Now we need to answer a seventh question: “So what?” How did the answers we got when we asked Dr. DeRouchie’s six questions help us grasp the main point of Genesis 38?
Well, the answers to the questions “Who?” “When?” and “Where?” hint that before they enter the Promised Land, Israel is being warned about the dangers of intermarrying with Canaanites (see Deut 7:1–5). That’s because they were God’s “treasured possession,” “holy” to him, and needed to separate themselves from all idolatry (Deut 7:6). They need to distance themselves from God’s enemies and destroy them, not adopting their customs but remaining faithful to their covenant Lord (see Deut 18:9–14).
But I think that the answer to the question “What?” is paramount for our goal of rightly interpreting the text in its historical context. Judah has basically forsaken God’s covenant and endangered the future of the line of Abraham – the line of promise and blessing. If God is going to fulfill his promise of blessing the nations through Abraham’s descendants, he must do it through grace!
And then Judah acts with heartless cruelty toward his helpless daughter-in-law, Tamar. He had a responsibility to care for her, but he abandoned her to a life of widowhood and barrenness.
But Tamar took matters into her own hands to secure her future, to continue the family line. Yes, she deceived Judah, but I like how the NET Bible describes her action:
Though deceptive, it was a desperate and courageous act. For Tamar it was within her rights; she did nothing that the law did not entitle her to do.
—NET Bible, Genesis 38:26, footnote 50.
There's the key! "It was within her rights."
Judah sinned, the NET Bible continues, “because he thought he was going to a prostitute.”¹ But Tamar knew that Judah was one of the possible men who could marry her and provide an heir for his family. She acted wisely, bravely, and was used by God to continue the family of blessing. In fact, Jesus was descended from one of the twins that were born because of Tamar’s uprightness! (Gen 38:29–30; Matt 1:3)
It is also fascinating to see how Tamar’s triumphant presentation of Judah’s “credit cards,” so to speak, when she was about to be burned alive as a fornicator (38:24), began a process of transformation in Judah’s life. He admitted that he had sinned (38:26), and by the time we get to Joseph’s trial of his brothers, it is Judah who offers himself to his father as “a pledge of [Benjamin’s] safety” (43:9), and who makes one of the most beautiful speeches in the Bible (and the longest in the book of Genesis), begging Joseph to keep him as a slave in Egypt instead of Benjamin (44:18–34).² He has returned to the family not just physically but spiritually; he has become a true descendant of Abraham.
May God help us turn away from sin, to be a holy people for our God who made a new covenant with us, to live courageously for the proclamation of the gospel and the forming of a people for Jesus’ glory.