Respecting the Patriarchs: Judah

 

Why are King David and Jesus Christ born of the line of Judah? Judah was not the oldest of Israel’s (Jacob’s) sons- that was Reuben. Nor was he Israel’s favorite son- that was Joseph. Nor were Judah’s sons blessed by Israel in Genesis- that honor went to Joseph’s sons Ephraim and Manasseh. The line from which the Kings rose did not even come from Judah’s legitimate son Shelah. 

Why?

If Jacob in Scripture is a lying cheat, Judah is practically a demon. 

By the time of Judah’s birth, his mother Leah had given up hope that her husband would ever love her. “Judah” means praise, and his mother said “This time I will praise the Lord” instead of basing the name off of the hope that her husband would finally love her, as with her older sons Reuben and Levi. 

If you thought that this name would make Judah “true and teach the way of God truthfully and care for no man, for you do not regard the position of men”, let’s just say you’d be disappointed. 

While Judah is not specifically named, it is likely that he participated in deceiving the men of Shechem then plundering the city after his brothers Simeon and Levi slaughtered the men in retaliation for the rape of their sister Dinah. 

We next see Judah encouraging his brothers to sell Joseph into slavery as a way of profiting while escaping the guilt that would have come with his murder. 

Judah grows up to take a Canaanite wife, never a good sign in that he refuses the great effort his father and grandfather went to avoid taking Canaanite wives. He also mirrors the life of Esau, whose Canaanite wives made his parents miserable. Sure enough, his first son Er is so wicked that God slays him, and his second is also slain by God after giving Scripture readers an example of contraceptive sex. Here Judah is a type of the nation of Israel, leading the family into wickedness by conforming to the ways of the surrounding pagan peoples. 

Judah compounds a disastrous situation by refusing to give his third son Shelah to his daughter-in-law Tamar, who was entitled to support and the hope of a family after losing her first two husbands and was unlikely to find it elsewhere. Judah does this out of fear that Shelah will die, though Er and Onan’s deaths were due to their own wickedness and not Tamar. In this, he is a foil to God who does not withhold his only begotten son from the world. 

By this point, Judah’s wife has died and so he has a tryst with a woman who appears to be a prostitute but who is actually his daughter-in-law in disguise. 

On finding out soon after that Tamar is with child out of wedlock, Judah’s first outburst is that she should be burned. This is a wicked, and likely defensive reaction from a man who had just spent a night with a prostitute three months earlier. Moreover, Judah knew she was with child (children, it turned out), so he is thoughtlessly condemning her children to death as well. 

Much like Ross’s red sweater in the tv series Friends, Tamar shows the cord and staff of the man who fathered her children as she is hauled out for burning on her father-in-law’s orders. 

After a life of lying, plundering, selling his own flesh and blood, abysmal fatherhood, and lewd bedroom behavior, Judah makes like the Prodigal Son and comes to his senses as he hits rock bottom. As with the Prodigal Son, repentance involves a return to his father.

While he could have watched the primary witness of his sin burn, he publicly acknowledges his sin, and even admits that Tamar was more righteous than him for he not only committed fornication but caused the situation by refusing to give his son Shelah to Tamar in marriage. Here Judah reverses the response of Adam: rather than blaming the woman who sinned with him, he takes the responsibility upon himself and proclaims the woman to be more righteous. 

Would any of us have the courage to confess such a thing publicly?

It is the firstborn of the resulting twins, Perez, who becomes the ancestor of the kings of Judah and the Messiah according to Matthew and Luke. Matthew’s genealogy of Christ mentions Tamar by name. 

Judah does not lay with Tamar again. The next time we see him, he personally guarantees his younger brother Benjamin’s safety to Jacob on the journey to Egypt for grain, then offers himself as a slave to Joseph to release an imprisoned Benjamin back to his father Jacob. In this, Judah is atoning for his selling of Joseph into slavery and the devastation that came to Jacob afterward. Would we volunteer ourselves for slavery to save our brother and to preserve our father from mourning, even after our father lavished favoritism on said brother?

When Jacob comes to dwell in Egypt, he sends Judah to Joseph before him. Judah now has the authority of speaking and acting for his father and in a sense is the head of household. 

Next, Jacob pronounces an astounding prophetic blessing on Judah, in contrast to the curses leveled at Judah’s three elder brothers: “The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his legs, until he comes to whom it belongs, and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples.” 

It is not the most righteous son, nor the favorite, nor the eldest, nor the most successful in the world whose line gives rise to God made man, but the penitent.