Oh, What a Tangled Web We Weave

In our review of Genesis thus far, the men (Noah, Abraham, Isaac) have received most of the attention. The women? Not so much. For example, the Bible doesn’t even tell us the name of Noah’s wife. We hear a little bit of Sarah and Hagar but Rebekah is the first woman in Genesis who takes charge of a situation and turns it to her advantage.

Before we get to her story in Gen 27, let’s rewind to Gen 25:19-34. The storyteller recounts that Rebekah was one more in a long line of OT women who had difficulty conceiving. Eventually she became pregnant with twins and received an oracle that the elder will serve the younger.

Jacob, the younger son (if only by a few minutes) became her favorite and she no doubt indoctrinated him in the prophecy so that, when the time was ripe, he took advantage of the situation to purchase the birthright from Esau for a bowl of lentil stew. The birthright entitled the firstborn to a double share of his father’s inheritance (Deut 21:17), so that may have been the most-lopsided financial deal prior to the Dutch purchase of Manhattan Island from Native Americans.

Mother’s Little Helper

Back to Gen 27. The story begins with Isaac, blind and at death’s door, wishing to impart his blessing to Esau, his favorite son. Rebekah overhears their conversation and fashions a plan for Jacob to steal the blessing. He offers a couple of objections which Rebekah easily swats away.

Why does she try to deceive Isaac in this fashion? While it might be the custom that the elder gets both birthright and blessing, perhaps she rebels at the injustice of the practice in the case of twins. Or maybe she argues that birthright and blessing go together. Having purchased the birthright for a mess of pottage, Jacob is also entitled to the blessing that goes with it.

Whatever her reasoning, Rebekah does most of the advance work of preparing a couple of goats and dressing Jacob in Esau’s best garments. All Jacob needs to do is play the part and is rewarded with a blessing of an abundance of grain and wine and dominance over his brother.

Then, in what is one of the most pathetic scenes in the OT, Esau arrives to find that Jacob has once again usurped him of his inheritance. He pleads with Isaac to scrounge up one last blessing and gets a promise that one day his descendants will throw off the yoke of Jacob’s descendants.

Esau vows that once Isaac is dead and the time of mourning is past, he will kill Jacob. Learning of this, Rebekah tells Jacob to flee to her brother Laban’s home in Haran and lay low until Esau cools down. She’ll then send for him to return. Little does she know that Jacob will be away for twenty years and she’ll never see him again. Moralists would say this is her punishment for deceiving Isaac.

Isaac Blessing Jacob (1638) by Dutch artist Govert Flinck, a pupil of Rembrandt who borrowed from his style.

Some Girls

Then, as a coda to this story (Gen 27:46-28:9) Rebekah complains to Isaac that Esau has married two of the local girls and she doesn’t want the same to happen to Jacob. Isaac calls for Jacob and sends him off to Laban’s home in Paddan-aram with a blessing. What? Another blessing? I thought he was all blessed out. Seeing this, Esau tries to please his parents by marrying within the family, taking one of Ishmael’s daughters as a wife.

Critical biblical scholars point out that the reference to Esau’s Hittite wives (Gen 26:34-35) and the coda belong together and both come from the P source. One of the giveaways is the P source always refers to Laban’s homeland as Paddan-aram while the J source calls it Haran. The P source provides a completely different motivation – finding a suitable wife – for Jacob’s travel outside the promised land. It is in the P source that the blessing of Abraham for offspring and possession of the land is passed on to Jacob.

Other than the final v. 46, the obvious signs of multiple sources such as contradictions, parenthetical comments, resumptive phrases (such as “and he said again”), and so on are lacking in Gen 27. The awkward etymology of the name Jacob in v. 36 may indicate an interpolation. And the content of the blessings to Jacob and Esau could very well have been composed by a later redactor. Other than those quibbles, the bulk appears to me to be a unified piece.

Not everyone agrees. Some biblical scholars see four, five, or ten different layers in Gen 27. For example, they claim Rebekah’s part in the story was added by a later redactor, perhaps in an effort to shift blame for the deception away from Jacob. Other layers would have heightened the rivalry of the brothers or played up the hairiness of Esau. The result is a convoluted explanation for the composition of the passage that does not appear to need it (unlike Gen 14, for example, that reads like a jumble).

Papa Was a Rolling Stone

An intriguing analysis of this chapter from Adrien Bledstein [1] turns the traditional explanation on its head. Instead of Isaac being duped into bestowing his blessing upon the wrong son, Bledstein proposes that Isaac engineered the entire episode to make sure the right son received the blessing. Her interpretation requires one to read the canonical text as a whole instead of treating the J and P strands separately.

In this telling, Isaac had his doubts whether Esau deserved a blessing after he foolishly sold his birthright and married Canaanite women. Yet he was bound by custom to give Esau the blessing. He purposely let Rebekah overhear his instructions to Esau; she took matters into her hands and Jacob played his part.

Isaac was not fooled for a moment, but before bestowing his blessing, he had to test Jacob. Eight times Isaac questions Jacob’s identity and each time Jacob either has a ready answer or had prepared his ruse (wore Esau’s clothes that smelled of the field and goat hide to make his neck and arms feel hairy). Satisfied that Jacob seemed to have thought of everything, Isaac blessed him with an abundance of grain and wine (items that wouldn’t have been very useful to the hunter Esau anyway) but held back the most-important blessing of possession of the land.

When Esau arrives, Isaac pretends to be shocked and tells Esau the content of Jacob’s blessing. It is at this point that Esau should have asked for the Abrahamic blessing of the land that was withheld from Jacob but he does not, thus failing his test and confirming Isaac’s suspicion that Esau is not worthy it. He leaves Esau with the consolation prize that one day he will break his brother’s yoke from his neck.

Now assured that Jacob is indeed the worthy successor, Isaac is able to send him off to Paddan-aram with the Abrahamic blessing of numerous descendants and possession of the land. Through plausible deniability, Isaac was able to ensure the appropriate son received the Abrahamic blessing, not merely the eldest son as custom would have dictated.

Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?

While highly entertaining, this interpretation only makes sense within the canonical text. It simply doesn’t work if you isolate the J and P versions of the story. But the most obvious interpretation of the canonical text is that Rebekah is controlling the events. Portraying Isaac as the master manipulator takes away the dominance Rebekah has been given in the story. Bledstein’s interpretation is just too clever by half.

I believe emphasizing Rebekah’s dominance is the point of the narrative. The entire episode is very reminiscent of the first chapter of 1 Kings where Adonijah, the eldest surviving son of David, has assumed the throne because the dying King has not named a successor. The prophet Nathan and Bathsheba cook up a plan to “remind” David that he had once promised to name Solomon as his successor. David pulls himself together long enough to make his announcement and Adonijah is out. Just as in Gen 27, we see a mother deceive her elderly husband to ensure the fortunes of her younger son over the rival claim of an elder son.

The theme of the younger son being favored over the elder (Abel over Cain, Isaac over Ishmael, Jacob over Esau, Judah over Reuben, Ephraim over Manasseh) is a continuing motif in Genesis and one we will need to explore in more detail in a future article.

[1] Adrien Bledstein "Binder, Trickster, Heel and Hairy-man: Rereading Genesis 27 as a Trickster Tale Told by a Woman" Genesis, A Feminist Companion to the Bible, ed. A. Brenner (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993) 2:282-295

The Evolution of Abraham

Every superhero has an origin story that explains how they got their superpowers or what motivates them. Nations also have origin stories. Israel has more than one origin story.

This seems like a curious claim. Isn’t the Bible the origin story of Israel? Yes, but as we have seen, the Bible has preserved competing traditions.

Competing Origins

The oldest origin story for Israel is the cycle of narratives surrounding Jacob in Gen 25-35. Judging by the historical context, the substance of the Jacob cycle appears to have been written down at the end of the 8th or the beginning of the 7th century BCE. After cheating his older brother of birthright and blessing, Jacob flees to the land of the Arameans, acquires wives and children and livestock, and obtains recognition as his own tribe (Gen 31). The final chapters have Jacob reconciling with his brother and connect him to sacred sites such as Peniel, Shechem and Bethel.

The Jacob cycle is a complete legend of Israel’s origin. On its own, it explains the existence of the twelve tribes and which are the most important, proves their rights to the hill country of central Palestine, recounts the founding of the main sanctuary at Bethel, and so on. But this Israel is not the one we know from other traditions in the Bible. This Israel is not a community of believers nor a warring nation, but a tribe struggling for recognition.

Compare the origin story of Jacob with the better-known origin story of Moses and the Exodus. Moses, too, had to flee to a foreign land where he married the daughter of a desert sheikh, only to finally return to his homeland with a mission. But Moses is not a patriarch, his sons play no role in the formation of Israel. According to the Exodus story, one is not a son of Israel through genealogy but by hearing the call from YHWH through his prophet Moses. Israel’s origins lie not in the tents of Laban, but in Egypt and the desert.

If this theory of competing origin stories sounds highly speculative to you, there is some hard evidence to support it. In chapter 12 of the Book of Hosea (end of 8^th century BCE), the prophet invites his audience to choose between the competing and conflicting legends of origins. Hosea’s challenge closes with this:

Jacob fled to the land of Aram,
there Israel served for a wife,
and for a wife he guarded sheep.

By a prophet YHWH brought Israel up from Egypt,
and by a prophet he was guarded.

Hosea seems to be asking his audience: Who do you want to be? Biological descendants of a scoundrel or a people called by God? He hoped to persuade his audience to choose Moses but, in the end, Israel refused to choose one origin story over the other and kept both.

Abraham: The Promise by Israeli artist Zvi Leonhard (https://zviandariane.com/). God uses the dust of the earth and stars of the heavens as metaphors for descendants beyond measure (Gen 13:16; 15:5)

Growth of the Abraham Legend

Is the Abraham cycle yet another origin story?

First of all, the Abraham cycle is not as old as the Jacob cycle. References to Abraham don’t appear outside Genesis until Ezek 33:23-29 and Is 51:1-3 (both 6^th century). The Ezekiel reference says Abraham came to possess the land. The reference from Isaiah says YHWH blessed Abraham and Sarah and made them parents of multitudes. In both citations we see expressed the dual theme of the Abraham cycle: the land and offspring.

Despite the fact that the references are 6^th century, biblical scholars believe that the origins of the Abraham legend were formed around the same time as the Jacob cycle (8^th-7^th centuries BCE). The core set of narratives (Gen 13; 16; 18-19; and 21:1-4) is centered on Hebron and the sacred oak of Mamre. Abraham (under his original name of “Abram”) has two sons, but only one belongs to Israel. Through Lot, Abraham is also related to the Moabite and Ammonite people. If the Abraham cycle is an origin story, it is not just an origin story of Israel.

Based on the core narratives, Abraham is an indigenous hero of the south. Isaac, too, is a legendary hero of the south, centered around Beersheba. Early on, Isaac was joined to the Abraham cycle as Abraham’s son. What remains of Isaac’s story (Gen 26) and was recast as narratives involving Abraham (Gen 20 and 21:22-34). Outside of Gen 26, Isaac only appears as either a son of Abraham or a father of Jacob.

After the fall of the northern kingdom of Israel to the Assyrians in 721 BCE, the survivors brought their national origin story (the Jacob cycle) to the southern kingdom of Judah where it was merged with the combined Abraham-Isaac cycle. During the Babylonian exile, the conjoined Abraham/Jacob cycle of stories was modified to reflect a promise of land because the Israelites were no longer in possession of the land. A Babylonian backstory was provided for Abraham. The divine command that came to Abraham in Ur to go forth to Canaan was a call for the exiles to leave Babylon and return to the promised land.

With the addition of the primeval history and Joseph narrative, Genesis became a prequel to the Exodus story.

The Ecumenical Patriarch

While it may have started as legends of a southern hero, the Abraham cycle evolved into something else. What is his ultimate role in the OT?

One clue can be found in  a curious note (Gen 15:9) made upon the death of Abraham:

His sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field of Ephron son of Zohar the Hittite, east of Mamre, the field that Abraham purchased from the Hittites.

We thought we had seen the last of Ishmael back in Gen 21:8-21 when he and his mother Hagar had been expelled to the desert. At a story level, the purpose of Ishmael's exile was leave Abraham only one remaining son when God called for a sacrifice (Gen 22). Yet the P source brings Ishmael back into the story as a reminder that Abraham is not only the father of Israel or Judah or the Jews, but is the ancestor of many nations.

According to an interesting article by Albert de Pury, Professor for OT studies at the University of Geneva, Abraham was ultimately seen as an “ecumenical patriarch.” In contrast to other traditions that found their way into the Bible insisting the promised land must be taken from the Canaanites in a war of conquest that ends in the extermination of all the land’s former inhabitants, Abraham is seen as peacefully co-existing with the various Canaanite clans. He is the father of or is closely related to neighboring nations such as the Arabs (Ishmael is the ancestor of the twelve tribes of the Arab federation), the twelve tribes of Israel (through his grandson Jacob), Edomites (through his grandson Esau), Midianites (through his second wife Keturah), and Ammonites and Moabites (through Lot).

De Pury uses the adjective “ecumenical” in the sense of “worldwide or general in extent, influence, or application.” As the father of many nations (Gen 17:5), perhaps a better adjective – although more technical – for Abraham’s role in Genesis would be “transethnic” or “transnational” patriarch.

The more commonly-used meaning of the word “ecumenical” is “of, relating to, or representing the whole of a body of churches.” It is in this sense that the term “ecumenical patriarch” is appropriate for how Abraham is viewed today.  Abraham is venerated by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. If the children of Abraham can focus on him as a symbol of what we have in common rather than what divides us, the world will be a better place.

Hail and Well Met

One of the books that became a major influence on how I approach the Bible is The Art of Biblical Narrative by Robert Alter. A professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, Alter sees the OT with the eyes of a literary critic, subjecting the biblical texts to the kind of critical analysis one might apply to the works of Shakespeare. The texts display literary artistry and are not simply cobbled together from various sources.

In chapter 3 of the book, Alter speaks of something I’ve written about in previous articles, how the same story gets told two or three times, sometimes with the same characters:

Three times a patriarch is driven by famine to a southern region where he pretends that his wife is his sister, narrowly avoids a violation of the conjugal bond by the local ruler, and is sent away with gifts. Twice Hagar flees into the wilderness from Sarah’s hostility and discovers a miraculous well and that story itself seems only a special variation of the recurrent story of bitter rivalry between a barren, favored wife and a fertile co-wife or concubine. That situation, in turn, suggests another oft-told tale in the Bible, of a woman long barren who is vouchsafed a divine promise of progeny, whether by God himself or through a divine messenger or oracle, and who then gives birth to a hero. (p. 49)

Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear

Alter provides a modern-day example that particularly stuck with me over the years. Think of the gun-slinging hero in Westerns, able to draw and outshoot the bad guys before they can even pull their triggers. In a similar analogy I used way back when I began my blog five years ago, suppose that centuries from now, only a dozen Western movies have been preserved. In all but one, the hero has such a “hyperreflexive arm”. In the one exception, the hero has a withered arm and has taught himself to shoot from a rifle slung over his back.

Alter imagines that, having studied the surviving samples of 20^th-century Western cinema, future scholars might hypothesize these are all derivations of one original story of a hero with lightning reflexes. The oddball story of the rifleman with a withered arm would be a variant from a different source tradition.

Unlike these imaginary scholars of Western cinema studies, we who have seen untold number of Westerns from the Lone Ranger to Matt Dillon know that the image of the quick-on-the-draw gunfighter is a convention in that genre. When you have a major departure from the convention, the uniqueness tells you something about the character or story. In this case, it might be the hero’s determination to overcome a physical handicap or the rifle provides some advantage over the typical six-shooter.

Alter calls these conventions “type-scenes” and identifies several in the Bible: “the annunciation … of the birth of the hero to his barren mother; the encounter with the future betrothed at a well; the epiphany in the field; the initiatory trial; danger in the desert and the discovery of a well or other form of sustenance; the testament of the dying hero” (p. 51).

Betrothal type-scenes

Alter spends the rest of the chapter discussing a particular convention he calls the “betrothal type-scene” in which the hero of the story meets his future bride at a well in a foreign land. He draws water for the “girl” (how she is usually referenced) who then rushes home bringing news of the stranger. The stranger is invited to a meal, after which the betrothal between the stranger and the girl is finalized. 

I’ll skip over the first betrothal type-scene in Genesis for now and return to it later. In the second example (Gen 29:1-20), Jacob, escaping from his brother’s wrath, arrives at a well in a foreign land. Rachel arrives to water her flock but a large stone covers the well’s mouth. Jacob moves the massive stone and waters her flock. After Jacob informs Rachel that he is her kinsman, she runs to tell her father, Laban. The closed well is a metaphor for Rachel’s closed womb and Jacob’s labor in moving the stone foreshadows the various obstacles he will need to overcome in securing his bride and making his fortune. Stones also feature prominently in the Jacob cycle of stories.

The third example comes from Exodus (2:15b-21) where Moses, escaping from Pharaoh’s wrath in Egypt, arrives by a well in Midian. Zipporah and her six sisters come to water their flock but are driven off from the well by shepherds. Faced not just with an inanimate obstacle but with enemies, Moses drives off the hostile shepherds and waters the flock of Zipporah and her sisters. How Moses rises to the challenge is entirely appropriate for someone who has killed an Egyptian taskmaster, will later face off with Pharaoh to liberate his people, and become Israel’s military commander for the next forty years. That the tale is briefly told is typical of how the Torah doesn’t dwell on Moses’ personal life.

Elizarus and Rebekah at the Well (1670s) byJohann Carl Loth. The name of Abraham's oldest and most-trusted servant isn't given in Gen 24, but earlier in Gen 15:2 Abram laments that without a son, "Eliezer of Damascus" will be his heir.

Rebekah takes charge

Now that we have reviewed a couple of examples, let’s return to the first betrothal type-scene (Gen 24:10-61) and see how it differs from the simpler stories we just examined.

The main difference is that it is Abraham’s servant – instead of Isaac – who travels to the foreign land. The servant showers Rebekah with gifts that her brother is quick to notice. This is revealing of Laban’s grasping nature and why he will later become one of Jacob’s obstacles.

Alter says this is the only example in the Bible of a surrogate meeting the future bride. This is fitting because Isaac is a passive and shadowy figure in Genesis. We last saw him about to be sacrificed at God’s request. He’s not mentioned again until this betrothal episode, and then he only appears at the end to take Rebekah as his wife. Isaac appears in Gen 26 but these are recycled stories (wife-sister, treaty with Abimelech, dispute over wells, and origin of the name of Beersheba) from the Abraham cycle. Isaac plays a part in Gen 27 in which Jacob steals his blessing from Esau, but by then Isaac is old and blind.

The other major departure is that Rebekah draws water for the stranger (= the servant) instead of the other way around. The number of actions (11 verbs in the four verses of vv. 16-20) Rebekah takes (drawing water, filling her jar, pouring, giving drink, etc.) are emblematic of the dominant role she later plays (taking, cooking, dressing, giving) in the story of securing the blessing for her favored son, Jacob (Gen 27). As the most-controlling of all the matriarchs, it is appropriate that she dominates her betrothal scene.

Jesus the Bridegroom

Being a professor of Hebrew literature, Robert Alter limits his analysis to the OT. But if we include the NT, we see something that looks like a betrothal type-scene in the story of Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4:1-42. Once again we have a stranger (Jesus) in a foreign land (Samaria) who is sitting beside Jacob’s well about noon when a Samaritan woman arrives to draw water. A conversation ensues, after which the woman leaves her water jar behind and returns to the city to inform its citizens of the stranger she just met. Moved by her testimony, they invite Jesus to stay with them for a couple of days.

A major difference in this version is that, instead of a maiden, we have a five-times married woman. There is no actual exchange of water, although the subject of water is the lynchpin of the dialogue that ensues in which Jesus contrasts the stagnant water of the well with his living water (the gift he has to offer). The episode ends not with a betrothal contract but with the townsfolk coming to believe in Jesus.

Understanding the literary conventions puts the modern reader of the Bible in the mind of the originally intended audience. When we watch a Western and see the hero face off with the bad guy on a dusty street in front of a saloon, we expect a shootout. Similarly, when the ancient audience saw the hero arrive at a well in a foreign land, they expected he would meet his future wife there. Knowing how the scene is supposed to play out, the audience – modern or ancient – revels in any twists from the standard convention. As the saying goes, “God is in the details.”