So he gave them to her, and they had sex behind the bushes.
Behind the Bushes
JUDAH WAS A GENEROUS LOVER. He took his time. He enjoyed giving pleasure as much as he enjoyed receiving it, and he made sure that Tamar was satisfied. In this she counted herself fortunate, especially since it was in all probability the last time there would be any sex in her life.
But pleasure wasn’t the point. She loved her father-in-law, and the tenderness with which he touched her was a revelation, given Er’s clumsiness and the bitter onslaughts of Onan. It wouldn’t have mattered greatly, though, if Judah had been a selfish lover. She was there for one purpose only: to collect his seed.
The veil was dense enough to hide her features, but not so dense that she couldn’t see through it. As she lay back, knees raised, robe hiked up onto her belly, his penis thrusting slowly inside her, she examined his face. He was looking down at her with a smile. She couldn’t know what he was feeling, but from the look in his eyes it seemed like gratitude—almost, to her amazement, like love. After their climaxes, she noticed tears at the corners of his eyes as he held her in his arms and stroked her hair. Then he stood up, extended his right hand to help her off the ground, nodded in acknowledgment, and thanked her, his voice filled with emotion.
When she went home, she took off the veil and robe and put on her widow’s clothes again. She had gotten through the difficult part. The rest was in the hands of Baal. All she had to do was wait.
Where Is the Harlot?
JUDAH SENT HIS FRIEND HIRAH, with a kid on a leash, to redeem the pledge from the woman. Hirah went all over the neighborhood asking, “Where is the harlot who was sitting by the roadside at Enayim?”
“What harlot?” everyone said. “There was no harlot here.”
Finally he gave up and went back to Judah.
“I looked all over,” he said. “I asked everyone. But I couldn’t find her.”
Judah said, “Well, she can keep the pledge. If I go on looking for her, I’ll make myself a laughingstock. My conscience is clear. I kept my promise. I can’t help it if you weren’t able to find her.”
The First Trimester
ALREADY, BEHIND THE BUSHES at the entrance gate to Enayim, Tamar knew she was pregnant. This was not wishful thinking. She felt it in her body. She was certain.
So during the following weeks and months, she wasn’t surprised at her breasts’ sensitivity, the crankiness that could bring her to tears at the slightest upset, the sometimes baffling, sometimes delicious, fatigue, the craving for odd combinations of food, and the sense of smell heightened, it seemed, beyond the realm of the human. Yes, she would tell herself, it is happening, just as I knew it would. My body is changing around the child. It is changing for the child.
These were the quiet days, the days of calm, when she could go about her daily chores with the awareness that no one knew what had happened. People would know soon enough.
The Hivites, like all Canaanites, honored sex for its own sake and condoned sacred prostitution, and secular prostitution too, for that matter, as long as it was practiced by unmarried women. But they were severe in punishing unfaithful wives and widows; the penalty was death by fire. Tamar didn’t think that her family would betray her, even though their sense of piety would urge them to. But eventually someone would notice. She couldn’t stay in the house all the time, and sooner or later someone would see her at the market or at the well and would denounce her to Judah, the head of her husband’s family. She could be as certain of this as of the sun’s rising in the east.
So she would be brought before Judah, and he would be forced to condemn her to death. It couldn’t happen in any other way. But she felt no fear. She had staked her life on Judah’s probity, and she knew how he would react when she showed him the seal and staff. There was no chance in the world that he would disown them. For him to deny responsibility would be as if one fine morning the sun decided to rise in the west.
She didn’t consider herself particularly brave. In devising her act of trickery, she had simply been claiming what was rightfully hers, according to the laws of man and of Baal. And there was no risk. She knew Judah. They had talked many times about right and wrong—or rather, he had talked and she had listened respectfully, admiringly. He had a lofty mind, she thought, and though she would never dream of renouncing her family’s faith, she thrilled when he spoke of his single God, blissful and alone behind the curtain of appearances, who had created heaven and earth and the moral law in the human heart. The possibility that her father-in-law would be capable of doing anything unworthy brought a smile to her lips.
Denouement
ABOUT THREE MONTHS LATER, one of Tamar’s neighbors said to Judah, “Your daughter-in-law is a whore, and she has gotten herself pregnant from her whoring.” This neighbor was a notorious busybody, and Judah at first refused to believe her. But soon there was another report, then another.
So he had Tamar brought before the town elders, and it was clear that the reports were true. “It saddens me to say it,” he told the elders, “but according to the law she must be burned.” This conclusion may seem very harsh, but if Tamar was pregnant, she had to be guilty, and it was not only Judah’s right but his duty to condemn her to death. It never occurred to him to look beyond the evidence, which seemed indisputable. He had expected much more from her, and he was ashamed that he had been so wrong about her character.
They stood in the market square, with her family and a crowd of townspeople in attendance. Some of them were shocked into silence, but many, especially the women, were vocal. “Slut!” they shouted. “Whore!” And to Judah: “Burn her!”
Tamar stood calmly, as if the death sentence had nothing to do with her. After Judah read it out, he asked if she had anything to say.
“Sir,” she answered, “the man who got me pregnant is the owner of this seal and this staff. See if you recognize whose they are.”
The courage and delicacy of her response have echoed through Jewish history. The medieval commentator Rashi wrote, “She did not want to embarrass him by saying, ‘You are the man who got me pregnant.’ She thought, If he confesses, good. If he doesn’t confess, let them burn me alive, but I will not embarrass him. From this example our sages concluded, ‘It is better to be cast into a fiery furnace than to shame your neighbor in public.’”
As for Judah, the situation would have been shameful only if there had been something to hide. But in patronizing a harlot, he had done nothing immoral.
He recognized the seal and staff as his own. Then he remembered the encounter at Enayim. Ah. So it had been Tamar. He blushed at his delinquency. Being a righteous man, he bowed his head in acknowledgment and said, “This woman is in the right, and I am in the wrong, because I didn’t give her to my youngest son.”
It would have been easy for Judah to deny responsibility. He could have said, “Yes, I did have sex with you, one time. But how many other men have you slept with? How can I know that the child is mine?” But he didn’t allow his mind to play such tricks on him. He immediately understood that Tamar was a heroine, and with his acknowledgment he himself became a hero. In fact, he became, for the moment, a master of reality:
When he makes a mistake, he realizes it.
Having realized it, he admits it.
Having admitted it, he corrects it.
He considers those who point out his faults
as his most benevolent teachers.
He thinks of his enemy
as the shadow that he himself casts.
He was filled with admiration for his daughter-in-law’s resoluteness in the face of the obstacle he had created. It was clear that he needed to make amends to her in every way possible, to take her in and treat her as a beloved daughter, and to honor her for a courage and strength of character that far exceeded his own.* Needless to say, he never had sex with her again.
It was while she was pregnant that he moved back to Hebron. Neither Jacob nor anyone else in the famil
y realized that he had been gone for twenty-two years, since in their world just six days had passed; every day of theirs was three and two-thirds years of Judah’s. They were too polite to ask for explanations about how he had aged so radically or about Shelah and Tamar; and Judah, after his initial bewilderment at returning home as a reverse Rip van Winkle, soon dismissed the subject from his mind.
When Tamar gave birth to twins, whom she named Perez and Zerah, Judah pronounced them to be the legitimate children of his eldest son, Er, her dead husband, fathered by himself. Nine generations later, in the line of Perez, Jesse begot David, who was to become king of Israel. After another twenty-seven generations (according to Matthew), or forty-two generations (according to Luke), Joseph of Nazareth begot Jesus.
The Jewish tradition shows a remarkable degree of tolerance for the apparent scandalousness of this line of descent. After all, not only was Tamar a Gentile, but both prostitution and incest (of a sort) were the necessary ingredients in her pregnancy. She is also honored in the Christian tradition, but in a fascinatingly oblique way. Here is how the Evangelist Matthew traces the lineage of Jesus: “Abraham begot Isaac, Isaac begot Jacob, Jacob begot Judah and his brothers, Judah begot Perez and Zerah out of Tamar,… Salmon begot Boaz out of Rahab, Boaz begot Obed out of Ruth,… David begot Solomon out of Uriah’s wife…” The peculiar feature in his list is the mention of the four women, each of whom had something sexually irregular about her: Rahab was a prostitute and the madam of a brothel; Ruth got her second husband by an act of immodesty, if not solicitation; and Bathsheba began her relationship with David in adultery. Why did Matthew insert them into his genealogy? (In Luke’s divergent genealogy, no women are mentioned.) The likeliest explanation is that he wanted to excuse the pregnant and unwed Mary by these implied analogies.
Now we can return to our Joseph, son of Jacob, great-grandson of Abraham. We rejoin him as he travels with the Ishmaelite caravan on its way down to the land of Egypt.
III.
In Potiphar’s Palace
Sinai Journal
HOMER SAYS THAT A MAN LOSES half his soul on the day he becomes a slave. But Joseph’s soul remained intact. What he had lost—his home and family, his dignity, his arrogance—was actually a gain. He had died to his old self and been reborn as someone more self-aware, more skeptical of his assumptions, a lover of the truth. He saw the world with curious eyes now. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing for him to be a slave, he realized. He had become the lowest of the low, an element, like water, content with the low places that people disdain. Life had accordingly become very simple. His job was to follow directions. Whatever someone in authority told him to do, he did. He was free of decisions, and he would soon be free of idleness as well. There was no feeling of humiliation in any of this. On the contrary, he was grateful to know exactly what his duty was at every moment.
The first day of the journey was uncomfortable, but once his bonds were untied, the Ishmaelites treated him decently. They fed him well; some of them even took a liking to him, particularly a young man named Tema. Tema talked to Kedar, the leader of the caravan, and Joseph was given a camel of his own to ride on.
* * *
They entered the Sinai, the Land of Turquoise. Nothing on all sides but red granite and blue sky. On the first day, the flies sent their hospitality committee; they hovered around Joseph’s legs, arms, and face and would not be shooed away. “This is the flavor of the desert,” Tema said. “You get used to them.”
* * *
Falcons circled overhead. On both sides of the trail the caravan passed huge red granite boulders that looked like Henry Moore sculptures. Some of the boulders had names: “the Overturned Boat,” “the House of the Lions,” “the Two Rocks Talking.” Tema, with a laugh: “They’re talking because they like each other very much.”
* * *
Tema told him that in this heat it was important not to get dehydrated. So they stopped every few hours to drink water and rest in the shade.
* * *
One day they found a boulder house beside a spring. Tema said that hunters would sit here and wait for ibexes, who have to drink at least once a day, unlike gazelles, who can go for days without water. The canyon was covered with wild mint, which had tiny purple flowers and was wonderfully fragrant. They gathered some for tea.
* * *
Quails everywhere, whistling from wadi to wadi. Tema pointed out the occasional quail trap: three sticks propping up a rock.
* * *
As the wadis became narrower, the landscape changed: willows, reeds. The caravan stopped for an hour, and Joseph, along with Tema and several other young men and boys, climbed down to twin pools, an upper and a lower one, next to a cliff shaded by willows. In this desert, water seemed like a miracle. It moved him beyond words. He dived into the upper pool. Freezing! When he climbed out and sat on the rocks to dry, he could see how deeply the dirt had caked into his skin.
* * *
He thought of his father every day. He knew how devastated he must be. There was nothing Joseph could do about that.
Thinking of Jacob was a curious process. His image would appear in Joseph’s mind arbitrarily, as he was on the camel or lying under his blanket at night. He saw the old man weeping or tearing his clothes in grief, and he would immediately react to that image with sorrow, pity, and a helpless sinking feeling in his stomach. But as soon as he became aware of this reaction—usually just a few moments had passed, though sometimes he got lost in his pity—he would remember that God’s will was always done, that both he and his father were in the care of that vast intelligence. And then, for a while, the image of Jacob no longer made his heart ache.
* * *
Sitting around the campfire one night, they talked about women. Tema to Joseph: “Everyone knows that women are smarter than men. The female ibex leads the herd and warns others of danger. If one of our young men is too wild, he usually settles down after he gets married. His wife says, ‘You must provide for us.’ She shows him the right way, and the young man stops his foolishness.”
“On the other hand,” Kedar said with a wry smile, “all trouble comes from women. Life is difficult with them and difficult without them. Look at the rocks: they’re silent, unmoving. If there were no women, we’d be like these rocks. As it is, we go about from land to land so that we can provide for our wives.”
Joseph looked at him with interest. Kedar was in his forties or fifties, his face baked by the sun, deep wrinkles in his forehead and around his eyes.
“With that attitude,” Joseph asked, “how can you trust your wives?”
“Ah,” Kedar said, “never trust a woman. Never even trust your own wives.”
Joseph, puzzled: “Don’t you love your wives?”
“Of course I do.”
“But how can you love someone and not trust her?”
Kedar: “I love my three-year-old boy, but I wouldn’t trust him with a camel.”
The conversation moved to children. Kedar: “You must keep your children close to you. Children are your own flesh. What happens to flesh, to meat, if you leave it somewhere and don’t keep your eyes on it?”
Tema, like a good student: “It rots.”
Kedar nodded. “So with children.”
The young men and boys around the campfire listened attentively. This was how they learned the wisdom and the foolishness of their elders.
* * *
After placing his blanket under a lone pomegranate tree, Joseph lay watching the shadow of the moon on the cliffs. A bat swooped down, feasting on insects attracted by the oil lamp. After an hour the moon rose. Then the first small trumpets of the mosquitoes.
He slapped at one on his right cheek. How annoying to have all this beauty interrupted! But then he considered his reaction. On the sixth day of the Creation, in the story that Jacob had delighted to tell him from as far back as he could remember, God had looked at the world and had said, “Behold, it is very good.” Hadn’t that sixth-day awaren
ess continued until now, and wouldn’t it continue until the end of time? Didn’t God, even now, look at everything He had created and see that it was very good? What if even flies too, and ants and mosquitoes, had their purpose to fulfill and Joseph’s annoyance was a missed opportunity to appreciate that? The mosquito, bless its little black heart—didn’t it have its own peculiar beauty, when you stood apart from yourself as a human being? Wasn’t its whine an essential note in the harmony of creation? Maybe there was nothing unnecessary or mistaken or evil in all the universe. Could that really be true?
* * *
Another night. Wild donkeys—five, with two colts—were watching them from the hill above. Tema told Joseph that he had more than once lost food to wild donkeys. So he took the bread, dates, winter pears, dried meat, and other staples and placed them close to his blanket. “Their leader is planning to wait till we go to sleep,” he said. “She thinks we’ll leave the food unprotected. The gods tell us to be kind to animals, but enough is enough.” Then he collected stones and arranged them in a pile beside him. Every now and then, when the donkeys got too close, he threw a stone at them.
All night, in and out of Joseph’s dreams, the clomp clomp of donkey hooves.
Arrival in Egypt
RED BOATS ARE SAILING UNDER a turquoise sky. On shore, in the high-walled gardens, cats doze in the sun, skinny from eating lizards, and in rosemary and honeysuckle the bees labor like slaves.
Joseph and the Way of Forgiveness Page 5