Jamin Bradley

I know a single mother who is struggling to get by. She measures a successful week in singular dollars, hoping to find just enough to complete all of her tasks and pay all of her bills. There is no end of her difficulties in sight, and there are a hundred systemic and personal complications keeping her paralyzed.

This is what a single woman’s life can look like in a country that fights against patriarchy. Now imagine how much harder it would have been in a world that lived and breathed patriarchy. That was the world of Tamar, daughter-in-law of Judah. Though at first glance her story looks like an illicit sex story, it’s actually an ancient story of justice.

First, she was married to Judah’s son, Er, whom the Bible labels as “ra.” This is the same Hebrew word to denote the “evil” in the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Clearly Er had chosen to live the complete opposite of God’s desire, and the Bible says that this was the ultimate reason that God brought about an end to his life. We can only imagine how such a man might have treated his wife.

Tamar was left with no man to help her get by in a world where men ruled, so she was given over to an ancient kind of justice: Er’s brother Onan was to give her the children she deserved. While Onan was happy to have another sexual partner, he always pulled out in time to prevent her from getting pregnant. Who knows how many times this happened and what Tamar tried to do to prevent it. Onan didn’t care since the customs stated that those children technically belonged to Er, not to him. God saw this oppression and abuse against Tamar as “ra” and took Onan’s life as well.

Judah now looked at Tamar as though she was cursed. The custom was to now let his next son Shelah give her children, but he was afraid Shelah would die too. He told her to wait until Shelah was older, but when the time came, he never made arrangements with Tamar.

Tamar had enough. One way or another, she was going to get the child she legally deserved from this genetic line. She put on a veil to disguise herself as a prostitute, and Judah saw her and went for a visit and managed to get her pregnant. When she started showing, his immediate reaction was to kill her rather than recognize the horrible ways his family had treated her. Judah changed his tune quickly when Tamar proved that he was the father. He was convicted and deemed her to be righteous—that is, in the right.

This story has been said to be about the evils of masturbation. It is not. It’s been said to be about how couples should only have sex to get pregnant. It is not. I imagine some have made Tamar out to be a villain given the lengths she goes to. She is not. This is a story about women, God’s care for them, men’s oppression of them, and the lengths to which one marginalized woman had to go to find justice.