Tamar

תמר


Literally the date-palm; from a root meaning "to stand erect", including the phallic and towers.

Ezekiel 47:19 and 48:28 makes it a town on the southern border, following the definition of the borders given in Numbers 34:3 ff. That text identifies Tamar, by implication at least, with Kadesh Barne'a, which Numbers 20:3 ff also calls Merivah, the place where Mosheh struck the rock to draw out water. I only mention this because, if Tamar and Kadesh Barne'a and Merivah are all the same place - one the palm-shrine, one the town, one the spring - then Mosheh and the Beney Yisra-El spent a great deal of those forty years of wandering actually already well inside what would become Yisra-El! Indeed, wandering homelessly in precisely those locations where Sha'ul would pursue David during his "wilderness" years! Are we then in the realms of mythology, or history?

Genesis 38:6 makes her the daughter-in-law of Yehudah, and has an interesting tale of harlotry and incest which is explained in the textual commentaries, and which is an alternate version of the rape in 2 Samuel 13, where she is a daughter of King David whose son Amnon beds by force.

2 Samuel 14:27 however makes her a daughter of Av-Shalom (Absalom), where previously she was his sister.

But really she is the goddess in one of her classic symbolic forms, the highly sexual date-palm whose bright orange fruit suggest nothing so much as testicles.

The Arabians worshipped the Palm of Nejran as a goddess. The god of Byblos was born under a palm tree, which makes him a variation of Osher (Osiris), as the palm grew around his coffin when it was washed up.

The English river Tamar is thought to come from the the legend of Tamara the Water Nymph, whose story you can read here, and which has absolutely nothing but pure coincidence to do with Biblical Tamar.

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