It seems surprising that God would choose Judah as the ancestral line leading up to Jesus, when it was Judah in Genesis 37:20 who supported the plot to “kill Joseph and throw him into a cistern and say a ferocious animal devoured him,” and Judah who then suggested they make money from selling Joseph instead (26-27), and Judah who agreed to soaking Joseph’s robe in goat’s blood and telling their father it was Joseph’s blood (31-33).
Why on earth, then, would God choose Judah as a prophecy about Jesus – which Jacob has been making obvious so far in Genesis 49 – unless the horrible things Judah did to Joseph also ties in with a prophecy about Jesus. Because there’s a hint of that in verse 11, when Jacob tells Judah, “he will wash his garments in wine, his robes in the blood of grapes.” Is Jacob remembering Judah soaking Joseph’s robe in blood, and relating that to Jesus too? If so, then we have a prophecy about Jesus’ death nearly two thousand years before it happened.
It ties in with Isaiah 63 too. In verse 1, we have a figure picturing Jesus “robed in splendour,” but at the same time “his garments are stained crimson.” Which ties in with the “richly ornamented robe” Jacob made for Joseph in Genesis 37:3, that Judah and his brothers also stained crimson by soaking it in blood (31).
When asked then, in Isaiah 63:2 – “Why are your garments red, like those of one treading the winepress?” – the one representing Jesus replies: “I have trodden the winepress alone; from the nations no one was with me” (3). Which is exactly what happened to Jesus on the cross. He trod that winepress alone too, left to die a slow agonizing death, abandoned by all, including his disciples.
The same thing happened to Joseph, dumped in a waterless cistern to die a slow death alone, abandoned by his brothers too. No one even thought about how it must have felt for him.
Except, perhaps, for Judah, because it was Judah who spared Joseph’s life (Genesis 37:26-27). Did Judah have a tiny speck of understanding how Joseph felt, then, and is that why God chose him? And in turn to help us in our understanding too, of how Jesus felt on the cross and seeing his death through his eyes, described in his own heart-wrenching words in Isaiah 63?
Jacob has one more verse for Judah that could tie in with Jesus too, when he talks about “Eyes like wine; teeth like milk”….(next blog)
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