On God Spare the Girls

[cw: discussions of rape and sexual assault, from the Bible and Shakespeare play Titus Andronicus]

A new novel by a fellow alumna of The University of Texas at Austin, with a protagonist that chooses this university to the reluctant dread of her evangelical family – set under the big skies of rural Texas and punctuated with appearances by Blue Bell and Whataburger – and woven with close readings of Biblical stories. It’s a story about the sexual wrongdoings of men, and their power, and the excuses made and forgiveness demanded, and the women left in the wake questioning their own faith and their own sanity. I’ve been so excited to read it that I was nearly avoiding it, because of how close to home I knew it would hit.

I read it within a single day. It is a tightly paced and clearly drawn novel, with almost frustratingly realistic characters. Please read it. It deserves to be read for its own sake, and meanwhile, I’ve swiftly added it to the short list of novels I recommend to people I’m close to who want to understand me better.

There are two Biblical passages that serve as the subject for pivotal reflections in God Spare the Girls, both Old Testament, neither getting farther afield than the tale of the first patriarch, Abraham, and his family. The first is the story of Lot and his daughters. The second is the story of Sarah.

I’ll leave those stories for now – the novel handles them just fine. (Go read it!) Instead I want to examine a pair of Old Testament passages that have loomed large in my mind since my own girlhood, instructive, threatening, confounding.

You don’t want to be a woman named Tamar in the Old Testament. I thought this was such an odd coincidence when I came across their stories during my free-time readings around age 10, discovering two unfortunate women who bore the same name. (I was the sort of kid who made it a personal mission to read the Bible cover-to-cover, in part because of my ravenous appetite for the written word with limited access to material – no public library cards for us! – and in part because this was a praiseworthy act. What could be unsafe about reading the Bible? We had to tiptoe around so much worldly media, made dangerous with inappropriate content, and it was freeing to sit down with the one book I knew for sure could never hurt me.)

No one ever mentioned this particular coincidence. Unlike lots of evangelical Christian trivia – the different names of the disciples across gospels, the fact that Jonah was swallowed by a fish not a whale – I had never come across an acknowledgement of this easter egg. Two women named Tamar! When there were so few women to go around to begin with.

Then again, it’s not like their stories were the subjects of Sunday school classes or illustrated books of Bible stories. I only discovered them on my unguided expeditions through the Bible as naked text.

(The books that I re-read in this manner the most growing up were Ruth and Esther, of course. I loved the narrative bits of the Bible, anyway – Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, the Gospels and Acts – but these two self-contained episodes, the only books named for and revolving around women, were my favorites in form and in subject.)

The Tamars have their stories told in Genesis and Samuel, respectively, as supporting episodes in the larger stories of Jacob’s sons and King David. The first Tamar has a story that I might tell people with a laugh and an air of mischief: this is a story about a woman getting what’s hers, the story that birthed the phrase onanism. And, of course, my usual hook: it’s the story that taught me about the mechanics of sex.

(I’m using the NIV translation, since that’s what I was raised with.)

Genesis 38:6 Judah got a wife for Er, his firstborn, and her name was Tamar. 7 But Er, Judah’s firstborn, was wicked in the Lord’s sight; so the Lord put him to death.

8 Then Judah said to Onan, “Sleep with your brother’s wife and fulfill your duty to her as a brother-in-law to raise up offspring for your brother.” 9 But Onan knew that the child would not be his; so whenever he slept with his brother’s wife, he spilled his semen on the ground to keep from providing offspring for his brother. 10 What he did was wicked in the Lord’s sight; so the Lord put him to death also.

11 Judah then said to his daughter-in-law Tamar, “Live as a widow in your father’s household until my son Shelah grows up.” For he thought, “He may die too, just like his brothers.” So Tamar went to live in her father’s household.

12 After a long time Judah’s wife, the daughter of Shua, died. When Judah had recovered from his grief, he went up to Timnah, to the men who were shearing his sheep, and his friend Hirah the Adullamite went with him.

13 When Tamar was told, “Your father-in-law is on his way to Timnah to shear his sheep,” 14 she took off her widow’s clothes, covered herself with a veil to disguise herself, and then sat down at the entrance to Enaim, which is on the road to Timnah. For she saw that, though Shelah had now grown up, she had not been given to him as his wife.

15 When Judah saw her, he thought she was a prostitute, for she had covered her face. 16 Not realizing that she was his daughter-in-law, he went over to her by the roadside and said, “Come now, let me sleep with you.”

“And what will you give me to sleep with you?” she asked.

17 “I’ll send you a young goat from my flock,” he said.

“Will you give me something as a pledge until you send it?” she asked.

18 He said, “What pledge should I give you?”

“Your seal and its cord, and the staff in your hand,” she answered. So he gave them to her and slept with her, and she became pregnant by him. 19 After she left, she took off her veil and put on her widow’s clothes again.

20 Meanwhile Judah sent the young goat by his friend the Adullamite in order to get his pledge back from the woman, but he did not find her. 21 He asked the men who lived there, “Where is the shrine prostitute who was beside the road at Enaim?”

“There hasn’t been any shrine prostitute here,” they said.

22 So he went back to Judah and said, “I didn’t find her. Besides, the men who lived there said, ‘There hasn’t been any shrine prostitute here.’”

23 Then Judah said, “Let her keep what she has, or we will become a laughingstock. After all, I did send her this young goat, but you didn’t find her.”

24 About three months later Judah was told, “Your daughter-in-law Tamar is guilty of prostitution, and as a result she is now pregnant.”

Judah said, “Bring her out and have her burned to death!”

25 As she was being brought out, she sent a message to her father-in-law. “I am pregnant by the man who owns these,” she said. And she added, “See if you recognize whose seal and cord and staff these are.”

26 Judah recognized them and said, “She is more righteous than I, since I wouldn’t give her to my son Shelah.” And he did not sleep with her again.

So there’s a lot to unpack here.

The online NIV uses the word semen here – I distinctly remember my Bible reading seed when I was growing up, obscuring the matter slightly. But it was certainly the first time that I realized something came out of the penis, something that made you pregnant, as opposed to the general mashing-together producing some effect that could result in a child. Sex, as a concept, was already irredeemably gross to me. I can’t say that this helped matters.

I think the closeness of marriage and prostitution in this passage also stuck with me. I remember working my way slowly through the mechanics of patriarchy as a preteen girl, trying to find the language to describe the way that the world seemed to bear down around me. One of the great gifts of becoming an adult and reading widely was discovering that I was not so alone and unreasonable as I felt as a preteen and teen – there are full generations of women who had been speaking and writing eloquently about these things, giving full names and explanations to the phenomena which mystified and frustrated me. It’s also been a great sorrow, thinking about how much less I might have suffered in my teenage years, if I’d only had access to the kind of feminist thinking that would tell me: you’re not crazy, this isn’t all in your head, the world is cruel and unfair to women, the way the Bible talks about them is messed up, the way Hollywood presents them is messed up, the way the men around you talk about them is messed up, the way boys are treating you at school is messed up. As it was, I grasped for words when trying to explain my feelings to my family, and would often end the resulting debates in tears. There was something clarifying and comforting about a Biblical story that, while making no apologies for its systems of oppression against women, at least laid it all out very clearly.

“Marriage is basically the same thing as prostitution, isn’t it?” I asked my mom one day as a preteen, feeling brave. “Women give men sex, and the men have the money.” The fundamental exchange seemed to be identical, only as a prostitute, you had to have sex with lots of men, which did seem like a worse deal, to me. (My mother assured me that marriage and prostitution were extremely different.)

I liked that Tamar won at the end of the story. I liked how Judah – son of Jacob, the next in the line of patriarchs – was exposed as a wrong-headed hypocrite. I didn’t like that Tamar had to sleep with him to get there, though. I didn’t like imagining her entering that bedchamber over and over, submitting her body for the use of several men. It all seemed like a sort of hell to me. But at least she made it through. She bore twin sons, and Judah never slept with her again. She’d done her time. 

I’d forgotten about the threat of being burned to death. It was the sex which stuck out in my mind as the real terror.

Which, as it turns out, is a good transition to the second Tamar.

This is not a Bible story that I pull out as a party trick. It’s not one for joking, and it doesn’t make you laugh afterwards. I’ve rarely shared it with people, though it lodged in my brain, too, when I was younger.

2 Samuel 13:1 In the course of time, Amnon son of David fell in love with Tamar, the beautiful sister of Absalom son of David.

2 Amnon became so obsessed with his sister Tamar that he made himself ill. She was a virgin, and it seemed impossible for him to do anything to her.

3 Now Amnon had an adviser named Jonadab son of Shimeah, David’s brother. Jonadab was a very shrewd man. 4 He asked Amnon, “Why do you, the king’s son, look so haggard morning after morning? Won’t you tell me?”

Amnon said to him, “I’m in love with Tamar, my brother Absalom’s sister.”

5 “Go to bed and pretend to be ill,” Jonadab said. “When your father comes to see you, say to him, ‘I would like my sister Tamar to come and give me something to eat. Let her prepare the food in my sight so I may watch her and then eat it from her hand.’”

6 So Amnon lay down and pretended to be ill. When the king came to see him, Amnon said to him, “I would like my sister Tamar to come and make some special bread in my sight, so I may eat from her hand.”

7 David sent word to Tamar at the palace: “Go to the house of your brother Amnon and prepare some food for him.” 8 So Tamar went to the house of her brother Amnon, who was lying down. She took some dough, kneaded it, made the bread in his sight and baked it. 9 Then she took the pan and served him the bread, but he refused to eat.

“Send everyone out of here,” Amnon said. So everyone left him. 10 Then Amnon said to Tamar, “Bring the food here into my bedroom so I may eat from your hand.” And Tamar took the bread she had prepared and brought it to her brother Amnon in his bedroom. 11 But when she took it to him to eat, he grabbed her and said, “Come to bed with me, my sister.”

12 “No, my brother!” she said to him. “Don’t force me! Such a thing should not be done in Israel! Don’t do this wicked thing. 13 What about me? Where could I get rid of my disgrace? And what about you? You would be like one of the wicked fools in Israel. Please speak to the king; he will not keep me from being married to you.” 14 But he refused to listen to her, and since he was stronger than she, he raped her.

15 Then Amnon hated her with intense hatred. In fact, he hated her more than he had loved her. Amnon said to her, “Get up and get out!”

16 “No!” she said to him. “Sending me away would be a greater wrong than what you have already done to me.”

But he refused to listen to her. 17 He called his personal servant and said, “Get this woman out of my sight and bolt the door after her.” 18 So his servant put her out and bolted the door after her. She was wearing an ornate[a] robe, for this was the kind of garment the virgin daughters of the king wore. 19 Tamar put ashes on her head and tore the ornate robe she was wearing. She put her hands on her head and went away, weeping aloud as she went.

20 Her brother Absalom said to her, “Has that Amnon, your brother, been with you? Be quiet for now, my sister; he is your brother. Don’t take this thing to heart.” And Tamar lived in her brother Absalom’s house, a desolate woman.

In the course of time, Absalom kills Amnon, before he is killed himself in a conflict with David. Their father is something of a cipher in all of this. David is “furious” after the rape, and then mourns Amnon’s death, before wishing for Absalom to return from his banishment and to be reunited with his son. Does he long for reunion with his daughter? The political futures of the men are the subject of many chapters after this one. But Tamar is never mentioned again; her story ends here. She is ruined, and whatever remains of her life will be a slow wait for death. She can never be anything else than this one thing that happened to her. And the only man who seems to bear any care for her memory – for that is what she is now, reduced to memory – is Absalom.

The name Tamar does appear again, a few chapters later. Three sons and a daughter were born to Absalom. His daughter’s name was Tamar, and she became a beautiful woman. So there is one Tamar in the Bible who, as far as we know, avoids tragedy. She at least earns that singular epithet, the primary measure of value allotted for women. She is beautiful.

Re-reading this passage, I felt astonished by the dialogue – its directness, the unchanging horror of the dynamic between a woman and a man who can overpower her. This scene has been passed down from men to other men through generations of oral and written story, study and sermonizing. They’ve known what this looks like. They’ve always known. He hated her with intense hatred. In fact, he hated her more than he had loved her.

I’ve finally gotten around to reading Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, this summer – speaking of feminist texts that, decades earlier, gave clear language to the intangible horror I felt inside me as a girl. I’ve just finished Rich’s Of Woman Born, and I’ll probably deal with it in more detail soon, but I did want to spotlight one quote that comes to mind.

The son of the fathers learns contempt for himself in states of suffering, and can reveal them only to women, whom he must then also hold in contempt, or resent for their knowledge of his weakness.

p. 212 (Norton edition, 2021)

Or, as Linda Radlett says to her lover in The Pursuit of Love, which I’m currently reading: “First you seduce them, then you despise them…what a monster you are.” (p. 147, Penguin Essentials, 2018)

There’s another part of the 2 Samuel passage that stood out to me in the re-reading, reminding me of another text. I’d forgotten the conversation that opens Tamar’s story: the friend who goads Amnon on, the hand of the omnipresent network of toxic male entitlement that says: what is she, in the face of your wanting? You’re a man. Go take it.

The first play I ever saw at Shakespeare’s Globe was Lucy Bailey’s production of Titus Andronicus in 2014, widely praised for its rawness and power. Reviews hailed how audience members would drop like flies, fainting at the scenes of bloody violence. Titus is, of course, Shakespeare’s rape play. If you’re going to do it, best to do it in full force, I suppose, and make the audience feel the horror of the brutality, as much as is possible. I have mixed feelings these days about the effectiveness of exhibition as a root of compassion, but I think my bedrock faith is still there. That’s what I think art is for, isn’t it? This is what being a person is like, sometimes. Maybe it is for you too. Maybe it isn’t, and it’s worth thinking about.

But a debate on the moral complications of staging sexual violence within entertainment is neither here nor there. I just wanted to draw a comparison between 2 Samuel 13:1-5, and Act 2 Scene 1 from Titus.

Two brothers (Chiron and Demetrius) are bemoaning their desire for Lavinia, who is betrothed to another. And it takes another man (Aaron) to push them over the edge.

CHIRON
Aaron, a thousand deaths
Would I propose to achieve her whom I love.

AARON
To achieve her! how?

DEMETRIUS
Why makest thou it so strange?
She is a woman, therefore may be woo’d;
She is a woman, therefore may be won;
She is Lavinia, therefore must be loved. […]

AARON
Why, then, it seems, some certain snatch or so
Would serve your turns.

CHIRON
Ay, so the turn were served.

DEMETRIUS
Aaron, thou hast hit it.

AARON
Would you had hit it too!
Then should not we be tired with this ado.
Why, hark ye, hark ye! and are you such fools
To square for this? would it offend you, then
That both should speed?

CHIRON
Faith, not me.

DEMETRIUS
Nor me, so I were one.

AARON
For shame, be friends, and join for that you jar:
‘Tis policy and stratagem must do
That you affect; and so must you resolve,
That what you cannot as you would achieve,
You must perforce accomplish as you may.
Take this of me: Lucrece was not more chaste
Than this Lavinia, Bassianus’ love.
A speedier course than lingering languishment
Must we pursue, and I have found the path.
My lords, a solemn hunting is in hand;
There will the lovely Roman ladies troop:
The forest walks are wide and spacious;
And many unfrequented plots there are
Fitted by kind for rape and villany:
Single you thither then this dainty doe,
And strike her home by force, if not by words:
This way, or not at all, stand you in hope.
Come, come, our empress, with her sacred wit
To villany and vengeance consecrate,
Will we acquaint with all that we intend;
And she shall file our engines with advice,
That will not suffer you to square yourselves,
But to your wishes’ height advance you both.
The emperor’s court is like the house of Fame,
The palace full of tongues, of eyes, and ears:
The woods are ruthless, dreadful, deaf, and dull;
There speak, and strike, brave boys, and take
your turns;
There serve your lusts, shadow’d from heaven’s eye,
And revel in Lavinia’s treasury.

Like Jonadab, Aaron proposes a “speedier course”. Wooing is dismissed; letting women make up their own minds is tedious, uncertain. Easier to just cut to the chase and skip to the good parts, isn’t it?

We also watched Promising Young Woman in the past week, but this entry is long enough already.

Suffice it to say: these stories are still speaking to current realities. It’s funny, because that’s exactly the sort of sentence a pastor might wield when talking about the holy inspiration of the Bible, how it remains a source (if not the source) of true wisdom across all human experience. The reality is a little different. The Bible speaks to us not because it’s the cure but because it is riddled with symptoms itself, diseased, just as all culture is, with the ills that humans bear. I’m not under any illusions that Genesis and 2 Samuel, with their suffering Tamars, present a clear warning and lesson to men about the evils of misogyny. That’s not their game. These texts aim at the glory of their God, and the mythmaking of a patriarchal lineage. Women’s stories are a sideshow, women’s personhood an afterthought. 

The remarkable thing is that the display of misogyny is there, clear, preserved in amber and passed down for us to recognize. 

Written 15 July 2021