One of the things I was asked in my oral entrance examination was about the relevance of Genesis 38 to the book. That is a good question. Why is this strange story of Judah and Tamar included in the midst of the Joseph story? Last week this came up in class and I share with you what the professor said:<\/p>\n
\nGenesis 38 appears to be an interruption in the story of Joseph. Professor believes it is a study of contrasts. Chapter 37 ends with Joseph being sold into the house of Potiphar; chapter 39 begins with the very same thing. Chapter 38 gives us the “meanwhile back at the ranch.” So the chronology is tight but it fits. (The person who figured the chronology all out was Cassuto; critics say that the events cannot fit \u2013 you cannot have Judah becoming a grandfather in the interval between the sale of Joseph and the arrival of the brothers in Egypt. But Cassuto shows how. You need to know this.) <\/p>\n
Our interest is in Joseph because he is the good guy. Professor talked about Gen 38 with Waltke. Waltke said to tell the students that Joseph’s character is flat; Judah is the interesting person, because his character develops downward and upward. Instead of seeing Judah as a foil for Joseph, which is what Professor has said for 30-some years, instead see Joseph as a foil for Judah. Of course the perfidy of Judah’s behavior would have led to the assimilation of his descendants as Canaanites, but it’s only when a Canaanite woman acted as more righteous than he that he was more ready to come back to the family and become part of the promised community. That is part of the explanation for taking the family into Egypt, where they would not assimilate. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
I’m not so sure I like the foil idea (if this suggests that Joseph is somehow less important, or there are fewer lessons to learn, then I can’t agree). I do however like the last idea – that this story shows what would have happened to the nation of Israel if the sons had not gone to Egypt – they would have assimilated with the Canaanites and there wouldn’t have been a nation. <\/p>\n
I decided against including his comments here on why he thinks that Moses divorced of Zipporah. If you want to know more, you can email me and I’ll send you the reference to a journal article where you can read about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the things I was asked in my oral entrance examination was about the relevance of Genesis 38 to the book. That is a good question. Why is this strange story of Judah and Tamar included in the midst of the Joseph story? Last week this came up in class and I share with\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ancient-israel","category-phd-coursework"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=622"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}