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The story of Tamar
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Welcome to the CommonsCast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 2:Our series, stories of shadow has been an one. I appreciate you braving these stories, bringing them out of their dark corners and boldly into our lives. What we've learned from David's and Bathsheba's stories from Hagar and her family too is that God can still find us behind the dimness of loneliness, of lost dignity, and wavering faith. I think we've all found a bit of ourselves in these stories. So today, we have another shadow story one full of surprises.
Speaker 2:We're spending time in Genesis 38 with a woman named Tamar and her father-in-law Judah. We'll be talking about vulnerable status, family dysfunction, moral dilemmas, and new beginnings. But before we dive in, let us pray. God who sees us through. As we dive into your word today, grant us the space to clear our crowded minds, to see, hear, and feel your movement in stories that challenge us.
Speaker 2:Grant us a peace to know your aliveness in these texts and your aliveness in communities right now. Meet our hesitation with divine confidence, our fear with holy calmness, our pain with spiritual well-being. As we draw near two stories of shadows, illuminate in us what has always been destined for the light. Amen. Now, we're first introduced to Tamar in verse six.
Speaker 2:A man named Judah takes her as a wife for his oldest son, Er. And as quickly as this relationship is introduced to us, Er dies just like that. And the reasons surrounding around his death are mysterious. All we know is that he was considered evil in the eyes of the Lord. If that's not bad enough, this man, Eir, dies before he's able to have a child with Tamar.
Speaker 2:Now, we briefly touched on this last week. Children, especially baby boys, were crucial to the preservation of family lines and for women especially to their social security. There's a solution to this awful situation Tamar finds herself in though, it's called a levirate marriage, which is essentially a customary practice in the Hebrew tradition stating that if a man dies without a son, his widow must marry his brother. Romantic, I know. So according to these leverage marriage laws, next up for Tamar was heir's younger brother, Onan.
Speaker 2:Now, this guy, Onan, is very familiar with elaborate marriage laws, knew that in marrying Tamar, he would have to share a significant portion of his father's Judah's estate with the boy that Tamar gives birth to. Now, Anan had zero interest in sharing that, so simply put, he sabotages the marriage, a chance of having an offspring, and undoubtedly Tamar's fortune. Like, here's what the text says. Then Judah said to Anan, sleep with your brother's wife and fulfill your duty to her as a brother-in-law to raise offspring for your brother. But Onan knew that the child would not be his, so whenever he slept with his brother's wife, he spilled his semen on the ground to keep from providing offspring for his brother.
Speaker 2:Yes. You heard that right. And whatever image comes to mind when the text says spilled his semen, that's exactly what it means. It's simple really, the biblical authors are skilled craftsman in painting a very vivid picture with as few words as possible. So, this image that you have in your mind about Onan that is undoubtedly correct was considered sinful.
Speaker 2:He didn't fulfill his leverett duty, he sabotages Tamar's ability to conceive and according to the story, the Lord puts him to death also. So far, for Judah, things are looking bleak. He looks down on his family lineage, he's literally watching his bloodline disappear one by one. Judah's quick to scapegoat Tamar. She's the common denominator for tragedy in his family.
Speaker 2:She marries Eir, he dies under suspicious reasons. She marries Onan, he also dies under suspicious reasons in their eyes at least but we know the real story don't we? The spilled semen obviously. Instead, Judah opts to send Tamar back to her father's house. He does so unjustly though because Hebraic law notes that now Tamar is under his jurisdiction.
Speaker 2:Judah is legally required to provide for her a husband or a son. Tamar is a foreign woman in a foreign land with nothing to her name. She's stuck and Judah knows this but as he sees it, he has to cover for himself before he can cover for her. He wants to get rid of this woman as quickly as possible. In his eyes, she's wicked.
Speaker 2:Death follows her wherever she goes. And he's not about to risk marrying her to his youngest son, Salah, not with the way things have been going on so far. Judah, a man of privilege and power is accustomed to all of the ways he benefits from the patriarchal customs of the ancient Near East and he's quick to place blame on a vulnerable tamer. Judah, like Abraham, like David is not a monster by any means. However, the way he chooses to deal with his tamer problem is far from excusable especially given the power differential he has over her.
Speaker 2:Momentary lapse in judgment from someone in power is not the fault of the young woman he's marginalized. Think about some of our modern examples where we tend to blame victims, A high unemployment rate or a competitive rental market is not the fault of recent immigrants. Just like a violent perpetrator is to blame not their most recent victim who fearfully chose to stay silent. There are many ways that you and I will benefit and participate in systems that work for us while simultaneously impoverishing others. If we let that broken system be the lens by which we choose to treat the world and people around us, if preservation of power is our main motivator, we've lost the plot entirely.
Speaker 2:And it seems that Judah has to, for now at least. Now, these two characters, Tamar and Judah are going to take us on a journey, a roller coaster where you're not actually too sure who's good and who's bad, they're two flawed protagonists with two entirely opposed lived experiences that weave around each other in really unpredictable ways. But first, to understand Tamar's story, it's important to familiarize yourselves with Judah's complicated family history. A couple chapters back in Genesis, Judah's father, Jacob, marries and has children with a set of sisters, Rachel and Leah, and their female slaves, Bilhah and Zilpah. These relationships are fractured by fits of jealousy and prolonged barrenness and just so so much anger.
Speaker 2:This is a family that Judah is born into. Jacob has 12 sons and as these men grew up, Joseph, the youngest son of Jacob was absolutely cherished by their father. His dad even made him this ornate bedazzled robe and publicly proclaims darling Joseph as the favorite. Harsh, I know. Deeply hurt by this and after an attempt to murder him in a nearby village Judah convinces his brothers to sell him into slavery as one does I guess.
Speaker 2:Clearly Judah likes to get rid of his problems. Out of sight, out of mind is his motto from the get. And still, after all of this work to get rid of his Joseph problem, his father still doesn't favor him. This is a huge sting to Judah's ego. Judah has daddy issues tenfold now and all of that resentment builds up for years and it's not a stretch to imagine that he misplaces a lot of that plane when he himself becomes a father.
Speaker 2:So, excusing any of Judah's behavior, it's important to note just how much one can be influenced by family history. How a parent's personality traits will without a doubt show up in their children's lives. I see this in my own life every day. My insatiable desire for drama and gossip that comes from my mother. We love a good story.
Speaker 2:My inability to show up anywhere on time, well, that comes from my dad. Schedules are mere suggestions to us and without airing all of our dirty laundry, let's just say it's sometimes really hard to shake the dominant character traits we all inherit from our family trees. The Judah that Tamar meets enters her life with all of this baggage. His actions in her life are both a product of nature and nurture or lack thereof. Now, Tamar is extremely vulnerable in these circumstances with no husband and no male heir, she's as good as dirt.
Speaker 2:So, when Judah sends her back to live with her dad with zero intention of marrying her to Shelah, he takes away her agency. He fails to deliver on his end of the promise. Tamar knows this, she knows what she's owed and she knows that she's being cheated out of a decent life. The theologian Kimberly Russell notes this about Tamer's boundedness to the patriarchal goals, squeezing the life out of her future. Traits that power systems and institutions such as patrilineal inheritance which limits women's access to power in the public square, laws that allow male relatives to annul vows made by women, and customs that frame women as property all work to control the procreative abilities of women.
Speaker 2:The systems of power governing women's bodies have existed from the dawn of time. Systems of power that remove agency and reduce safety and increase vulnerability in the lives of the most vulnerable are unfortunately a reality for generations worth of folks. There's little comfort when we read the text in a world today that perpetuates cycles of violence, but I do believe that there is comfort in the way that Tamer moves her story forward. It's unsettling, but it's remarkable how Tamer propels herself out of the grim shadows in a really, really brave way. So let's keep reading.
Speaker 2:After a long time, Judah's wife, the daughter of Shua, died. And when Judah had recovered from his grief, he went up to Timnah to the men who were shearing his sheep. And his friend Hirad the Abdulamite went with him. When Tamar was told, your father-in-law is on his way to Timnah to shear his sheep, she took off her widow's clothes and covered herself with a veil to disguise herself and then sat down at the entrance to Anaim, which is on the road to Timnah. For she saw that though Shelah had grown up, she had not been given to him as a wife.
Speaker 2:When Judah saw her, he thought that she was a prostitute for she had covered her face. Not realizing that she was his daughter-in-law, he went over to her by the roadside and said, come now, let me sleep with you. And what will you give me to sleep with you? She asks. Well, I'll send you a young goat from my flock, he said.
Speaker 2:Will you give me something as a pledge until you send it? She says. And Judah says, what pledge should I give you? Tamar says, Your seal and its cord and the staff in your hand. So, he gave them to her and slept with her and she became pregnant by him.
Speaker 2:After she left, she took off her veil and put on her widow's clothes again. Okay. Alright. So, there's a lot going on here for sure. And if you sense a bit of uncertainty around Tamar's actions, if you don't necessarily agree with her cleverly concocted but ethically questionable behavior here, that's fine.
Speaker 2:If you feel unease about the patriarch of a Judean nation hiring a sex worker after his wife dies, that's fine too. You're supposed to. The Bible often pushes us to consider situations and ethics that come from way out of left field in order to help us understand that the world is far more complex than we might imagine, and that we can empathize with far more people than we think we're capable of. These texts and the people living in them will make us uncomfortable, but if we believe that the divine lives and moves and has being in all places at all time, let's suspend our judgment for just a moment. Instead, let's look for what's beneath the surface.
Speaker 2:So, while Judah forces Tamar in this moral dilemma, he's also battling an ethical conflict of his own. He's plagued by his own traumatic past that Judah carries a complex history into this new generation. So it's not at all surprising when faced with another threat to generational security, he looks out for himself before anybody else. However, little did he know that Tamar is even more willing to go to great lengths to feel safe, carrying just as much pain and trauma and fear about her own future. Of course, these choices aren't entirely representative of these two people.
Speaker 2:They are decisions made out of desperation, of self preservation, of pride, and grief. And like Tamar, the sex workers that you see in the downtown core, the clients who frequent safe consumption sites, the couple living under a tarp by the Peace Bridge, there's so much more than what what meets the eye there. Kmart didn't enter this story wanting to trick her father-in-law into sex. The vulnerable folks in her city didn't enter this world wanting to live on the fringes of society. Hardships and broken promises, threats to safety drive people into moral dilemmas.
Speaker 2:Perhaps you've found yourself at a fork in the road and both paths tested every page of your ethical rule book. Perhaps an older version of you made the wrong decision and you hurt someone because you were hurt or you led with hatred because deep down that's what the world taught you about yourself. Just know that like Tamar and Judah and David and Bathsheba and all the other narratives left for us to explore, you are so much more than your worst decision. That's not how I see you, that's not how this biblical author sees you, and that's not how God sees you either. Like you, the divine is not finished with these two.
Speaker 2:No. No. We still have so much more to learn from them. If we keep reading, after a while, Judah sends his friend, the Adullamite, with the young goats so that he could get his pledge back. His friends asked these men where is the shined prostitute who was beside the road at Anaheim?
Speaker 2:And the men reply, well, there hasn't been a shined prostitute here. He reports this back to Judah who says, fine, let her keep what she has or we will become a laughing stock. After all, I did send her this young goat, but she didn't find her. Three months later, Judah finds out that Tamar is guilty of prostitution and is expecting a child. And when he hears this, Judah hastily orders, bring her out and have her burned to death.
Speaker 2:When she's brought out, here's what Tamar has to say. I am pregnant by the man who owns these. See if you recognize whose seal and cord and staff these are. And Judah recognized them, and he said that she is more righteous than I. Boom.
Speaker 2:Mic drop moment. I told you this is riveting. I mean, can't you just picture it? The flutter in her belly from the sweet babies she's wanted so desperately, the pounding in her heart wondering if the deadly risks she took will pan out? And it does.
Speaker 2:She did it. Tamar finds her voice and takes her life back. Now, some commentators say that this is a story about two people who make bad choices, but God uses their bad behavior to accomplish God's purposes. Many chastise Tamar forgetting that Judah carries just as much blame here. Tamar often carries the burden of these interpretations.
Speaker 2:A common reading accuses her of prostitution, of adultery, of incest, deceit, revenge, immodesty, that's a long list. If only Tamar had been more patient, God would have rewarded her. And you and I both know the sting of an if only. If only you'd prayed harder. If only you just calmly talk things through.
Speaker 2:If only you'd had a little bit more faith. If only you just stop yelling and be less aggressive. And if onlys are rarely, if ever, a source of comfort when you know that on the other side of that sentence is a system that has no concern for your freedom. Martin Luther King highlights this experience in our modern day. The experience of being told to just wait idly by for justice to find its way to your opened and shaking hands, as if that has ever worked.
Speaker 2:In the mid nineteen sixties, MLK wrote from a Birmingham jail in response to eight clergymen who pled with doctor King to postpone all protests in Birmingham, Alabama. MLK sought nonviolent protests because while his kids were segregated in disintegrating schools, and while his community lived in abject poverty, while violence and the threat of death was all he and the people around him knew, the authorities around him told him, just wait, sit down, speak calmly, three centuries worth. Here's what MLK pens behind bars in response. When you're harried by the day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments. When you're forever fighting a degenerating sense of nobody ness, then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.
Speaker 2:There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. In response to questions about unlawful protests, these moral and ethical dilemmas, he says an unjust law is no law at all. Now, you might say that Tamar and Martin Luther King are worlds apart, but the point remains. When vulnerable people are continuously oppressed, when they're told to sit pretty and wait for justice to come their way, when their voice isn't heard, when cries aren't acknowledged, when they're told to hold out hope and that's all they've ever been doing, The time comes when compliance is suffocating. When the knee of oppression pressing down on your airways has to move and you just need to find a way to breathe.
Speaker 2:Tamar had to be her own heroine. She sought out her own justice, but the divine meets her there, protects her amidst a risky plan, and with the blessing of two baby boys, reassures her that, yes, she does get a chance at a decent life. I want us to also note this critical comment by Judah. She is more righteous than I. Judah speaks the truth here.
Speaker 2:He acquits Tamar while simultaneously confessing his own shortcomings. This is remarkable. It's rare to see such an honest change of heart, and I'm grateful that it's here in the text. And this powerful word righteous, it eclipses the previous title of prostitute or whore. Tamar isn't defined by her worst day, neither are you, and you know what?
Speaker 2:Neither is Judah. Because in later chapters, Judah eventually reconciles with his brother, Joseph. Remember, the one he sold into slavery? How could you forget? This is a gargantuan change in character.
Speaker 2:It's beautiful and it leads us to believe that perhaps he learned something from the most unsuspecting person. The woman he so badly wanted to get rid of helped him find his way back to the brother he'd once rid himself of too. What I love most about this story, and what I hope that you do too, is how without even knowing it, they moved towards their better future. A future where there was forgiveness and new beginnings and something better up ahead. Judah becomes merciful and forgives, and Tamar's name is exalted.
Speaker 2:She gives birth to two to twins and finds herself central in Christ's own lineage. If you've ever found yourself wondering if your voice, if your story will always remain on the margins, if there's room for you to move with power and dignity in this world, this story is for you. Tamar is your icon. In a weird way, the story gives us a happy ending. So, when you find yourself in a shadow story, keep going.
Speaker 2:Know that you're resourceful, march towards the light and find your voice there. All of our stories are full of strange surprises, blessed little surprises worthy of being discovered. Let us pray. God who seeks us out, Help us to make sense of our stories, how they form us to believe that love is scarce and tumultuous and elusive. Grant us the vision to see ourselves as you see us, as loved and lovely, worthy of goodness and joy.
Speaker 2:Reveal to us this truth so that we might reveal it to those around us. Thank you for wanting more from us than a life in hiding. Thank you for that welcoming light you draw us into. Amen.