How to Understand and Teach: Genesis 38 (Judah & Tamar)
Since “all Scripture is God-breathed,” we ought to teach the whole counsel of God… including those passages we are tempted to avoid because they’re so tricky. We want to give a few examples about how to teach tough passages in order to encourage you to teach the whole counsel of God. Read the rest of the series here: Teaching Tough Passages.
One of the things I love most about our faith is how accessible it is. The clarity of Scripture allows its messages to be understood in every culture in the world. At the same time, the Bible is still a record of historic events that occurred in specific contexts. One of the challenges I find when communicating the Bible with teenagers is emphasizing both the message of a passage and its historical context. Tying those two things together in your teaching can be quite difficult, especially in a passage like Genesis 38 (the story of Judah and Tamar).
Here are some principles for approaching a passage like this:
Helping Students Prepare for the Text
While I am grateful for the scholars who introduced chapters and verses to Scripture, this is one of the few passages where those divisions don’t serve the reader well. This text cuts the wider story of Joseph abruptly in half, suddenly shifting to his older brother Judah. For students to experience this story as intended for the original audience, they need to see the stories in Genesis sequentially, interrupting Joseph’s narrative rather than teaching chapter 38 as a stand-alone story.
If we situate it within that wider narrative, we are reminded that the entire story of the patriarchs was one of both failure and faithfulness, sometimes by the same individual. The patriarchs are not always heroes but rather present God with opportunities to display his unwavering faithfulness in the face of their weakness. These are traits the original audience would know all too well. As such, priming students to look for God’s faithfulness and commitment to His people in a text like Genesis 38 is important – especially when a gracious and loving God can seem absent.
Helping Students Look at the Text
Helping students keep these redemptive themes in mind is important because Genesis 38 can otherwise become a classic case of “missing the forest for the trees.” There are several cultural elements in the text that students will struggle to understand, and it will be important to help them empathize with the text’s audience rather than just being weirded out. Let’s look at a couple of these potential potholes:
38:7 – and the LORD put him to death. Students may gloss over this, but some may be caught off guard by the seeming lack of grace the Lord shows here. The reality is that we don’t know what sins Er committed, but we know wicked people experience God’s judgment. It is possible to read this as an act of compassion by God towards Tamar, who would have had to endure an evil husband otherwise.
38:8 – the duty of a brother-in-law. Students usually freak out here because this is a foreign concept. In their day, property would remain within a family, being transferred to the eldest male. Even when land would be rented out or sold, it would eventually return to the family that was “planted” there by God. The only exception to this was if someone died without a male heir. Thus, it was dangerous to allow branches of one’s family tree to “die out.” The practice here of the brother impregnating his dead brother’s wife was seen as a caring and sacrificial act. The brother would be committing to care for the widow and her child without gaining the benefits of the child being his heir. Today’s challenge is for us to help students not get stuck on the strange and almost incestuous custom, but to see how it reflects a commitment to the family. If students see this, they will understand why it was truly wicked for the other brothers to reject Tamar.
38:9 – waste the semen on the ground. Sadly, this text is often wrongly used as a prooftext against masturbation. That isn’t the point here. What is being described is more akin to what we would call the “pull-out method” of family planning today. The point is that Onan is faking his service to God, his dead brother, and Tamar, engaging in marital relations without the benefits of pregnancy, producing an heir.
If students can make it here, they will see how all the men in the story fail to be faithful to God and their family – especially to Tamar. This is an important emphasis. The final landmine in the story is the way Tamar reconciles the situation. She realizes Judah is not committed to the family line continuing through her, so she plots to be impregnated by Judah himself by masquerading as a temple prostitute.
Judah’s lack of godliness has already been shown by this point, both in taking a wife from a foreign people and by wronging Tamar. So it isn’t as shocking as it should be for him to celebrate a successful farming task by worshipping gods of the area who are associated with harvest and fertility, through sex with their temple prostitute. Tamar takes advantage of this, gets pregnant, and is able to avoid Judah’s own death sentence by revealing him to be the father. She finally has twins, before the text shifts back to Joseph.
Helping Students Understand the Text
The significance of this text has many layers. The original readers would have been reminded of God’s faithfulness to them to preserve them, even in the midst of such sin. The shocking nature of this story is part of the message. Judah serves as a kind of negative foil for Joseph who (unlike Judah) resists the sexual temptation and remains committed to his family. Readers would also recognize the similarities between Perez and Zerah’s birth and Jacob and Esau’s birth, a reminder that God’s gracious hand was in this story even in its unorthodox unfolding.
Another meaning would come later through the story of Ruth. Ruth is likewise a story of a pagan woman committed to God’s family, and a relative “redeeming” her by giving her protection and a child. This man, Boaz, is explicitly connected in Ruth 4:18-22 as the direct descendant of Perez, Judah’s child of infidelity. The author of Ruth begins the genealogy of Ruth 4 with Perez instead of Jacob or Abraham, thereby showcasing God’s redemption. Even with a very broken family background, God’s faithfulness to Tamar’s lineage continues. Judah’s descendants would produce a man who is basically presented as the “anti-Judah”: Boaz, and eventually, the great King David.
God’s faithfulness doesn’t stop there! Matthew continues to highlight Judah, Perez, Boaz, and David, and then continues to connect this royal line to Jesus, the Son of God Himself. Jesus came from this same broken mess of a family. Further, Matthew highlights multiple women in Jesus’ line who are also either foreign or sexually “tainted” in some way. This has multiple connotations, highlighting God’s redemptive work, displaying God’s ultimate plan of ‘grafting in’ the nations to his people, and showcasing the importance of women in redemption history.
Helping Students Apply the Text
Here are some of the applications I would make when teaching Genesis 38 to students.
God is faithful to His people and His plan to save. No matter how crazy the world is even now, his plan isn’t being threatened. God didn’t forget or abandon Tamar in the abuse and mistreatment she received. He provided for her and used her descendants to carry out his plan of salvation for all people.
That faithfulness comes only because of God’s love, not people’s obedience. Judah doesn’t deserve his role in David or Jesus’ line. But even Judah’s sin can’t stop God from being who He is – and neither can ours.
Some important tangential applications:
While God doesn’t ‘approve’ of Tamar’s method of getting pregnant, He used it for His glory. God brings life from complex family situations.
Matthew’s use of Tamar along with Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary in his genealogy subverts many stereotypes about what faithfulness to God looks like. The foreign heritage and the negative sexual reputations of several of them are meant to communicate this idea clearly.
On a personal note, my eldest son is named Judah. While he was a young child, we only emphasized the “Lion of Judah” identity of Jesus to him. But now my son asks me often for more detail about the life of Judah as he gets older. I’m glad I get to share with him that his name is a reminder that God’s people aren’t perfect, but their Redeemer is, and that although we may fail, He will remain committed to his people forever. Hopefully, our students can see this glorious truth in a difficult passage like this.