Kimberly Steele

 If you've ever read the Old Testament you'll know there are a lot of seriously weird stories in there.  Your Sunday School curricula skipped a lot. Not that I blame them. Remember that episode where Joseph's brothers are out moving their flocks, and some dudes from Shechem kidnap their sister Dinah (Leah's daughter, and apparently the only girl in the family). She's raped by the son of the local petty king, who then petitions Jacob her father to let his son marry her. Her brothers then trick the rapist and his whole household into getting circumcized, and while they're in pain, they storm the place, kill everybody, and rescue Dinah. 

That one's tricky to tell to first-graders. 

Anyway, another such story is that of Tamar. One of Joseph's other brothers, Judah, arranges a marriage between Tamar and his son Er. Er died without children, so Judah pushed Tamar onto his next son, Onan. The idea was, if Onan could father a son on Tamar, then that son would inherit Er's estate, just as though he had been Er's biological child (yay Levirate marriage). It was a way of preserving inheritance lines. Anyway, Onan refused to impregnate Tamar, probably because as long as Tamar remained childless, he was in line to inherit his dead brother's estate. Tamar, frustrated, takes matters into her own hands:  she dresses up like a hooker, hangs out by the roadside waiting for her father-in-law Judah, propositions him, and gets pregnant with his child. She demands some of his personal possessions in payment (ring, necklace, and staff), and later produces them as proof that Judah is the father so she doesn't get burned alive (penalty for adultery). 

The various explanations I've run across for the significance of this story, over the years, are...   inadequate at best. Tamar is generally regarded as the heroine of this story. She was not afforded her rights as a widow, and she found a way to get them by subterfuge.  IIRC she is in the bloodline of Christ, and one of the few women recorded therein, so the ancients must've thought it very important also. In the genealogies you have generation upon generation of man begat man begat man begat man, with the occasional Sarai, Rebecca, Leah, Rachel, and Tamar thrown in. They're not accidental. Nothing survives millenia in a narrative like this without a reason. It always felt like there was something very uncomfortably missing. 

Recently, I ran across a mention of the Book of Jubilees, and read it. Thought to be written down maybe first or second century BC, and more importantly...  seems to have been generally accessible to, and read by, the early Christians. It purports to be the account of one of The Watchers (an angel) given direct to Moses while he was up on the holy mountain. There are references to it in the New Testament. It is a fairly short read, it covers the same ground as Genesis and part of Exodus, from the Creation to Moses, but from an oddly different angle-- it skims over a lot of the details covered in the Bible version, and adds a lot of detail of its own, such as the names of wives and daughters, people's relative ages, a very detailed account of the death of Abraham, lots of stuff. And, interestingly, it holds up a lens under which quite a lot of weird-sounding things in the OT come into crisp focus: bloodlines. Is this a right and correct way to interpret the stories? Is the information accurate? I don't know. But early Christians seemed to take this additional account for granted. There are a lot of Bible-conspiracy-theory types who get really hung up on the very brief mentions of the Rephaim (giants) in here. That, IMO, is one of the least interesting things going on in the text. 

In the Jubilees iteration of things, certain people (Lot, Esau, Canaan) are marked out, along with all their descendants, for destruction. They're all going to be rooted out of the earth like weeds, at some point in the future, and it's imperative that the people of God's Covenant, Jacob and his descendants, not intermarry with them. It's repeated over and over: don't marry Canaanite women! It doesn't seem to be a religious thing. There's still the insistence that worshiping idols is forbidden, but at the same time, Jacob marries Leah and Rachel, whose father Laban worships idols (we know this because Rachel steals them when the family leaves Laban's household: WTF Rachel?). But Leah** and Rachel are the right bloodline, so everything's fine. It's not even imperative that they marry inside the extended tribe-- Jacob married an Egyptian woman, Asenath (in Jubilees, she is Potiphar's daughter: but also Potiphar is a eunuch so I am confused about the definition of 'eunuch' here!*), and this seems to have been fine also. 

But Caananites are marked out for destruction because Canaan appropriated land that was given to one of his uncles by Noah. This is taboo. Lot earned that curse by procreating with his daughters. Esau... well, all his wives were Canaanite women, so his family doesn't make the cut. 

So what does this have to do with Tamar?

She's from an approved family background (from the daughters of Aram). But Er and Onan aren't. Out of Jacob's twelve sons, who are destined to be the founders of the twelve tribes of Israel (ok, not Reuben because he slept with his father's concubine), they all marry women from approved family lines except Judah and Simeon. Jubilees says these two married Canaanite women (gasp!). Simeon regrets this and then marries a proper wife. But that still leaves Judah, polluting the family tree. He has three sons with his Canaanite wife. By the logic of Jubilees, all his offspring are now marked out for destruction. There's no way his sons can become the Tribe of Judah. Er dies childless (he was wicked and the lord slew him), after rejecting Tamar (because he wants to marry a Canaanite woman from his mom's side of the family). Onan refuses because he wants his brother's stuff. Judah tells Tamar to live 'as a widow' in her father's house until the youngest son, Shelah grows up.  But then, when Shelah grows up, Judah's Canaanite wife Bedsu'el refuses to let him marry Tamar. Then Bedsu'el dies. Judah is delaying for whatever reason. Tamar hears he's going to be in the area and pulls her roadside hooker stunt. 

After the fact, it's declared absolutely wrong, and a capital offense, for a man to bed his daughter-in-law or mother-in-law. But, it is explained, until Tamar, there wasn't a rule about it. This is why rules get made. Nobody gets burned alive this time. But next time...  don't even think about it. So Tamar gets out of being married off to her dead husband's kid brother, she gives birth to (twins?) Perez and Zerah right before the whole clan has to move to Egypt because of famine. Judah is deeply ashamed, repents, is forgiven by God. But the real upshot of this story is: "unto Judah we said that his two sons had not lain with her, and for this reason his seed was stablished for a second generation, and would not be rooted out."  See what happened there? Tamar saved the family bloodline from Canaanite corruption. That's why she's the heroine of this story. Not because she got her own justice, not because incest is good actually, but because she was the instrument by which Judah's illicit marriage was remedied. 

I am not, of course, commenting on good or bad here. Only that the Book of Jubilees version of this story makes sense, where the Genesis version... seems to be missing something.  In this iteration, it is almost exclusively a story about bloodlines. And in that light it works: we can understand why this episode made it into the canon. The Old Testament is obsessed with bloodlines, genealogies, birthrights, and genetic covenants. 

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*I seriously want to know the rest of the story now, concerning pharaoh's eunuchs. Did "eunuch" mean something other than "man with no testicles" in that context? If not, why does Potiphar, Pharaoh's eunuch, have a wife? I mean, that would explain why Potiphar's wife was so desperate to seduce Joseph, her husband's hot young household manager, but still...   Asenath is supposed to be his daughter?  So either eunuch has some other meaning, or the wife and daughter happened *before* he became a eunuch. 

**I love that in the Jubilees version, Leah the unwanted wife of Jacob, gets a happy ending. Rachel of course dies untimely after giving birth to Benjamin. Leah remains. Jacob learns to appreciate and love her truly after all: when she dies, the book says: "for he was lamenting her for he loved her exceedingly after Rachel her sister died; for she was perfect and upright in all her ways and honoured Jacob, and all the days that she lived with him he did not hear from her mouth a harsh word, for she was gentle and peaceable and upright and honourable.  And he remembered all her deeds which she had done during her life and he lamented her exceedingly; for he loved her with all his heart and with all his soul."