The book of Genesis is the book of beginnings. It recounts God’s inspired and authoritative record of the very good beginning of the heavens, earth, plants, creatures, Sabbath, and man as male and female; it also provides the miserable events of Satan’s temptation of Eve, then Adam, the fall, and curses on Satan, the ground, creatures, and our first parents and their seed. Derek Kidner observed, “The man and the woman have been sold a false idea of evil, as something beyond good; of wisdom, as sophistication; and now of greatness, as greed.” The glorious garden of Eden would no longer have Adam and Eve walking its paths in intimate fellowship with God because their sin resulted in the fall and ensuing eviction without reentry. What a situation! Was there any hope for Adam and Eve and those coming from them by ordinary generation who share guilt for the first sin?

Along with the curses resulting from the fall is God’s covenantal promise that one would come from the seed of the woman to bruise Satan’s head at the cost of his own bruised heel (Gen 3:15). This promise required a single line of successive generations beginning with Adam and Eve, then terminating with Jesus the Messiah, the Christ. Why do genealogies have such a significant part in the Old Testament? The central reason is that they show the succession of generations from the first parents to Christ, and they provide documentation for God’s fulfillment of his promise to Abraham that he would beget many nations and the sons of Jacob would inhabit the land of Canaan. The seed plot extends from the curse to the Christ, including a central but unexpected occurrence within the sequence associated with events surrounding Judah and his daughter-in-law Tamar, as recounted in Genesis 38.

But before considering the Judah–Tamar narrative, some insight from the chapter preceding Genesis 38 is required to provide context. It tells of Jacob’s son Joseph, whose dreams revealed he would come to rule over his brothers and father (Gen 37:5–8, 10–11). As we would expect, the family did not receive well the message of these dreams. There are few individuals who would savor being ruled by a child or a sibling. Even though Jacob loved Joseph more than any of his brothers and showed that love by giving him a fine robe with many colors (37:3), he found Joseph’s dreams offensive, as did the brothers, because it meant they would come to bow before him. The brothers were intensely jealous of Joseph and loathed him, so when Jacob sent Joseph to visit the brothers pasturing the sheep, they saw him coming from a distance and conspired to kill him (37:18–21).

But when the eldest brother Reuben heard their plan, he proposed that instead of killing Joseph, he should be thrown into a pit (37:22). Such an approach gave the brothers time to think about what their final solution should be regarding Joseph. Even though Reuben was the leader of his brothers, his position was in transition. In the past Reuben had sinned gravely by sleeping with his father’s concubine, Bilhah, and thus defiled his father’s bed (35:22), a sin for which he would lose his birthright when Jacob blessed him in Genesis 49:3–4. Nevertheless, Reuben was still the leader, so he guided the brothers to settle on a solution other than killing Joseph. But Reuben also had a plan known only to him. He hoped he could rescue Joseph from the pit and return him to his father (37:22). But Reuben’s plans would be frustrated.

The brothers sat down to eat and saw off in the distance an Ishmaelite caravan of camels burdened with fine goods to sell in Egypt (37:25). Judah spoke up, saying, “‘What profit is it if we kill our brother and conceal his blood? Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites, and let not our hand be upon him, for he is our brother, our own flesh.’ And his brothers listened to him” (37:26–27).

The final solution comes from Judah. Notice that he appeals to the brothers’ sense of family and their relationship to Joseph as half brothers, but he also points out that they were not going to “profit” from his death, so why not sell him to the Ishmaelites and effectively make him dead to Jacob? Nahum M. Sarna comments on verse 26 regarding Judah:

He now assumes leadership, a role he is later to take once again in the protection of Benjamin [43:8–10; 44:14–34]. The text leaves unclear whether Judah’s suggestion is a desperate compromise to save Joseph’s life, or whether his “What do we gain” is an expression of sordid hostility. At any rate, this narrative reflects the history of the Israelite tribes. Reuben’s authority is on the decline while Judah rises to prominence.

Notice here that the Hebrew word translated “profit” (בצע) is an unjust gain, plunder, or pillaging. Judah’s proposal would keep Joseph alive and enrich the brothers with twenty shekels of silver to divvy among themselves (Gen 37:28). Reuben was away during the sale of Joseph, so when he returned and saw that his brother was gone and heard about the transaction with the Ishmaelites, he was incensed as well as fearful of his father’s reaction (37:29–30). But Reuben had a plan that involved soaking Joseph’s cloak in goat’s blood and sending it to their father back home. Jacob would inevitably conclude that his beloved son Joseph had been attacked by a wild beast and killed. Jacob’s predictable response was anguish (37:31–35). Genesis 37 ends with the Ishmaelites selling Joseph in Egypt to Potiphar, the captain of Pharaoh’s guard (37:36). Judah’s part in the final solution to the Joseph problem shows his ascendency to lead the brothers as the ability of firstborn Reuben to lead diminishes.

The section of Genesis extending from chapters 37–50 has been called the Joseph story or narrative because it deals with events in his life. But the continuity of the narrative seems broken by chapter 38 because it says nothing concerning Joseph but instead deals with Judah. Regardless of what chapters 37–50 may be called as a literary unit, a question is how the context of chapter 38 informs its interpretation and position in Genesis. As has been seen, the point about Judah in chapter 37 is that he was an opportunist who used the Joseph problem to enhance his leadership position among the brothers at Reuben’s expense.

The significance of Judah for the seed leading to Christ is provided by Genesis 49, which is the account of Jacob blessing his sons as his death approached. Since Reuben was born to Leah as Jacob’s firstborn son, it is anticipated that he would receive the greatest blessing, but instead he was rebuked and then punished by having his position taken from him (49:3–4). Reuben was demoted because he had lain with Bilhah, his father’s concubine, and shamed his father. The next two sons in birth order were Simeon and Levi. It would be expected that they would move up the inheritance ladder from positions 2 and 3 to positions 1 and 2, but this would not be the case because they also sinned and shamed their father when their sister, Dinah, was raped by Shechem, the son of Hamor. Simeon and Levi responded with vengeance and slaughtered all the people of Shechem along with his father, Hamor (34:1–29). In punishment, Jacob redefined the duo’s inheritance of land—first, by distributing Simeon’s within Judah’s territory, and second, by distributing the tribe of Levi among all the tribes (34:30–31). Judah was promoted to the place of first heir because of the sins of the three sons sequentially ahead of him.

Additional insight into the character of Judah is given in Genesis 38, which narrates a remarkable, redemptive-historical incident of his life that preserved the seed of the woman. Judah betrayed his obligation to marry within the covenant people when he married a Canaanite woman who was the daughter of Shua (38:2). More than that, he put his family at risk because the marriage created a divided household with some allegiance to his wife’s family rather than having full allegiance to his own tribe of Israel. She first bore him a son named Er, then a son named Onan, followed by another son named Shelah. When Er matured he married a woman named Tamar. Er “was wicked in the sight of the Lord, and the Lord put him to death” (38:7). Er had not fathered a son by Tamar to carry on his name, so Judah told his son Onan to “perform the duty of a brother-in-law” (38:8) so she could have a son in Er’s name. In this era, to preserve a deceased man’s inheritance the brother-in-law was to have intercourse with his widowed sister-in-law so a son could hopefully be born. This practice called the levirate would become written law for the Jews in later years, as recorded in Deuteronomy 25:5–6:

If brothers dwell together, and one of them dies and has no son, the wife of the dead man shall not be married outside the family to a stranger. Her husband’s brother shall go in to her and take her as his wife and perform the duty of a husband’s brother to her. And the first son whom she bears shall succeed to the name of his dead brother, that his name may not be blotted out of Israel.

It was Onan’s duty to father a son with his widowed sister-in-law, Tamar. But what did he do? Genesis 38:9 suggests that he repeatedly had sex with her, satisfying his desire, but he also practicedcoitus interruptus to keep her from becoming pregnant. Sometimes when individuals today argue against the use of birth control they point to this passage and say Onan sinned by practicing birth control, but that was not the issue at all because he sinned by not fulfilling his levirate duty, enjoying the sex in itself, and denying the responsibility he had to his family. Onan knew that any son born to Tamar would have a share of Judah’s inheritance, which would then decrease the share for himself, so not inseminating his sister-in-law increased his future share of the estate. What happened to Onan for failing to provide a son for his deceased brother? Genesis 38:10 answers that question: “And what [he] did was wicked in the sight of the LORD
, and he put him to death also.”

How often are individuals put to death in Scripture for a single sin? Not often, but the accounts provided are fearful. Nadab and Abihu were executed for offering “unauthorized fire” to the Lord (Lev 10:1–2). Uzzah died for touching the ark of the covenant to steady it (2 Sam 6:6–7). Achan was stoned to death for stealing forbidden things when Jericho was defeated (Josh 7:10–26). A man gathering sticks on the Sabbath was killed for his trouble (Num 15:32–36). And Ananias and Saphira were struck dead for lying about a donation to the church (Acts 5:1–11). Within the first few verses of Genesis 38, first Er and then Onan were killed by the Lord for their evils. Judah had only one son left, Shelah. The trouble is Judah was not inclined to tell Shelah to fulfill his brother-in-law function out of fear that he too would die and because he needed his last son to be his heir. His reluctance is understandable, but his inaction was still wrong. Judah responded to this turn of events by telling Tamar to go to her father’s house and wait for Shelah to grow up so he could do the duty of a brother-in-law. Tamar did what she was told, continued to dress as a widow in mourning, then waited in hope of having a son by Shelah as Judah promised.

But what would happen next?

©Barry Waugh. All Rights Reserved.

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Post authored by:

• Barry Waugh

  

  Barry Waugh (PhD, WTS) is a member of a PCA congregation in South Carolina and has edited Presbyterians of the Past since 2015. He has also written for the Westminster Theological Journal and The Confessional Presbyterian; contributed to Gary L. W. Johnson’s, B. B. Warfield: Essays on His Life and Thought, 2007; and edited Letters from the Front: J. Gresham Machen’s Correspondence from World War I, 2012.

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