ויהי בעת ההיא, והמדנים מכרו אותו, [the Torah contrasts the facts with the perception of the facts, i.e. Joseph was alive but the Midianites had sold him. I believe that this is why the author quotes the beginning of this verse without elaborating on it at all. He leaves it to our imagination to fill in this next item in the tragic chain of errors beginning with the fact that Yitzchok had shown more love for Esau. Ed.] at about the same time when Joseph was sold to Egypt at the suggestion of Yehudah who had proposed this instead of bringing him back to his father and had thereby bereaved his father, Yehudah reaped some of the fruit of his ill advised plans, in that the way was paved for him to be bereaved of two of his own sons in due course.

והיה בכזיב, the reason why she called their third son Shelah, a word reminiscent of Kings II 4,28 (לא) תשלה, “(do not) deceive, disappoint, disillusion,” a name which is not exactly complimentary to the bearer of it, was due to Yehudah being in כזיב, i.e. a reference to his being absent, so that she did not have this moral support when she began the labour pains prior to giving birth to her third son. [I am not sure if the author understood the Torah as using to the word כזיב to describe Yehudah’s state of mind, and that there was no such place at all. Ed.] Had he been there, he would never have agreed to the name she gave his son.

ויהי ער רע בעיני ה', the words “in the eyes of G’d,” are mentioned to tell us that he was not evil to his fellow human beings.

כי לא לו יהיה הזרע, he knew that not he alone would get the credit for performing this act of love for his deceased brother, seeing that part of the merit would go to his older brother seeing he had first fulfilled the commandment of marrying, so that he would share in the merit of having a son sired posthumously through a levirate union with his widow by his younger brother. [I fail to understand how someone who married in order to use sex only as an act of self-gratification can be described as having acquired a merit by the act of marrying. Perhaps gratifying the sex urge only with someone to whom one is married is by itself a מצוה, and this is what Seforno had in mind. Ed.]

לבלתי נתן זרע לאחיו, for not having given his seed for the use (perpetuation on earth) of his deceased brother.

שבי אלמנה, wait for a while in a state of widowhood. This expression also occurs in Hoseah 3,3 ימים רבים תשבי לי, “you will have to go a long time without marrying.”

פן ימות הוא כאחיו, so he would not be so preoccupied with Tamar’s beauty due to his immaturity which had deflected his brothers from the purpose of marriage, and he too would die as a result of this.

ותמת בת שוע, so that Yehudah should have brought his daughter-in-law into his house as a replacement for his wife. This is what Avraham had done when Yitzchok’s wife Rivkah moved into Sarah’s tent after the latter had died. (24,67) Yehudah’s failure to give Tamar his wife’s quarters to live in may have caused her to despair of having any kind of future in his family.

בפתח עינים, at the beginning of two major roads. Such a highway is known as עינים, as we know from Genesis 16,7 על העין בדרך שור, “by the road leading to Shur.”

אשר על דרך תמנתה, so that Yehudah could not avoid meeting her when he would return from Timnatah.

כי ראתה כי גדל שלה, she thought that when Yehudah would see her without widow’s garments he would ask her why she had shed those garments. She would answer him that the time had come for Shelah to marry her. He himself had suggested that she live as a widow only until Shelah would grow up. In the meantime he had already matured.

כי לא ידע כי כלתו היא, he did not even recognise her after he joined her in her private quarters. Had he recognised her he would surely have spoken to her concerning why he had not given her to his surviving son. G’d has His own agenda; clearly, it was His wish that Tamar bear a child or two children sired by Yehudah who in His eyes was more acceptable than his son Shelah [whose mother‘s antecedents we know little about.] G’d wanted that the eventual Messiah should have had genetic material dating back to Tamar.

What will you give me. If he had offered immediate payment she would not have accepted it, because what she wanted was evidence that she could present later on to prove that he was the father.

אם תתן ערבון, if you are prepared to give me such tokens I am willing to sleep with you as you requested.

ופתילך, your closely fitting sash. The items Tamar chose as pledge were all things which testified to the superior standing of its owner in society. We know from Job 38,3 that a sash is evidence of someone’s manhood, i.e. someone’s superior status. She wanted to own such trinkets reminding her constantly of Yehudah’s status so that her child would be influenced by the thoughts she entertained during her pregnancy and would grow up to be like its father.

ותלבש בגדי אלמנותה, because she was no longer willing to be married, seeing that she had achieved her purpose and was with child from the man whose seed she wanted to perpetuate.

וגם אנשי המקום אמרו, in their uninhibited conversation. Chirom warned Yehudah that his pursuit of this search would be liable to hurt his image

הנה שלחתי, so that I have not betrayed my promise.

וגם הנה הרה, she did not even bother to hide her condition which reflects negatively on you. This is similar to a statement by our sages in Yevamot 35 “when a woman had illicit sex she engages in all kinds of bodily convulsions to avoid becoming pregnant and thereby revealing her shame and that of her husband or lover.”

היא מוצאת והיא שלחה, even at this late stage in the trial when she was already on the way to the site of her execution, Tamar did not despair, as she had a heart as stout as that of a lion.

לאיש אשר אלה לו, even though she was in extreme danger she did not want to publicly embarrass Yehudah. She is the person who inspired our sages to declare that one ought to prefer to be burned in public to publicly embarrassing a fellow human being (Sotah 10

צדקה ממני, even though she approached me under false pretences, misrepresenting herself, she still acted more righteously than I did. I did not see her at all when I sent her the goat. [I was too embarrassed to be seen, Ed.] Her deceit was practised for a noble cause. and appears to have been approved by G’d, seeing she meant to maintain the seed of her deceased husband, whereas I was merely wanting to gratify my libido. Immediately she had done what she meant to do she resumed living as a widow as I had told her to do. My seeking her out to let her have the goat I had promised her was meant only to ensure that my good image would be preserved. This in itself is not a worthy cause. Our sages have used this occurrence as the basis for their saying that “a sin committed for noble cause is better than a good deed when same is not performed as such but as something self-serving.” (Nazir 23).

והנה תאומים בבטנה, she recognised shortly before giving birth that she was going to give birth to twins. This is the reason the midwife tied the red string to the baby first appearing out of her womb.

ויהי כמשיב ידו, the prefix כ meaning “as if,” describes that he did not really retract his hand. He was forced to, being pushed by his brother.