Bible.com Keep The Feast, day 12

Genesis 37-41 §

And Judah replied, “Let her keep the things as her own, or we shall be laughed at. You see, I sent this young goat, and you did not find her.”

Genesis 38:23 (Emphasis added)

What a picture of the human (my own) response to sin! What a caricature of human-centered “repentance”. Judah does not even recognize his own sin in the matter of Tamar and his sons. Then he compounds it by going whoring. Then he tries to hide it, not because he is afraid of God’s justice (though hiding it would be futile then anyway). He hides it because he’s afraid for his own reputation, and he follows that up by blaming his servant for not finding “the woman”, and “the woman” for disappearing with his things.

But God knew. And in this case, Tamar knew too.

Corn? §

Corn is a new world plant (Maize, according to Wikipedia, is first domesticated in southern Mexico). What plant was Pharaoh dreaming about (Genesis 41)? Grain, seven ears or heads on a stalk. I don’t think of seven ears being on the same stalk for anything but corn, and so I’ve always just “filled in” corn in Pharaoh’s dream, even though that’s wrong (impossible). The lesson is I need to be more careful, hew more closely to the text, rather than understanding only what I already understood. What else have I been glossing over? What else have I been “filling in” with Stick when I should have been seeking out God in the text?