Judah

Judah's first recorded speech in the Joseph account asks what profit there would be in killing Joseph, and proposes selling him instead. The others agree. Twenty pieces of silver change hands. What Judah weighed in that moment is left for the reader to judge from his own words.

The chapter describes the traders in more than one way, and it is worth reading carefully rather than tidying up. Verse 25 has a caravan of Ishmaelites approaching. Verse 28 mentions Midianite traders and then says the brothers sold Joseph to the Ishmaelites. Genesis uses both descriptions and does not explain the relation between them, so Audela does not reduce Judah's proposal to a sale to one named group.

Genesis presents this as the lesser of two crimes, not as a rescue. Joseph is still sold. The brothers still bring the bloodied coat to their father and let him believe a wild animal has eaten his son. Judah lives with that for years, and Genesis records no word from him about it during those years.

Genesis 38 stands between two portions of the Joseph account. That placement is a plain feature of the text; whether the writer intended it to make a point is an interpretation, and it is treated in the notes rather than stated here as Scripture. What the chapter itself does is follow Judah away from his family into Canaanite company, into a marriage the text does not comment on, and into the deaths of his two eldest sons, both of which Scripture attributes to their own wickedness rather than to Tamar.

Then comes Judah's own wrong. He tells his widowed daughter-in-law to wait at her father's house until his third son grows up, and the text tells us what he was actually thinking: he feared this son would die too. He never sends for her. She is left a widow with no husband, no child and no standing, and the man responsible for correcting that is the one who arranged it.

Tamar acts. She disguises herself, waits on the road, and keeps Judah's signet, bracelets and staff as proof of who has fathered her child. Genesis reports what she did without commending the method; nothing in the chapter presents deception or prostitution as a course to imitate.

Three months later Judah hears that his daughter-in-law is pregnant and orders her burned. It is the most damning moment in the chapter: the man who withheld his son from her, and who had gone to a roadside prostitute himself, calls for her execution. Then the pledge is produced. In Genesis 38:26 Judah declares Tamar more in the right than himself and names the thing he had withheld, and Genesis adds that he did not touch her again. Read the verse in your own translation; the wording there is the wording that matters.

That statement is the only verdict the chapter gives, and it is a comparison between two people rather than a rule for behaviour. It is also the first thing Judah is recorded as admitting.

The chapter ends with twins. Perez, the younger by the account of the birth, is the son the rest of Scripture follows, and Matthew names both him and his mother in the genealogy of Jesus.

This is worth pausing over before any application is drawn. The line to David does not run through Judah's marriage. It runs through the account Judah himself called less righteous than his daughter-in-law's conduct.

Years later famine drives the family to Egypt, and the Egyptian official they must satisfy is the brother they sold. When Jacob refuses to let Benjamin go, Reuben offers his own sons as a guarantee, and Jacob ignores him. Judah offers himself instead: let the boy go with him, and let his father hold him personally answerable for the boy. Read his words in Genesis 43:8-9.

It is a small thing on the page and a large thing in the story. The brother who once turned a brother into money now puts himself up as the security for one.

When Benjamin is accused, Judah speaks the longest speech in Genesis. Most of it is about his father: the old man's love for this youngest son, the son already lost, and what the loss of a second would do to him. Then he asks to be kept as a slave so that the boy can go home.

Genesis does not narrate a change of heart anywhere between chapter 38 and chapter 44. It shows a man who sold a brother into slavery for silver asking to become a slave so a brother can go free, and leaves the two scenes standing next to each other. Whether we may call that repentance, and on what grounds, is treated below rather than assumed here.

At the end of his life Jacob speaks over each son. The first three are dealt with by their deeds: Reuben for his father's bed, Simeon and Levi for the slaughter at Shechem. Then Jacob comes to the fourth and speaks of a lion, the obedience of peoples, and a ruler's staff that will not leave Judah. English translations differ over part of verse 10, so read it in your own.

Chronicles later states plainly what Genesis leaves implicit: the birthright belonged to Joseph's sons, and the rule belonged to Judah. Nothing in either text says Judah earned it.

By the wilderness census Judah is the largest tribe, camped on the east side of the tabernacle and first to move. When the tribes ask who shall go up first after Joshua's death, the answer is Judah. Its territory holds both Bethlehem and, later, Jerusalem.

The name becomes a place and then a nation: the kingdom of Judah, and eventually the word from which Jew comes.

Four generations after Perez, Boaz marries Ruth in Bethlehem and their son Obed is grandfather to David. The promise Nathan brings to David of a house and a throne established for ever is spoken to a man of Judah's tribe, in Judah's territory, from Perez's line.

Psalm 78 states the choosing as God's act rather than the tribe's achievement, and puts Judah and David in the same sentence.

The kingdom splits and the line narrows to one tribe. Then Jerusalem falls, the temple burns, and the people of Judah are carried into Babylon. Matthew's genealogy names that break rather than smoothing it over.

Some return. Micah, writing before the exile, has already said which town in Judah the ruler will come out of.

Matthew opens the New Testament with a list, and Judah is in its third line, with Tamar named beside him. Hebrews argues from that tribal descent when it explains that Jesus was not a priest by Levitical succession. Revelation takes Jacob's lion and puts it on Christ.

The words of Jacob's blessing and the words of the last book of the Bible meet on the same person. Between them lie roughly forty generations of the history above, faithful and unfaithful alike.