"Dress like whores"

[Laurence Horn]

At 2:04 PM -0400 7/20/02, James A. Landau wrote:
>A streetwalker does not wear garish makeup and revealing clothes because they
>are sexy per se.  Rather she wears whatever the local convention is for her
>to wear, since her clothing/makeup/demeanor etc. are for recognition.
>Consider the following 3,000-year-old account
>
>"[she] covered herself with her veil, and wrapped herselof, and sat in the
>entrance of Enaim [i.e. at a crossroads]...When Judah saw her, he thought her
>to be a harlot; for she had covered her face."
>
Hey, I recognize this--it's part of the Onan story, which somehow
made it onto the handout for my "spitten image" talk a couple of ADS
annual meetings ago.  (Genesis 38, if anyone wants to track it down.)
The lady in question, Tamar, wasn't really working as a harlot, she
just wanted to have her brother-in-law's baby according to levirate
law, but Onan wouldn't oblige (spilling his seed on the ground, like
Dorothy Parker's parrot of the same name, and getting slain by the
Lord for his impertinence), so she had to settle for her
father-in-law's baby instead.  Not really her fault, just following
the law as best she could.

larry