"Where sin abounded..."

Genesis 38:1-30

September 5, 1999

Text Comment

v.1 Judah's leaving the family and "going down" from the higher country of Hebron to the foothills is probably itself some indication of the spiritual disintegration of the family. There was no longer a sense of the importance of their being together as the covenant people of God. There is no prayer, no relationship with the living God, no transcendent value holding the family together. (Waltke)

The events of this chapter overlap with the events of the following chapters that give an account of Joseph's life in Egypt. The events of this chapter span approximately twenty years and so leave room for what will be happening to Joseph, who was in Egypt twenty-two years before being discovered there by his brothers.

v.2 To marry a Canaanite, we have already learned on a number of occasions in the narrative so far, was a betrayal of the covenant. Judah must have known that in doing so he was going against his father's wishes. The very thing Abraham had feared regarding Isaac and took steps to prevent and Isaac feared regarding Jacob and took steps to prevent, Judah does apparently without a thought. The family has lost its spiritual identity and is intermarrying with the Canaanites. The peremptory way in which this marriage is described, literally, "Judah saw and took," suggests that the marriage was based on lust primarily, as the combination elsewhere in Genesis of "saw...and took" suggests an illicit taking (Eve saw and took the fruit; Shechem saw and took Dinah; etc.). Her name isn't even mentioned! Such a view of women will now run in his family, as we shall see.

The tendency to an immediate plunge from grace as soon as faith is no longer an active principle is demonstrated often enough in the Bible and certainly here.

v.7 Er is evil spelled backwards in Hebrew. There is a play on words here. One commentator seeks to bring it into English by translating "Er erred." The narrative is filled with such plays on words. I pass by most of them because they are too hard to appreciate for non-Hebrew speakers like us. But they are an indication of how expertly the narrative is written and how the author's purpose is so suggestively conveyed down even to the details of the text.

The Lord does do this, you know. End the life of evil people. Even in our age. Remember those who had fallen asleep in Corinth because of their profanation of the Lord's Supper. What will eternity tell of the reasons for the death of people!

v.8 This is the ancient custom of levirate marriage (from the Latin word for brother-in-law). It was already a fixed custom of this culture as is indicated by the fact that the phrase "fulfill your duty as a brother-in-law" is a single verb in Hebrew. By this custom, Tamar's first child would have been born to Er and would have given him social immorality, heirs who would bear his name and receive his property. It was a sacred obligation. The OT law enforced it, so that a man's name would not be blotted out, as we read in Deuteronomy 25:6, though it did give a man a way of opting out.

v.10 Onan's behavior was the worst of all possible behaviors. He had sex with his sister-in-law, many times, but refused to give her and his brother the heir that she was seeking. His behavior was sensual and selfish. He abuses the situation for the satisfaction of his own lusts while betraying all the sacred responsibilities he had. And, of course, it is worse still for Tamar, who becomes the mistress the man never leaves his wife for.

v.10 There is no mention of Judah's grief over the death of his two sons, so soon after the account of Jacob's inconsolable grief over what he thought was the death of Joseph. Judah is a calloused, hard, and unfeeling man. Later in this chapter he will order his daughter in law to be burned to death. This is the same man, of course, whose idea it was to sell his brother into slavery and so make some money while ridding themselves of a youngster they hated.

v.11 Judah told Tamar he would provide for her marriage, but the narrator tells us that he had no real intention to do so. Judah is so spiritually blind that he does not suspect that his sons are the problem and imagines that Tamar is. He doesn't want to give Shelah to her for fear he might die too. The man is driven now by nothing but superstition, he thinks Tamar is ill-omened. He is no longer practicing moral reasoning. What is more, he had the responsibility for her, but is handing her back to her father, indicating again how little sense of the holiness of the family bond Judah had. As one commentator puts it, Judah is like a modern American, who can't put one and one together to reach two. He cannot see the connection between his sexual immorality and the woe that has befallen our land. Oh, no, it must be something else that is causing our problems. We've lost our moral sense. Judah had lost his moral sense.

v.14 Tamar's action reveals two things. First, Tamar knows enough of Judah's character to believe he would consort with a prostitute. Interestingly, the text doesn't explicitly say that Tamar dressed as a prostitute, it just says that Judah took her for one. Perhaps Tamar knew that all that would be necessary would be for her to sit by the road a woman by herself. And, second, she knew that Judah, despite his assurances, would never make provision for her. She knew that she had been lied to and the obligation that Judah owed to her meant nothing to him. She was left a widow, though technically still betrothed to Shelah.

Tamar herself is consumed with her right as matriarch of the line of Judah's eldest son. Judah's admission in v. 26 will indicate that, whatever the justice of her means, her effort to secure what was hers by right was, by and large, righteous and was to her credit. She is, in fact, for all our doubts about what she did, the heroine of the story and the only one who seems to care about what a covenant family member ought to care about.

v.16 While sex with a prostitute was sinful and evil, sex with a daughter-in-law was a crime punishable by death. The fact that there was characteristically a lot of wine-drinking at sheep-shearing time (they made a festival out of it) may explain why Judah did not penetrate Tamar's disguise. In a Canaanite form, the sheep-shearing festival would be a kind of Mardi Gras.

v.17 Judah doesn't want to wait to satisfy his appetites, though he was quite willing for Tamar to wait to receive what was rightfully hers!

v.18 Tamar's hard bargaining, together with Judah's lust, results in his giving her a very serious pledge, what one commentator (Wenham) refers to as a kind of ANE equivalent of all of one's credit cards. Or, perhaps better, one's passport or driver's license. (Waltke) These things would have unmistakably belonged to Judah, clear evidence that he had given them to her. Each seal had a design on it that was individual to its owner.

v.24 An extreme penalty, in other words, worse, more terrible than other forms of execution that the law allowed. Tamar's sin would have been adultery because it was infidelity during betrothal, she still being betrothed to Shelah, even if Judah had no plans to give her to him. The ultimate double standard here, of course! Under OT law, if Tamar was culpable, so was her partner! And the OT explicitly forbids a different moral standard for men than for women. Cf. Hosea 4:14.

v.25 A close parallel to 37:32. Judah is deceived as he had deceived his father regarding Joseph, as Jacob had long before deceived Isaac. You may have noticed that in all three episodes goats and items of clothing figure in the deceit. It is a subtle, not yet overt indication, that justice will finally be done; that, in the end, no one will get away with his crimes. Judah deceives, but will succeed no more than his father before him.

v.29 Perez technically the younger son, Zerah having stuck his hand out first, but he will be the father of the Judah line.

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At first glance, chapter 38 seems to have nothing to do with the developing story of Joseph in Egypt. It is easy to think that the flow of the narrative is interrupted by it and scholars used to think of it as a kind of irrelevant digression. The reader expects to go from the last verse of chapter 37 to the first verse of chapter 39. But the narrator does not do that. He interposes this account of Judah and his family. Why will become clear only later, but when it does we will then see that chapter 38 is fundamental to our understanding of the entire history of Joseph and Judah, that we could not really appreciate its climax and conclusion without first having heard of the events reported in chapter 38, what one commentator calls "the most sordid chapter in the OT." Remember, as we read in 37:2, this is the family history of Jacob; it concerns all his sons, not just Joseph. What is more, as we said last week, the real hero of the story is not, as I always thought, Joseph himself, but Judah, the very Judah who is described in such despicable terms here in chapter 38. It is to Judah at the end of the story that the great promise is made: it will be from Judah that will come the seed of the woman who would crush the head of the serpent, that will come the Messiah, the Savior, the King of Kings.

What we have here is an account of a thoroughly disreputable man, utterly blind to his own corruptions, treating others with contempt and cruelty. He is a member of the covenant family, but that covenant means nothing to him. Sensual pleasures and his reputation with the world are what motivate this man. He would rather betray every article of God's covenant than become a laughingstock among the Canaanites. He was a hard-hearted man, a calloused man, and getting more so by the year: selling his brother into slavery, making his way among the Canaanites, raising sons so evil that the Lord had to execute them while they were still comparatively young men, arranging marriages for his sons with Canaanite women, lying to his daughter-in-law: a man can live this way only so long before his conscience is seared and silenced. At the last, only selfish interest remained to guide Judah. It is no surprise really, then, that in such a moral universe as that, a man like that should find himself committing incest without even knowing it! He was, by this time, a truly evil man.

But, then, at the end, a great, a truly wonderful, surprise! We have an account of the first beginnings of a turn, a turn that when complete is going to make of Judah the one son of all the twelve sons of Jacob -- including even the worthy Joseph -- who ought to be the ancestor, the progenitor, of the King of Kings and the Savior of the world.

We see it first in v. 26, in Judah's acknowledgement of his sin and of the justice of Tamar's cause and even of her action, left as he had left her, with no alternative.

"She is more righteous than I," he admits.

The confession is more forthright even than it sounds in the NIV. The two principle Hebrew grammarians and the best commentators agree that the Hebrew should not be read as a simple comparison, but as what is called a "comparison of exclusion" in which the subject alone possesses the quality of the adjective, to the exclusion of the thing being compared. In other words, Judah said not "she is more righteous than I" but "she is righteous, not I!" [GKC, 133b n.1, p. 430; Waltke, O'Connor, p. 265] So, there is no claim to righteousness at all on Judah's part, he is not asserting merely that she is more righteous than he, but that she has been righteous while he has not been. A far better thing for a man to say who had behaved as Judah had behaved!

In Proverbs 28:13 we read:

"He who conceals his sins does not prosper, but whoever confesses and renounces them finds mercy."

Well, for the first time, we find Judah in the way of God's mercy, because for the first time we find him acknowledging his sin, honestly and openly. And, then, we find him renouncing his sin, at least to the extent that it was possible for him to do so in this particular case. We read in v. 26 that "he did not sleep with Tamar again."

Though he had done so before, though the ice had been broken as it were, though we have found Judah so far a thoroughly sensual man and a man with little regard for the sacred honor of the family or for his responsibilities to preserve that honor and purity, though we might well have expected Judah to do something with Tamar similar to what his son Onan had done, Judah does nothing of the kind.

The Lord has been at work in his heart. His conscience has been awakened. Conviction of sin has troubled him. He stands self-condemned on account of what he has done. And now he cannot live as he had before. Sin has become sin to him once more! And that, as in the case of so many multitudes of others, was the beginning of the turn for this man: when sin became sin to him; when he began to reckon with his moral failure; his need for the forgiveness of God. He had been a moral failure, of course, for long years; but he had never really admitted it or reckoned with that fact until now.

As Alfred Lord Tennyson has it in The May Queen,

"He taught me all the mercy for he showed me all the sin."

And as Pascal wrote:

"There are only two kinds of men: the righteous, who believe themselves sinners, and the rest, sinners who believe themselves righteous."

Which is to say, that the great turning point is reached precisely when a man or woman, boy or girl, realizes, truly recognizes, knows for a certainty that he or she is a sinner in desperate need of the forgiveness of God. God may have to do great things to bring a man to that recognition, as he did here with Judah, a man's life may well have to fall into ruins before he is ready to turn, but turning is all that God requires of him. Or as another wise man has it, "Convictions [of sin] are not needed to make us welcome to Christ, but to make Him welcome to us." [Duncan, Just a Talker, 51]

And so what do we find here in this "most sordid chapter in the Bible"? We find the grace of God and grace abounding where sin has abounded and God's grace beginning to cover a multitude of sins. That Jesus Christ himself descends from this disgusting incest is as grand a picture of God's grace overcoming man's sin as can be imagined.

What can possibly come of lives like these? Of history like this? Cruelty, infidelity, hardness of heart, sexual promiscuity, even incest. What can come of that? By the grace of God, by the blood of Jesus Christ, heaven can come of that!

When you think of Genesis 38 and then read Revelation 21:10-12 you gain some sense of the astonishing world of divine grace, the power and the glory of God's saving love and work. John gives us there his vision of heaven.

"And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and showed me the Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. It shown with the glory of God, and its brilliance was like that of a very precious jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal. It had a great, high wall with twelve gates, and with twelve angels at the gates. On the gates were written the names of the twelve tribes of Israel."

Or, in other words, Judah's name is found there on the gate of heaven! This Judah, this thoroughly ugly and disreputable man, this cruel and hateful man, who became by the grace of God, a new man, a man of grace and love and goodness himself, as we shall see.

You remember, do you, the marriage of Ruth to Boaz? Ruth was from a pagan family, just as Tamar was; but she cared about God's covenant, and joined herself to it and to God's people. And when she married Boaz, the elders prayed for him, "may your house be like the house of Perez, whom Tamar bore to Judah, because of the children that the Lord will give you by this young woman" (Ruth 4:12).

What we have in Genesis 38 is a picture of what we all are without the grace of God -- all of us, whatever our sins, however polite, however little we or anyone else takes notice of them (no one took notice of Judah's either, in that corrupt day, until the Lord himself brought them to light) -- and the rest of the Bible tells us what that grace can make of us.

It is the one truly fabulous thing in all the world -- that a man like Judah should find his name on the gate of the City of God!