Tamar
Of all J’s (The Yahwist’s) Heroines, Tamar, in this writer's humble opinion, is the most vivid and the most revelatory of J’s identity, both as a woman (as I believe the author of the original story of creation to the death of Moses, who lived and wrote during the end of King Solomon's reign and the beginning of his dopey son's Rehoboam's reign, to be) and as a literary ironist of high civilization and intense sophistication. Since J’s heroines (Eve, Rebecca, Sarai, Hagar, Tamar) are more admirable than her male protagonists (by leaps and bounds), I will go further and observe that Tamar, despite her very brief appearance in only a single chapter, Genesis: Chapter 38, is the most memorable character in the Book of J, in something of the same sense that Barnardine is in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, despite his similarly brief role. Tamar is a triumph of J’s elliptical style, in which so little is said overtly, and so much expressed through the reticences of character and situation.
The name Tamar means a palm tree, first made emblematic in the Bible by the palm tree beneath which the prophetess Deborah sits and judges Israel. It is the figure of King David that hovers again in the recesses of J’s text, because J assumes that her readers and auditors know that Tamar was the ancestor of David. Perhaps J would have appreciated the added irony that for Christian readers, Tamar ultimately is the ancestor of Jesus Christ, in a Christian view the Messiah being born from the House of David. Tamar indeed is the fountainhead of all who will carry the Blessing after Judah, for only Tamar bears Judah sons who will survive.
Thomas Mann, beautifully expanding upon J in Joseph and His Brothers, gives us a Tamar who sits at the feet of Jacob, learns her sense of the Blessing’s importance from Jacob as Israel, the father of the tribes, and plots therefore to make a place for herself in the story, so that her name will not be scattered, as Yahweh scattered the names of us all at the Tower of Babel. J, even subtler and more ironic than the ironist Mann, does not expose to us such an explicit explanation. Mann has a properly novelistic sense of the Blessing: not to be excluded from the narrative. J’s version of the Blessing emphasizes aesthetically what it stresses humanistically: more life. For J, as for the author of 2 Samuel, the special representative of human vitality is David, at once human-all-too-human and the apotheosis of the most complete and admirable human qualities. Judah, though he carries the Blessing, is hardly a heroic figure for J. King David’s vitality, she tells us, comes from the heroic tenacity of Tamar. It is not accidental that Tamar is a name only in the Davidic family (the name, in fact of his tragic daughter, raped by her brother Amnon, avenged by her brother Absalom), or that of Judah’s wife, the unnamed daughter of the Canaanite Shua, hence called bat-shua in the Hebrew, should bring to mind the name of King David’s queen, Bathsheba. J makes clear that in centering on Tamar she alludes to David, to his personality, career, and legacy. And can I take a moment here to say that the Yahwist is second only to Shakespeare in her story-telling and representation of character. Forgive me for the digression.
Tamar’s drive to become the bearer of the Blessing is frustrated by the sickliness, the lack of vitality, of Judah’s three sons. J, endless punner, may intend a wordplay between Er (possibly meaning “on guard”) and ariri (“childless”), while Onan (possibly meaning “active”) seems to play upon ‘on' (“grief”). The third brother, who also doubtless would have retreated from the vital Tamar into death, is called Shelah, which might imply a reluctant emergence from the mother’s womb (which J has hinted at before). What is clear is that these guys are at best nitwits to carry the Blessing, and displeasing to Yahweh, whose frequent impishness is reflected in Tamar’s shrewd seduction of Judah. What after all was the lady to do? As the widow of the inconsequential Er and the perverse Onan (the name has become synonymous with masturbation, but in J he rather practices what seems coitus interruptus), Tamar had little to expect from the reluctant Shelah, even if Judah had not violated the ancient Hebraic custom of yibbum, which obliges the surviving brother of a deceased husband to marry the widow. What is startling, and crucial to J’s art, is the boldness and resourcefulness of the wronged Tamar.
Judah’s wife dies; the mourning period ends; Judah goes up to a place called Timnath for the sheep shearing, or a time of excess, of letting go. As an average sensual male emerging from a set period of abstinence, Judah is scarcely inclined to request that a supposed wayside cult prostitute unveil herself to him. His pledge - the signature like seal and scepter-like staff - is Tamar’s prophetic defense against the judicial murder that would otherwise await her under patriarchal laws that J is delighted to see outflanked. His fear of being exposed to ridicule is enhanced by his authentic sense of justice, since he is indeed less in the right than Tamar. J is little interested in him anyway, in comparison to Tamar. Wonderfully enigmatic as always, resembling her creator J in this, Tamar handles Judah with consummate tact, sending his pledges to him with the brief remark that these will identify the prospective father. J’s mordant observation that Judah was not intimate with her again is a pure irony, since neither he nor Tamar would wish one another again. Yet, he has his heirs, and she has her place in the Blessing’s story. What has J taught us of her, and of the qualities she will bring to her descendant David?
J ends Tamar’s story with the birth of twin boys, Peretz, whose name means “breach,” and Zerah, or “brightness,” who thus replace the pallid Er and the unpleasant Onan. The twin-birth is unexpected and clearly alludes to the return of the agonistic spirit, with Zerah recalling Esau, and Peretz recalling the wrestler Jacob, grandfather of these new competitors for the Blessing. Peretz, David’s ancestor, breaches his way out first, while Zerah’s hand with its crimson thread suggests the repetition of the red man of Edom. Tamar is therefore the second Rebecca, mother of an endless rivalry. J intends us to see Tamar as the prime representative of agonistic continuity in the history of the Blessing, since it is she alone who guarantees the heritage of vitality that runs from wrestling Jacob to the truly heroic and charismatic David, the authentic object of Yahweh’s love.
The elliptical J gives us no psychological of spiritual portrait of Tamar, no account of her motives or of her will. No other author makes us as much collaborators as J does; we have to sketch Tamar’s character, and color in her formidable personality, just as we do Yahweh, Eve, the serpent, etc. A woman of the people, with no previous connection to the House of Israel, she is presumably Judah’s choice for his son Er, precisely because of her vitality. Indomitable, she does not accept defeat, whether from Er, Onan, or Judah. Her will becomes the will of Yahweh, and ten generations later leads to David, of all humans, the most favored by Yahweh. Pragmatically, Tamar is a prophetess, and she usurps the future beyond any prophet’s achievement. She is single-minded, fearless, and totally self-confident, and she has absolute insight into Judah. Most crucially, she KNOWS that SHE is the future, and she sets aside societal and male-imposed conventions in order to arrive at her story, which will turn out to be Yahweh’s truth, or ...David. Tamar's sons are born without stigma, and she too is beyond stigma. Thomas Mann was imaginatively accurate in making her Jacob’s disciple, for her struggle is the woman’s analogue to Jacob’s grand defiance of death at Esau’s hands in an all-night contest with death’s angel (or was it Yahweh himself?). Of the two agonists, Tamar is the more heroic and battles even greater odds than Jacob: natural, societal, preternatural. Jacob wins the new name of Israel; even more gloriously, Tamar wins the immortality of her own name, and a central place in the story that she was not born into and so had to usurp for herself.
The name Tamar means a palm tree, first made emblematic in the Bible by the palm tree beneath which the prophetess Deborah sits and judges Israel. It is the figure of King David that hovers again in the recesses of J’s text, because J assumes that her readers and auditors know that Tamar was the ancestor of David. Perhaps J would have appreciated the added irony that for Christian readers, Tamar ultimately is the ancestor of Jesus Christ, in a Christian view the Messiah being born from the House of David. Tamar indeed is the fountainhead of all who will carry the Blessing after Judah, for only Tamar bears Judah sons who will survive.
Thomas Mann, beautifully expanding upon J in Joseph and His Brothers, gives us a Tamar who sits at the feet of Jacob, learns her sense of the Blessing’s importance from Jacob as Israel, the father of the tribes, and plots therefore to make a place for herself in the story, so that her name will not be scattered, as Yahweh scattered the names of us all at the Tower of Babel. J, even subtler and more ironic than the ironist Mann, does not expose to us such an explicit explanation. Mann has a properly novelistic sense of the Blessing: not to be excluded from the narrative. J’s version of the Blessing emphasizes aesthetically what it stresses humanistically: more life. For J, as for the author of 2 Samuel, the special representative of human vitality is David, at once human-all-too-human and the apotheosis of the most complete and admirable human qualities. Judah, though he carries the Blessing, is hardly a heroic figure for J. King David’s vitality, she tells us, comes from the heroic tenacity of Tamar. It is not accidental that Tamar is a name only in the Davidic family (the name, in fact of his tragic daughter, raped by her brother Amnon, avenged by her brother Absalom), or that of Judah’s wife, the unnamed daughter of the Canaanite Shua, hence called bat-shua in the Hebrew, should bring to mind the name of King David’s queen, Bathsheba. J makes clear that in centering on Tamar she alludes to David, to his personality, career, and legacy. And can I take a moment here to say that the Yahwist is second only to Shakespeare in her story-telling and representation of character. Forgive me for the digression.
Tamar’s drive to become the bearer of the Blessing is frustrated by the sickliness, the lack of vitality, of Judah’s three sons. J, endless punner, may intend a wordplay between Er (possibly meaning “on guard”) and ariri (“childless”), while Onan (possibly meaning “active”) seems to play upon ‘on' (“grief”). The third brother, who also doubtless would have retreated from the vital Tamar into death, is called Shelah, which might imply a reluctant emergence from the mother’s womb (which J has hinted at before). What is clear is that these guys are at best nitwits to carry the Blessing, and displeasing to Yahweh, whose frequent impishness is reflected in Tamar’s shrewd seduction of Judah. What after all was the lady to do? As the widow of the inconsequential Er and the perverse Onan (the name has become synonymous with masturbation, but in J he rather practices what seems coitus interruptus), Tamar had little to expect from the reluctant Shelah, even if Judah had not violated the ancient Hebraic custom of yibbum, which obliges the surviving brother of a deceased husband to marry the widow. What is startling, and crucial to J’s art, is the boldness and resourcefulness of the wronged Tamar.
Judah’s wife dies; the mourning period ends; Judah goes up to a place called Timnath for the sheep shearing, or a time of excess, of letting go. As an average sensual male emerging from a set period of abstinence, Judah is scarcely inclined to request that a supposed wayside cult prostitute unveil herself to him. His pledge - the signature like seal and scepter-like staff - is Tamar’s prophetic defense against the judicial murder that would otherwise await her under patriarchal laws that J is delighted to see outflanked. His fear of being exposed to ridicule is enhanced by his authentic sense of justice, since he is indeed less in the right than Tamar. J is little interested in him anyway, in comparison to Tamar. Wonderfully enigmatic as always, resembling her creator J in this, Tamar handles Judah with consummate tact, sending his pledges to him with the brief remark that these will identify the prospective father. J’s mordant observation that Judah was not intimate with her again is a pure irony, since neither he nor Tamar would wish one another again. Yet, he has his heirs, and she has her place in the Blessing’s story. What has J taught us of her, and of the qualities she will bring to her descendant David?
J ends Tamar’s story with the birth of twin boys, Peretz, whose name means “breach,” and Zerah, or “brightness,” who thus replace the pallid Er and the unpleasant Onan. The twin-birth is unexpected and clearly alludes to the return of the agonistic spirit, with Zerah recalling Esau, and Peretz recalling the wrestler Jacob, grandfather of these new competitors for the Blessing. Peretz, David’s ancestor, breaches his way out first, while Zerah’s hand with its crimson thread suggests the repetition of the red man of Edom. Tamar is therefore the second Rebecca, mother of an endless rivalry. J intends us to see Tamar as the prime representative of agonistic continuity in the history of the Blessing, since it is she alone who guarantees the heritage of vitality that runs from wrestling Jacob to the truly heroic and charismatic David, the authentic object of Yahweh’s love.
The elliptical J gives us no psychological of spiritual portrait of Tamar, no account of her motives or of her will. No other author makes us as much collaborators as J does; we have to sketch Tamar’s character, and color in her formidable personality, just as we do Yahweh, Eve, the serpent, etc. A woman of the people, with no previous connection to the House of Israel, she is presumably Judah’s choice for his son Er, precisely because of her vitality. Indomitable, she does not accept defeat, whether from Er, Onan, or Judah. Her will becomes the will of Yahweh, and ten generations later leads to David, of all humans, the most favored by Yahweh. Pragmatically, Tamar is a prophetess, and she usurps the future beyond any prophet’s achievement. She is single-minded, fearless, and totally self-confident, and she has absolute insight into Judah. Most crucially, she KNOWS that SHE is the future, and she sets aside societal and male-imposed conventions in order to arrive at her story, which will turn out to be Yahweh’s truth, or ...David. Tamar's sons are born without stigma, and she too is beyond stigma. Thomas Mann was imaginatively accurate in making her Jacob’s disciple, for her struggle is the woman’s analogue to Jacob’s grand defiance of death at Esau’s hands in an all-night contest with death’s angel (or was it Yahweh himself?). Of the two agonists, Tamar is the more heroic and battles even greater odds than Jacob: natural, societal, preternatural. Jacob wins the new name of Israel; even more gloriously, Tamar wins the immortality of her own name, and a central place in the story that she was not born into and so had to usurp for herself.
write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com
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