Not Often Heard: Judah and Tamar
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
February 9, 2003
Genesis 38; Mark 1:29-39

[Read the Text of Genesis 38 here.]

This is the second in a series of sermons entitled "Texts Not Often Heard". It is an attempt to bring into the regular life of the church, those portions of Scripture that we either unfamiliar with, uncomfortable with, or have little experience with. And boy do we have a doozy tonight...

INTRODUCTION

When I was a kid, there was a pretty simple rule in my household, if the sun was shining, I was supposed to be outside. My parents didn't want me inside watching television all day. So, I didn't really get a chance to see a lot of television that was on during the daytime. Until I would have a cold, or be otherwise sick at home, or maybe home on winter break when it was too cold out. And then I would be acquainted with something called All My Children--my mother's favorite soap opera. And on those rare occasions, I would get glimpses into the life of Pine Valley and into the lives of all those people who lived there: Tom and Brooke, Cliff and Nina, Palmer Cortlandt and his twin brother Stewart, and of course, Erica Kane. Because my exposure to this saga was only every couple of months, it was a little confusing, because they would always be married to somebody else the next time I'd see them. This one had the child of that one. This one turned out to be the sister of that one. It's a strange reality that soap operas inhabit. I guess you could say it's the function of a limited cast and the need for a new story every day. But there's a certain particular kind of story and situation that we find in soap operas that doesn't seem to have a whole lot to do with the way our lives really work. Such that on those rare occasions when our lives get overly dramatic or overly complicated, we'll say "My life is like a soap opera."

Imagine then our confusion when we open up Holy Scripture and come across a story like what we heard earlier. It's a little bizarre. A strange story. I am sure you didn't read this one in Sunday School.

II. THE TEXT

It's a strange story. We start with Judah--one of Jacob's twelve sons. And this story comes righ after 11 of the 12 have sold one of the twelve--Joseph--into slavery in Egypt. And that episode is followed by this strange little story about Judah. And Judah moves off and lives near an Adullamite. He takes a Canaanite wife--Shua--and has three sons: Er, Onan, and Shelah. He finds a wife for his oldest son. (Already we're getting the idea that decades are passing in this story). There's something about Er that God doesn't like and he dies. We're not told what it is.

There was a custom in the ancient world that when the oldest brother dies without an heir, it is the duty of his brother to take his widow as his wife and give an heir to his dead brother. The children that belong to that marriage are not the children of the surviving brother, but are counted as children of the dead brother. Onan knows that this is no good for him. Right now, he is the oldest brother and stands to inherit the bulk of his father Judah's estate. If he gives a son to his dead brother, his share of the inheritance is diminished. Onan knows how the whole system works and he knows what he has to do so as not to get his sister-in-law pregnant. He performs what's called coitus interruptus. The text says that he spills his semen on the ground and this is where the Catholic Church, among others, gets the idea about masturbation, but that's not what's going on here. What Onan is doing is using his brother's widow for sex but not providing his dead brother with an heir. So God kills him.

Now, Judah says, 'This woman has killed two of my sons already. I'm not giving her my last one.' Judah is not perceiving his sons' fault--he thinks there is something wrong with Tamar. And so he tells her to return to her father's house and live as a widow until his third son is old enough. But he has no intention of doing that. In fact, Tamar discovers that the third son becomes old enough, but Judah hasn't done anything about it. This is problematic for her: she is a widow, and in this time and place, she needs a husband and family for her own material well-being. Judah is more concerned that his third son will die.

And so after his own wife dies and the period of mourning is over, he goes off on business. He finds a prostitute on the way. (What's also strange is that there is no judgment--the narrator of the story does not condemn Judah for using a prostitute.) The prostitute is his own daughter-in-law in disguise, wearing a veil. He sleeps with her but he doesn't have any cash on him. He says that he will give her a kid from his flock. She asks for collateral: his signet and staff. The signet is a piece of clay used to make your seal in wax. It's like his ID or his driver's license. Later on, he sends his friend with a kid to redeem the signet and staff. He sends his friend to find "the woman"--he never bothered to get her name, real or pretend. He can't find her and comes back to Judah. Judah wants to keep it quiet because he's afraid of ridicule.

It turns out that his daughter-in-law is pregnant. His reaction is fairly swift: bring her out here so that we can burn her to death. She sends to him the signet and the staff and says "Whoever owns these is the father of my baby." You can almost hear the organ music swelling in the background was we fade to commercial in our little soap opera here.

Judah does the right thing. He owns up to it and declares "This woman is more in the right than I am, because I did not give her my son." And we are told that she conceives twins: Perez and Zerah.

III. WHY WE DON’T READ THIS IN CHURCH

Why don't we hear this story in church? Well, there's deception in it, and that makes us uncomfortable. Judah tricks Tamar with regard to his youngest son, and then Tamar tricks Judah by dressing up as a prostitute and seducing her own father in law. It makes us struggle to find the moral of this story.

There's the violent and shocking punishment for Tamar's alleged prostitution: being burned to death. We are often confused and conflicted by the harsh Old Testament penalties for crimes. We don't know how to interpret them and so we skip over them a lot. There's also the strangeness of the cultural tradition of a brother marrying his dead brother's widow to provide an heir. It is so beyond our own experience that it doesn't seem to have much relevance for us today.

But we all know why we don't hear this story in church: it's because it has sex in it. That makes us more uncomfortable than anything else in the Bible. The bluntness of the language used "to go into her", can seem kind of crass and often irreligious. We're a little embarrassed by this story. Many might prefer that it weren't in the canon and that we could just continue with that charming little story about Joseph and his coat. We'd all be much happier to avoid this strange little diversion.

IV. WHY WE OUGHT TO

First, it's a good thing to get over our hang-ups about sexuality in Christianity. Just because St. Augustine had a hard time dealing with his sex life, the Western Church has struggled with sin and sex and often confused the two--assuming that sexual relations are by definition sinful. St. Augustine had a real guilty conscience. He sowed a lot of wild oats as a young man. He had a child out of wedlock with a woman he doesn't even bother to name in his Confessions. He had history as a womanizer and is the author of the infamous quote: "Lord, make me chaste... but not yet." When he was struggling to understand where sin comes from and is examining the Garden of Eden story, he concludes that original sin is created and passed down through sex. From this, we in the Western Church have this understanding that sexuality is almost inherently evil, perhaps a necessary evil. And so when we encounter such stories, we get a little embarrassed.

We have to remind ourselves that our sexuality is a gift of God. We have to remind ourselves that it's not in the act, but in the abuse and misuse of the act, that the sin lies. But it's a really big hang-up that we have in the church. Perhaps we ought to read this story if only to make ourselves uncomfortable from time to time. To make ourselves ask questions about sex and sexuality and deal with a fairly basic force in our human lives.

There's also something to be said in this story about responsibility. The real sin in the story is Judah not living up to his responsibility and his sons not living up to theirs. Perhaps this story is really about responsibility. When Judah is caught and his staff and signet are produced, he admits that he has not done the right thing. "She is more in the right than I am"--and this he says of a woman who tricked him into thinking she was a prostitute. His failure to be responsible to his daughter-in-law (and to his dead oldest son) puts him more in the wrong than Tamar's deception. He didn't do right by his own family.

Perhaps this reminds us, too, that our faith begins at home--with the very members of our family. If we cannot work it out in our responsibilities to our closest family members, how can we be expected to live out our faith in the world at large? It was once said of Justice William O. Douglas that he was a great humanitarian in the abstract but that he didn't like people. There are a large number of people who make the world their priority, but do not give enough care to the people in their lives. What good does it do to care about the rights of people halfway around the world, if your wife is a battered wife? It starts at home. Judah's righteousness begin with his own house: with his sons and his daughter-in-law. And he gets called on it--and that's why he confesses that Tamar has been more in the right.

And it says something to us about power. There's a neat little thread that runs through the Old Testament, often involving women. Rebekah, Rachel, Esther, and Rahab. They'll often use trickery to turn the tables or even the balance when it comes to confronting power. Rebekah tricks Isaac into blessing the second born son, Jacob. Society dictactes that the first-born son would. Esther tricks the Perisan king. All these tricks upset power and authority, the societal norms, the way business as usual is done. They have this curious after effect of effecting God's will. God tells Rebekah that her second born is his chosen. God reveals his plan to the women of the Old Testament, but because the cards are stacked against them that they have to do what it takes.

But it's less about the trick--it's not sanctioning deceptiveness or trickery--than it is about challenging the hierarchies of power and institutions that determine how the world works. Tamar demands respect and to be treated right. In the end, she has two children: Perez and Zerah. Perez is the ancestor of King David, and we all know who King David was the ancestor of, too. Without this strange little story stuck in the middle of Genesis, there would be no Davidic monarchy or the messianic line, no Joseph of Bethlehem, earthly father of Jesus.

V. CONCLUSION

We read this text because it tells us the story of people of faith. It teaches us things about responsibility and living out our faith. We read this text because it shakes things up. And reminds us that things need shaking up. It's good to throw a little Judah and Tamar into the mix. To challenge our complacencies about the world and our relationships in it. And to remind us that sometimes, at the end of the line, we wind up with results that are more wondrous than the crude, and even embarrassing beginnings to our stories.