The Veil of Tamar

Gen. 38:14 narrates the Biblical episode of Tamar, Judah’s twice daughter-in-law. God kills both her first husband Er, because he is wicked, and her second husband Onan, because he refuses to give his seed to his brother’s former wife. Judah therefore promises Tamar to his third son Shelah, but since he is not in the age of marriage yet, Judah asks Tamar to dress like a widow until Shelah grows up. One day Judah goes up to Timnath to shear his sheep. What happens next is narrated in Gen. 38:14: And she put her widow’s garments off from her, and covered her with a vail, and wrapped herself, and sat in an open place, which [is] by the way to Timnath; for she saw that Shelah was grown, and she was not given unto him to wife. When Judah saw her, he thought her [to be] an harlot; because she had covered her face. (KJV) This Biblical episode contains several “forbidden gazes”: Shelah cannot look at Tamar as his betrothed wife because he is too young. At the same time, other men must not look at Tamar as a potential wife either, or as a lover, because she has been promised to Shelah. When Judah comes across Tamar on his way to Timnath, he must not look at her face because she is offering her body to him as a prostitute. At the same time, it will be exactly by veiling her face as a prostitute that Tamar will be able to have Judah recognize her rights as a daughter-in-law. This complex network of forbidden gazes and desires is manifested by two strategies of occultation: on the one hand, Tamar is forced by Judah to hide her status of both betrothed and unmarried woman by dressing up as a widow. On the other hand, Tamar forces Judah to recognize her rights by dressing up as a harlot. Simultaneously, the garments that hide Tamar’s real self also make her conspicuous under a different identity (as a widow, as a harlot), in an intricate interplay of reality and fiction. Biblical exegetes and artists have often struggled with this episode: as regards exegesis, the story of Tamar and Judah has been interpreted in several different, at times opposite, ways. As regards art, painters were frequently at pains to condense within a single image such a paradoxical tangle of gazes and desires, occultation and ostentation: how could one depict Tamar simultaneously as a betrothed woman, as a widow, as a harlot, and as a woman that triumphs over a world ruled by men? The paper will focus on the Jewish and Christian exegeses of the story of Tamar in the Renaissance and the early modern period, as well as on coeval visual representations, in order to answer the following questions: how did the Renaissance and the early modern period interpret, both in Biblical exegeses and visual representations, this episode? How did they determine the status of the female body, and its relation to the male gaze and desire? How were garments used to articulate such relation? And what does the analysis of these exegetical and visual materials reveal about the visual and bodily culture of the Renaissance and the early modern period?