Here’s a retelling of the Genesis account of Judah and Tamar (from The Feast).

Judah arranges a marriage between Er and Tamar. Er dies because he’s got moral issues. The writer of this story seems more comfortable than I am in ascribing death to God’s judgment. Regardless, Er is dead, and Tamar now needs a husband, according to Jewish tradition. This is a little part of Torah known as the “levirate law” (see Deut. 25; Ruth 3–4), which states that the next oldest surviving brother should marry the widowed sister-in-law in order to preserve the dead brother’s lineage and to give the widow a place in the social schema. Onan becomes the lucky guy to take on his brother’s wife.

Apparently he goes along with the arrangement publicly. But his private acts of nonconsummation (for lack of a better word) have earned him his own noun, “Onanism.” (Just thought you’d like to know that little factoid, if you didn’t already.) God is not pleased and strikes him dead. Two dead brothers, a woman twice widowed, and a whole lot of confusion. Judah, the patriarch and leader, looks around and does the obvious math: Tamar is the common denominator. To protect the son he has left, Judah sends Tamar back to live with her parents, sending the message to anyone watching that this woman is dangerous. In Judah’s eyes, she’s a pawn and a problem more than she is a person.

The story then reads “after a long time,” which in Scripture means the story is about to get really interesting. Judah goes through his own hard time when his wife dies, and he takes a buddy with him to Vegas once he’s finished his mourning period. Okay, it wasn’t Vegas, for those who read your Bibles carefully. It’s Timnah.

Somehow Tamar finds out about her father-in-law’s travel plans, and she decides that, if she is to get what she needs to survive and have any social value, she must take matters into her own hands. Tamar decides to play “the whore” (the Hebrew indicates) by wearing a veil. The veil points out that Tamar knows exactly what she’s doing: she’s seducing the man who’s denied her respectability all this time.

Judah must not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, because he does not recognize her upon approach, which could be a testimony to how drunk he is. (As an aside, this part of the story reminds me of Jacob with Rachel: after all that hard work, how does he not know he’s been given the wrong sister? How drunk are you when you are unable to distinguish between the hot sister and the one with “weak eyes”—a Semitic way of saying, “not as pretty”?) Or perhaps Judah’s failure to recognize Tamar is a testament to how little he’s paying attention. He’s treating Tamar not as a person, but as a thing to be consumed.

Either way, the story makes things pretty clear: Tamar is approaching this encounter as a business proposition. Judah is approaching it as a “boys will be boys” experience. Both know what they want, and both get it. Because Judah cannot pay Tamar for her services rendered, he leaves his drivers’ license and credit cards with her. Actually, the seal he leaves with her is his proof of identity encased in a cylinder he would have worn around his neck. Like Esau, he’s willing to trade a great deal for a moment of indulgence.

Three months pass. Judah finds out Tamar is pregnant and becomes incensed, demanding her punishment for misconduct in a moment of thick irony. According to Torah, she could be hanged, burned, stoned, strangled, or beheaded. One scholar reminds us of the seriousness of the moment: “Criminals who were to be burned or strangled had to stand in dung up to their knees.”¹ But Judah is specific: Tamar must be burned.

And then, Tamar sends a prophetic word back to Judah. Like Nathan’s conversation with King David, Tamar exposes Judah for the Torah violator he really is and not the public do-gooder he claims to be. Judah has made a mess of his role in the story. Tamar is not afraid to bring his transgressions to the surface, despite her own obvious sins.

Only the Bible would continue with this sordid story. Tamar gives birth to twins, a familiar twist in the Genesis narrative—one of these twins will be in the lineage of King David, and of Jesus.

The mess becomes the place for God to do God’s mysterious work. We still tend to think that God works best with perfect people, whose hair is cut just right, who know all the right language. But the Bible continually reminds us that God isn’t interested so much in people who look the part. God’s interest lies in people who make a mess of the part. People who, like Judah, are more interested in appearing virtuous than practicing virtue by protecting the innocent and vulnerable, granting justice to a widow who’s lost two husbands, abstaining from giving in to lust and physical longing that turns a woman into “the sum of her parts,” a far cry from the image of God that Genesis declares women to be. No matter how often we forget, God keeps working with lyin’, cheatin’, whorin’ jerks.

This story says something about power. Those who have power, like Judah, usually act quite different in public than they do in private. The narrative details of this story prove the point. Judah only deals with his misuse and abuse of Tamar once he is publicly exposed. People in power so often wait for a public shaming to become truly authentic in their real messes of sexual exploitation, gender bias, injustice, abuse of power, public persona versus private reality.

Enron. 9-11. Abu-Ghraib. Mortgage crises. But big messes occur when little messes happen in the midst of our daily choices and actions. Adultery, abuse, betrayal, gossip, and hate. The big messes and little messes cannot be separated. Recognizing this entanglement gives us a place from which we can begin rebuilding our faith. God is interested in the messes we’ve made. God decides to enter into the mess, and makes sense of our world.