The Friday session at last month’s conference at Bethany Bible School was on sexuality. For our inductive Bible study, we focused on Genesis 38:1-26, the story of Judah and Tamar.
A key verse in the story, bringing together a number of its key words and themes, is v. 16, Judah’s words to Tamar followed by the author’s explanation: “ ‘Come, let me come in to you,’ for he did not know that she was his daughter-in-law.”
Judah solicited Tamar, his “daughter-in-law”, for sex because he thought she was a prostitute, because “he did not know that she was his daughter-in-law.” Though this might seem like the text’s absolution of Judah, a justification for his “going in” to his daughter-in-law, it is, in fact, an indictment of him. Indeed, for even if Judah would not, as the text implies, have solicited his own daughter-in-law for sex, his hiring of a prostitute is a solicitation of someone else’s daughter for the same.
Indeed, the use of the title “daughter” or “daughter-in-law” is frequent in the text. The first usage of “daughter” occurs in v. 2, where Judah “saw the daughter of a certain Canaanite whose name was Shua; he married her and went in to her.” This last comment, that Judah “went in to her”, is the same approach that he takes later on, in v. 16, with his daughter-in-law (“Come, let me come in to you”), also described by the author in v. 19 (“So he gave them to her, and went in to her . . .”). In other words, just as Judah, as a younger man, once approached a “certain Canaanite’s daughter”, so he now, as an older man, approaches his own “daughter-in-law.” And, although he would never dream of defiling his own daughter-in-law—she who belongs to him, and he to her—he, by hiring a prostitute, is quite willing to defile someone else’s. Judah, in fact, makes his opinion quite clear as to what should happen to daughters who “play the whore” (v. 24); when he is told that Tamar is pregnant through prostitution, he wishes her to be “brought out and burned” (v. 24). Yet he does not see—until Tamar’s well-conceived scheme exposes his guilt—that it is he who is responsible for disgracing her, taking away her life. As a result, he is more worthy of the fire than she, as he himself is finally forced to admit: “she is more in the right than I” (v. 26).
To Judah’s credit, his admission of guilt leads to a change in behavior. After being exposed, the text states that “he did not lie with [Tamar] again, literally (Hebrew), that “he did not know her again” (v. 26). Judah’s “not knowing” of Tamar at the end of the story brings to mind both his previous “not-knowing” of her in the middle (v. 16) and that which Judah’s late son, Onan, knew with regard to Tamar. Onan, that is, knew, according to the levirate law of the Israelites (Deut. 25:5-10), that the children born to Tamar through his seed would not be his own; instead they would belong to his late brother, Er, who had first married Tamar but died before giving her children. The children would not honor the name "Onan” but “Er”. Therefore, though it was the responsibility of Onan, the next-of-kin to the deceased, to raise up children for his brother’s widow (to give her, just as Judah once gave the daughter of Shua her own “Er”, “Protector”), he “spilled his semen on the ground whenever he went in to his brother’s wife” (v. 9). Though it was what Onan “knew” that led him to “spoil his seed”, it did not prevent him from “knowing” his brother’s widow. Though the purpose of him marrying her was to produce children, he engaged in the act of procreation without allowing it. He used the widow for sex without allowing her to enjoy its fruits.
Onan’s knowing of Tamar led directly to Tamar’s being disowned. For, after “the Lord killed him” because “the thing that he did was displeasing to the Lord” (v. 10), Judah begins to fear that the source of Onan’s death, like his brother Er before him, is Tamar, the one whom they both married. Though the text is certain that the brothers died because of their own sin, Judah fears that his sons have died because of Tamar. As a result, though he owes Tamar his next-born, Shelah, he sends Tamar away from his household—though through marriage she now belongs to Judah’s family—and back to her “father’s house” to “sit as a widow” (vv. 11-12). Though, through marriage to his sons, Judah once claimed Tamar as his daughter, he now sends her back to where she came from. Judah once knew her as his daughter; his dismissal of her, though veiled with the excuse that Shelah is not yet of age, is really to say, “I never knew you.” Realizing that Judah has never intended to give her Shelah, Tamar moves from “sitting” as a widow to “sitting” on the road to Timnah as a prostitute when she hears that her father-in-law will be going that way (v. 14); she is desperate to produce children for Judah’s line. It is here that Judah meets her and asks her for sex—for “he did not know that she was his daughter-in-law” (v. 16). Thus the cycle is complete: what the son set in motion by knowing the father completes by not-knowing—the disowning of Tamar.
Yet even here, at their moment of greatest disgrace, does the redemption of Judah and Tamar begin. For the conception of their proscribed union exposes the sin of her father-in-law and restores to her her dignity as his daughter. Ashamed of his actions, Judah pronounces the one he once assumed guilty for the death of his sons now “more righteous than I.” He also “does not know her again” and, therefore, knows her again as his daughter.
-Joe
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