Roots Unseen: The Biblical Tamar and Botanical Epistemologies

GT-seminar: Roots Unseen: The Biblical Tamar and Botanical Epistemologies

Abstract: A character named Tamar appears in two seemingly distinct narrative episodes in the Hebrew Bible: once as Judah’s daughter-in-law in Gen 38 and a second time as David’s daughter in 2 Sam 13. A close reading of these texts, alongside the account of Abram and Sarai in the Genesis Apocryphon, evokes a botanical image of a date palm whose roots, unseen, determine the future of a people.

Bio: Jacqueline Vayntrub is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible at Yale University in the Divinity School with appointments in Religious Studies and Judaic Studies. She has a PhD from the University of Chicago and has held fellowships at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania. Her expertise is in biblical poetry and wisdom literature, biblical poetics, and literary theory both ancient and modern