What Does Genesis 38:6 Mean?

Judah took a wife for Er his firstborn, and her name was Tamar. The marriage of Tamar to Er is reported in a single verse, and like most of the marriages in Genesis 38 it is arranged by the father: Judah takes a wife for his firstborn son. Tamar's origins are not given: she is identified only by her name. She is not identified as a Canaanite, which may be significant: the chapter that begins with Judah marrying into Canaan now introduces a daughter-in-law whose ethnicity is left unstated. Later Jewish tradition identified Tamar as a convert or as a descendant of Shem; the text simply names her and places her in the household.

Tamar is the moral center of Genesis 38. In a chapter where Judah's choices are repeatedly wrong: the Canaanite marriage, the failure to supervise his sons, the acquiescence to Onan's behavior, the withholding of Shelah, the use of a woman he believed to be a prostitute: Tamar is the one who acts rightly. The declaration in verse 26 ("she is more righteous than I") is Judah's own verdict on the comparison between his conduct and hers. She enters the chapter as a named but voiceless figure in an arranged marriage; she will exit it as the woman declared righteous, the mother of Perez through whom the line of David and the Messiah will descend.

The name Tamar means "palm tree": a name associated with elegance and uprightness in Hebrew and Canaanite culture. The Song of Solomon uses it as a metaphor for beauty. The woman named "palm tree" will prove to be straight in her dealing when everyone around her bends toward self-interest. She appears in Matthew's genealogy (1:3) as one of the four women named before Mary in the ancestry of Christ: each of them associated with an irregular union that God used to preserve the covenant line. Tamar's place in the Messiah's genealogy begins here, with her name and her marriage to a man who will die in the next verse.