Tamar’s monologue by TSW
This is a world of absurdity and the absurdity started with my farther-in-law. I never regard him as a respectable person. He could not teach his children well. My husband was not a nice son. His brother is also not a nice person. His brother dishonored me by spilling his semen on the floor. But instead of rebelling against it, I subscribed to it. Why didn’t I defy? The system says I have to sleep with his brother, so that my husband would have descendants of his. What the heck! So my womb is a public vessel, or is it not? I didn’t even ask, could I say no? So I let his brother into me. It was strange. I felt being used. There was no passion in his touch. I was not punisthed, but was angry. He had to pay a high price for his meanness. The system regarded me, or my womb as a vessel belonging to the patriarchal line, vessel of property.
I was happy. My revenge worked. I respect the prostitute they acted in their own and live an independent life. Why not I be like them -an independent whore.
Perez’s Monologue by IVB
My family story is a story of apparent success that failed. My father, Judah, who should have been my grandfather, was “acquainted with grief” all of his life. He lived everyday watching his father mourn the loss of Uncle Joseph. My mother happily joined his family by marrying his oldest son, but he died and she grieved too, for a lost husband and no children.
Then Dad married his second son to my mother and lost him, too, and still had no grandchildren. He had even more to mourn. In his grief, he rejected my mother and sent her home. He was afraid he might lose his 3rd son, if he gave my mom to him. A while later he lost his wife, so now his grief was terrible. Finally, he recovered and decided to work, herding and shearing sheep. The sight of a “prostitute” was too tempting after so much loss, so he paid her for her services with his ID.
Later he discovered that he had fathered me with Tamar. That grieved him more than anything because he had committed incest. His anger at my mother changed to anger with himself. He understood why my mother had acted when he had failed in his promise to her. He became a bitter person.
I admire my mother. As a young woman she obeyed her parents and community traditions. But Her father-in-law’s promises of children and family were not fulfilled. She decided to become proactive herself. I didn’t understand her motive for wanting to be pregnant by her father-in-law, unless my birth proved she was capable of bearing sons. It also showed how selfish Judah always was about caring more for his bloodline than for her as a person. In the end, he did understand his passion for continuing his bloodline led him to commit incest, a grievous sin.
At our birth my brother tried to emerge first, but I succeeded in being the first-borne. The midwife said, “So this is how you have broken through.” Somehow that statement resonated with Judah and Tamar, my parents, when they heard that Uncle Joseph had become famous and successful as a slave in Egypt.
I decided that even when we try, or someone else tries, to engineer our future and fail miserably, God can still show us how acting in our own behalf can be right or wrong. If we choose God’s way, we can live through all the consequences of the wrongs we choose into the future God sees for us.
