Common misinterpretations include assuming the passage condemns marriage to Canaanites as the cause of Er's death, whereas it specifies Er's personal evil without linking it to his mother's ethnicity; another error is conflating this with Onan's later sin in Genesis 38 involving levirate duty, projecting detailed reasons for Onan's judgment onto the unspecified wickedness of Er here, or treating the verse as promoting infanticide or cursing firstborns rather than noting divine justice within a historical genealogy.
I Chronicles 2:3
King James Version (1769)
3 The sons of Judah; Er, and Onan, and Shelah: which three were born unto him of the daughter of Shua the Canaanitess. And Er, the firstborn of Judah, was evil in the sight of the Lord; and he slew him.
This verse introduces the sons of Judah—Er, Onan, and Shelah—born to the daughter of Shua the Canaanitess, and states that Er the firstborn was evil in the sight of the Lord who slew him, serving as a genealogical note in the lineage leading to David and the Messiah while underscoring God's sovereign judgment on individual sin regardless of ancestry or prominence in Israel's history.