Then Judah said to Tamar his daughter-in-law, “Remain a widow in your father’s house, till Shelah my son grows up”—for he feared that he would die, like his brothers. So Tamar went and remained in her father’s house.
In the course of time the wife of Judah, Shua’s daughter, died. When Judah was comforted, he went up to Timnah to his sheepshearers, he and his friend Hirah the Adullamite. And when Tamar was told, “Your father-in-law is going up to Timnah to shear his sheep,” she took off her widow’s garments and covered herself with a veil, wrapping herself up, and sat at the entrance to Enaim, which is on the road to Timnah. For she saw that Shelah was grown up, and she had not been given to him in marriage. When Judah saw her, he thought she was a prostitute, for she had covered her face. He turned to her at the roadside and said, “Come, let me come in to you,” for he did not know that she was his daughter-in-law. She said, “What will you give me, that you may come in to me?” He answered, “I will send you a young goat from the flock.” And she said, “If you give me a pledge, until you send it—” He said, “What pledge shall I give you?” She replied, “Your signet and your cord and your staff that is in your hand.” So he gave them to her and went in to her, and she conceived by him.
Comment: Continuing the story last written about in the devotional on August 20th, we find Tamar a widow for the second time and Judah, keen to keep her inherited property within his wider family, telling her to wait and when his third son grows into adulthood she should accept him as her third husband. The young man, Shelah, grew up but wasn’t sent to her. So she tricked Judah, twice her father-in-law, into immorality, pretty obviously to get her own back on him. She played a ‘girl of the wayside’ to lead him into hopefully learning a lesson and being forced to sort out her widowhood. She planned the trick well. In payment for wayside sex she asked him for something which was distinctly ‘his’, which when he’d be able to pay (a goat), she would return to him. Obviously Judah stayed in the area for a while. The sheep were being shorn and she was ‘his’ on more than one occasion. I think that in her scheme it was what she wanted, and she became pregnant!!
Prayer: Help me to find honest moral answers to my problems as I face them, O Lord. I don’t want to wander into foolishness and sin.
As I read it! 