The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (20 page)

The elder snorted. “She says nothing,” he said, “because there is nothing to say. So burn her!”

Though it was chilly inside the house, Judah suddenly felt slightly feverish. A fine sweat appeared on his brow, and his skin prickled beneath his woolen robe. With a quick swipe of his right hand, he brushed the sweat from his forehead, then wiped his hand on his sleeve.

“Say the words,” one of the old men encouraged in a low whisper. “The Law decrees it—”

At that moment, there was a commotion at the back of the room,
and the crowd parted slightly to reveal the figure of Tamar’s mother and one of the menfolk from her village. The mother, casting her eyes down and wearing a look of misery and confusion, stumbled forward. Behind her, a young man held a bundle in his outstretched arms, but Judah could not see what was wrapped in the bulky gray blankets.

“Go away, woman,” one of the elders hissed. “You have no business here.”

Judah raised one hand to silence the old man, and he did the same to the crowd with a single black look. The Canaanite woman took three more steps in utter silence and then fell to her knees, pressing her forehead to the floor. The young man carefully lowered the bundle to the floor in front of Judah’s chair, and he, too, fell to his knees.

“I beg you to listen, master!” the old woman cried out in a desperate screech.

“Yes?” Judah encouraged her. “What do you want to say?”

“My daughter sends me with a message.”

“Go on.”

The old woman raised her head slightly but stayed on her knees.

“Tamar bids me say these words to you: The father of my child is the man to whom these things belong.’”

And then Judah rose from his chair and knelt in front of the old woman. He reached out and drew open the folds of the woolen blanket to reveal a cylinder of carved quartz on a length of worn rawhide and a leather-wrapped walking staff.

For one crazy moment, Judah wondered exactly how the old woman had gotten her hands on the pledge that he had given to the harlot by the side of the road. And then, a moment later, he understood.

“Whose seal is it?” demanded one of the graybeards. “Whose seal? Whose staff?”

“Tell us,” called a harsh woman’s voice from the crowd, “and hell burn, too!”

The old woman did not speak, and it was Judah’s voice that was heard in the cold room.

“No one will burn today,” he said, amazing himself no less than the others. “Tamar is right, and I am wrong—I should have sent Shelah to her bed.”

The room fell silent, and even the querulous old men waited to hear Judah’s words.

“The seal and the staff are mine,” Judah said, “and so is the child.”

Tamar as the Harlot by the Side of the Road

T
he narrator of Genesis 38—or, more likely, some pious editor who came along later and tried to cool down and clean up the story
¹
—hastens to reassure us that Judah did not sleep with his daughter-in-law a second time: “And he knew her again no more” (Gen. 38:26). But Tamar does not disappear from the biblical narrative. Rather, she gives birth to twin boys, Perez and Zerah, and the Bible carefully notes that Perez is the progenitor of a long line of celebrated figures, including David, Solomon, and, according to the New Testament, Jesus of Nazareth. So Tamar, the willful young woman who plays the harlot in order to seduce her own father-in-law, is the great-great-grandmother of kings, prophets, and the Christian Messiah.

Still, the figure of Tamar—a Canaanite, a seducer and sexual trickster, a young woman who refuses to submit to the authority of the stern patriarchy under which she lives—has been nearly written out of the biblical tradition over the centuries precisely because her sexual adventure on the road to Enaim is so audacious, provocative, and titillating. When forced to confront her story in the Holy Scriptures, clergy and scholars have struggled to explain away the sexual encounter between Tamar and her father-in-law, a coupling that is specifically prohibited
elsewhere in the Bible (Lev. 18:15) and one so close to incest that it is still capable of shocking us.

A favored explanation in the rabbinical tradition is that the tale of Tamar and Judah, which pops up in Genesis in the middle of the story of Joseph in Egypt, is intended to be contrasted with the episode that immediately follows it: the failed seduction of Joseph by the wife of Potiphar, the Egyptian overlord to whom Joseph has been sold as a slave. As Judah is succumbing to Tamar’s charms at a roadside in Canaan, the righteous young Joseph is turning away the hot overtures (“Lie with me!”) of Potiphar’s wife in an Egyptian palace with chilly indignation: “How then can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?” (Gen. 39:7–9).

Joseph, the rabbis encourage us to believe, illustrates how a goodly man is supposed to react to the sexual allure of a forbidden woman; he just says “No!” even if it means an open-ended stay in Pharaoh’s dungeon. Judah, by contrast, is supposed to be a sorry example of weak flesh and a failed spirit. And yet this facile explanation falls under its own weight: Joseph leads his people into the place where they will be enslaved and nearly destroyed, but the coupling of the virile Judah and the fecund Tamar will bring forth the greatest kings of ancient Israel and ultimately the Messiah.

Tamar is a woman who demonstrates how an Israelite and a Canaanite can transcend the bitter and often bloody antagonism between these rival claimants to what we still like to call the Holy Land. She allows us to glimpse the deadly peril that confronted women of the biblical era who did not submit to the mastery of a male, whether father or husband. Above all, Tamar is a woman whose will is so strong, whose passion burns so bright, that she writes herself into history through an act of illicit physical love.

That Tamar is a Canaanite may have been even more embarrassing to the rabbinical authorities than the fact that Judah sleeps with her and fathers a pair of sons by her. One of the great themes of the Hebrew Bible, as we have already seen, is the outright condemnation of marriage outside the Twelve Tribes of Israel, and the Canaanites are the most
strictly forbidden of all prospective lovers and spouses: “[N]either shalt thou make marriages with them: thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son” (Deut. 7:3).
*

The fear and hatred with which the Canaanites are regarded throughout the Bible lead us to another of its awkward and mostly overlooked features. We are told in the Book of Genesis that Canaan is promised by God to Abraham and his descendants, but we discover in the Book of Exodus that Canaan is not an empty paradise “flowing with milk and honey.” When the Israelites, after fleeing Egypt and spending forty hard years in the wilderness under the troubled leadership of Moses (see chapter nine), finally cross the Jordan River into “the Promised Land,” the place is teeming with tribes and clans that had lived there long before the Exodus: “The Hittite, the Amorite, and the Canaanite, the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite,” among others (Josh. 12:7).

God’s solution is to declare a war of conquest—we might easily use the terms “ethnic cleansing” and even “genocide”—against the native dwellers of the Promised Land. The slaughter of Midianites that we encountered in the Book of Numbers is only an augury of the bloodthirsty campaign in Canaan itself. According to the rules of war set forth in Deuteronomy, the invading Israelites are obliged to “proclaim peace” to a besieged city, and if the city-dwellers respond with “an answer of peace” then their lives are to be spared and they are to be permitted to live as “tributaries” to the Israelites. But these rules of engagement apply only to the “far off” cities. An entirely different strategy is decreed for the cities within the Promised Land itself, the cities of the Canaanites and the other peoples who dwelled in Canaan before the Exodus.

God takes credit for the early victories of the Israelites over their enemies on the field of battle: “I gave them into your hand, and ye possessed their land; and I destroyed them from before you” (Josh. 24:8). But the Promised Land is
not
cleansed of its native population, and the Bible explains that God eventually withdraws his favor from the Israelites because they are so tempted to “forsake the Lord, and serve strange gods” (Josh. 24:20). So Canaan turns out to be a place where men and women of different tribes and different faiths live side by side—not unlike our own country or, for that matter, the Holy Land in our own times—and the Israelites are forced to make some kind of peace with the tribes whom they did not defeat in war. The Promised Land is divided up among the tribes of Israel, we are told in the Bible, but the various native-dwelling tribes (including the Canaanites) remain on the land, living and working among the conquering Israelites as a kind of disempowered working class or even as slaves.

Why is the Bible so bloodthirsty toward the Canaanites and the others who dwelled in the Promised Land? The obvious geopolitical fact is that the Israelites hope to remove these peoples from their homeland—or at least to rule over them—out of an entirely amoral impulse toward the conquest of Canaan and the establishment of national sovereignty for the Israelites. Even the Almighty recognizes a certain injustice in the displacement and exploitation of the Canaanites:

But as we have already discerned beneath the surface of the story of Dinah and Shechem, other, even darker reasons explain the fear and loathing of the Canaanites that we find throughout the Bible. The Canaanites must be destroyed, the Bible says, so that they will not teach the Israelites “all their abominations, which they have done unto their gods, and so yet sin against the Lord your God” (Deut. 20:18). Such “abominations” included not only the making of idols (and the bacchanalian abandon with which the idols were worshipped) but also the tantalizing (and thus sternly forbidden) rite of sexual intercourse with sacred prostitutes as an act of goddess worship. Ironically, when God announces that he will no longer assist the Israelites on the field of battle because of their infidelities, the Almighty is fully aware that the temptations facing his Chosen People will be all the more alluring. “I will not drive them out before you,” God says of the Canaanites, “but they shall be unto you as snares, and their gods shall be a trap unto you” (Judg. 2:3).

The Canaanites, then, turn out to be both the strategic and the religious rivals of the Israelites. That is why we find stories throughout the Bible that are meant to ridicule the Canaanites and to depict them as unworthy of lordship over their own land. An often-ignored incident in the story of Noah (Gen. 9:22–24), for example, shows one of Noah’s sons, Ham, as a coarse and irreverent brute who dares to peek at his father’s naked body when the old man is lolling around in a drunken stupor and then boasts about it to his brothers, who are too respectful of their father to look at his nakedness. Ham, we are pointedly told by the biblical storyteller, is “father of Canaan.”
*

When it turns out that the Canaanites and the other peoples of the Promised Land cannot be exterminated, the Israelites are sternly warned against intermarriage with strangers in general and the Canaanites above all, and they are threatened with divine punishment if they consort with non-Israelites: