וירד יהודה, “Yehudah descended;” our sages explained that this choice of words by the Torah means that Yehudah’s brothers, who up until then had considered him as their leader and spokesman, demoted him on account of the sale of their brother Joseph and the anguish this had caused their father. (B’reshit Rabbah, 85,1) Ibn Ezra questioned this, seeing that only twenty two years elapsed between the sale of Joseph and the reunification of the brothers with him and the family’s moving to Egypt. We know that Joseph had been seventeen years old when he had been sold; we also know that he was thirty years old when he interpreted Pharaoh’s dream; we further know that the family descended to Egypt in the second year of the famine, i.e. nine years after Joseph had been appointed viceroy of Egypt. If you count the years from the time Yehudah got married to the daughter of the man described earlier until the descent of the whole family with Yehudah at their head more than twenty two years must have passed. If we count a year each for the time Yehudah’s wife was pregnant with each of her three sons, and add the years after Onan’s death during which Shelah grew to maturity, i.e. was old enough to get married, you already have accounted for 16 years. Add a year till Peretz could have been born and you have accounted for already 17 years. Even if you were to assume that Peretz was no more than 7 years old when he became the father of Chetzron and another year for the birth of his brother Chamul, all of whom are listed in Genesis chapter 46 as having come to Egypt with Yaakov and Yehudah, you already have accounted for 25 years not 22. One would have to say that when Shelah was described as having “grown” up, the Torah refers to his having become 9 years old, at which age it is possible to produce semen fit to sire a child. We can find support for this from the Talmud, tractate Niddah, folio 45, where the Mishnah discusses a nine year old who performed the levirate marriage ceremony on his sister-in-law whose husband had died without having had any children, that he cannot give such a sister-in-law a decree of divorce until he reaches the age of 13, as a minor cannot divorce his wife. Moreover, the original marriage of his deceased brother had been a marriage in the full sense of the word, and what he did was only to substitute for his deceased brother, so that any divorce cannot be less complete than that. According to an opinion quoted in the Talmud tractate Sanhedrin, folio 69, there were periods in former eras when seven year old males were able to impregnate females with their semen.

ותקרא את שמו שלה והיה בכזיב בלדתה אותו, “she called his name Shelah, as he (her husband) was in a place called Keziv at the time when she gave birth to him.” (standard explanation) The expression “shelah” and “keziv,” are identical in meaning. They appear in connection with inability to give birth, such as in Kings II 4,16 when the woman from Shunem being promised by the prophet Elisha that she would give birth to a son tells him not raise false hopes as she knew she was past the age when this was possible. The words she used were אל תכזב. When she upbraided the prophet after the son she did bear had died before growing up, she reminded him of what she had said then and used the verb שלה. (verse 28 in the same chapter) The word כזב meaning interruption in the sense of termination, also occurs in Isaiah 58,11: וכמוצא מים אשר לא יכזבו, “like a spring whose waters do not fail.” According to this, the name shelah indicated that his mother knew she would not bear any more children. [This leaves the question of why the masculine והיה, “he was,” is used in our verse Ed.] My teacher told me that כזיב is the place of a town or village. It was customary in those days that mother and father named their children alternately. The father would name the firstborn, so that it would have been Yehudah’s turn to name the son born third. Seeing that he was not at home when this son was born, the mother decided to name him instead. This is why the Torah explains why Yehudah had not named Shelah.

בפתח עינים, this expression may be understood as we know from the Talmud, tractate Sotah folio,10, where Rabbi Shmuel bar Nachmeni understands it as giving a reason for her apparently inappropriate behaviour, when Yehudah first asked her about her personal status; she said that she was not married, was a widow, that she was ritually pure, and quite unattached to any other man when she had married, and that even then she was not anyone’s daughter-in-law. [The marriage had not been consummated. Ed.]

ויחשביה לזונה, “he considered her as a harlot.” Why should Yehudah have cared? He turned around to resume on his way to the shearing. However, Tamar raised her face to heaven to pray and ask G–d why she should not be able to give birth to a worthwhile and intelligent son from the semen of such a righteous man as Yehudah. Upon hearing her prayer, G–d immediately dispatched the angel Michael who made Yehudah have second thoughts and turn around. The Torah here wrote: ויט אליה, “he turned to her,” and we find the same expression in Numbers 22,33 where it is written of Bileam’s she-ass: ותט לפני, “she turned around before me;” (the angel speaking to Bileam) in both instances the angel Michael was the subject. (subject discussed in B’reshit Rabbah 85,8)

ותאמר אם תתן לי ערבון, “she said: ‘if you will give me a pledge;’” some commentators claim that Yehudah did not sleep with Tamar until after he had given her a token to serve as a marriage betrothal. They interpret her question above as her asking for such a token. It was meant to mean: “what kind of token of your intention to wed me are you going to give me?” Yehudah’s answer was that he would send her a young goat. Thereupon she asked for a guarantee that he would indeed send that goat. By insisting that he would give her his signet ring she meant that this would be her wedding ring. According to Rabbi Moshe, this whole interpretation is difficult to accept as the handing over of such a token requires the presence and confirmation by two witnesses in good standing as spelled out in the Talmud, tractate Kiddushin folio 65. Some people claim that an important person such as Yehudah would never travel except in the company of at least two people who could qualify as witnesses, just as a Torah scholar in our time does not travel alone and that therefore the betrothal of Tamar had been duly witnessed. If you were to counter that the betrothal was still invalid as she had never received the promised goat from him, and the Talmud in Kiddushin folio 8 states that even if the suitor gave the bride a token worth a p’rutah (smallest copper coin) as a pledge to cover the remainder, such a betrothal is not legally valid. We would therefore have to say that he gave her his signet ring not as a pledge, but as an outright gift at that time. After having done so, he told her that when he would send her the goat he expected her to return his ring. This is how, in my opinion, the author of the above interpretation must have meant it.

זנתה תמר כלתך, “your daughter-in-law Tamar has committed an act of adultery.” Why did the informant have to add that Tamar had also become pregnant as a result of her act of adultery? Perhaps we can answer that in that era when acts of adultery did not result in the woman becoming pregnant as a result, no legal proceedings were instituted against her. Alternately, proceedings used to be instituted after such a woman had committed adulterous acts with more than one individual.

הוציאהו ותשרף, “take her outside so that she may be burned.” Ephrayim from Kahse, (location) says that Tamar was the daughter of Shem who we heard was the priest of Shalem, and as such if she had committed adultery while still in her father’s house, if sentenced to death for harlotry would die by burning; (Leviticus 21,9) (compare also B’reshit Rabbah 85,10). Yehudah’s judgment is hard to understand as there had been no witnesses to the adultery Tamar had been accused of. Neither had she been warned not to commit such an act and been advised of the potential penalty, as is required by Jewish law. Rabbi Joseph, a resident of the land of Israel, answered this by saying that the generation in which Yehudah lived was morally deprived, and in such circumstances warnings and witnesses are dispensed with when her pregnancy was proof enough of how it had come about. In times like that, the Torah applies additional measures to counteract serious crimes as no one would commit such acts in the presence of acceptable witnesses and after being warned. Rabbi Joseph based himself on the Talmud in tractate Sanhedrin folio 46, where we read as follows: “Rabbi Eliezer son of Yaakov said that the Jewish Court is authorized to decree death penalties not according to the legislation of the Torah when the circumstances demand it, in order to be deterrents to potential sinners.” The Talmud quotes several historical instances when this occurred, including the carrying out of a death penalty against 80 witches on a single day, in spite of the generally accepted rule not to carry out more than one such sentence per day. This happened already during the first hundred years of the period of the second Temple. Joshua’s executing Achan ben Karmi for stealing from the loot of Jericho, obviously without witnesses, why else had lots to be cast to find the guilty party, (Joshua chapter 7) is further proof of the authority of the leader appointed by G–d in circumstances that are not normal. We are still left with the problem that if Tamar was indeed the daughter of Shem, and according to the historical data given to us by the Torah for the time when her father died, this occurred long before the sons of Yehudah were born, how could Yehudah have told her to return to the house of her father and spend there the years of her widowhood there? (Genesis 38,11) [According to the chronology of the Torah, Shem was born about 1557 after Adam was created, and died at the age of 500, i.e. in .2007 after the creation of Adam. Avraham was born in the year 1949 after the creation of Adam, he sired Yitzchak 100 years later. Yitzchok was 60 years old when he fathered Yaakov and Esau, and Yaakov was at least 88 years old when he fathered Yehudah, Tamar’s father in law. You, the reader do not need a calculator to understand the problem created by Rabbi Joseph quoted by our author. Ed.] He must have meant that “her father’s house,” was not to be understood literally, but he meant the family from which she stemmed.

ויאמר צדקה ממני, he (Yehudah) said: “she is more righteous than I am. ”G–d’s methods when sitting in judgment cannot be compared to the way a human judge deals with offenders. When a human judge tries a case, and the accused party admits his guilt, the judge proceeds to carry out the penalty for the offence in question, having proven that he did not act arbitrarily. In other words, if the offence carries the death penalty, it is carried out forthwith. According to Proverbs 28,13, this is not G–d’s way of dealing with the guilty party Solomon describes it as: ומודה ועוזב ירוחם, “if he confesses and abandons sin, he will experience mercy.” As soon as Yehudah’s brother Reuven heard about how he had publicly acknowledged being the father of Tamar’s unborn children, he himself acknowledged his guilt in defiling his father’ couch. (Yaakov’s words in Genesis 49,4) This is also what Eliphas said to Job (Job 15,18) אשר חכמים יגידו ולא כחדו מאבותם, “that which the wise men have transmitted from their fathers and have not withheld it.” The wise men that Job referred to are none other than Yehudah and Reuven. This is why the descendants of those two sons of Yaakov were the only ones whose territory was never invaded by aliens [prior to the building of Solomon’s Temple? Ed.] (compare Moses’ blessing in Deuteronomy 33, 6-7)

צדקה ממנו, the meaning is as per Targum, i.e. “she has become pregnant from me.” We are puzzled by this commentary, as if true, the sin of sleeping with one’s father-in-law is far greater than that of sleeping with a total stranger. We must assume therefore, that prior to the giving of the Torah, the way the system of the Levirate marriage was practiced was that in the absence of the deceased husband of the widow having any siblings, another close family member would perform that rite with the widow in order to ensure that the name of the deceased would be preserved thereby. Yehudah’s statement at the time when Tamar explained her complaint that she had not been given as a wife to Shelah, must therefore be explained as follows: “actually, seeing that at the time Onan died Shelah was not yet old enough to perform these rites it was my duty to have done so, especially as I could not be sure he would do so even when he would grow up.” At the time when Yehudah, through sleeping with Tamar had actually fulfilled the required rite though not having been aware of it, G–d said to him: “by doing so you saved four lives from death. One was saved from dying in a pit and three were saved from dying by being burned to death. This is based on Daniel 1,6: ויהי בהם מבני יהודה דניאל, חנניה, מישאל, ועזריה, there were among them from the descendants of Yehudah: ‘Daniel, Chananyah, Mishael and Azaryah.’ The verse does not trace their ancestry to Chizkiyah, but to Yehudah. Daniel was saved from a pit, the other three from a fiery furnace. An alternate explanation of the words: צדקה ממנו, “she became pregnant from me.” Yehudah claimed that he had married her legally by betrothing her with his ring, as mentioned earlier in my commentary. Rabbi Moshe queries this interpretation claiming that such a betrothal is invalid when performed by the father-in-law. He bases himself on the Talmud, tractate Sotah folio 10, the Talmud, quoting the dialogue between Yehudah and Tamar there claims that when Yehudah asked her about her marital status, including asking her whether perhaps her father had accepted a token of betrothal on her behalf, she responded by saying that this was impossible as she was an orphan. Rashi on the Talmud there explains that even if she had been betrothed by her father, had he lived, such a betrothal would have been invalid as she would have had to be a minor for such a betrothal to have any legal significance. She is quoted as having told Yehudah that she was completely and legally available and was not ritually impure either. At any rate, when the Torah subsequent to the revelations after the trial writes that Yehudah ולא יסף עוד לדעתה, this line has to be understood that he did not stop to have marital relations with her, as he had now found out that everything had been legal to begin with. (verse 26) According to our author this latest interpretation follows the view expressed in the Talmud tractate Yevamot folio 100, that even a woman with an infant on her shoulder is believed when she claims that her betrothal at the time had been illegal.