Sex in the City

Judah decided to leave his father and brothers and head off on his own.  He settled some distance away near the home of a man named Hirah and made a home for himself there. 

He married a young Canaanite woman and shortly after they slept together in the marriage bed she conceived and bore three sons in quick succession.  The eldest son was named Er.  Judah chose a young woman named Tamar to be husband to Er, but Judah did some things that Lord Yahweh thought were terribly evil so the Lord Yahweh killed Er. 

Judah then went to his second son, Onan, and said to him, “Onan, your brotherly duty is to sleep with Tamar, so that she will produce children for your brother.”

Onan was not happy with what tribal custom required him to do, and since Onan knew that the children that he fathered with Tamar would not be his, whenever he went to bed with his brother's wife he pulled out from her before he ejaculated and he spilled his semen on the ground so that he would not give offspring to his brother.  That angered the Lord Yahweh, so he put Onan to death also. 

Frustrated that Tamar had not produced children for Er, Judah instructed his daughter-in-law Tamar, to go home to her father's house and remain there as a widow until the youngest son and brother grew up and was old enough to marry her.  So Tamar went to live in her father's house.  She waited.  And waited.  Judah's youngest son Shelah was now grown, yet Judah had not brought Shelah to her for marriage.

In course of time Judah's wife died.  After the required time of mourning for his wife was over Judah and his friend Hirah, who was still his neighbor, went on a journey to the village of Timnah, where the sheepshearers lived, because Judah wanted to have his sheep sheared.   When Tamar heard that her father-in-law was headed to Timnah to shear his sheep and realizing that Judah was now out of mourning for his wife and could be seduced, she took off her widow's clothes, put on a veil, wrapped herself in a shawl and sat down at the entrance of a small town along the road to Timnah. 

When Judah saw her sitting there he did not recognize Tamar because she had covered her face with a veil and he assumed she was a local prostitute.  He went over to her as she sat by the roadside and said to her, "Come with me, I want to have sex with you.”

She said, "What will you pay me to have sex with me?"

Judah answered, "I will send you a young goat from my flock."

Tamar said, "If you aren't going to pay me now, you will have to give me something valuable to keep as security until you send my payment.” 

Judah said to Tamar, "What do you want me to give you?"

She replied, "I will hold your signet ring, the belt that binds your robe, and the staff that is in your hand."

So Judah gave them to her, and they had sex and she got pregnant by him.  Then she got up and went back home.  She took off her veil and put on the mourning garments of her widowhood.

Judah sent his friend Hirah with the baby goat he had promised to the prostitute and asked Hirah to bring back the items that he had left with the prostitute as security—his ring, his belt and his walking staff.   Hirah could not find the woman.  He asked around town, "Where is the temple prostitute who sits by the road into town?"

The people of the town said, "We don't have a prostitute here."

Hirah returned to Judah and said, "I could not find her and the people in the town said that they did not have a temple prostitute in that town."

Judah replied, "Then just let her keep those things of mine as her own, otherwise we will be laughed at.  I already sent the young goat, as you know, and we could not find her, so let's just forget about it.”

About three months later Judah was told by some friends, "Your daughter-in-law Tamar has been sleeping around.  She is a whore.  Even worse, she is now pregnant as a result of being a whore."

So Judah said, "Drag her out of her house and  burn her to death.”

As she was being taken out of her house she sent word to her father-in-law with this message: "It was the owner of these who made me pregnant. Notice, please, who owns the signet ring, and the belt to tie around a robe, and the walking staff."

Then Judah, shocked at seeing his possessions and realizing what had happened, acknowledged that the possessions were his and he said, "She is more in the right than I am, since I did not give her in marriage to my son Shelah, as I had promised.”

So Judah got his stuff back and he did not sleep with Tamar again.

 

Tribal tradition is strong in this story: the father picks the wife for his sons, there is a duty to marry and have children with a dead brother’s wife so that he will have offspring and the tribe will have more members, violation of tribal duty results in death, which was not an uncommon punishment. We get the term onanism [pulling out of sexual intercourse just before ejaculation] from this story, but contrary to some misinterpretations of this story, Onan's trouble with Yahweh was not because he pulled out of intercourse before ejaculation or because he wasted the semen, but because he did not do his duty to father children for his dead brother as was required by the customs of the time.