenesses, and sphinxes and lions and elephants were carved to line the avenues of temples and palaces.
Not only were there strange gods in Egypt, but strange people, darker in colour than Joseph, and speaking a strange language. In their knowledge of astronomy, they were far more sophisticated than the nomadic Hebrews. And Joseph was sold to a man who lived in a palace, and not a tent. He was extraordinarily adaptable, Joseph, toughened by the rough trip into Egypt, where he was sold to Potiphar, who was in the service of the Pharaoh.
Joseph had the perceptiveness to look around him, to observe and contemplate all that he saw.
If we human beings are called to be observers and contemplators, this calling is given reality because it is God’s gift to us (as it was to Joseph), and this is what hallows it. It is nothing we can take pride in. At the end of this twentieth century since the birth of Jesus we cannot return to the old arrogance of considering ourselves to be the only focus of God’s interest. We are called to observe the wonders of creation, to contemplate them, and then to make an appropriate response.
Our understanding of the stars in their courses and our own little planet has changed and expanded enormously since Copernicus and Galileo and Newton and Einstein and Hawking. And it will go right on changing; we must rejoice in it, rather than turning our backs in fear. Perhaps on his long journey south, Joseph also learned to move without fear from one way of looking at creation to a far different way, to let his images move and expand with his knowledge. We must learn that same openness.
Sold into Egypt Page 7
