Judah Could Not Draw His Sword on the Man Who Held Benjamin

Click for full size

The Day He Fought Instead of His Father

Judah came to Jacob in the morning and told him to sit down. "You fought all day yesterday and you are worn out. Give me today."

The enemy line saw him come and saw the lion in his face and the lion in his teeth, and then they heard the voice, and the fear went through them before the first blow landed. He went over the army the way a flea goes over a dog, from one armed man to the next, hitting and moving and hitting again, and by evening he had put down eighty thousand and ninety six men carrying swords and bows.

He ran out of strength. Zebulun stepped up on his left and took the line and killed eighty thousand more while his brother stood breathing. Then Judah came back into it, grinding his teeth with a sound like thunder cracking in midsummer, and the whole army broke and ran, and did not stop running for eighteen miles.

That night he slept.

The Woman He Sent Out to Be Burned

Years before that, a woman was carried out of a house in Canaan to be put in a fire, and the order had come from him. Tamar was his son's widow and she was pregnant and the sentence was burning, and Judah had said it out loud. "Take her out and burn her."

She did not name him. She sent a bundle to him instead, a seal and a cord and a staff, and told the court the owner of these was the man.

They were his. He was standing in the court of Shem, in front of the elders, in front of his own father, with a way out available to any man willing to keep his mouth shut for one minute. He stood up and said, "She is more righteous than I," and gave the whole of it, and kept nothing back from Jacob and nothing back from the court.

She came out of the fire. So did the twins she was carrying.

Judah Roared and Egypt Nearly Went Over

Then came the famine, and the road to Egypt, and the silver goblet found in the youngest brother's sack.

The man who ran Egypt gave his ruling. "The one who had the cup becomes my slave. The rest of you go home to your father in peace."

"Benjamin is taken," Judah said, "and you talk about peace in my father's house."

Then he roared. The sound went four hundred parsangs. Hushim son of Dan heard it standing in the land of Canaan and jumped and came, and the two of them roared together, and the ground under Egypt came close to turning over. One of them was the roar of a lion and the other was the voice of a great cat. When the anger came up in Judah, every guard in Joseph's hall lost the teeth out of his head.

The brothers caught it off him. They kicked at the floor of that hall until it was cut into furrows, like lions with the kill taken away from them.

Blood Coming Out of Both His Eyes

He was doing it for a boy he had personally guaranteed, and he was doing it for an older account. It was Judah who had let Jacob believe Joseph was dead. He thought, standing in that room, "If I spend myself on this, perhaps the Holy One will let me off that."

The men of Shilo said blood ran out of both his eyes when he was like this. Others said he wore five garments under his clothes, layered the way a soldier layers armor, and that one hair over his heart would stand up and tear through all five.

Joseph watched the signs arrive on his brother's face and went cold. "He may kill me," he thought.

He was sitting on a stone pillar. He kicked it, without getting up, and it came apart into a heap of gravel.

Judah looked at the gravel. "This one is stronger than I am."

The Sword That Would Not Come Out

He put his hand on the hilt and pulled.

The blade stayed in the scabbard. He pulled again and it would not move for him, the same hand that had gone through five coats of armor with one hair, locked on a sword that would not come out of its own sheath.

He let go of it. "This man is afraid of God," he said, and that was the end of the fight, and the family that was two seconds from being finished in a foreign hall walked out of it whole.

The fire he had pulled Tamar and her twins back from opened again in Babylon generations later, and three men out of his people walked through it and came out with nothing burned. A pit of lions opened in the same city, and a lion of Judah went down into it and came up untouched.

In the wilderness his tribe marched under a lion worked in gold with hooks along it like swords, and God let a strip of the seventh cloud of glory rest on the standard, and inside the cloud the first letters of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob burned with light off the Shechinah (the Divine Presence). Every camp in Israel could see which way Judah was facing.