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BIBLE
STUDY LESSON
For
the week beginning Sunday March 3, 2019
JUDAH AND
TAMAR
Genesis 38
After Joseph’s older brothers indirectly sold him into “chattel slavery”
in Egypt, Judah, the son of Jacob and Leah, left home and moved to Adullam,
about 15 miles northwest of Hebron. There he met and married a Canaanite woman,
who was the daughter of a man named Shua. She became pregnant and bore him a
son, whom Judah named Er. She then became pregnant again and had another son,
and this time, she named him, she called him Onan. And when she became pregnant
a third time, she again named her son, calling him Shelah (Judah didn’t even
bother to name his sons, born after Er).
By the time Shelah was born, Judah had
already moved his family to Chezib (also called “Achzib”, which means “false”).
At that time, Achzib was a Canaanite city in the lowlands of the territory that
would later be allotted, by Joshua, to his brother, Asher’s tribe (Joshua
19:29). However, the tribe of Asher would fail in their attempt to drive out
the Canaanites from that immediate area, and from several other cities that
were allotted to them by Joshua (Judges 1:31).
When Judah’s oldest son, Er, grew up, Judah
arranged his marriage to a young woman named Tamar. However, because of Er’s
wickedness before the LORD, his life was taken away at an early age, before he
fathered any children (Vs.6-7). And so Judah tried to invoke “Levirate Law”
upon Er’s younger brother, Onan, his second son, but Onan refused to accept the
responsibility of giving his brother an heir, even though he did marry Tamar to
take advantage of the situation for sexual gratification only. In fact, whenever
he had sexual intercourse with Tamar he would withdraw himself from her just
before he climaxed, and let his semen spew on the ground to keep from
impregnating her. His actions angered the LORD, and because of his steadfast
refusal to give his brother an heir, the LORD took his life also (Vs.8-10).
To explain this judgment from GOD, upon
Onan, one needs to understand Levirate Law. “Levirate”, from the Latin “levir”,
which means “husband’s brother”, had always been a “Hebrew custom”. It required
a brother to marry the wife of a deceased brother, if they, as a couple, had not
yet had any sons born to them. The first son born from the union of the
deceased brother’s surviving wife, and his surviving brother, would be considered
the “heir” of the brother who had passed away. However, GOD also sanctioned this
custom, as HE later had Moses to codify it into “the Law of GOD” in Deuteronomy
25:5-10.
After Onan’s death, Judah told Tamar not to
remarry, but instead, to return to her parent’s home and remain a widow until
his youngest son, Shelah, was old enough to marry her. However, Judah was
deceiving Tamar at the time, and really had no intentions of following through
on this promise because he feared he would endanger the life of his only
remaining son, if he too, refused to comply with the Levirate Law, as his older
brother had done (v.11).
Now several years later, and after Shelah
had grown into manhood, Judah’s wife passed away. One day, after his time of
mourning for her was over, Judah and his friend Hirah, the Adullamite, went
over to nearby Timnah to oversee the shearing of his sheep. Tamar was aware
that Shelah was now a grown man, and she was incensed that Judah had not yet
kept his promise to her, that Shelah would be held to the Levirate Law, to
marry her (Vs.12-14).
Consequently, Tamar decided to take matters
into her own hands, and she devised a scheme against Judah that would by-pass
his son Shelah, and actually trick him into fulfilling the Levirate Law
himself, with his own body. And so, after hearing that Judah was going over to
Timnah, she hurriedly changed out of her “widow” clothes, and put on the attire
of a prostitute, which included a veil for her face that would keep Judah from
recognizing her.
Tamar then ran ahead of them down toward
Timnah, and sat along the road outside of the village of Enaim (about halfway
between Chezib and Timnah), and she waited there for them to pass by. From the
nature of her scheme, she obviously had some insight into Judah’s immoral
sexual history, or maybe Judah just simply had a known reputation for using the
services of prostitutes from time to time, seeing how she knew exactly how to
entrap him.
Sure enough, Judah noticed her as he went
by on the way to Timnah, and he stopped to proposition her to sleep with him.
Since her face was veiled, he did not realize that she was his daughter-in-law.
And so Tamar asked Judah how much was he willing to pay her, and in response,
he offered to send her a young goat once he returned back home to Chezib.
However, already knowing from experience
that she couldn’t trust Judah at his word, she asked him what pledge he could
leave with her that would ensure that he would send her the goat later on. When Judah asked her “what did she require”
as a pledge, Tamar requested that he give her his “identification seal”, which
hung from a cord around his neck, and, his walking stick that he held in his
hand.
Judah gave Tamar these articles, and he
slept with her, and she became pregnant with his child. After returning home
Judah asked his friend Hirah to take the goat back to the prostitute and
retrieve his items from her. However, when he got there, she was nowhere to be
found. In fact, the locals told Hirah that, “there has never been a prostitute
working, anywhere near the village of Enaim”.
Three months later, word reached Judah that
his daughter-in-law, Tamar, was pregnant as a result of prostitution. Then, an
angry, hypocritical Judah, quickly announced “a death sentence” upon Tamar, and
they dragged her out of her house into the streets, to kill her. However, as
they were dragging her to her death, she convinced them to allow her to send a
message to Judah, proclaiming that the man who impregnated her is the owner of
this “identification seal” and “walking stick”.
Upon seeing the items, Judah was forced to
admit that they were his, and he then confessed his “hypocrisy” and “lack of
integrity”, and proclaimed that he was more guilty than Tamar was, because, not
only did he proposition and sleep with her, thinking that she was a prostitute,
he also had earlier broke his promise to her that she could marry his son when
he became of age. And a now, repentant Judah, never slept with Tamar again.
In the final segment of this dramatic
chapter, we see that, in the time of Tamar’s delivery, she gave birth to, not
one, but two sons. In a birth that is very reminiscent of Jacob and Esau’s
birth, we see that one of the twin’s hands, Zerah’s, came out first. However,
the other twin, Perez, was the first to make “the complete breach”, and he
became the one, who was actually born first.
And so we see that, despite Judah’s
attempts to hinder Tamar’s marriage to his son, the line of “the promise” would
continue on through Perez. And the prophecy concerning Jacob ruling over his
older brother Esau, was now being lived out through Judah’s family. And even
though he and his brothers had dealt unjustly with their younger brother,
Joseph, by indirectly selling him into “chattel slavery” in Egypt, GOD shows
that, at the end of the day, no matter what plans we are able to conjure up
using our “human ingenuity”, HIS Will, is “a prevailing Will”, and will always
win out over our “human efforts”, no matter how great our desire is, “to do
what we want to do”.
A Sunday school lesson by,
Larry D. Alexander
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