Genesis 37-38: family values

I would so love to know where some of those really smug Family Values Christians (oops, sorry, might I have alienated someone there?) get their ideas from. These two chapters are absolute corkers on this front.
In Chapter 37 Joseph son of Jacob, of the "coat of many colours," gets sold off to Ishmeelite traders by his brothers for 20 pieces of silver (prophets apparently rate less than Messiahs, or maybe there were inflationary pressures...) because they are jealous of him. The Ishmeelites, by the way, are apparently the same as Ishmaelites, the descendants of Abraham and Hagar. So this should be a lesson - cast your concubines and children into the wilderness and they will live to buy your great-grandkids as slaves.
OK, so maybe repeatedly telling your siblings about your dreams where you, one of the younger members of the family, get to rule them all is not drawn directly from Tact 101. Reuben and Judah are apparently the nicer brothers for wanting to just a) put him in a hole with no water or b) sell him to the traders, instead of just bumping him off outright. Or maybe the concept of having 'blood on your hands' is taken very literally here, so if someone dies from being put in said waterless hole you DON'T have their blood on your hands. The legal repercussions of that for prison camps commanders the world over would be joyous...
In Chapter 38 we have some more upstanding examples of how to run your family life. Judah's kids keep getting killed off by God - in one case, that of Onan, for spilling his 'seed' on the ground after being sent in to sleep with his brother's widow. For this, he gets bumped off and gets a term for masturbation named after him for about the next four thousand years. Tough punishment. Since the lady in question, Tamar, seems a little jinxed Judah is reluctant to marry his last son to her in case he dies too, so in a fit of desperation she 'plays the harlot.' Interestingly, she is identifiable as such because she covers her face. To complicate matters, the client she manages to acquire is her father-in-law, Judah, who gets her pregnant and very generously decides not to execute her as a whore when this is discovered, because she's rather cunningly asked him for some identifiable gifts.
This story - understandably, since the resulting twins are the ancestors of the great Israelite king David - attracts some interest, despite (like tales such as the Tower of Babel and the rape of Dinah) occupying very little space in the Bible itself. Tamar's actions have been reframed by feminist scholars such as Gila Safran-Naveh, a professor of Judaic Studies at Cincinatti University, as a reclamation of a woman's control over her body and her ego after she is hurt and rejected by being widowed and denied a second proper husband (having been married to one son, she seems to have become the property of her father-in-law's family instead of returning to her own parents). This is one of the most fascinating things about reading the Bible - the massive potential for reinterpretation and for digging beneath the initial, obvious patriarchal messages of stories which actually offer so much scope for seeing women's possession of subaltern power and influence.



As a final interesting point, there seems to be nothing specifically reprehensible in the view of this story about paying for sex - the main concern seems to be the dishonour implicit in not paying for sex that you have had, and breaking the commercial agreement therein. Women are definitely confined with the family as facing death if they have sex elsewhere, threatening male ownership of them and male security in their notions of fatherhood, but if women have been taken outside these structures (by choice or force) and become 'harlots' they do apparently have an identifiable status which should be honoured.

The image of Tamar and Judah is from the Residenzgalerie Salzburg, painted by an artist from the school of Rembrandt