Page 32 - Pentateuch

As with so much in his life, these last years are a mixture. In the middle of the pain and frustration, God
again speaks to Jacob. He revisits Bethel, getting rid of the household gods of his wives. God promises once
more to bless Jacob’s descendants, reaffirming him with the name Israel. He is a deceiver no more, yet he
has testing and refining to go through to the end of his life. Now, however, his relationship with God is
open, whereas before YHWH stood “off-stage” using uncles and mandrakes and livestock to nudge Jacob to
Himself.

Joseph is loved by his father more than his brothers. Already,
trouble is brewing, not unlike in the family of Jacob, who loved
Rachel more than Leah (28:31). Joseph has at least two dreams
and spills the contents of them to his brothers. They will bow
to him. This second insult does not go well with his siblings. At
the first opportunity, they decide to eliminate Joseph. First,
they are going to kill him, attributing his death to wild animals.
One brother objects, so they put him in a dry cistern and
eventually sell him to a passing caravan of merchants on their
way to Egypt. Twenty shekels of silver are exchanged, and the
brothers return to their father Jacob with a bloody robe to
Fig. 20: Ancient cistern in Edom near Petra
substantiate their story of a ferocious animal. The chapter
ends with Jacob grieving and Joseph being sold to an official of
Pharaoh (chapter 37).

Our minds naturally want to fill in some gaps. We can imagine a father doting on a young son. We can see
these brothers muttering among themselves about their uppity brother. We have no trouble hearing
Joseph down in the well pleading with his brothers as they sit about eating their lunch. We speculate about
motives. Reuben, the eldest, plans to rescue Joseph and take him back to Dad. Judah comes up with the
sales idea. From beginning to end, all are portrayed as typical humans, sinners like everyone else.

The account now shifts to a strange series of events ending in a birth as a result of incest. Judah, the fourth
son of Jacob by Leah, marries and has three sons, Er, Onan, and Shelah. The first son marries a Canaanite
woman named Tamar. We must pause here to remember how much time has gone by. In six short verses, a
generation is born, and the eldest is old enough to marry. Moses has obviously left out a lot of events. He is
targeting something important.

As history continues, Er is killed by God for general wickedness. Tamar is promised to the second son
following the practice of levirate marriage. Then, Onan does not want to “raise offspring” for his brother
and practices a form of birth control. YHWH kills him, too, leaving the youngest son as the next man
responsible for a new generation. Tamar understands her situation and decides to take measures into her
own hands. Posing as a prostitute, she gets Judah, her father-in-law, to have sex with her without knowing
who she is. She is pregnant and avoids execution at the command of Jacob by producing proof of his
fatherhood. Twins are born at the end of this happy family story, Perez and Zerah.

We scratch our heads over this lengthy chapter of lust. Why in the world did Moses include such stuff? We
can’t use this in Sunday school. No preacher is ever going to work through this chapter on a Sunday
morning. How does this fit into the ongoing account of God’s work in Genesis? We can work through the
concept of “levirate marriage,” strange as it is to modern minds. A man is to marry the widow of his
deceased brother to father a child who would “carry on the name of his deceased father and eventually

30