The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (17 page)

T
amar reclined against the trunk of an ancient olive tree at a fork in the road near the village gate. Her face was artfully veiled, and between her breasts she wore a tiny cloth sack of balsam and myrrh that she had cadged from one of the village women. Beneath her robe of blue cotton, the afternoon heat began to raise a fine sweat on her skin. A scent—of myrrh, of lemons and oranges, of the private places of her body—suffused her garment like a perfume.

She watched the road with half-closed eyes and waited for the man called Judah. She had heard that he was on his way to the festival at Timnah and she counted on catching his eye as he passed by. If her plan worked, he would not recognize Tamar as his own widowed daughter-in-law. Instead, Judah would take her for a common whore. And, more than that, his passion would be aroused and he would seek her favors in the nearby olive grove.

On that, Tamar thought to herself, everything now depended.

Judah had wandered into the district a few years before, a lone Israelite among the native people of Canaan. He was seeking to put himself at a distance from his stern father, an Israelite chieftain called Jacob, and a gaggle of brothers who competed for the old man’s favor.

The prospect of settling as a stranger among the Canaanites was more agreeable to Judah than staying in the household of his father. Jacob’s favorite son, Joseph, had been set upon and killed by some wild beast while tending the old man’s flocks—or so the brothers had told Jacob when they returned from the distant hills with Joseph’s blood’ stained robe. The brothers consoled their father and competed with each other in displaying their grief, but they watched each other with cautious eyes: Would one of them tell the grieving father what had
really
happened in the place where Joseph disappeared?

So Judah decamped from his father’s place in the hill country near Hebron and moved into the lowlands where the Canaanites tended their fields and their flocks. Near the Canaanite village of Adullam, Judah and a few of his men pitched their tents in a meadow that belonged to a villager named Hirah. When Hirah and his men approached the Israelite squatters, Judah hailed them with one hand raised in greeting and the other hand on the short sword that he wore on his hip.

As it turned out, Hirah did not seek to drive Judah and his band of Israelites out of the meadow. Indeed, he saw a chance to profit by the encounter. Like all newcomers, Hirah calculated, they would be willing seekers of advice and buyers of land and goods. So Hirah befriended the stranger and offered to sell him houses and fields and livestock, and Judah was soon the master of his own estate: a plot of open land, an orchard of lemon and orange trees, a flock of sheep and another of goats.

Judah built a house, dug a well, raised a wall of rough stone to mark the boundaries of his land. The fields were planted with wheat, and the flocks were allowed to graze in the distant wadis. Before long, a few of Judah’s kinfolk heard of his good fortune, and their tents began to blossom like wildflowers around the compound. Judah boldly married a Canaanite woman, the daughter of a neighboring landowner named Shua. And Judah’s wife, a shy, soft-spoken woman known as Bathshua—daughter of Shua—gave him three sons.

Soon enough, Judah was a chieftain in his own domain, surrounded by dutiful Israelites who sought his favor and protection even as they had once attended on Jacob. Judah sent gifts to his father’s house at Hebron to demonstrate his wealth—a Canaanite weaving, a vessel of worked silver, a ram or a ewe—but Judah preferred to stay within his own walls. He did not want to face his father with the burden of his guilty knowledge about the fate of Joseph, a slave in Egypt—or, perhaps more likely, dead.

As time passed, Judah continued to rely on Hirah’s knowledge of the curious dialect spoken by the locals and his willingness to offer advice
on their ways in everything from sheepshearing to well-drilling. But Judah learned that he was still at the mercy of the Israelite graybeards who had attached themselves to his compound and constantly reminded him of his duties as the chieftain of his own clan. “The Law decrees …” was their tiresome refrain, and they were constantly nudging him in one direction or another.

“The worship of Baal is an abomination in the eyes of the Lord,” the elders insisted, and so Judah forbade the Canaanites who lived among them as servants and shepherds to sacrifice to their own gods.

“The Canaanites are fornicators who seduce our young men and turn our young women into whores,” they cried, and Judah forbade the Israelites to visit the temple prostitutes who offered their bodies as altars for the worship of Astarte, the goddess of fertility, in the nearby Canaanite towns.

“Your firstborn must marry so that the clan will survive into yet another generation,” the old men carped, reminding Judah that a grandson was all the more crucial because his own wife had ceased giving him sons. And so Judah cast about for a wife for his eldest son, the one called Er.

Judah mentioned the matter to Hirah, of course, and soon his old friend appeared at Judah’s door with a match to propose.

“I have found a suitable wife for your firstborn son,” Hirah said. “A flower of Canaan! And so your son may be assured of a willing woman with a fertile womb.”

“Perhaps I should send back to my father’s house for a woman of our own people,” Judah mused. “That’s what the old men say.”

“Your father’s spies!” Hirah hissed, saying out loud what Judah had always suspected. “If you allow your father to pick a wife for your son, you will put a spy in his bed. Far better that you should choose Tamar—”

“Tamar?” asked Judah. The name meant “date palm,” and Judah
was reminded of the oasis where he and his brothers had struck a bargain with the caravaners who carried Joseph off to Egypt.

“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.”

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 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.