Genesis38chapter 38

Genesis 38:1-2

The account breaks off from Joseph and turns to Judah, and the first words say he went down from his brethren, which is the same verb the next chapter uses of Joseph being brought down to Egypt. One brother goes down by his own choice, having just proposed the sale, and the other goes down in a caravan he was sold into. Judah then marries a Canaanite woman, which is what Esau had done at 26:34 and what both Abraham and Isaac had taken deliberate steps to prevent for their own sons.

Genesis 38:3-5

Three sons arrive in three verses, Er, Onan and Shelah, the father naming the first and the mother naming the other two. Jerome reads Chezib in the last verse as a word carrying the sense of deception rather than a place name, and Clarke ties it instead to Achzib, a town that later fell to the tribe of Judah. The line is set down at speed, and within two more verses two of the three are dead.

Genesis 38:6-7

Judah chooses Tamar for his firstborn, and Genesis never tells us where she came from or whose daughter she was. Er is called wicked in the sight of the LORD and is killed, and the text refuses to say what the wickedness was. Clarke notes that the Hebrew letters of the name Er reversed spell the word for wicked, and Gill reports the rabbinic guess at the sin while granting that the writer withheld it.

Genesis 38:8-10

Judah tells Onan to raise up seed to his dead brother, the first appearance in Scripture of the custom that Moses later wrote into the law at Deuteronomy 25:5. Onan takes the marriage and withholds the child, because the heir would carry his brother's name and not his own, and Clarke points out that this is what the act was for rather than anything the older popular reading made of it. The sin the text names is a brother refusing his brother, and the chapter sits inside the story of ten brothers who had just sold theirs.

Genesis 38:11

Judah sends Tamar back to her father's house with a promise fixed to a date that never arrives. The verse gives his real reason and it is fear, lest peradventure he die also, so he treats the widow as the danger rather than the conduct of his own sons. She is left neither married nor released, and she waits.

Genesis 38:12-14

Judah's wife dies, he is comforted, and he goes up to the sheepshearing at Timnath, which Jamieson describes as the most festive season of the farming year. Tamar hears of it, puts off her widow's garments, covers herself with a vail and sits by the road, because she has seen that Shelah is grown and she has not been given to him. Genesis has already used a garment to deceive twice, Jacob wearing his brother's clothes before a blind father and Judah's own brothers carrying Joseph's coat to theirs, and the third time the garment is turned on Judah.

Genesis 38:15-16

Judah takes her for a harlot because her face is covered, and Gill notes that it was the place she sat in rather than the vail alone that made him think so. The writer says a second time in the next verse that he knew not that she was his daughter in law, so the reader is never allowed to think he recognised her. She asks what he will give her, which means the terms are set by her before anything else happens.

Genesis 38:17-18

The price Judah offers is a kid from the flock, and it is the third kid inside three chapters of this family's story. Jacob had covered himself in kid skins to take a blessing that was not his at 27:16, and these same sons had dipped Joseph's coat in a kid's blood to break their father at 37:31. Tamar asks for a pledge instead of the promise, and what she takes is his signet, his cord and his staff, the three things by which a man in that country was known.

Genesis 38:19-20

She lays the vail aside and puts the widow's garments back on, so the disguise lasts exactly as long as it is needed and the evidence stays in her keeping. Judah sends the kid by the hand of his friend to redeem the pledge, and the woman cannot be found. He has handed over the tokens of who he is and holds nothing in return but an undelivered promise.

Genesis 38:21-23

Hirah asks the men of the place for the woman using a different word from the one the narrator used, and Clarke marks the change, since the question is about a kedeshah, a consecrated woman, rather than the zonah of verse fifteen. The answer is that there had been no such woman there at all. Judah drops the search, and the reason he gives is that he does not want to be laughed at, which Wesley reads as concern for his standing with men and none for what he had done.

Genesis 38:24-25

Three months later Judah hears that Tamar is with child and sentences her to burning in a single breath, and Henry notes how readily men are severe about the very sin they are carrying. She then sends his own pledge back to him with the words that had once been his own, Discern, I pray thee, whose are these. The Hebrew phrase is the one Judah and his brothers had put to their father over Joseph's bloodied coat at 37:32, and the Jewish writers Henry cites had already fastened on the repetition.

Genesis 38:26

Judah acknowledges the signet and says she has been more righteous than he, and he names the reason himself, because that I gave her not to Shelah my son. It is the first confession of wrong recorded from any son of Jacob, and Clarke observes that the wrong he owns is the broken promise rather than only what happened by the road. The same man will stand before the ruler of Egypt and ask to be a bondman in Benjamin's place at 44:33, and it is to Judah that the dying Jacob gives the sceptre at 49:10.

Genesis 38:27-28

Twins are in the womb, and Wesley hears in the hard birth the struggle of Jacob and Esau at 25:22-26 breaking out again in the family that came from it. The midwife binds a scarlet thread on the hand that appears first, which Clarke reads as a sign of how carefully the right of the firstborn was guarded. What she guards is lost in the next verse, because the hand goes back in.

Genesis 38:29-30

The unmarked child breaks out first and is named Pharez, a breach, and the one wearing the scarlet thread follows him as Zarah. That is the fifth time in Genesis that the younger comes ahead of the elder, after Abel, Isaac and Jacob, and before Ephraim receives the greater blessing under crossed hands at 48:14. The elders of Bethlehem bless Boaz by this house at Ruth 4:12, the line of David is traced from Pharez at Ruth 4:18, and Matthew opens his gospel by naming Pharez and Zara of Tamar.