Risk-Averse Women Rarely Birth Royalty

This is a Christmas post.

Rembrandt van Rijn, The Jewish Bride. Some say the couple is Boaz and Ruth; since that’s one of my favorite stories & this is one of my favorite paintings, we’ll go with that.

What is going on with Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus? It’s intensely weird.¹ Many of you will hear it at Christmas Vigil Mass tonight,² where the priest may use part of his homily to highlight how weird the genealogy is—or he might look out at the sea of children and prudently limit himself to the observation that, unlike Luke’s genealogy, this one includes women. But what women!

Matthew mentions Mary, obviously. But the other four women he names are Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba “who had been the wife of Uriah.” These four women are… well, I’ve seen them euphemized, hilariously, as “unexpected,” “unlikely,” or “complex and sometimes messy.” Why does Matthew pass over better-known matriarchs in the line of David—Sarah, Rebecca, Leah—to highlight them?

I always spend a lot of Christmas Eve thinking about these women. When I was Catholic, it was because their place in tonight’s reading indicated that it was important to think about them now, although it was very hard to figure out why. I’m no longer Christian, but I still think about them on Christmas Eve, because I just genuinely love thinking about these stories. I still love the Bible. It's the source I’m most familiar with for stories about people living very differently from me: pastoralists, citizens of a brand-new kingdom, conquerors, refugees, polygynists. These four stories are particularly compelling, dealing with love, sex, marriage, betrayal, and the hunger for children, deeply foreign and relatable at once. If you’re not familiar with them, or haven’t thought about them in a while, it is well worth thinking about them tonight.

(Catholic readers might be set a little on edge about reading this because I said I’m not Catholic. I want to reassure you that I don’t have anything disrespectful to say about Mary.)

Tamar

Tamar marries Judah’s son Er, but he dies, smitten by God for unspecified wickedness, leaving her childless. No son, so: who is Er’s heir?

The modern impulse is to say it’s Tamar. For the inheritance of wealth that comes from saved income, that’s a fair answer. It makes sense for a wife and helpmeet to keep what she helped her husband earn throughout their marriage. Back then, there was much less surplus, much less saving, and this inheritance question largely dealt with things Er inherited (or would have later inherited) from his father. It doesn’t really make sense for a childless widow to take that inheritance away from the bloodline that built it and give it to a strange man’s children. On the other hand, Tamar gave up her virginity and the protection of her father to enter this marriage.

Levirate marriage is not an unreasonable solution. When a man dies childless, his brother (or the next closest male relative marries) the widow. The widow’s first son by this new marriage inherits the dead man’s property and (legally, if not genetically) continues the bloodline. The widow’s new husband continues his own line, legally, by the widow’s next son—or the first son of another wife, whichever comes first, these were polyginists after all.

This is a very weird idea for a modern audience. My intuition, shaped by contemporary storytelling, is that women would rebel against levirate marriage. But that’s kind of a Disney-movie way to look at things. It’s much better, escapism-wise to have a story about a woman plagued by suitors than a woman who’s desperate for a protector. But I probably should have noticed from, like, real life, that women—even beautiful women, women with good character, women with money—spend much more effort trying to get married than trying to avoid it. If, for some reason, Judah and Er had tried to take the levirate marriage provision off the table in advance, Tamar and her family probably would have refused the marriage. She’s not going to give up her virginity and the protection of her father without the assurance that she’ll be provided for in a worst-case scenario.

So Tamar is now married off to Er’s next son, Onan. You might not remember Tamar, but I bet he sounds familiar.

Generally people think of Onan’s sin as masturbation. Then some people will say, “No, his sin was pulling out.” Biblically, Catholically speaking, yes, his sin was probably pulling out. But if you think that the problem here is that Onan broke an arbitrary rule—or that he violated disgust/purity intuitions—or even that this rule existed for the greater good, because no-coitus-interruptus societies outcompete tolerant societies TFR-wise, and Onan’s death was a sacrifice of individual freedom for social good—then you are missing how shitty Onan was. You have to realize that Onan fully intended to ruin Tamar’s life. He actively planned to leave her childless forever, watching his other children enjoy what her son should have inherited. And what did he think he would get in exchange for this? Not even the inheritance. He would enjoy the inheritance during his lifetime anyway, it would get passed on to his son regardless. He planned to ruin her life just to consolidate the estate into a holding for one heir.

So God strikes Onan down too, for intending to waste Tamar’s fertility, for such a small reward.

At this point, Judah tells Tamar, “My next son Shelah is too young to get married, so stay at your father’s house³ and we’ll marry you off to him when he’s old enough.”

It is an established problem, in this setting, that a man can marry a young woman who turns out to be under a curse, and then a whole line of brothers is destroyed as they marry her one after the other. Maybe Judah is trying to avoid that outcome, or maybe he just wants a younger woman for his youngest son. In any case, when Shelah comes of age, Judah does not follow through on this.

Tamar hears that her in-laws are back in town—and it’s clear that they’re welshing on their obligation to her. But Tamar wants a baby. And, as will become abundantly clear, she’s ovulating, hard. So, driven by circumstance, and by a crazy hormonal cunning (which the women reading this can probably sympathize at least a little with, although they have almost definitely not done anything as wild as what Tamar is about to do), she comes up with a plan.

Tamar takes off her widows’s weeds and dresses up as a prostitute, which at that time and place included covering her face with a veil. She sets up in a spot where her father-in-law will bump into her. He does. Having not seen her in years (plus the veil) he doesn’t recognize her, and makes an offer, basically “I’ll gladly give you a baby goat someday for sex today.” But obviously Tamar has reason to distrust him, even if she was just after the goat, which she’s not, so she tells him to give her his seal, his cord, and his staff, & promises to return them when he sends the goat. He agrees. They sleep together, he leaves, and Tamar goes home and changes back into her mourning-clothes. Judah actually does try to find and pay the woman he’s slept with, kind of to my surprise, but obviously she’s nowhere to be found.

Three months later, Judah hears that Tamar is pregnant. He’s so enraged he calls for her to be executed—which has the additional benefit of getting a problem off his hands. But she sends him a message, “The man who got me pregnant gave me these,” and with the message returns his seal, his rod, and his staff. Judah is suitably chastened, and says, correctly, “She is more righteous than I.” She bears Judah’s twins (she was really ovulating) and keeps his lineage going.

Tamar gets a lot of heat, because obviously this is a kind of crazy story, but from my secular perspective she didn’t do anything wrong. Judah had contracted an agreement with her family for the exclusive right to her fertility, and planned on killing her when he thought she’d broken her side of the bargain, even though he had already broken his. She kept her agreement not to give her fertility to another bloodline, and she also had the dignity to let Shelah, who was not at fault here, live his own life.

Rahab

Five generations later, we get a spy noir. Two Israelites go to Jericho to figure out how the city can be conquered. The spies take lodging at an inn/brothel (apparently a common combination then/there). The king hears about foreigners in his city and demands that Rahab, the woman who runs this house, deliver the strangers to him. But she says they’re long gone. The kings’ men search her house anyway, but when they don’t find the spies, they continue the chase down the path that Rahab said she saw the Israelites take. When the coast is clear, she goes up to her rooftop, where the spies are hidden under piles of flax.

Rahab has heard how the Israelites conquered the Egyptians, the Amorites, Sihon, and Og. She begs them to spare her and her household when they inevitably conquer Jericho. They agree, and she helps them escape, telling them the best way to avoid the King’s men.

Joshua, as you know, blows down the walls of Jericho, but keeps the spies’ promise to spare Rahab and her family, and she lives a long life in Israel. The book of Joshua doesn’t say anything more about her, but the Talmud (& obviously the New Testament) say that one of the spies took her as a wife, and Dante’s Paradiso shows her in Heaven. This is usually thought of as a story about faith and repentance. I think another important lesson here is that women of ill repute are rarely heavily invested in the current regime. You probably could have learned that from any spy noir.

Ruth

Ruth is a young widow whose loyalty to her mother-in-law Naomi (a woman who has lost both of her sons and her husband) leads her into poverty in her mother-in-law’s homeland. In that time, the custom for providing for the poor was “gleaning:” after a household’s harvesters make their first pass over a field, people with no better options would pick what they’d left unharvested, take anything that had been dropped, etc. Ruth goes to glean in the field of a rich older man, Boaz—Rahab’s son, by the way.

Boaz has heard about Ruth, and he’s so touched and moved by her loyalty to Naomi that he treats her as well as a member of his own household, offering her various protections and privileges, giving her extra grain to take home. My favorite detail: Boaz urging Ruth to dip her bread into the sauce at the household’s dinner.

Ruth tells Naomi all about this, and the gears in Naomi’s head start turning. The old widow, delightfully calculating and cunning, tells the young widow, “Shouldn’t I find security for you, and get you provided for?” She tells Ruth to bathe, put on perfumes and ointments, dress up in her best clothes, go to the threshing-floor where the men will be sleeping off their drink, and lie down with this rich man who’s been so nice to her.⁴

My take on this is that Naomi is old enough to be realistic about how people work. She knows that Boaz is too aware of Ruth’s powerlessness and dependence (we see him going out of his way to make sure his young men don’t insult or harass her, which Naomi says Ruth couldn’t count on in other men’s fields) to make a pass at her himself. She also knows that it’s not actually true that a man will stop respecting you if you sleep with him. Sure, sometimes a man will refuse to marry a woman because she put out too early. Much more often he’ll say that’s why he won’t marry her, when he never intended to marry her anyway. And obviously a man will often respect a woman less when she sleeps with other men. But with a basically sexually continent man, especially a man who already has reason to think that you’re a woman of loyalty and character, as Boaz does with Ruth, taking a sexual risk for him is a really good strategy to get his commitment. The more sexually strict the society is, the less a girl has to do to make this work. I’m sure you know as well as I do that in a really religious social setting, a woman can get a husband for something that in the secular world barely earns you a boyfriend.

So Ruth follows her mother-in-law’s advice. Boaz wakes up to find her at his feet, and she asks him to cover her with his garment (absolutely my favorite romance trope by the way). Sometimes people talk about this like it was a totally above-the-board request for protection, but she’s clearly seducing him. He’s naked under there! Whether they in fact have sex right then or wait she’s clearly offering!

Boaz is deeply, deeply moved at being chosen by this younger women, who (he says) could have any man she wants. He tells her that, if he can get the legalities squared away, of course he’ll marry her—but either way, he will make sure she’s provided for. She sleeps beside him, but follows his instructions to sneak off early before anyone else can see her….

….because there’s a man with a prior claim on inheriting from Ruth’s dead husband, which is to say (as we learned from the Tamar story) inheriting both her dead husband’s land and Ruth herself, and he would hardly marry her if he’d heard about the night she spent with Boaz, would he?

Boaz easily gets his rival-ish to give up his claim (legal complications—these men never want to do levirate marriage for some reason) and marries Ruth himself, giving her a son, who is legally Naomi’s grandson. Naomi is so happy, and takes so much care of him, that everyone says “Naomi has a son now!”

My verdict on Ruth is that she and Naomi showed good judgment of male character, and that Ruth was very sweet and seductive, and that she did nothing wrong. But also that what she did was certainly not within the bounds of the rules or guaranteed to work.

Bathsheba

You probably actually know this story. David’s faith was strong but he needed proof, he saw Bathsheba bathing on the roof, etc etc etc, one thing leads to another, her first husband is dead and her son is the next king.

There’s a strong dichotomy in the contemporary discourse around this story, and I think both sides are wrong.

The trad interpretation of this story—by which I specifically do not mean the traditional interpretation, but the interpretation that today’s trads tend to focus on—is that this is a story about modesty.

This take necessarily creates in response the feminist interpretation, which is that it’s fucked up to be focusing on Bathsheba’s modesty here. David is a literal king. He has agency and power and he should not have done it. Bathsheba is a victim here.

I think we can just fully set aside the “Girls, this story is about the importance of modesty” moral. The story of Susannah opens in much the same way: Susannah is bathing, two peeping toms catch each other spying, they conspire to use their pillar-of-the-community status to blackmail her to sleep with them. But Susannah refuses even in the face of threats to her life. Then God sends Daniel to save her and strike these sinners down. The important thing to note here is that absolutely no one in Susannah’s story implies that she did anything wrong by bathing where people could see her. They didn’t have indoor plumbing, I guess; anyway, it is clearly a male obligation not to spy on women while they bathe.

The feminist interpretation is somewhat more right in the sense that this is straightforwardly, textually a story about David’s sins, and there’s no implication that his blameworthiness is mitigated by Bathsheba’s temptations, whether they’re intentional or not. David actually is the king, he has agency, he has no excuse for his sin. But reading this as a straightforward #metoo story is a stretch. If Bathsheba said anything against David, I would believe her. Powerful men can and do use their power against women. But it’s also true that women want powerful men, and will often behave very wrongly to get a part of that power.

Keep in mind that David did not go into this situation wanting to marry Bathsheba; he wanted to sleep with her once and cover it up. Uriah certainly didn’t want to be cuckolded. Or to die. David’s other wives and their sons didn’t particularly want Bathsheba’s son Solomon to be the next king. Adonijah in particular—Solomon’s greatest rival—didn’t want Solomon to be king, and Adonijah didn’t want to be killed to remove threats to Solomon’s reign.

And yet, Uriah was in fact conveniently gotten out of the way, David did end up marrying Bathsheba, Adonijah did end up dead (as a direct result of Bathsheba telling Solomon about an ambiguous request that Adonijah made), and Solomon winds up on the throne. Bathsheba married a king and bore a king, at the cost of several people’s lives and many people’s wishes. It’s theoretically possible, I guess, that this all happened coincidentally, without Bathsheba doing anything Machiavellian.

What does it mean?

A list unavoidably raises the question, “What do the members of this set all have in common?” What is Matthew doing, rhetorically, by structurally putting these women in a position to be compared with Mary?

Some people say that the commonality between Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba is their sin. I think this raises questions about Mary that the gospel of Matthew genuinely does not intend to raise. The book emphasizes the virgin birth. Also….if this was about reminding us of sinners, why not include Sarah, who’s much more of a central character, and who treated Hagar so horribly?

Mary’s pregnancy was, in the most literal and neutral sense, questionable. When an unmarried woman is pregnant, people are going to have questions about it. People did have questions about it! Of course, “questionable” doesn’t imply “wrong;” things can be questionable without being wrong, or wrong without being questionable. Contrast the virgin birth to, for instance, a married woman conceiving by adultery. That’s morally wrong, but (unless the child’s father looks very different from the mother’s husband….or the husband is obviously not around at the time of conception, off fighting a war, for instance) it doesn’t really raise any questions. Mary’s fiat, her consent to bear Jesus, was unselfish and brave precisely because it put her at risk. This is the best read on Matthew’s genealogy that I’ve been able to come up with, after thinking about it for years: reminding his readers that Mary is not the first (and far from the worst) to take a risk to her reputation in order to bear a child.

1. One of the weird things about Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus is that it isn’t actually a genealogy of Jesus at all. It’s a genealogy of Joseph, who Matthew repeatedly tells us is not Jesus’ father. But in another sense it’s not weird that Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus isn’t a genealogy of Jesus, because Luke’s genealogy of Jesus is not a genealogy of Jesus either, for the same reason. Which, I guess, is weird in itself.

2. And I guess many of you will be going to a Protestant service tonight? Do y’all read Matthew’s infancy narrative on Christmas Eve too? I really don’t know what y’all get up to. I know that Orthodox Christmas isn’t for a couple of weeks for many of you & that anyway you read Luke on Christmas Eve and Matthew on Christmas Day instead.

3. This is also really shitty of Judah, by the way. She gave up her virginity and offered her fertility to his family; he has incurred the obligation to care for her.

4. It’s at this point that a footnote in the New American Bible says “Israelite custom and moral expectations strongly suggest that there is no loss of virtue involved in the scene.” This seems profoundly unlikely to me, given the fact that Naomi tells her to do it secretly, and Boaz tells her to sneak away after. Also, Hosea 9:1 associates threshing floors with prostitution….