If
you decide to look up Tamar, add some extra search terms, because there is more
than one Biblical Tamar. It is a place name, and there are three women called
Tamar who appear in the Old Testament. One gets only a passing reference, while
another is the daughter of King David who is treated so shamefully by her
brother (see 2 Samuel 13). It is the first Tamar that Matthew draws our
attention to. She was probably a young teenager when Judah (son of Jacob and
Leah) paid the bride-price, perhaps some cattle or sheep, to take her from her
father and give her as wife to his eldest son, Er. Tamar’s difficulties begin
when Er died, presumably still a young man and possibly not of natural causes
given the phrase ‘the Lord put him to death’. The rules of Levirate marriage
then came into play; although they may not have been formally codified at this
time, the tradition was already in place that younger brothers should take
their elder brother’s widow as wives (this could be in addition to any wives
they already had).
Er’s
brother Onan was not keen on this. Perhaps he felt that if he failed to provide
heirs for Er, then Er’s share of the family inheritance would come to him,
Onan, instead. So he obeyed his father, too Tamar, but ensured that she would
not get pregnant by ‘spilling his seed on the ground’. This would have been
humiliating for Tamar. Judah removed Tamar from Onan and suggested that his
third son, Shelah, could fulfil this duty. But Shelah was not yet old enough to
do so, and Tamar was returned to her father until Shelah was a man. This return
would have been humiliating for Tamar. She would have been seen as a woman who
had failed in her wifely duty to provide children for the family; she was being
returned as damaged or unwanted goods to wait for what must have been an
unpalatable future, having to become the wife of a much younger man – although
she was probably still fairly young herself.
Tamar
may well have had grounds for feeling she had been poorly treated by Judah’s
family; tied to Judah by the bride-price that had been paid for her, she was
trapped and unable to look forward to any kind of respect or dignity in her
older age – unless she could return to Judah’s family to produce a child by
Shelah. Time passed, and Shelah’s
adulthood arrived without Tamar being fetched back. We can only speculate on
how she felt about this, but her actions may help us to understand her. Tamar
heard that her father-in-law was in the area to shear sheep, and took her
future into her own hands, possibly for the first time in her life.
Read Genesis 38: 12-30
Consider
In
the Middle East at that time there were two kinds of prostitutes: those who
slept with men because they needed the money (Rahab falls into this category),
and the shrine or Temple prostitutes. These were women who served the goddesses
of fertility. Men could approach them at the Temples of the goddesses, or at
locally made shrines which were put up at particular times when fertility rites
were relevant – at the time of seeding, for example. Sleeping with the
prostitute was considered to be a metaphor for sleeping with the goddess
herself, and would be a way of ensuring fertility for the crop, herd or flock.
Judah would have assumed that he was sleeping with a Temple prostitute whose
services would bring fertility from a goddess to his flock, and the payment –
part of the flock that he wanted to be blessed – would go towards the upkeep of
the Temple.
In
exposing Judah when she returned his pledge items, Tamar showed that he was not
only willing to use prostitutes, but that he had betrayed the God of his
fathers. His was a double hypocrisy, condemning Tamar for ‘playing the whore’,
but also expecting his people to follow Yahweh, while not trusting Yahweh
himself.
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Question
1)
Did Tamar have any
alternatives, or was this the only way to ensure her future?
2)
Women today are
considered to be more independent and less vulnerable. Are there any situations
when a woman (or a man) might be as trapped in their circumstances as Tamar
was?
3)
Judah betrayed God –
in his heart by what he thought he was doing, even if Tamar’s deceit meant he
wasn’t really. We could easily be complacent about this, condemning Judah while
believing that we modern western Christians would never let God down by looking
another way, even for a short time. But are there other ‘gods’ that distract us
from being good disciples? What might be the modern things we trust in and
forget to pray, or that we allow to take up our time and energy when we should
be worshipping or serving God?
4)
Tamar’s reward was to
become the mother of twins. The first to be born, Perez, was considered the
younger. But as with other twins in the family, it was the younger who stood in
the direct line that led to the Messiah of Israel. The status of being mother
to Perez raised Tamar in the eyes of Israel, who saw her as having been
rewarded by God. Does it make any difference to the way we see Tamar in the
twenty-first century?
The Scarlet Thread
The scarlet thread in this
story singles out Zerah as the older twin, and so the senior one, who would
receive Er’s inheritance, and as eldest son of eldest son (in terms of family
position, even though not biologically), Zerah’s thread marked him out as the
future head of the family. The genealogy tells us that the status accorded to
Zerah isn’t necessarily important to God, who chose the ‘younger’ one, the
first to emerge fully from the womb, as an ancestor for Jesus. The thread here
marks out what matters to humans and misses what matters to God.
When you reflect on Tamar,
the first of the women Matthew marks out as important in the line that led to
Jesus, what do you think marks her out? Why does her presence in Jesus’ story
matter? Keep a note of your thoughts and ideas, so that Tamar’s thread can be
linked with the other women as we trace their stories.
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