Judah Confesses What the Wine Did

A man who has lived long enough and sinned badly enough sometimes reaches a point where honesty becomes easier than pretense. Judah, dying, chose honesty.

He began with his strength. He told his children he had been faster than a hind, strong enough to catch wild horses and hold them, brave enough to kill a lion with his hands and snatch a kid from its jaws. He had fought in the wars the sons of Jacob waged against the kings of Canaan and against Esau's family, and in all those battles he had distinguished himself beyond the others. Jacob, he said, had no anxiety when Judah was with his brothers in their conflicts, because Jacob had seen in a vision an angel of strength walking at Judah's side on all his ways.

Then he stopped talking about his strength and started talking about what his strength had not protected him from.

Wine. He had spoken publicly about how the face of a beautiful woman had never tempted him during war, and had criticized his brother Reuben for his transgression with Bilhah. Then the spirit of passion took hold of him, and he saw the daughter of a Canaanite merchant named Shua, and the wine at their table turned his eyes, and he married her without asking his father, without waiting, without thinking about what he was doing. This is how the Testament of Judah in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, a text compiled no later than the second century BCE, describes the beginning of Judah's decline: not with catastrophe, but with a cup of wine at a rich man's table.

His sons by this woman brought him grief. Two of them died before they could give children to Tamar, the woman they had each married. The third son he refused to give to Tamar, afraid the same fate would take him too. He was wrong to refuse, and he knew it, and still he refused.

The scene at Enaim follows. Tamar, veiled, waited at the crossroads. Judah did not recognize her. He made his offer. She asked what he would give her as pledge, and he handed over his signet, his cord, and his staff. The Ginzberg tradition reads these three objects as symbols: the staff is the tribe's support, the cord is its power, the signet is the glory of the kingdom. Judah gave all three to a woman he thought was a prostitute. He gave away his kingdom before he knew it was his.

Three months later, when Tamar's pregnancy was discovered, Judah ordered her burned. She sent the three pledges back to him. Judah confessed publicly. Tamar was more righteous than he was, he said. He had withheld his third son. What she had done she had done because he had left her no other path. He acknowledged it in front of everyone.

The old teachers who preserved this in the Legends of the Jews and in the Midrash Rabbah texts emphasized that this public confession was not just a personal moment. It set a pattern. Judah confessed, and afterward his descendants David and Manasseh also confessed their sins publicly, and God heard their prayers. The willingness to be seen in one's failure, the tradition held, ran through the line of Judah like a vein of gold through stone.

On his deathbed, Judah passed all of this down to his sons. Do not love money. Do not follow your eyes. Wine hid the commands of the Lord from me. Wine made me betray the mysteries of my father Jacob to the Canaanite woman Bath-shua. For the rest of his life after Tamar, he ate no flesh and drank no wine and sought no pleasure. And then, having said all of this, he told them what Jacob had told him: that no ruler would cease from the house of Judah, no teacher of the law from his posterity, until the Messiah came from his line, and the obedience of all peoples came to him. His eyes clearer than wine. His teeth whiter than milk. Never having looked upon unchastity. Never having eaten anything taken by violence.

The man who spent a night with a veiled woman at a crossroads believed he would be the ancestor of someone like that. He died at a hundred and nineteen years old. He asked his sons not to bury him in a costly garment and not to embalm his body. Carry me to Hebron, he said. He wanted to rest near Abraham, near Isaac, near the ground that had held his fathers.

What the Testament of Judah preserves, written no later than the second century BCE, is something most moralistic readings of Judah's story skip over: the redemption was not his to complete. He confessed. He repented. He changed. But the line that ran through him toward the Messiah was not because of his virtue in the later years. It ran through his failure at the crossroads, through Tamar's courage, through the twin sons born from that encounter, Perez and Zerah. The royal line of David comes through Perez. Judah did not earn this. The tradition insists it was given to him anyway, because confession, honest and public confession without excuse or self-justification, turned out to be the quality God was looking for all along.