The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (18 page)

“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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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?”

Judah was surprised at her bluntness—and surprised, too, to realize that he was haggling with a whore like a coarse field hand. What would the graybeards say? And yet Judah felt almost giddy as he imagined the moment of pleasure that he knew he would not deny himself, no matter what price she asked.

“A kid from my flock,” he said.

An extravagant offer, Judah thought to himself, since he knew that the price of a whore was no more than a loaf of bread or its equivalent in copper coins. But he wanted to impress the young woman with his wealth and generosity, even if she was only a common harlot. Judah calculated that the woman would be more ardent if she knew that he was a rich and powerful man. Anyway, it was Hirah who carried his purse on the road to Timnah, and Judah had no coins to give her.

“And where is the little beast?” she demanded. Her voice was bolder now, more commanding, as she sensed how urgently he desired to satisfy himself with her body. “I don’t see it.”

“Do you take me for a herdsman?” he asked, irritated and impatient. “I leave it to others to tend my flocks. But I will pick out a fat kid when I return to my house, and I will send it to you.”

“How do I know that you will not take your pleasure now,” she taunted, “and then forget about me?”

“What?” Judah asked, suddenly irritable. “Do you take me for a cheat?”

Tamar studied Judah’s face—his hooded brown eyes, his swarthy skin, his bristling black beard, and his fleshy cheeks now flushed red. She could see that he was angry, but so needful that she no longer doubted that she could get what she needed from him.

“Give me a pledge until you send the kid,” Tamar said playfully, “and I will give you what you want.”

“A pledge?” Judah was frankly baffled. “Are you jesting?”

“Something of value,” Tamar explained, moving her shoulders so that her breasts swayed slightly under the fabric of her robe, “that I may keep until you send me what you have promised.”

The proposition was ludicrous, even laughable, but Judah did not laugh. “And what can I pledge?” he asked impatiently.

“Give me your seal,” Tamar said.

Judah reached up and touched the cylinder of carved quartz that hung around his neck on a cord.