When Judah saw her, he thought her to be an harlot; because she had covered her face.
Tamar veiled her face as a deliberate disguise, and because her face was hidden Judah took her to be a prostitute and failed to recognize who she was. The incident belongs to the record of Judah's sin in Genesis 38. That chapter stands among the sorry incidents that are not necessary to the narrative of Jacob and Joseph, whose true story runs from Genesis 37 to Genesis 39 onward and shows how God overrules human wrath, ambition, and jealousy to His own praise. Genesis 38, with this deception and fall, displays one of the sad fruits of Jacob's mistake in taking more than one wife, namely low standards of morality and crime.
The exposure of such sin is given in order that sin may be shunned, not to encourage lust nor to excuse wrongdoing, and it directs the reader to God's love, mercy, and power as the remedy. From this union came Perez, also called Pharez, who stands in the human ancestry of Christ, born of Tamar whom Judah in this moment mistook for a harlot.
That tainted birth, joined with Jacob's selfish craft, David's passions, Rahab's heathen background, and the sin and idolatry of Solomon and the later kings of Judah, made the line from which Christ sprang one that concentrated in Him all the weaknesses of humanity. Christ therefore took flesh not from a sinless being but from sinful man, with all the weaknesses and sinful tendencies to which fallen human nature is subject. That flesh was rendered even more subject to infirmity by the physical and moral deterioration of the race through the generations. This was no accident but a necessary part of the plan of redemption, in order that He might suffer death and be tempted as man.
Tamar veiled her face as a deliberate disguise, and because her face was hidden Judah took her to be a prostitute and failed to recognize who she was. The incident belongs to the record of Judah's sin in Genesis 38. That chapter stands among the sorry incidents that are not necessary to the narrative of Jacob and Joseph, whose true story runs from Genesis 37 to Genesis 39 onward and shows how God overrules human wrath, ambition, and jealousy to His own praise. Genesis 38, with this deception and fall, displays one of the sad fruits of Jacob's mistake in taking more than one wife, namely low standards of morality and crime.
The exposure of such sin is given in order that sin may be shunned, not to encourage lust nor to excuse wrongdoing, and it directs the reader to God's love, mercy, and power as the remedy. From this union came Perez, also called Pharez, who stands in the human ancestry of Christ, born of Tamar whom Judah in this moment mistook for a harlot.
That tainted birth, joined with Jacob's selfish craft, David's passions, Rahab's heathen background, and the sin and idolatry of Solomon and the later kings of Judah, made the line from which Christ sprang one that concentrated in Him all the weaknesses of humanity. Christ therefore took flesh not from a sinless being but from sinful man, with all the weaknesses and sinful tendencies to which fallen human nature is subject. That flesh was rendered even more subject to infirmity by the physical and moral deterioration of the race through the generations. This was no accident but a necessary part of the plan of redemption, in order that He might suffer death and be tempted as man.