The Living Bible (15 page)

Genesis
38

About this time, Judah left home and moved to Adullam and lived there with a man named Hirah.
²
 There he met and married a Canaanite girl—the daughter of Shua.
^3-5
 They lived at Chezib and had three sons, Er, Onan, and Shelah. These names were given to them by their mother, except for Er, who was named by his father.

    
⁶
 When his oldest son, Er, grew up, Judah arranged for him to marry a girl named Tamar.
⁷
 But Er was a wicked man, and so the Lord killed him.

    
⁸
 Then Judah said to Er’s brother, Onan, “You must marry Tamar, as our law requires of a dead man’s brother; so that her sons from you will be your brother’s heirs.”

    
⁹
 But Onan was not willing to have a child who would not be counted as his own, and so, although he married her,
*
whenever he went in to sleep with her, he spilled the sperm on the bed
*
to prevent her from having a baby which would be his brother’s.
¹⁰
 So far as the Lord was concerned, it was very wrong of him to deny a child to his deceased brother, so he killed him, too.
¹¹
 Then Judah told Tamar, his daughter-in-law, not to marry again at that time, but to return to her childhood home and to her parents, and to remain a widow there until his youngest son, Shelah, was old enough to marry her. (But he didn’t really intend for Shelah to do this, for fear God would kill him, too, just as he had his two brothers.) So Tamar went home to her parents.

    
¹²
 In the process of time Judah’s wife died. After the time of mourning was over, Judah and his friend Hirah, the Adullamite, went to Timnah to supervise the shearing of his sheep.
¹³
 When someone told Tamar that her father-in-law had left for the sheepshearing at Timnah,
¹⁴
 and realizing by now that she was not going to be permitted to marry Shelah, though he was fully grown, she laid aside her widow’s clothing and covered herself with a veil to disguise herself, and sat beside the road at the entrance to the village of Enaim, which is on the way to Timnah.
¹⁵
 Judah noticed her as he went by and thought she was a prostitute, since her face was veiled.
¹⁶
 So he stopped and propositioned her to sleep with him, not realizing of course that she was his own daughter-in-law.

    
“How much will you pay me?” she asked.

    
¹⁷
 “I’ll send you a young goat from my flock,” he promised.

    
“What pledge will you give me, so that I can be sure you will send it?” she asked.

    
¹⁸
 “Well, what do you want?” he inquired.

    
“Your identification seal and your walking stick,” she replied. So he gave them to her and she let him come and sleep with her; and she became pregnant as a result.
¹⁹
 Afterwards she resumed wearing her widow’s clothing as usual.
²⁰
 Judah asked his friend Hirah the Adullamite to take the young goat back to her, and to pick up the pledges he had given her, but Hirah couldn’t find her!

    
²¹
 So he asked around of the men of the city, “Where does the prostitute live who was soliciting out beside the road at the entrance of the village?”

    
“But we’ve never had a public prostitute here,” they replied.
²²
 So he returned to Judah and told him he couldn’t find her anywhere, and what the men of the place had told him.

    
²³
 “Then let her keep them!” Judah exclaimed. “We tried our best. We’d be the laughingstock of the town to go back again.”

    
²⁴
 About three months later word reached Judah that Tamar, his daughter-in-law, was pregnant, obviously as a result of prostitution.

    
“Bring her out and burn her,” Judah shouted.

    
²⁵
 But as they were taking her out to kill her she sent this message to her father-in-law: “The man who owns this identification seal and walking stick is the father of my child. Do you recognize them?”

    
²⁶
 Judah admitted that they were his and said, “She is more in the right than I am, because I refused to keep my promise to give her to my son Shelah.” But he did not marry her.

    
²⁷
 In due season the time of her delivery arrived and she had twin sons.
²⁸
 As they were being born, the midwife tied a scarlet thread around the wrist of the child who appeared first,
²⁹
 but he drew back his hand and the other baby was actually the first to be born. “Where did
you
come from!” she exclaimed. And ever after he was called Perez (meaning “Bursting Out”).
³⁰
 Then, soon afterwards, the baby with the scarlet thread on his wrist was born, and he was named Zerah.

Genesis
39

When Joseph arrived in Egypt as a captive of the Ishmaelite traders, he was purchased from them by Potiphar, a member of the personal staff of Pharaoh, the king of Egypt. Now this man Potiphar was the captain of the king’s bodyguard and his chief executioner.
²
 The Lord greatly blessed Joseph there in the home of his master, so that everything he did succeeded.
³
 Potiphar noticed this and realized that the Lord was with Joseph in a very special way.
⁴
 So Joseph naturally became quite a favorite with him. Soon he was put in charge of the administration of Potiphar’s household, and all of his business affairs.
⁵
 At once the Lord began blessing Potiphar for Joseph’s sake. All his household affairs began to run smoothly, his crops flourished and his flocks multiplied.
⁶
 So Potiphar gave Joseph the complete administrative responsibility over everything he owned. He hadn’t a worry in the world with Joseph there, except to decide what he wanted to eat! Joseph, by the way, was a very handsome young man.

    
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 One day at about this time Potiphar’s wife began making eyes at Joseph, and suggested that he come and sleep with her.

    
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 Joseph refused. “Look,” he told her, “my master trusts me with everything in the entire household;
⁹
 he himself has no more authority here than I have! He has held back nothing from me except you yourself because you are his wife. How can I do such a wicked thing as this? It would be a great sin against God.”

    
¹⁰
 But she kept on with her suggestions day after day, even though he refused to listen, and kept out of her way as much as possible.
¹¹
 Then one day as he was in the house going about his work—as it happened, no one else was around at the time—
¹²
 she came and grabbed him by the sleeve
*
demanding, “Sleep with me.” He tore himself away, but as he did, his jacket slipped off and she was left holding it as he fled from the house.
¹³
 When she saw that she had his jacket, and that he had fled,
^14-15
 she began screaming; and when the other men around the place came running in to see what had happened, she was crying hysterically. “My husband had to bring in this Hebrew slave to insult us!” she sobbed. “He tried to rape me, but when I screamed, he ran, and forgot to take his jacket.”

    
¹⁶
 She kept the jacket, and when her husband came home that night,
¹⁷
 she told him her story.

    
“That Hebrew slave you’ve had around here tried to rape me,
¹⁸
 and I was only saved by my screams. He fled, leaving his jacket behind!”

    
¹⁹
 Well, when her husband heard his wife’s story, he was furious.
²⁰
 He threw Joseph into prison, where the king’s prisoners were kept in chains.
²¹
 But the Lord was with Joseph there, too, and was kind to him by granting him favor with the chief jailer.
²²
 In fact, the jailer soon handed over the entire prison administration to Joseph, so that all the other prisoners were responsible to him.
²³
 The chief jailer had no more worries after that, for Joseph took care of everything, and the Lord was with him so that everything ran smoothly and well.

Genesis
40

Some time later it so happened that the king of Egypt became angry with both his chief baker and his chief butler, so he jailed them both in the prison where Joseph was, in the castle of Potiphar, the captain of the guard, who was the chief executioner.
⁴
 They remained under arrest there for quite some time, and Potiphar assigned Joseph to wait on them.
⁵
 One night each of them had a dream.
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 The next morning Joseph noticed that they looked dejected and sad.

    
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 “What in the world is the matter?” he asked.

    
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 And they replied, “We both had dreams last night, but there is no one here to tell us what they mean.”

    
“Interpreting dreams is God’s business,” Joseph replied. “Tell me what you saw.”

    
^9-10
 The butler told his dream first. “In my dream,” he said, “I saw a vine with three branches that began to bud and blossom, and soon there were clusters of ripe grapes.
¹¹
 I was holding Pharaoh’s wine cup in my hand, so I took the grapes and squeezed the juice into it, and gave it to him to drink.”

    
¹²
 “I know what the dream means,” Joseph said. “The three branches mean three days!
¹³
 Within three days Pharaoh is going to take you out of prison and give you back your job again as his chief butler.
¹⁴
 And please have some pity on me when you are back in his favor, and mention me to Pharaoh, and ask him to let me out of here.
¹⁵
 For I was kidnapped from my homeland among the Hebrews, and now this—here I am in jail when I did nothing to deserve it.”

    
¹⁶
 When the chief baker saw that the first dream had such a good meaning, he told his dream to Joseph, too.

    
“In my dream,” he said, “there were three baskets of pastries on my head.
¹⁷
 In the top basket were all kinds of bakery goods for Pharaoh, but the birds came and ate them.”

    
^18-19
 “The three baskets mean three days,” Joseph told him. “Three days from now Pharaoh will take off your head and impale your body on a pole, and the birds will come and pick off your flesh!”

    
²⁰
 Pharaoh’s birthday came three days later, and he held a party for all of his officials and household staff. He sent for his chief butler and chief baker, and they were brought to him from the prison.
²¹
 Then he restored the chief butler to his former position;
²²
 but he sentenced the chief baker to be impaled, just as Joseph had predicted.
²³
 Pharaoh’s wine taster, however, promptly forgot all about Joseph, never giving him a thought.