Notes 53: Tamar's story (38:1-30)

SYNOPSIS: "And now for something completely different": the story of Joseph is temporarily interrupted at the conclusion of Act I, as Speiser puts it (but for comic relief??) with the telling of a separate little story about Judah's daughter-in-law Tamar, a Canaanite. This story involves an ancient custom, called levirate, whereby in order to avoid the extinction of a family line if a husband dies one of his brothers is required to marry the widow and give her offspring who will be counted as heirs of the deceased brother. One of Judah's sons marries Tamar and dies, a second son (Onan) then marries her but avoids giving her offspring (whence the term Onanism), and dies also as a punishment from God. Judah has one more son but is afraid of losing him too so he asks Tamar to wait until the boy is old enough. Tamar realises that she is never going to have her right to marry again fulfilled and carries out a very tricky ruse to get Judah to give her what she deserves: she disguises herself and poses as a prostitute, gets Judah to have sex with her, is impregnated by him, holds some objects of his to ransom so he will come looking for her and finally reveals to him who she is and claims inheritance rights; Judah admits that he is in the wrong and the matter is settled amicably.

• Text of the passage

This is of course another of those bits of Genesis that some would consider improper, and therefore it is less well known (surprisingly, given today's love of outrage and scandal) because anthologists have thought better to skip over it and the general public has not had its attention drawn to it very much, but it's there. Since I already posted a paragraph about this in one of my early pieces but that was a few months ago now, let me copy it here to save you the trouble of looking for it, and myself the work of rewriting it:

Women can be every bit as tricky as the menfolk in Genesis. In another strange story, Jacob's son Judah gets his comeuppance from a woman whom (in accordance with the customs of the time) he had mistreated by not applying the levirate, a law according to which if a woman is widowed, it is the obligation of the dead husband's brother to step in and give her children in order to keep the hereditary line going. Not to repeat all the details of the case (ch. 38), but Tamar marries one of Judah's sons, who dies, her brother-in-law occupies his place but he too meets a bad end, and Judah, surmising that this woman is bad news, makes excuses and puts her off when Tamar casts her eye on his youngest son. Tamar, showing that Canaanite women could be tricky too, lays an elaborate trap for Judah, and he falls right into it. Posing as a prostitute, she gets Judah to have sex with her and she becomes pregnant. (Let us remember that Tamar isn't actually a prostitute, she only makes Judah think she is one; apparently she is on moral high ground, or at least above sea-level, given that she has been wronged by Judah's family who had the obligation to provide her with offspring under the levirate rule; since Judah withheld his youngest son from her, she seems to have taken this to mean that Judah himself, the father, was fair game. Just for the record...) The interesting twist to this tale is that when Tamar reveals her conspiracy and informs Judah that she is expecting his baby (actually they turned out to be twins!), Judah admits defeat and concedes: "She is more in the right than I, inasmuch as I did not give her to my son Shelah" (38:26). Surely it is more than a little remarkable that such a story has been conserved in Genesis in which a Canaanite woman has the edge over a son of a patriarch (and the father of a tribe of Israel) in guile, resourcefulness and moral rectitude - and wins.

Clearly the author of Genesis who decided to insert this little story at the particular place in the book where it is found (as Speiser says, between "Act I" and "Act II" of Joseph's story) had reasons for that choice which we may try to guess. But it is equally clear that the story of Tamar was not tailor-made for the occasion; it must have already been in circulation, prior to its placement here, as an independent story, and another set of questions can be asked about Tamar's tale as such. It strikes me as being a pretty good story in its own right; we might or might not want to dwell on the slightly risqué nature of the subject matter (or so it seems to us  now, at least), which, if perceived as such by contemporary audiences, would surely just have added "colour" and made it more fun; but with or without that component, it bears all the marks of the kind of yarn that folk love to recite: the Story of How Tamar Got Her Own Back Against Judah. What makes it a bit shocking to modern audiences is the (openly) implied attitude regarding prostitutes, the exotic legal and cultural background in the whole concept of the levirate, and the idea of Judah, one of the fathers of the Israelite nation, being involved in such goings on, but to this last I will retort once again: it's a story!

Or maybe it's more than a story. Commentators have come up with some other ideas about this passage. To the question of why the Joseph story is interrupted by this other narrative about Judah, the answer proposed by Speiser could be paraphrased as: Because it's there. If there was a legend about Judah in circulation, the author of Genesis would not have felt free to ignore it; it had to be included (though one might wonder where). 

Now it has been pointed out that there seems to be a clash of sorts between this story and the way Judah was pictured in the Joseph story, where there is no sign that he is not still part of the family group of Jacob's sons who turn up in Egypt to buy grain. This suggests the probability of independent threads of traditions, and as we know, when these are found, Genesis attempts not to choose between them and suppress the ones that pose a nuisance, but to weave them into the book, even if some jagged edges are produced.

And another thought: not only is this story there, it is about Judah. What is special about Judah? Well, there were twelve tribes of Israel and so on, but at the end of the day, Judah was after all a great kingdom. Naturally, stories about Judah were going to be interesting because they could be understood as the history of the Judaeans (who later came to be known as Jews).

Is the inclusion of this passage merely random, or is this narrative motivated? Speiser (EAS, p. 300) says:

Through the period of Judges and down to the time of David, Judah expanded by absorbing various Canaanite elements. The beginning of that composite history is here intimated by Judah's settlement among Canaanites and his acquisition of a Canaanite wife. His line, however, is in danger of extinction; but a daughter-in-law by the name of Tamar, apparently another Canaanite, takes heroic measures and triumphs in the end.

Speiser goes on to compare the figure of Tamar to Rachel, who stole Laban's idols, because like her she rescues the continuity of the family's line by "resolutely following the intent of the law, by unorthodox and hazardous means." Or as the Century Bible puts it, according to the theory of some (CB, p. 341-2):

This chapter is generally regarded as tribal history, elaborated by the skill of the historian in the form of popular tradition... Such narratives as these are the natural result of the adoption of the genealogy as a form of stating tribal relationships.

38:1 adullami
From Adullam, a Judaean town.

38:5 w'haya vikhziv b'lidtah oto
Apparently means that he was in [the town of] Achzib when she bore him.

38:8 bo el éshet axíkha w'yabbem otah w'haqem zéra‛ l'axíkha
(JPS) 'Join with your brother's wife and do your duty by her as a brother-in-law, and provide offspring for your brother.' This, without an appropriate explanation, probably doesn't make a great deal more sense to the average reader than the Hebrew. The 'join with' of the translation corresponds to bo el in the original, while 'do your duty by her as a brother-in-law' attempts to translate w'yabbem otah. We understand the joining part, but what about the duty as brother-in-law? EH explains:

The marriage of a man and his brother's wife is forbidden by the Torah (see Lev. 18:16, 20:21). An exception is made only when a married brother dies without a son. According to Deut. 25:5, the brother of the deceased is obligated to take the widow as his wife. This institution is known in Hebrew as yibbum. In English it is called "levirate marriage" (from Latin levir, "a husband's brother").

Thus the whole English phrase is summed up in H in a single verb (y-b-m, conjugated as a piel or intensive), and w'yabbem otah might be glossed, as suggested by Speiser, 'levirate her' (so to speak). But actually this verb is derived from the noun yavam 'brother of deceased husband' (CHALOT, EK).

Why did they have such a custom? "The institution of the Levirate," explains Speiser, "is an alternative to adoption," and he adds, inserting the same reference as EH: "The requirement was later relaxed, cf. Deut. xxv 5 ff." (EAS, p. 297, my emphasis). But the point was that the family (i.e. brothers) of a deceased man would not only (as a duty, not a privilege!) extend the family's "protection" (through marriage) to the widow, but would furthermore make up for his failure to provide offspring (i.e. genealogical continuity) on behalf of the dead brother and in his legal name. This is implied in the third part of the Hebrew sentence, w'haqem zéra‛ l'axíkha 'provide offspring for your brother' using the hiphil conjugation of q-w-m, which means 'to raise, establish' etc. (CHALOT). Nevertheless, the present story, where Tamar does everything in her power to assert her claim to the levirate as her right, only makes complete sense if we admit that the institution was thought of as favouring the widow's interests as much as the genetic survival of the bereaved family. Cf. the story of Ruth.

38:9 wayyéda‛ onan ki lo lo yihye hazzára‛
'But Onan knew that the seed would not be [counted as] his.' If Onan gave Tamar a child, by law the child would inherit from Er, Onan's dead brother. What's the big deal, one might ask, especially since back in the day a man could have more than one wife if he wanted to, so he would still have a chance to have his own heir, but a note in EH suggests what the real problem might have been (my emphasis): "With the death of the firstborn [i.e. Er], Onan stood to inherit one-half of his father's estate, because his brother left no heir. Should he provide an heir to his brother, however, his own portion would be less.'

w'haya im ba el éshet axiw w'shixet ártza 
(KJV) 'And it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother's wife, that he spilled it on the ground.' Coitus interruptus. 

38:10 wayyéra‛ b'‛ene YHWH asher ‛asa
'What he did was displeasing to the Lord.' A great deal of nonsense has been said about this meaning a prohibition of masturbation, but it doesn't look to me like it says any such thing, or is even talking about that. First of all, what v. 9 says is that Onan failed to impregnate his sister-in-law because he had no interest in doing so; the idea that its subject matter is masturbation is quite ridiculous, as if nobody knew that there is quite a difference between one thing and the other. Secondly, there is nothing in the text to suggest that "what he did" that angered God was that; the real matter of concern here, to quote EH, was simply that Onan "evades his obligation to his dead brother, not because of the manner in which he acts. The issue here is the levirate obligation, not birth control."

38:12 wayyirbu hayyamim
Lit. 'the days became many', i.e. 'a long time passed' which is relevant to the story because it was on account of the passage of time without further word from Judah that she reaches the conclusion that he isn't planning to marry her to his son Shela. This provides her with her motivation for what she now does, while the information that Judah will be going to Timnah to shear his flock, and that he is now a widower, provides the opportunity.


wayyá‛al ‛al goz'ze tzono
(JPS) 'He went up... to his sheepshearers.' What this signifies is that it was the shearing season, which according to EH "was filled with joy and revelry." Speiser notes that the turn of phrase seems strange and suspects there might have been a minor corruption of the text so that perhaps it originally said 'he went to the shearing' or 'he went to (supervise his) shearers.

38:14 wattásar bigde alm'nutah me‛aléha watt'khas battza‛if wattit‛alaf
'She took off  her widow's clothes, covered her face with a veil, and wrapped herself up.' The gist of which is that she changed her clothes and disguised herself (as a prostitute). More specifically, the first part wattásar bigde alm'nutah me‛aleha, tells us that she put away the widow's garb, which is what she was obviously wearing as the widow of Judah's first to sons. She did this to adopt her disguise (when she is done with that, she puts her bigde alm'nutah back on again, v. 19). It doesn't tell us what her prostitute's raiments were, but it says that she covered herself with a veil (watt'khas battza‛if). The veil wasn't necessarily an intrinsic part of the prostitute costume, but she had a reason for covering her face: she didn't want Judah to know her identity, since that was basic to her plan. The mention of the veil is interesting to us as confirmation that in her normal everyday attire she was not veiled, and if this were still in doubt that is settled in v. 19 where, changing back into her regular clothes, it says wattásar tz'‛ifah 'she took off her veil.' Thus there is ample evidence that veils were only used by women in Israelite society in certain particular contexts, one of which was apparently during the marriage ceremony (witness the story of Jacob's wedding with Leah). In their everyday life Jewish women did not have veils.

38:24 hotzi'úha w'tissaref
'Bring her out so that she may be burnt.' According to EH, the reason Judah thought Tamar deserved the death penalty was the report that she had flouted her engagement to Shela, which is to say that, under the law, Tamar was legally engaged independently of the fact that Jacob had held back on their marriage. This was so manifestly unfair that Judah himself eventually acknowledges this to all concerned at the end of the story (v. 26, wayyakker y'huda etc.). Thereupon Judah not only pardoned Tamar and repealed his verdict that she should be executed but confessed to his own guilt and conceded that her behaviour had been more correct than his. Which is why this is actually a good story. In that light, the w'tissaref serves, dramatically, to underline the final twist of this quasi-folktale.

38:27 wayhi b'‛et lidtah w'hinne t'omim b'viTnah
'When the time came for her to give birth, there were twins in her womb.'  This is the second time in Genesis that twins are born, the first of course being the birth of Esau and Jacob, where the corresponding notice reads (25:24): wayyiml'u y'méha lalédet w'hinne tomim b'viTnah which amounts to the same formula essentially. Besides the two variants of the word for 'twins' there is also exists a third, to'amim. Why so many stories about twins? Well, this story seems to allude to a rivalry between the two children, who are believed to have represented clans; and the same is true of Isaac's sons, of course. Peretz (péretz) and Zerah (zérax) were two tribes of Judah, but Peretz was the more important of the two.