The genealogies of the Bible typically mention only the fathers. Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus departs from this pattern. He mentions several women, all of whom are connected to stories of some sexual impropriety. Matthew deals subtly with the scandal of Mary’s pregnancy by reminding his readers through this genealogy that God has used scandalous women in the past. The first woman Matthew mentions is Tamar.
I cannot tell you the story of Tamar without providing enough background detail to make it understandable. This will take some time, and if you are looking for a quick Christmas fix, you might want to come back tomorrow. But if you want to finally understand a confusing Bible story, stick around. We’ll get there.
Genesis 38 tells the story of Tamar and her husbands. Tamar was married to Er, Judah’s eldest son, but, we are tersely told, he “was wicked in the sight of the Lord, and the Lord put him to death.” Er is not very important to the story, and he exits quickly.
So the widow Tamar is then married to Er’s younger brother, Onan. Onan does not want to give Tamar children, so he has sex with her but withdraws before she can conceive. The Bible is not shy about the details. God is angry at Onan’s treatment of Tamar, so he kills Onan. Take a lesson fella: God cares how you treat your wife in bed.
To understand this story, you need to know a few details about ancient near eastern marriage. Marriages involved a contract. That doesn’t sound romantic to us nowadays, but our own wedding vows are based on this idea.
An ancient near eastern marriage contract was a little like our marriage vows combined with a prenuptial agreement. It might list property that each person brought to the marriage, the bride-price or dowry that was exchanged, and might include promises for future behavior, such as the husband (in a polygynous society) promising to never take a second wife.
These marriage contracts were not just contracts between a man and a woman. Marriage was a way to combine the economic interests of two families. Marriages were expensive, and once a wife was brought into a family, that family wanted to keep her. So if her husband died, especially if he died without children or without sons, it was a common practice for the widow to remarry one of his relatives. The first son she had with her second husband would be considered the son of her first husband (confused yet?), and would receive the inheritance of the first husband.
Archeology has uncovered hundreds of marriage contracts in the countries surrounding ancient Israel, and one of my favorites actually lists the order by which the bride will marry the groom’s brothers. It goes through FIVE brothers, making it explicitly clear which one gets the bride next if the current husband dies. A marriage contract like that suggests that this bride was either very rich, or really hot.
When Tamar’s first two husbands died, Judah, as the head of the family, had two choices. He could back out of the marriage contract, divorcing Tamar and settling up on whatever property agreement the contract had included, or he could keep her in the family and marry her off to his next son.
Judah wanted to look like a respectable, upstanding man who lived up to his agreements, but he did not actually want to give his last son to this jinx of a woman, so he tried to weasel out of it. He told Tamar to go back to her father’s house and wait until his youngest son was old enough to marry. Sending her back to her father’s house is usually an act of divorce, but Judah’s promise means Tamar is not free from her marriage contract.
The years go by, and the youngest son grows up, and Judah marries him to another woman rather than Tamar. But because he did not free Tamar from the marriage contract, Tamar is still unable to remarry anyone else. For the sake of his own convenience and self-importance, Judah has left Tamar in a precarious position in a society in which a woman’s status depended on her family relationships.
But Tamar is crafty. When she realizes that Judah has no intention of neither fulfilling nor cancelling the marriage contract, she dresses up like a prostitute, veils her face, and hangs out on the road where she knows Judah will be. Judah, who is now widowed himself, passes by, solicits her services. He has sex with her and, again not shy with the details, the text subtly lets us know that he did not even take off her veil, since he never recognized her.
Tamar was not exactly blessed with good lovers for husbands.
Because that is what Judah now is. He is the head of a family that has a marriage contract with Tamar. He has now consummated that contract. However irregular a situation it might be for a father to take his son’s widow as wife, that is exactly what Judah has now done. Tamar’s scandalous behavior is actually an act of faithfulness. Despite all the neglect she received from Judah and family, she has honored her agreement with them. She has been a faithful wife.
The rest of the story makes Judah look even shabbier. In lieu of payment to the “prostitute” he visited, he gave her his staff and his seal, the ancient near eastern equivalent of his driver’s license and credit card. When Tamar turns up pregnant, Judah finally pays attention to her, and self-righteously (and stupidly) demands her death for her “immorality.” The fact that Judah decides this, rather than her own father, is evidence that she is still obligated by marriage contract to Judah’s family.
Tamar privately brings out the staff and seal, and Judah realizes what has happened. His self-importance deflates, and he says “She is more righteous than I, because I did not give her to my son Shelah.”
Throughout this story, Judah wants to look respectable. He wants to look like an honorable man, a fine, upstanding citizen who can be counted on to keep his promises and do the right thing. But he only wants to LOOK like it. He does not actually want to risk anything for it.
Tamar, on the other hand, is faithful to a marriage contract that has brought her nothing but grief. We do not know if she was able, in this society, to back out of the marriage contract on her own. That important detail is currently lost to history. But she chooses to be faithful to a family of losers who do not deserve her, while determinedly limiting just how far they can mistreat her.
Tamar is scandalously faithful.
Sadly, the memory of Tamar’s crafty integrity has faded with time, and most people, even scholars, read this story now as though it were merely salacious gossip about Judah. But there is something more meaningful than that in this story.
Most of us are like Judah, wanting to look good more than we want to be good. We want to be respected and admired, but not inconvenienced. Like Judah, many of us are frauds. Like Judah, we may even know it.
But God is like Tamar, faithful past expectation, faithful past deserving, faithful to the point of scandal. God is faithful in the scandal of a virgin in Nazareth conceiving a child. God is faithful in the scandal of a newborn king sleeping in a manger. God is faithful in the scandal of the public execution of the cross.
Like Tamar, God’s faithfulness comes from God’s own character. But unlike Tamar’s marriage, God’s covenant with us is also love. God loves us, and wants us to love him back. This is the promise and invitation of Christmas, when God invites us into a new covenant and contract with him, a contract of steadfast faith and abiding love.
Wow. Thanks for this post. I love that God chooses people we’d never suspect. Those last three paragraphs really made me think… I never thought of that before.
enjoyed that so much. i knew the history of tamar but i really loved the way you put it down and made it easy to remember.
I find the greed motives in this story fascinating. My understanding is that Judah’s property would be divided among his three sons, with Er’s share going to the first son of Tamar and Onan. That gives Onan a solid interest in preventing that son from being born - presumably if Tamar dies without bearing any sons, Er’s line dies out and Onan’s share increases. Of course, that means Onan can’t have any sons himself until either Tamar dies or he marries a second wife (and I suppose Judah would be expected to postpone arranging that second marriage until after the problem of Er’s offspring had been cleared up). So that means that Onan is either banking on the imminent death of his wife and/or father OR that he is motivated solely by personal greed, with no interest in having sons of his own. Either possibility presents him as monstrously out of step with the values of that time and place.
I find Judah’s motive for withholding Shelah to be a bit murkier. Could it really be just that he considered Tamar to be bad luck? (How about disobeying God? That’s bad luck!) I wonder if he preferred to concentrate his inheritance upon his remaining son rather than dividing it among these hypothetical unborn grandsons. Primogeniture hadn’t been invented yet, right? It’s a funny thing - you’d think there would be a clear advantage in keeping the family’s wealth intact rather than dividing and sub-dividing all the time, yet clearly in Biblical times the attitude was the more sons the better - perhaps because the family’s wealth was increasing with each generation, and sons were essential to the process. But in Judah’s particular situation, these unborn grandsons will not contribute much to the family’s prosperity in his lifetime - better, then, to hand down his property intact to his one remaining son.
I wonder, too, if it made a difference to Judah that Er’s heir would be his own direct biological son. (I assume that Tamar’s offspring would still be designated to Er and Onan, even though she married Judah, not Shelah?) If so, that made him the opposite of Onan, who seemed to resent his brother’s (legal) son, even though it would actually be his own offspring. If Onan and Tamar had borne children as expected, would Onan be more distant from the son who was legally designated his brother’s heir? Did this legal fiction of fatherhood have repercussions for the child’s relationship to his biological father - or was it in fact an honour, because it meant that this son would be the sole heir of the deceased brother, whereas any subsequent sons would inherit only a share of Onan’s portion?
Clearly I’m way too interested in this story, and not for any moral that it teaches. It’s one of my favourites, with the subsequent birth of twins being another great twist.
B&P, I read Onan’s motives as primarily hatred and jealousy of his older brother. That is the context into which this story is inserted (the brothers of Joseph who hate and envy him). This story actually interrupts the flow of Joseph’s narrative, and I think fits where it does because ancient readers would have seen both Onan’s actions and the actions of Joseph’s brothers as a kind of metaphorical fratricide.
The practice of levirate marriage was, in many ways, cushy for the biological father, as long as he could afford to take care of the wife. It meant his son was already provided for, while everyone recognized whose son he really was. In genealogies, the sons of levirate marriages seem to be listed by their biological fathers rather than their nominal ones. Judah’s sons by Tamar are listed as Judah’s sons, and Boaz’s son by Ruth is listed as Boaz’s son, not Mahlon’s or Chilion’s.
This story is one of my favorites, too. I love the complexities of motive and character in Genesis, expressed in such terse details.
I agree with Chickadee. You have such a gift for making these stories applicable for us. I love the Old Testament stories and the Jacob/Joseph stories are some of my favorites. I just got an ESV Literary Study Bible for Christmas and I’m interested to look in the notes and see what it says about Tamar.
Thanks, Veronica! You should write a devotional or Bible study book.
Hey Veronica,
Thanks for the greatly helpful explanation and insights. The gospels record an amazing number of incidents between Jesus and prostitutes. I’ve frequently wonder if His faithfulness and love towards women, especially those of ill repute, is in part rooted in His love for His mother and the “scandal” they had to endure.
Thank you again, Veronica. I rather like Tamar, who like Mary understood: It is better to have faith and be thought a prostitute, than to be unfaithful and thought a paladin. Jesus knows the difference, and sees straight through to the heart. Again, the gospels provide amazing evidence.
- bro-in-law
PS. Do you think the sexual mistreatment could have been passed down? Jacob’s mistreatment of Leah was passed to Judah, who in turn passed it to his sons?
Veronica, these Christmas posts have been wonderful. I just sent all my readers (all, you know, three of them!)
over here to read yours.
And I agree with Leann - you should write a devotional. It would be better than a lot currently on the market. I’d buy it!
“Thanks, Veronica! You should write a devotional or Bible study book.”
Yes. You should!
Hello. That was a beautiful expo. I read the Francine Rivers series on the women listed in the line of Christ and it was SO eye opening! Especially Bathsheba. Thanks so much.
I have studied these passages before but your writing really makes the people come to life. And you transitioned wonderfully at the end to inviting us to join His covenant and share the love, and I pray that everyone who reads your post will have done just that.
[...] Tamar, as I understand her. I prayed for a long time that God would teach me the faithfulness and determination of Tamar. That [...]