Judah's First Marriage Was a Punishment for a Good Deed Left Half-Done

There is a teaching in the rabbinic tradition that a person who begins a good deed and does not finish it brings misfortune on their own head. The proof text the rabbis used was Judah.

Judah had saved Joseph's life. When the brothers were debating what to do with the dreamer they had thrown into the pit -- kill him, leave him, let the snakes finish him -- it was Judah who proposed the alternative. What profit is it if we slay our brother? he asked. Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites. It was a mercy of a kind. Joseph would live. He would just no longer be in Canaan, near his father, in the place where he belonged.

But that mercy was incomplete. Judah had the authority to do more. He was the brothers' acknowledged leader -- the one they listened to when he spoke, the one who could change the direction of a group decision with a single well-chosen argument. If he had pressed further, if he had said not merely let us not kill him but let us return him to our father, the tradition in the Legends of the Jews is explicit: his brothers would have obeyed. He had the power to finish what he had started. He used that power to get Joseph out of the pit and into a caravan instead of out of the pit and back home.

The text preserved in Judah Married a Merchant's Daughter in Adullam lays the consequences out without softening them. After Joseph disappeared into Egypt, Judah's brothers stripped him of his leadership. He was excluded from their fellowship. He went to Adullam alone and built a life there -- a life that the tradition reads as a series of punishments for the unfinished rescue.

At Adullam he met Hirah, a Canaanite merchant who would become his friend, and through Hirah he met Hirah's king, who threw a feast and presented his daughter Bath-shua. The wine was poured. Passion took over. Despite knowing that the daughters of Canaan were corrupt -- a thing Judah knew and the tradition emphasizes he knew -- he married her. The Legends offers a devastating comparison: even Esau had eventually recognized that Canaanite women were wicked, and yet Judah, the lion of Israel, took one of them for his own.

The holy spirit, the tradition says, cried out in protest at the moment of this marriage. The glory of Israel went down in Adullam.

What followed was unrelenting loss. The first son, Er, died young and childless -- his very name meant the childless one, a name that carried its own verdict. The second son, Onan, died too, for refusing his duty to his dead brother's wife. Then Bath-shua herself died, a year after her sons. The woman Judah had married in passion, over the protest of the holy spirit, in the full knowledge that it was a mistake, was gone. Three of the four people he had built a family with in Adullam were dead in rapid succession.

The tradition in the Legends preserves a passage attributed to Judah himself in his old age, in which he connects his own failures with a kind of painful self-knowledge: he had boasted that no beautiful woman had ever turned his head in battle, and had judged his brother Reuben for his sin, and the spirit of passion had answered that boast by taking hold of him. Pride before a fall. Judah's years in Adullam were not random misfortune. They were the harvest of what he had planted.

But the same tradition that records Judah's descent also holds open the possibility of return. The brothers had told Judah, after Joseph was sold, that he should be the first to marry since Jacob was too consumed by grief to provide wives for his sons. He was still their leader even in his exile from the fellowship. The position was not permanently lost. The Talmudic tractate of Midrash Rabbah on Genesis traces the intricate connections between Judah's choices and the messianic line that would ultimately pass through him, noting that nothing in the story was wasted -- that even the years in Adullam, even the dead sons, even Bath-shua's scheming against Tamar, had shaped the situation that would eventually force Judah to the most important reckoning of his life.

A man who finishes good deeds is called complete, the tradition implies. A man who begins them and stops is incomplete, and incompleteness has a cost. Judah paid that cost in Adullam. The payment took years. But the tradition does not let him stay in debt forever. What Judah eventually learned to do -- to stand up before witnesses and say I have sinned, to choose the shame that extinguishes itself over the fire that burns forever -- was the completion, at last, of a character that had been unfinished since the day the caravan disappeared over the horizon toward Egypt.