Abstract
Is Tamar among the matriarchs? At first glance, not at all. She draws a striking contrast to precedent in her identity, her fertility, her breach of bridal convention, and most significantly the antagonism and absence of God in her procreative plight. Yet her story still alludes extensively to the matriarchal experience, suggesting that she is perhaps a matriarch after all, but one on whom matriarchy fits differently. This study accordingly explores how Tamar might stretch and develop matriarchal identity. In particular, it draws special attention to a resonance between her experience and a narrative trend in Genesis of divine absence and human responsibility. Exploring the conceptual possibilities of “godlessness” through the thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and other theologians who have traced the contours of God in powerlessness and suffering, this study suggests that, as a godless matriarch, Tamar is perhaps closer to God. Perhaps among the matriarchs she helps to introduce Bonhoeffer’s “God of the Bible, who gains ground and power in the world by being powerless.”
Introduction
Is Tamar among the matriarchs? At first glance, not at all. First, unlike previous matriarchs, she hails not from within the safe bounds of the ancestral family but from untold lineage in Canaanite land. Second, she does not share the archetypal experience of a barren womb. Third, as a bride she falls short of the matriarchal mold, securing her place in the ancestral family not through the sentimental greeting-by-the-water and subsequent patriarchal negotiation, but through a sequence of events that perverts and then inverts the patriarchal conventions for union. Finally, and perhaps most damning of all, she receives no divine aid. The character of God is seemingly antagonistic toward her procreative plight and then strangely absent from it.
On the surface, Tamar’s peculiarities paint a parody of a matriarch. Throughout her story, thematic and lexical allusions call to mind her matriarchal predecessors, but each allusion falls short of its own suggestion. Tamar, it appears, is a mockery of a matriarch.
Even so, Tamar does accomplish the reputed objective of an ancestral matriarch. She bears offspring, and, in a particularly propitious manner, twins. This achievement revives the question. Is Tamar among the matriarchs? At second glance, her matriarchal shortcomings do form a rather comprehensive list. Such frequent allusion to the matriarchal experience suggests that perhaps Tamar is a matriarch after all, but one on whom matriarchy fits differently. In other words, the extensive allusions may prove Tamar’s place among the matriarchs even as they suggest a different kind of matriarch. Perhaps they stretch matriarchal identity to include her different experience.
This study, then, will trace the matriarchal contours of Tamar in comparison with her forerunners, first showing how she seems to fall short of their standard, and then exploring whether her character might not be read in fact as a development of matriarchal identity. Drawing special attention to a resonance between her experience and a narrative trend in Genesis of divine absence and human responsibility, it will ask whether Tamar’s character might not exhibit the growing maturity of matriarchal characters, and of human characters in general.
A mockery of a matriarch
Doubtful ancestry
Tamar is a stranger, unidentified by ethnicity or land of origin. She enters the story on the heels of Judah’s nameless wife, who is the daughter of a Canaanite man (Gen 38:2, 6). As Judah has settled in Canaanite territory, it is only natural to assume that Tamar too is a Canaanite, a woman of the land. 1
It is no secret how the ancestral family feels about marriage with Canaanites. Abraham makes his servant swear to find a wife for his son Isaac “not from the daughters of the Canaanites” but rather from his own land and kindred (Gen 24:2–4). Isaac and Rebekah uphold a similar standard. Embittered by their elder son Esau’s marriages with “women of the land” (Gen 26:34–35; 27:46), they direct their younger son Jacob toward family (Gen 27:43–28:2). Abraham’s original prohibition echoes anew in the voice of his son: “You shall not marry from the daughters of Canaan” (Gen 28:1). The memory of this repeated warning against “the daughters of [the] Canaan[ites]” casts suspicion over Tamar’s character. A stranger in Canaanite land, she is not a matriarch who would meet with the approval of the ancestral family.
The examples of Ishmael and Esau serve to confirm the censure with which the ancestral family greets exogamous marriage, that is, marriage outside the family. Both Ishmael and Esau marry wives from outside the family: Ishmael marries a woman from the land of Egypt (Gen 21:21), and Esau marries two Canaanite women and a daughter of Ishmael (Gen 28:8–9; cf. 36:2–3). Ishmael and Esau also represent the two main “disinherited” figures of the ancestral family—sons who ultimately lose their place in the family. Whether their marriages cause the break from the family or are simply symptoms of the break, their correlation with disinheritance throws doubt on exogamy as an acceptable ancestral practice. A proper matriarch, it seems, is one who fastens a patriarch even more firmly to the ancestral family. Here Tamar misses the mark. A stranger in the land of Canaan, she more resembles the wives of the disinherited than she does the mothers of the ancestral promise.
A fertile womb and no divine aid
Tamar’s name hints at another difference between her and the matriarchs. Meaning “palm tree,” the name Tamar suggests fertility. 2 Previous matriarchs battle with barrenness, or at the very least blocked wombs. Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel all have trouble enough bearing children that the narrator designates them as “barren” (ʻqrh), a descriptor of the inability to have children (Gen 11:30; 25:21; 29:31). Although Leah does not receive the same designation, she must nevertheless have her womb “opened” before she can begin to bear children (Gen 29:31). This opening, in fact, flags a fundamental dimension of matriarchal childbearing: divine intervention.
Eve’s declaration at the birth of Cain—“I have acquired a man with [the help of] the LORD” (Gen 4:1)—sets the precedent for mothers in Genesis, and matriarchs in particular. In one way or another, God is nearly always involved in the procreative process. Thus the narrator attributes Sarah’s childbearing to divine fulfillment (Gen 21:1–2); Rebekah conceives only after Isaac prays to the Lord and the Lord grants his prayer (Gen 25:21); Leah attributes her childbearing to God in five of the six names she gives (Gen 29:32–33, 35; 30:18, 20); Rachel ascribes Bilhah’s first surrogate birth to divine judgment in her favor (Gen 30:6); and the narrator notes that God opens Rachel’s womb before her first childbearing experience, after which Rachel attributes her son’s birth to God and gives him a name indicating her hope that God will repeat the deed (Gen 30:22–24).
So involved is God in these births that God regularly appears to usurp the patriarch’s procreative role. In the stories of Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel, the verbs that precipitate matriarchal conception belong not to the future father but to God (Gen 21:1; 25:21; 30:22). 3 The matriarchs conceive, the narrative seems to say, not only because of their husbands but also and more importantly because of God. Jacob infers this when he responds to Rachel’s cry for children: “Am I in the place of God?” (Gen 30:2). In the world of the ancestral family, God is a procreative partner of the matriarchs.
Tamar could hardly be further from the matriarchs in her procreative experience. If her name suggests a fruitful womb, then her encounter with Judah, which may be her first full experience of intercourse, proves it. She is fertile enough to bear offspring from the single occasion. Yet over the course of the story in Genesis 38, Tamar struggles to bear offspring. In this way her experience bears resemblance to that of the matriarchs. 4 But that resemblance is inverted. For the barrier that bars her from bearing is not barrenness but her procreative partners, both men and God. Her first two husbands shortchange her. Both die young, and one actively forestalls conception by spilling his seed on the ground. More interesting, however, is the fact that God causes their deaths. Rather than acting as a procreative partner for Tamar, God only complicates the procreative process. On the face of the story, then, God does not support Tamar the way God supports other matriarchs.
A perverse and reversed betrothal
When Judah goes up to Timnah and encounters Tamar at the entrance to Enaim (ʻynym), their experience invokes the outlines of a betrothal scene. Not only does the narrator refer to Tamar as Judah’s klh, which here means “daughter-in-law” but can also mean “bride” (Gen 38:11, 16), 5 Judah also meets her at a location suggestive of water. While Enaim serves primarily as a place name, it may also be translated “two springs.” 6 This connotation calls to mind the spring of water by which Isaac’s servant meets Rebekah (Gen 24:16) and also the well at which Jacob meets Rachel (Gen 29:10), for elsewhere the narrator uses “well” (b’r) interchangeably with “spring” (ʻyn). 7
Thus, Judah’s encounter with Tamar recalls a common type-scene: a betrothal by water. 8 In its two famous examples in Genesis, the patriarch or his representative journeys into foreign territory and meets the future bride by a body of water. 9 A sentimental scene follows, in which the future bride captivates her male audience. Thus, the narrator shares what Isaac’s servant sees, namely a “very beautiful girl,” and Jacob responds to Rachel’s arrival with a show of bravado and then a tearful kiss. Afterwards the girl “runs” home to her family to share news of the newcomer’s arrival. Then follows a negotiation between the patriarch or his representative and a man of the household, in which the men establish the terms of the betrothal.
Judah and Tamar’s “betrothal” may happen near a body of water, but there the comparison ends. The typical sentimentality of the type-scene is perverted by Tamar’s true identity, and the standard patriarchal negotiation that completes the ancestral union features a stunning reversal of gender roles in which Tamar invokes the modest matriarchal initiative of her predecessors but then far eclipses it.
The narrative dramatizes the perversion of the betrothal by drawing attention to Tamar’s identity, which is anything but bridal. First it foreshadows the betrothal with the mention of Judah’s consolation (nḥm) over his deceased wife (Gen 38:12). The most immediate precedent to this behavior is Jacob’s mourning (nḥm) just one chapter earlier (Gen 37:35), but earlier in Genesis Isaac finds consolation (nḥm) from his mother’s death when he consummates his marriage with Rebekah (Gen 24:67). By itself, the mention of Judah’s consolation does little to evoke a betrothal scene, but soon thereafter Tamar covers (ksh) herself with a veil (ʻṣyp), which Rebekah herself had done just before meeting Isaac (Gen 24:65). 10 Even as this maneuver marks Tamar with the mannerism of a former matriarch, it also underscores the difference between Tamar and the matriarchs. Whereas, before, a veil-covering had identified a bride, here it serves an altogether different purpose. When Judah sees Tamar’s covered face, he will think she is a prostitute (Gen 38:15). The kaleidoscope of identities here ironizes Tamar’s claim to matriarchy, for she fails at being a bride in two ways. First, her veil-covering does not signify a bride but a prostitute. Second, as the narrator reminds us, she is not simply a prostitute but more importantly the klh of Judah (Gen 38:16), which here does not mean bride, but rather daughter-in-law. Dress as a bride she may, but her identity here is everything but bridal. She is instead an anonymous prostitute in the eyes of Judah and family in the eyes of the narrator and his audience.
As in the original betrothal type-scene, Judah and Tamar’s encounter leads to a negotiation, albeit one that has nothing to do with betrothal. Here Tamar demonstrates a familiar trait of preceding matriarchs: initiative. Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah all demonstrate a self-motivated character at key junctures in their lives. Sarah, Rachel, and Leah take recourse to surrogate mothers when they themselves are unable to bear children. Rebekah intervenes in the lives of her sons and husband, ensuring that Jacob receives the blessing of the firstborn, protecting him, and steering him in the direction of her brother so that he might marry within the family. Similarly, Tamar takes initiative in her own plight.
One might say that like the matriarchs before her, Tamar has also taken recourse to surrogacy. The strange manner of Tamar’s surrogacy, becoming her own surrogate, “posing as another woman herself,” 11 marks the drastic extent of her initiative. In what follows, she goes so far beyond her forerunners that one might question whether her initiative identifies her as a matriarch or sets her apart from the group.
Normally in a betrothal scene the matriarch-to-be proceeds from being the object of a man’s gaze to being an object that is “given” and/or “taken.” 12 Here, however, Tamar drives both the inaugural moment of perception and the subsequent transaction. First, she “sees” (r’h) before Judah does (Gen 38:14–15). At this juncture in the story, she is the subject whose interests propel the encounter, not Judah. The place of their encounter, ptḥ ʻynym, accentuates Tamar’s superior awareness. Alternatively translated “the opening of the eyes,” it suggests that now Tamar sees things for what they are. 13 Judah, on the other hand, cannot recognize his own daughter-in-law.
Next, Tamar negotiates the payment for herself. Unlike the patriarchs before him, Judah does no taking (lqḥ) here. Instead he finds himself doing the paradigmatic reverse: giving (ntn; 38:16–18). He gives to Tamar the promise of a future payment, a pledge item, and ultimately a son. The conception that follows this negotiation, wthr lw (Gen 38:18), underlines Tamar’s strangeness among the matriarchs and biblical women in general. This formulation occurs only once in the Bible. It resembles a typical phrase for an instance of childbirth, yld l- (e.g., Gen 17:21; 30:17). But whereas the latter indicates that the woman has borne a son to or for the patriarch, the anomalous expression of Tamar’s conception points in a different direction. While it could mean that Tamar has conceived to or for Judah, 14 most translations instead interpret that Judah is not the beneficiary of the deed but rather the means by which it is achieved. 15 In other words, Tamar conceives by him. In this parodic reversal of a betrothal negotiation, the woman’s gaze initiates the encounter, her terms drive it, she is not taken but instead the one taking, and her end is prioritized. Here, the offspring is not a product born for the patriarch, but a result won from him. Interestingly, the marked gender inversion of this scene matches one other story in Genesis. The daughters of Lot also usurp the male initiative, lexically as well as logistically, for they do what is normally reserved for men: they “go into” and “lie” with their partner, who is also, as it happens, a father figure. 16 This parallel would only serve to distance Tamar from her matriarchal predecessors. It suggests that she is as much of a matriarch as Lot’s daughters, which is to say, not at all.
Summary
On the face of the story, then, Tamar is a mockery of a matriarch. Her identity and her experience both stand in stark contrast with her predecessors. First, as a stranger in the land of Canaan, her entrance into the ancestral family does not abide by the endogamous standard. Second, neither does she struggle with barrenness nor does her help come from God. Rather, she is apparently fertile and her struggle is seemingly against God, insomuch as God eliminates her first two husbands. Finally, her momentous encounter with Judah at the entrance to Enaim initiates a perverse and reversed “betrothal” scene, where the sentimental encounter between patriarch and bride (klh) is in fact the meeting of a father and his daughter-in-law (klh), and the bridal attire (ṣʻyp) signifies a prostitute, where the woman’s gaze initiates the negotiations instead of the man’s and she is given payment rather than given in return for payment, and where she is the beneficiary and the man is the means, rather than the other way around.
Some women in Genesis, like the wives of Ishmael and Esau, marry into the lineage of the ancestral family but just as quickly find themselves on the outside. At this point in the ancestral narrative, several large doubts loom over the place of Tamar. As readers who know the outcome of the biblical story, who know that Judah’s name is eponymous with an Israelite kingdom, we do not experience these uncertainties. But when we suspend our foreknowledge, we discover an uncertain drama in the question of Tamar’s ancestral standing.
On the surface, she is a mockery of a matriarch, destined for exclusion. But if we consider her character more deeply, we begin to discover other possibilities.
… Or just a different kind of matriarch?
Tamar’s story contains several allusions to the experience of her matriarchal forerunners: the question of ancestry, a procreative predicament, a betrothal scene, a display of matriarchal initiative. Taken individually, each allusion falls short. The expectations raised by each allusion meet with contradiction: a woman likely of Canaanite lineage, who is not barren but fertile, who does not receive God’s aid but if anything encounters divine opposition, who is no “bride” but in fact a daughter-in-law, whose story’s resolution comes not through marriage and the patriarchal negotiations of fathers and husbands but through a simulated act of prostitution and an excessive display of matriarchal initiative. Thus, the matriarchal allusions fail to take root. The story appears to expose each allusion as a fraud and suggest that Tamar is likewise a fraud of a matriarch.
But incongruous allusions can point more than one way. Just as it is possible that these allusions are parodies, calling into question the qualification of Tamar as a matriarch, so also it is possible that they call into question the matriarchal model. Valentin Voloshinov and Mikhail Bakhtin, two influential twentieth century philosophers of language, explore this phenomenon as it relates to quotation or “reported speech.” Normally the author maintains an authorial relation to that which she quotes. She controls the reported speech inasmuch as she selects which words to quote and frames them with her own commentary. As Voloshinov points out, however, in some cases
the verbal dominant may shift to the reported speech, which in that case becomes more forceful and more active than the authorial context framing it. This time the reported speech begins to resolve, as it were, the reporting context, instead of the other way around.
17
Transposed to the use of allusions, this idea might reach a similar conclusion: if the allusions achieve a level of coherence on their own that rivals the power of the way they are used, then they might offer an alternative meaning. Bakhtin broaches this idea in his discussion of parody:
[A] heightening of activity on the part of the [parodied] discourse is also possible. When parody senses a fundamental resistance, a certain strength and depth to the parodied words of the other, the parody becomes complicated by tones of hidden polemic. Such parody already has a different sound to it. The parodied discourse rings out more actively, exerts a counterforce against the author’s intentions.
18
Bakhtin thus suggests the irrelevance of intention. Regardless of what an author or narrator might be held to mean, the “strength and depth” of the parodied elements might afford them an agency of their own, independent from the control of the author. Bakhtin’s reference to parody clues us in to how we might read the allusions of the Tamar story, for the allusions in her story indeed seem parodic. They are failed and distorted imitations of that to which they refer. But by Bakhtin’s thinking, if the allusions resonate with one another and achieve an integrity of their own, then they might together “[exert] a counterforce” against the suggestion that each allusion is a failure, and likewise that Tamar is a failure of matriarch. In other words, instead of mocking Tamar as a matriarch, the allusions might serve to make a point about both Tamar and matriarchy.
This effect might be illumined with a brief analogy. The resistance of parodied elements is like the effect of the following description: “It is covered in fur, but it’s nothing like a cat. It has a tail, but it’s nothing like a cat. It has whiskers, but it’s nothing like a cat. It pounces on mice, but it’s nothing like a cat,” and so on. While the description maintains, “It’s nothing like a cat,” the descriptive contents themselves begin to suggest otherwise. Perhaps this cat is nothing like the traditional cat. Perhaps it is different. But the description evokes the image of a cat. In a similar way, when parodied elements are collectively coherent they might conspire together and become a counterforce against the suggested parody.
Such might be the case with Genesis 38. Beyond all the non-ancestral trappings of the story—Tamar’s exogamous entry into the family, her fertility, God’s seeming indifference or even opposition to her plight, the gender inversion by which she resolves her predicament—there persists an experience that resonates with matriarchy. Tamar lives through the drama associated with a betrothal, endures a procreative dilemma, responds by taking the initiative, and ultimately bears twins whose primogeniture is contested. Although various allusions in the story fall short individually, together they still recall the fundamentals of a matriarchal experience, thus proposing that Tamar may be a matriarch after all, albeit different than any we have seen before.
Following the lead of this suggestion, what remains for this study is to explore how Tamar’s difference might meaningfully develop the figure of the matriarch. The most salient aspect of Tamar’s difference, and perhaps the most fecund, is God’s relation to her. In the first half of the story, the divine character takes up an antagonistic position insofar as the deaths of Er and Onan hinder Tamar from childbearing. This apparently adversarial position draws a striking contrast to the previous relations between the ancestral family and God, in which God promised to multiply the ancestral offspring, not subtract from it. In the latter half of the story, God goes strangely missing. As conspicuous as God is in the conceptions and childbearing of previous matriarchs, so is God absent in the conception and childbearing of Tamar.
For the sake of distinguishing Tamar from her predecessors, we might call her the “godless” matriarch, for there is nothing in her story to suggest that God is with her as God had been with preceding matriarchs. Either God is against her or absent from her plight.
Perhaps closer to God
The godlessness of the Tamar story corresponds with a general trend in the narrative of Genesis. The sole character at the story’s start, God recedes in both visibility and agency as the story progresses. The story becomes increasingly “godless” as God becomes more absent and less active.
Godlessness in Genesis
Richard Elliott Friedman considers Genesis particularly illustrative in its development of the divine character. Reading a similar development over the course of the Hebrew Bible, he interprets Genesis as a “microcosm” of the biblical relationship between God and humanity. 19 As in the grand biblical narrative, so in its first book: the divine character’s agency diminishes, and humans assume more personality and responsibility.
Friedman traces this trend through the characters of the first humans, Noah, Abraham, Rebekah and Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph.
20
At the beginning, the divine character is intimately involved in the lives of humanity. God personally disciplines the first humans, who show little responsibility and appear “childlike” in their simple act of disobedience.
21
God addresses Noah personally too, although Noah demonstrates more responsibility and initiative than the first humans, as he builds an ark, plants a vineyard, gets drunk, and confers upon his children curses and blessings. This human agency and determination grows even further in the character of Abraham, who regularly engages in dialogue with God and even voices doubts and challenges God’s judgment (cf. Gen 15:2, 8; 18:22–33). God’s diminishing role becomes more evident in the transition to the next generation. In the tale of Abraham’s servant and his visit with the family of Laban, God becomes a figure of speech rather than a figure operating decisively within the narrative itself. The divine character falls further to the sidelines in what follows. For whereas God had directly designated Isaac as the heir of the covenant, Rebekah and Isaac play a decisive role in directing the covenant through Jacob. Even as it becomes clear in the story of Jacob that God still intrudes into human affairs, so it also becomes evident that humans are now claiming the power to determine their own future. Jacob sets conditions on the developing relationship between him and God (Gen 28:20–22), after which he even fights a character whom he identifies as God.
22
The divine–human balance completes its reversal in the story of Joseph. As Friedman observes, in Joseph’s character,
Genesis arrives at a point at which God is working behind the scenes (39:2–3, 21, 23; 45:5–9) while a man controls a divine power enough that he must persist in informing people that the power is really God’s and not the man’s.
23
Hugh C. White expounds upon this point with the argument that Joseph uses God, rather than vice versa. Earlier in the narrative, God had determined the path of the human characters. By the Joseph story, however, God has been largely reduced to a figure of the human characters’ dialogue, a tool of persuasive speech. When Joseph ascribes his family’s reunion in Egypt to divine providence, his evaluation does not stand in for the narrator’s. Rather, “this view is being presented to the brothers in direct discourse as a means of persuasion … It is the utterance by Joseph of this statement which releases the power to bring about this end [of reunion].” 24
Friedman points out that as human characters take on more responsibility, so they also assume more developed personalities. In God’s absence, they appear to mature. Thus, characters like Jacob and Joseph demonstrate much more depth than the relatively one-dimensional characters of the first humans and Noah. Jacob transforms from an energetic go-getter who is unafraid to deceive others into a relatively helpless father who is deceived by his own sons. And Joseph, who at first seems uncomprehending of his own dreams and guileless in his sharing of them, becomes a wise and sensitive man who interprets the dreams of others and forgives his brothers for their offense against him. 25 As several other scholars have noted, Judah too undergoes a metamorphosis from a self-seeking prodigal son to a responsible and caring leader among his brothers. 26
W. Lee Humphreys encapsulates this outline of divine absence and human development with an astute observation about the means of God’s characterization. What Friedman and White spotted in the situation of Joseph—namely, a God no longer objectively represented by the narrator but rather constructed through the assertion of human characters—Humphreys discerns in increasing measure throughout the narrative of Genesis:
We move from a preponderance of narrator’s notices of God’s actions and speeches, occasionally tempered by notices of God’s thoughts and feelings, to a significance [sic] reliance on what other characters say about God as a character in stories they construct.
27
He highlights several points of this progression, drawing attention to the way that the human characters use God to confirm their own agenda:
The depiction of a God who guides Abraham’s servant to the right place and woman to secure a wife for his master’s son, and who nicely observes the script set by the servant as a sign of God’s designs [Gen 24] is appealing. Appealing in their own way are Jacob’s and his wives’ constructions of God as one who takes their side to secure their rights in the face of Laban’s alleged exploitation and appropriation of their talents and goods [Gen 31]. Even more so is Joseph’s construction of a God whose providential designs for life and good can catch up and transpose the desires and actions of a family, apparently bent on self-destruction, into relief and regeneration for the elect family [Gen 45]. But as appealing as these depictions are, we cannot forget that they are constructions by other characters in the story-world of Genesis.
By the end of Genesis, God has effectively moved from creator to construct, thus completing a reversal of divine and human agency. As God becomes increasingly absent from the scene, so human characters speak more about God and take more responsibility for proceedings.
Godlessness in Bonhoeffer’s thought
The dynamic of divine and human agency in Genesis echoes a curious thought that Bonhoeffer explored in his letters from prison. Bonhoeffer discerned in his world a “movement toward human autonomy,” a “discovery of the laws by which the world lives and manages its affairs in science, in society and government, in art, ethics, and religion.” 28 He called this “the world’s coming of age.” 29 Human beings, he said, had “learned to manage all important issues by themselves.” 30 Rather than explain events through divine agency, people had learned to explain and explore life in other, more immediate terms. Thus, religion and God had been increasingly relegated to the position of a “stopgap” for the few areas of life that remained unsolved. 31 Bonhoeffer observed that people might talk about God as an agent in the world when they approached a boundary of human knowledge or power, like disease or death. 32 Otherwise, they were quite content to speak of life as a matter of its own determination.
Rather than resist this coming of age and its nonreligious interpretation of life, Bonhoeffer embraced it. In his view, it reclaimed an important biblical theme of which religion had lost sight. Whereas much of religion had displaced redemption to an afterlife or an otherworldly explanation, the world come of age looked for redemption “within history, that is, this side of the bounds of death.” 33 For Bonhoeffer, redemption within history was a crucial tenet of the biblical worldview on both sides of the testamental divide, as evidenced in the redemption “out of Egypt and later out of Babylon,” and also in the resurrection that points people to “life on earth in a wholly new way.” 34 Faith was not “an escape route out of … earthly tasks and difficulties into eternity.” 35 Whatever happened later, redemption and resurrection happened here and now. “This-worldliness must not be abolished ahead of its time; on this, NT and OT are united.” 36
In accordance with his this-worldly reading of redemption, and, one might conjecture, in accordance with the dire circumstances of his reality, Bonhoeffer interpreted God first and foremost as a figure of suffering, not as a figure of power but in fact as a figure of powerlessness: “God is weak and powerless in the world and in precisely this way, and only so, is at our side and helps us.”
37
For Bonhoeffer, God acted in the world not as an external agent occasionally intervening but rather as a companion who shares humanity’s suffering and who calls on its heart:
Human religiosity directs people in need to the power of God in the world, God as deus ex machina. The Bible directs people toward the powerlessness and the suffering of God; only the suffering God can help. To this extent, one may say that the … development toward the world’s coming of age, which has cleared the way by eliminating a false notion of God, frees us to see the God of the Bible, who gains ground and power in the world by being powerless.
38
Bonhoeffer’s hermeneutic is only suggestively sketched in his letters, but one can find its traces in recent theology and biblical scholarship. John D. Caputo, for instance, expands on a similar idea in his theology of God’s weakness:
[T]he counterpart of the weakness of God is the responsibility this weakness imposes upon us to be strong, to assume responsibility for ourselves, to take charge of our lives, to answer the call that is issued in the name of God.
39
In other words, God is of the order of call, and humanity is of the order of response: “God insists, while we exist.” 40 For Caputo, as for Bonhoeffer, it is precisely in God’s powerlessness that God gains ground: “God is what God does, and God does what is done in the name of God, which is the birth of God in the world.” 41
Catherine Keller frames this idea in terms of a theology of becoming, which she develops through her interpretation of the biblical creation story. Drawing on the work of William Brown, she reads a basic call and response in the relationship between Creator and creation from the very beginning. She interprets God’s words “let there be” less as monological imperatives and more as dialogical invitations, emphasizing how the earth and the sea have a responsive role to play, how they are invited to “bring forth.” 42 Similarly, one might read even a divine-interventionist story like the exodus through a similar hermeneutic. For at its root, that story is about a cry, the Israelites’, which then becomes God’s, to which Moses is called to respond (cf. Exod 3:9–10).
In blunt fashion, Bonhoeffer calls the powerlessness and suffering of God exactly what it looks like to the world: “godlessness.” In this way, Bonhoeffer hallows godlessness. Godlessness becomes the space in which God shares the world’s suffering and in which God’s call is heard: “The human being is called upon to share in God’s suffering at the hands of a godless world. Thus, we must really live in that godless world and not try to cover up or transfigure its godlessness somehow with religion,” 43 that is, with a God of supernatural power or a God of celestial solutions to whom humanity might displace its own responsibility. For Bonhoeffer, then, faith is accepting this godlessness and responding to the call therein. While others in the world were lamenting the collapse of religion in the face of science or technology or the senseless death of war, Bonhoeffer felt that perhaps this godless world was approaching a more authentic faith. Now, instead of displacing God to the gaps of knowledge or power, to later or to elsewhere, the world was encountering God where God really is: powerlessness and suffering and the call therein. Thus, he could declare: “The world come of age is more godless and perhaps just because of that closer to God than the world not yet come of age.” 44
The godless matriarch
Bonhoeffer’s expression evokes a parallel between his thought and the interpretation of divine agency in Genesis. “The world come of age” suggests a world that has matured. Similarly, Friedman compares the reversal of agency in the biblical narrative to the process of growing up. Noting how in Genesis the characters first appear “childlike” and take little responsibility for their actions but later become “more in control of their destiny,” he muses: “[L]ike children growing and separating from their parents, [is] the biblical story too … about the growing, maturing, and natural separating of humans from their creator and parent?” 45
In both the Genesis that Friedman apprehends and the world that Bonhoeffer envisions, “godlessness” is not so much a declaration of atheism as it is a call to responsibility. The absence of God’s character in the latter stages of Genesis does not mean that God is gone or no longer cares but that now “God gains ground and power in the world” through the divine call of powerlessness and the human response. God does not arrive on the stage of the world as a discrete entity from somewhere else, but inheres within it as a subject who intimately shares the world’s experience and whose call inspires the response of human characters. God no longer acts directly and without mediation; rather, as Caputo puts it, “God does what is done in the name of God.”
In Tamar’s plight, God never appears. Unlike other matriarchs, Tamar must face her predicament alone. The brief divine cameo early in the story only strengthens the sense of her desolation. Whether the summary deaths of her first two husbands are read as objective accounts of divine agency or as the narrator’s interpretation of two inexplicable deaths, they do nothing to suggest God’s concern for Tamar. But it is precisely in this “godless” situation that Tamar demonstrates a radical agency and responsibility that outstrips the matriarchal initiative previously on display.
Whereas previous matriarchs live largely within the parameters of patriarchy, showing initiative by appropriating handmaids as surrogates and influencing the decisions of the patriarchs through plea and suggestion, Tamar stages a comprehensive reversal of gender roles. First, she flouts Judah’s commands. Whereas he commands her to stay (yšb) at home and be a widow (ʼlmnh; v. 11), she does just the opposite, putting aside “the garments of her widowhood (bgdy ʼlmnwth)” and sitting (yšb) away from her home (v. 14). This defiance effectively announces her as an autonomous subject in the story. Now it is her desire that motivates the plot of the story, and it is primarily her gaze, her actions, and her words that direct the plot.
She completes the reversal of gender roles in her encounter with Judah. At the beginning of the story, Judah’s actions repeat the typical procreative sequence of Genesis: seeing (rʼh), taking (lqḥ), and going into, followed by the woman’s conceiving (hrh; vv 2–3). In her encounter with Judah, however, Tamar inflects three of these four actions with feminine initiative. Although Judah does see (rʼh) Tamar and approaches her on the side of the road (v 15), it is ultimately her seeing (rʼh) that initiates the encounter (v 14). Next, instead of Judah taking (lqḥ), he must perform its paradigmatic opposite. He must give (ntn) Tamar what she demands (v 18). Finally, after Judah goes into her, she conceives. But here the singular grammatical formulation (hrh l-) suggests that rather than conceiving in order that she might bear her child for a man, she is instead conceiving by the man. 46 He is the instrument by which she can achieve her own end.
For many readers, Tamar’s unconventional response to her plight raises ethical questions. Although these questions resist easy resolution, what lies beyond doubt is Tamar’s radical agency. She takes remarkable responsibility for the predicament encompassing her and all of Judah’s family. That Judah himself pronounces her righteousness (v 26) and later demonstrates an incredible sense of responsibility himself, selflessly offering himself as a pledge for the release of Benjamin (Gen 43:8–9) and pleading to remain a slave in Egypt so that his brothers may return home (Gen 44:33), suggests that Tamar’s culturally transgressive act may have nonetheless been the (or a) right response. Indeed, it calls to mind Bonhoeffer’s rumination on a radically responsible faith that in the situation of apparent godlessness heeds neither custom nor convention but only the “question and call” of God:
Who stands firm? Only the one whose ultimate standard is not his reason, his principles, conscience, freedom, or virtue; only the one who is prepared to sacrifice all of these when, in faith and in relationship to God alone, he is called to obedient and responsible action. Such a person is the responsible one, whose life is to be nothing but a response to God’s question and call.
47
In this way, Tamar stands for a new kind of matriarch: godless and perhaps closer to God. She is a matriarch fit for her place. For in the increasing godlessness toward the end of Genesis, Tamar is not the only one who stands firm. Like Bonhoeffer’s world “come of age,” the end of Genesis does not feature a deus ex machina but rather characters who take inspiration from God even as they take responsibility for themselves and their world.
Readers commonly interpret the Joseph drama as evidence of divine intervention. They read Joseph’s celebrated summary of the story—“It was not you who sent me here, but God” (Gen 45:8)—not as a character’s interpretation of events but as narrative reality. But what if we read these words simply as God-talk in the mouth of Joseph? While such a hermeneutic removes God as a discrete character in the story, perhaps it also “frees us to see the God of the Bible, who gains ground and power in the world by being powerless.”
As just a name, God seems powerless. But it is precisely in the powerlessness of this name that the characters respond to the world in inspired ways and give flesh to God’s redemption. When Joseph proclaims that God and not his brothers sent him to Egypt, he is not simply making a theological claim. More importantly, he is forgiving his brothers. He is giving a new meaning to a past transgression, crossing through the wrong and no longer holding them to account for it. For Joseph, God is the name by which forgiveness takes flesh.
Similarly, when Joseph’s brothers first discover the added money in their sacks and cry out, “What is this that God has done to us?” (Gen 42:28), and when Judah later accounts for the cup in Benjamin’s sack by saying, “God has found the guilt of your servants” (Gen 44:16), they are not merely speculating theologically. They are coming to terms with their past. The name of God is a call to take responsibility, to confess that they were wrong. God is the name by which repentance takes flesh.
As a discrete character in the Joseph story, God does nothing. But in the powerless name of God, the divine call takes root in the lives of the human characters. God gains ground and power in the world through their responsive acts of forgiveness, confession, and repentance alike.
Conclusion
Is Tamar among the matriarchs? If she is, she is a different kind of matriarch. She is godless, and perhaps just because of that, closer to God. In the godlessness of her predicament, she heeds neither culture nor convention but a deeper call to which she responds. In doing so, she draws justification from the mouth of Judah. Then she bears twins and arguably more. For it is only after his experience with Tamar that Judah demonstrates responsibility in his relationship to God and others. It is also only after his discussion with Judah that Joseph does likewise. In the mouths of Judah and Joseph, the powerless name of God bears the redemptive acts of confession, repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation.
By the end of Genesis, God has left the narrative as a character but has returned as a name, as deeds done in a name, as call married with response (which, come to think of it, is not unlike the way it all began). In the place of a deus ex machina, Tamar has helped to introduce “the God of the Bible, who gains ground and power in the world by being powerless.” 48 Like Bonhoeffer’s coming of age, she “leads us to a truer recognition of our situation before God.” 49 Instead of a redemption beyond death, we find in her story and in the story that follows it “redemption within history,” reconciliation and new life for the ancestral family, and an example, perhaps, for our own world come of age.
Footnotes
1.
Esther Marie Menn, Judah and Tamar (Genesis 38) in Ancient Jewish Exegesis: Studies in Literary Form and Hermeneutics, Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 51 (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 54, conjectures that the lack of ethnic identification for Tamar “may actually reflect the narrator or redactor’s attempt to shield Tamar and her relations with Judah from the pejorative force of the biblical laws and narratives condemning intermarriage with Canaanites.”
2.
Phyllis Bird, Missing Persons and Mistaken Identities: Women and Gender in Ancient Israel (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997), 202, n. 13, and Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Reading the Women of the Bible: A New Interpretation of Their Stories (New York: Schocken, 2002), 266.
3.
Menn, Judah and Tamar, 88, n. 169.
4.
Richard J. Clifford, “Genesis 38: Its Contribution to the Jacob Story,” CBQ 66 (2004): 528, identifies Tamar’s struggle to bear children as a correspondence between her story and previous ancestral childbearing episodes.
5.
Judy Fentress-Williams, “Location, Location, Location: Tamar in the Joseph Cycle,” Bible & Critical Theory 3 (2007): 20.5.
6.
Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis: Chapters 18–50, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 440; Menn, Judah and Tamar, 37, n. 33.
7.
E.g., Gen 24:11, 13, 16, 20.
8.
Laurence A. Turner, Genesis, Readings: A New Biblical Commentary (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 166.
9.
Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 51.
10.
Danna Nolan Fewell and D. M. Gunn, Gender, Power, and Promise: The Subject of the Bible’s First Story (Nashville: Abingdon, 1993), 88; Fentress-Williams, “Location, Location, Location,” 20.5.
11.
Menn, Judah and Tamar, 95.
12.
E.g., see the uses of ntn and lqḥ in Gen 24:51, 61, 67; 29:19.
13.
Carolyn J. Sharp, Irony and Meaning in the Hebrew Bible, ISBL (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 90.
14.
From a cursory review, I could only find one such translation: Young’s Literal Translation.
15.
In the context of Tamar’s overwhelming agency and independence at this stage in the story, this translation makes more sense.
16.
Menn, Judah and Tamar, 97–98. See also Melissa Jackson, “Lot’s Daughters and Tamar as Tricksters and the Patriarchal Narratives as Feminist Theology,” JSOT 26 (2002): 30–35, which offers a more in-depth exploration of the parallels between these two stories. In addition to the basic similarities noted by Menn, Jackson points out that the stories focus on the relationship between a daughter and father figure, involve characters who are effectively widows and widowers, play on the difference between sexual and cognitive knowledge, and present trickster characters as the protagonists.
17.
V. N. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Latislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik, Studies in Language 1 (New York: Seminar, 1973), 121.
18.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson, Theory and History of Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1984), 198.
19.
Richard Elliott Friedman, The Hidden Face of God (San Francisco: Harper, 1995), 39.
20.
Friedman, The Hidden Face of God, 31–40.
21.
Friedman, The Hidden Face of God, 31.
22.
Jack Miles, God: A Biography (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 58–66, perceives a process of divine domestication unfolding earlier in the drama between Abraham and God. In the binding of Isaac, he sees a delicate compromise: Abraham goes through the motions of obeying God, but in ambiguous enough fashion that his ultimate obedience (i.e. sacrificing Isaac) remains a question, while God stops short of demanding Abraham’s unequivocal trust; God does not allow Abraham to follow through with the sacrifice of Isaac (perhaps because God is afraid that Abraham will not and thus God will have no claim to Abraham’s trust). In Miles’s reading, God cuts God’s losses and makes provision for ancestral desires.
23.
Friedman, The Hidden Face of God, 39. Cf. Miles, God, 78, who summarizes: “The Lord God is active and articulate in his relationship with Abraham; it is Abraham, not the Lord God, who keeps silent. In the story of Joseph, by contrast, the Lord God is neither active nor articulate.”
24.
Hugh C. White, “The Joseph Story: A Narrative Which ‘Consumes’ Its Content,” Semeia 31 (1985): 67–68.
25.
Friedman, The Hidden Face of God, 40.
26.
See, e.g., James S. Ackerman, “Joseph, Judah, and Jacob,” in Literary Interpretations of Biblical Narratives, ed. Kenneth R. R. Gros Louis (Nashville: Abingdon, 1982), 85–113; Richard J. Clifford, “Genesis 38: Its Contribution to the Jacob Story,” CBQ 66 (2004): 519–32; Jonathan Grossman, “The Story of Joseph’s Brothers in Light of the ‘Therapeutic Narrative’ Theory,” BibInt 21 (2013): 171–95.
27.
W. Lee Humphreys, The Character of God in the Book of Genesis: A Narrative Appraisal (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2011), 241.
28.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Bonhoeffer Reader, ed. Clifford J. Green and Michael P. DeJonge (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013), 792.
29.
Bonhoeffer, Reader, 794.
30.
Bonhoeffer, Reader, 792.
31.
Bonhoeffer, Reader, 790–91.
32.
Bonhoeffer, Reader, 779. “Religious people speak of God at a point where human knowledge is at an end (or sometimes when they’re too lazy to think further), or when human strength fails. Actually, it’s a deus ex machina.”
33.
Bonhoeffer, Reader, 797.
34.
Bonhoeffer, Reader, 796–97.
35.
Bonhoeffer, Reader, 796–97.
36.
Bonhoeffer, Reader, 797.
37.
Bonhoeffer, Reader, 803.
38.
Bonhoeffer, Reader, 803.
39.
John D. Caputo, The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps, Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 36.
40.
Caputo, The Insistence of God, 13.
41.
Caputo, The Insistence of God, 36.
42.
Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (New York: Routledge, 2003), 116–17.
43.
Bonhoeffer, Reader, 803.
44.
Bonhoeffer, Reader, 804.
45.
Friedman, The Hidden Face of God, 59.
46.
The formulation hrh l- does resemble the common yld l- and remains semantically ambiguous. It could mean “conceive for/to.” In the context of Tamar’s marked agency in this portion of the narrative, and taking into account what seems semantically smoothest, it makes sense to follow the precedent of most translations and render it “conceive by.” Perhaps the semantic ambiguity speaks to the shared desire of Tamar and Judah, for both ultimately desire a son. Thus Tamar both conceives “by” Judah to bear the son she desires, and also conceives “for” Judah the son that he desires.
47.
Bonhoeffer, Reader, 764.
48.
Bonhoeffer, Reader, 803.
49.
Bonhoeffer, Reader, 802.