Genesis 12-36—
Manuscripts of the Gods: The Bible and Ancient Cultural Thresholds
by James Whitlark, Ph.D.
Patriarchy
After another transitional genealogy, with surprising suddenness, there is a conversation.
God commands Abram to go to an area to be given him (as Eden to Adam). Additionally,
God promises Abram what was forbidden to the people of Babel. His name will become
so great it will be used in blessings. To be thus invoked, Abram would be like a
god (again the problematic motif of the metaphorically divinized human). Is this
a contract or a prediction? When Abram leaves the assigned area to seek sustenance
in Egypt is he violating an agreement or following divine providence? The narrative
is non–committal, particularly about its most controversial incident, Abram’s presenting
his wife Sarai as his sister. Read as a novel, his command to her that she say she
is his sister sounds as if he is ordering her to lie. But scripture is not a novel.
God has just revealed that those who curse Abram will be cursed. Then the text itself
seems to force readers to condemn him.
Thus, there is a double bind. At Gen. 20.12, Abram says that she
is his half–sister. Roman readers encounter a comparably disturbing moment: Deucalion,
ancestor of all humanity, calls his wife Pyrrha his “sister” (Metamorphoses
1.351). Since Genesis neither denies nor affirms Abram’s words, he may be lying.
(Later when Isaac claims Rebekah to be his sister he clearly is.) If, however, Abram
is veracious, he is violating Lev. 18.11, and the chosen people spring from his incest.
Again, readers face a koanlike cusp.
Returning from Egypt, Abram is visited by God, who confirms that the land is given
to him and that the patriarch will have descendants as numerous as the dust of the
earth (an allusion to the creation of Adam from such particles). In contrast, Abram’s
nephew Lot chooses an area likened to Egypt, a type of voluptuous temptation, so
Lot is soon in captivity. With 318 servants, Abram rescues him (Gen. 14.1-17). Near
the end of the first century C.E., the Christian exegete Father Barnabas takes this
to be the number circumcised in 17.23 and comments:
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It says, “From Abraham’s household eighteen men and three hundred.” What knowledge, then, was given to him? Learn that he mentions eighteen first and after a bit three hundred. So far as the eighteen, ten equals iota, eight equals eita. Together these equal [the first two letters of the name] Jesus. And because the cross was to be graced with the form of the letter tau, he says three hundred [which is its numerical equivalent] (Epistula, 9.8, trans. in Visotzky 14–16). |
Barnabas expects readers to believe that Abram received a revelation
of the coming of Christ through translation of the number 318 into a Greek alphabet
not even in existence during the days of that patriarch. Through this reasoning,
Barnabas contends that Abram would never have followed literally God’s command “ye
shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin,” but would have understood it as meaning
join the Christian community that would come into existence in about two thousand
years. Only through the actions of an “evil angel,” Barnabas continues, did the Jews
later take the words “circumcise the flesh of your foreskin” to mean “circumcise
the flesh of your foreskin.” Barnabas’s methodology, gematria (cryptographic
play with letters and numbers), became far more important in Jewish than in Christian
hermeneutics—though coming to opposite conclusions.
In “Belief Systems as Attractors,” Ben Goertzel argues, “It is concluded that irrationality
tends to occur when some subset of the mind persists largely due to the fact that
it is itself an attractor for the cognitive equation rather than due to its
interactions with the remainder of the mind. This analysis implies that irrationality
is a kind of abstract dissociation, a welcome conclusion in the light of recent
work relating dissociation with various types of mental illness” (Goertzel 123–124).
In other words, dissociation occurs because the attractor is not sufficiently “strange”
to release the attention quickly to other attractors. Barnabas’s conclusion is irrational
because, in a sense, he is not chaotic enough to deal with a text close to the looseness
of orality.
The number of Abram’s servants is far from the most interesting
exegetical concern in the passage. In an interpolation or digression interrupting
the triumphal return and meeting with the King of Sodom, Melchisedec, King of Salem,
blesses Abram (Gen 14:18–20). The dislocation has intrigued Barnabas–like seekers
of order, e.g., producing the later Jewish traditions that Melchisedec was Abram’s
ancestor Shem or the Archangel Michael (Graves and Patai, 147–148; Leach, “Mechisedech
and the Emperor,” in Leach and Aycock 79). 2 (Slavonic) Enoch and the Qumran
fragment 11QMelch anticipate his apocalyptic return (Robinson 439). Like a snow–balling
iteration, speculation about Melchisedec grew itself becoming the core of a scripture,
Hebrews. Despite being a work probably of Roman origin from the end of the first
century (Suggs et al 1521), Hebrews equates Melchisedec with Jesus—not a universal
assumption in ancient Roman Christianity. (An early Christian mosaic from Santa Maria
Maggiore, Rome, has a dark–haired Christ hover above the bread offered by the light–haired
Melchisedec—clearly two different beings). Because Melschisedec’s ancestors and progeny
are not mentioned, Hebrews presumes that he had none: “Without father, without mother,
without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life; but made like
unto the Son of God; abideth a priest continually” (Hebrews 7.3). Consequently, not
only what the Pentateuch includes but also its omissions are divinely inspired. Nonetheless,
the covenant set forth therein has passed away: “For if the first covenant had been
faultless, then should no place have been sought for the second” (Hebrews 8.7).
In Hebrews, the hermeneutic methodology reflects a literate transformation of the
old pairings. In the Hebrew scriptures, certain stock comparisons (e.g., allusions
to the creation accounts) occur so often as to constitute a typology. Hebrews takes
the next step, hypostatizing typology itself. Priestly sacrifices, for instance,
become reflections of archetypal order: a single, continuous sacrifice performed
by Christ in heaven (as if His action were a Platonic idea that all eucharists imitate).
In his very influential Preface to Plato, Eric Havelock argued that Plato
believed in the existence of “ideas” (derived from a Greek word for seeing) because
Plato’s perspective was shaped by literacy. The evanescence of orality no longer
satisfied him. He wanted language to exist somewhere in an absolutely permanent,
visual form, a desire acquired through becoming accustomed to texts. The Platonic
hermeneutics of Hebrews would therefore evidence the impact of growing literacy on
reader response. Allegorizing in Hebrews also may reflect literate predilections:
Whatever else allegory may be and whatever theory of reading it may suggest, it draws
its force from the psychological implications of the practice of literacy. Its power
emerges from the tension of withholding, from what it does not say or cannot say
or will not say directly. Its representational nature trades on the explicit assumption
of significant distance (Near 322).
Genesis employs duality in a less explicitly philosophical manner even than typology,
let alone elaborate allegorizing, yet the archaic pairings are spiritually meaningful
in their own ways. Returning victorious, Abram meets not one but two kings. To the
priest of God Most High, Abram gives a tenth of the spoils. To the King of wicked
Sodom, Abram gives all of them. The spiritual unsoundness of this bifurcation in
favor of evil is a new instability that must be countered by another dynamic, divine
intervention, an iteration of the covenant.
In a vision, God visits the patriarch. Despite the previous promise of as many heirs as there are motes of dust, Abram expects to die childless. God again pledges, this time with a celestial image to complement the terrestrial one. Descendants will number as many as the stars of the heavens. (Obviously the two are not exactly the same number.) Abram “believed in the Lord” yet inquired “whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it?” (15.6– 8). He has faith at one moment and at the next does not. He is about to require God to swear an oath.
For the gods thus to bind themselves is a frequent occurrence in Metamorphoses, usually with ironic results as in the case of Phaeton. His father Apollo swears on Styx to give the son anything—the result: earth almost destroyed and Phaeton dead. Because of this stereotype, Roman readers of the Pentateuch might have reason to expect that the promised descendants will not be entirely a blessing. After Abram has asked for the oath, God reveals an outline of the Pentateuch, including the horrifying threat of four–hundred years of Egyptian captivity. (A later tradition developed this into Abram’s seeing the Torah, the text into which he is written— Graves and Patai 154). Then, a pair of burning objects (a torch and brazier) floats between the two halves of severed animals as if God moved there. Comparable oath ceremonies between split sacrifices survive among the Ethiopian Baka and Male tribes, signifying that perjury would cause the one testifying to be torn asunder. The threat may be of a divided God, bifurcation extended to the infinite.
Abram’s faithful doubts continue to complicate the begetting of the promised descendants. Not trusting that the seventy–six–year–old Sarai can conceive, Abram visits the slave-girl Hagar. First Hagar then Sarai (after she reaches 90) give birth, resulting in what we should have expected all along: a pair of sons, Ishmael and Isaac, another double lineage. Enmity will divide them (Gen. 16.12).
Preceding the birth of Isaac, God once again makes the covenant with Abram. It is understood in a preliterate manner as a relationship that must be constantly restated in varying form rather than an exact written document, yet these repetitions are part of the written Torah. One sign of the covenant is a change of two names: Abram to Abraham, Sarai to Sarah.
Changes of name at the coronation ceremony or the assumption of
important office were common in Israel; thus Hoshea became Johoshua (Numbers
XIII. 16), Gideon became Jerubbaal (Judges VI. 32), Jedidiah became Solomon
(2 Samuel XII. 25), Eliakim became Jehoiakim (2 Kings XXIII. 34), Mattaniah became
Zedekiah (2 Kings XXIV. 17— Graves and Pattai, 165).
Abram, however, is neither being crowned nor given public office. Apparently, he
is being prepared for the begetting, the only event soon to occur. This emphasis
on genealogical functions is quite typical of Genesis. Complementary to the spiritual
or linguistic change in Abram is a physical one, even more closely related to his
patriarchal rôle: circumcision. Abraham laughs at God’s promise but has to
submit to the less amusing operation anyway.
Then, of course, comes a story in which it is Sarah who laughs. There is no reason to assume that exactly two variants of the tale were available to a transmitter, but as usual two are paired. The details of the annunciation and laughter link the versions but otherwise they are different. In the second, God comes as one of the “men”; the other two continue to Sodom. Abraham’s welcoming ceremony is provided in detail and then repeated almost verbatim in Sodom by Lot. Thus, the visit to Abraham is a doublet both of the significantly different narratives that precede and follow it, creating a texture of fractal–like self–similarity.
The best known analog of the sequence is the tale of Philemon and Baucis (Metamorphoses 8.616–724). In its frame story, the evil son of Ixion is a skeptic: “You put too much faith in the power of the gods, if you think they can give and take away the shapes of things” (Innes 195). To try to persuade him to be more believing, Lelex tells of Philemon and Baucis. Like the two angels that visit Sodom, Jupiter and Mercury test the hospitality of the area. Only the aged couple Philemon and Baucis welcome them. So, after granting a minor reward to the two (magically produced wine) the gods destroy all the neighbors while directing Philemon and Baucis to safety. When that couple has lived out their lives, they turn into trees. Each miracle is slightly more difficult to accept than the next. That heavenly beings should appear in human form is a challenging notion, but it might be a vision. That they could affect physical matter (multiply wine) is more clearly supernatural. Destroying a whole region is a larger miracle, but some people regularly attribute disasters to divine displeasure. The metamorphosis is the greatest deviation from everyday experience. Thus, Lelyx adds that he receives word of it from responsible people and has himself seen the trees.
Genesis provides much the same pattern. First there is the unbelief of Abraham and Sarah, the latter chided for it by God. Then readers are told things each more incredible than the next: the arrival of the testing angels, their blinding the Sodomites, the destruction of the region, the metamorphosis of Lot’s wife to a pillar of salt. This time not Abraham’s and Sarah’s but the readers’ faith undergoes a double bind. Hearing of Lot’s devotion, readers are to emulate his piety (despite temptations to the contrary). The tale resembles blasphemous humor but tells of a God who reproves laughter and devastates entire regions that displease him.
Genesis continues with the story of drunken Lot’s begetting two sons by his two daughters on successive nights. Where Ovid condemned “disgusting,” “sinful” Myrrha for “criminally” tricking her father into incest (Metamorphoses 10.469), Genesis says nothing against any of the participants. In the light of this neutrality, Lot’s carelessness (two nights in a row going to bed drunk and having sex in his sleep) sounds uncomfortably like risqué humor.
It tempts Hebrew readers to feel pride and laugh at the incestuous
origins of the hated Moabites and Amonites. Then, like the humbling creation story
following the exalting one, the narrative immediately tells of Abraham’s receiving
money for the loan of his wife and saying that she is his half–sister. If he is to
be believed, Jewish readers have themselves come from incest (as, in the previous
case, they come from fallen Adam). The two tales of incest trap the readers as Nathan
did King David, by telling two parallel incidents. David quickly denounces the sinner
in the first of these; then, David realizes his own involvement in an analogous situation
(2 Samuel 12).
Close to the end of this section exploring the relationship of humor and faith, an
ambiguous verse has Sarah say she now has good reason to laugh for joy or that others
will laugh at her (21.6). At 17.17, 18.12, and 21.9 the text also puns on the name
of Isaac (Yi.s h–a lq). It means “‘he laughs,’… probably abbreviated from
a longer form such as yi.s h–a lq––e l, God Laughs’” (van den Born 1072-1073).
If one thinks that at each point Genesis is seriously offering a different etymology
of the name, one might conclude that these attempts reflect inconsistent traditions
awkwardly and pointlessly juxtaposed. If, however, one presumes the text is sporting
with words and the reader, one comes to a more favorable opinion. The transition
to the next section comes with the final pun (21.9): Sarai sees Ishmael sporting
at or with Isaac (the Masoretic text of the passage can mean either). Her demand
that Ishmael be cast out prepares for the sacrifice and salvation of Abraham’s two
offspring.
Context for the sacrifice of Isaac is also provided by the two servants accompanying
father and son. While the text records the name of Abraham’s servant Eliezer, these
two servants are anonymous, called “men,” like the two angels who brought destruction
to Sodom. Simply in terms of the plot, the two servants could be omitted, but they
may remind readers of the two supernatural beings, thereby generating an uncanny
mood. Furthermore, they have to act as representatives of Abraham’s household. When
he leaves them behind immediately before the sacrifice, the implication is that,
if present at the altar, they would object. Abraham’s faith transgresses human conventions,
the inhumanness of his actions also heightening the uncanny mood. Logically the servants
must be men or angels, but the evocative text brings both to mind. More strangely,
Isaac is doomed to be sacrificed but is spared. Trying to avoid these contradictions,
rabbinical commentary responded by having him shed a quarter of his blood or even
be burned to ashes (Nitidtch 46).
In each of the stories of the two sons, the emotional binary employed is horror turning suddenly to joy. According to the psychological “opponent theory,” alternation between poles intensifies each emotion: “one state prepares one for its opposite. Returning feelings ‘overshoot the mark’” (Carlson and Hatfield 337). Isaac’s importance to God’s promise and Abraham’s long wait for him (dominating episode after episode) further intensifies the climax. In other words, even though relations among the Middle–Eastern tribes probably contribute to the stories of Isaac and Ishmael, the pattern is (to use Briggs’ term for fractal repetition) a “reflectaphor” of this basic pattern in the Bible: juxtaposition of poles.
Speaking to Abraham and Hagar, the saving angel “called,” a form
of that word qara, also meaning read. Indeed, the angel functions like a reader
relaying God’s words, yet the command to kill Isaac came to Abraham from God directly.
The liberating voice is the relayed or lectoral one.
By pairing the stories, the text parallels God with jealous Sarah. This should not
surprise Romans familiar with Metamorphoses or the Aeneid, where one
of the most frightening aspects of the divine manifests as Juno’s jealousy. Ex 34.14
declares: “For thou shalt worship no other god: for the Lord, whose name [is] Jealous,
[is] a jealous God…” His desire for exclusive devotion is like that of a possessive
wife. His direct presence is terrifying, making profound demands. His more compassionate
side, however, manifests indirectly: God to the angel to Hagar to Ishmael (or the
angel to Abraham to Isaac) and then to the audience of the faithful through text
and reader. Aware that God is in conflict with his own word, Rabbinic tradition decrees
that even if God Himself manifested to contradict scripture and commentary, the latter
would still be binding (Tractate Baba Metzia, 59 a,b.).
The theme of belief on trial, which dominates preparation for Isaac’s
birth, culminates in the sacrifice. Perhaps the greatest test of faith in the Bible,
it is also one of the most unpredictable, God’s demanding one sacrifice (22.2) and
then changing to another. Truth personified seems to have used words in a strange,
new way. Thus, the readership also undergoes an ordeal in which they must ground
their faith on other than a literal understanding of what God says and does. Another
aspect of this ordeal, Abraham’s comforting lie to Isaac that God will provide a
sacrifice turns out to be the truth. Readers experience how flexible language becomes
when stretched to encompass ineffable events. The episode ends with the Almighty
once more making the covenant, this time voluntarily swearing by Himself (22.16)
and comparing Abraham’s descendants both to heaven and earth (22.17), thereby combining
the celestial/terrestrial dichotomy that pervades and pulls apart much ancient thought.
James Sanders describes changing reader response to the sacrifice of Isaac:
Such a story, no matter what form criticism and source criticism can show it originally
meant, to the exiles surely meant that the future of the believing community, of
Israel, the questions of the continuation of the people, the anxiety about whether
there would be another generation, rested in the hands of the life–giver, of him
who gives and gives again (Sanders 1987, 30).
More Patriarchal Pairings
In terms of genealogy, the next important event is Isaac’s marriage, which the text
pairs with the death of Sarah: “And Isaac brought her into his mother Sarah’s tent,
and took Rebekah, and she became his wife; and he loved her: and Isaac was comforted
after his mother’s death” (24.67). Thus, Rebekah is to be the new Sarah, Isaac the
new Abraham. After a few verses of genealogy cataloguing Abraham’s concubinage, he
gives all to Isaac and dies. Then to Rebekah, a long–barren woman like Sarah, come
the next pair of struggling brothers, Esau and Jacob.
Their story disseminates from puns used throughout but brought together most powerfully in 27.36:
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Isn’t he called ya’qob? (Fokkelman 46). |
Particularly if in oral form (when it must be memorable to be told and retold), narrative
includes reversals of expectation or it seems pointless and dull. Such reversals
are, of course, one more form of mapping on dual “strange attractors” with unpredictable
swings between them. In Genesis, an often noted pattern is God’s preference for younger
over elder. Beginning in the womb and continuing through most of their lives, the
struggle between Esau and Jacob is the most developed instance of this motif (previously
exemplified by Cain and Abel as well as Ishmael and Isaac).
Because of the culture’s commitment to primogeniture and patriarchy,
to be unexpected and thus interesting, the narrative must sometimes champion younger
siblings and females. As a byproduct of readers’ craving for chaotic freshness, stories
may fulfill a compensatory function, helping to rebalance a culture’s biases, thus
bringing it back to what is now called “the edge of chaos”—though surviving Roman
fictions demonstrate at least an intuitive understanding that literature must be
as exciting and surprising as Genesis manages to be.
Beginning his non-periodic oscillations, Jacob goes from the triumph of stealing
the blessing to the despair of being robbed and stripped naked. Then, in a dream,
God proclaims the covenant with him. He falls in love with Rachel, works seven years
to obtain her, and at the nuptial finds that he has been cheated much as he did Isaac.
Later, concerning livestock, Jacob tricks her father Laban whom she deceives to steal
the household gods. In leaving Laban, Jacob survives two threatening meetings with
human antagonists, one with angry Laban, the other with Esau. In between, he wrestles
with a “man,” whom Jacob identifies as God. Wrestling—a struggle with one combatant
ahead, then the other—serves as a repeated motif of oscillation throughout Jacob’s
life from his wrestling in the womb, to Rachel’s “wrestling” with Leah (30.8), to
the night combat at Penuel/Peniel.
By the nineteenth century, that mysterious battle had become to some an allegory of artistic wrestle with language. Typically, an 1891 poem by Herman Melville urges readers, “fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart,/To wrestle with the angel—Art” (Melville 231; See also, Whitlark 1991, 43, 236n.24).The foundation for the interpretation is that any reading of Genesis 32 involves a linguistic struggle with paradox and obscurity. Sharing the darkness of the night itself, the text vaguely terms Jacob’s combatant a “man” as if nothing more could be seen of him than his gender. Jacob is “alone.” This might mean that he was alone until the man arrived or except for the man or that the experience was visionary not physical. Pronouns are vague, e.g., “And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him” (32.25). As Roland Barthes and others have noted, in terms of ordinary human action, one may assume that the “man” used on Jacob a wrestling trick of a sort sometimes forbidden.
Since, however, Jacob identifies this “man” as God, also possible is it that Jacob, as usual, is the one who tries a ploy. Miraculously, then, what Jacob attempts to do to the “man” happens instead to Jacob. In seeming to fear the dawn, the “man” appears less like God than like some nocturnal phantom. On the man’s being God, however, rests the validity of Jacob’s change of name to Israel—but only for a while. Following the idolatry of Jacob’s family, in chapter 45, God (again) changes Jacob’s name to Israel. The repetition is as if the first alteration never occurred or as if impurity had restored the old Jacob and a new initiation was thus necessary. In the subsequent narrative, Jacob alternates between names.
Whether through editorial inadvertence or design, nothing is permanent.
Typically, Jacob retitles Penuel “Peniel”; within a sentence, it reverts to Penuel.
In a strange mixture of piety and the Documentary Hypothesis, the Anchor Bible volume
on Genesis remarks:
Significantly enough, Jacob is henceforth a changed person. The man who could be
a party to the cruel hoax that was played on his father and brother, and who fought
Laban’s treachery with crafty schemes of his own, will soon condemn the vengeful
deed by Simeon and Levi (xxxiv) by invoking a higher concept of morality (xlix 5–7).
It is noteworthy that this transformation is intimated by J who, unlike E,
does not normally go out of his way to portray his protagonists as blameless heroes
(Speiser 257).
As to higher morality, Jacob condemns his sons because, “You have brought trouble on me by making me odious to the inhabitants of the land, among the Canaanites and the Perizzites: my numbers are few, and if they gather themselves against me, and attack me, I shall be destroyed, both I and my household” (Gen. 34.30). He voices no concern for the victims and seems only worried that retribution will reach him. Occurring long after the incident, the remarks at 49.5–7 are cryptic and may be a metaphoric description of it or a summary of many such incidents. Jacob’s immediate response to the threat of attacking neighbors is to tell his children to give him their idols for him to hide under a tree. If he knew they had idols and that idolatry was forbidden by his covenant with God, why does he wait for a crisis to impound the images and why does he refrain from destroying them?
Genesis does not provide an L4 hagiography of Jacob as a sinner reformed. Instead, the largely L3 text pairs his tricks against his enemies with ones played on him. Repeatedly, God comes to him not because he is pure but because he is troubled (the vision of ascent to heaven after he is left naked, the experience at Peniel/Penuel when he fears death at the hands of his brother, the renaming at Bethel while he escapes his angry neighbors). Nonetheless, the problems of understanding the story of Jacob pale before that of Joseph, where hermeneutics itself is foregrounded in the interpretation of the most chaotic narratives: dreams.
Continue to Gen 37-
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