The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible

by Jonathan Kirsch

  —GENESIS 38.6

  “Tamar is the woman I have found to be the bride of your firstborn,” Hirah explained. “Her name suits her: she flowers even in the desert, and she will bear the sweetest of fruit.”

  From the day she arrived in the compound, Tamar was not like the Israelite women among whom she suddenly found herself as the bride of Judah’s eldest son. The other young women fell silent when Judah passed the women’s tent. Drawing their veils about their faces, they followed him with their eyes, then fell into chatter and giggles when he was out of earshot.

  Tamar, by contrast, ignored the chieftain—or seemed to—and continued to speak in a voice that was somehow too loud, too strong. Although a married woman, she was not careful about her veil and boldly allowed her father-in-law to see her uncovered face; sometimes she actually smiled or even laughed in the presence of the menfolk! Some of the young women were outraged by Tamar; some secretly admired her audacity. But if Judah noticed that his daughter-in-law was bolder than the rest—indeed, if Judah noticed the dark-eyed young woman at all—he gave no sign of it.

  Not long after her marriage to Er, however, Tamar turned into an object of pity rather than outrage in the eyes of the women. As the wife of Er, who was destined to become the chieftain in his own time, she was to be the mother of many powerful sons. But one day her husband left the compound on some errand that no one bothered to explain to Tamar, and he never came back. Tamar, the Canaanite flower, found herself a childless widow among the Israelites.

  No one who actually knew the fate of Judah’s firstborn son ever talked about it—Judah himself was silent on the subject—but there was a hint of scandal in the strange disappearance. “He was wicked in the sight of the Lord,” was all that the old men were willing to say, “and the Lord slew him.”

  And Er, Judah’s first-born, was wicked in the sight of the Lord; and the Lord slew him.

  —GENESIS 38:7

  As if that explained everything! the Israelites complained to one another. Exactly what sin did Er commit to bring down God’s wrath upon him? Did he sacrifice to the Canaanite gods and go up in flames along with the sacrificial lamb? Or, more likely, was he discovered in a bed where he did not belong, and did he then suffer the wrath of a vengeful father or husband? Tamar, who knew all too well that her husband did not burn very hot in bed, did not think much of either explanation. Perhaps, she thought to herself, he fell under a blow from one of the sullen young men of Canaan who did not share Hirah’s affection for the strangers among them.

  Judah called Tamar into his presence only once after Er’s death. She noted that her father-in-law never actually looked at her, averting his eyes as if out of embarrassment, but the three old men who hovered behind his chair studied her with brazen curiosity and open disdain.

  “You will not be forgotten,” Judah announced brusquely. “My second-born son will do what he is obliged to do.”

  “I am sorry, Father,” she said, “but I do not understand.”

  “Quiet, girl!” one of the old men hissed.

  “Of course you don’t understand, poor benighted heathen that you are,” another of the old men began. “The Law decrees—”

  Now the third old man interrupted, noisily clearing his throat and speaking in a rumbling drone that sounded like distant thunder to Tamar.

  “Onan will come unto you in your tent, and lie with you, and perform the duty of a husband’s brother,” the graybeard said, using the stilted Hebrew phrases of the Law to describe the fate that awaited the widowed Tamar. “Though you will never marry Onan, the child of your union with him will be regarded as the true son of your dead husband, and the child will take the name of your dead husband and his inheritance, too.”

  And Judah said unto Onan: “Go in unto thy brother’s wife, and perform the duty of a husband’s brother unto her, and raise up seed to thy brother.”

  —GENESIS 38.8

  And Onan knew that the seed would not be his; and it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother’s wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest he should give seed to his brother.

  —GENESIS 38:9

  “And so,” said the first old man in a voice that sounded almost cheerful by comparison, “you may remain among us and raise the child.”

  “Enough,” Judah said, allowing himself one oblique glance at her veiled face. “You may go, daughter.”

  The old men watched as Tamar backed out of the house and then put their heads together behind Judah’s back.

  “Now let us pray,” one of them intoned, “that the second-born is more fruitful than the firstborn.”

  “For her sake,” another one said, “as well as ours.”

  Onan glowered at Tamar from the shadows of the tent where his father had delivered him. Freshly bathed, anointed with fragrant oil, and draped in bridal robes, she now reclined on a mound of weavings on the floor—the very same bedding on which she had once submitted to the attentions of his older brother.

  “Go to her,” Judah had instructed his second-born son, “and take your brothers place between her legs.” And when Onan grimaced at the suggestion, Judah laughed out loud: “It won’t be so bad, I promise you.”

  Now, as Onan hesitated, he noticed that his brother’s robe, familiar and haunting, still hung from one of the ropes of the tent.

  “Are you ready?” he croaked.

  Tamar nodded at him but did not speak.

  “Well,” he said, lingering near the opening of the tent, “I am not.”

  Tamar was lovely enough—Onan had not failed to notice the glittering dark eyes above her veil even when Er was alive—and the thought of bedding his brothers widow was tantalizing precisely because it would have been forbidden under any other circumstances. But Judah had explained the solemn consequences of a moment of pleasure with Tamar, and Onan could not rid himself of the thought that he was about to do himself out of his own good fortune.

  The death of his older brother had been a stroke of luck, Onan had thought at first. Er had been so arrogant, so lazy, always lording it over his brothers simply because he had been fortunate enough to be born first. Now Er was dead, and it was Onan who stood to inherit Judah’s lands and houses and flocks as the eldest son. He would be the next chieftain, and Judah’s place would someday be his own.

  Unless, that is, Onan performed his duty in Tamar’s tent and succeeded in impregnating Tamar with a son. The birthright of his dead brother would pass not to Onan but to the baby whom he sired with his brother’s widow, and the bawling little bastard would grow up to regard his own real father as a mere servant!

  “Damn!” Onan said out loud.

  “Master?” called Tamar. If she feared him, she did not show it.

  “What do you want?”

  “Come to me now,” Tamar said sweetly, “and I will help you….”

  Onan stared at her in the half-light of summer twilight, and he noticed that Tamar had removed her veil and her robes. He made out the shape of her breast, the curve of her hip, the slender legs. At last he approached, crouched at her side, and reached out to touch her.

  Tamar said nothing. She tried to anticipate what her brother-in-law desired of her, but Onan pushed her delicate hand aside and handled her crudely and brusquely, almost in anger. Onan poked and probed Tamar’s body with a kind of brutal curiosity, and then, quite to Tamar’s amazement, he reached under his cloak and fingered himself urgently.

  Onan saw the look of astonishment on her face.

  “If you want me to do my duty,” he admonished her, “then leave me be!” A moment later: “Enough! On your back! Let me—”

  Tamar shivered ever sp slightly as he entered her, a spasm of tension rather than pleasure, and she felt breathless under the deadweight of his body. But she encouraged him with a tender hand at the back of his neck and the same sweet words that she had once whispered into his brother’s ears.

  Tamar consoled herself with the single thought that she held with perfect clarity even as Onan
labored over her: A son would restore Tamar to her rightful standing in the compound of the Israelites. A son of her own would ensure her a place in Judah’s house, a seat at his table, an opportunity to survive and even to prosper. A son, she told herself, was life itself.

  Onan was nearly breathless with pleasure, but he cautioned himself against yielding to the impulse to spend himself between Tamara legs.

  “Ah!” he began to groan. “Ah, ah—”

  “Yes, yes, yes—” coaxed Tamar.

  Summoned away from her body by the cawing of his mind, Onan drew back and pulled himself out. Then—in a terrible moment that caught both of them by surprise—he spent himself in three shuddering spasms, and spilled his seed on the floor of the tent in an arc of wasted passion.

  “No!” shouted Tamar as she grasped what he had done—but it was too late. She began to weep, and her tears were hot and angry. “You pig—”

  Onan, flushed red with shame, could think of nothing else to do but slap her across the face to silence her. But the weak, glancing blow stopped only her tears, not her words.

  “You pig,” she repeated.

  Tamar rose, gathering her robe around her waist to cover her nakedness, and backed away from him. She dressed hastily in a dark corner of the tent as Onan watched. At last he got up, walked to the opening of the tent, then paused at the threshold and stared out into the compound.

  “Whore,” he spat out, although Tamar was already too far off to hear him.

  As if Tamar had wished it upon him, a fever seized Onan the very next day and did not let him go. The compound fell into that strange silence that always marked the onset of illness. Was it the plague? Who else would fall ill and die? And exactly what offerings and sacrifices were necessary in order to preserve the health of the others? Even the children seemed to disappear into the tents and the houses around the compound, as if to avoid disturbing the ailing young man with the sound of play, and Judah himself was not to be seen for seven days.

  And the thing which be did was evil in the sight of the Lord; and He slew him also.

  —GENESIS 38:10

  At last, the word was passed from Judah’s house: Onan, too, was dead.

  Now the whispers that spread from tent to tent were more pointed: the hand of the God of Israel, the deity that the Israelites knew as Yahweh, had struck down two of Judah’s sons. What evil had Onan done that the vengeful god of the Israelites would take his life? And did Tamar play a role in the death of the two men who went to her bed?

  Judah summoned Tamar into his house a second time. The elders of the clan were there, but so was Hirah. Judah spoke quietly: The house of Judah again would do its duty to Tamar. Shelah, his youngest son, would be sent to her tent as soon as he was deemed old enough. Until then, she would return to her own village and wait.

  “Take her to her father,” Judah instructed Hirah.

  “And remind him,” one of the old men added, “that she must live in a manner that is worthy of a woman who is both widowed and betrothed.”

  Judah watched his old friend and his daughter-in-law stoop to cross the threshold of his house, and suddenly he was taken with a peculiar sensation. Their dialect, their manner of dress, their rites of worship, all of their Canaanite ways suddenly struck him as alien and mysterious and terribly dangerous. And Tamar, so fierce and so dark, struck him as a creature more nearly like a spider than a woman. Judah vowed to himself: God forbid that his third son, his last son, should fall into her tainted bed.

  “Let her remain a widow in her father’s house,” he said to the gray. beards, using the old phrases of the Hebrew tongue, “lest Shelah die like his brothers.”

  Then said Judah to Tamar his daughter-in-law: “Remain a widow in thy father’s house, till Shelah my son be grown up.” For he said: “Lest he also die, like his brethren.”

  —GENESIS 38:11

  And Tamar went and dwelt in her father’s house.

  —GENESIS 38:11

  And in the process of time Shua’s daughter, the wife of Judah, died; and Judah was comforted, and went up unto his sheep-shearers to Timnah, he and his friend Hirah the Adullamite. And it was told Tamar, saying: “Behold, thy father-in-law goeth up to Timnah to shear his sheep.”

  —GENESIS 38.12

  A year passed, and Shelah’s beard began to grow—or so Tamar learned from the gossip of the kinfolk who passed through her father’s village—but she was not summoned to the compound of the Israelites. Every morning and every night she brushed out her long black hair, as if to prepare herself for her betrothed, and then one day she noticed that a few strands of silver had appeared at her temples. On that day, Tamar vowed to wait no longer for what was owed to her: a son and a place in the house of Judah.

  Not long after, one of the men of her village who tended the flocks of the Israelites brought word that Judah’s wife had been laid to rest. Bathshua had given him no more children after Shelah, and, more recently, her belly had grown hard and round with some foul growth. She lingered a long while, then died at last, and Judah observed the Israelite ritual of mourning even though Bathshua had been a Canaanite like Tamar.

  “And now that he is finished with one of our women,” said the shepherd to Tamar’s father, “he is rushing off to Timnah with his good friend Hirah to carouse with a few more.”

  Tamar listened in silence to the coarse talk as she worked with needle and thread over a long blue cloak.

  “Perhaps he will find another one,” Tamar’s father said, “to become his wife.”

  “Oh, he will find plenty of women at Timnah,” the shepherd said with a leer, “but no wife.”

  At Timnah, as Tamar knew, the shepherds—and not a few of the rich landowners who hired them—gathered with their flocks for the sheepshearing, and when the wool was gathered and the hard work was done, they fell into a celebration that lasted for days on end. The wine merchants and the whores were always there, too, and the men freely availed themselves of their goods and services. Hirah, Tamar thought to herself, knew how to console the grief-Stricken Judah in a livelier way than the sour old graybeards would have allowed.

  “And when will you go back to the Hebrews?” Tamar’s father asked the shepherd.

  “Not soon,” the man said. “Judah leaves for Timnah in three days and he won’t be back until the new moon. Until then, I will stay here and drink with my own people for a change.”

  Tamar continued to slip the needle deftly through the thick blue fabric on her lap. As she worked, an intricate pattern appeared beneath her fingers in delicate silver thread, as if by magic.

  As Judah trudged along the road to Timnah with Hirah at his side, he spotted a figure in the distance, a woman in a blue robe who leaned against an olive tree at the crossroads. The heat of the afternoon and the tedious rhythm of their footfalls had lulled him into a kind of half sleep. Even Hirah had fallen into silence as the sun rose directly overhead. And so the beguiling woman by the side of the road seemed to appear as if in a dream.

  And she put off from her the garments of her widowhood, find covered herself with her veil, and wrapped herself and sat in the entrance of Enaim, which is by the way to Timnah; for she saw that Shelah was grown up, and she was not given unto him to wife. When Judah saw her, he thought her to be a harlot; for she had covered her face.

  —GENESIS 38:14–15

  Only when he approached the crossroads did Judah see that the figure was a slender young woman with long black hair, veiled like a married woman but dressed like a common whore. As he drew closer still, Judah caught the scent of the woman, saw the strong muscles of her calf and thigh as she reclined in the shade of the tree, and imagined in his stupor that her dark eyes sparkled with a light of their own.

  “Hirah, my good friend, I believe I’ll rest my feet for awhile,” said Judah to his companion as they approached the fork in the road, “and I will catch up with you later on.”

  “We must keep going if we are to reach Timnah by nightfall—” Hirah scolded
Judah gently. Then he caught the hungry look on Judah’s face. He laughed out loud and slapped Judah on the back.

  “Be patient, my friend,” said Hirah, “and you will soon be able to comfort yourself with seven women at once.”

  But Judah had already turned aside and was striding toward the veiled woman. Hirah stopped, shrugged, and called out to Judah.

  “I will wait for you around the bend,” Hirah shouted. “Do not tarry too long.”

  As Judah approached, the young woman remained frozen and silent, her arms wrapped around her knees and her head slightly inclined toward the ground. If she were not dressed like a common whore, Judah would have thought she was terrified of the strange man who strode up to her so boldly.

  “Woman,” Judah said gruffly, “let me lie with you.”

  And he turned unto her by the way, and said: “Come, I pray thee, let me come in unto thee.” For he knew not that she was his daughter-in-law. And she said: “What will you give me, that thou mayest come in unto me?”

  —GENESIS 38:16

  And he said: “I will send thee a kid of the goats from the flock.”

  —GENESIS 38:17

  The young woman did not answer, and Judah wondered for a moment if he had been mistaken in taking her for a harlot. But now he felt a fluttery ache in the pit of his stomach, a vague but insistent hunger that he could not ignore. Of course she was a whore! The alluring garment that she wore, the scent of strong perfume that rose from her skin, and the pendant that hung between her breasts belonged to no decent woman.

  “Let me lie with you,” Judah demanded again.

  When the young woman finally looked up at Judah’s face, she spoke in a clear and certain voice. “What you will give me, then,” she asked, “to lie with me?”