Read The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible Online
Authors: Jonathan Kirsch
The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (23 page)
The story of Rahab is told in the Book of Joshua, which chronicles the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites after the Exodus from Egypt. Before the Israelites launch their attack, two unnamed spies are sent to infiltrate the town of Jericho and report on its defenses. But the spies pause in their dangerous mission to avail themselves of the services of a local prostitute
(zonah)
named Rahab, and they are interrupted when a patrol sent by the King of Jericho shows up at her house. The good-hearted Rahab conceals the spies and then allows them to escape. To reward her, the spies promise that Rahab and her family will be spared when the Israelite army returns in force, and they instruct her to hang a red thread in her window as a signal to the conquering army of Israel (Josh. 2:1–19).
To emphasize the similarities between Tamar, the feigned Canaanite harlot, and Rahab, the authentic one, the sages elaborated upon the biblical text by imagining that Tamar’s sons, Perez and Zerah, are the two unnamed spies in the Book of Joshua—and by suggesting that the red thread that is hung in Rahab’s window as a signal to the
conquering army was the very same one that the midwife wrapped around Zerah’s hand. And the New Testament, too, suggests a direct linkage between Tamar and Rahab: The genealogy of Jesus of Nazareth, as given in the Gospel of Matthew, identifies four women from the Hebrew Bible as his direct ancestresses: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Báthsheba (Matt. 1:5–7). Notably, all four of these women are non-Israelites who married Israelite men, and all four engaged in sexually questionable conduct, including acts of prostitution and seduction.
Still, Tamar was so troubling to the stern rabbinical authorities who studied and explained the Bible that they sought to attribute the whole steamy episode to the hand of the Almighty. The rabbis imagined Tamar to be a descendant of the high priest Shem, son of Noah; she has been given the gift of prophecy by “the holy spirit” and knows with certainty that she is destined to be “the mother of the royal line of David, and the ancestress of Isaiah.” When she plays the harlot to ensnare Judah, the goodly man ignores her, but “God [sends] the angel that is appointed over the passion of love” to compel Judah to turn back and place himself in Tamar’s embrace.
Later, according to rabbinical tales, Tamar is summoned to a celestial court of justice, where her fate is to be determined by a jury consisting of a ghostly Isaac, an aging Jacob, and Judah himself. At first, Tamar declines to defend herself out of fear of incriminating Judah, and so Judah declares the pregnant Tamar to be guilty and worthy of burning.
At the last moment, to save herself, Tamar searches for the pledges that would prove her innocence—Judah’s seal and staff—but cannot find them; an evil angel has hidden them in order to prevent the birth of David. So God sends the angel Michael to place the crucial evidence before the jury. Confronted with the truth, Judah confesses not only to fathering Tamara child but also to selling Joseph into slavery—and, moved by the spirit of confession, his brother Reuben volunteers a mea culpa for sneaking into the bed of his father’s concubine, Bilhah!
“It is better that I should perish in a fire that can be extinguished than I should be cast into hell fire,” Judah is made to declare by the rabbinical storytellers, who also tell us that Judah later married the wronged woman. “Now, then, I acknowledge that Tamar is innocent.”
“Ye are both innocent!” a heavenly voice is heard to say. “It was the will of God that it should happen!”
26
The tale as told by the rabbis betrays a certain unmistakable anxiety about a flesh-and-blood woman who simply refuses to shut up and go away. But their version of the story turns the intrepid Tamar into a marionette whose strings are worked by the divine puppeteer. What makes her so remarkable and so memorable—and so appealing to the contemporary reader—is the fact that Tamar will
not
be manipulated or intimidated or ignored.
The sheer willfulness of Tamar was celebrated by Thomas Mann, who retold the story a millennia or so later in
Joseph the Provider
, one volume in the novel
Joseph and His Brothers
, which he based on the bib’ Heal tales. Mann imagines Tamar as a young Canaanite woman, “gifted with the soul-and-body charm and mystery of Astarte,” who sits at the feet of the Hebrew patriarch Jacob and learns from him that God has chosen the Israelites as his people and has promised them “the hero who one day should be awoken out of the chosen seed … [t]he prince of peace and the anointed.” Tamar resolves that
she
will be the one to bear a son to carry on Judah’s name and line; hers would be the “womb of salvation,” the place where the “chosen seed” would be planted, where it would grow and flourish.
“Tamar had made up her mind, cost what it might, by dint of her womanhood to squeeze herself into the history of the world,”
27
writes Mann in
Joseph the Provider
. “She played the temptress and whored by the way, that she might not be shut out; she abased herself recklessly to be exalted.”
28
Even in the spare and measured words of Genesis 38 itself, the willful and indomitable Tamar is not less than the savior who ensures the survival of the Jewish people and, ultimately, the birth of a savior. The very word “Jew” (Yehudi) is specifically and directly derived from “Judah”
(Yehuda)
—and, among the Twelve Tribes of Israel, it is the tribe of Judah that survived and, through the House of David, supplied the Israelites with its greatest kings and the line that would ultimately produce a savior. But the tribe is facing early extinction precisely because none of Judah’s sons is able to implant a son in Tamar’s womb, and the Jewish people would have perished then and there if not for Tamar’s courage and determination. By playing the harlot, she saves the tribe of Judah—and thus the Jewish people—from obliteration.
Thus the story of Tamar and Judah suggests an urgent and crucial truth that has never been more pertinent than it is now. God instructed
the Israelites to drive out or kill the Canaanites, but the Israelites were forced by the circumstances of history to live side by side with them; today, the struggle of Arab and Jew to find a way to live with one another on the same bloody ground where Judah and Tamar first met is no less momentous than it was three thousand years ago. To be sure, the Bible offers abundant and bloody examples of war and terror practiced on each other by Israelite and non-Israelite. But the story of Tamar, like other shining examples in the Bible, suggest that these ancient enemies did, and can, find a way to live in peace With one another.
*
The events described in Genesis 38 supposedly take place
before
the enslavement of the Israelites under Pharaoh, the Exodus from Egypt, and the conquest of Canaan, at a time when Jacob and his sons are only sojourners in Canaan. According to the chronology of the Bible itself, the Book of Deuteronomy and its laws against intermarriage are unknown to Judah because they would not be handed down until centuries later. But, as we have already seen, Genesis was probably edited by redactors working sometime after 400
B.C.E
., and the biblical author who retold the story of Judah and Tamar was intimately familiar with the laws of Deuteronomy. Biblical scholarship suggests that Genesis 38 describes the landscape of Canaan and the circumstances of the Israelites at a much later date than the text itself indicates, long after the Exodus from Egypt and the conquest of Canaan, when the troubled coexistence of Israelites and Canaanites in the Promised Land was not only a fact of history but an unavoidable reality of daily life.
*
At least one contemporary Bible critic has proposed that Ham’s encounter with his father is an incident of incestuous homosexuality and not merely filial disrespect.
*
One contemporary scholar has argued that we ought to regard Tamar as an Israelite, pointing out that Genesis 38 does not plainly state that Tamar is a Canaanite. According to the revisionist interpretation, the real lesson of Tamar is that Judah’s three “half-breed” sons—the offspring of his marriage to a woman who
is
plainly identified as a Canaanite—are doomed by the Almighty and unable to father any children. Only when Tamar is mated with Judah himself, a full-blooded Israelite, are healthy male offspring born. The “purity of Israelite blood” is the whole point of Genesis 38, according to the revisionist reading, and the Talmud includes a story that starts with the same premise and reaches a similar conclusion: Judah’s wife, a Canaanite woman, plots to keep her sons from impregnating Tamar precisely because “she was not a Canaanitish woman.” But the scholarly consensus, and the sense of the text itself, suggests that Tamar is a beguiling outsider and not an Israelite.
*
Judah’s seal, described in the text of Genesis 38 as “thy signet and thy cord,” is some’ thing that a man in biblical times might wear around his neck on a rope cord or a chain. The seal itself was a small cylinder of fired clay or carved stone in which were inscribed the letters of the man’s name or other symbols to indicate his identity. At a time when legal documents consisted of clay tablets, the cylindrical seal was rolled over the wet clay in order to imprint the bearer’s name or symbol on the document; later, when papyrus scrolls were in common use, the seal was pressed into a ball of wet clay (a
bulla)
that was attached to a string wrapped around the scroll.
ZIPPORAH AND MOSES
The Lord met him, and sought to kill him
.—
EXODUS 4:24
T
he flames in the fire-pit threw shadows against the walls of the tent where Zipporah’s husband and baby slept. But Zipporah lay wide awake on the pile of bedding that all three of them shared, gazing at the ghostly figures that seemed to dance and leap across the taut fabric.
Only that morning, Zipporah had stood in the family compound in the hills of Midian and bidden farewell to her father and six sisters. Father, a priest of the Midianites, had been no less stern and solemn than if he were presiding over some ritual offering to the ever-demanding gods, although Zipporah had detected a slight hoarseness in his voice that betrayed some sorrow. Her sisters wept openly, and she heard the keening sound of their voices for a long time after she turned, her infant son in her arms, and followed her husband down the rocky path that pointed in the direction of Egypt.
Now she found herself alone with her husband and baby at a sparse oasis far from her home. They had trekked from sunrise to sundown, her husband driving a pair of pack-asses ahead of them. The moon had already risen when they came to a muddy watering hole and a couple of strangled palms that served as a lodging place for travelers on the caravan route through the desert. On the far side of the pool were a cold fire, a pile of camel droppings, the shards of a shattered wine jar—all
signs that someone else had recently paused here—but not a living soul could be seen. At odd moments, a gust of wind would howl through the oasis, stirring up little whirlwinds of sand; then it was still and quiet again.
And it came to pass on the way at the lodging-place, that the Lord met him, and sought to kill him. Then Zipporah took a flint, and cut off the foreskin of her son, and cast it at his feet; and she said: “Surely a bridegroom of blood art thou to me.” So He let him alone. Then she said: “A bridegroom of blood in regard of the circumcision.”
—
EXODUS 4:24–26
Zipporah gathered a few sticks of wood, built a cooking fire, and prepared a pot of porridge while her husband watered and tied up the asses, unpacked and raised their tent. Then he joined her and the baby at the firepit for a hasty evening meal. They ate without speaking, as if silenced by the terrible dangers of the journey they had undertaken. Now and then, when the baby fretted, Zipporah loosened her cloak and gave him a breast to quiet him down. With the fire still burning in the pit, a faint candle in the vast darkness of the desert, they retreated to their tent for the night. Soon she heard the rhythmic breathing of her slumbering husband and baby, one loud and one faint.
The shadows on the tent wall caught Zipporah’s eye and forbade her to sleep. She thought of the tales that she had heard as a child from a woman of her fathers clan, a crone who told fearsome stories in a voice that hissed like a serpent. The stories came back to her now—of gods who demanded unspeakable pleasures from young women who had not yet known a man, demons who set their mouths upon the mouths of innocents and sucked the life out of them while they slept, fat and foul-smelling creatures who oozed up from muddy pools and swallowed strong men right down to their feet.
Zipporah shuddered as if in the grip of a fever, then pulled a corner of the bedding around her shoulders to warm herself against the cold desert air.
