Tamar doesn’t usually make it into Sunday School flannelgraph sets. Her story in Genesis 38 is messy, scandalous, and uncomfortable for anyone who wants the Bible to be a neat moral guidebook. She was Judah’s daughter-in-law, widowed twice, promised security but denied it, and ultimately forced to take matters into her own hands. And what did she do? She disguised herself as a prostitute, slept with her father-in-law, and conceived the children that secured her future.

For centuries, Tamar has been branded immoral - a trickster, a schemer, a femme fatale. But in reality, she wasn’t a seductress playing games. She was a widow maneuvering in a system stacked against her, surviving in the only way the law left open to her.