Scripture records two women with the name Tamar, both famous for reasons they would not have chosen. Both victims of broken trust. One is King David’s daughter by his wife Maacah, who was raped by her half-brother Amnon. She is not the Tamar in my upcoming book When Life Doesn’t Match Your Dreams.
The other Tamar is also remembered for unhappy circumstances and broken promises, but hers is a situation that we struggle to understand in today’s culture. This Tamar was a Canaanite who married an Israelite’s son. Judah’s son, Er. The story goes on to tell us how Tamar’s first husband died, so Judah gave her to his second son, but he also died. So Judah sent her back to her father promising to send for her when his youngest son was of marriageable age.
The thing is, Judah had no intention of sending for Tamar again. He may have thought Tamar cursed or somehow responsible for the deaths of his two oldest sons, though Scripture puts the blame on the men not Tamar. In any case, Judah broke his promise.
In time, Judah’s wife died and he went off to shear his sheep, which was kind of like party-time in that culture. He would have been in a good mood and since he was past his time of mourning his wife, he was also probably missing sex.
Tamar guessed that this might be true of her father-in-law, so she dressed up like a prostitute and stood by the road where he would see her. He took the bait, slept with her, and she became pregnant, which was the whole goal of levirate marriage (one brother marrying his dead brother’s wife) in the first place.
The thing is, no one knew what Tamar had done until she was obviously pregnant. And when Judah found out, he was ready to kill her.
The fascinating story is in Genesis 38 – and I encourage you to read it because though her actions and the culture of that day seem strange to us – we can all understand what it’s like to be forgotten. To have promises purposely broken. To see a covenant marriage ripped apart. To be on the losing end of someone’s word.
Tamar could have died a widow in her father’s house. But she was young. She wanted children. And she decided she was going to do something about her father-in-law’s broken trust.
Can you relate to how she must have felt?
Have you ever been the one who has suffered because someone made you a promise or told you they would do this or that and then never did? I daresay we are all guilty of breaking the trust others put in us.
Sometimes it’s a simple thing like breaking a dinner date without a good reason. Other times it can be as serious as breaking the covenant of marriage because life looked better in another person’s company.
The reasons we break our word, our promises, are endless.
Eventually, Judah did the right thing by Tamar. He never did give her to his third son, but once he realized she was carrying his twin sons, he never touched her again and he cared for her the rest of her life. She is one of five women God chose to list in the lineage of grace, the line of Christ.
What Tamar lived through was not easy. Widowed twice, abandoned to live in disgrace in her father’s house, and then accused of adultery, when the truth was the opposite. God deemed her precious in His sight.
Despite the futile words, broken promises, and her bold solution to fix her own problems, she came to be part of God’s covenant people. I don’t know her heart as the Bible does not tell us. But her strange (to our modern thinking) actions, showed her to be a woman of her word. Judah called her righteous. God gave her grace.
#behindthesceneswithtamar #whenlifedoesntmatchyourdreams #brokenpromises #futilewords #boldsolutions #keepingourword #brokentrust #livegrace
