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We Who Thirst by Jessica LM Jenkins
Delve into the captivating tales of women from the Bible, exploring their lives within ancient cultures and historical contexts. These narratives reveal not only their stories but also the profound love and beauty of the God we worship.
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We Who Thirst by Jessica LM Jenkins
022 What's up with that? Part 1: Understanding Biblical Law and Family Dynamics Across Time
In this episode Jessica answers listener questions about ancient law and household dynamics.
Delve into the fascinating world of ancient biblical marriage and family structures that challenge our modern assumptions. In this eye-opening episode, we explore how the concept of household—not the individual—formed the foundation of Old Testament society and shaped everything from inheritance laws to marriage practices.
Have you ever wondered why biblical patriarchs had surrogates for their wives? Or why inheritance went to sons instead of daughters? The answers lie not in male lust or gender discrimination, but in understanding the radically different social structures of ancient times.
Most surprising is the revelation about who actually controlled reproduction in biblical households. Contrary to popular teaching, it was the matriarch—not the patriarch—who managed this domain. This explains why Sarah gave Hagar to Abraham, and why Rachel and Leah gave their handmaids to Jacob. These weren't acts driven by male desire but by women exercising their household power (sometimes to the detriment of other women).
We also unpack how concepts we take for granted—human rights, democracy, individualism—simply didn't exist when the Mosaic Law was written. This helps us understand that God was working incrementally through existing cultural frameworks, planting seeds of justice that would grow over time. As Jesus himself acknowledged when discussing divorce laws, some Old Testament practices were permitted "because of the hardness of your hearts," not because they represented God's ideal.
The story of Tamar brings these principles to life, showing how her actions weren't manipulation but a creative solution to hold Judah accountable to his family obligations. When Judah declared, "She was more righteous than I," he recognized that she understood household commitments better than he did.
Understanding these cultural dynamics doesn't mean we must approve of ancient practices, but it helps Scripture make sense in its context. What questions do you have about Old Testament marriage and family practices? Send me a message—I'd love to explore more of these topics in future episodes!
Listen to this YouTube talk to learn more about ancient households and heterarchy: https://youtu.be/OO-E36xt_2E?si=NKuPvHVrujk14VTq
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Welcome back to the we who Thirst podcast. This episode is going to be a little bit different. I've had a couple requests to do a podcast episode. That's kind of like what I do on my Instagram stories. So if you don't follow me on Instagram, I do ask me anything. I will talk about random topics that are on my mind and I do this without a lot of preparation in the moment, like I don't study for that topic and then talk about it. I just take all the knowledge I've accumulated and we discuss, and so I have collected a series of questions about the Old Testament law, the patriarchs, marriage dynamics, family dynamics, and we're going to talk through those today. Some of these questions, I will admit up front, need more research and I'll probably do a whole episode on certain things by themselves, but for today we're just going to go and we're going to start talking through these questions to give us a foundation and I think it'll just be a really fun conversation. So these are questions that came in on Instagram in my stories through one of the question boxes or a couple different question boxes, but the first one I think and I've gotten lots of variations of this particular question throughout the years and the person wrote why doesn't God tell the patriarchs to prioritize treating women well? I insert a variation on this in my stories the other day why doesn't the Mosaic Law go farther? Doesn't the Mosaic Law go farther? Why doesn't it give women more rights? Why doesn't it do all of these things? And so I want to take a step back before we talk about Mosaic Law, the patriarchs, any of it, and just kind of hone in on some of our assumptions that we can bring to the text without realizing it.
Jessica LM Jenkins:We have things that are part of our modern culture that the ancient person, moses, the hearers of the Mosaic law, ancient Israel, pretty much the entire Old Testament didn't even have as a culture. These were concepts that were completely new. They had zero idea these things could even exist. They had zero idea these things could even exist. So sometimes we come to the text going why doesn't this text give humans freedom or point to things that are a high value in my culture, when the idea of that didn't even exist in ancient culture? Jessica, what are you talking about? Let me explain. So one thing is, since it was, why didn't God tell the patriarchs to prioritize treating women well? That was the question.
Jessica LM Jenkins:One thing that the ancients didn't have necessarily was the real concept of human rights. If you look at the ancient cultures, they were in every way, in many ways barbaric the kings and rulers of city states or large empires like Assyria, babylon, egypt. They would just brutally torture people and murder people and do whatever they wanted to keep their power. The idea of human rights is a Judeo-Christian concept that came apart partly because of the theological concepts that started in the Mosaic Law and developed throughout Scripture. So when we look at the Mosaic Law, which is the beginning of that concept of human rights in many ways, and you wonder why doesn't it spell out the full extent of human rights that we would like to see? It's because it's the beginning and God is working his people baby steps towards how he wants humans to treat each other.
Jessica LM Jenkins:But the Mosaic law is not the perfect encapsulation of a perfect society. We see Jesus even admit this. I believe it's Mark 7. I might have the reference wrong on that, I'm not looking things up.
Jessica LM Jenkins:But when Jesus is talking with the Pharisees and they ask about divorce, like why did Moses say we could divorce our wives? And Jesus says Moses allowed you to divorce your wives because of the hardness of your heart. So Jesus in the New Testament and at least Matthew and Mark freely admits that the Mosaic law is not the actual laws. The commands of the Mosaic law is not how far God actually wants to go. Moses allowed no-fault divorce for the men. They could just decide you burnt my toast, you're out of here, I'm going to marry someone else. And Jesus says that wasn't God's design, that's not God's will.
Jessica LM Jenkins:Jesus says the Mosaic law is not an encapsulation of a perfect society, it is not the end goal. And so when we read the Mosaic law, when we look at the lives of the patriarchs, we have to understand that this is not where God is trying to put us at the end. This is the beginning. This is your crawling toddler who's trying to take their first steps. And they keep falling on their little diaper over and over and over and over again. And you, as a parent, you pick them up and you encourage them and you say we can do this, take another step. That is what the Mosaic Law is. It is there to help us realize we're falling on our diaper. It is there to help us realize we need a hand to hold on to because we can't walk yet I need to hold daddy's hand. That it is. It is as Paul says. It is a tutor, it is an educator, it is a helper. It is not a perfect set of laws and commands for a perfect society.
Jessica LM Jenkins:God does not Scripture lay out a blueprint for a perfect society. Scripture talks about how it has everything we need for life and godliness. So we have to separate sanctification from society. Scripture teaches us what we need to know to be sanctified, to become like Jesus. The Holy Spirit works with Scripture to pull those things together, but it does not. Its purpose has never been. This is how you order a perfect society. So if you are looking for scripture to tell you how to order society corporately, it doesn't do that. It talks about holiness and it can give you idea what a holy society could look like. But different cultural paradigms have different ways of going about this. So why doesn't God tell the patriarchs to prioritize treating women well?
Jessica LM Jenkins:They didn't necessarily have the concept of human rights. To be like, they're human, you have to treat them well. They're equally human to you. That wasn't like a concept that they were thinking about. Human rights abuses didn't like that concept that they were thinking about. Human rights abuses didn't like that concept they didn't have.
Jessica LM Jenkins:Another concept they didn't have in the Old Testament was a strong concept of self or the individual. Now that's going to sound shocking because we are a very individualistic society and our sense of self is completely central to our personal identity. That is everything in our culture points us back to. Who am I, who is myself? In our society and in our government, the self, the individual person, is considered the smallest unit of society. So a family is made up of individual people. For me it's my husband, me and my two kids. We are four individual people. There are four individual, tiny units in our family, and then a city is made up of a bunch of individuals and states and countries are all made up of individuals. That is a post-enlightenment concept In the ancient world, especially in the Old Testament.
Jessica LM Jenkins:The smallest unit of society is not the individual, it is the household, and household could range in size. An average peasant household is going to be 8 to 15 people and this could be grandparents, parents, children, grandchildren. It could have three or four generations in it. It could be 8 to 15 people, an exceptionally wealthy household like Abraham and Sarah. It talks about how Abraham had 315 or 50 or something like that over 300 fighting men born in his household. Obviously they're not all Abraham's children, because at this point he doesn't even have children of his own, but his household is. If all those 300 plus men are married and have 1.5 children, abraham's household is over a thousand people and yet that is considered the smallest unit in society. For an average family it's 8 to 15. For Abraham it was over a thousand, which go listen to my episode on Hagar and Sarah. That household dynamic makes their story make a lot more sense.
Jessica LM Jenkins:So when you consider Old Testament law, you have to consider that by and large, laws are oriented to protect the smallest unit of society, which is the household, not necessarily the individual. There are laws that protect individuals, but overall we're trying to protect the smallest unit of society In our day, that's the individual. In the ancient world it was a household. So there's a lot of laws that rub us wrong, especially when it comes to women, because it's like hey, she has rights. Well, a, human rights didn't really exist. And B, we're considering the good of the household, not necessarily the good of the individual. You don't have to love that, you don't have to love that, you don't have to like that, especially from our individual self-culture, but you have to understand this is the way, as far as I understand, the ancient world worked, so their laws are going to be much more focused on household dynamics and needs, not necessarily the individual. This even plays out with God's continued care for the widow and the orphan, because these are people who's outside a household or they make up a household by themselves, and so God's like we got to care for these many disenfranchised, impoverished households. Even if it's just one or two people, they need to be brought in and they need to be cared for, and that is part of my concern. So I want to lay out these foundational concepts because they are really important.
Jessica LM Jenkins:We today, even if you're listening and you believe that feminism is bad and it's not good, all these things, the way it's often used in evangelical circles even if you believe that the benefits of feminism modern day feminism first wave, second wave, third wave, fourth wave, whatever wave it impacts how we view women and how we view society Women having a vote in elections, women being able to get their own checking accounts, women being financially independent from a man, from a household, as an individual. These are modern concepts that come because of feminism. The ancient world didn't have feminism. They didn't even really see the individual as a separate unit. So they didn't have feminism and democracy. If we talk about having a vote democracy. If I'm correct, the Greeks kind of came up with democracy, at least as far as we know, at least on a broad scale, and that was in the 300s BC.
Jessica LM Jenkins:Moses, and it depends when you think the Mosaic Law was written. Earliest dates for Moses' Mosaic Law would be like 1500 BC. Later dates if you believe it was done during the Persian period, during the exile or during the kingdom, it could be as late as 400 or 500 BC, no matter where you put it, it happens pre-invention of democracy. So you're dealing with a culture that doesn't necessarily, culture-wise, believe in human rights. God is planting the seeds of human rights because in many ways that is a Judeo-Christian concept that even atheists have benefited from, from Christianity. So we're pre-democracy, we are pre-human rights, we are pre way pre, because it's the enlightenment that really the I think, therefore, I am philosophical idea for the individual person. They are communal, they think in household terms, they think in family terms, large tribe terms. So the smallest unit of the society is the household. Then you have your tribe, which is made up of households, et cetera, and it expands out from there.
Jessica LM Jenkins:So why doesn't God tell the patriarchs to prioritize treating women well? He does lay out concepts of character, kindness, justice, mercy that you are supposed to use in all of your relationships, but the law is focused on households, not the individual relationships nearly as much. And if you interpret the Mosaic Law through that lens, it will make so much more sense and you'll see how God is actually working continually in the Mosaic Law to benefit women. But he doesn't necessarily directly, even though we would like him to be like. Treat women well, give them freedom, give them a right to vote, give them a right to own property, all of those things Right. Those are new concepts that the ancient world, when the Mosaic law was written, didn't necessarily have. So we're wanting to place a modern concept into the ancient world and it just can't work that way. So we can talk more about all of that in the future.
Jessica LM Jenkins:But I'll go on to the next question. The next question is did Abraham and Sarah separate after Isaac's not sacrifice? We do not know. I don't necessarily think they did. We kind of see them together, though I know there are scholars who claim that they separated, even one who even says Abraham went back to Hagar after the sacrifice. The text doesn't tell us. It's all conjecture. I don't love going down conjecture rabbit trail so we don't know. Alongside that is a question about Moses and Zipporah.
Jessica LM Jenkins:Moses sends Zipporah away before the exodus. Does he potentially marry someone else? We do know Moses marries a second wife who is Cushite, and that's when Miriam and Aaron get all upset because he married this other woman who is Cushite, and that's when Miriam and Aaron get all upset because he married this other woman. Some people think that might have been Zipporah, described a different way. I haven't looked into it enough to have a hard and fast.
Jessica LM Jenkins:I've always read it as separate women. Moses does send Zipporah away before the Exodus. I have always read and again I want to dive into this more deeply I've always read that more just as a protective husband. He and Zipporah and their boys go to Egypt and then things start getting heated with Pharaoh and Moses sends her back to her dad, which I could totally see my husband doing. He's like this is getting dangerous. I'm going to send you back to your daddy where you're safe. And then daddy brings her back to him once they have exited Egypt him once they have exited Egypt. So I've always just read that. As I need to keep this woman and my kids safe, I'm going to put them out of harm's way while I do my prophetic shake up the world thing, but I don't want them to get caught in the crossfire or have to go through all these plagues. That's how I read it. I could be wrong. I love Zipporah, so it definitely deserves a deeper dive. Um, it definitely does. I love Zipporah, so it definitely deserves a deeper dive. So why? Um?
Jessica LM Jenkins:I got a lot of questions on like polygamy and Jacob's wives and all of those things. Questions about, um, sarah and Tamar. I'm just going to refer you to that episode. I went through Sarah and Tamar in depth with laws and all sorts of things. Those are excellent episodes. Go listen to those. I think they're very early on, so you'll have to scroll all the way back to the beginning of the podcast. But I'm not going to talk about Sarah and Hagar today, not Tamar. Sarah and Hagar you can head back to listen to that. I do want to do a whole episode on Tamar. There's a question about her. I'll answer it briefly. We will be having a whole episode on Tamar because she's amazing. So polygamy Some people mentioned Jacob, having two sisters as wives and how icky that is.
Jessica LM Jenkins:One thing to keep in mind with the Old Testament patriarchs is that they are descriptive, not prescriptive. God is not spelling out this is the type of marriage you should have. In fact, I think a lot of the patriarch's marriage relationships actually are cautionary tales against polygamy and against having two wives that are sisters. I also believe and again I didn't look it up, but I remember there being a passage that says you cannot sleep with your wife's sister. So the Mosaic law. Later, when Moses writes, hundreds of years after Jacob, he says you can't even do this Like this is an illegal relationship. So first Genesis shows us how having two wives that are sisters is a bad idea. And then Moses later on says and it's against the law. So we get the living illustration bad idea. And then law you may not do it. So scripture often shows us things that are not working to help us realize that they are not good ideas.
Jessica LM Jenkins:Next question is surrogacy. Again, I talk about that in the Sarah and Hagar episode quite frequently, but one question I thought was really good was Jacob's concubines. Why did Jacob take the concubines, since he had so many children with Leah? Was it lust, something else? This is a fantastic question and it shows our assumptions, which I've had for years. Reading into these texts, I see a lot of people and I've heard sermons talking about Abraham and Hagar or Jacob and Zilpah and Bilhah, I believe, are their names talking about his concubines. Talking about his concubines that it was the man's lust. The man is lustful. This is why he's taking concubines and I want to gently push back on that, because we don't necessarily know whether there's lust involved and so we're reading motives into their hearts.
Jessica LM Jenkins:But as I've studied Old Testament marriage dynamics and I have a whole lecture on this on YouTube, I'll try to put a link in the show notes. You can go watch that and it breaks down how a heterarchical household works in Old Testament. But we often come to Old Testament texts assuming a hierarchy where men rule women, men own women. That's not really how it worked. From my research in the Old Testament, if there was a hierarchy in the household, it is an age-based hierarchy, not a gender-based hierarchy in the household. I'm not talking about outside, I'm talking about in the household. It's an age-based. So you have your patriarch, which is your oldest male, and you have your matriarch, which is the oldest female. They are each kind of responsible for certain areas in the household and they work together kind of concurrently. Push comes to shove, he probably has the final say, but they work concurrently and there are times she's going to have the final say and then they are in charge of the men and women under them in their respective areas.
Jessica LM Jenkins:And what we often don't realize, partly because of our purity culture, complementarian evangelical mindset, especially evangelical sex duty mindsets, where it's like women, you have to give sex to your husbands or you're in sin, that kind of vibe. We come to the text with those assumptions in our mind, just like we have feminism and democracy and human rights and individualism in our brains as pre-assumptions. So we read about the concubines and we assume that the men are ruling all the women and we assume that it's a lustful action because men have this insatiable need for sex, when actually the Old Testament says sex is a duty that the husband owes his wife. The Old Testament doesn't say women ever that I recall owe sex to men. It's something the man owes to his wife. It is his husbandly duty towards her, and I've even interacted with Jewish people who are like they still talk about how the husband owes sexual relations to the wife. It is not the duty, does not reverse. That is an evangelical purity culture concept that is twisted scripture and does not understand the Old Testament. So could Abraham and Jacob had some lust? Sure, they are human. Do we know that they had lust? The text does not tell us.
Jessica LM Jenkins:And what we do not talk about in the surrogacy passages is that one of the things the matriarch is in charge of is reproduction. That is the matriarch's domain. Okay, the husband owes the women sexual relations, a child. That is his duty to her and the matriarch is in charge of this. This is why we see Rachel and Leah. Leah says I'm going to buy from Rachel because Rachel's the beloved. So Leah comes up and says I'm going to buy from you. I'm going to barter with you that I get to have sex with our husband tonight and I'm going to give you these mandrakes and Rachel's like okay, I accept the mandrakes, you may have sex with the husband. The women are bartering for who gets to sleep with the man, because the women were in charge of the reproduction. Could a man force his way onto a woman and do nasty things? Of course it happens all the time. Men have done that all throughout history. So we're not saying that doesn't happen, but in the structure the matriarch is the one kind of in charge to make sure this is happening.
Jessica LM Jenkins:And so when it comes to surrogacy, it is not the husband who is bringing in these surrogates. Neither Abraham or Jacob say, hmm, I think I should get a surrogate for my wife. No, it is the women saying, for whatever reason. And with Jacob well, with both Sarah and Jacob's wives it's the women saying I'm not having children, so I'm going to give my husband a surrogate and inform him he now has another wife Because, again, reproduction is the matriarch's role.
Jessica LM Jenkins:And with Rachel and Leah it's tricky because you don't have a clear matriarch. So that structure gets real fishy because they are sister wives. They are kind of equal wives. You don't necessarily have first wife, second wife, dynamic, older wife, younger wife. You have sister wives and so they butt heads constantly. You have the surrogacy thing and the surrogatesrogates Bilhah and Zilpah. They are clearly secondary wives. They are wives, they are. They talk about them using the same types of language that they do, rachel and Leah. But it was Rachel who realized she couldn't have children, so she informed Jacob that he's now sleeping with her maidservant so that Rachel could have children through her maidservant. Leah stops having children and then does the same thing with her maidservant, and so this is a woman's way, actually, of using another woman to benefit herself. It is not the man making this choice. It is the women making this choice for themselves and for other women who may or may not have had a choice in the matter.
Jessica LM Jenkins:We do find in Babylonian records that surrogates often entered into a written contract with the person they were carrying for Right, and so there may have been a level of choice that we assume they didn't have, especially with Sarah and Hagar and you can listen to the whole episode. I go through the laws, all of it With Sarah and Hagar, we kind servant women, and Hagar was the one who agreed to do the surgency, and they had some sort of agreement together, which makes actually, in my opinion, a whole lot more sense of the story. Go listen to that episode. And so the same with Rachel and Leah. They could have had multiple maidservants and they could have entered into an agreement with Bilhah and Zilpah, that you were going to be a surrogate for me and they would at times write these surrogacy agreements out in contracts and there was protections for the surrogates and a whole bunch of stuff. I go through it in the Sarah and Hagar episode. So I don't think it was Jacob's lust because he had two wives. His hands were full. The wives gave him two more wives, secondary concubine wives but it was because the woman had charge of reproduction and it was a woman's job to provide an heir.
Jessica LM Jenkins:Because again, we're dealing with household dynamics. If you're going to have a household that continues on, you have to have children or your household dies, unlike an individualistic society where we just assume every individual is going to be born, live and die. You want your household to continue. There isn't supposed to be a death of a household. It is supposed to continue, so that we assume the smallest unit of society is going to have an end. They assume the smallest unit of society is supposed to continue, which also impacts all the inheritance laws of the Old Testament.
Jessica LM Jenkins:Somebody said that they really struggle with the fact that inheritance is given to the oldest son, not the oldest child, potentially a daughter, and there's some reasons for this? It's because and there's some reasons for this it's because again, we're dealing with household, not individuals. And so the oldest son was given in Old Testament law, the Mosaic law, he was given a double portion. So let's say the man has four sons, one each. The oldest son, with his two portions of the inheritance, has to care for the parents, unmarried sisters, all of the things. He is going to become the next patriarch and it is his job to make sure everybody in the household is taken care of. And that's his birthright, that's his job. So this isn't favoritism. It's the CEO passing off the keys to the company to the next person who's supposed to take care of the company, whereas the other guys get to start their own company, if that makes sense. So the oldest gets the double portion. What about the daughters? Why couldn't she? Well, daughters married outside the household and became part of a new household.
Jessica LM Jenkins:Again, we're not thinking individually. You have households. So a household has a man, his wife and children. Let's say they have two sons and two daughters. So in their household the sons are going to inherit this household's property, the household in many ways Carol Myers talks about. It's likely that it's considered the whole household's property, not the man's.
Jessica LM Jenkins:We read it because the man is the face of the household. And so, like my family, you would call us the Jenkins. We have a last name and so you just talk to us about the Jenkins family. In the ancient world they didn't necessarily have last names, so we talk about Abraham's family. He's the face of the household, like Jenkins is the face of our household. It's the face of the household, like Jenkins is the face of our household, our overarching last name. That groups us all together. So it's not that the man only owned the land, it's that it belongs to the household. And so when you're divesting your property, your sons get it because they stay in the household.
Jessica LM Jenkins:Again, these laws are about household dynamics, not individual dynamics. The sons stay in the household, so they get to keep the land. The oldest gets more because he has to take care of parents, unmarried siblings, widows, etc. He has to run the family business. The daughters when they marry and every woman marries the idea of staying single as a man or woman in the ancient world didn't exist. Everybody got married. Being single wasn't an option. The daughters when they marry, they join a new household. So, especially under the Mosaic Covenant where the land belongs to specific tribes and families for perpetuity. Because, again, households are supposed to last. They don't end, like individuals end. So you have to keep the land within the tribe, within the household, within that tribe. So if you're of the tribe of Judah and you marry your daughter to the tribe of Simeon, which is perfectly fine to do you can't give some of Judah's land to the tribe of Simeon. It just doesn't work that way. Because she transfers to the new household, she, as the individual, is now part of a new group because, again, they're not thinking on the individual level, they're thinking on the group level. So she goes to the new household.
Jessica LM Jenkins:Now there would be dowries, there would be bride prices, and they're not buying, selling like cows, dowries. Bride prices are we can afford to take care of your daughter and we're going to make kinship ties between our families, and then dowries are she needs to have money in case you fools or jerks, and we are choosing to invest in your family unit. It's kind of like giving a married couple a down payment on their business, like Jack and Jill want to get married and they want to dig wells. We'll just go with the Jack and Jill. They want to dig wells. That's what they want to do. They want to have this well business. So at their wedding, both of their families pitch in and say we're going to give you $30,000 to start your well business.
Jessica LM Jenkins:Think about dowries and bride prices more about business investments into a couple starting a business, because your household and your business are completely combined. There is no separate family versus economy. In the ancient world, economy and family are two sides of the same coin. And so bride price and those things they're not buying selling Give me 30 shekels for the cow, give me 40 for your daughter. It's usually more. We're investing in this couple, for their future, so that they can have sheep, they can have goats, they can have the things they need to start their family business sustenance, agrarian farming kind of deal.
Jessica LM Jenkins:So women didn't get inheritance because you have to keep it with the household per the law and because when they got married they went to a new household. It doesn't seem fair to us because we think individually. I as a woman should get the same inheritance as my brother does, because we're individual and my parents' inheritance would be an individual thing for us, individual children and it's their individual property that they have, separate from their parents and my grandparents, etc. The ancient world. Again, we're talking households, not individuals. So that is a lot of background on these questions.
Jessica LM Jenkins:I am going to end our episode there. I have a few more, but I just I hope these sorts of interactions are helpful to you to just understand the law and the Old Testament and what is going on, because there's so much that sometimes just doesn't make sense. You read it and you're like that's not fair, that doesn't seem right. Well, when you understand the culture, you don't have to like it. I'm not saying you have to like it. My goal is to make it make sense. If you understand the culture, it at least makes sense. Maybe there's still a better solution.
Jessica LM Jenkins:A lot of the marriage examples from the patriarchs are ick. Oh, I did say I was going to talk about Tamar briefly and I want to do that before we close. So the question came in was Tamar manipulating Judah? I was taught that she was. This is common. She does trick him. She gets pregnant by him. Real quick recap for those who are like oh, I can't place Tamar Judah had three sons. His oldest son married Tamar and the text very simply says he was evil and God killed him Done, okay.
Jessica LM Jenkins:So we have the concept of leverant marriage, and I will do a whole episode on this. So I'm going to go really fast. We have the concept of leverant marriage because, again, two households, when they join a couple together in marriage, both households are saying we take on the obligation to make sure this woman has children, because reproduction is the matriarch's, the woman's role and it is her lifeline to the future. There are no 401ks, there are no retirements. She cannot exist outside of a household. Nobody can, not even men, but especially women. And so the families are agreeing we are going to make sure she has children, because that is what she needs to survive in our culture. And so that's where leverant marriage comes in, because the family takes on the obligation for that bride to have children. Now her husband is supposed to get that done. That is the way it's supposed to happen. And if he stays alive and they don't have children, they generally blame it on the woman, which was not fair, but it's the way it was. We know men can be infertile as well, but I digress. So, anyway, but it's the way it was. We know men can be infertile as well, but I digress, so anyway.
Jessica LM Jenkins:Judah marries his oldest son to Tamar. That means his family has taken on the responsibility to make sure she has a son, a child. God kills his oldest son because he's evil. So Judah marries Tamar to his second son, who may have had other wives, we don't know. That guy decides not to get her pregnant. He sexually uses her and then ejaculates on the floor and God says I'm not having that and kills him. Great Now Moses has lost two men, two sons, in marriage to Tamar. He tells Tamar I will marry you to the youngest son when he's old enough to be married. Evidently he was too young at the time. Go back and live with your parents until he's old enough. Tamar says okay, that's fair, with your parents until he's old enough. Tamar says okay, that's fair, he is a kid, I'll go back. So she goes back. Kid grows up.
Jessica LM Jenkins:Judah does not fulfill his promise.
Jessica LM Jenkins:He's like she's a black widow. I've lost two boys to her already. I'm not doing it. Tamar is sitting there going. You are not fulfilling your family obligations to me Because when I married your oldest son, your whole household took on an obligation to make sure I had children. You are dropping the ball. You owe me a sexual reproductive obligation and so, because he's not doing what he was supposed to do, she deceives him and she dresses as a prostitute and he goes and visits a prostitute poor form and she basically takes the ancient equivalent of his driver's license and social security card as collateral for the payment he promises her. And they do the deed and she gets pregnant and she goes back to her parents' house like nothing ever happened.
Jessica LM Jenkins:And then neighbors are all like Judah Tamar is pregnant, and it wasn't your kid, oh no. And Judah's like this is bad, she has dishonored my family, she's dishonored us all. I'm gonna deal with her because he has the right to do that. She's part of his household, even though she's not living there, and so he's gonna enact punishment upon her for getting pregnant from someone not in his household, because, again, we have to keep reproduction and everything in the household. And then she's like well, the man who got me pregnant here's a driver's license, social security card. He's like oh shoot, that was me. And then he says she was more righteous than I Because she was the one who understood and upheld the familial reproduction commitments that were made at her wedding and he dropped the ball and he publicly owned it. So was she manipulating Judah? Not really. She was using a creative workaround to hold him to his commitments. Now it was his son, not him, who was supposed to, but God used that anyway and she becomes part of the line of Jesus. So, but hopefully, as we've talked through all those other things, hopefully even the story of Tamar makes a lot more sense when you understand a lot of these background pieces of information.
Jessica LM Jenkins:I'm going to close our episode here. It's gone a little long, but I really hope this was fun for you. I would like to do more of these. Let me know your feedback. You can send me an email, you can send me a DM, you can talk on Discord if you're a member of my Patreon. But I can't wait to dive into all of these women and all of these situations in more depth and detail and give you laws and all of the things at a later point. But as we enter into summer, I hope the Lord will bless you and keep you and make his face shine upon you and give you rest. Have a great day.
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