THAMAR (Heb. Tāmār «Palm»). - Name of three women and one locality of the Old Testament.
1. Wife of Er, firstborn of Judah (v.), son of Jacob (Gen. 38:6). When her husband died, she passed by the law of the levirate to Onan (v.); when he too died because of his sin, constrained by her superstitious father-in-law, who feared for the lives of his other sons, to remain in seclusion, she by a deception induced her father-in-law Judah himself to unite with her, by whom she had the two sons Pharez and Zerah. The right of the woman had prevailed (cf. Ruth 4:12) to give a legal descendant to her first husband; in Pharez the direct line of the Judeo-Davidic genealogy was preserved (Mt. 1:3).
2. Daughter of David by his wife Maacah (because she was the sister of Absalom; cf. II Sam. 13:1 with 3:3), of great beauty, who against her will had a part in a dark tragedy of the royal family: violated by her brother (by the mother Ahinoam: ibid. 3:2) Amnon (ibid. 13:1 ff.), she took refuge with Absalom, who two years later avenged her by killing his half-brother Amnon at a banquet (ibid. 13:28-29).
3. Daughter of Absalom, likewise celebrated for beauty (ibid. 2:27).
4. Locality named in Ez. 47:19 (and to be restored also in v. 18) and 48:28 in the ideal description of the eastern borders of Palestine (moreover in the Hebrew of I Kings 9:18, kethibh), which is made to correspond to a region near Kadesh, in the present-day 'Arabah, probably to Assonthanar of Gen. 14:7, near the southern tip of the Dead Sea. Giovanni Rinaldi