De Virtutibus

This nobleness has been an object of desire not only to God-loving men, but likewise to women, who have discarded the ignorance in which they have been bred up, which taught them to honour, as deities, creatures made with hands, and have learnt instead that knowledge of there being only one supreme Ruler of the universe, by whom the whole world is governed and regulated;

for Tamar was a woman from Syria Palestina, who had been bred up in her own native city, which was devoted to the worship of many gods, being full of statues, and images, and, in short, of idols of every kind and description. But when she, emerging, as it were, out of profound darkness, was able to see a slight beam of truth, she then, at the risk of her life, exerted all her energies to arrive at piety, caring little for life if she could not live virtuously; and living virtuously

And yet she, having married two wicked brothers in turn, one after the other, first of all the one who was the husband of her virginity, and lastly him who succeeded to her by the law which enjoined such a marriage, in the case of the first husband not having left any family, but nevertheless, having preserved her own life free from all stain, was able to attain to that fair reputation which falls to the lot of the good, and to be the beginning of nobleness to all those who came after her. But even though she was a foreigner still she was nevertheless a freeborn woman, and born also of freeborn parents of no insignificant importance;