Judah's Dysfunctional Family

Genesis 38

Genesis 38: 6-7, NIV Judah got a wife for Er, his firstborn, and her name was Tamar. But Er, Judah’s firstborn, was wicked in the Lord’s sight; so the Lord put him to death.

What?!?! Genesis 38 apparently jumps in time, leaving Joseph’s journey into slavery to learn about his brother Judah’s marriage and children. Judah apparently left his brothers shortly after Joseph was sold into slavery, and married a Canaanite woman, having many children.

Judah finds a wife for Er, but in the very next sentence, given above, he is killed because God found him wicked. No reason is given.

I took a look at the Torah to see how it compared.

Genesis 38, 607, JPS Judah got a wife for Er his first-born; her name was Tamar. But Er, Judah’s first-born, was displeasing to the Lord, and the Lord took his life.

This is almost worse. Er simply displeased God, and was put to death for it.

After Er’s death, Judah asks Onan to sleep with Tamar, to fulfill his duty as brother-in-law by producing offspring for his now-deceased brother. This is known as Levirate Law.

In ancient Israelite society, a man was forbidden from marrying his brother’s wife, with one exception. If his brother died without having a son, then that man would be obligated to impregnate his widowed sister-in-law. If a son is born, that child would be the deceased brother’s heir. This is the Levirate Law.

Onan refused, and “whenever he lay with his brother’s wife, he spilled his semen on the ground to keep from producing offspring for his brother” (Gen: 38:9). God viewed this action as wicked, and put Onan to death. Randomly, many religious conservatives have used this story to support their reasons for believing that masturbation is a sin.

Time passes, and we find Tamar casting off her widow’s clothes to pull a trick on Judah. She dresses up as a prostitute, with her face covered, and he sleeps with her. When, three months later, Judah is told that Tamar is guilty of prostitution, he orders her to be burnt to death. Why is it okay for a man to sleep with a prostitute, but the woman is the only one of the pair that must be killed?

Luckily for Tamar, she kept evidence of who she slept with, and Judah relents, recognizing, “she is more righteous than I, since I wouldn’t give her to my son Shelah.” Odd logic. She goes on to give birth to twins.

This is one messed up family tree. And, as we will find out in the New Testament, one of these twins, born via incest and prostitutions, has a well-known descendant. Named Jesus.

Genesis 36

This chapter is mostly genealogy, so I’d like to take a moment to look at the different ways Judaism views the story of Jacob, a story which will take us to the end of Bereishit (Genesis). Kabbalistic traditions are definitely in the minority amongst Jews, but I found the Kabbalah perspective interesting, and included it here.

From the point of view of the Jewish tradition, it is not the historical Jacob (if there is one) that matters most, but Jacob as he appears in Genesis as the progenitor of the twelve tribes of Israel. It is believed to be a moot point whether or not the narrator(s) of Genesis approve of Jacob’s actions and behavior. There is certainly much Jewish commentary that disapproves of Jacob’s deceptions, and his claim to birthright. However, in rabbinic literature, Jacob is made to represent the Jewish people as a whole, and the conflict between Jacob and Esau has been interpreted as the love-hate relationship between Rome and the Jews. Later in history, this relationship is seen as a symbol of the relationship between Christianity (Esau) and Judaism (Jacob).

In Kabbalistic doctrine of the Sefirot, and the Zohar text, each of the patriarchs represent one of the ten Sefirot. Abraham is the “pillar of loving-kindness”; Isaac, “the pillar of judgement”; and Jacob the “pillar of truth”, since truth is arrived at when apparently contradictory principles are reconciled.

The Kabbalah Sefirot.

Biblical Geneaology

Going back to the genealogy, we find that Esau’s wives don’t match up with previous chapters. In Genesis 26, Esau marries Judith and Basemath. In Genesis 28 he marries Ishmael’s daughter Mahalath.

Now, in Genesis 36, the order of the names of the wives is Adah, Aholibamah, and Basemath. Basemath is stated to be the daughter of Ishmael, whereas in Genesis 28, Basemath was a Hittite, and Mahalath was a daughter of Ishmael.

Confused? Yep, me too.

Many Christian commentators hold the view that yes, there are variations that are not easily accounted for, but they are not important enough to waste time thinking about. In other words, just sweep these inconsistencies under the rug and forget about it.

One aspect of the genealogy that stands out is Amalek, one of the chiefs of Edom descended from Eliphaz, firstborn son of Esau. If we recall, back in Genesis 14, the Amalekites were destroyed back during the time of Abraham. But here, turns out the founder of the Amalekites is Abraham’s great-grandson, who was not alive all those years ago! Quite a conundrum.

The Tower of Babel...and more Genealogy

Construction of the Tower of Babel, painted by Lucas van Valckenborch, 1594.

Genesis 11

The Tower of Babel, in Genesis 11, has been used by religious conservatives, both Jewish and Christian, to explain the myriad number of languages that have existed on Earth. I believed in this story, up until I started taking anthropology classes in college and began to learn about how languages evolve from each other over extended periods of time. Linguistic evidence does not support the idea that humanity was ever united by a single language, or that the world’s languages suddenly appeared at the same time.

Genesis 11:1-8, NIV “Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

In the Old Testament, Babel is synonymous with Babylon…and Babylon is part of the Babylonian empire that would wreak havoc on Israel and the Israelites in the 6^th century BCE. Considering the way Israelites were treated by the Babylonians, it is not surprising that the city becomes the centerpiece of a story about greed and having too much ambition.

Another problematic part of this story is the use of the word “us”. Let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other. In my opinion, this is another snippet that shows that ancient Israelites, before they formalized monotheistic Judaism, believed in multiple gods.

Genesis 11 concludes with more detailed genealogy, ending with Abram, his wife Sarai, Abram’s brother Nahor, and his wife Milcah. A little bit of incest going on in this family tree, since Milcah is actually married to her uncle; her father is Abram and Nahor’s brother Haran. Terah, Abram’s father, took him, Sarai, and Lot and left Ur of the Chaldeans to go to Canaan. However, they decided to settle in Haran, for a reason not specified.

The writers of Genesis refer to Abram’s birthplace as “Ur of the Chaldees”, but the Chaldeans did not appear in Mesopotamia until early in the first millennium BCE. This is long after the estimates of when Abram lived (if he was a real person), which place him in the historical record between 2000 and 1500 BCE.

Table of Nations

Genesis 9:22-29 and Genesis 10

Genesis 9:22-25, NIV “Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father’s nakedness and told his two brothers outside. But Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it across their shoulders; then they walked in backward and covered their father’s nakedness. Their faces were turned the other way so that they would not see their father’s nakedness.

When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what his youngest son had done to him, he said,

“Cursed by Canaan!

The lowest of slaves

Will he be to his brothers.”

What happened in the tent?

Ambiguity at its finest. A straightforward reading shows Ham witnessing his father naked, walking out, and gossiping about it to his two brothers. So why the severe reaction from Noah? There is no shortage of theories about what is really going on here.

·      Ham castrated Noah

·      Ham sodomized Noah

·      Ham actually slept with Noah’s wife, and Ham’s son Canaan was born out of that interlude.

·      Ham did not avert his eyes fast enough.

·      Ham is a major gossip, and Noah grew tired of it.

Whatever the reason may be, the end result is the Curse of Ham given by patriarch Noah. The story’s original objective was to justify the way ancient Israelites treated Canaanites. In more modern times, the Curse of Ham has also been interpreted as an explanation for black skin, and justification for the African slave trade.

I am beginning to see how easy it is to twist the Bible’s words to one’s own advantage.

The 1st century Jewish-Roman historian, Flavius Josephus was one of the first people who tried to
assign known ethnicities to the names listed in Genesis 10. The map above is his work. 

Genesis 10

Noah's Descendants, According to Genesis 10. 

Genesis 10 reads like a mythological account of the creation of many of the first civilizations, all claimed to be founded by the descendants of the sons of Noah. There are many ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia that make an appearance in this geneology.

According to the Bible, Nimrod (son of Cush, who was the son of Canaan, who was the son of Ham-the disgraced son of Noah) founded the cities of Babylon, Erech (also known as Uruk), Akkad, and Calneh. He then continued on to Assyria.

Many of the cities mentioned are found in the archaeological record. The world’s first cities were built in Mesopotamia; the land between the Tigris and Euphrates in what is now Iraq.

	Biblical Record	Archaeological and Historical Record
Uruk (Erech)	Founded by Nimrod, the mighty warrior	The first city built by the Sumerians, a group of people that arrived in Sumer around 5000 BCE. Uruk was built by the Euphrates River around 3100 BCE. This occurred at the same time as the unification of two separate kingdoms in northern Africa that formed the start of the Egyptian civilization.
Akkad	Mentioned once in Genesis 10:10, another city founded by Nimrod.	The existence of Akkad is only known from textual sources, its location has yet to be identified. It is mentioned more than 160 times in Akkadian cuneiform sources. Akkad was the capital of the Akkadian empire. In 2350 BCE, King Sargon from Akkad conquers the area of Sumer, including Uruk.
Babylon	Gen 10:10 Founded by Nimrod. However, in Gen. 10:16, the Amorites are claimed to be descended from Canaan (who would have been an uncle to Nimrod).	Babylon was founded by the Amorites, a people from Syria who moved into Mesopotamia around 1900 BCE, and Babylon became the chief city of the Amorites.
Hittites	Sons of Canaan. They make a reappearance later in the Bible.	The Hitittes flourished in central Anatolia (modern day Turkey) between 1600 and 1200 BCE. The center of their kingdom was Hattusas.
Nineveh	City built by Nimrod after he went to the land of Assyria.	City built around 883-859 BCE by the Assyrians.