The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (22 page)

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.

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:

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.

To understand the story of Tamar, we must look back to a curious tradition of the biblical era called
yibbum
¹⁷
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 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, 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.)

So the story of Judah and Tamar embodies one of the persistent but sometimes overlooked themes of the Bible: the usurpation of the firstborn son by a younger brother. Abraham’s firstborn son, Ishmael, is cast aside in favor of his younger half brother, Isaac (Gen. 17:15–22); Isaac’s second-born son, Jacob, resorts to outright fraud to steal the blessing of the firstborn from his older brother, Esau (Gen. 27:1–30); among Jacob’s twelve sons, it is his fourth-born, Judah, who bestowed his name
upon the Jewish people and whose line prevailed in the history of Israel. So, too, in Genesis 38, we see that the second-born, Perez, prevails over his twin brother, not to mention all three of Judah’s sons by his Canaanite wife.

We are reminded by all of these stories that biblical history is not always shaped by the hand of God. Rather, the destiny of the Israelites is more often served by willful men and women who act on their own initiative and impulse, often in daring and even shocking ways, to make sure that their seed will survive and their descendants will inherit the blessing promised by the Almighty in such ambiguous terms to the Chosen People. And none of the men and women in these stories displays more chutzpah than Tamar herself.

Of course, Tamar can be likened to other women of the Bible who are depicted as sexually adventurous and yet utterly righteous. Like Tamar, Lot’s daughters and Ruth the Moabite woman deploy themselves in bed in order to secure children for themselves and survival for their distant descendents. And Tamar is linked in a curious way to another Canaanite woman who acts valiantly to preserve and serve the Israelites and their destiny: Rahab, the original hooker with a heart of gold, whose life is saved by a red thread like the one that figures in the birth of Tamar’s children.