Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 181:721 (Jan 2024)
Article: Trickery And Levirate Marriage: Lot And Judah As Type And Antitype
Author: D. C. “Mac” McIntyre

BSac 181:721 (January-March 2024) p. 42

Trickery And Levirate Marriage: Lot And Judah As Type And Antitype

D. C. “Mac” McIntyre

D. C. “Mac” McIntyre is an independent researcher and a PhD candidate in theology and apologetics at Liberty University.

Abstract

While narrative themes of trickery, incest, death, and humiliation are unsettling, a typological reading of the incestuous narratives of Lot and Judah divulges a redemptive arc. This article argues that the Judah-Tamar narrative (Gen 38) serves as a corrective lens to the Lot-daughters narrative (Gen 19) through an escalation in the antitype. These narratives evince a God who cares for widows and who can redeem even the worst of situations.

Though many have described the similarities between Tamar and the daughters of Lot, few have ventured to take this apparent echo to its logical conclusion.1 Lot’s daughters and Tamar exercise similar roles as tricksters because Lot and Judah have similar narrative roles as patriarchs who fail to fulfill the levirate ideal. This article examines the two incestual narratives of trickery as an intentional type that shows Judah to be a corrective lens as Lot’s antitype. In this case, a particular institution, levirate marriage, is central to understanding the relationship between these two scenes. This article has a brief methodological discussion of the discourse function of types and escalation in the antitype, followed by a narrative examination of the two accounts. Then a

BSac 181:721 (January-March 2024) p. 43

synthesis of the two narratives will be proffered with special attention given to differences in the two accounts. This highlights the necessity of confrontation, repentance, and reconciliation by the people of God after sinful actions and would have produced a narrative effect on the model readers of the Sinaitic audience.

Type-scenes are a subset of repetition. They necessitate an evaluation of the repetition’s discourse function. Repeated elements in a text allow “listeners to predict what a speaker is about to say, to utter the predicted words and then to receive confirmation of their prediction either through exact repetition or near-repetition or in the form of a relexicalization.”2 Therefore, repetition points the reader back to an initial story through similarities while emphasizing dissimilarities within a given text. Because of the natural emphasis on dissimilarities, Longacre notes the use of repetition as a peak marking event.You must have a subscription and be logged in to read the entire article.
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