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

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.”

Take My Wife -- Please

Abraham is renowned in the Bible for being a man of faith. Maybe that’s how he ended up, but he certainly didn’t start off that way.

Abram Goes Down to Egypt

The first time we see Abraham – then named Abram – in action is Gen 12:10-20 and it’s not exactly edifying Prefiguring what will happen later in Genesis and Exodus, a famine hits the land of Canaan and Abram goes down to Egypt. Because his wife Sarai is so beautiful, Abram fears he will be killed for her. But if he announces she is his sister; instead of being killed, Abram will get the bride price for her. The plan works. Pharaoh brings Sarai into his harem and rewards Abram with much livestock (including camels) and slaves. YHWH afflicts Pharaoh and his household with plagues on behalf of Sarai. Learning of the ruse, Pharaoh expels Abram and Sarai.

The story is rather unsettling on many levels. Many modern interpreters view the passage as illustrating Abram’s lack of trust in YHWH. Despite having been promised earlier in 12:1-9 that YHWH would make him into a great nation, Abram thought he needed to take matters into his own hands to protect YHWH’s promise. But by endangering Sarai he put the promise in jeopardy and YHWH had to bail him out by punishing the Egyptians.  

An older view is that Abram did nothing wrong. He knew Egypt was a land of evil-doers and there’s nothing wrong with deceiving people who would try to do you harm. In fact, Abram turned the situation to his advantage. Instead of being killed, he walked away much wealthier. Abram is not condemned for what he did but the Egyptians are certainly punished for abducting Sarai.

Sarai is Taken to Pharoah’s Palace by James Tissot (1836-1902) [courtesy: Wikimedia Commons]

Because It Worked So Well the First Time…

You would have thought he had learned his lesson the first time, but amazingly Abram pulls the same stunt again in Gen 20.

In that passage, Abram – now called Abraham – finds himself in Gerar, in Canaan. Again, he passes off his wife – now called Sarah – as his wife and Abimelech, the king of Gerar, takes her. Unlike the previous version of the story, we are told that God prevents Abimelech from touching her. Later we learn there is a plague of infertility throughout the land (a plague of impotence, perhaps?). God (not YHWH) appears to Abimelech in a dream, sentences him to die, and Abimelech defends his innocence. God agrees. Abimelech demands an explanation from Abraham, returns Sarah to him, and gives him money to restore her honor. Abraham prays on behalf of Abimelech and God lifts the plague.

In this story, it is clear that Abimelech is a god-fearing man. He is horrified to learn that he had unwittingly taken another man’s wife (“I did this in the integrity of my heart and the innocence of my hands”). He’s also outraged at Abraham’s deception (“What were you thinking?”). Abraham’s pathetic defense is that Sarah is his half-sister, so he wasn’t telling a complete falsehood, just leaving out an important bit of information (in Catholic theology, this would be referred to as a “mental reservation”).

In the lengthy dialogues between God and Abimelech and Abimelech and Abraham, the biblical author of this passage is making it clear that Abraham is the guilty party, even if the outcome was to his benefit.

And, just to prove the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, in Gen 26:1-11 Abraham’s son Isaac pulls the exact same ruse when he tries to pass off his wife Rebekah as his sister with King Abimelech of the Philistines in Gerar. Seriously.

Multiple Versions, Multiple Sources

One possible explanation for multiple versions of essentially the same story is that we are dealing with multiple sources. Gen 26 explicitly references Gen 12 (this famine is different from that of Abraham, “do not go down to Egypt”), but is completely unaware of Gen 20 (does not try to explain why Abimelech fell for the trick again). Gen 12 and 26 mostly use the name YHWH in reference to the deity whereas Gen 20 uses Elohim (God). Gen 20 also has the motifs of God appearing in a dream, “fearing God”, and Abraham as a prophet. The character of Abimelech is tied to parallel narratives (in Gen 21 with Abraham and 26 with Isaac) describing how Beer-sheba got its name.

Based on these indicators, Gen 12 and 26 are usually attributed to the same source (J) while Gen 20 is attributed to a second source. This particular source is called the Elohist (E) because it refers to God as Elohim prior to Exodus. Other hallmarks of the Elohist source are God appearing in dreams, the need to “fear God”, and the establishment of prophetic authority.

If two sources are involved, it is not surprising that we have two versions (doublets) of essentially the same story. There are many examples of this in Genesis. What is surprising, however, is that we have doublets (Gen 12 and 26) within the same source.

Although Gen 12 and 26 apparently come from the same source, they do not appear to come from the same time. Of the two, Gen 12 is the more archaic. As we saw earlier, through his quick-thinking, Abram turns a bad situation into a money-making opportunity. The patriarchal narratives are rife with characters who use deception to advance in the world.

But the version that appears in Gen 26 seems from a later time. In this version, Abimelech is very much the innocent party; he does not take Rebekah into his house. Had he not spied Isaac and Rebekah making a very public display of affection, Abimelech would not even have been aware of their deception. Unlike the other versions of this narrative, God is not involved, neither to plague the kings nor to inform them of the deception.

What About Sarah?

Lost in all of the focus on Abraham is Sarah. A 2015 article from Christianity Today titled “David Was a Rapist, Abraham Was a Sex Trafficker” gets to the heart of the matter: Abraham profited by pimping out his wife. The utilitarian argument could be made that Sarah would have been abducted whether or not Abraham told the truth, so his lie saved his life and made him richer. But what exactly was the rest of the plan? Had God not intervened, what would have happened to Sarah? Would Abraham ever have been able to reclaim her?

Typically, when a king wants to make an alliance with another king, he will give one of his daughters in marriage to seal the deal. The author of Genesis wants to portray Abraham or Isaac as the equivalent of a king, even though they were more akin to tribal chief or sheik. But neither Abraham nor Isaac had daughters that could be married off, therefore the need to pass off their wife as their sister. The sources seem bound to the story-telling convention of a kingly alliance but had to contort it to take account of the daughterless patriarchs, no matter how nonsensical the resulting tale became. (For comparison, Jacob did have a daughter to bargain with the king of Shechem in Gen 34 but that didn’t turn out so well.)

One could say that I’m inappropriately applying 21^st century concepts of women’s personhood and agency to a culture that saw women as the property of men. But if my reading of the variations in the stories are correct, the idea that Abraham would sell Sarah to some foreign potentate bothered the authors three millennia ago. This uneasiness with the patriarchs’ deception may have been due to the development of law codes around adultery and perjury in a legal system that simply did not exist when the original narrative first circulated in an oral tradition.

Opening Up the Bible

The varying nuances and interpretations for odd stories like the wife-sister triplets are one of the reasons why I love a critical approach to studying the Bible. If you believe that the wife-sister stories happened exactly as reported, then you are limited to thinking Abraham was either devious or lacking in faith. He was also very reckless to try his ruse a second time and Abimelech was foolish not to suspect Isaac was pulling the same scam.

However, if you accept a critical approach to understanding the Bible, new avenues of interpretation open up to you. You can explore the possibility of multiple sources or a literary variation on the standard alliance-through-marriage narrative. Why is the author repeating essentially the same story multiple times? What is he trying to say by slightly varying the narrative each time? Can the story be better understood by looking at what happened immediately prior to it or does it shed light on what is to come?

Once you open up the world of the Bible, the Bible opens up for you.