Genesis: Messianic Bloodline, history detailed
A prince named Shechem, of a nearby city saw her, raped her, and took her to his home. He wanted to marry her and make her his princess. All of that was a big “no no.”
The heathens would have to convert to (pre) Judaism. The king and his son pleaded with Jacob for their people to intermarry. For the city to convert to being Hebrews, all the males had to be circumcised. But on the third day after, when all the males “were in pain”, Simeon and Levi took swords, went into the city, and killed all of the males, and took back their sister. You can read the whole story in Genesis chapter 34. It’s unknown which family member Dinah ended up marrying. Maybe it was Naphtali or Dan, the sons of Bilhah.
News of the slaughter spread around the countryside. Judah retuned home with his pregnant wife and his stepdaughter, and the house of Jacob soon left the area after Bilhah gave birth to Tamar. They traveled to Bethel, and then to Ephrath, where Rachel had difficult labor. She died within hours of giving birth to Benjamin, Jacob’s twelfth son. All of this happened in the time period of 2051 BC to 2050 BC.
When Judah’s firstborn son named Er was of age in 2031 BC, Judah got Tamar to be his son’s wife. But Er was evil, and God killed him. Two years later, Judah gave Tamar to his second son named Onan, but God struck him down also, after he spilled his sperm on the ground, in order to not make Tamar pregnant.
Judah then tells Tamar to wait (four years?) “in her father’s house” for his third son (Shelah) to come of age. But Onan died in 2029 BC, and Judah’s stepdaughter died soon after, unmarried, one year after the household of Israel moved to Goshen in 2028 BC. In 2025 BC, while yet living with her father (Reuben) in Goshen, Tamar saw that Shelah was of age, and Judah had not given her to be his son’s wife, in order to give offspring in the name of Er, the deceased.
So, when Tamar is told that Judah was going up to Timnath (outside of Goshen) to shear his sheep, she goes there and pretends to be a harlot, and gets pregnant by Judah, her father-in-law. But Tamar married Er and later Onan while the family was yet in Canaan, therefore her father had to be an unnamed older Hebrew whom Moses fails to identify, trying to hide this “skeleton”. Reuben was her father, and Bilhah her mother. Tamar gave birth to Pharez (an ancestor of Yeshua), and his twin brother Zarah, in 2024 BC, four years after moving to Goshen. Only about forty-six people were in the family when they arrived in Goshen. The rest (of the seventy), Jacob saw during his lifetime while he lived in Egypt.
In the next chapter, the death of Jacob and the enslavement of Israel.
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