History remembers Tamar as a footnote and a scandal, the widow who disguised herself to trap her own father-in-law on a lonely road. Tamar Triumphant tells the story Genesis 38 leaves in shadow. Tamar was no harlot. In this imagining, Tamar was a daughter of the priestly line of Shem, raised to worship God Most High, then handed into a house of Canaanite idols to launder the bloodline of a scheming man's sons (Er and Onan).

Tamar Triumphant is a richly researched reimagining of the strange, unforgettable chapter that interrupts the story of Joseph, a tale of deception and grace, brokenness and rebuilding, betrayal and hard-won forgiveness, and the quiet, relentless providence of God.

Where Genesis draws its veil, this bold retelling dares to lift it, giving cause and consequence to the deaths the text records but will not explain. Widowed twice, cast aside, and nearly burned alive on a rumor, Tamar holds to her God through every betrayal, until the wrong done to her becomes the very thread by which His promise is carried forward.

Now in Goshen and a grandmother, she tells the truth of it to a single listener: Asenath, the Egyptian wife of Joseph, who has never understood the wound her own husband carries. Piece by piece the buried history of the house of Judah comes to light, the jealousy that broke a family, the deception that reached back generations, and the God who let every one of Judah's works of the flesh come to nothing: the Canaanite marriage, the sons he tried to cleanse by taking Tamar, the blessing he grasped at with Joseph believed dead. In the end, the promise he clutched for was carried instead through the widow he discarded.