Conversation Points for Genesis 38:11, 13-26 and Matthew 24:36-44

Study Format:
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?

Interesting Ideas to Consider:
Genesis 38:11, 13-26
• This story forms an interruption to the story of Joseph. In doing this it accomplishes two things. 1) It slows the narrative and thus heightens the tension concerning Joseph’s fate (much like a commercial break in an exciting moment in a TV show). 2) It keeps the rest of Jacob’s family from being forgotten in the story, anticipating Judah’s later role as the primary carrier on of the family lineage.
• Other important themes that mirror the Joseph story include recognition (Joseph hid from his brothers much like how Tamar hid from Judah), reversal (Joseph rose from prison to power, Tamar moved from obscurity to ancestor of the promised line of Judah), and deception through evidence (Joseph hid a cup on his brother Benjamin, Tamar took Judah’s staff, signet, and cord as identification).
• Judah’s line bypassing his sons helps to make sense of how Jacob’s line bypasses Judah’s older brothers and falls to him, God is not beholden to strict genealogical lineage.
• Tamar is a Canaanite, which is important to her role in Jesus’ lineage. Jesus’ message is for all, gentiles as well as Jews, because Jesus himself is from gentile origins.
• In the ancient near east, a woman’s place in society came from her spouse or son. Inheritance also passed from father to son. In order to keep inheritance lines straight and to protect widows, if a man died without fathering an heir, it was the man’s brother’s responsibility to father an heir for his brother. The child would be considered the son of the dead man, not the son of the brother. Because of that, as weird and inappropriate as it seems to us, it was not at all unethical our inappropriate for Judah to father a child with his son’s widow. The child would be considered Judah’s grandson, even though Judah was the biological father.
• Judah called Tamar “more in the right than [him]” (v. 26) because she was willing to go to greater risks on behalf of an heir for her husband/his son.

Matthew 24:36-44
• Like the passage we heard from Luke’s Gospel two weeks ago, this passage foretells destruction that Matthew’s audience had already experienced. Scholars date Matthew’s gospel to sometime after 70 CE, so sometime after the fall of Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans.
• Modern dispensationalism would have us read “one will be taken and one will be left” as favorable to the taken. But when I think about what happens when someone is “taken” by an invading army, I wonder if the emphasis could be on the randomness of warfare and comfort for those who are “left” to pick up the pieces.
• Thief seems like a strange metaphor for Jesus, but the emphasis seems to be on the urgency and the unexpectedness, the importance of vigilance and action.

Works Sourced:
Boring, M. Eugene. “The Gospel of Matthew.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VIII. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.

Fretheim, Terence. “The Book of Genesis.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume I. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1994.