Analyze Genesis 38 (the story of Judah and Tamar) as an isolated story. Explain how ancient audiences were meant to understand both characters, and be sure to give particular attention to Tamar’s role as a woman.

Please read the PDF introduction of the paper. It contains all the important requirement.Please don’t write a long introduction paragraph, just go straight to the point.Analyze Genesis 38 (the story of Judah and Tamar) as an isolated story. Explain how ancient audiences were meant to understand both characters, and be sure to give particular attention to Tamar’s role as a woman. only use Jewish Study Bible and bible itself, do not bring anything to this analysis except this biblical text as evidence. You should have no bibliography, since your only source is the text of Genesis 38. The paper should be organized to explain Tamar’s centrality to Genesis 38 in two dimensions: as the foil for Judah, the ancestor of the people known to the audience, and perhaps the audience’s own primary identity; and as a woman who operates at the margins of accepted female behavior and yet is not condemned explicitly. You should work through all the research tasks listed above, but the paper itself should follow your own most important conclusions. For every main point, make sure to present specic evidence for your ideas — evidence from the text. It is important that you account for both elements of the story: the portrayal of Judah as the name known to all as part of “current” identities; and the weight of Tamar as a character known only to this one tale and yet shaping what is thought of the ancestor Judah by who she is and what she does as a woman. Good papers can be measured by more than one virtue, and there is no grading template for necessary elements. The following are indications of quality: a) Demonstration of careful reading and observation, noticing details that are not obvious and connecting them to the large questions raised by the project. b) Proposal of insightful conclusions supported by a combination of specic evidence and precise reasoning. Cite your evidence. c) Sensitivity to the text as a text, accounting for every part of it in your conclusions about Judah and Tamar; there should not be major gaps, even as your emphasis will depend on your interpretation of the material. d) Awareness of the difference between the issues faced by the writer and the audience and the setting portrayed in a time when the whole people were represented by a single ancestor. e) Clarity of writing, both in terms of organization and sentence by sentence. 1. Consider the setting in Genesis, before Israel was a people in its own land, and when it is presented as a family of brothers under one father Jacob. The Judah and Tamar story is embedded in the middle of the Joseph story that starts in ch. 37, without evident connection to what immediately precedes or follows. Accepting that Judah is a son of Jacob (Gen 29:34–35), read ch. 38 on its own. What elements of the story reect the interest in origins? Keep in mind that this text is about the people of Judah as a whole. What is it saying in these terms? 2. Think about the structure of the Genesis 38 text: try outlining it. What are the large units that make up its main parts? What is the most effective way of dening these, to yield the most insight about the story’s impact? Every part of the story matters, even if some strike you more strongly. There is a reason for including every detail. 3. Who are the main characters in Genesis 38, and why is each one important? Somehow the whole thing revolves around Judah and Tamar, one identied with a people known to the author and audience, the other a woman with no signicance beyond this text. Get a sense of these two in relation to each other and to the minor players. 4. Work systematically through every piece of evidence for Tamar. What are the basic facts (in textual terms) about her identity, what she does, how she is portrayed? How was the audience meant to view her in broader terms? She does something clearly outside of accepted behavior and yet evades punishment. How do you evaluate the interplay of conventional expectation and the ability to break from convention? Build a picture of Tamar’s personality. Is she meant as a model? Is she to be admired? 5. Do you understand the odd marriage expectations at the start? Working only from this text, construct your own denition of the envisioned marriage rules. The story then uses this to place Judah and Tamar in a certain light. Why have the story go through this twisted plot? There is no comparable tale in the Bible! 6. So far as this all comes around to Judah, whose name is central to the audience’s own setting, how do you evaluate every aspect of what he does and says? In the end, do you think this text was written by a member of the people of Judah? (It could have come from the rival people of Israel, the other kingdom.) Whoever wrote the story, it casts not just the man but the people of Judah in a certain light: is it sympathetic? 7. Think about the social world on view throughout. What do you learn about families and about women in particular? Be careful. Dene both the structures within which women live and the way Tamar works within those structures. Does the story offer explicit social expectations or simply assume them? Look for specic evidence.