CHAPTER 9
Tamar Becomes a Prostitute—and the Progenitor of David and the Messiah
Yehuda went down, away from his brothers
and turned aside to an Adullamite man—his name was Hira.
There Yehuda saw the daughter of a Canaanite man—his name was Shua,
he took her [as his wife] and came in to her.
She became pregnant and bore a son, and he called his name: Er.
She became pregnant again and bore a son, and she called his name: Onan.
Once again she bore a son, and she called his name: Shela.…
Yehuda took a wife for Er, his firstborn—her name was Tamar.
But Er, Yehuda’s firstborn, did ill in the eyes of YHWH, and
YHWH caused him to die.
Yehuda said to Onan:
Come in to your brother’s wife, do a brother-in-law’s duty by her,
to preserve seed for your brother!
But Onan knew that the seed would not be his,
so it was, whenever he came in to his brother’s wife, he let it go to ruin on the ground,
so as not to provide seed for his brother.
What he did was ill in the eyes of YHWH,
and he caused him to die as well.
Now Yehuda said to Tamar his daughter-in-law:
Sit as a widow in your father’s house
until Shela my son has grown up.
For he said to himself:
Otherwise he will die as well, like his brothers!
So Tamar went and stayed in her father’s house.
And many days passed.
Now Shua’s daughter, Yehuda’s wife, died.
When Yehuda had been comforted,
he went up to his sheep-shearers, he and his friend Hira the Adullamite, to Timna. Tamar was told. …
She removed her widow’s garments from her,
covered herself with a veil and wrapped herself,
and sat down by the entrance to Enayim/Two-Wells, which is on the way to Timna,
for she saw that Shela had grown up, yet she had not been given to him as a wife.
When Yehuda saw her, he took her for a whore, for she had covered her face.
So he turned aside to her by the road and said:
Come-now, pray let me come in to you—
for he did not know that she was his daughter-in-law.
She said:
What will you give me for coming in to me?
He said:
I myself will send out a goat kid from the flock.
She said:
Only if you give me a pledge, until you send it.
He said:
What is the pledge that I am to give you?
She said:
Your seal, your cord, and your staff that is in your hand.
He gave them to her and then he came in to her—and she became pregnant by him.
She arose and went away,
then she put off her veil from her and clothed herself in her widow’s garments.
Now when Yehuda sent the goat kid by the hand of his friend the Adullamite, to fetch the pledge from the woman’s hand,
he could not find her.
He asked the people of her place, saying:
Where is that holy-prostitute, the one in Two-Wells by the road?
They said:
There has been no holy-prostitute here!
So he returned to Yehuda and said:
I could not find her; moreover, the people of the place said: There has been no holy-prostitute here!
Yehuda said:
Let her keep them for herself, lest we become a laughingstock.
Here, I sent her this kid, but you, you could not find her.
Now it was, after almost three New-Moons
that Yehuda was told, saying:
Tamar your daughter-in-law has played-the-whore,
in fact, she has become pregnant from whoring!
Yehuda said:
Bring her out and let her be burned!
[But] as she was being brought out,
she sent a message to her father-in-law, saying:
By the man to whom these belong I am pregnant.
And she said:
Pray recognize—
whose seal and cords and staff are these?
Yehuda recognized them
and said:
She is in-the-right more than I!
For after all, I did not give her to Shela my son!
And he did not know her again.
GENESIS 38:1-26
Until now we have seen woman as sexual commodity, conniving manipulator, and disobedient subject. Now we see her—and hear her—in a somewhat different light: as procreator of biblical man.
The Genesis story that best reflects this role is the bizarre soap opera involving sex for pay between Judah and his disguised daughter-in-law Tamar. The brief vignette, which appears in the middle of the Joseph story, is packed tightly with numerous layers, each inviting multiple interpretations.
First, the story serves as the biblical foundation for the mysterious ritual of the “Levirite marriage.” This ritual, which is elaborated later in the Bible, 1 requires a brother to impregnate his widowed sister-in-law if his dead brother has left her without a male child. 2 The “Levirite (Latin for brother-in-law) marriage” is designed to protect the blood line of the dead brother, so that “his name shall not be blotted out.” Indeed, the resulting male child, though genetically the son of the sperm donor, is legally the son of the dead brother, whose name he carries and whose property he inherits.
In the Tamar story, Judah—the fourth son of Jacob, whose name will be given to the Jewish people—marries a Canaanite woman, who bears him three sons. Judah arranges for his oldest son, Er, to marry Tamar, a woman of unspecified, but probably not Jewish, heritage. The commentators struggle to make Tamar Jewish by concocting imaginative tales of her origin, because she becomes the progenitor of some of the important Jewish leaders: “chalilah [God forbid] that David and Mashiach [the Messiah] should be from the cursed seed of Canaan.” 3 In any event, God found Er to be wicked and slew him. The commentators speculate over the precise nature of Er’s evil. Rashi believes that Er committed the same sin for which his younger brother Onan was famously killed—spilling his seed so as to avoid impregnating Tamar. His selfish reason, according to Rashi, was that “he did not want her to lose her beauty through pregnancy and childbirth.” 4 Whatever the reason, 5 Tamar was now childless and husbandless. So Judah instructed his son Onan to fulfill his Levirite duty by impregnating his sister-in-law.
Onan was now faced with a clear conflict of interest. If he satisfied his Levirite duty and succeeded in producing a male heir, Onan would deprive himself (and his future children) of Judah’s inheritance. As matters now stood, Onan was Judah’s eldest son and heir. But if Tamar had a male child, that child—Er’s son by law—would become the primogenic heir, since Er’s line would continue through that child.
No wonder, then, that Onan, knowing that “the seed would not be his,” engaged in coitus interruptus and deliberately spilled his seed on the ground “so as not to provide seed for his brother.” Rashi delicately describes Onan’s actions as “threshing within,
winnowing without,” 6 while another sage—Ben Tamin Ha-Mizrachi—indelicately characterizes the act as anal intercourse. The midrash employs the euphemism “he ploughed on roofs” to describe “unnatural intercourse.” 7 This provoked an angry response from Ibn Ezra: “This interpretation is sheer madness. Heaven forbid that the holy seed become defiled with such filth.” 8 Whatever the mechanics of the act, God was not pleased at Onan’s obvious circumvention of the Levirite duty, and He slew Onan, too. This left poor Tamar with two dead sex partners and no seed.
Before we return to the plight of Tamar, we need to turn briefly to Onan, whose name carries a terrible legacy in modern religious sermonizing. The sin of onanism—of spilling one’s seed on the ground—has been preached against by gene
rations of rabbis, priests, and ministers. “If you masturbate, you will be struck dead”—or at least blinded or made bald or have hair grow on the palm of the offending hand. The humorist Dorothy Parker mocked this puritanical view by naming her parrot “Onan,” because he too spilled his seed on the ground. Parker may have been no less faithful to the text than some of these traditional commentators, because masturbation was not Onan’s grievous sin; it was failing to satisfy his Levirite duty. Both involved spilling one’s seed for nonprocreative purposes, but there the similarity ends. According to one contemporary commentator,
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 evil 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.” 9
Now back to Tamar. Her father-in-law, Judah, had yet a third son, and since neither of his other sons had managed to impregnate Tamar, Judah was obliged to promise Tamar the seed of his youngest son, Shelah. He did so, but without intending to keep his promise, since he was worried that sex with Tamar carried some kind of black-widow curse. Considering the fate of his first two sons, who can blame him? So Judah—who is presented as rather cold and calculating; we never see him grieving the loss of his first two sons—orders Tamar to go back to live with her father’s family until Shelah has grown up, hoping that distance will discourage her from holding him to his promise. The dutiful daughter-in-law follows Judah’s command and moves back to her village. 10 Eventually she realizes that she has been duped. Shelah, who has now grown up, is never going to perform his Levirite duty and she is going to end up a childless widow, with no claim to Judah’s fortune and no status in Judah’s clan.
With the benefit of a bit of biblical hindsight, we realize that this could not be allowed to happen, since Tamar is slated to become the foremother of King David and the prophet Isaiah, as well as the Messiah. Indeed, Tamar is the best and last hope that Judah will have any male heirs, since his first two sons were struck down before fathering any children and his youngest virtually disappears from biblical view following this story and does not seem to have fathered any children. 11 The entire future of the Jewish people, who eventually derive from the clan of Judah, is now at risk and in the hands—or, more precisely, the empty womb—of Tamar. 12 Tamar must beget a male child from the seed of Judah.
According to midrashic commentary, Tamar had been given the gift of prophecy and knew that she was destined to become “the mother of the royal line of David, and the ancestors of Isaiah.” 13 For the resourceful Tamar prophecy is no substitute for action: She must give destiny a shove in the right direction. Her actions move us to the next layer of this complex story.
Convinced that Judah will never let Shelah impregnate her, Tamar takes advantage of two facts she has just learned: first, that Judah has recently been widowed; and second, that he is about to pass on a road not far from her village. 14 Again we see a relatively cold Judah, quickly completing his obligation to mourn his deceased wife and rushing to join the sheepshearing festivities. As we know from elsewhere in the Bible, “sheepshearing was the occasion for elaborate festivities, with abundant food and drink.” 15 Determined to carry the seed of Judah—if not by way of his children, then by way of Judah himself—Tamar dresses herself as a harlot and sits by the side of the road, her face covered by a veil. Judah propositions her and agrees to pay her a baby goat in exchange for sex. The midrash regards this as an extraordinary fee for such services, observing that a loaf of bread is the usual compensation for sex with a harlot. Some commentators see the baby goat as symbolic, because “it picks up the motif of the slaughtered kid whose blood was used by Judah and his brothers to deceive Jacob (as Jacob before them used a kid to deceive his father).” 16 Tamar also uses a garment—the harlot’s veil—to fool Judah, much as Judah used Joseph’s garment to fool Jacob. 17 Tamar agrees to Judah’s proposition and demands a pledge until he can arrange to have the goat sent to her. He gives her his signet and staff, they have sex, and she becomes pregnant.
When Judah returns home, he is determined to pay his debt to the harlot and retrieve his telltale possessions. But his messenger can find no trace of any harlot near the place where Judah encountered the veiled woman. 18 In the meantime, Judah is told that his widowed daughter-in-law is pregnant, apparently from whoring around. Furious at this family dishonor, Judah demands that Tamar be brought to him and burned. 19 But the wily Tamar produces the signet and the staff and declares that “by the man to whom these belong I am pregnant.”
The commentators stress that Tamar did not directly accuse her father-in-law, waiting instead for him to acknowledge his responsibility. They suggest that the dutiful daughter-in-law would not have blown the whistle on Judah if he had remained silent, 20 because she did not want to embarrass him. This seems questionable in light of the fact that she had deliberately asked for his seal, which is intended as a source of identification. Upon inspection of the seal, it would become apparent who its owner is, since a seal is the ancient equivalent of a modern credit card or driver’s license. 21 It is fair to infer that she intended to use it as insurance against precisely the accusation she anticipated.
Confronted with the evidence, Judah revokes the death sentence, contritely proclaiming that Tamar is more righteous than he, since he had broken his promise to give her to his son Shelah. This part of the story ends with a strange coda: Judah did not “know her again” (38: 26). 22
Why would the Bible go out of its way to tell us that Judah did not have sex with Tamar again? Surely the reader should assume that now that he knows the harlot on the side of the road is his own daughter-in-law, he wouldn’t dream of violating the incest taboo that was later explicitly and emphatically incorporated in Leviticus 18:15. Moreover, since she is now pregnant with his—and his dead son’s—child, there is no longer a Levirite obligation. 23 Perhaps the reason is precisely to emphasize that it is never proper to have sex knowingly with one’s daughter-in-law, even if the woman’s husband and the man’s wife are now dead and even if it is intended to fulfill the Levirite duty.
On a larger level, the Tamar story tells us much about the dependent status of women during biblical times. Moreover, it seems that the author intended to praise Tamar for her resourcefulness: She plays within the rules and still gets her due. The system was heavily weighted against women in general and against childless—really sonless—widows in particular. 24 Tamar understood she was in no position to demand her rights. So she resorted to an approach common in the Book of Genesis—trickery. Indeed, if some of the later books of the Bible glorify violence, it can fairly be said that Genesis accepts trickery as a way of achieving one’s legitimate rights or accomplishing one’s destiny. Certainly Tamar is in the good company of Abraham (who tricked a pharaoh and Abimelech), Isaac (who tricked Abimelech), Jacob (who tricked Esau twice and his father, Isaac), Rebecca (who helped Jacob trick Isaac), Lavan (who tricked Jacob), Rachel (who tricked Lavan), Jacob’s older sons (who tricked Jacob), 25 and Joseph (who tricked his brothers).
As is typical in Genesis, Tamar’s trickery is part of a cycle of deception. It is payback for Judah tricking her into believing that his third son would fulfill the Levirite obligation and for Onan tricking her into having sex with the false expectation of impregnation. But Tamar is not victimized by further trickery, nor is she criticized for tricking Judah into impregnating her. Indeed, she is praised even by the man she fooled and is rewarded by giving birth to twins who become the progenitors of the Jewish people and two of their greatest heroes, as well as the Messiah.
This story, like several others in Genesis, reflects ambivalence about the rules of status that prevailed in biblical times. Just as the secondborn Jacob is praised for securing his rights and destiny in the face of pr
imogeniture, so too is Tamar praised for her determination and ingenuity in the face of societal rules that render a childless widow worthless. These, however, are not revolutionary stories. The heroes don’t change the rules but instead triumph by dint of their creative manipulations of the system. Tamar does not employ violence, only guile. Her deceptions are proportional and rational. She employs self-help to avoid an unjust punishment. The Bible seems to be suggesting a precursor to the common-law doctrine of “necessity,” under which ordinarily illegal actions are justified if necessary to prevent a greater evil. For example, a starving man may break into an empty home to secure food, and an endangered ship may enter a private mooring to avoid sinking. Trickery is wrong, as is sex outside of marriage and especially with one’s father-in-law, but if these actions are necessary to secure one’s right to procreate, they may be deemed justified. The imperative of motherhood—especially motherhood of biblical leaders—trumps even the rules against incest, as it did when Lot’s daughter raped their father in order to save humankind.
In addition to foreshadowing a legal defense—necessity—the story of Tamar is also the first biblical account of a criminal trial. Primitive as it is, Judah’s summoning and sentencing of Tamar is a legal proceeding. To be sure, it is an Alice in Wonderland trial, with the death sentence preceding the evidence. Eventually, however, Tamar is permitted to present her case and reverse the judgment. Judah is legislator, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner. His word is law, and his law is arbitrary fiat. Fortunately for Tamar, he is a benevolent despot who is willing to acknowledge the error of his ways. Judah rules neither because he is righteous nor because the people have selected him, but rather because of his status as the head of his clan. In a primitive world without formal law, one’s position determines rights. In such a world, guile is needed to overcome the injustices of status.
The Genesis of Justice Page 16
