The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (21 page)

Now there’s a certain stinging irony to the decree against intermarriage that figures so prominently in the Bible. A long list of Israelites did, in fact, marry outside the Twelve Tribes, and some of the most inspiring stories of the Bible feature successful intermarriages. Jacob’s celebrated favorite son, Joseph, marries the daughter of an Egyptian high priest (Gen. 46:20). Moses marries a Midianite woman, Zipporah, who plays a crucial role in the history of the Israelites by taking on God himself to spare her husband’s life (Exod. 4:24–26). Ruth, a Moabite woman who seduces and then weds an Israelite man, is (like Tamar) a direct ancestress of King David and, therefore, of the Messiah. David himself falls in love with Bathsheba, who was married to a Hittite and may well have been a non-Israelite (2 Sam. 11:3).
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Their son, Solomon, manages to collect some seven hundred wives of his own, including a fair number of idol-worshipping foreigners. “[K]ing Solomon loved many strange women,” the Bible is forced to concede, “[and] his wives turned away his heart after other gods” (1 Kings 11:1, 4 KJV). So the Bible is deeply conflicted on the subject of marriage with non-Israelites, flatly condemning intermarriage in theory but not always in practice.

As we saw in chapter five, the bitter and often bloodthirsty hatred of the stranger that we find in certain passages of the Bible can be traced to the priests and scribes who compiled and edited much of the Bible sometime after the series of foreign invasions dispersed and nearly destroyed the Israelites. As these editors, or redactors, labored over texts that described the events of the long-distant past, they saw around them an endangered remnant of the Israelite people, the pitiable survivors of a once-glorious monarchy who now lived at the mercy of foreign conquerors and rival claimants to the land of Canaan itself. To these pious men, intermarriage with non-Israelites was a threat as profound as conquest or exile, and it is likely that they insinuated their xenophobia into the ancient texts.

Still, the redactors of the Bible were forced to deal with facts of recent history—and a rich body of legend and lore—that plainly
depicted intermarriage by some of the greatest, prophets and kings of Israel. So the Bible is forced to accommodate two very different traditions, one that tolerates and even celebrates marriage with non-Israelites, and one that bitterly condemns and forbids it. Thus, on one hand, the fact that Moses married Zipporah, a Midianite woman, was apparently deemed too fundamental to ignore and too crucial in the history of Israel to condemn; Zipporah is depicted in the Book of Exodus as a heroic woman who literally saves the life of Moses when God himself seeks to kill him. On the other hand, readers are reminded that God disapproves of such couplings when it comes to ordinary Israelites. As we have already seen, the redactors included the gruesome and slightly leering account of the Israelite prince who is impaled along with his Midianite lover as a punishment for the crime of making love (Num. 25:1–9, 17).

So, too, does the story of Tamar and Judah present a puzzling and contradictory moral example, at least according to the unambiguous legal boilerplate of the Bible itself. Even if Tamar
had
been an Israelite, her elaborate conspiracy to seduce her father-in-law by playing the harlot would be a shocking violation of the biblical commandment that is intended to keep men from sleeping with their daughters-in-law. But the fact that she is a Canaanite makes her not only an incestuous seducer but a stranger, and the Bible is sometimes even harsher on strangers than it is on those who merely indulge in forbidden sexual practices.
*

The biblical authors were fairly obsessed with the alluring but forbidden figure of the harlot, and the Bible is studded with references to literal and metaphorical prostitution. The prophet Hosea, for example, reports that he was called upon by God to go out and marry a whore, which he apparently did with alacrity and perhaps even some enthusiasm, although he insists that the point of his illicit union was to rebuke his fellow Israelites for their spiritual faithlessness in worshipping strange gods.

The Bible allows us to understand that prostitution was common enough in ancient Israel, if only because harlotry among the women of Israel is condemned in such strong terms: “Profane not thy daughter, to make her a harlot, lest the land fall into harlotry, and the land become full of lewdness” (Lev. 19:29). Priests are specifically prohibited from marrying a prostitute, and death by burning—the punishment prescribed for Tamar—is decreed for any daughter of a priest who turns to prostitution (Lev. 21:7, 9, 14)-

The story of Tamar confirms that there were at least two kinds of prostitutes whom an Israelite man might have encountered in ancient Canaan: a common whore
(zonah
, according to the original Hebrew) and a temple or “cultic” prostitute
(qedeshah)
,
³
whose sexual practices were sanctified among the Canaanites as a form of worship of the goddesses of fertility. Tamar is described by the biblical narrator as a common prostitute
(zonah)
when we are first told how she disguises herself as a harlot to seduce her father-in-law. But when Judah sends his Canaanite crony, Hirah, in search of the woman who is holding his seal and staff, Hirah refers to the woman by the Hebrew word for a sacred temple prostitute
(qedeshah)
rather than a common whore.

The Hebrew term
qedeshah
translated as “sacred” or “cult” or “temple” prostitute, actually means “a consecrated woman” and was understood to refer to a woman who literally made herself available to
all comers at a place of pagan worship—perhaps a temple of Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess of love, or Astarte, the Canaanite goddess of fertility; “divine intercourse” was understood to be a form of prayer that would be rewarded with “abundant harvests and an increase of cattle.”
⁴
Such titillating notions were encouraged by the chronicles of the Greek historian Herodotus, who reports that even the wealthy matrons of Babylon were legally obliged to serve as sacred prostitutes at least once: “Such of the women as are tall and beautiful are soon released,” he writes with a leer, “but the ugly ones have to stay a long time before they can fulfill the law.”
⁵

More recent and discerning historians who have studied ancient texts and other archaeological evidence from sites throughout the Near East suggest that a
qedeshah
was actually a midwife, a wet-nurse, a singer, and perhaps a sorceress rather than a prostitute. “Tragically,” observes Bible critic Mayer I. Gruber, “scholarship suffered from scholars being unable to imagine any cultic role for women in antiquity that did not involve sexual intercourse.”
⁶
According to the revisionists in Bible studies, “divine intercourse”—if it actually took place at all—was less likely to have been the “whole-scale debauchery” depicted by the biblical prophets than an occasional act of ritual sexual union between a priest and a priestess on a seasonal holy day or perhaps in time of plague, drought, or famine.
⁷
Thus, as used by the biblical author in Genesis 38,
qedeshah
may not be intended as a technical term for a cult prostitute but rather as a “poetic synonym” for a “common or garden harlot.”
⁸

To the modern reader, the reference to Tamar as a sacred prostitute rather than a common whore may suggest that the biblical author was trying to dignify and elevate Judah’s dealings with the woman. We might imagine that a visit to a temple prostitute was perceived as something loftier than buying the sexual services of a whore, especially in the eyes of his Canaanite friend. We are tempted to conclude that the biblical storyteller was trying to put the best face on Judah’s dalliance with the harlot by the side of the road.

Of course, there is nothing sacred about the roadside transaction between Judah and Tamar: it is a bargain of the oldest and most secular kind, sex for money, and the repartee between Tamar and Judah shows us a whore haggling with a trick over the terms of payment. Indeed, the
pledge that Judah gives to Tamar—his staff and his seal
*
—is simply a form of collateral to secure his promise to pay her for the services that she has rendered, “a kind of Near Eastern equivalent … of a person’s major credit cards,” in the words of contemporary Bible scholar Robert Alter.
⁹

But if the reference to Tamar as a sacred harlot strikes us as an effort to pretty up Judah’s encounter with her, the very opposite would have been true for the Bible reader of two thousand years ago. Any trafficking by an Israelite with a sacred harlot was not merely a sexual indiscretion but an act of apostasy—an outrage against divine law and a capital offense among the Israelites. When Hirah uses the word for a temple prostitute to refer to Tamar, he is suggesting that Judah had done exactly what the Bible condemns as the worst offense imaginable, worshipping a pagan goddess by engaging in sexual intercourse with that deity’s sacred harlot.

Indeed, one scholar suggests that the casual use of the term for a sacred prostitute in Genesis 38 is the best evidence that the story itself originated with the Canaanites rather than the Israelites.
¹⁰
And, as we shall see (see chapter eleven), some Bible readers go so far as to suggest that Tamar was actually the priestess of a Canaanite fertility cult who was seeking to lure Judah’s sons away from the God of their fathers. But the very fact that the story of Tamar and Judah earned its way into Holy Scripture, and survived the efforts of later religious authorities to rewrite the history of Israel, tells us something important and surprising about the degree of tolerance toward sexual adventure that prevailed among at least some of the biblical authors and editors.

The story of Tamar suggests that there was nothing unusual about encountering and even patronizing a prostitute in the Holy Land in the days of the patriarchs. Other passages of the Bible confirm that prostitution was so commonplace that the price of a harlot’s services might be as little as a loaf of bread (Prov. 6:26), and that one might encounter a prostitute along the road (Prov. 7:11–12) or even at holy sites where pilgrims congregated (Hos. 4:14). Indeed, it’s possible that Judah recognizes Tamar as a prostitute simply because he sees her sitting at a crossroads, a place where harlots may have typically plied their trade in biblical times.

And yet the story of Tamar provokes a tantalizing question. Exactly how does Judah know that Tamar is a harlot in search of business? And we might wonder: Is he really fooled by Tamar’s disguise?

We are told only that Tamar wears a veil, an essential plot device that conceals her identity from her father-in-law. But, according to current scholarship on the folkways of the ancient Near East, only married women—
not
prostitutes—were veiled in public.
¹¹
If we believe that Judah is tricked into thinking that Tamar is a harlot, we know that she had to adopt some other adornment or costume to signify that she is a prostitute and thereby to arouse Judah’s sexual appetite.

A pendant or some other decoration on her face and around her neck might have been the way a prostitute of biblical times announced her availability as a paid sexual partner. For example, the prophet Hosea calls on his adulterous wife to “put away her harlotries from her face, and her adulteries from between her breasts, lest I strip her naked” (Hos. 2:4), which suggests to some commentators that a harlot was identifiable by “the badges of her profession, something on her face, something between her breasts.” So we might imagine that Tamar wears makeup or perhaps a nose-ring, and hangs some object
around her neck that Judah would identify as the markings of a harlot.
¹²

The Song of Songs, a book of erotic love poetry that somehow found its way into Holy Writ, suggests what woman might wear around her neck as a symbol of sexual availability: “My beloved is unto me as a bag of myrrh,/That lieth betwixt my breasts” (Song of Songs 1:13). And the Talmud confirms that “wanton women” would put a mixture of balsam and myrrh in their shoes “so that its scent would arouse passion in young men.”
¹³

All we really know with certainty, of course, is that Judah decides that the woman whom he sees on the road to Timnah is sexually desirable—and sexually available. He is a widower who has just completed the long period of mourning for his dead wife, and he is needful of sexual companionship; indeed, the spare text of Genesis 38 is fairly aglow with sexual tension at the moment of their encounter. We might surmise that a harlot’s disguise is only a thin excuse, perhaps devised by Tamar and perhaps by the biblical storyteller, to justify the blunt sexual proposition that Judah makes to Tamar.

“Will you have sex with me?” is how Judah’s proposition can be understood in plain English, although most translations use more decorous and euphemistic language: “Let me lie with you” (NEB) or “Let me come in unto thee” (JPS).