ellauri171.html on line 1064: Judah, who has bought her for his firstborn son, Er, loses it, er, I mean loses Er. When he, er, I mean Er dies, Judah gives Tamar to his second son, Onan, who is to act as levir, a surrogate for his dead brother who would beget a son to continue Er’s lineage. (Onan's sin you must be familiar with first hand!) In this way, Tamar too would be assured a place in the family. Onan, however, would make a considerable economic sacrifice. According to inheritance customs, the estate of Judah, who had three sons, would be divided into four equal parts, with the eldest son acquiring one half and the others one fourth each. A child engendered for Er would inherit at least one fourth and possibly one half (as the son of the firstborn). If Er remained childless, then Judah’s estate would be divided into three, with the eldest, most probably Onan, inheriting two thirds. Onan opts to preserve his financial advantage and does coitus interruptus with Tamar, spilling his semen on the ground. For this, God punishes Onan with death, as God had previously punished Er for doing something equally wicked (unfortunately we are not told what, maybe sodomy in the flock).
ellauri171.html on line 1066: Although the readers know that God has killed two of Judah’s sons, Judah does not. This is known as dramatic irony. He suspects that Tamar is a “lethal woman,” a woman whose sexual partners are all doomed to die. So, Judah is afraid to give Tamar to his youngest son, Shelah, the inventor of Shelah quantifiers. So doing, Judah wrongs Tamar. According to Near Eastern custom, known from Middle Assyrian laws, if a man has no son over ten years old, he could perform the Levirate marriage (yibbum) obligation himself; if he does not, the woman is declared a “widow,” free to marry again. Judah, who is perhaps afraid of Tamar’s lethal character, could have set her free. But he does not—he sends her to live as “a widow” in her father’s house. Unlike other widows, she cannot remarry and must stay chaste on pain of death. She is in limbo.
ellauri171.html on line 1072: Judah, a man of honor (buahahaha) tries to pay. His friend Hirah goes looking for her, asking around for the kedeshah in the road (Gen 38:21.). The NRSV translates this as “temple prostitute,” but a kedeshah was not a sacred prostitute; she was a public woman, who might be found along the roadway (as virgins and married women should not be). She could engage in sex, but might also be sought out for lactation, midwifery, and other female concerns. By looking for a kedeshah, Hirah can look for a public woman without revealing Judah’s private life. The woman, of course, is nowhere to be found. Judah, mindful of his public image, calls off the search rather than became a laughingstock. BRUAAHAHAHA!
ellauri171.html on line 1076: Tamar’s place in the family and Judah’s posterity are secured. She gives birth to twins, Perez and Zerah (Gen 38:29–30; 1 Chr 2:4), thus restoring two sons to Judah, who has lost two. Their birth is reminiscent of the birth of Rebekah’s twin sons, at which Jacob came out holding Esau’s heel (Gen 25:24–26). Perez does him one better. The midwife marks Zerah’s hand with a scarlet cord when it emerges from the womb first, but Perez (whose name means “barrier-breach”) edges his way through. Cuts the queue. From his line would come David. Not surprising.
ellauri171.html on line 1078: Tamar was assertive of her rights and subversive of convention. She was also deeply loyal to Judah’s family. These qualities also show up in Ruth, who appears later in the lineage of Perez and preserves Boaz’s part of that line. The blessing at Ruth’s wedding underscores the similarity in its hope that Boaz’s house “be like the house of Perez, whom Tamar bore to Judah” (Ruth 4:12). Tamar’s (and Ruth’s) traits of assertiveness in action, willingness to be unconventional, and deep loyalty to family are the very qualities that distinguish their descendant, King David.
ellauri499.html on line 78: This historical reconstruction proposes that YHWH—a deity firmly rooted in the central Israelite hill country during the Iron Age—only formally became Israel’s god during the ninth century BCE, when Samaria’s Omride kings deliberately modeled the local deity YHWH on the more popular Levantine warrior storm-god Baal(-šamêm). Furthermore, I argue that YHWH only officially became Judah’s patron god and the primary deity of the Jerusalem temple under the direct influence of Omride Israel’s YHWistic political-religious reforms. Ultimately, I conclude that Baal worship was traditional in ancient Israelite and Judahite religion down to the end of the monarchic period, at which point small circles of Judahite scribes began to advocate "historically innovative" monopoöistic political-religious ideologies pitting the Israelite deity YHWH against the allegedly “foreign” god Baal.
ellauri499.html on line 82: Furthermore, I argue that YHWH only officially became Judah’s patron god and the primary deity of the Jerusalem temple under the direct influence of Omride Israel’s YHWistic political-religious reforms.
ellauri499.html on line 86: The dominant biblical portrait of the gods YHWH and Baal, particularly in the books of Kings and Hosea, is that of ideological rivals vying for the undivided loyalty of Israel—a people that frequently rejects YHWH’s exclusive worship in favor of “foreign” Baal worship, which is presented as an existential threat to Israel and Judah’s collective identity and survival (e.g., 1 Kgs 18:17–40, 19:18; 2 Kgs 10:18–28, 21:3, 23:4; Hos 2:18 [ET 16], 13:1; Zeph 1:4; cf. Num 25:1–9; Deut 4:3–4; Judg 2:11–23, 3:7).
ellauri499.html on line 92: In a buzzword (well, 2) the relationship between YHWH and Baal in ancient Israel and Judah was "dynamic" and "complex", refecting developments in Israel and Judah’s religious, social, and political histories, and any historical reconstruction of YHWH and Baal’s shared history in ancient Israel and Judah requires critical evaluation and integration of all the available types of evidence—biblical, epigraphic, iconographic, archaeological, and onomastic (includ- ing toponyms)—situated in their ancient social, cultural, political, economic, and historical "contexts."
ellauri499.html on line 96: Adopting this perspective, I conclude that: (1) Baal worship was traditional to ancient Israelite and Judahite religion down to the end of the monarchic period; (2) YHWH’s cult cannot be said to have originated historically in Bronze Age Arabia—as the reigning “Midianite-Kenite Hypothesis” maintains—but is rooted in the central Israelite hill country in the Iron Age (cf. the “Berlin Hy- pothesis”); (3) YHWH cannot clearly be said to have originated as a storm god, as many scholars maintain, but especially appears to have taken on storm-god features under Baal’s infuence in the Iron II period; (4) YHWH became Israel’s representative god under the patronage of Samaria’s ninth-century Omride kings, who seem to have modeled YHWH on the more popular Levantine deity Baal(-šamêm); (5) YHWH’s associations with the deep south are to be connected to political and economic expansion into the Egyptian Sinai during the ninth and eighth centuries; (6) YHWH officially became Judah’s patron god and the primary deity of the Jerusalem temple under the direct infuence of Omride Israel’s YHWistic political-religious reforms; (7) Jerusalemite YHWism further developed distinctive YHWistic traditions that reflect and respond to Judah’s specifc social-political economy and political-religious history; and (8) the Hebrew Bible’s Baal polemics largely derive from limited Judahite scribal circles in the late monarchic and post-monarchic periods that advocated newly invented insidious political-religious ideologies.
ellauri499.html on line 149: Along these lines, the oracle in Jer 11:13 hyperbolically claims that Jerusalem contained as many altars to Baal as the city had streets, perhaps an indication of Baal’s popular appeal in Judah’s capital. Strikingly, Hosea and Jeremiah are the only prophetic books that appear to have been vexed by the worship of Baal.
ellauri499.html on line 153: The important issue is when and how YHWH formally became the patron god of Jerusalem’s Davidic kings and the temple. Generally, scholars tend to follow the biblical story and identify this critical moment in Judah’s political-religious history with David, portrayed as YHWH’s anointed king over Israel, Jerusalem’s conqueror, and the one responsible for the installation of YHWH’s ark in Jerusalem. However, the David story likely was first written down only in the period of the two kingdoms, long after David’s reign, and its romanticized portrayal of David as YHWH’s pious shepherd-warrior-king clearly functions as  political-religious propaganda in the service of David’s royal house in Jerusalem.
ellauri499.html on line 155: Furthermore, the Hebrew Bible’s surprising memory that Judah’s founding king did not construct YHWH’s temple in Jerusalem has the ring of historical truth to it, especially in light of biblical apologetics that attempt to explain away this anomaly. Late Bronze or early Iron Age Jerusalem, which was evidently a non-Israelite/Judahite city and whose religious identity early on may have been especially linked to El, the Sun god.
ellauri499.html on line 157: Yet, onomastics and the biblical materials clearly show that by the mid- to late eighth century YHWH had become Judah’s kingdom god, inseparably linked to David’s royal house in Jerusalem.
ellauri499.html on line 161: In sum, Judah’s political subordination to Israel may have had a strong impact on Jerusalemite royal political theology. It may be, then, that Jerusalem’s Davidic monarchs first installed YHWH as their divine patron in connection with, or under the infuence of, the Omrides’ elevation of YHWH to the position of Israel’s kingdom god.
ellauri499.html on line 181: The destruction of the kingdom of Israel in 722/720 by the Assyrians, together with Sennacherib’s failed siege against Jerusalem in 701, likely only served to consolidate this new brand of Judahite YHWism, the proponents of which— perhaps best exemplifed by the post-monarchic authors of the Baal polemics in the Elijah cycle—probably remained in the minority until sometime after Judah’s defeat by the Babylonians in  587-586.
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