Tamar's Twins - Reminding us that babies are miraculous

In the olden days it was cool for religious leaders to get prostitutes

Once upon a time, Israel's son Judah knocked up his daughter-in-law. The word "Jew" comes from Judah. The Jews are Judah's descendents. It might help to review the story of Tamer's pregnancy.

After Judah had sex with his daughter-in-law, she became pregnant with twins whom she named Zerah and Perez. I don’t know how common twins are when the Father of the Jews gets his dead son’s wife pregnant, but I assume it’s still fairly rare. It must just have been a sign of how special Judah and Tamar’s relationship really was.

When Tamar was delivering the babies, Zarah reached his arm out through his mother’s vagina. The midwife saw it and tied a red piece of string around Zarah’s wrist and said, “This one came out first.”

After the whole wrist incident, Perez was delivered first, then Zerah. However, because Zerah had the red string around his wrist, he got to be the official “first born.”

When I first though about this, I thought there was no way an infant’s arm would be long enough to accomplish Zerah’s feat. However, I checked and among modern, average size people, a newborn’s arms should be around six inches long, and the distance from the cervical opening to the entrance of the vagina is around four inches. That’s totally long enough for Zerah to stick out his hand.

The thing is, there’s not a lot of extra room in your average uterus for a lot of messing around.

 

It's even worse with twins in there.

 

 Unless of course, Tamar had some sort of super-uterus.

 

 I that case, I'm sure Zerah and Perez would have been able to work something out.

Moral: not all uteruses are equal.

Ref: Genesis 38:27-30