Take a moment to read the entire chapter of Genesis 38 before reading the devotional below.
Sex is complicated, and today’s chapter has a lot of messed up stuff in it. First of all, Judah marries a Canaanite woman, showing his willingness to stray to other gods. Then, Judah’s son grows up and becomes so wicked that God kills him. The woman he was supposed to marry, Tamar, would by custom become the wife of the next brother in line. Judah’s second son wasn’t too keen on that, so he practiced ancient birth control methods to avoid getting her pregnant. God saw that as evil and killed him too.
Tamar is fed up at this point and takes matters into her own hands. She dresses up as a prostitute and Judah approaches her and sleeps with her. Then in an all-too-common, blame-the-woman scenario, Tamar becomes pregnant and Judah is outraged that she was prostituting herself (until he is found out to be the one that slept with her). Tamar gives birth to twins.
Here’s your freedom for today:
God brings evil to light to vindicate the oppressed.
It is amazing to me just how long patriarchal systems have lasted. Thousands of years later in a totally different culture, we still see men sexually exploiting women and blaming them for being promiscuous. Judah doesn’t even consider confessing until he gets caught with the closest they had to DNA evidence. But in this story God kills two wicked men and sees to it that Tamar gets to have children, one of whom is noted to be the ancestor of Boaz in the book of Ruth. This line extends all the way to Jesus himself, as we see from the geneology in Matthew 1. God was setting up a long but important redemption process and making sure that the wrongs that were done to Tamar would not erase her from Israel’s history.