The following article was written for and appears in the Jewish Chronicle 15th December 2006

After Joseph’s brothers have sold him to merchants travelling to Egypt, the story is interrupted by another shocking tale, focussing on Judah, Jacob and Leah’s third son.

It was Judah who suggested selling Joseph – rather than killing him. Years later, it is he who pleads with Joseph-cum-Egyptian-overlord, for the return of Benjamin to his bereft father. Now we learn (Genesis 38) that Judah fathered three sons with a Canaanite woman. After the two eldest are executed, in turn, by the Eternal One, for their wrong-doing, and Judah fails to marry-off his widowed daughter-in-law, Tamar, to his youngest son, she takes extreme measures.

Disguising herself as a prostitute, Tamar propositions her father-in-law, asking him to leave a pledge, until he pays for her services – his signet, cord and staff. When later, Judah is told that his daughter-in-law has ‘played the harlot’, and become pregnant, he calls for her to be burnt. Brought before him, Tamar shows him his pledge. Confronted with his misconduct, Judah confesses, ‘She is more righteous than I; because I did not give her to Shelah, my son.’ (Genesis 38:26).

Tamar’s action ensured that Judah had grandchildren – and the chapter ends with the births of Peretz and Zerah, the younger twin supplanting the elder, in a clear echo of Jacob and Esau. But the tale does more than demonstrate Tamar’s righteousness: Her only value is as a mother – a central motif in Genesis, and highlighted in the accounts of the births of Jacob’s children. Initially barren, Rachel strives to compete with her fecund elder sister, Leah: However beautiful she is, and however much her husband loves her, a woman’s existence only has meaning if she produces children – even at the cost of her own life; as Rachel’s death giving birth to her second son, Benjamin, suggests (Genesis 35:19). And so the tale of Judah and Tamar, like their usurping younger twin-son, Peretz (meaning, ‘breach’), ‘breaks’ into the Joseph narrative, and dramatises one of the key themes in the Book of Genesis.