Judah

Judah/Yehuda (Hebrew: יְהוּדָה, Standard Yəhuda) was, according to the Book of Genesis, the fourth son of Jacob and Leah, and the founder of the Israelite tribe of Judah.

Judah's name

The text of the Torah explain that the name Judah refers to Leah's intent to praise Yahweh, on account of having achieved four children. In classical rabbinical literature, the name is interpreted as being a combination of Yahweh and dalet (the letter d). The dalet has the numerical value 4, which these rabbinical sources argue refers to Judah being Jacob's fourth son.

However, some Biblical scholars believe that Judah's tribe was not originally part of the Israelite confederation and that Judah's name, being derived from the name of the Israelite God, is eponymous—created after the fact. The Bible itself admits that tribe of Judah was not purely Israelite, but contained a number of others, the Jerahmeelites, and the Kenites, merging into the tribe at various points.

Biography

In the Bible, was Judah who suggested the sale of Joseph to the Ishmaelite traders, after Joseph's brothers intended to kill him. "What will we gain if we kill our brother and cover up his blood?" Judah asks. Come, let's sell him to the Ishmaelites and not lay our hands on him; after all, he is our brother, our own flesh and blood." (Gen. 37:26)

While little is said about the other 12 sons of Jacob other than Joseph (whose exile in Egypt is recounted in detail), a special chapter is devoted to Judah. According to Genesis 38, Judah left his brothers and lived with a man of Adullam named Hirah. There, he married the daughter of the Canaanite Shuah, by whom he had three sons, Er, Onan, and Shelah. Er married Tamar, but died childless. According to the custom of the time, his widow was given in marriage to his brother Onan. "Lie with your brother's wife," Judah is reported as saying. "and fulfill your duty to her as a brother-in-law to produce offspring for your brother."

However, knowing that the offspring of this marriage would not be legally his, Onan "spilled his semen on the ground" whenever he had sex with Tamar. The Lord reportedly put Onan to death for this.

Judah now began to fear that Tamar was cursed. Although he promised her that she could marry his third son when he came of age, Judah told Tamar: "Live as a widow in your father's house until my son Shelah grows up." However, when the time came, he did not keep his word to her.

Years later, after the death of his own wife, Judah went to the town of Timnah with his friend Hirah for a sheep-sheering festival. At the town gate, he encountered a veiled woman, apparently one of the town's prostitutes.

"Come now, let me sleep with you," Judah prposed.

"And what will you give me to sleep with you?" she asked.

"I will send you a young goat from my flock," Judah promised.

The woman agreed to these terms but demanded Judah's staff and seal as collateral. Judah gave them to her, and she slept with him as promised.

After the festival Judah returned home and sent his friend Hirah with the goat to pay the woman and get back his staff and seal. Hirah asked the men who lived there, "Where is the shrine prostitute who was beside the road at Enaim?" The men, however, knew of no such woman. Hiram went back to Judah and reported the situation. Judah said, "Let her keep what she has, or we will become a laughingstock."

For three months, life returned to normal. Then, Judah was told that Tamar, his son's betrothed wife had turned up pregnant. Infuriated, Judah demanded that she be brought from her father's house for punishement: "Bring her out and have her burned to death!" he declared.

Before the sentence could be carried out, however, Judah received a message from Tamar. With the message were Judah's precious staff and seal. "I am pregnant by the man who owns these," the messenger said in Tamar's name. "See if you recognize whose seal and cord and staff these are."

Judah recognized items and was stricken in his conscience. "She is more righteous than I," he admitted, "since I wouldn't give her to my son Shelah."

Tamar bore two twin sons Judah, Pharez and Zerah. Pharez (or "Perez") was ancestor of the royal house of David. Moreover, their birth was a miraculous one. Like her forerunner Rebecca, the mother of Jacob and Esau, Tamar suffered greatly during her pregnancy, as her twin sons wrestle with each other for supremacy in her womb. Zerah's hand emerged first, and a midwife tied a red thread around his wrist. However the child withdrew his hand, and the "second son," Perez, was born first. The lineage of Perez and Zerah is detailed in the First Book of Chronicles, chapter 2. In Christian tradition. Perez is also the ancestor of Jesus Christ.

In Genesis 43, Judah joins Jacob's other sons in going to Egypt to by grain. There, they unknowing meet their long-lost brother, who now acts as the Pharoah's representative in negotiating the deal. When they return to Canaan, Judah is the spokesman for the group in reporting the Jacob regarding the terms of additional grain sales. The disguised Joseph has demanded that their youngest brother, Benjamin, be brought with them. However, Benjamin is Jacob's favorite, and he balks at the idea.

Judah declares: "I myself will guarantee his safety; you can hold me personally responsible for him. If I do not bring him back to you and set him here before you, I will bear the blame before you all my life."

In subsequent interviews with Joseph—who turns the tables on the brothers and Judah again takes the leading part among the brothers and makes a most touching and persuasive plea for the release of Benjamin, whom Joseph intend to hold as a hostage. "Please let your servant remain here as my lord's slave in place of the boy," Judah asks, "and let the boy return with his brothers. How can I go back to my father if the boy is not with me? No! Do not let me see the misery that would come upon my father." It is Judah's plea that finally moves Joseph to reveal his true identity and bring the story to its happy conclusion.

In Jacob's final blessing blessing to his sons, Judah is be exalted to the position of chief of the brethren:

Judah your brothers will praise you;

your hand will be on the neck of your enemies;

your father's sons will bow down to you.

You are a lion's cub, O Judah;

you return from the prey, my son.

Like a lion he crouches and lies down,

like a lioness—who dares to rouse him?

The scepter will not depart from Judah,

nor the ruler's staff from between his feet,

until he comes to whom it belongs

and the obedience of the nations is his. (Gen. 49:8-10

Rabbinical views

According to the rabbinical literature, Judah was born on the fifteenth of Sivan. Sources differ on the date of death, with the Book of Jubilees advocating a death at age 119 and the midrashic Book of Jasher giving his death at the age of 129.

The Book of Chronicles mentions that ... a ruler came from Judah ..., which classical rabbinical sources took to imply that Judah was the leader of his brothers, terming him the king. The same part of the Book of Chronicles also describes Judah as the strongest of his brothers, and rabbinical literature portrays him as having had extraordinary physical strength—capable of shouting huge distances, able to crush iron into dust in his mouth, and with hair that stiffened so much, when he became angry, that it pierced his clothes.

Fighting Canaanites

Rabbinical sources also allude to a war between the Canaanites and Judah's family resulting from of the destruction of Shechem in revenge for the rape of Dinah. Judah features heavily as a protagonist in accounts of this war. Judah kills Jashub, king of Tappuah, in hand-to-hand combat, after first having deposed Jashub from his horse by throwing an extremely heavy stone at him from a large distance. The accounts go on to state that while Judah was trying to remove Jashub's armor, nine assistants of Jashub fell upon him in combat, but after Judah killed one, he scared away the others. Judah also killed many members of Jashub's army—42 men according to the Book of Jasher, but 1000 according to the Testament of Judah).

Selling Joseph

In the Torah's Joseph narrative, when his brothers are jealous of Joseph and contemplate murdering him, Judah suggests that they sell him to some passing Ishmaelites. It is not entirely clear whether Judah's motives were to save Joseph or to harm him but keep him alive. Rabbinical sources held Judah to have been the leader of his brothers, and these sources also hold him responsible for this deception. Even if Judah had been trying to save Joseph, the rabbis tend to regard him negatively for it, for the leader of the brothers, Judah should have made more effort. Accordingly, the reason that Judah no longer lived with his brothers after this is that, after witnessing Jacob's grief at the loss of Joseph, the brothers held Judah entirely responsible and ousted him. Divine punishment was also inflicted on Judah in punishment in the form of the death of Er and Onan, and of his wife..

Protecting Benjamin

The biblical Joseph narrative eventually describes Joseph as meeting his brothers again, while he is in a position of power, and without his brothers recognising him; in this latter part of the narrative, Benjamin initially remains in Canaan, and so Joseph takes Simeon hostage, and insists that the brothers return with their younger brother (Benjamin) to prove they aren't spies. The narative goes on to state that Judah offers himself to Jacob as surety for Benjamin's safety, and manages to persuade him to let them take Benjamin to Egypt; according to classical rabbinical literature, because Judah had proposed that he should bear any blame forever, this ultimately led to his bones being rolled around his coffin without cease, while it was being carried during the Exodus, until Moses interceded with God, by arguing that Judah's confession (in regard to having sex with Tamar) had led to Reuben confessing his own incest.

When, in the Joseph narrative, the brothers return with Benjamin to Joseph, Joseph tests whether the brothers have reformed by tricking them into a situation where he can demand the enslavement of Benjamin. The narrative describes Judah as making an impassioned plea against enslaving Benjamin, ultimately making Joseph recant and reveal his identity; the Genesis Rabbah, and particularly the midrashic book of Jasher, expand on this by describing Judah's plea as much more extensive than given in the Torah, and more vehement.

The classical rabbinical literature goes on to argue that Judah reacted violently to the threat against Benjamin, shouting so loudly that Hushim, who was then in Canaan, was able to hear Judah ask him to travel to Egypt, to help Judah destroy it; some sources have Judah angrily picking up an extremely heavy stone (400 shekels in weight), throwing it into the air, then grinding it to dust with his feet once it had landed. These rabbinical sources argue that Judah had Naphtali enumerate the districts of Egypt, and after finding out that there were 12 (historically, there were actually 20 in Lower Egypt and 22 in Upper Egypt), he decided to destroy three himself, and have his brothers destroy one of the remaining districts each; the threat of destroying Egypt was, according to these sources, what really motivated Joseph to reveal himself to his brothers.

Critical views

The marriage of Judah and births of his children are described in a passage widely regarded as an abrupt change to the surrounding narrative. According to textual scholars, the reason for the abrupt interruption a story from the Jahwist source has been inserted into the Elohist narrative about the life of Joseph.

The main motive of the Tamar narrative, is, according to many Biblical scholars, an eponymous aetiological myth concerning the fluctuations in the constituency of the tribe of Judah; textual scholars attribute the narrative to the Yahwist, though Biblical scholars regard it as concerning the state of the clans not much earlier. A number of scholars have proposed that the deaths of Er and Onan reflect the dying out of two clans; Onan may represent an Edomite clan named Onam, who are mentioned in an Edomite genealogy in Genesis, while Er appears from a genealogy in the Book of Chronicles to have later been subsumed by the Shelah clan.

Some scholars have argued that the narrative secondarily aims to either assert the institution of levirate marriage, or present an aetiological myth for its origin, since it highlights cases of marriage for pleasure not for having children (Onan), of refusal to perform the marriage (Jacob, on behalf of Shelah), and of levirate activities with men related to the dead husband other than fraternally; Emerton regards the evidence for this as inconclusive, though according to classical rabbinical writers this is the origin of levirate marriage. A number of scholars, particularly in recent decades (as of 1980), have proposed that the narrative reflects an anachronistic interest in the biblical account of king David, with the character of Tamar being the same; the proposals partly being due to the scenes of the narrative - Adullam, Chezib, and Timnah - overlapping.

See also

• Tribe of Judah
• Kingdom of Judah

Children of Jacob by wife in order of birth (D = Daughter)

Leah

Reuben (1)

Simeon (2)

Levi (3)

Judah (4)

Issachar (9)

Zebulun (10)

Dinah (D)

Rachel

Joseph (11)

Benjamin (12)

Bilhah (Rachel's servant)

Dan (5)

Naphtali (6)

Zilpah (Leah's servant)

Gad (7)

Asher (8)

Hebrew Bible Genealogy from Adam to David

Creation to Flood

Adam

Seth

Enos

Kenan

Mahalalel

Jared

Enoch

Methuselah

Lamech

Noah

Shem

Origin of the Patriarchs

Arpachshad

Shelah

Eber

Peleg

Reu

Serug

Nahor

Terah

Abraham

Isaac

Jacob

Nationhood to Kingship

Judah

Pharez

Hezron

Ram

Amminadab

Nahshon

Salmon

Boaz

Obed

Jesse

David

Publications

• Winckler, Geschichte Israels (Berlin, 1895)
• Ed. Meyer, Die Israeliten und ihre Nachbarstämme (Halle, 1906)
• Haupt, in Studien ... Welthausen gewidmet (Giessen, 1914)

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