Judah And Tamar and The Seed of the Woman (Part One)
By Dr. Barry Waugh - Posted at The Heidelblog:
The book of Genesis is the book of beginnings. It recounts God’s inspired and authoritative record of the very good beginning of the heavens, earth, plants, creatures, Sabbath, and man as male and female; it also provides the miserable events of Satan’s temptation of Eve, then Adam, the fall, and curses on Satan, the ground, creatures, and our first parents and their seed. Derek Kidner observed, “The man and the woman have been sold a false idea of evil, as something beyond good; of wisdom, as sophistication; and now of greatness, as greed.” The glorious garden of Eden would no longer have Adam and Eve walking its paths in intimate fellowship with God because their sin resulted in the fall and ensuing eviction without reentry. What a situation! Was there any hope for Adam and Eve and those coming from them by ordinary generation who share guilt for the first sin?Along with the curses resulting from the fall is God’s covenantal promise that one would come from the seed of the woman to bruise Satan’s head at the cost of his own bruised heel (Gen 3:15). This promise required a single line of successive generations beginning with Adam and Eve, then terminating with Jesus the Messiah, the Christ. Why do genealogies have such a significant part in the Old Testament? The central reason is that they show the succession of generations from the first parents to Christ, and they provide documentation for God’s fulfillment of his promise to Abraham that he would beget many nations and the sons of Jacob would inhabit the land of Canaan. The seed plot extends from the curse to the Christ, including a central but unexpected occurrence within the sequence associated with events surrounding Judah and his daughter-in-law Tamar, as recounted in Genesis 38.
But before considering the Judah–Tamar narrative, some insight from the chapter preceding Genesis 38 is required to provide context. It tells of Jacob’s son Joseph, whose dreams revealed he would come to rule over his brothers and father (Gen 37:5–8, 10–11). As we would expect, the family did not receive well the message of these dreams. There are few individuals who would savor being ruled by a child or a sibling. Even though Jacob loved Joseph more than any of his brothers and showed that love by giving him a fine robe with many colors (37:3), he found Joseph’s dreams offensive, as did the brothers, because it meant they would come to bow before him. The brothers were intensely jealous of Joseph and loathed him, so when Jacob sent Joseph to visit the brothers pasturing the sheep, they saw him coming from a distance and conspired to kill him (37:18–21).
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Part Two: