“Biblical Womanhood” is a pulse-raising phrase that typically describes a set of prescriptive (and subordinating) gender norms based on particular interpretations of selected portions of scripture. Funnily, those selected portions don’t typically include the accounts of actual Biblical women – many of which make for fascinating / inspiring / disturbing / all-round-complicating reading. When they get read at all, that is.
One of my favourites is that of Tamar, through whose initiative God extends the tribe of Judah, establishes the house of King David and, according to the Christian testament, selects the human ancestry of the Messiah. Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus actually goes out of its (patrilinear) way to honour her by name – and yet, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard her mentioned in church. Perhaps because we’re stumped for a Sunday School moral-of-the-story (though we have disturbingly little difficulty deriving neat takeaways from the lives of male biblical “heroes” whose actions give us far more actual cause for discomfort).
She was the centre, you see, of a sex scandal. One that messes with our tidy Christian notions of respectability and culpability and consequence enough to leave us blushing, and confused, and perhaps (for some of us) a little threatened. To briefly summarise from chapter 38 of Genesis:
Tamar is the twice-widowed, childless daughter-in-law of Judah, the founder of one of the twelve tribes of Israel. Now, the custom in many patriarchal clan societies for protecting such women was to marry them to the next available brother-in-law, who would provide socio-economic support for her and a line of descent for the deceased. But Judah has already lost two sons (as he sees it) to Tamar, so he stalls her marriage to his youngest indefinitely.
Realising that Judah has no intention of performing his legal duty, Tamar devises a plan to exact justice for herself and for her late husband. Disguised as a sex worker, she receives Judah’s advances in return for a temporary pledge of some personal belongings, which he fails to redeem as she carefully covers her tracks. Some time later, the news reaches Judah that his daughter-in-law has somehow gotten pregnant; he rails violently against her, summoning her with the intention of burning her to death … until, dun dun daaaa! she produces the pledged items and reality hits him: he is the father! “She is more in the right than I”, he pronounces, acknowledging his guilt in withholding her due. Having addressed the immediate injustice, Tamar’s actions ripple right the way through Hebrew and Christian scripture, as both David’s and Jesus’s ancestry are traced back to Judah via Perez, one of her (twin) sons.
LADY TAMAR
And they said, There was no harlot in this place. (Genesis 38)
Justice is blind, they say; in his case she
Was veiled – and pliable, available,
He reckoned, as he reckoned on a fee
And fronted his position of control.
He got a deal he didn’t bargain for.Justice had been the death of his first hope,
His second coming nowhere, premature,
So he (or so he thought) had shut her up.
Now this. Now then, let justice roll, now, let her burn –
Pluck out the eyesore! sever the loose limb!
A sentence quietly repealed when shown
The pan shot with his figure in the frame.
Justice broke forth as due – but, in a twist
Of grace, her children rose, to find him blessed.
Carolyn Whitnall, 2019 (edited May 2021).
We don’t have to look far to find modern day “Judahs” – people in high places who are quick to shame, and silence, and dismiss those in their power, while slow to submit their own priorities and conduct to the same moralistic criteria that they wield in judgement. Take the recent focus on Jerry Falwell Jr., a prominent figure among Trump’s white evangelical support base who is (well, was) in charge of a large Christian university with a strongly conservative curriculum and a strict cisheteronormative-marital code of sexual conduct for its students.
A few weeks ago Falwell was forced to resign over some risqué social media photos followed by the revelation of a years-long sexual and financial entanglement between himself, his wife Becki, and a younger man who happens to have been an actual “pool boy”. (For those curious, it seems that Falwell “liked to watch”). In a statement pre-empting the media reports, Falwell distanced himself from the affair, blaming his wife and accusing the ex-lover of blackmail and fabrication – but it wasn’t enough to save his job, or his reputation (at least, for now; the world seems geared around the bouncing-back of men like him).
It’s not so much Falwell’s consensual sexual antics that concern me (though I'm disturbed by some of the other reports emerging about Becki Falwell’s abusively aggressive pursuit of students in her care). It’s the judgement that, like Judah, he holds over others, whilst pleasing himself freely. And it’s not impotent, hypothetical judgement – for, like Judah, he has power to act on his pronouncements. Judah had power to suppress Tamar's rights; he had power to shame her; ultimately, he had power to end her life. Falwell has power to impose the demeaning ideals of “purity culture” on students and on the wider evangelical community he helps to influence. He has power to mobilise opposition to LGBT+ rights. He has power to set an educational agenda to suit his own (in places anti-scientific) ideology. He has power to jeopardise the health of students and staff by maintaining business-as-usual during a pandemic. He has power to secure votes for a white supremacist presidential candidate who promises Christian exceptionalism barely disguised as “religious liberty”. (And the long-running link between “religious liberty” – which shockingly recently meant "freedom" to racially discriminate – and the tax exempt status of private Christian universities might, to the cynical, seem a clue as to why Falwell, like his father before him, cares so very deeply about this particular issue).
Maybe he has a little less of that power at the moment. Maybe the penny has dropped, for some in his “tribe” – so that they will think twice before heeding his culture war rallying cries from now on. I hope and pray so, especially in the context of the looming election. But what of Falwell himself? Tamar’s revelation seems a brush with grace for Judah. On seeing the incriminating evidence, he makes no attempt to hide: his confession is immediate, unhesitant and blunt. He has wronged her. The text is characteristically brief but my imaginative reading is of a man changed – undeservedly blessed by the opportunity to confront ugly truths about himself, as well as by the children he is parent to along with Tamar. By contrast, Falwell’s hasty denial of guilt, his determination to cling to status in the face of disgrace – without thought (it appears) for those harmed by his influence – suggests no such self-realisation. And honestly, this makes me deeply sad for him as well as those who bear the consequences. Worldly power seems a ominous, contradictory end for Christians to pursue, even via less questionable means. Perhaps a better biblical analogy at this point would be that uncle of Judah’s who notoriously “sold his birthright for a mess of pottage” (Genesis 25:29-34). And what a mess it is.
[Thumbnail image from Nijwam Swargiary on Unsplash.]
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