Tamar's Twins - Reminding us that babies are miraculous

In the olden days it was cool for religious leaders to get prostitutes

Once upon a time, Israel's son Judah knocked up his daughter-in-law. The word "Jew" comes from Judah. The Jews are Judah's descendents. It might help to review the story of Tamer's pregnancy.

After Judah had sex with his daughter-in-law, she became pregnant with twins whom she named Zerah and Perez. I don’t know how common twins are when the Father of the Jews gets his dead son’s wife pregnant, but I assume it’s still fairly rare. It must just have been a sign of how special Judah and Tamar’s relationship really was.

When Tamar was delivering the babies, Zarah reached his arm out through his mother’s vagina. The midwife saw it and tied a red piece of string around Zarah’s wrist and said, “This one came out first.”

After the whole wrist incident, Perez was delivered first, then Zerah. However, because Zerah had the red string around his wrist, he got to be the official “first born.”

When I first though about this, I thought there was no way an infant’s arm would be long enough to accomplish Zerah’s feat. However, I checked and among modern, average size people, a newborn’s arms should be around six inches long, and the distance from the cervical opening to the entrance of the vagina is around four inches. That’s totally long enough for Zerah to stick out his hand.

The thing is, there’s not a lot of extra room in your average uterus for a lot of messing around.

 

It's even worse with twins in there.

 

 Unless of course, Tamar had some sort of super-uterus.

 

 I that case, I'm sure Zerah and Perez would have been able to work something out.

Moral: not all uteruses are equal.

Ref: Genesis 38:27-30

Judah and his Daughter-in-Law – Keeping things in the Family

Now with 50% more typos

This story is about Judah. He is a son of Israel (the man, not the country) and is one of the guys that sold his brother Joseph (the guy with the coat of many colors) to slave traders. The word Jew comes from Judah.

Well, after selling off Joseph of the Technicolor Dream Coat, but before moving to Egypt to live off Joseph’s success; Judah found a wife for his firstborn son, Er. Her name was Tamar. It turns out that Er wasn’t such a great guy so God killed him. This doesn’t sit very well with Judah so he sat down his second son Onan and explained that he was going to have to marry Tamar now and make babies which would count as Er’s children.

Onan decided he didn’t want to make babies if they were weren’t going to count as his, so when having sex with his sister-in-law/wife he used the best form of birth control available to him: early withdrawal (also known as Onanism, what are the odds, right?). The bible isn’t clear if God doesn’t like letting sperm hit the ground or not making babies for your brother. In either case, Onan is guilty so God kills him too. Christianity in general decided this verse is more about wasting sperm than not making babies for your brother. It is the basis for the condemnation of masturbation and birth control. I.E. don’t use birth control or God will kill you.

According to tradition, Tamar should then have passed on the Judah’s third son, Shelah. However, Judah was starting to think that any dude who marries Tamar ends up dead so he told her she needed to move back in with her parents and wait until Shelah was fully grown before being passed off to him.

Well, because Judah didn’t want Tamar’s vagina to kill Shelah he didn’t let them get married after Shelah was fully grown.  Tamar decided this was no good so when Judah was out tending the sheep one day she dressed up like a hooker and waited for Judah to come by. Of course, being the upstanding guy he was, Judah saw a hooker (didn’t realize it was his man-killing daughter-in-law) and asked her for sex. Tamar asked him how much he was willing to pay and Judah promised her a sheep. Since he didn’t have any sheep with him just then, Tamer asked him to leave his ring, bracelets, and staff as security. They have sex and Tamar gets pregenant, but she doesn’t show up later to trade Judah’s bling for the sheep.

Eventually Judah finds out that Tamar is pregnant and he ordered her to be burned for having sex without his permission. She showed up for the burning and told everyone the father was the owner of the ring, bracelets, and staff. Judah realized he was the father so he didn’t have his daughter-in-law burned. She was allowed to live and a few months later squeezed out her father-in-law’s babies: twins.

Ref: Gensis 38

King David’s Kids – And I thought my family was weird

Sharing Our Cultural Heritage

So King David (that guy that killed Goliath by throwing a rock at him) ended up super rich and had like hundreds of wives, so I guess statistically this was bound to happen sooner or later.

David’s son Amnon was hot for sister. Now, Amnon figured he couldn’t get himself a piece of that action because sister (Tamar) was a virgin which apparently made her off limits. Amnon was so hard up he stopped eating and lost a lot of weight. Fortunately Amnon had a much more pragmatic friend who sorted out a solution. He told Amnon to pull a Ferris Bueller and pretend to be sick, then when daddy came by to check on him he could ask to have Tamar come up to his room and make him dinner so he could get her alone.

So, Tamar went to Amnon's room and made dinner for her brother, who still wouldn’t eat. Instead he made all the servants and guards clear the room and asked Tamar to hand deliver the food. When Tamar reached out to Amnon with the food, he grabed her and explained about all the sex they were going to have. Naturally Tamar freaked out and told her brother that if he wanted her that bad he should ask their dad to let them get married. This didn’t work for Amnon who just raped her instead.

After the rape Amnon decided he didn’t like Tamar anymore and told her to get out. Tamar got even more upset and explained that raping her and then NOT marrying her is WORSE than just raping her. Amnon, having got what he wanted and apparently not liking it that much, didn’t care and had his servant force Tamar out of the room and lock the door behind her.

Tamar’s brother Absalom found her crying and figured out Amnon raped her. Absalom told Tamar not to worry about it too much ‘cause it was just her brother. Tamar moved into Absalom’s house and became a spinster.

Two years later Absalom sorted out a plan to get Amnon to help take care of the sheep for a little while. While Amnon was in the fields, Absalom had his servants kill Amnon for raping his sister. Absalom immediately fled the country because he was afraid his dad would have him killed for taking out Amnon. He stayed away for three years until one of his buddies helped him patch things up with his dad.

Things were good between Absalom and his dad for a while, until Absalom led a rebellion against his father, chased him out of Jerusalem and had sex with all his dad’s concubines (because what biblical character isn’t trying to get it on with his dad’s wives). They kept the war going though, and one day after a particularly bad battle Absalom was riding his mule under an oak tree and got his head caught in the branches where he was left dangling. One of David’s servants found Absalom dangling there and stabbed him in the heart. When David found out he got all sad and cried because his son (and rapist of his wives) was dead.

Ref: 2 Samuel 13-18