Genesis 38:1

And it came to pass at that time, that Judah went down from his brethren, and turned in to a certain Adullamite, whose name was Hirah.

EXPOSITORY (ENGLISH BIBLE)

Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers

(1) At that time.—This does not mean at the time of Joseph’s sale; for as there was only an interval of twenty-two years between that event and the descent into Egypt, this period is scarcely long enough for the events recorded in this chapter. According to the usual chronology, Judah, Leah’s fourth son, would not have been more than eight years old when he left Padan-aram, and only one year at most older than Joseph, the son of Jacob’s old age. But the more true chronology which we have followed, gives time for him to have been Joseph’s senior by twenty years, and the events recorded here probably began soon after his father’s arrival at the tower of Eder.

Adullamite.—The town of Adullam, near which was David’s famous cave, has been clearly identified by Lieut. Conder (Tent-work, ii. 158). It lay in the great valley of Elah, which formed the highway from Hebron to the country of the Philistines, some two or three miles south of Shochoh, and fifteen or sixteen miles west by north from Hebron. Judah “went down” thither, not as Abenezra and others have supposed, because it was to the south, but because it was towards the sea, and the road is an actual descent from the hill country of Judah into the Shephelah, or lowland, in which Adullam was situated. The sons of Jacob often, probably, with a few retainers, made expeditions in search of pastures for their cattle; and Hirah, apparently, had shown Judah hospitality on some such journey, and finally a friendship had grown up between them. “Turned in to,” however, literally means pitched (his tent) close by; and the friendship between Judah and Hirah, thus accidentally formed, seems to have ended in Hirah taking the charge of Judah’s cattle.

Benson Commentary

Genesis 38:1. At that time — That is, about that time; this expression, as also the words then, in those days, often referring in Scripture to a considerable space of time. For though these words, as Le Clerc well observes, seem to connect the following events with those spoken of in the former chapter, yet some of them, particularly Judah’s marriage, which leads to the rest, must have happened long before Joseph was sold into Egypt. This chapter must therefore be here placed out of the order of time, and the events here recorded must have happened soon after Jacob came from Mesopotamia into Canaan, though Moses, for some special reasons, relates them in this place. Judah went down from his brethren — Withdrew for a time from his father’s family, and got intimately acquainted with one Hirah an Adullamite. When young people that have been well educated, begin to change their company, they will soon change their manners, and lose their good education. They that go down from their brethren, that forsake the society of the seed of Israel, and pick up Canaanites for their companions, are going down the hill apace.

Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary

38:1-30 The profligate conduct of Judah and his family. - This chapter gives an account of Judah and his family, and such an account it is, that it seems a wonder that of all Jacob's sons, our Lord should spring out of Judah, Heb 7:14. But God will show that his choice is of grace and not of merit, and that Christ came into the world to save sinners, even the chief. Also, that the worthiness of Christ is of himself, and not from his ancestors. How little reason had the Jews, who were so called from this Judah, to boast as they did, Joh 8:41. What awful examples the Lord proclaims in his punishments, of his utter displeasure at sin! Let us seek grace from God to avoid every appearance of sin. And let that state of humbleness to which Jesus submitted, when he came to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself, in appointing such characters as those here recorded, to be his ancestors, endear the Redeemer to our hearts.

Barnes' Notes on the Bible

Judah marries and has three sons. "Went down from brethren." This seems to have been an act of willful indiscretion in Judah. His separation from his brethren, however, extends only to the matter of his new connection. In regard to property and employment there seems to have been no long or entire separation until they went down into Egypt. He went down from the high grounds about Shekem to the lowlands in which Adullam was situated Joshua 15:33-35. "A certain Adullamite." He may have become acquainted with this Hirah, when visiting his grandfather, or in some of the caravans which were constantly passing Shekem, or even in the ordinary wanderings of the pastoral life. Adullam was in the Shephelah or lowland of Judah bordering on Philistia proper. "A certain Kenaanite." This connection with Shua's daughter was contrary to the will of God and the example of his fathers. Onan was born, we conceive, in Judah's fifteenth year, and Shelah in his sixteenth.

At Kezib. - This appears the same as Akzib, which is associated with Keilah and Mareshah Joshua 15:44, and therefore, lay in the south of the lowland of Judah. This note of place indicates a change of residence since her other children were born. In the year after this birth the dishonor of Dinah takes place. "Took a wife for Er." Judah chose a wife for himself at an early age, and now he chooses for his first-born at the same age. "Was evil in the eyes of the Lord." The God of covenant is obliged to cut off Er for his wickedness in the prime of life. We are not made acquainted with his crime; but it could scarcely be more vile and unnatural than that for which his brother Onan is also visited with death. "And be a husband to her." The original word means to act as a husband to the widow of a deceased brother who has left no issue. Onan seems to have been prompted to commit his crime by the low motive of turning the whole inheritance to his own house. At the time of Er's death Judah must have been in his twenty-seventh year; Joseph was consequently in his twenty-third, and Jacob had for ten years past had his headquarters at Hebron. Hence, the contact with Timnah, Adullam, and Enaim was easy.

Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary

CHAPTER 38

Ge 38:1-30. Judah and Family.

1. at that time—a formula frequently used by the sacred writers, not to describe any precise period, but an interval near about it.Judah marries a Canaanitish woman, who bears him three sons, Genesis 38:1-5. He marries his eldest son to Tamar, Genesis 38:6. He being wicked is slain by God, Genesis 38:7. The second son is commanded to marry her, Genesis 38:8. His wickedness, Genesis 38:9; and death, Genesis 38:10. He promises her his third son, but performs not, Genesis 38:11. She by a subtle practice commits incest with him, Genesis 38:13. He gives her a pledge, Genesis 38:18. She is found with child; Judah commands her to be burnt, Genesis 38:24. She brings to her father the pledge, Genesis 38:25. He acknowledges it; acquits her, and condemns himself, Genesis 38:26. She brings forth two sons, Genesis 38:27-30.

This story is not without difficulty, if we consider how little time is allowed for all the events of this chapter, there being not above twenty-three years between Judah’s marriage and the birth of Pharez, yea, and the birth of his sons too, Hezron and Hamul, who are said to go into Egypt with Jacob, Genesis 46:12. But there are two ways proposed for the resolution of it, as the phrase, at that time, may be understood two ways; either,

1. More largely, for the time since Jacob’s return from Padan to Canaan, and so the history may be conceived thus, Judah was married some years before the selling of Joseph, though it be here mentioned after it, and so out of its place, as being the foundation of all the following events, which are here placed together, because they followed the selling of Joseph. Judah, and Er, and Onan, and afterwards Pharez, are supposed each to marry and have a child at fourteen years old, which, though unusual, wants not examples both in sacred and profane writers. And they that will quarrel with the Scripture, and question its authority for some such uncustomary occurrences which it relates, show more of impiety than wisdom in it, and shall do well to consider, that God might so order things by his providence, and record such things in his word, upon the same account on which he hath put several other difficult passages in Scripture, partly to try and exercise men’s faith, humility, and modesty; and partly to punish the evil minds of ungodly men, and for their sins to lay an occasion of stumbling and cavilling at the Scriptures before them that greedily seek and gladly catch at all such occasions. Or,

2. More strictly, for the time following the sale of Joseph, which seems the more probable way, and so the story lies thus, Judah was now about twenty years old when he married, and the three first years he hath three sons, Er, Onan, and Shelah. The two first marry each when they were about seventeen years old. Three years after both their deaths, and when Shelah had been marriageable a year or two, and was not given to Tamar, Judah lies with Tamar and begets upon her Pharez. But as for Hezron and Hamul, they are said to go into Egypt with Jacob, as also Benjamin’s ten sons are said to go with him thither, to wit, in their father’s loins, because they were begotten by their father in Egypt, whilst Jacob lived there, of which more in its proper place.

Judah went down from his brethren; probably in discontent, upon occasion of quarrels arisen among them about the selling of Joseph, whereof Judah was a great promoter, if not the first mover.

A certain Adullamite, of the city of Adullam; of which see Joshua 12:15 15:35.

Gill's Exposition of the Entire Bible

And it came to pass at that time,.... This some refer to the time of Jacob's coming from Padanaram into Canaan, soon after he came to Shechem, and before the affair of Dinah; but to this may be objected the marriage of Judah at an age that may seem too early for him, his separation from his brethren, and having a flock of his own to keep, which seems not consistent with the above history: wherefore it is better to connect this with the history of Joseph's being sold into Egypt; for though there were but twenty three years from hence to Jacob's going down into Egypt, Joseph being now seventeen, and was thirty years when he stood before Pharaoh, after which were seven years of plenty, and two of famine, at which time Jacob went thither with two of Judah's grandsons, Hezron and Hamul, Genesis 46:12, which make the number mentioned; yet all this may be accounted for; at seventeen, Er, Judah's firstborn, might marry, being the eighteenth from the selling of Joseph, and the marriage of his father; and Onan at the same age, which was the nineteenth; and allowing two or three years for Tamar's staying for Shelah, there was time for her intrigue with Judah, and bearing him two sons at a birth, before the descent of Jacob into Egypt; as for his two grandsons, they may be said to go into Egypt; as Benjamin's sons did in their father's loins, being begotten there during Jacob's abode in it:

that Judah went down from his brethren: not from Dothan to Adullam, as Ben Melech observes, as if this separation was at the time and place of the selling of Joseph; but rather from Hebron thither, after he and his brethren were come home to their father, and had reported and condoled the death of Joseph; and Judah is said to go down, because he went from the north to the south, as Aben Ezra notes; whether this departure from his brethren was owing to a misunderstanding or quarrel between them on account of the affair of Joseph, or on any account, is not certain:

and turned in to a certain Adullamite; an inhabitant of Adullam, a city which afterwards fell to the tribe of Judah, and where was a famous cave, that had its name from thence in David's time; it was ten miles from Eleutheropolis to the east (i), and eight from Jerusalem to the southwest (k); hither he turned, or stretched out (l); that is, his tent, with his flock, which he extended to Adullam, as Ben Melech interprets it, and joined to this man:

whose name was Hirah; whom the Jews (m) fabulously report to be the same with Hiram king of Tyre, in the days of David and Solomon, and that he was the husband of Nebuchadnezzar's mother, and lived twelve hundred years.

(i) Jerom de loc. Heb. fol. 88. F. (k) Bunting's Travels, p. 78. (l) "et tentorium fixerat", Schmidt. (m) Shalshalet Hakabala, fol. 8. 2.

Geneva Study Bible

And it came to pass at that time, that {a} Judah went down from his brethren, and turned in to a certain Adullamite, whose name was Hirah.

(a) Moses describes the genealogy of Judah, because the Messiah should come from him.

EXEGETICAL (ORIGINAL LANGUAGES)

Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

1. at that time] Cf. Genesis 21:22. The notes of time in this chapter are very indefinite. Cf. 12, “in process of time.” The marriage of Judah with the daughter of Shua, the birth of his three sons, Er, Onan, and Shelah, and the marriage of the first two with Tamar, evidently represent a long interval.

Adullamite] Judah moved from the high ground near Hebron to the lower, i.e. southern, country. The town of Adullam (Joshua 12:15; Joshua 15:35) is now identified with the ruins ‘Aid-el-mâ, 17 miles S.W. of Jerusalem and about 12 N.W. from Hebron. See 1 Samuel 22:1.

Judah and Simeon in Jdg 1:1-20 are represented as acting by themselves, and their names do not appear in Deborah’s Song commemorating the patriotism of the Israelite tribes.

Pulpit Commentary

Verse 1. - And it came to pass. The present chapter appears to interrupt the continuity of the narrative of Joseph's history. Partly on this account, and partly because the name Jehovah occurs in it (vers. 7, 10), it has been pronounced a later Jehovistic interpolation (Tuch, Bleek, Davidson, Coleuso). Its design has been explained as an attempt to glorify the line of David by representing it as sprung from Judah (Bohlen), or to disclose the origin of the Levitate law of marriage among the Jews (Knobel); but the incidents here recorded of Judah and his family are fitted to reflect dishonor instead of glory on the ancestry of David (Havernick); and the custom here mentioned of raising up seed to a dead brother by marrying his widow, though the idea may have originated with Judah (Lange), is more likely to have descended from earlier times (Delitzsch, Keil). Rightly understood, the object of the present portion of the record appears to have been not simply to prepare the way for the subsequent (Genesis 46:8-27) genealogical register (Gerlach), or to contrast the wickedness of Judah and his sons with the piety and chastity of Joseph in Egypt (Wordsworth), or to recite the private history of one of Christ's ancestors (Bush, Murphy, 'Speaker's Commentary'), or to show that the pre-eminence of Judah in the patriarchal family was due exclusively to grace (Candlish), but also and chiefly to justify the Divine procedure in the subsequent deportation of Jacob and his sons to Egypt (Keil). The special danger to which the theocratic family was exposed was that of intermarrying with the Canaanites (Genesis 24:3; Genesis 28:6). Accordingly, having carried forward his narrative to the point where, in consequence of Joseph's sale, a way begins to open up for the transference of the patriarchal house to the lend of the Pharaohs, the historian makes a pause to introduce a passage from the life of Judah, with the view of proving the necessity of such removal, by showing, as in the case of Judah, the almost certainty that, if left in Canaan, the descendants of Jacob would fall before the temptation of marrying with the daughters of the land, with the result, in the first instance, of a great and rapid moral deterioration in the holy seed, and with the ultimate effect of completely obliterating the line of demarcation between them and the surrounding heathen world. How the purity of the patriarchal family was guarded till it developed into a powerful nation, first by its providential withdrawment in infancy from the sphere of temptation (Genesis 46:5), then by its separate establishment in Goshen beside a people who regarded them with aversion (Genesis 46:34), and latterly by its cruel enslavement under Pharaoh (Exodus 1:10), is a subject which in due course engages the attention of the writer. At that time.

(1) If the date of Judah's marriage, as is most probable, was shortly after the sale of Joseph (Keil, Kurtz, Lange, Alford, Wordsworth, Quarry), since at the time of that atrocity Judah was still living with his brethren, the only difficulty calling for solution is to account for the birth of Judah's grandchildren, Hezron and Hamul (the sons of Pharez, the twin child of Judah by Tamar), in the short interval of twenty-two years which preceded Jacob's descent into Egypt without making Er and Onan marry in comparative boyhood. The case becomes a little less perplexing if Hezron and Hamul, though said to have come into Egypt (Genesis 46:27; Exodus 1:1; Deuteronomy 10:22), may be regarded as having been born there (Hengstenberg), since twenty-two years afford sufficient space for the birth of Judah's three sons, Er, Onan, and Shelah, which may have taken place during the first three years after their father's marriage, and for the birth of Pharez and Zarah, even if Er married as late as eighteen. Of course if the narrative requires the birth of Hezron and Hamul to have taken place in Canaan (Kalisch), it is simply impossible to hold that all this occurred within little more than a score of years. Hence

(2) the date of Judah's marriage has been placed before the sale of Joseph (Augustine, Aben Ezra, Rosenmüller, Drechsler, Baumgarten, Gerlach, Ainsworth, Candlish, Murphy, Inglis); but even on this assumption the task is arduous to make the birth of Hezron and Hamul occur before the emigration of their great-grandfather to Egypt. For as Judah was not more than four years older than Joseph (cf. Genesis 29:35 with Genesis 30:25), his age at the time of Joseph's sale could not have been more than twenty-one. But placing Judah's marriage at the earliest possible date, viz., in his fifteenth year, only substitutes an interval of twenty-eight years instead of one of twenty-two, in which Judah's son Er must be born, grow up to manhood, (say at fifteen) marry, die, and leave his widow Tamar, who, after marrying with Onan and waiting for Shelah (which would consume at least another year), must become the mother of twin sons by her father-in-law (for which another year would be required), and must see the elder of the two married at ten years of age, if his sons are to be born upon the soft of Canaan. On either hypothesis, therefore, it seems indispensable to hold that Judah's grandsons were born in Egypt; and in this case there is little gained by putting Judah's marriage earlier than Joseph s sale, i.e. in Judah's twenty-first year. That Judah went down - from Hebron (Genesis 37:14), or the mountains (Keil), towards the south (Aben Ezra, Rosenmüller) from his brethren, - setting up a separate and independent establishment apart from them; "not only immediately after Joseph was sold, but also on account of it," "in a fit of impenitent anger" (Kurtz), in a spirit of remorse (Lange) - and turned in to a certain Adullamite, - literally, and pitched (sc. his tent, Genesis 26:15) up to, as far as, or close by, a man, an Adullamite, i.e. belonging to Adullam, a town in the Hebron valley (Joshua 15:85); in the time of the conquest the seat of a Canaanitish king (Joshua 12:15), afterwards celebrated for its connection with the history of David (1 Samuel 22:1, 2; 2 Samuel 23:13), subsequently mentioned in Scripture (2 Chronicles 11:7; Nehemiah 11:30; Micah 1:15), but never successfully identified (vide ' Land and the Book,' pp. 606, 607; Robinson, 2:175) - whose name was Hirah - "Nobility" (Gesenius). Genesis 38:1

Keil and Delitzsch Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament

About this time, i.e., after the sale of Joseph, while still feeding the flocks of Jacob along with his brethren (Genesis 37:26),

(Note: As the expression "at that time" does not compel us to place Judah's marriage after the sale of Joseph, many have followed Augustine (qusaet. 123), and placed it some years earlier. But this assumption is rendered extremely improbable, if not impossible, by the fact that Judah was not merely accidentally present when Joseph was sold, but was evidently living with his brethren, and had not yet set up an establishment of his own; whereas he had settled at Adullam previous to his marriage, and seems to have lived there up to the time of the birth of the twins by Thamar. Moreover, the 23 years which intervened between the taking of Joseph into Egypt and the migration of Jacob thither, furnish space enough for all the events recorded in this chapter. If we suppose that Judah, who was 20 years old when Joseph was sold, went to Adullam soon afterwards and married there, is three sons might have been born four or five years after Joseph's captivity. And if his eldest son was born about a year and a half after the sale of Joseph, and he married him to Thamar when he was 15 years old, and gave her to his second son a year after that, Onan's death would occur at least five years before Jacob's removal to Egypt; time enough, therefore, both for the generation and birth of the twin-sons of Judah by Thamar, and for Judah's two journeys into Egypt with his brethren to buy corn. (See Genesis 46:8.))

Judah separated from them, and went down (from Hebron, Genesis 37:14, or the mountains) to Adullam, in the lowland (Joshua 15:35), into the neighbourhood of a man named Hirah. "He pitched (his tent, Genesis 26:25) up to a man of Adullam," i.e., in his neighbourhood, so as to enter into friendly intercourse with him.