The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible

by Jonathan Kirsch

  “Tamar bids me say these words to you: The father of my child is the man to whom these things belong.’”

  And then Judah rose from his chair and knelt in front of the old woman. He reached out and drew open the folds of the woolen blanket to reveal a cylinder of carved quartz on a length of worn rawhide and a leather-wrapped walking staff.

  For one crazy moment, Judah wondered exactly how the old woman had gotten her hands on the pledge that he had given to the harlot by the side of the road. And then, a moment later, he understood.

  “Whose seal is it?” demanded one of the graybeards. “Whose seal? Whose staff?”

  When she was brought forth, she sent to her father-in-law, saying: “By the man, whose these are, am I with child,” And she said: “Discern, I pray thee, whose are these, the signet, and the cords, and the staff.”

  —GENESIS 38.25

  Judah acknowledged them, and said: “She is more righteous than I; forasmuch as I gave her not to Shelah my son”

  —GENESIS 38:26

  “Tell us,” called a harsh woman’s voice from the crowd, “and hell burn, too!”

  The old woman did not speak, and it was Judah’s voice that was heard in the cold room.

  “No one will burn today,” he said, amazing himself no less than the others. “Tamar is right, and I am wrong—I should have sent Shelah to her bed.”

  The room fell silent, and even the querulous old men waited to hear Judah’s words.

  “The seal and the staff are mine,” Judah said, “and so is the child.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE WOMAN WHO WILLED HERSELF INTO HISTORY

  Tamar as the Harlot by the Side of the Road

  “SAVE ALIVE NOTHING THAT BREATHETH”

  THE SACRED WHORE

  “A BAG OF MYRRH BETWEEN MY BREASTS”

  “GIVE ME CHILDREN OR ELSE I DIE”

  THE STRANGE TRADITION OF THE LEVIRATE “MARRIAGE”

  THE RED THREAD

  The narrator of Genesis 38—or, more likely, some pious editor who came along later and tried to cool down and clean up the story1—hastens to reassure us that Judah did not sleep with his daughter-in-law a second time: “And he knew her again no more” (Gen. 38:26). But Tamar does not disappear from the biblical narrative. Rather, she gives birth to twin boys, Perez and Zerah, and the Bible carefully notes that Perez is the progenitor of a long line of celebrated figures, including David, Solomon, and, according to the New Testament, Jesus of Nazareth. So Tamar, the willful young woman who plays the harlot in order to seduce her own father-in-law, is the great-great-grandmother of kings, prophets, and the Christian Messiah.

  Still, the figure of Tamar—a Canaanite, a seducer and sexual trickster, a young woman who refuses to submit to the authority of the stern patriarchy under which she lives—has been nearly written out of the biblical tradition over the centuries precisely because her sexual adventure on the road to Enaim is so audacious, provocative, and titillating. When forced to confront her story in the Holy Scriptures, clergy and scholars have struggled to explain away the sexual encounter between Tamar and her father-in-law, a coupling that is specifically prohibited elsewhere in the Bible (Lev. 18:15) and one so close to incest that it is still capable of shocking us.

  A favored explanation in the rabbinical tradition is that the tale of Tamar and Judah, which pops up in Genesis in the middle of the story of Joseph in Egypt, is intended to be contrasted with the episode that immediately follows it: the failed seduction of Joseph by the wife of Potiphar, the Egyptian overlord to whom Joseph has been sold as a slave. As Judah is succumbing to Tamar’s charms at a roadside in Canaan, the righteous young Joseph is turning away the hot overtures (“Lie with me!”) of Potiphar’s wife in an Egyptian palace with chilly indignation: “How then can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?” (Gen. 39:7–9).

  Joseph, the rabbis encourage us to believe, illustrates how a goodly man is supposed to react to the sexual allure of a forbidden woman; he just says “No!” even if it means an open-ended stay in Pharaoh’s dungeon. Judah, by contrast, is supposed to be a sorry example of weak flesh and a failed spirit. And yet this facile explanation falls under its own weight: Joseph leads his people into the place where they will be enslaved and nearly destroyed, but the coupling of the virile Judah and the fecund Tamar will bring forth the greatest kings of ancient Israel and ultimately the Messiah.

  Tamar is a woman who demonstrates how an Israelite and a Canaanite can transcend the bitter and often bloody antagonism between these rival claimants to what we still like to call the Holy Land. She allows us to glimpse the deadly peril that confronted women of the biblical era who did not submit to the mastery of a male, whether father or husband. Above all, Tamar is a woman whose will is so strong, whose passion burns so bright, that she writes herself into history through an act of illicit physical love.

  “SAVE ALIVE NOTHING THAT BREATHETH”

  That Tamar is a Canaanite may have been even more embarrassing to the rabbinical authorities than the fact that Judah sleeps with her and fathers a pair of sons by her. One of the great themes of the Hebrew Bible, as we have already seen, is the outright condemnation of marriage outside the Twelve Tribes of Israel, and the Canaanites are the most strictly forbidden of all prospective lovers and spouses: “[N]either shalt thou make marriages with them: thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son” (Deut. 7:3).*

  The fear and hatred with which the Canaanites are regarded throughout the Bible lead us to another of its awkward and mostly overlooked features. We are told in the Book of Genesis that Canaan is promised by God to Abraham and his descendants, but we discover in the Book of Exodus that Canaan is not an empty paradise “flowing with milk and honey.” When the Israelites, after fleeing Egypt and spending forty hard years in the wilderness under the troubled leadership of Moses (see chapter nine), finally cross the Jordan River into “the Promised Land,” the place is teeming with tribes and clans that had lived there long before the Exodus: “The Hittite, the Amorite, and the Canaanite, the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite,” among others (Josh. 12:7).

  God’s solution is to declare a war of conquest—we might easily use the terms “ethnic cleansing” and even “genocide”—against the native dwellers of the Promised Land. The slaughter of Midianites that we encountered in the Book of Numbers is only an augury of the bloodthirsty campaign in Canaan itself. According to the rules of war set forth in Deuteronomy, the invading Israelites are obliged to “proclaim peace” to a besieged city, and if the city-dwellers respond with “an answer of peace” then their lives are to be spared and they are to be permitted to live as “tributaries” to the Israelites. But these rules of engagement apply only to the “far off” cities. An entirely different strategy is decreed for the cities within the Promised Land itself, the cities of the Canaanites and the other peoples who dwelled in Canaan before the Exodus.

  [O]f the cities of these peoples, that the Lord thy God giveth thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth, but thou shalt utterly destroy them (Deut 20:10–18).

  God takes credit for the early victories of the Israelites over their enemies on the field of battle: “I gave them into your hand, and ye possessed their land; and I destroyed them from before you” (Josh. 24:8). But the Promised Land is not cleansed of its native population, and the Bible explains that God eventually withdraws his favor from the Israelites because they are so tempted to “forsake the Lord, and serve strange gods” (Josh. 24:20). So Canaan turns out to be a place where men and women of different tribes and different faiths live side by side—not unlike our own country or, for that matter, the Holy Land in our own times—and the Israelites are forced to make some kind of peace with the tribes whom they did not defeat in war. The Promised Land is divided up among the tribes of Israel, we are told in the Bible, but the various native-dwelling tribes (including the Canaanites) remain on the land, living and working am
ong the conquering Israelites as a kind of disempowered working class or even as slaves.

  [T]he Canaanites were resolved to dwell in that land. And it came to pass, when the children of Israel were waxen strong, that they put the Canaanites to taskwork, but did not utterly drive them out (Josh. 17:12–13).

  Why is the Bible so bloodthirsty toward the Canaanites and the others who dwelled in the Promised Land? The obvious geopolitical fact is that the Israelites hope to remove these peoples from their homeland—or at least to rule over them—out of an entirely amoral impulse toward the conquest of Canaan and the establishment of national sovereignty for the Israelites. Even the Almighty recognizes a certain injustice in the displacement and exploitation of the Canaanites:

  And I gave you a land where thou hadst not laboured, and cities which ye built not, and ye dwell therein; of vineyards and olive-yards which ye planted not do ye eat (Josh. 24:13).

  But as we have already discerned beneath the surface of the story of Dinah and Shechem, other, even darker reasons explain the fear and loathing of the Canaanites that we find throughout the Bible. The Canaanites must be destroyed, the Bible says, so that they will not teach the Israelites “all their abominations, which they have done unto their gods, and so yet sin against the Lord your God” (Deut. 20:18). Such “abominations” included not only the making of idols (and the bacchanalian abandon with which the idols were worshipped) but also the tantalizing (and thus sternly forbidden) rite of sexual intercourse with sacred prostitutes as an act of goddess worship. Ironically, when God announces that he will no longer assist the Israelites on the field of battle because of their infidelities, the Almighty is fully aware that the temptations facing his Chosen People will be all the more alluring. “I will not drive them out before you,” God says of the Canaanites, “but they shall be unto you as snares, and their gods shall be a trap unto you” (Judg. 2:3).

  The Canaanites, then, turn out to be both the strategic and the religious rivals of the Israelites. That is why we find stories throughout the Bible that are meant to ridicule the Canaanites and to depict them as unworthy of lordship over their own land. An often-ignored incident in the story of Noah (Gen. 9:22–24), for example, shows one of Noah’s sons, Ham, as a coarse and irreverent brute who dares to peek at his father’s naked body when the old man is lolling around in a drunken stupor and then boasts about it to his brothers, who are too respectful of their father to look at his nakedness. Ham, we are pointedly told by the biblical storyteller, is “father of Canaan.”*

  When it turns out that the Canaanites and the other peoples of the Promised Land cannot be exterminated, the Israelites are sternly warned against intermarriage with strangers in general and the Canaanites above all, and they are threatened with divine punishment if they consort with non-Israelites:

  [T]hou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them; neither shalt thou make marriages with them: thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son. For he will turn away thy son from following Me, that they may serve other gods; so will the anger of the Lord be kindled against you, and He will destroy thee quickly (Deut. 7:2–4).

  Now there’s a certain stinging irony to the decree against intermarriage that figures so prominently in the Bible. A long list of Israelites did, in fact, marry outside the Twelve Tribes, and some of the most inspiring stories of the Bible feature successful intermarriages. Jacob’s celebrated favorite son, Joseph, marries the daughter of an Egyptian high priest (Gen. 46:20). Moses marries a Midianite woman, Zipporah, who plays a crucial role in the history of the Israelites by taking on God himself to spare her husband’s life (Exod. 4:24–26). Ruth, a Moabite woman who seduces and then weds an Israelite man, is (like Tamar) a direct ancestress of King David and, therefore, of the Messiah. David himself falls in love with Bathsheba, who was married to a Hittite and may well have been a non-Israelite (2 Sam. 11:3).2 Their son, Solomon, manages to collect some seven hundred wives of his own, including a fair number of idol-worshipping foreigners. “[K]ing Solomon loved many strange women,” the Bible is forced to concede, “[and] his wives turned away his heart after other gods” (1 Kings 11:1, 4 KJV). So the Bible is deeply conflicted on the subject of marriage with non-Israelites, flatly condemning intermarriage in theory but not always in practice.

  As we saw in chapter five, the bitter and often bloodthirsty hatred of the stranger that we find in certain passages of the Bible can be traced to the priests and scribes who compiled and edited much of the Bible sometime after the series of foreign invasions dispersed and nearly destroyed the Israelites. As these editors, or redactors, labored over texts that described the events of the long-distant past, they saw around them an endangered remnant of the Israelite people, the pitiable survivors of a once-glorious monarchy who now lived at the mercy of foreign conquerors and rival claimants to the land of Canaan itself. To these pious men, intermarriage with non-Israelites was a threat as profound as conquest or exile, and it is likely that they insinuated their xenophobia into the ancient texts.

  Still, the redactors of the Bible were forced to deal with facts of recent history—and a rich body of legend and lore—that plainly depicted intermarriage by some of the greatest, prophets and kings of Israel. So the Bible is forced to accommodate two very different traditions, one that tolerates and even celebrates marriage with non-Israelites, and one that bitterly condemns and forbids it. Thus, on one hand, the fact that Moses married Zipporah, a Midianite woman, was apparently deemed too fundamental to ignore and too crucial in the history of Israel to condemn; Zipporah is depicted in the Book of Exodus as a heroic woman who literally saves the life of Moses when God himself seeks to kill him. On the other hand, readers are reminded that God disapproves of such couplings when it comes to ordinary Israelites. As we have already seen, the redactors included the gruesome and slightly leering account of the Israelite prince who is impaled along with his Midianite lover as a punishment for the crime of making love (Num. 25:1–9, 17).

  So, too, does the story of Tamar and Judah present a puzzling and contradictory moral example, at least according to the unambiguous legal boilerplate of the Bible itself. Even if Tamar had been an Israelite, her elaborate conspiracy to seduce her father-in-law by playing the harlot would be a shocking violation of the biblical commandment that is intended to keep men from sleeping with their daughters-in-law. But the fact that she is a Canaanite makes her not only an incestuous seducer but a stranger, and the Bible is sometimes even harsher on strangers than it is on those who merely indulge in forbidden sexual practices.*

  THE SACRED WHORE

  The biblical authors were fairly obsessed with the alluring but forbidden figure of the harlot, and the Bible is studded with references to literal and metaphorical prostitution. The prophet Hosea, for example, reports that he was called upon by God to go out and marry a whore, which he apparently did with alacrity and perhaps even some enthusiasm, although he insists that the point of his illicit union was to rebuke his fellow Israelites for their spiritual faithlessness in worshipping strange gods.

  Go, take unto thee a wife of harlotry and children of harlotry; for the land doth commit great harlotry (Hos. 1:2).

  The Bible allows us to understand that prostitution was common enough in ancient Israel, if only because harlotry among the women of Israel is condemned in such strong terms: “Profane not thy daughter, to make her a harlot, lest the land fall into harlotry, and the land become full of lewdness” (Lev. 19:29). Priests are specifically prohibited from marrying a prostitute, and death by burning—the punishment prescribed for Tamar—is decreed for any daughter of a priest who turns to prostitution (Lev. 21:7, 9, 14)-

  The story of Tamar confirms that there were at least two kinds of prostitutes whom an Israelite man might have encountered in ancient Canaan: a common whore (zonah, according to the original Hebrew) and a temple or “cultic” prostitute (qedeshah),3 whose sexual practices were sanctified among the Canaanites as a form of wo
rship of the goddesses of fertility. Tamar is described by the biblical narrator as a common prostitute (zonah) when we are first told how she disguises herself as a harlot to seduce her father-in-law. But when Judah sends his Canaanite crony, Hirah, in search of the woman who is holding his seal and staff, Hirah refers to the woman by the Hebrew word for a sacred temple prostitute (qedeshah) rather than a common whore.

  The Hebrew term qedeshah translated as “sacred” or “cult” or “temple” prostitute, actually means “a consecrated woman” and was understood to refer to a woman who literally made herself available to all comers at a place of pagan worship—perhaps a temple of Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess of love, or Astarte, the Canaanite goddess of fertility; “divine intercourse” was understood to be a form of prayer that would be rewarded with “abundant harvests and an increase of cattle.”4 Such titillating notions were encouraged by the chronicles of the Greek historian Herodotus, who reports that even the wealthy matrons of Babylon were legally obliged to serve as sacred prostitutes at least once: “Such of the women as are tall and beautiful are soon released,” he writes with a leer, “but the ugly ones have to stay a long time before they can fulfill the law.”5

  More recent and discerning historians who have studied ancient texts and other archaeological evidence from sites throughout the Near East suggest that a qedeshah was actually a midwife, a wet-nurse, a singer, and perhaps a sorceress rather than a prostitute. “Tragically,” observes Bible critic Mayer I. Gruber, “scholarship suffered from scholars being unable to imagine any cultic role for women in antiquity that did not involve sexual intercourse.”6 According to the revisionists in Bible studies, “divine intercourse”—if it actually took place at all—was less likely to have been the “whole-scale debauchery” depicted by the biblical prophets than an occasional act of ritual sexual union between a priest and a priestess on a seasonal holy day or perhaps in time of plague, drought, or famine.7 Thus, as used by the biblical author in Genesis 38, qedeshah may not be intended as a technical term for a cult prostitute but rather as a “poetic synonym” for a “common or garden harlot.”8