Jacob's son Judah, guilty about selling his brother Joseph as a slave, leaves his father's home to try to start a new life.

Context

• Reference Genesis 38:1

• Judah was one of Jacob's older sons. Joseph was one of the youngest.

• The brothers, jealous of Joseph. threw him in a pit to die.

• Judah convinced his brothers to sell Joseph as a slave rather than let him die.

• The brothers brought home Joesph's bloodied multi-colored coat and convinced Jacob that Joseph was dead.

Aftermath

• Judah left Jacob's home and moved to Adulam.

• He had several children (including Onan, who I think of as the founder of customer banking, since he suffered severe consequences for early withdrawals).

Notes

The colors of the famed "technicolor dreamcoat" worn by Judah's brother Joseph sparked the opening image of this piece.

The obvious choice for a monologue by Judah would have been to use the story of Judah and Tamar, since it’s neatly self-contained in Genesis 38.

Trying to write it, however, I found that the story involved a lot of surprising assumptions that would have had to be understood and explained in the context of the story. The status and role of prostitutes, both sacred and otherwise, in that society was one tricky aspect. Levirate marriage (in which a childless widow would become the wife of the late husband’s brother) was also difficult. Getting these straight would involve so much exposition that there would be little room for any emotional content in the brief format that I had chosen for this project.

So I backed up a step and looked at Judah’s role in the story of Joseph. I was surprised to see that Joseph comes across in the text as a lazy, arrogant jerk. The brothers’ resentment of him is, while taken to extremes, understandable.

But I got to imagining the aftermath of the deed, when the brothers have to live with the enormity of their actions, not only having sold their brother into slavery but having to keep up the pretense that he was killed, not letting their father know the truth. Judah had saved his brother’s life, but he couldn’t let his father know. The guilt stayed with him throughout his life, until he tried to redeem himself by surrendering himself rather than his youngest brother to an Egyptian leader (not realizing that that leader was Joseph himself).

This seems to give a reason for Judah’s abruptly leaving the scene at the beginning of the next chapter of Genesis, beginning a new family and trying to forget what had happened.