Commentary for Genesis 38:16

ויט אליה אל הדרך AND HE TURNED UNTO HER BY THE WAY — from the road he was following he turned to the road where she was. In old French détourner; English to turn aside.

כי לא ידע כי כלתו היא, he did not even recognise her after he joined her in her private quarters. Had he recognised her he would surely have spoken to her concerning why he had not given her to his surviving son. G’d has His own agenda; clearly, it was His wish that Tamar bear a child or two children sired by Yehudah who in His eyes was more acceptable than his son Shelah [whose mother‘s antecedents we know little about.] G’d wanted that the eventual Messiah should have had genetic material dating back to Tamar.

ויט אליה, he detoured in her direction from the direction he had been walking.
אל הדרך, to the beginning of the path where she was sitting, there being an opportunity nearby to enjoy privacy.

הבה נא אבא אליך, “if you please, I wish to have relations with you.” If the Torah had applied the rules of grammar here, it should have quoted Yehudah as saying הבי instead of הבה. However, seeing that Yehudah considered the woman a harlot, a woman who demands sexual relations outright in the manner males do, he changed his mode of address and treated her as if she were a male. The Torah preferred to quote Yehudah verbatim instead of observing the rules of grammar. We find a parallel to this in Genesis 19,32 when the daughters of Lot initiate sexual intercourse with their father by first making him drunk. They too acted in a manner which is usually a male prerogative, and this is why the Torah wrote לכה נשקה instead of לכי נשקה. I have explained the matter there.

הבה נא COME, I PRAY THEE — Prepare yourself and your mind for this. Wherever הבה occurs it signifies “preparing oneself”, except in any passage where it must necessarily be translated by “giving”. And, indeed, those signifying “preparation” have almost the meaning of “giving”. (ערבון (17— means a PLEDGE.

What will you give me. If he had offered immediate payment she would not have accepted it, because what she wanted was evidence that she could present later on to prove that he was the father.

הכר נא, an expression demanding an immediate response, similar to such expressions we had explained in connection with הבה נא in Genesis 11,4.