Today, I am reading and commenting on Genesis 36-38.

I am not quite sure how this is going to come together.  There were a few things about today’s passage which I wanted to comment about, but I’m not sure how, or even if, they fit together.  Today’s passage says that Esau went into a land away from his brother Jacob because their possessions were too great for them to dwell together.  That land was Seir.  Yet, yesterday’s passage said that Esau was already living in Seir when Jacob returned from Paddan-aram.  I have seen commentaries which suggest that in yesterday’s passage Esau was in Seir as part of his nomadic moving his herds around and he only made it permanent after Jacob’s return.  I am hesitant to accept that resolution for this apparent contradiction.  However, I do believe that if we properly understand these two references we will discover that there is not a contradiction.

Next I want to write a few things about how Reuben responded to his brothers wanting to kill Joseph.  Reuben tried to save Joseph from his other brothers, but was not willing to call them out for wanting to kill their younger brother.  So, he suggested that rather than get blood on their hands by outright killing him, they throw him in a pit and let him starve to death.  No, Reuben did not outright say that last part, but it was understood.  Perhaps the brothers understood that throwing Joseph in the pit would allow them to change their minds later, pull him out, and send him home.  However, since Reuben did not come out and SAY that they shouldn’t kill Joseph, Judah later came up with the idea of selling Joseph into slavery.  This allowed the brothers to emotionally distance themselves one step further from killing their brother.  When Reuben came back, all his plans for saving Joseph were for naught.  Reuben was right for stopping his brothers from killing Joseph outright, but he should have confronted them with the wickedness of their plan.  We should also notice that it was Judah who came up with the idea of selling Joseph and we will want to think about what changes led to his later behavior.

Which brings me to the last account in today’s passage.  In the account of Judah and Tamar the first thing I noticed was that Judah thought Tamar was a prostitute because she had covered her face with a veil.  That makes me think about those cultures which insist that women cover their faces to avoid “tempting” men.  How do we reconcile that with a culture in which men “identified” someone as a prostitute because she covered her face?  Just a thought which makes we wonder about the cultural origins of women concealing their faces when in public.  From this same account I want to ask whether perhaps Judah’s first response to learning of Tamar’s pregnancy influenced his later behaviors.  Judah initially wanted her burned to death for her immorality.  When he learned that he was the father of her children (she was pregnant with twins), he realized that he had failed in his moral obligations worse than she had.  He had sex with a prostitute (or, so he thought) who was doing so as part of worship to an idol (again, so he thought), while she had sex with the father of her dead husbands, a man who had been supposed to marry her to his remaining son in order to provide for her, and to produce heirs for his dead sons.  I suspect that the way in which he had failed Tamar brought home to Judah his moral failings and brought about a true repentance and transformation.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.