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.

The Camel's Nose Under Moses' Tent

A popular trope in the media is the science-proves-the-Bible story and I reviewed a couple of those (Sodom destroyed by meteor and Joshua witnessed an eclipse) recently. Not quite as popular is the science-disproves-the-Bible story and we have a recent example of that from 2013 where two researchers from Tel Aviv University dated the introduction of domesticated camels in the area south of the Dead Sea to the latter third of the 10^th century BCE.

How does this disprove the Bible? Well, camels are featured prominently in some of the stories in Genesis and these stories supposedly took place hundreds of years before the Exodus. Yet the scientific evidence shows domesticated camels only came into widespread use after the time of Solomon.

The article itself doesn’t address the anachronistic reference to camels in Genesis. That was brought out in media reports in early 2014 such as the one in the New York Times: “Camels Had No Business in Genesis”. Reports like this in the popular media unleashed a wide range of critics questioning the original research in order to defend the accuracy of Genesis.

The problem, though, is that camels aren't the only anachronisms in Genesis.

Handler offering camel rides in the Australian Outback. Camels are not native to Australia. They were imported in the 1800s for use as transportation in the desert. When the camels became displaced by motorized transportation in the 1920s, they were released into the wild. (photo by author, 2012)

Who Wrote the Five Books of Moses?

Traditionally, Genesis and the other four books of the Torah (or Pentateuch) were attributed to Moses. That’s why they are called “the Five Books of Moses”. And when I say “attributed”, I don’t mean people only thought the traditions in them go back to Moses. No, the commonly-held view for centuries was that the Torah was entirely penned by Moses. Some allowance was made for Joshua recording the events of Moses’ death and burial (for obvious reasons) but that was it.

However, over the centuries astute students of the Torah noticed Moses was unlikely to have called himself “more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth” (Num 12:3). That’s not the sort of thing a humble man would say.

Other verses point to the Torah having been written long after Moses:

• “Canaanites were then in the land” (Gen 12:6) implies that Canaanites were no longer in Canaan
• “before any king ruled over the Israelites” (Gen 36:31) implies that kings had ruled over Israel at the time this was written
• “since then, no prophet has arisen in Israel like Moses” (Deut 34:10) implies that the present time of the author is long after that of Moses

In addition to the aforementioned camels, references to “Philistines” in the Torah are out of place as the Philistines did not arrive at the coastal areas of Canaan until around 1200 BCE (more than a century after Moses). Genesis 11:28 refers to “Ur of the Chaldeans” but the Chaldeans did not occupy the region containing the city of Ur until about 1000 BCE.

Clearly, the Torah wasn’t written in Moses’ time. Nor, as we have seen from studying the creation and flood stories, was it written by a single author. There was a Yahwist source (J) and a Priestly source (P) who contributed the bulk of Genesis through Numbers with the Deuteronomist (D) who was largely responsible for Deuteronomy. Based on internal clues, J’s setting best fits in the 9^th/8^th centuries BCE and P belongs to the 6^th century BCE (after the fall of Jerusalem).

Writing in the 9^th or 8^th century BCE, the author would be familiar with the idea of domesticated camels. Camels would have been part of the cultural milieu for one or two centuries. Writing down a story about Abraham or Isaac, the Genesis author would have naturally assumed the patriarchs used camels as well.

Cultural Memories

Unlike stories of the exodus or conquest that could be proven or disproven by archaeology, the patriarchal narratives of Gen 12-50 are family stories and, barring the excavation of a clay tablet recording Abraham’s purchase of a burial plot or an inscription announcing the appointment of Joseph to pharaoh’s court, verifying the existence of individuals through archaeology is next to impossible. The destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah by fire and brimstone would be one possible avenue to archaeological verification, but the evidence presented so far seems extremely weak.

True, just because the patriarchal narratives were written down hundreds of years after they occurred doesn’t mean truly old traditions couldn’t have been handed down orally for generations. But I think we need to be very modest as to what can reasonably go back to the period of 2000-1500 BCE. Details of individual events will be lost after a few generations, but events happening in the longer timescales of society, religion, and ethnicity are more likely to be recalled centuries later.

Given all this, what aspects of the patriarchal narratives may go back to a pre-Israelite period? Two things stand out: the location of the ancestral home in the Haran region and worship of the Canaanite god El.

The older J source places Abraham’s home in Haran, a city in upper Mesopotamia. The names of Abraham’s ancestors – Serug, Nahor, Terah – are all place names in the region around Haran. The P source overwrote the tradition of the ancestral home of Haran with “Ur of the Chaldeans”, a major city in lower Mesopotamia, but still retained Haran as a stopover point. Abraham’s relatives (including Laban) remained behind in Haran when Abraham continued his journey to Canaan.

By the time the stories were collected into the Torah, Arameans occupied the ancestral homeland. That’s why we see references to “Laban the Aramean” (Gen 25:20; 31:20, 24) and “my father was a wandering Aramean” (Deut 26:5). The current occupants of the Haran region were assumed to have existed at the time of the patriarchs just as camels were.

The other element of pre-Israelite cultural memory is the worship of the Canaanite God, El. The P source is quite clear that YHWH was known to the patriarchs only as El Shaddai (Ex 6:2-3). Bethel and Penuel, two prominent cultic sites in the patriarchal narratives are compounded with the name El, as is the name Israel itself. Although the J source insists that the name YHWH was invoked from almost the very beginning, there are no names compounded with YHWH until the era of Moses (Jochebed and Joshua are the first).

In my view, it is clear that the stories in Genesis were written centuries after the time they supposedly took place. The patriarchal narratives may retain some accurate cultural memories of an ancestral homeland in Haran and the worship of the Canaanite god El prior to the introduction of the YHWH cult. But the individual stories of Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph are simply not historical in the same sense as those pertaining to David, Jeremiah, and other figures appearing later in the Bible.