Thursday, February 17, 2011

Some Poor Fainting, Struggling Semen: Rotten Apples, Spilled Seed and the Lyin' of Judah

Genesis 38 (read here)

Cut Judah some slack: the fourth son of Israel and one of Jesus' not-so-great grandfathers didn't actually know the woman was his daughter-in-law. He thought Tamar, his oldest son's widow, was merely a prostitute, which explains why she got his goat in more ways than one.

The man had morals. Not very good ones, but he had them.

My buddy Hirsh believes that Someone somewhere created the world but not the God of the Bible because the Bible is, as he says, "fiction." If so, they should only sell it in the back of the bookstore, behind the Harlequin Romance novels. Forget KJV or NIV; Genesis 38 alone is enough to earn all of Holy Writ an XXX in any translation. That chapter almost seems like God's attempt to short-circuit Scripture's skeptics.

It's your typical boy meets girl, boy marries girl, boy and girl have kid, kid's a punk, kid gets married, kid offed by God for being a punk, boy gives daughter-in-law to second kid, second kid "pulls out" of the relationship, second kid offed by God, daughter-in-law dresses up like prostitute, boy solicits prostitute with one goat and two forms of ID, prostitute extorts boy, daughter-in-law turns up pregnant, boy orders daughter-in-law to be killed, daughter-in-law outs boy, boy repents, yada-yada-yada...the Savior of the world is born.

I've seen it a million times.

Seriously, if this whole thing is a fairy tale, if you're pushing God as Almighty and the very personification of perfection, would you really make Christ's kinfolk out to be the Kardashians?

Most of us try to shove family skeletons so far back into our closets you'd have to go to Narnia to get them out. God, on the other hand, makes no bones about His. And in case you missed it in Genesis 38, He puts the X-ray back up via Jesus' genealogy in Matthew 1.

If God was worried what the neighbors would think, stories like this wouldn't have made the canonical cut. Perhaps He was more concerned with what people whose lives mirror those in Genesis 38 would think if He didn't include characters like them.

1 comment:

Lovell's Lookout said...

nice booneman... great to see you at the game the other night...