Biblion Bible Commentary
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Judah, Tamar, and three sons
Genesis 38:1-11
1 At that time, Judah went down from his brothers, and visited a certain Adullamite, whose name was Hirah. · WEB
The narrative breaks off from Joseph to follow Judah down into Canaan, and a widow is left waiting for a husband who is never sent.
The chapter is an interruption and it is deliberate. Joseph has just been sold into Egypt, and the narrative turns aside for thirty verses to follow a different brother — the one who proposed the sale.
The placement makes a comparison that neither chapter states. Judah went down from his brothers, married a Canaanite woman without a word about it from anyone, and settled among them. Joseph went down to Egypt in chains and, in the next chapter, refuses a Canaanite's wife's proposition on the ground that it would be sin against God. Two brothers go down at the same moment. One is in a foreign country by choice and does as it does; the other is there against his will and does not.
The marriage itself breaks the family's one firm rule. Abraham made a servant swear an oath to prevent it; Isaac commanded Jacob against it; Esau's Canaanite wives grieved his parents. Judah simply saw the daughter of a certain Canaanite man, took her, and had three sons by her.
What happens to those sons is reported with a bluntness unusual even for Genesis. Er, Judah's firstborn, was wicked in Yahweh's sight. So Yahweh killed him. No explanation of the wickedness is given, and no explanation is offered for the sentence. The text is willing to say that God took a life and to leave the ground of it unstated.
Then the levirate duty, which the law later codified Deuteronomy 25:5–6 and which is plainly older than the law, since Judah invokes it as a known obligation. A brother of a man who died childless was to father a son who would count as the dead man's heir, so that a widow was not left destitute and a line was not extinguished.
Onan's refusal is described with precision, and the text states the motive rather than leaving it to be guessed: Onan knew that the offspring wouldn't be his, and he acted lest he should give offspring to his brother. What was evil was not an act in isolation but a deliberate scheme — he took what the arrangement gave him and withheld what it required, so that his brother's estate would fall to him instead. He is using a widow while defrauding a dead man, and the thing which he did was evil in Yahweh's sight, and he killed him also.
And then Judah, who has now buried two sons, does the calculation that drives the rest of the chapter. He sends Tamar back to her father's house as a widow, until Shelah, my son, is grown up — and the narrator tells us what he actually thought: Lest he also die, like his brothers.
He has decided that the woman is the problem. He will not risk his third son on her, and he will not release her either, because a formal release would let her remarry and cost him the connection. So he parks her in her father's house indefinitely, in widow's clothing, with a promise he does not intend to keep.
Tamar goes and waits, and the chapter's next scene begins with the words she saw that Shelah was grown up, and she wasn't given to him as a wife.
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