Tamar: Seven Verses from Judah's House to the Genealogy of Christ

A Woman of the Patriarchal Age

Tamar (תָּמָר) belongs to the age of the patriarchs, an era placed around 1996 BC to 1635 BC on Ussher's chronology (1650). She is known in Scripture by a small number of verses: four in Genesis, one in Ruth, one in 1 Chronicles, one in Matthew. Seven verses in all, and never more than a single verse at a time. She is introduced not by her ancestry but by her marriage: "Judah took a wife for Er, his firstborn, and her name was Tamar" (Genesis 38:6). That is the whole of her introduction. No father, no mother, no clan.

It is worth saying at the outset that her name also belongs to a place and to others, so many occurrences of the word "Tamar" in the Bible have nothing to do with this woman. What follows stays with the verses that do.

Named, and Then Sent Away

The first thing we learn about Tamar is that she was given. Judah took her as a wife for his firstborn son (Genesis 38:6). She enters the record as an object of someone else's arrangement.

The next verse that names her shows the arrangement collapsing: "Then Judah said to Tamar, his daughter-in-law, 'Remain a widow in your father's house, until Shelah, my son, is grown up;' for he said, 'Lest he also die, like his brothers.' Tamar went and lived in her father's house" (Genesis 38:11). Two things stand in that verse, and they do not sit easily together. There is a promise, Shelah when he is grown. And there is a reason that is not the promise, spoken by Judah to himself: fear that this woman is connected with the deaths of his sons. The text puts the spoken word and the unspoken motive side by side and lets the reader see the gap. Tamar hears only the first half. She goes, and she lives in her father's house, waiting.

The third verse is a report reaching her: "Tamar was told, 'Behold, your father-in-law is going up to Timnah to shear his sheep'" (Genesis 38:13). She is on the receiving end of news. Judah is on the road.

The fourth is the report going the other way: "About three months later, Judah was told, 'Tamar, your daughter-in-law, has played the prostitute. Moreover, behold, she is with child by prostitution.' Judah said, 'Bring her out, and let her be burned'" (Genesis 38:24). Between verse 13 and verse 24 the dossier of verses that name her is silent, and three months have passed.

The Accusation and the Sentence

Honesty about Tamar means not softening Genesis 38:24. The charge brought against her is that she has played the prostitute, and the evidence is her pregnancy. The man who hears the charge is the man who sent her home to wait for Shelah, and his judgment is immediate and lethal: bring her out and burn her. The same chapter that records his promise records his verdict.

The verses that name Tamar do not give us her words in her own defence. Her voice is not quoted in any of the seven. What we have of her is what others say about her, what is done to her, and what she bears.

And what she bears is recorded without comment: "Tamar his daughter-in-law bore him Perez and Zerah. All the sons of Judah were five" (1 Chronicles 2:4). The chronicler, centuries later, keeps her name in the register, and keeps the phrase "his daughter-in-law" in it too. The relationship is not scrubbed. She is also named at Ruth 4:12.

What We Do Not Know

Scripture does not name her parents. No tribe and no people are given for her. We do not know her age, her death, or where she was buried. The wider account of Genesis 38 moves around her, but the verses that actually name her are single, scattered lines: a marriage note, an instruction, a message received, an accusation, and then genealogies. Anyone who claims to know more about Tamar than this is working from somewhere other than the text.

The Line to Christ

The New Testament names her once. "Judah became the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar. Perez became the father of Hezron. Hezron became the father of Ram" (Matthew 1:3). Matthew did not have to include her. Genealogies in that register commonly run father to son. But her name stands there, in the opening lines of the Gospel, attached to the two sons she bore.

The woman accused in Genesis 38:24 and sentenced to the fire is the woman named in Matthew 1:3. Both verses are Scripture, and the second does not erase the first. It simply carries her name forward, into the line that runs through Hezron and Ram and onward. Tamar has no speech recorded, no ancestry, no tribe. She has sons, and she has a place in that list.