Commentaria in Genesim
7. AND HER ALSO WAS WICKED.—The Hebrews and Christians agree that both Her and Onan sinned by the sin of wantonness and withdrawal, which is against the nature of generation and of marriage: for he destroys the effect and the conception in his seed. Hence this sin is compared by the Hebrews to homicide, and is called detestable by Scripture, verse 10. Her and Onan therefore did not sin by cruelty, as St. Augustine will have it, Against Faustus, book 22, chap. 48, but by wanton lust, namely by withdrawing themselves in the act of marriage, so as to pour out the seed outside the natural vessel of the wife; and Her did this from intemperance of lust, namely lest childbearing and the rearing of children should take something from the beauty of his wife, and consequently from his own venereal delight. Onan, the brother of Her, sinned by the same sin, but from another motive, composed of the records of many authors of various times, Ranke, Untersuchungen über den Pentateuch, vol. 1, p. 260 ff., and Havernick, Einleitung in das Alte Testament, vol. 2, p. 225, have already observed. For in a more suitable place, says Rosenmüller, Moses could not set forth this whole history of the marriage and offspring of Juda, because, since he had undertaken to narrate the incest of Juda with Thamar, which happened after the sale of Joseph, it was necessary to go back further to tell how Thamar fell into this incest, and on what occasion she was driven to it. Wherefore both the whole marriage of Juda and the offspring born of it had to be set forth.
and therefore graver and more wicked, namely from envy, lest, if he completed the act of marriage, he should beget children not for himself but for his brother. Beautifully, Her in Hebrew by metathesis is Ra, that is, evil, perverse: for he who had been called by his father Er, that is, watchful, was by sin turned into Ra, that is, perverse. Onan in Hebrew is the same as iniquity and sorrow; for sorrow, like a son, inseparably accompanies and follows iniquity, its mother.
AND HE WAS SLAIN BY HIM.—Both Her and Onan were slain by God for the sin of wantonness, through an evil angel, as it seems, namely through Asmodeus.
For he slew the lustful husbands of Sara, Tobias iii, 7. Again, says Abulensis, God slew them by sending upon them a terrible plague, so that it was manifest that they were taken away not naturally but by God, in punishment of their iniquities.
Let confessors note this vengeance of God upon the effeminate, and upon spouses who withdraw themselves in the act of marriage, and let them impress it upon their penitents. For if in that age, so rude, uncultivated and abject, God thus punished Her and Onan, how will he punish in this light and under the law of the Gospel the Christians who defile themselves?
St. Christina the Astonishing saw in spirit the world full of and overwhelmed with this sin of pollution, and that God therefore threatened the whole world with most grievous plagues, which, to avert them, she tortured herself in wondrous and horrible ways and pains. John Benedictus in the Summa of Cases, on the sixth precept of the decalogue, relates from Conrad Clingius something marvellous about this sin (let those who report it answer for its credibility), whether received by revelation or by experience: namely, that those who persist in this sin of pollution for as many years as Christ lived, that is, thirty-three, are incurable, and as it were of desperate salvation, unless a wonderful, rare and extraordinary grace of God come to their aid and convert them. Let him therefore who has fallen into this sin see to it that he rise from it at once by penance, lest he contract a habit to which nature is of itself most prone, and which afterwards he cannot put off, and so weave and plait for himself the cords of inextricable lust, which may drag him in and bind him indissolubly to the fire of hell.
9. THAT THE CHILDREN SHOULD NOT BE HIS.—Note that before the law, Deuteron. xxv, 5, it was the custom among the fathers that a brother should take the wife of a brother who had died without children, and raise up seed to him, that is, offspring, lest his name and family perish; in such a way, namely, that the firstborn whom he begot of his brother’s wife should be reckoned by the name, not of himself, but of his brother: but the rest born afterwards were reckoned his own, and called by his own name.
were to be called the sons of Onan. But envious and impious Onan, lest he should give light to his brother, put out his own lamp, while he poured out and destroyed his seed upon the ground.
Note second the enallage: “sons,” that is, a son, namely the firstborn, as I said, and, if he should die, the second-born, who would succeed in the place of the firstborn.
Note third that certain legal observances were in use before Moses: for such are this adoption and arrogation of sons; such also were the observance of the sabbath, the distinction of clean animals from unclean, circumcision, and certain others, which the fathers observed before Moses and the law by the impulse or precept of God.
11. BE A WIDOW.—From this and from verse 8 it is gathered that in that age a woman who had married into a family was thereafter as it were bound to it, so that if her husband died she would take another of the same family, to raise up seed to the dead brother; but if there were no such man, or he did not offer himself, then she could take a husband from another family. By this custom, therefore, Thamar clung to the family of Juda, and did not pass from it into another.
FOR HE FEARED.—In Hebrew it is, for he said (understand: I will not give my third son Sela to Thamar himself as husband), lest he too die, as his two elder brothers, who were Thamar’s husbands, died in marriage with her. Hence it is plain that Juda, under this pretext and by guile, wished to send Thamar away from himself and his family, into which she had already been incorporated by a double marriage, saying that his son Sela was still younger; and so by weaving delays he eluded Thamar; for he feared that Thamar, either on account of her sins or her ill-fortune, was the cause, or at least the occasion, of the death of her husbands: for this was cast in the teeth of Sara, the wife of Tobias, from a like suspicion, Tobias iii, 9.
Thamar perceived this guile of Juda; she sought offspring from no other source than the stock of Juda and Abraham, blessed by God; and when she saw that Sela, the husband promised to her, now grown and mature, was denied her, by a marvellous stratagem she eluded the guile of Juda, and turned it back upon Juda’s own head.
14. SHE TOOK A VEIL,—she wrapped herself in a mantle, lest she be recognised. The theristrum was a summer veil, says Suidas, so called from theros, that is, from summer and the heat which it kept off. Hebrew women anciently (as Italians now do) covered the head and the whole body with a mantle or veil of silk, as I said on Ezech. xvi, 10; and this partly for modesty, partly for ornament (for the theristrum is here set against the garments of widowhood and mourning), partly to keep off the heat.
SHE SAT IN THE CROSS WAY.—In Hebrew it is: she sat bepetach enayim, which the Septuagint render, she sat at the gates of Enan. But note: the Hebrews call a crossway petach enayim, that is, an opening, and, as the Chaldee renders it, the dividing of two eyes, because at a crossway we are wont to turn our eyes in two directions, namely along two paths. So harlots sit at crossways, that they may hunt and catch the passers-by on both sides: hence Thamar sat at the crossway, catching Juda.
16. AND GOING IN TO HER.—Juda here sinned by simple fornication, for he did not recognise his daughter-in-law: and Juda’s wife was already dead, as is plain from verse 12, and so Juda was now a widower and free; but Thamar sinned both by fornication, and as it were by adultery (for she was betrothed to Sela, the son of Juda, as is plain from verse 14), and by incest, because she knew that Juda was her father-in-law. Francis Georgius therefore errs, section 4, problem 265, where he asserts that Thamar did not sin, because she acted for the sake of a mystery. He errs more gravely, problem 267, as does R. Moses, Guide, book 2, chap. 50, when they excuse the fornication of Juda with Thamar on the ground that before the law of Moses harlotry was not forbidden, and therefore was lawful. For it is certain that simple fornication is a sin against the law of nature, and therefore was forbidden and unlawful at all times, even before the law of Moses, as St. Jerome, St. Augustine, Against Faustus, book 22, St. Thomas, Lyranus, Abulensis and others everywhere teach.
You will say: St. Chrysostom and Theodoret here excuse Thamar and Juda. I answer: They do not excuse the deed, but the intention of the deed in Thamar, because Thamar intended not lust, as Juda did, but offspring. Second, they excuse this deed in a certain way, in that they refer it to the disposition of God, that is, to his permission and ordination. For God permitted this sin, and this fornication, so that Christ might be born of Phares: he therefore ordained it toward Christ.