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

by Jonathan Kirsch

  To the modern reader, the reference to Tamar as a sacred prostitute rather than a common whore may suggest that the biblical author was trying to dignify and elevate Judah’s dealings with the woman. We might imagine that a visit to a temple prostitute was perceived as something loftier than buying the sexual services of a whore, especially in the eyes of his Canaanite friend. We are tempted to conclude that the biblical storyteller was trying to put the best face on Judah’s dalliance with the harlot by the side of the road.

  Of course, there is nothing sacred about the roadside transaction between Judah and Tamar: it is a bargain of the oldest and most secular kind, sex for money, and the repartee between Tamar and Judah shows us a whore haggling with a trick over the terms of payment. Indeed, the pledge that Judah gives to Tamar—his staff and his seal* —is simply a form of collateral to secure his promise to pay her for the services that she has rendered, “a kind of Near Eastern equivalent … of a person’s major credit cards,” in the words of contemporary Bible scholar Robert Alter.9

  But if the reference to Tamar as a sacred harlot strikes us as an effort to pretty up Judah’s encounter with her, the very opposite would have been true for the Bible reader of two thousand years ago. Any trafficking by an Israelite with a sacred harlot was not merely a sexual indiscretion but an act of apostasy—an outrage against divine law and a capital offense among the Israelites. When Hirah uses the word for a temple prostitute to refer to Tamar, he is suggesting that Judah had done exactly what the Bible condemns as the worst offense imaginable, worshipping a pagan goddess by engaging in sexual intercourse with that deity’s sacred harlot.

  Indeed, one scholar suggests that the casual use of the term for a sacred prostitute in Genesis 38 is the best evidence that the story itself originated with the Canaanites rather than the Israelites.10 And, as we shall see (see chapter eleven), some Bible readers go so far as to suggest that Tamar was actually the priestess of a Canaanite fertility cult who was seeking to lure Judah’s sons away from the God of their fathers. But the very fact that the story of Tamar and Judah earned its way into Holy Scripture, and survived the efforts of later religious authorities to rewrite the history of Israel, tells us something important and surprising about the degree of tolerance toward sexual adventure that prevailed among at least some of the biblical authors and editors.

  “A BAG OF MYRRH BETWEEN MY BREASTS”

  The story of Tamar suggests that there was nothing unusual about encountering and even patronizing a prostitute in the Holy Land in the days of the patriarchs. Other passages of the Bible confirm that prostitution was so commonplace that the price of a harlot’s services might be as little as a loaf of bread (Prov. 6:26), and that one might encounter a prostitute along the road (Prov. 7:11–12) or even at holy sites where pilgrims congregated (Hos. 4:14). Indeed, it’s possible that Judah recognizes Tamar as a prostitute simply because he sees her sitting at a crossroads, a place where harlots may have typically plied their trade in biblical times.

  Thou hast built thy lofty place at every head of the way, and hast made thy beauty an abomination, and hast opened thy feet to every one that passed by, and multiplied thy harlotries (Ezek. 16:25).

  And yet the story of Tamar provokes a tantalizing question. Exactly how does Judah know that Tamar is a harlot in search of business? And we might wonder: Is he really fooled by Tamar’s disguise?

  We are told only that Tamar wears a veil, an essential plot device that conceals her identity from her father-in-law. But, according to current scholarship on the folkways of the ancient Near East, only married women—not prostitutes—were veiled in public.11 If we believe that Judah is tricked into thinking that Tamar is a harlot, we know that she had to adopt some other adornment or costume to signify that she is a prostitute and thereby to arouse Judah’s sexual appetite.

  A pendant or some other decoration on her face and around her neck might have been the way a prostitute of biblical times announced her availability as a paid sexual partner. For example, the prophet Hosea calls on his adulterous wife to “put away her harlotries from her face, and her adulteries from between her breasts, lest I strip her naked” (Hos. 2:4), which suggests to some commentators that a harlot was identifiable by “the badges of her profession, something on her face, something between her breasts.” So we might imagine that Tamar wears makeup or perhaps a nose-ring, and hangs some object around her neck that Judah would identify as the markings of a harlot.12

  The Song of Songs, a book of erotic love poetry that somehow found its way into Holy Writ, suggests what woman might wear around her neck as a symbol of sexual availability: “My beloved is unto me as a bag of myrrh,/That lieth betwixt my breasts” (Song of Songs 1:13). And the Talmud confirms that “wanton women” would put a mixture of balsam and myrrh in their shoes “so that its scent would arouse passion in young men.”13

  All we really know with certainty, of course, is that Judah decides that the woman whom he sees on the road to Timnah is sexually desirable—and sexually available. He is a widower who has just completed the long period of mourning for his dead wife, and he is needful of sexual companionship; indeed, the spare text of Genesis 38 is fairly aglow with sexual tension at the moment of their encounter. We might surmise that a harlot’s disguise is only a thin excuse, perhaps devised by Tamar and perhaps by the biblical storyteller, to justify the blunt sexual proposition that Judah makes to Tamar.

  “Will you have sex with me?” is how Judah’s proposition can be understood in plain English, although most translations use more decorous and euphemistic language: “Let me lie with you” (NEB) or “Let me come in unto thee” (JPS).

  We might even imagine that Judah actually recognizes Tamar behind the veil, that he had longed for her even when she was wed to his son, that he seizes the opportunity to act on his longings. Perhaps the harlot’s disguise is merely a game that each of them plays by prior arrangement or by tacit consent, whether to provide “plausible deniability” for their love affair or to titillate each other. If so, the story of Judah and Tamar can be read not as a cautionary tale but as an erotic love story that somehow slipped into the pages of the Holy Bible.

  “GIVE ME CHILDREN OR ELSE I DIE”

  The theme of woman as a seducer is as ancient as Eve, and Judah’s words to Tamar evoke the image of a black widow who mates and then kills, a metaphor that sums up the fear that some men feel toward a powerful woman:

  “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” (Gen. 38:11).

  The story of Tamar may trouble contemporary readers who are uncomfortable with a heroine whose weapon of choice is her own sexuality, whether because they are put off by the lurid roadside coupling or because they are offended by the depiction of Tamar as a seducer who tricks a powerful man into giving her children. To some, the tale is scandalous because it is so sexually explicit; to others, it is “sexist.” Yet if we understand what is actually at stake for Tamar when she entices Judah to make love to her, the story takes on both heightened drama and urgent meaning: Tamar must conceive a male child, and she will go to the extreme of seduction in the guise of a whore in order to do it. Why is Tamar so desperate? And why are Judah and the rest of his clan so tolerant of her act of incest and seduction?

  The answer lies in the plight of women in biblical times. A woman was defined by her ability to produce children, and a childless woman was seen as someone cursed by God. Over and over again in the Bible, we encounter women for whom childlessness was a matter of life and death. The matriarchs of the Israelites—Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel—are only the most prominent examples. “Give me children,” cries Rachel to Jacob, “or else I die” (Gen. 30:1).

  The urgency is explained by the fact that a woman’s identity, her social status, and even her livelihood were utterly dependent on the men to whom she was related: first her father, then her husband, and later her sons. A woman was forced to rely on her children for support
if her husband died because a widow generally did not inherit property from her deceased husband in the ancient Near East; under biblical law, a man’s estate passed directly to his children (Deut. 21:16–17) or his other blood relations (Num. 27:8–11). A childless widow like Tamar, then, had no acceptable and comfortable place in the community where she lived; she could not safely engage in sexual conduct, bear or rear children, or earn a living outside these narrow confines.14

  In fact, if a woman like Tamar dared to engage in a sexual relationship at all, she was regarded as so threatening to the social and moral order of biblical society that she simply had to be obliterated. An unmarried woman who slept with a man faced a death sentence under the stern law of the Bible (Deut. 22:21), and so did the wife who strayed outside the marriage bed (Lev. 20:10). It’s significant that the stoning of an unmarried woman who engaged in forbidden sexual activity was supposed to take place “by her father’s house,” as if to make the point that a woman without an approved male protector—whether father, husband, or adult son—was simply too dangerous to be allowed to live at all.

  For Tamar, a Canaanite woman who has married into her husband’s tribe, the crisis of childlessness is even more dire. An outsider must bear children in order to earn a place in her husband’s family, and if she is widowed before she has produced a child, then she is likely to remain a stranger in the eyes of her husband’s clan.15 For that reason, Tamar finds herself in terrible peril. She could not inherit her husband’s property, she could not rely on the inheritance of her children, and she could not comfortably return to the house of her father, except perhaps as a lonely spinster to be shut away and ignored. The childless and widowed Tamar is a “misfit” who simply does not belong anywhere.16

  So Tamar’s sexual ambush of Judah on the road to Timnah was the act of a courageous and resourceful woman who refused to accept passively the fate that the patriarchy of ancient Israel decreed for a childless widow. She was not merely a seducer who tricked her father-in-law into giving her children by playing the harlot. Rather, she was a woman who stood up for her legal rights in the only manner available to a woman of her time and place.

  THE STRANGE TRADITION OF THE LEVIRATE “MARRIAGE”

  To understand the story of Tamar, we must look back to a curious tradition of the biblical era called yibbum17 in Hebrew but more commonly known in English as the “levirate marriage.” As we shall see, the phrase itself is yet another fussy euphemism. A levirate marriage is not really a marriage at all; rather, it is a form of approved sexual intercourse outside of marriage, a process that we might liken to “stud service” rendered by a brother-in-law to his widowed sister-in-law.

  Levir is the Latin word for “brother-in-law,” and the so-called levirate marriage was a custom that obliged a man to impregnate his dead brothers widow if the brother died without a male heir. The child born of a levirate “marriage” was not considered to be the offspring of his biological father. Rather, the child was named after the dead brother, and—crucially—inherited the property of the dead brother.18 Thus, the levirate tradition assures that Tamar, if successfully impregnated, will earn a position within the household of her dead husbands family.19

  Although the Bible also speaks of the custom of marriage between a widow and her brother-in-law,20 the essential responsibility of the brother-in-law is to implant his seed in her womb. And, in fact, Genesis 38 does not tell us that Tamar married Onan, or Shelah, or Judah, or anyone else. All we know is that Judah “knew her again no more,” but he recognized her children as his rightful heirs (Gen. 38:26).

  The story of Tamar depicts a young widow who is so insistent on her rights under the levirate tradition that she turns to her father-in-law to impregnate her when her brothers-in-law are not up to the task. But even her choice of mates is not quite so shocking when we consider it in the context of the biblical era; the levirate duty might be fulfilled by men in the family other than the brother-in-law.21 The Book of Ruth, for example, depicts the elaborate plan of the widowed young woman to place herself under the protection of, an even more distant relative of her dead husband than either brother-in-law or father-in-law. But there is always a distinction between impregnation, which is the woman’s right according to the levirate tradition, and marriage, which has little or nothing to do with it.

  “Marriage may come,” writes one scholar. “It is perhaps to be desired, at least by the widow. But within the scope of the levirate custom, at least for this story, Tamar can expect only conception of a child.”22

  Tamar is not alone in regarding the duty of the levirate as something nearly sacred. The Book of Deuteronomy decrees that a man who refuses to do his duty to his dead brother’s widow is worthy of contempt and humiliation. The wronged woman is specifically empowered to “spit in his face” and, curiously, remove one of his sandals (Deut. 25:9), a ritual whose significance is the subject of much debate among scholars.23 But an even more dire fate is imposed on Onan, who spills his seed on the ground rather than impregnate the widowed Tamar as the law requires.

  “Yahweh,” a Bible scholar has cracked, is “the God who kills levirate dodgers.”24

  Onan’s name has come to be associated with masturbation, but only because of an intentional misreading of the Bible story by sermonizers of Victorian England who were obsessed with the imagined evils of masturbation. Anxious to find at least some faint biblical authority for condemning it, the moral guardians of the nineteenth century seized upon Onan as a cautionary example of what can go wrong when one engages in “self-abuse.”25

  But what is actually depicted in Genesis 38 has nothing to do with masturbation. Onan is engaging in a form of coitus interruptus to avoid impregnating Tamar, and he is condemned to death because of his dereliction of duty. Spilling one’s seed on the ground, especially in an effort to avoid the duty of the levirate, is a capital offense in a culture that valued, above all else, childbearing and the preservation of a man’s name through his offspring. Indeed, the rebuke that a widow is to deliver to the reluctant brother-in-law is specified in the Bible: “My husband’s brother refuseth to raise up unto his brother a name in Israel” (Deut. 25:7).

  To the modern reader, the fact that Onan spills his seed on the ground suggests that he is motivated by feelings of guilt, embarrassment, or moral restraint. When we consider the real purpose of the levirate marriage, however, we realize that Onan is acting out of pure greed. He knows that he stands to lose a portion of his own inheritance by providing an heir to his dead brother, and so refuses to bring the sexual encounter to a climax that might actually produce a child.

  Even if clergy over the centuries have shunned the story of Tamar when writing their sermons, the biblical storyteller makes it clear that we are intended to see Tamar as a courageous woman who risked death by fire in order to claim what was hers by right. Onan, the “levirate dodger,” is killed by divine wrath because he would not make love to her, but Judah suffers no punishment at all for sleeping with daughter-in-law under lurid circumstances precisely because he is fulfilling the duty that his son neglected. If any blame is attached to Judah, it is only that he delayed in putting a man in Tamar’s bed to carry out the strange tradition of the levirate marriage.

  “She is more righteous than I,” declares Judah, explicitly acknowledging his own defiance of the levirate custom, “forasmuch as I gave her not to Shelah my son” (Gen. 38:26).

  THE RED THREAD

  The story of Tamar and Judah as told in Genesis 38 does not end with the sublime moment when Judah acknowledges that he is the father of the babies in her womb. The biblical storyteller goes on to tell an odd incident about the birth of the infants, and if the encounter between Tamar and Judah sometimes reads like an erotic fairy tale with a trick ending, the birth scene ends with an even odder twist.

  As it turns out, the pregnant Tamar is carrying not one but two babies. During labor, we are told, one of the infants thrusts his hand out of Tamar’s womb. The midwife, mindful of the primacy of
the firstborn son, ties a red thread around the tiny hand so that she can identify the infant who was truly the first to emerge from the womb, in case the hand is withdrawn during labor.

  And it came to pass, when she travailed, that one put out a hand; and the midwife took and bound upon his hand a scarlet thread, saying: “This came out first” (Gen. 38:28).

  And, sure enough, the tiny hand disappears from sight, and the other baby—the one without the red thread around his hand—is delivered first.

  That child is named Perez—the Hebrew word means “breach”—because he “broke forth” from his mothers womb ahead of his brother. Zerah, the baby with the red thread around his hand, is delivered next. Technically, Zerah is the firstborn son and the one who is entitled to inherit his father’s name and estate, but it is the second-born infant, Perez, who is named in the Bible as the ancestor of David, the glorious king who establishes Jerusalem as the capital of a united Israel; and Solomon, who builds the temple in the Holy City; and, ultimately, the Messiah of the New Testament. (See chapter fifteen.)