PART 2: THAT’S NO LADY, THAT’S URIAH’S WIFE

 

Genesis | Joshua | 1 Chronicles |  Ruth | Gospel of Matthew

WARNING: Masturbation, Murder, Adultery, Prostitution
CONTEXT: ~ 2000 BCE – 30 AD

In light of the conflicted relationship between Judaism and the offshoot cult known as Christianity, it is ironic that the “Old Testament” prophecies regarding the coming of the savior are so critical to the Christian Messiah narrative. The Christian vision of the Savior is quite different from the Jewish one.

From a Jewish point of view, the Messiah was expected to be a military leader who would rid Judea of the occupiers (Assyrian, Babylonia, Persian, Greek, Roman). As a warlord, David is the perfect national icon for Savior of the Jews; however, he is not a role model for peace, love and family values.

In scripture, YHWH assures the Judeans multiple times that a member of the Davidic dynasty would always reign from the monarchial throne (1 Kings 11:36 | 1 Kings 15:4 | 2 Kings 8:19). That didn’t turn out to be true either biblically or in actual history. The Judean monarchy ended in 589 BCE and has not been heard from since.

It is a serious stretch for bible literalists to explain this clear inaccuracy, but that doesn’t stop them from trying. For the purposes of this discussion, however, that specific broken divine promise is not particularly relevant.

Our topic in Part II concerns only the biblical lineage of Jesus and some colorful stops along the way. Each discussion item is associated with a female forebear. There are only five women listed in the timeline between Abraham and Jesus (about 2,000 Bible years), each the protagonist of a sketchy narrative.

The genealogies in Matthew and Luke don’t match each other.

From Judah to Jesus, the Book of Matthew identifies the women who contributed to Jesus’s DNA:

Tamar: Canaanite unwed mother
Rahab: Canaanite prostitute
Ruth: Moabite
Bathsheba: Adulteress
Mary: Unwed mother, eternal virgin

Let us proceed.

God Kills a Wanker and Judah’s Indiscretion
Picking up the thread from Part I, we look in on Jacob/Israel’s fourth son Judah, a tribal chieftain settled in the hills of southern Palestine. We continue the story at Genesis 38, which opens with YHWH killing Judah’s first two sons, Er and Onan.

As we saw previously, Judah is Abraham’s great grandson and therefore ethnically Iraqi and Syrian. He proceeds to marry a Canaanite woman. Canaanites are traditionally considered to also be Arabic, so the offspring of the man who gives his name to the Jewish people are Arabic on all sides. 

YHWH kills Judah’s firstborn son Er and in short order he also kills also his younger brother Onan. We don’t know why or how he kills Er, but we do know that Onan was offed because he masturbated away his seed rather than fulfilling his duty to impregnate Er’s widow Tamar. Look up “onanism” in the dictionary.

It is clear from scripture that Onan was not only punished for flogging the dolphin: he was killed not fulfilling his breeding responsibility to his sister-in-law. Extra biblical sources tell us that this obligation is stipulated by levirate law, yet levirate law is first encountered in Deuteronomy and will not be given to Moses for many hundreds of years after Genesis. So Onan is punished for breaking a law of the future.

After Er and Onan are murdered by God, Judah has one son remaining, but hesitates to put him in the levirate saddle with Tamar. Considering the fate of the first two sons, this is entirely understandable. 

“Lest peradventure he die also, as his brethren did.” – Gen 38:11 [ KJV]

The tribal chieftain continues to put Tamar off.

Upon hearing that Judah is planning a sheep shearing road trip with a buddy and concluding that the clan boss is not going to willingly provide her with a mate, Tamar hatches a plan. Posing as a prostitute, she entices her father-in-law into her tent as he passes on the way to the sheep shindig.¹ Not recognizing his veiled daughter-in-law, Judah agrees on a kid goat sex fee and unknowingly takes his pleasure with his son’s widow. He promises to send her the goat payment later and provides surety by leaving his signet ring, staff and bracelets. Rookie mistake! The latter are emblematic of his official position as tribal ruler. 

Upon returning from the sheepfest, Judah is true to his word. He has his friend take a kid goat and go pay the prostitute, but no such person can be found. Judah is puzzled, but life goes on.

But unlike his hapless son, Judah did not spill his seed. Tamar becomes pregnant with a child who will be a forebear of the Messiah, although this is not even slightly clear to the general reader. Three months later, the mean girls in Judah’s camp see that the Canaanite widow is showing and report her sinful condition to Judah. As chief of the clan, Judah is enforcer of the law, although no law has yet been been given by El or YHWH.Judah gets on his high horse and commands that Tamar be burned for violating tribal morality standards. He sends for her and prepares to execute her for being an unwed mother. But in an excellent plot twist, Tamar produces the personal items Judah had pledged during their amorous encounter. 

“As she was being brought out, she sent word to her father-in-law, “By the man to whom these belong, I am pregnant.” – Gen 38:25. [ESV]

Rut roh.

Judah quickly reconsiders the death sentence and does a little soul searching. In due course, Tamar gives birth to twins: Perez and some other guy. We are not told what happens to Shelah (Judah’s remaining son), but based on the scriptural account all descendants of the tribe of Judah are borne by Tamar.² Of particular interest is the relationship between the illegitimate birth of Jesus and his forebear Perez, who is the offspring of Judah and an unwed Canaanite woman. These bible facts are never mentioned in Sunday School lessons.

Judah’s family tree is picked up again in 1 Chronicles 2 with the chain of holy lineage passing through the following individuals: Perez, Hezron, Ram, Amminadab, Nahshon and Salman. In scriptural accounts, Judah’s dalliance with Tamar is semantically glossed over:

“Judah the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar.” – Gospel of Matthew 1:3-5 [NLT]

In summary, the Savior’s blood line runs through Judah’s Canaanite daughter-in-law and not through any of his sons. Judah is 100% Arab, and so is Tamar.

The Canaanite Harlot
Next up in the Messiah’s blood line is Rahab, a good hearted prostitute living in the doomed city of Jericho. The biblical era in Joshua covers the period between the putative post-Exodus arrival of the Israelites in Canaan and the implementation of the monarchy beginning with King Saul.

The account of the harlot Rahab is found in the Book of Joshua. Josh. 2 describes how the Israelites send two spies to reconnoiter Jericho in advance of the planned attack. Rahab hides two Israelite spies in her home and helps them escape in a basket lowered from the city walls. This act is in exchange for amnesty for her family after the attack. During the battle she hangs a red banner outside her window and the Israelite army spares her family.

I am going to take a moment to call out Christian apologetics accounts of Rahab, which seek to interpret her actions as being influenced by her love of God, meaning the Christian deity, who is a repurposing of YHWH, the Israelite deity. If this account were actual history, Rahab would have been a worshipper of El/Baal and would not have encountered YHWH in the first place since he was traveling with the Israelites.³ In Sunday School lessons she is described as more or less of a good Canaanite in the same sense that Tonto was a good Indian. And of course, the whore thing is not mentioned to little Sunday students. But it is equally legitimate to view her as a traitor who conspires with an enemy invader that lays waste to her home city.⁴

More fundamentalist Christian sects also argue that Jesus’s forbear was a different Rahab than the particular harlot found in Joshua, but that is primarily because they don’t like the idea. Therefore, it must not be true. However, there are only a few women mentioned in the genealogy at all, and in terms of chronology this Rahab matches up perfectly with the Matthew account.

While Jewish extra biblical tradition has Rahab marrying Joshua, the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) makes no mention of any marriage. If we are to accept the genealogy in Matthew, it has to be Salmon that she marries. A bride of Joshua scenario would not work. 

This Jewess Icon Is A Moabite
This brings us to the tale of Ruth and Boaz. While Ruth is often portrayed as a strong Jewish proto feminist woman, the great grandmother of King David was in fact a Moabite. This reality is attested unambiguously in scripture, if not in reality.

Ruth’s story introduces another challenging ethnicity into Jesus’s heredity, as the Moabites are much vilified throughout the Hebrew Bible. In a continuation of incestuous themes that often pop up unexpectedly in the Old Testament (for example, Abraham marries his half-sister Sarah; Jacob marries two of his first cousins; Nahor marries his niece and Moses’s father marries his aunt), the Moabites are descendants of Lot and his older daughter (the Ammonites are descended from the other daughter). Following the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and the famous pillar of salt event, Lot and his unnamed daughters make their way to a cave in Zoar.⁵ Bored in the hills, Lot’s daughters throw an all night drunken debauch and mate with their dad.

“And they made their father drink wine that night: and the firstborn went in, and lay with her father; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose.

And it came to pass on the morrow, that the firstborn said unto the younger, Behold, I lay yesternight with my father: let us make him drink wine this night also; and go thou in, and lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father.

And they made their father drink wine that night also: and the younger arose, and lay with him; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose.

Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father.” – Gen. 19: 32 [KJV]

Their offspring are the Moabites and the Ammonites, both bad bad people. The Moabites are the product of an incestuous father – daughter relationship and therefore tainted. They were furthermore worshipers of Chemosh, the Moabite god associated with a sun cult and blood sacrifice. These are kinds of people Ruth comes from – and by extension, Jesus is descended from them as well.

Not only is it far from clear why the Book of Ruth focuses on a Moabite woman, the entire story is unrelated to anything that comes before or after. The main point seems to be that Ruth was a loyal hard-working person, which is why she attracts the attention of Boaz, a Jewish inhabitant of Bethlehem. The tale is convoluted, but ultimately Boaz purchases Ruth’s dead husband’s land back in Moab and acquires her in the bargain. Kind of a real estate deal sweetener.

“Moreover Ruth the Moabitess, the wife of Mahlon, have I purchased to be my wife.” – Ruth 4:10-17 [ASV]

Ruth then bears him Obed, who is the father of Jesse and the grandfather of King David. 

That’s No Lady, That’s Uriah’s Wife

King David and his wife/concubine Bathsheba are yet another link in the Savior’s gene sequence. Again, we have a series of events that fall on the sketchy side of family values. Most garden variety Christians are only familiar with a watered down version of David and Bathsheba, which is presented almost as a tragic love story about doomed lovers. But as written, it is a story of murder and adultery on the part of a man who is held up as the royal founder of the Jewish state.

There is no arguing the story is tragic for Bathsheba’s first husband Uriah the Hittite, David’s bravest general against the Amalekites, Ammonites, Edomites and Moabites. He is portrayed as one of the King’s “mighty men.” The trouble starts when David, who was a party animal and likely bi-sexual (modeled after Alexander the Great) sees Bathsheba bathing on her roof, he has her sent over to the palace for a tryst.

David and Bathsheba have a one night stand which results in a pregnancy. David brings her husband Uriah home from battle to spend quality time with his wife so that it will appear that his general is the father. Unfortunately, Uriah has a soldier’s code of honor that will not allow him to relax while the army is still in the field. David sends him to the front lines to battle the Ammonites where he is killed. David takes the precaution of arranging for Uriah’s men to desert him in the battle and leave him to the enemy.

The King marries Uriah’s hot widow, who eventually becomes Solomon’s mother; the blood line then continues twenty-eight generations to Joseph, the husband of Mary, but not the biological dad of the Messiah if you will. Mary is not of the House of David and Joseph is not Jesus’s father. This cast some doubt on the David – Jesus connection.

It is understood that Mary is the mother of Joshua ben Joseph, but matters such as how she remains a virgin while giving birth to Jesus’s siblings and how Jesus acquires a blood line from David are tricky.

In Luke 3:23, Joseph’s genealogy is quite different from the one in Matthew. While that account also has him as a descendant of David, the bloodline runs from David’s son Nathan and not from Solomon.

These topics will have to be discussed in another Fun Bible Stories essay.

However, note this fascinating final anomaly: It is critical to fulfilling various prophecies that Jesus be from the House of David, yet in the Matthew genealogy his wife Bathsheba is not even named. 

“David the king begat Solomon of her that had been the wife of Uriah.” – Matthew 1:6 [KJV]

Bathsheba, wife of the great king and forbear of the savior is here reduced to baby maker.

Ouch.

 

“David the king begot Solomon by her who had been the wife of Uriah.”

– Matthew 1:6

 

NOTES:

1. Nothing makes a tribal chieftain randier than the thought of all those sheep.
2. This means that all Jews are part Canaanite. This is a case where scripture and reality coincide: the ancient Hebrews were indeed a Canaanite people.
3. This is not dissimilar from the case of Abraham breaking away from his father’s beliefs because he has found the true god. But how did that happen? God doesn’t appear to contact Abraham until Genesis 17, when he is 99 and long after he has left his father’s house. YHWH doesn’t introduce himself by that name until Exodus – to Moses. By the same token, how does Rahab encounter YHWH and conclude she should reject her Canaanite deities?
4. Very convincing archeological evidence confirms that Jericho was destroyed several centuries prior to the biblical arrival of the Israelites. Legendary archeology Kathleen Kenyon excavated the site in the 1950’s and concluded the Egyptians destroyed the city about three hundred years prior to the arrival of the Israelites as described in the Old Testament. The site was deserted when Joshua’s spies would have arrived according to the biblical time frame. .
5. Many many years ago little twelve year old Sean kept reading beyond his scripture assignment and got into trouble with the pastor by asking questions about Genesis 19
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