I had a friend in my early teens named Bill. He and I were pretty close, shared many things, and spent time at each other’s house. He spent the night with me twice. Well, he tried to. The first time he and my brother were wrestling on an old mattress in the basement, and Bill broke his arm. We had to take him to the hospital, where his parents picked him up after they set his broken bone. He didn’t get to finish that night at my house. The next time he stayed with me, we were arrested for joyriding with another friend who decided to “borrow” his older sister’s car without telling her. We were at the downtown Omaha police station when his folks came to pick him up. He didn’t get to spend that night with me either. Well, needless to say, his folks wouldn’t let him stay with me anymore. The friendship just dissolved. I was indeed bad company for Bill. Something terrible always seemed to happen when he was with me.

Hirah had a friend like that. Judah! In the Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary, we can read about Hirah. He is the Adullamite mentioned in Genesis 38. Judah was staying with him when he propositioned the prostitute for sexual favors without knowing that she was his daughter-in-law. Earlier, the dictionary says, “…when he (Judah) married the Canaanite woman, the daughter of Shua. In vv 12 and 20–23, he is described as Judah’s friend who accompanied him to Timnah for sheep shearing and who was sent by Judah with a kid to pay the prostitute (the disguised Tamar) for her sexual favors and to redeem the pledges (his staff and seal) which Judah had left with her.”1 Nothing good ever happened when Judah was with Hirah! He was bad company, like me.

One of the shorter verses in the New Testament is 1 Corinthians 15:33 “Do not be deceived: Bad company ruins good morals.” Like most “truth” sayings in the Bible, there are always exceptions to this. Dinah was befriending the girls of the land when she fell into the hands of a rapist and kidnapper. Tamar was out propositioning her father-in-law to trap him, and Judah was a lustful man easily led to the slaughter getting his good friend Hirah to try to cover for him. Now, while all this was going on back in the land where Jacob and his family live, we see that in Chapter 39 of Genesis, Joseph is resisting the temptations of Potiphar’s wife. Although he found himself in bad company, Joseph did not compromise his values.

1 Gary H. Oller, “Hirah (Person),” ed. David Noel Freedman, The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 203.