The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (19 page)

“Your seal,” she repeated, “and your staff, too. Give them to me as a pledge for the kid—and then I will spread my legs for you.”

If Judah had paused long enough to think about it, he would have realized how risky and foolhardy it would be to hand over his seal to a common whore. The tiny cylinder was the device that Judah used to imprint his name on the clay tablet and papyrus scrolls that Hirah sometimes prepared to confirm the purchase of a new plot of land or the sale of a season’s harvest of wool; it was the very symbol of identity and authority. And the long trek to Timnah and back would seem longer still without a walking staff. But Judah was thinking only of the scent that rose from the young woman’s body—he was thinking only of the shadowy place between her legs—as he stood over her in the heat and the dust.

“Done,” Judah said, letting the leather-laced walking staff fall to the ground next to the young woman. Then he pulled the cord over his head and cast it down at her feet. “Let’s go, then.”

Tamar reached for the cord and held the seal in a closed fist. Then she rose to her feet and led Judah deeper into the olive grove on the hillside overlooking the crossroads. She reclined on the ground beneath one very old tree and drew up the hem of her robe to reveal her ankle, her knee, her thigh—and then she paused and waited.

Judah, biting his lower lip and breathing hard through his nose, lowered himself to the hard-packed soil. He reached out to touch her so tentatively that Tamar wondered for one anxious moment if Judah knew perfectly well that she was no harlot.

“Master!” she cried out when she felt his fingers on her flesh. Her purpose had nothing to do with getting pleasure, but she was suddenly aware of a strange hunger of her own. “Oh, master—”

Judah touched her with a tenderness that took her by surprise. As she yielded to his insistent caresses, Tamar thought to herself: sorry that the sons did not learn what the father clearly knows.

“Are you ready now, master?” she whispered at last.

He lowered himself over her body and began to probe with short, strong, rhythmic motions. Once, twice, three times, on and on. And then, as she responded to him with equal urgency, her veil fell aside and her face was revealed. Would he recognize her now? Tamar wondered. Would he draw back or—as Tamar imagined in a kind of wild reverie—would he persist even though he recognized her? And would he persist with even greater fervor
because
he recognized her?

And when they had spent themselves in each other’s arms, after he rolled to the earth next to her and Tamar hastily fixed the veil across her face once again, her thoughts took wing like prayers:
Take
hold, she instructed the seed that was about to plant itself within her womb.

Judah lay beside her for another long moment, cradling her briefly
with one strong arm. Then he rose to his feet and looked back down at her.

“My seal and my staff,” he mused aloud. “I will be taken for a beggar on the road.”

“Then you must send me a kid as you promised,” she said, “and be sure it is a healthy and strong one.”

Tamar reclined against the trunk of the ancient tree and watched as Judah hurried away, walking upright because he had no staff on which to lean, and she folded her arms on her belly.

Judah returned from Timnah in high spirits. The flock had flourished, the yield of wool was plentiful and of good quality, and Hirah had led him down the alleys and lanes of lantern-lit tents to sample the strongest red wine, the fattest cuts of mutton, and the most willing women. And now Judah could be seen striding with such a quick step through the compound that the graybeards could not keep up with him.

“He mourns no longer,” said one of the Canaanites who served Judah at table.

Still, Judah had not forgotten the young woman at the crossroads, and he began to afflict himself with the thought that she might appear at the door of his house to demand what was owed her. What a
scandal she would make, not only among the chattering women in the compound but especially among the old graybeards. Knowing that it would cost him little to honor his pledge, he summoned Hirah to his chamber.

“You remember the woman at the crossroads near Enaim?” Judah asked in a low voice.

“The whore to whom you gave your staff and your seal?” Hirah taunted. “Yes, friend, I have not forgotten what a foolish old goat you have become.”

“She was not a common whore,” Judah protested. “She was a temple prostitute.”

Hirah laughed out loud. “What do you know of the temple women, my Hebrew friend? And did you make an offering to Baal before you worshipped between her legs? No, Judah ben Jacob, make no mistake—she was a whore, and that’s all. Only now it is the whore who keeps your signet.”

“Listen, now, and do what I say,” Judah said earnestly. “Take a kid from the flock. Pick one with some meat on the bones. Then take it to the harlot at Enaim, and bring back my seal and my staff.”

“Of course,” Hirah smirked. “I will send one of my men—”

“No!” Judah said. “I want you to go, old friend.”

“Me?” Hirah was astounded. “You expect me to go in search of some whore with a kid on my back?”

“Your men would make light of the whole business,” Judah complained, “and soon the women’s tent would be buzzing. I need
you
to go. Do you understand?”

Hirah nodded and grinned. The sly twist of his mouth told Judah that he understood all too well.

Toward sunset on the second day after Hirah’s departure, Judah heard the commotion that always attended the arrival of a visitor to the compound. Judah cautioned himself against hurrying from the house to meet Hirah, and he waited instead by the threshold.

Even from a distance, Judah saw that Hirah carried something around his neck like a dark shawl. To his disappointment, he saw that it was the same kid that Hirah had selected from the flock to redeem Judah’s pledge.

“Why do you return with
that,”
he demanded, “instead of my seal and my staff?”

“I asked after the woman at Enaim, but I could not find her.”

“Whom did you ask?”

“Who else would know the whereabouts of a temple prostitute?” Hirah taunted. “The men of Enaim, of course—I asked where I might find the temple prostitute who sits by the fork in the road, and they said: ‘There is no temple prostitute here.’”

Judah’s throat closed. Of course, he knew perfectly well that the woman who held his seal and his staff as a pledge was a common whore, not a temple prostitute, and he worried that Hirah had asked after the wrong woman.

“But what if the woman,” Judah ventured, “was not actually a temple prostitute—”

Hirah laughed out loud. “So you admit it, then?”

“Curse you, Hirah,” Judah muttered, “to jest with me about something like this.”

“Do not worry, friend,” Hirah said. “The woman—whether she is a temple prostitute or a common whore—is long gone, and your seal and your staff are gone with her. Forget about them.”

“It was,” Judah said, “a matter of honor.”

“You have honored your word, haven’t you?”

Judah allowed himself to be consoled. “You’re right,” he said. “I sent the kid, and what more can I do? Let her keep the pledge, then, and no one can say that I do not keep my word.”

“And now you must give me something to drink,” Hirah complained, “or I will have a few stories of my own to tell.”

Judah led his friend into the house and waved over one of the servants. Good riddance to the whore, he thought to himself. Tomorrow he would ask Hirah to arrange for the artisans in the village to fashion him a new seal and a new staff. And what if it cost him more than the price of the kid to replace the missing pledge? The fact was that the harlot was gone, and along with her the prospect of scandal in the house of Judah.

Now and then, Judah thought of the harlot by the side of the road, but mostly he attended to the flocks and the crops, the petitions of his beseeching cousins, the repair of his houses and walls. Only Hirah knew what had happened at the crossroads, Judah kept telling himself, and his secret was safe with his old friend. And, since no one dared speak of the incident in Judah’s presence, he did not suspect that the compound and the women’s tent had fairly hummed with speculation for at least a week after Hirah had returned with a kid over his shoulder.

Eventually, the whispered stories of what had prompted Judah to send Hirah to Enaim in the first place were replaced by a new and much more urgent scandal. One of the old women had trekked to the village of Tamar’s father for a wedding, and she returned to Judah’s compound with the most remarkable news. Tamar was carrying a child.

“Young Shelah must have slipped into her bed,” she cackled as the rest tittered, “and done his duty after all.”

Of course, it could not have been Shelah. No one had ever told him
of Judah’s vow—and, truth be told, Judah was still fearful of the warning that could be heard in the crude jokes that his cronies uttered to each other when Tamar’s name was mentioned.

“She has killed off two of Judah’s sons,” they would say to each other. “Why risk the last one?”

Word of Tamar’s predicament finally reached Judah in the form of a whispered denunciation by the mother of a young woman who fancied Shelah for her own son-in-law.

“Tamar has played the harlot in her own father’s house,” she whispered to one of the graybeards, “and now she carries someone’s bastard in her belly.”

“And what am I to do about it?” Judah complained when the story was repeated to him.

“Burn her,” said one of the old men. “That’s what the Law decrees for adulteresses.”

“You want me to put Tamar to the fire?” Judah asked. “Are you serious?”

“The Law decrees it—” the old man began.

“Let the woman be,” Judah said, almost pleading. Judah found himself repulsed at the prospect of putting her lovely young flesh to the flames. And, as Judah now realized, no one would expect him to send Shelah to her bed any longer. “Let her stay in her father’s house,” he concluded, “and raise the bastard.”

“Bring her out, so that she may be burned,” one old man threatened, “or else you will be laughed at.”

Judah understood that a threat to his authority could not be safely ignored. What’s more, he did not relish the thought of the gossip that would persist for as long as Tamar and her bastard lived in the nearby village.

“All right, then,” Judah relented. “Summon her to my house.”

So it happened that Tamar was brought from her father’s house and escorted to Judah’s compound by the elders and a half-dozen young men
whom they had pressed into service. Everyone along the way could see that the story was plainly true: Tamar’s belly was big, and she carried low—a son, to be sure, but
whose
son?

Tamar was accompanied by her mother, who walked at her side, keening and moaning without pause, and one or two of her menfolk, who had been permitted to come along on the condition that they left their staffs and swords behind. Her father—or so it was whispered among the Israelites—had refused to enter the compound of the Israelites and submit to the indignity of a trial before Judah.

The old woman hung her head as they walked through the compound, but the shrill noise she made carried all the way to Judah’s door. The men from Tamar’s village cast cautious glances to the left and right as they passed the gauntlet of Israelites who had gathered to see the scandalous sight of Tamar, pregnant and doomed. But Tamar, wearing the black robes of mourning, held her head upright and stared straight ahead. A chill winter wind swept the robe around her ankles, but she did not shiver or comfort herself with folded arms.

At last, the procession entered the courtyard before Judah’s house, and Tamar was left under guard outside the door while the elders pushed into the room where Judah awaited them on a chair with armrests and a high back. One old woman, then a few younger men, and finally a small crowd of onlookers pushed into the room after them, and the graybeards did nothing to discourage them. An audience, they felt, would force Judah’s hand if he showed signs of timidity.

“The harlot stands outside,” one of the old men said, “and the evidence of her adultery is plain to see.”

“What will you do?” another one demanded, and Judah heard a few murmurs and titters from the crowd that surged around him.

“What does Tamar say?” Judah asked.