Tamar Triumphant and the Deception of Judah: Contemporary Scholarship/Feminist Views

For over two millennia, from ancient times to the present, Judah’s encounter with Tamar (Genesis 38) has captured the interest of numerous sources. Authors have sought to understand, explain, or sometimes reframe this fascinating and disturbing account, which involves both intrigue and incest.¹ This article considers the views of contemporary and feminist scholarship. Although Nahum M. Sarna labels the verses in Genesis 38:12-26, where Tamar takes on a disguise, as “The Deception of Judah,” those words equally can be ascribed to Judah’s own deceptive statement to Tamar in v. 11 — a fact he himself admits close to the end of the chapter: “She is more in the right than I, inasmuch as I did not give her to my son Shelah” (Gen. 38:26). Chapter 38 divides into two sections. “Whereas [deceptive] Judah is the main actor in vv. 1-11, it is [deceptive] Tamar in vv. 12-26,” explains Claus Westermann. In the first part of the chapter Tamar is an object, someone acted upon; only in the latter verses does she claim her agency. Tammi Schneider suggests that “Tamar is not a dazzling character; in most of her story she is passive,” and that when handed from son to son and sent back to her father’s house as a widow, there is nothing in the text to suggest even a protest.

Judah’s Deception (Judah as Deceiver)

Judah is in an almost untenable situation. Mieke Bal summarizes the problem: “Judah’s goal was an impossible one: to have offspring and to keep his sons in safety… these two goals are incompatible, for marriage would kill his son, while without marriage… the family would die out.” Gerhard von Rad notes that part of the chapter’s background is the issue of preserving property — a wife is also a capital asset, and if Tamar returned permanently to her father’s house she would take her dowry with her. Judah actively deceives Tamar, presenting a solution to her as an interim situation while treating it, for himself, as final. David Cotter is critical of Judah, who “brutalizes her socially rather than physically,” imposing on her the widow’s garment that implies she should remain “a speechless prop for the remainder of her life” — though Tamar, Cotter continues, ultimately takes “charge of her own destiny.”

Judah’s Deception (Judah Deceived)

Tamar is not completely unfree. She positions herself on the road to Timnah at a place the Hebrew calls Petah Enaim — “Two Wells” or “Eye Opening,” in various renderings — and changes her clothes. Cotter reads this as a parody of the biblical betrothal-at-a-well type-scene (Abraham’s servant and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel, Moses and Tzipporah), and observes that Tamar, invisible for years in her widow’s seclusion, becomes visible to the eyes of the father-in-law who had been ignoring her existence; Judah simply assumes that a woman dressed unfamiliarly must be a prostitute. Gordon Wenham reads the episode as an instance of “divine justice”: Jacob deceived his father Isaac, was in turn deceived by his son Judah (via the brothers’ bloodied coat), and now Judah is deceived by his own daughter-in-law — in all three episodes, goats and items of dress figure in the deception.

Some scholars praise Tamar outright. E.A. Speiser writes that with the Judah line “in danger of extinction,” Tamar “takes heroic measures and triumphs in the end,” taking her place alongside Rachel. Benno Jacob calls Genesis 38 “the crown of the book of Genesis and Tamar one of its most admirable women.” L. Juliana M. Claassens compares Tamar to Ruth as figures who resist the “dehumanization of the most vulnerable members of society,” noting that Tamar comes very close to being executed before her foresight saves her. Susan Niditch links Tamar to other biblical tricksters — Abraham, Jacob, Rebekah — whose power, though indirect and circumscribed, is nonetheless celebrated in the biblical tale.

Describing the encounter itself, the narrator explains that Judah took the veiled Tamar for a harlot, for she had covered her face — for he did not know that she was his daughter-in-law (vv. 15-16). Schneider questions the standard assumption that veiling signals prostitution, noting that Middle Assyrian Laws in fact required veiling of married and concubine women while explicitly forbidding it to prostitutes.² Tamar “does not pretend to anything apart from disguising herself and looking available. She leaves the rest to him.” As Athalya Brenner puts it, at this point “Tamar evolves from victim to agent.”

Toward the close of the chapter, at v. 25, Tamar presents the evidence that exonerates her: “Examine please [haker na]… whose seal and cord and staff are these?” Robert Alter notes the deliberate recurrence of the verb n-kh-r across Genesis 37:32-33, 38:26, and 42:7-8 — in the first case the brothers ask Jacob to “examine” Joseph’s bloodied coat, in the second Tamar sends Judah’s tokens back to him, and in the third Joseph “recognizes” his brothers without revealing himself. When Tamar speaks out with “Examine please,” it is, in Alice Ogden Bellis’s words, the act of “a woman who takes charge” — a call to be recognized as an individual with rights, one who may not be shunted away. At the end of the day, she is Tamar triumphant.