To express my debt to Prof. Bruce Waltke, I have entitled this sermon, "Judah: A Paragon of Love." That was the title of the sermon that Dr. Waltke preached here in August of 1996, a sermon which, when I heard it later on tape, fundamentally changed my understanding of this material and opened up to me, I believe, riches I did not know were here. Dr. Waltke will tell you himself, that many of these insights were relatively new to him as well and were the result of a new appreciation in biblical scholarship for the narrative genius that lies behind the book of Genesis. There are a few things, in our benighted age, that we do better than even much more godly generations did before us, and one of them is mining the riches of the Old Testament!

We finished chapter 43 with the brothers feasting together at Joseph’s table, the ten eating and drinking freely with Benjamin, even though the younger man had been given portions five times larger than theirs. Now Joseph puts all of this to a supreme test. He is going to test them at just that point where they failed so terribly years before: their loyalty to a brother, and a brother more favored than they by their father. He is really going to put it to them. Real faith can take it!

v. 3 The brothers must have thought that they had enjoyed great success. The great Egyptian had behaved in such a friendly manner; he had filled their bags to the very top; they had Simeon back and had Benjamin with them. All of this, however, was part of Joseph’s strategy: the test will come from out of the blue, devastate their optimism, and force them to respond instantaneously to a life-threatening trial. In other words, Joseph has made the test as demanding as he could. Character is best tested in the heat of crisis, not when one can calmly and slowly work out all the implications of various courses of action.

v. 5 The accusation, without explanation, is designed to provoke maximum fear. As in v. 15, a claim that Joseph practiced divination, a practice forbidden in the law of Moses, is made. It is doubtful that this was Joseph’s real practice. Rather, it is a means of preserving the pretense.

v. 10 You see the way in which the steward changes the arrangement. What the brothers propose, however severe on themselves, would not be the test Joseph was after. And the steward is obviously in on Joseph’s plan. The test must be that the brothers be free to walk away from their brother in his distress. So that is what the steward says: the one who has the cup will become a slave (as had Joseph) and the rest will be free to go. What will they do when Benjamin is found out? Remember, Joseph is treating Benjamin as his surrogate. He is enabling the brothers to relive what they had done to him and, in reliving that history, he provides them with an opportunity to redeem themselves. You see the brilliance of Joseph and his spiritual insight.

v. 11 The alacrity with which they dismounted is a demonstration of their confidence in their own innocence.

v. 12 The drama of this scene, the building tension, is intensified by the comment, "beginning with the eldest and ending with the youngest." With each unsuccessful search their hopes rose, only to be terribly dashed at the very end.

v. 13 To make matters worse, Benjamin looks guilty. But they stand beside him and returned with him. They hung in with him, they trust his innocence and, when they could walk away, they stand with him. They all tore their clothes. When Joseph disappeared years before, only Jacob had torn his clothes (37:34).

v. 15 Joseph is piling on the psychological pressure.

v. 17 Joseph makes the offer once more and the test couldn’t be clearer. You ten brothers can go home; only Benjamin needs to remain here a slave, and, after all, he does look guilty. You are not responsible for him. Joseph is giving them every opportunity to do again what they did to him years before.

v. 24 Judah tactfully omits, in his retelling, the charges of spying, their imprisonment, or Simeon’s being held hostage.

v. 29 In a stunning reversal, so it must have seemed to Joseph, Judah is even willing to recall his father’s words that seem to leave the ten brothers and the sons of Leah out of account altogether. A remark of pure humility.

v. 30 He is also willing to admit, with sympathy, that his father’s life "is bound up" with Benjamin.

v. 31 Before they were utterly careless about their father. But now we see a new sympathy, a new love, a new responsibility.

We have before us in chapter 44 the climax of the whole Joseph story and, in vv. 33 and 34, the "grand climactic moment" in the transformation of the ten sons and the reconciliation of them to one another, to Joseph, and to God.

Joseph devised the supreme test for his brothers. And, since clearly, Judah had by this time assumed the spiritual leadership of the family, the test was met by him on behalf of the others. The narrator indicates that already in v. 14 when he tells us that "Judah and his brothers" had returned to Joseph’s house.

And it is Judah who speaks. In v. 16 it seems likely that Judah is confessing the far greater crime of their sin against Joseph. The Egyptians, of course, would have thought that he was admitting that they stole Joseph’s silver cup, but Judah knew they had not (even if he didn’t know how it had got into Benjamin’s sack). But, that seems not to be Judah’s point or the concern of his heart anymore. He cannot escape the similarity of situation; he cannot fail to see the connection between what is happening to them all and what they did to Joseph twenty-two years before. In other words, he cannot help seeing what Joseph has taken such pains to ensure that the brothers would see. They were likely to be enslaved in Egypt just as they had enslaved their brother long before. In that sense, under the conviction of that ancient sin, believing, as he said in v. 16, that God himself was now uncovering their guilt, it made perfect sense for him to offer all of them as slaves to the Egyptian.

But Joseph will have nothing of that. Remarkable as the change that seems to have come over Judah is, to accept his offer would ruin the test. No, it must be Benjamin and the brothers must be put in a situation in which they are free to abandon their brother to his fate and save themselves. He tells them outright, "Go back to your father in peace." He opens the door and points the way.

But Judah is not the same man he once was. He was not the man any longer whose idea it was to get rid of their brother and make some money on the side. He was no longer the man who raised boys so disreputable that God executed them in the middle of their lives. He was no longer the man who refused to fulfill the duties of a patriarch and see to the needs of his daughter-in-law and, as a result, later committed incest with her, thinking her a prostitute.

When the Egyptian offered him and his brothers their freedom at Benjamin’s expense, he rose to speak and to plead. And what follows, in vv. 18-34, is the longest speech and the most passionate speech in the book of Genesis. Delivered by Judah, of all people! It is a speech one commentator describes as a "speech of singular pathos and beauty." [Driver]

One of the great works of scholarship that has helped revolutionize the study of Genesis in the last two decades is Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative. I want you to listen to Alter’s summation of Judah’s speech. It is a long citation, but it deserves your careful hearing.

"This remarkable speech is a point-for-point undoing, morally and psychologically, of the brothers’ earlier violation of fraternal and filial bonds. A basic biblical perception about both human relations and relations between God and man is that love is unpredictable, arbitrary, at times perhaps seemingly unjust, and Judah now comes to an acceptance of that fact with all its consequences. His father, he states clearly to Joseph, has singled out Benjamin for a special love, as he singled out Rachel’s other son before. It is a painful reality of favoritism with which Judah, in contrast to the earlier jealousy over Joseph, is here reconciled, out of filial duty and more, out of filial love. His entire speech is motivated by the deepest empathy for his father by a real understanding of what it means for the old man’s very life to be bound up with that of the lad. He can even bring himself to quote sympathetically (v. 27) Jacob’s typically extravagant statement that his wife bore him two sons – as though Leah were not also his wife and the other ten were not also his sons. Twenty-two years earlier, Judah engineered the selling of Joseph into slavery; now he is prepared to offer himself as a slave so that the other son of Rachel can be set free. Twenty-two years earlier, he stood with his brothers and silently watched when the bloody tunic they had brought to Jacob sent their father into a fit of anguish; now he is willing to do anything in order not to have to see his father suffer that way again." [174-175]

Another scholar who has devoted study to the art of narrative in Genesis [M. Sternberg, The poetics of Biblical Narrative, 308] adds this:

"Most important, if to a listener ignorant of the family situation and record, the brothers’ attitude as expressed by their leader would appear admirable, then to one in the know it surely manifests nothing short of a transformation, from subnormal to abnormal solidarity. That the sons of the hated wife should have come to terms with the father’s attachment to Rachel ("my wife") and her children is enough to promise an end to hostilities and a fresh start. That the second of these children should enjoy his brothers’ affection is amazing. But that Judah should adduce the father’s favoritism as the ground for self-sacrifice is such an irresistible proof of filial devotion that it breaks down Joseph’s last defenses."

I’m sure these men are right about the significance of Judah’s speech. The new mind and heart in Judah is impossible not to notice and to wonder at. Here is a man who was utterly careless of his father’s feelings before. In this speech he mentions his father fourteen times and always with sympathy and affection.

And the culmination in vv. 33-34 seals the point. Judah, after all, is not speaking rhetorically. He has no reason to believe that his offer will not be accepted and that he will remain a slave in Egypt for the rest of his life, just as he must imagine his brother, Joseph, had done as a result of Judah’s own perfidy years before.

This is the first instance of human sacrifice in the Bible, of one man laying down his life for another: Judah offering up his life for the sake of Benjamin and his father Jacob. And when, from the heart, he makes that offer the family is healed. Joseph could no longer maintain the pretense in the face of such love. Reconciliation then follows between both Joseph and the brothers and Joseph and Jacob in the next chapter as the denouement of the story. Judah’s self-sacrifice is the climax!

And Judah is the center of this story. There is no doubt about that. Judah is the developing, the changing character. Joseph, worthy though he is, is a much more static figure. It is Judah who is transformed and, if the truth be told, Judah who rises higher, even than Joseph. Joseph is righteous, but he never demonstrates the Christ-like compassion for others that Judah does. Can we be sure of that? Can we know that?

Oh, yes, we are told that in the most unmistakable way. When Jacob blesses his sons in chapter 48 and 49, Joseph is blessed as the prince of his brothers and he receives a double portion as if he were the eldest. He gets, in other words, his father’s blessing, as Jacob had received Isaac’s.

But the greatest blessing is not given to Joseph, it is given to Judah instead. We read Judah’s blessing in 49:8-12 -- I invite you to turn there, for a moment. The rest of the brothers will bow down to Judah. That is, of course, a very striking promise, following as it does the dreams that Joseph had that his brothers would bow down to him. And, not only will Judah rule over the family of Israel, he will go in conquest over his enemies.

That is the sense of the statement in v. 8 that Judah’s hand is on the neck of his enemies and as well the sense of Judah portrayed as a lion in v. 9. Judah is a fierce lion that has seized its prey, returned to its lair, and lies there daring anyone to challenge it.

And then the momentous promise in v. 10. The scepter and the staff are signs of royal authority. The king, will come not from Joseph’s line, not from Reuben’s, the firstborn, but from the line of Judah. The phrase "between his feet" is a euphemism for the private parts and refers to Judah’s progeny, his issue, the descendants who come from him. [Wenham] The king who will rule over the nations – an anticipation of the more specific prophecies still to come in which the Messiah will be given the nations for his inheritance.

And then, in vv. 11-12, there is a picture painted of the prosperity of the reign of this coming king who will be Judah’s descendant. "He will tether his donkey to a vine…" Ordinarily one didn’t tie a donkey to the vine because he would eat up the grapes. But the image here is of such plenty that no one cares if the donkey eats its fill. The next line, about washing his garments in wine has the same sense. There will be so much wine that one can wash his clothes in it. Throughout the OT, the golden age, the age of consummation is described in these same terms of bumper harvests and unimaginable plenty.

The sense of verse 12 is debated. It could be a description of the king’s beauty: eyes like wine, teeth white as milk. Or, it could be a continuation of the previous thought. His eyes are dark with wine, there is so much of it and his teeth white with all the milk he drinks.

In any case, it is clear that it is being promised to Judah that the great hope of the world and especially of the people of God will be realized through him and through his line.

Or, going back to 44:33: the king will come from Judah and no other. The one who was willing to die for others is alone worthy to be the king of God’s people. "Greater love hath no man than that he lay down his life for his friends." Judah’s greatest descendant taught us that and then proved it by giving up his life for us. It is, finally, Judah, not Joseph, who is the truest Christ-figure in this history, and the Christ-figure will be the father of the Christ himself!

There is the Holy Spirit’s own verdict in the events of the biblical history. What Christ, the Savior, will be is one who gives his life a ransom for many. It will be the Son of God’s self-sacrifice that will save the world.

And, in imitation of our Savior, it is this same life of self-sacrifice on behalf of others, of compassion for others, that God wants from us. Judah is the Bible’s hero in this history. Judah who gets the attention. Judah whose life story is told with the most psychological detail. Judah who is most obviously and wonderfully the product of God’s transforming grace. And what did that make of Judah? A man ready to give his life, to spend himself, for others. We are to be like such a man and we will be if we aspire to be like Christ himself, the lion of the tribe of Judah!

Thank God, brothers and sisters, for every opportunity to love someone sacrificially, to stand by someone in need when you might otherwise walk away. Be mindful of the importance of such a spirit so that when the opportunities come, out of the blue as they did for Judah, you will know what to do. God has told you, in this grand text, what he wants you to be; whom he wants you to be like. He has told you what he chooses most lavishly to reward. Judah’s spirit of compassion and sacrifice for others.

As Judah’s greater son would one day put it, "As I have loved you, so you love one another." "Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the Church and gave himself for her." "The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many."

"Be imitators of God…as dearly loved children, and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself for us." [Ephesians 5:2]