Komentaryo sa Genesis 38:1: Rashi, Chizkuni, Da'at Zekenim & Sforno

ויהי בעת ההוא AND IT CAME TO PASS AT THAT TIME — Why is this section placed here thus interrupting the section dealing with the history of Joseph? To teach that his brothers degraded him from his high position. When they saw their father’s grief they said, “You told us to sell him: if you had told us to send him back to his father we would also have obeyed you” (Genesis Rabbah 85:2).

וירד יהודה מאת אחיו, “Yehudah separated from his brothers;” he could not bear watching the anguish of his father. Rashi here writes that the word וירד, which means: “he descended,” means that he had been deposed from his position of being the brothers’ spokesman and leader by the other brothers. He derives this from the expression: מאת, understanding the meaning of that word as being: על ידי, “through the action of;”You could well ask that seeing that it took only 22 years until the brothers under the leadership of Yehudah went down to Egypt in order to buy grain, how was it possible that during these few years not only did Bat Shua, Yehudah’s wife bear him three sons, Er, Onan, and Shelah, but that two of them had already become married? And a few years after the death of Onan, Yehudah sired twins from his daughterinlaw Tamar, all before the descent of the brothers to Egypt for the first time? The answer to such questions is that in those times girls and boys were able to both sire and conceive and give birth already at the age of seven. According to a historical text accepted by our sages as accurate and reliable, called seder olam, Er, Yehudah’s oldest was born approximately a year after the sale of Joseph. Bat Shua bore Yehudah two more sons in short order, before she died (verse 12). When Er was seven years old he married Tamar. When he died and married Onan, and Onan died, Shelah was still too young to marry. Tamar remained a widow in the house of Yehudah for a year before returning to her mother’s home. When two or three more years had passed and she was not allowed to marry Shelah, she took matters into her own hands and contrived to become pregnant from a member of Yaakov’s family, her dearest desire, i.e. she became pregnant by her fatherinlaw, Yehudah. All of this had only taken about 19 years after Yehudah had been deposed and moved away from his brothers. In the meantime, Peretz, one of the twins Tamar had born to Yehudah had married at the age of seven and had himself become a father of Chetzron and Chamul, (Genesis 46,12) all before Yaakov and his family moved down to Egypt after the brothers’ second trip there. By the time Chetzron and Chamul came to Egypt, only twenty two years had elapsed since the sale of Joseph.[While this is interesting, this Editor cannot reconcile it with G-d having punished both Er and Onan at the tender age of 7 or eight years, for having deliberately failed to produce children (38,7 and 10) Where is the source for the culpability of such young children anywhere? Ed.]

וירד יהודה, “Yehudah descended;” our sages explained that this choice of words by the Torah means that Yehudah’s brothers, who up until then had considered him as their leader and spokesman, demoted him on account of the sale of their brother Joseph and the anguish this had caused their father. (B’reshit Rabbah, 85,1) Ibn Ezra questioned this, seeing that only twenty two years elapsed between the sale of Joseph and the reunification of the brothers with him and the family’s moving to Egypt. We know that Joseph had been seventeen years old when he had been sold; we also know that he was thirty years old when he interpreted Pharaoh’s dream; we further know that the family descended to Egypt in the second year of the famine, i.e. nine years after Joseph had been appointed viceroy of Egypt. If you count the years from the time Yehudah got married to the daughter of the man described earlier until the descent of the whole family with Yehudah at their head more than twenty two years must have passed. If we count a year each for the time Yehudah’s wife was pregnant with each of her three sons, and add the years after Onan’s death during which Shelah grew to maturity, i.e. was old enough to get married, you already have accounted for 16 years. Add a year till Peretz could have been born and you have accounted for already 17 years. Even if you were to assume that Peretz was no more than 7 years old when he became the father of Chetzron and another year for the birth of his brother Chamul, all of whom are listed in Genesis chapter 46 as having come to Egypt with Yaakov and Yehudah, you already have accounted for 25 years not 22. One would have to say that when Shelah was described as having “grown” up, the Torah refers to his having become 9 years old, at which age it is possible to produce semen fit to sire a child. We can find support for this from the Talmud, tractate Niddah, folio 45, where the Mishnah discusses a nine year old who performed the levirate marriage ceremony on his sister-in-law whose husband had died without having had any children, that he cannot give such a sister-in-law a decree of divorce until he reaches the age of 13, as a minor cannot divorce his wife. Moreover, the original marriage of his deceased brother had been a marriage in the full sense of the word, and what he did was only to substitute for his deceased brother, so that any divorce cannot be less complete than that. According to an opinion quoted in the Talmud tractate Sanhedrin, folio 69, there were periods in former eras when seven year old males were able to impregnate females with their semen.