On Women, Justice, and a Girl named Tamar

There is this story in Genesis 38 about a young girl named Tamar. For the sake of clarity, there are two narratives in scripture about a girl named Tamar, the one in Genesis is the first narrative.

After the sons of Jacob sell their brother Joseph into slavery, the brothers went back and began to live their lives. Tucked inside the narrative of the story of Joseph is the story of Judah, his older brother. Judah had three sons. Er, Onan, and  Shelah. In time, Judah found a wife for Er named Tamar. Apparently Er was a wicked man, and so God killed him. Genesis 38:7. This tiny insight in the narrative leaves the reader with a whole lot of room for speculation. What did Er do that was so wicked God killed him?

Per the custom of the day, if a man died the woman to whom he was married had the legal right to marry his younger brother. The first child of that match would become the first born son and heir of the whatever fortune was to be had. This is why there’s that funny exchange with the Sadducees in the Gospels about the resurrection of the dead. The oldest son dies and the woman marries the next son, and then he dies and then she marries the next son etc. This also explains the cultural backdrop in the book of Ruth concerning a son for Naomi.

Anyway, Tamar marries Judah’s second son, Onan. Now, knowing that the first son of Onan and Tamar would actually become the heir to Judah’s fortune, Onan pulled out when he was having sex with Tamar so she would not get pregnant.

This was evil in God’s sight. So God killed Onan, too.

There is only one son left, Shelah. Judah is in a quandary. He’s lost two sons to this woman and no one really knows why. Judah sends her home to her father’s house and explains that when Shelah comes of age, he’ll send for her. But Judah doesn’t follow through. He’s too afraid. Rather than begin to look at the sickness in his own house, he blames Tamar for what’s happened and forgets her.

Time passes and Shelah grows up. Eventually, Judah’s wife dies and he heads toward her hometown, which is also where Tamar’s family lives. Tamar’s friends tell her Judah is coming to town, and so Tamar puts on her widow clothes, covers her face, and goes to sit at the entrance of her village. When Judah comes he doesn’t recognize her as Tamar and thinks she’s prostitute. He initiates a liaison and Tamar asks for some kind of payment. Judah promises a kid from his flock when he returns home. In a quick turn of wit, Tamar asks for a deposit to secure the payment and Judah offers her his staff, his signet, and the cord around his neck. Judah hands it all over, which I find a bit baffling, but never mind. Off they go, have their encounter, and Judah leaves. Later, Judah sends her a kid and tries to retrieve his belongings but the woman he thought to be a prostitute has disappeared.

About three months pass and finally, after all these years, Tamar is pregnant. Word gets back to Judah who has legal grounds to kill her for getting pregnant. She has played the whore, and she legally belongs to Shelah. So, in a fell swoop Judah says, without thought to his own integrity or righteousness or lack thereof, “Burn her.”

Tamar acts quickly and manages to send the cord and signet and staff through a messenger to Judah and says, “It was the owner of these items who is the father of my child.”

Yikes. Talk about a plot point.  

In that very moment, life comes into singular focus for Judah in a way that changes him. He halts the burn order and says, “She is more right than I, since I did not give her Shelah.” The text also says he never sleeps with her again.

Interestingly, Tamar gives birth to twins. The firstborn is named Perez. If you turn to Matthew 1:3 you’ll read that Jesus is a direct descendant of that little baby, Perez. Talk about the mysterious ways of God.

This passage tucked inside the long story of Joseph sits inside me in uncomfortable ways. It’s not clean and tight. This story acknowledges that when someone has been harmed and wronged, and they find themselves inside an unjust situation, nothing they do is going to look good to the people around them. Nothing they do will convince people they are choosing righteousness. People see what they want to see. 

What are we to learn from this story?

First, I think this story invites us to pause for a moment and think about how little we understand about the inner workings of people’s lives and how little we know about the God we claim to serve. It would be wise for us to take a deeper, longer look at the mysterious God we serve. This God is not so easy to contain or summarize in three points.

Secondly, this story asks that we withhold judgment and comprehend that there is a righteousness that goes beyond that righteousness of rules. The righteousness that looks to the prophets and then onto Jesus. Jesus invites us to see beyond tit-tat rule keeping. Jesus invites us to consider the harm people have lived through, the abuse they’ve endured, and admit that sometimes the choices people make are the best and most right choices given their particular set of circumstances. The God we serve is able and willing to look at the heart of the matter. 

In General, Christians believe and are persuaded that there is a right and a wrong, a good and a bad and in order to live righteous lives before God, we must choose good. What we don’t often consider is that sometimes people sit in the middle of very difficult circumstances and choose the most right thing, and as outsiders, we don’t always know the whole story.

It’s easy to look at a set of circumstances from afar, make a judgement call, and say in hushed tones, “She’s sinning.” Or something even more self-righteous like, “I would never do what she did, but God still loves her.” Maybe from the outside looking in, they’re right. Strictly speaking it is wrong to play the part of a prostitute in order to have sex with your father-in-law so you can make a baby with him. But this story is about something more than, “strictly speaking.” 

If we look at the whole of the story, we see something more complex than a simple good and bad, right and wrong. We see that Tamar was working with a bad hand, and Judah was far more responsible for that bad hand than he was willing to acknowledge. We see, in the end, even Judah recognized that Tamar was more righteous than he, and it was he who was committing evil against her by withholding his third son.

What Tamar did was risky and scary, and it almost killed her. But she got her son, the heir. Not to mention, she didn’t let the rules of her society keep her from what was rightly hers.

With narrative, we are invited to do something other than offer a simple summary and application. We are invited to wrestle with it, to think about it, meditate on it, and let the story do its work in us. In stories like this one, we don’t simply read the narrative, we also let the narrative read us.

We live in a world that blames women for the harm doesn’t against them, a world that responds to her confessions of rape and molestation by asking her things like, “What did you do to provoke him?” or “Are you sure you said ‘no’ loudly enough for him to hear?”

In spite of all that, we have this story from an ancient text, from a time period so patriarchal it makes our heads spin. This story reprimands us. If we listen to it and let it teach us, it shores us up, and rattles our narrow-minded vision.

Here is a story that says, “Don’t mess with the women.” And maybe it also says, “Believe them when they tell you what happened.” 

I’ve been in the middle of a blog series on women in church leadership, advocating that it’s time to open the doors of equality in the church and let the women lead.

When I read this story from Genesis, I can’t help but smile with just a bit of pride, and also weep a little. As much as this God whom I serve is a mystery to me, and as true as it is that I don’t have a handle on the mysterious ways of God, I can say with confidence that when it comes to women and justice, with opening the door to equality in the church, God is on the side of the women.

This leads me to conclude that if God is on the side of the women, perhaps we should be too.

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