I think you will recall what happened. He had to give her a pledge. She had demanded it of him. She became pregnant by him, and then she sent word to him that she was pregnant by him, and Judah came at her breathing fire, you might say. I am sure that he was going to make sure this gal was put to death because she was playing the harlot. When he asked the men of that place, saying, "Where is the harlot that was openly by the way side?" They said, "There was no harlot in this place."
The same word is used for harlot in verse 21 and verse 22. If you want to look it up in Strong's a little bit later, it is Strong's 6948. Phonetically, it is ked-ay-shaw. This is the feminine of 6945. It is 6948 for the one, 6945 for the other, which is kaw-dashe. This word means "a sacred holy person." For kaw-dashe, it technically means a male prostitute; a Sodomite.
Now ked-ay-shaw is the feminine of kaw-dashe. They both have the same root. One is masculine, the other is feminine. Kaw-dashe means "a sacred holy person; a temple prostitute." That is why the King James Version translated it "harlot." But she was a holy woman. That literally is what that word translated harlot means. It means a holy woman.
Depending on the context, you are going to find that "holy" can indicate "clean, wonderful, exalted, great, unreachable, incomprehensible, incomparable, majestic." It indicates remoteness, and is even used in association with fire—holy fire; jealousy, fear, and wrath. You have to be very careful of this word, and see what kind of a context in which it appears.
Tamar was mistaken for a holy woman—a harlot; someone set apart for sacred duties which is kind of foreign to our thinking, but it is not foreign to the Hebrew at all. Incidentally, it is not foreign to Greek either, because they also used prostitutes in their temple, and those prostitutes were considered to be "holy women."
I do not know; but maybe, in this certain place, they were not worshippers of Ashtoreth. Thus the man, who responds to Hirah the Adullamite says, "We don't have anybody like that here." Maybe they were worshippers of Baal, or some other one; and they said, "No, no, no. We don't have people like that here."
Basically, he said, "Okay. If she's going to play games with me, she can come get the goat from me herself."
