A Long and Not-So-Fun Road to Transformation

I’m going to tell this story a little differently. I’m going to begin at the end, or near the end, of a very, very well-known Bible story, and then go back to the obscure one I want to tell.

I’m going to start with a scene of eleven frightened men in front of a powerful ruler who held their lives in his hands. What none of them knew yet was that the ruler was none other than their brother, Joseph, whom ten of them had sold into slavery some twenty-three years before. Joseph, before allowing his brothers to know it was him, felt the need to sound them out, to see what they had become in the past twenty-three years, to see if they were the same men who had sold him into slavery.
Joseph knew very well why he had been sold. Sure, they were annoyed with him for having dreams that prophesied greatness for himself, but that wasn’t what made his brothers consider killing him before Judah came up with the bright idea of selling him as a slave. What got him sold was his father’s decision to give him, the eleventh son, the birthright. The fact that Reuben didn’t deserve it didn’t bother the brothers. Reuben had had an affair with Bilhah, Rachel’s servant she had given to Jacob and by whom Jacob had had two of his sons. Jacob had declared that that meant that Reuben would not get the firstborn rights, they would go to the firstborn of Rachel. The brothers may have believed that Reuben’s dalliance with Bilhah only gave Jacob the excuse he wanted to give Joseph this preference.

The brothers were probably nearly as angry with their father as they were with Joseph—angry enough to get rid of the object of their father’s affection, whom they believed had cost them the affection they should have received from him, and their inheritance.

Joseph didn’t know that his brothers had told Jacob that he was dead. He didn’t know what they had told Jacob. But he did know his father. He knew that his disappearance after his father had sent him to check on his brothers was not going to get his brothers what they wanted. Jacob would transfer his affection to Benjamin. Benjamin, and not Reuben or anybody else, would get the next coat of many colors. Would the brothers try again? Would they as gladly be rid of Benjamin as they had been to be rid of him? Joseph used his position of power to find out.

First, he manipulated the circumstances so that his brothers would be forced to bring Benjamin with them the next time they came, and locked Simeon in prison to ensure that there would be a next time. It almost didn’t work. Jacob viewed Simeon as dead—perhaps suspected that he was—and refused to expose Benjamin to the danger of sending him on a long journey with his treacherous brothers. But eventually hunger drove Jacob to relent, and Joseph literally framed Benjamin for what appeared to be an inexcusably stupid theft, and announced that he was going to make him a slave for it. If the brothers were the same men he had known twenty-three years earlier, they would have said, “Fine, good riddance. Rachel is dead and had no other children. Now we’ll get our inheritance!”

But that wasn’t what happened. Instead, Judah stood up and explained the family situation, and why their father needed Benjamin so badly. Then he added, “Take me instead, and make me your slave in Benjamin’s place. I would far rather that than to have to see what this would do to my father.” As far as Judah knew, Benjamin was guilty of the theft of which he had been accused, and as far as he knew, his offer would be accepted and he would be a slave for the rest of his life.

Judah’s courageous speech was pivotal. It made Joseph cry. My Old Testament Survey professor in college said that Judah was, at that moment, a “type of Christ.” He meant that Judah’s action was representative of, and similar to, Jesus taking our punishment on Himself when he went to the cross. Of course it was significant that it was Judah, and not any of the other brothers, who made this appeal, since Judah was the one of the brothers who was the far-off ancestor of Christ.

But what had happened in the past twenty-three years that changed Judah from the man who said, “Come, let’s sell him to the Ishmaelites...(Genesis 37:27)” into the man who said, “Now, then, please let your servant [me] remain here as my lord’s slave in place of the boy, and let the boy return with his brothers. How can I go back to my father if the boy is not with me? No! Do not let me see the misery that would come upon my father. Genesis 44:33-34)”?

That is what the story in this blog entry is about.

The commentaries I consulted were not in agreement about something that always puzzled me, though they were in agreement that it was a puzzle. Judah’s road to transformation seems to have taken longer than 23 years, but the next words after the story of Joseph’s sale, the words that introduce what happened to Judah, begin with “at that time, Judah left his brothers.” Some of the commentators said that “at that time” referred to the time of Jacob’s living in Canaan after his return, which would give enough time. Another said that Judah’s grandchildren who are mentioned in Genesis 46:12 as going with the family to Egypt weren’t really born yet, but were represented by their father, who actually had been born at this time, but was a child. That explanation would make it possible for “at that time” to refer to around the time that Joseph was sold into slavery. Two things favor this theory: This is what the sense of the English translation would imply, and Judah was present at the sale of Joseph. If he had left his brothers earlier, how would he have been with them? But I suppose he always could have come back for a visit, to help out with the sheepherding.

The commentaries that favor the first theory say that Judah left his brothers when he was only a teenager, one of them saying that he was only about 15 or 16 years old. I can picture that—a rebellious teenager running away from home. Interestingly enough, the places mentioned where he stayed were later places associated with the tribe formed from his descendants. Judah left his family and went to the place that would, in later generations, be his.

He stayed with his friend Hirah, from Adullam. Many, many years later Adullam would be a refuge for Judah’s second greatest descendant, David, when he fled for his life from a literally insanely jealous king. But now the refuge was not a good thing. Judah had taken refuge from his godly family with a Canaanite, who was anything but godly. Judah stayed with and around Hirah for many years, and Hirah did nothing but get him into trouble.

The first thing Scripture records as happening while Judah was staying with Hiram was that he met a girl, a Canaanite girl. One commentator suggested that Hirah introduced them. We don’t know her name, but we are given her father’s name, Shuah. One of the commentators speculated that Shuah may have been a person of prominence in the area, and that is why we’re given his name.

Do you remember that in earlier generations, the son who inherited the special promises of God was not supposed to marry a Canaanite, and pains were taken to prevent that from happening? Maybe Judah didn’t think he would be the one, though he was. Or maybe he didn’t believe in the promise. Or maybe he didn’t care. But somehow or another Judah married Shuah’s daughter. He may have only been sixteen at the time—a great contrast to his father’s marrying at the age of 84. One of the commentators pointed out, and I can’t help but agree, that there is no way in the world Jacob approved of this marriage. Perhaps it happened without his knowledge.

As time went on, Judah had three sons, Er, Onan, and Shelah. And these three sons grew, and finally Er, the oldest, reached an age where Judah thought it would be a good idea to marry him off. The commentators said that Er was probably at least as young as Judah had been when Judah had married. This would place Judah at around thirty-two or thirty-three years of age, but as will become clear, he still hadn’t grown up yet. He found a wife for Er named Tamar. Nothing is said about Tamar’s parentage, or even whether or not she was Canaanite. Given subsequent events, I kind of wonder, but there is nothing to indicate she was anything else.

Something about Er was not pleasing to God, and Er died young, probably very shortly after his marriage. The Bible is very clear that Er’s death was because of his own wickedness, but it doesn’t say exactly what Er did. Whether or not people choose to believe it, God actually does have the right of life or death over us, and none of us are special enough to deserve life simply by virtue of being. We do not have the right of life or death over each other, but God does have that right over us. And since all of us have rebelled against him, we all deserve what Er got. It is because of God’s mercy that any of us receive grace.

At that time there was a custom that later became a law in Israel, a very unusual thing that was done in the case of a childless widow still young enough to bear children. At first glance when looked at through the eyes of our culture, it sounds horrible. But times were different then, and a childless widow was desolate. Men preferred to marry virgins over widows, and an unmarried woman did not have any means of support. At the same time, inheritance and property rights were extremely important to the men. So if a married man died childless, his brother was supposed to marry the widow. Their first son would be, for legal purposes related to inheritance, considered the son of the dead man.
Judah followed this custom, and told Onan to marry his brother’s widow. Judah, who had participated in the riddance of a rival to his own inheritance, then witnessed a horrible thing occur.

Onan may have reasoned that if Er had no child, then he would get Er’s double inheritance as the firstborn. But if Er did have a child, as he legally would if Onan fathered a child by Er’s wife, then that child would get the inheritance. This is speculation on my part—none of the commentaries said this. But this makes sense to me and really makes the story cohesive. Judah had acted without concern for his relatives to try to get an inheritance for himself—he might have thought that since Reuben’s bad behavior had cost him his rights as firstborn, those rights should have passed to Simeon. And since Simeon and Levi—the second and third born—had become mass murderers, then he, Judah, the fourth born, should have gotten the firstborn rights instead of Joseph. If he did think that, he might actually have been right.
Onan married Tamar, but he decided that he was not going to let her have a child, and practiced birth control as far as it was known at the time. And he died, too, struck down by God just like his brother had been. This time, we are told why: his refusal to allow Tamar to become pregnant. Whether or not this is an indictment against birth control or the method he used for it, it is certainly an indictment against his motives for doing it. God had said that He was going to make Abraham’s descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky or the grains of sand on the beach, and they were anything but there yet.

I don’t think Judah ever fully recovered. I think he began to see what he had done to his own father, now that he knew how it felt to lose a child—twice.
He told Tamar to go home to her father’s house and live there as a widow until his youngest son, Shelah, was grown up enough to marry her. But that wasn’t what he wanted to say; he only said it because custom dictated that he should. Either he had no intention of following through with it, or he put it off through extreme reluctance. He wasn’t sure why Er and Onan had died, but he thought maybe Tamar had had something to do with it. And Judah was not about to lose another son, his last one.

Judah then experienced another loss: his wife died. No mention is made of why or how she died, but she couldn’t have been old. Judah was not yet old. The Bible says later that his grief over her reached a resolution and he was able to go on with life. But it never says any such thing about his loss of his two older sons.
Tamar did as she was told, but having a baby was too important to the women of that time and place, and Tamar was no exception. And as time went by, she began to realize that Judah wasn’t going to keep his end of the bargain. No mention of a wedding between Shelah and herself was forthcoming.

Then one day she found out that Judah was going to a place called Timnah for a sheep shearing. Sheep shearings often became parties, and Tamar decided that she was going to enter into the festivities, and hopefully get things going her way. She put on a veil and went dressed as a shrine prostitute.

One commentator suggested that she may have hoped that Shelah would be there. If Shelah slept with her, then Judah would have to keep his word. If this was what she was hoping, things didn’t quite work out that way. Judah went with Hirah (remember him?), not Shelah. But something did happen, and, if her goal was to seduce Shelah in hopes of getting him as a husband and/or actually becoming pregnant, she got a little more than she bargained for.

I think Tamar didn’t let anyone see her until Judah was looking. She was doing a dangerous thing, acting like she was a prostitute. If there were a lot of men there, any one of them might have decided on a little, um, entertainment. But this didn’t happen. The Bible says she sat down at a certain place on the road to Timnah. But somehow she didn’t get, or take, any other “customers,” and later other men denied there had ever been a prostitute there. I think she watched the road and only showed herself when she saw Judah.

But Shelah wasn’t with him, after all. It was only Judah and his friend Hirah. And here Judah became very guilty of two very horrible sins that he knew he was committing—never mind the part that he didn’t know. He decided he wanted to use a prostitute, and he decided he wanted to use a shrine prostitute. That meant he was going to a prostitute who did what she did in service to an idol. Judah was committing both fornication and idolatry.

Tamar contracted with Judah for a young goat as payment for her favors, but then asked for a pledge. “What would you like for a pledge?” Judah asked her, ready to give her anything.

“Your seal, it’s cord, and your staff.” His seal was a signet ring, and his staff was probably marked somehow to show it was his. It was as though she were asking him for his driver’s license and social security card. But, Judah thought, he would get it all back as soon as he paid the goat.

They committed their sin, but she must have kept her veil on, or else it was dark. Judah had no idea what he had just done.

Later, Judah tried to keep his end of the bargain, not, of course, that he would let anyone see him paying a prostitute. He sent Hirah with the goat. Hirah saw no sign of a prostitute, and when he asked around, he was told there wasn’t one. Tamar had gone home and put on her widow’s clothes again, and acted as though nothing had happened.

Three months later, Judah got word that his daughter-in-law had engaged in prostitution and had become pregnant. His response: “Bring her out and burn her!”
She came with those who were arresting her, but she also got a message to Judah, along with a certain seal, cord, and staff. “The father of my baby owns these things.”

Oops.

Well, Tamar didn’t get burned. She had twins, but the birth was difficult. At first, a little hand came out, and the midwife, knowing Tamar was about to have twins, tied a red string around the baby’s wrist so they could remember which one was the firstborn. The baby pulled his hand back. Somehow or other the other baby got around his twin and came first, so he was named for this feat: Perez, meaning “breaking out.” Perez, four generations down from Abraham, was the next ancestor of Christ.
It was Perez, not Shelah, who was said to have had two sons when the family went to Egypt, one of whom was Hezron, who was the next ancestor of Christ. This is what makes it hard to think that all this could have happened in twenty-three years. This was what made one commentator say that it was like what it says about Levi in Hebrews, that he “was in the body of his ancestor” when Abraham paid tithes to Melchizedec, so it was as though he himself had paid the tithes. In the same way, Hezron was “in the body of his father” when he went to Egypt, mentioned because of who he was. But the verse also mentions another son, Hamul, so I don’t know. Besides, when this was written, Jesus hadn’t been born yet. Most people believe Moses wrote Genesis. How would Moses have known that Perez’ children were so important? This was even before David’s time, who also descended from Perez. I suppose God could have revealed it. The whole Bible is inspired of God, so that could have happened. I’m not quite sure how the time line works out. Maybe, as my mother used to say, that’s one of the questions we can ask God when we get to heaven.

Judah lost his two eldest sons, and then had twin sons by his daughter-in-law. He was brought through great loss, and then shame, and, I’m guessing, repentance, to become the man who went from self-seeking and jealous to noble and selfless and Christ-like. I look at my own life and see how far I have still to go to be Christ-like. I think, though, that it may be reasonable to think that this may cost me something. It may cost me a lot. Just ask Judah.