Reading Genesis, page 12
If the episode were only a tale about how Jacob the supplanter stole his brother’s blessing, the second iteration, the scene between Esau and Isaac, would not have such weight as it does. The voices of Esau and Isaac are very striking, significant because voices full of human passion could have been heard in any number of tents and dwelling places across the ancient world, as in our world. The narrative of Scripture has moved with astonishing speed from “Let there be light” to this intimate scene of shared grief and haplessness. There is no incongruity in this. Human beings are at the center of it all. Love and grief are, in this infinite Creation, things of the kind we share with God. The fact that they have their being in the deepest reaches of our extensionless and undiscoverable souls only makes them more astonishing, over against the roaring cosmos. That they exist at all can only be proof of a tender solicitude.
When Esau comes to his father with the game he has prepared for him, Isaac “trembled very exceedingly,” telling him someone else has come with game and he has blessed him, “yea, and he shall be blessed.” At these words Esau “cried a great and exceeding bitter cry … ‘Bless me, even me also, O my father!’” The son who despised his birthright is deeply anguished at this loss. The first words Isaac has said to Jacob in blessing him, that he loves the smell of Esau’s garments, means that the blessing would have been, whatever else, an act of love toward a dear son, and toward sensuous memory. His craving for game is a kind of engagement in Esau’s life, which savors of life itself to an old man who has lost most of the threads of connection to the world.
But this blessing does not belong to Isaac, or arise out of his great love for Esau. His son asks him, “Hast thou not reserved a blessing for me?… Hast thou but one blessing, my father? Bless me, even me also, O my father.” And Esau “lifted up his voice, and wept.” Isaac tries to give Esau a blessing of his own, but it is very different from the one Jacob has taken from him. The translations of Isaac’s blessing by the Jewish Publication Society and the Revised Standard Version of the Bible differ sharply, for a very interesting reason. The JPS translation is as follows:
See, your abode shall enjoy the fat of the earth
And the dew of heaven above.
Yet by your sword you shall live,
And you shall serve your brother;
But when you grow restive,
You shall break his yoke from your neck.
The RSV has:
Behold, away from the fatness of the earth shall your dwelling be,
and away from the dew of heaven on high.
The remaining lines are substantially the same in both translations.
According to the JPS note, the preposition min, which appears twice in these phrases, may or may not be “understood to express deprivation.” English has no way of expressing the ambiguity of this utterance. But Esau would, of course, have heard it. I have no name for the emotion I imagine coursing through him as he heard this equivocation from his father’s mouth. Given the oracular character of these words, which seem to foretell more than to bless, the ambiguity may have surprised Isaac himself. Altogether, Esau’s expectations are bitterly disappointed, and he reckons up the harm his brother has done him, first depriving him of his birthright, then his blessing. Word comes to Rebekah that Esau plans to kill Jacob after Isaac has died and the period of mourning for him has ended. Once again she takes a crucial, if discreditable, part in sacred history. She tells Jacob about Esau’s intentions, that he “doth comfort himself, purposing to kill thee.” She tells Jacob to flee to her brother Laban and stay with him until Esau’s wrath has cooled. “Then I will send, and fetch thee from thence.” Here that important literary structure, parallelism, again comes into play. Jacob retraces the long journey made by the nameless servant sent to find a wife for Isaac. This same purpose is now only a pretext invented by her so that Isaac will agree to let Jacob leave. She is tormented, she says, by the thought of his possible marriage to “daughters of the land,” and Isaac therefore blesses his journey to Padan-aram.
There is an irony here that deserves to be savored. Rebekah has shattered the covenant family, alienated its sons. She has, to all appearances, defeated their father in his desire to perform the signal act of his life, the conferring of the blessing he received from Abraham to another generation. She has potentially released the uncontrollable energies of revenge, threatening the covenant as an ongoing heritage. She asks Jacob, “Why should I be deprived also of you both in one day?” as if she had no part in the matter. Endogamy, or at least marriage within a cultural or religious group, is very common historically. The capstone of Hagar’s happiness is that she can give Ishmael an Egyptian wife. But it is hard to imagine a wife and mother of any sort more profoundly disruptive to her family than this close kinswoman, Rebekah. Nevertheless, Isaac agrees, Jacob obeys, and birthright and blessing are carried away from the tents of Isaac in the person of a resourceless fugitive.
Repetition and parallelism are also framing devices that encourage particular attention to what they enclose. These two journeys enclose the life of Isaac from his marriage to his death. The contrast between them, opulence in the first instance, desperation in the second, indicates a decline of fortunes, certainly. There seems to have been a radiance of blessedness, a flourishing visible to the world in Abraham, and, in a lesser degree, in Isaac. For Jacob there are poverty and obscurity. Yet, over time, he also flourishes.
The inclusio might also be intended to invite our attention to Rebekah, who lurks and listens and schemes to great effect. Though the text says that Isaac loved Esau and Rebekah loved Jacob, there is really no evidence that she loved anyone. Playing on the helplessness of the patriarch as he approaches death is abysmally unloving. She is ready to defraud Esau, supposedly to benefit Jacob, but she sends Jacob off without bride price or gifts to make himself welcome in Padan-aram, with no more than his staff. She tells him she will summon him back home when it is safe, but there is no evidence that she ever contacts him, not in all those years he was indentured to her brother. Unlikely as it seems, and this is surely the point, the Jacob of indolence and guile, through his singular life, emerges as a towering figure among the patriarchs. This is not to say that he became a self-made man but that the Lord was faithful to His promise to Abraham. Odd words like feckless and hapless can be applied to Jacob, and then, in time, words like pitiable and tragic. His greatness never transcends his humanity. And if it is bad feminism to say that Rebekah’s liveliness and vigor turned to resentment, scheming, and manipulation, her role in this seeming disaster was providential. The very mingled characters in Genesis, in the fact of their flaws and errors, should give hope to us all.
The fugitive Jacob “lighted upon to a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows, and lay down in that place to sleep.” The “certain place” will be called Beth-el, the House of God, an early shrine that will be destroyed by the reforming king Josiah centuries on. Here Jacob has his dream of angels ascending and descending a ladder whose top reached to heaven. He also experiences a full-fledged theophany, a vision of God making the promises to him that He had made to Abraham and Isaac. The land will be his and his descendants’, who will be like the dust of the earth. All the families will bless themselves by them. To this lonely man, the Lord says, “Behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest,” with more assurances.
Jacob, waking, says, “Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not.” This is just the realization Abraham came to in his dealings with the righteous Abimelech. The notes in my Bible interpret the events at Beth-el in terms of ancient religious belief, which is, presumably, the state of belief to be assumed in a man of Jacob’s time and place, and not to be considered individually meaningful—in a patriarch who has just had a vision of the Lord. “Ancient religious belief” of the kind that makes God limited and local, to be found in one place and not another, can also be called paganism. This distinction, between monotheism and polytheism, is so central to the Hebrew Scriptures that the appearance of pagan elements in the text should not be assumed to be naïve. Prevalent methods of criticism assume precisely this, claiming historicism.
Before he left for Padan-aram, Jacob received another blessing from Isaac, who prayed that El Shaddai, God Almighty, may “give thee the blessing of Abraham, to thee, and to thy seed with thee.” Clearly Jacob is indeed the heir of the covenant despite all. What this means to him and how he understands it seems to me to be the question the text is posing here. This is another framing of the independence of the covenant from its human bearers, even while it is profoundly associated with this fallible and vulnerable little clan. Its aloofness has to do with the nature of God, His faithfulness, first of all, which could not be absolute if it could be affected by the thoughts and actions of creatures so volatile as these mortals are. A covenant, a bond of faithfulness, is the form of relationship the Lord offers humankind.
Then there is the fact of His oneness and His omnipotence. I may appear to be imposing terms not appropriate to the religious consciousness of a literature as ancient as Genesis. But this can only seem to be true if the first Creation narrative is excluded from a reckoning of the theological universe Genesis presents to us. Elohim speaks into being even Being itself. There is no other God, and there is no limit to God’s effective power in a Creation that embodies the Will that brought it into existence. The elegance of this metaphysical poem is so striking that composition of it is assigned to a tradition of priestly writers in a later period. But there are real limits to how much would be gained by this. Nothing in antiquity could provide a context that would make it less singular. Our most contemporary cosmologists might say that the utterances of God are information and the moon and stars and the sea creatures are the hologram, at a sharp loss in poetry and implication.
The Hebrew Scriptures are consistent with this vision, except in the passages in Genesis where Abraham and his kin are being instructed by the Lord in the Lord’s own nature. The creation of all humanity in the persons of Adam and Eve populated the world with one divine image. The Flood narrative, in the Hebrew version, describes a humankind utterly known to God and an earth entirely exposed to His judgment. In the episode of the dream, Jacob is right that there is something holy in that place, and wrong to find the place holy rather than the moment and the circumstance of his own investment by God with the covenant of Abraham. The Lord tells Jacob that He will be with him wherever he goes. All places are the same.
There are Babylonian bas-reliefs of gods carrying bricks up ladders, building ziggurats that are meant to reach heaven. The “gate of heaven” recalls Babel, “the gate of God,” which did indeed bring God to earth, so the story goes, but only in order to put an end to such presumption. These are names Jacob applies to the place where he has slept, an etiology of Beth-el that suggests uneasiness with the localism that is implied in it. Then, after God has essentially claimed him for the purposes of His covenant with Abraham and Isaac, Jacob makes a remarkable vow: “If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat, and raiment to put on, so that I come again to my father’s house in peace; then shall the LORD be my God: and this stone, which I have set for a pillar, shall be God’s house.” He seems to be making the Lord’s status as his God conditional on God’s good behavior, by the standards of what one might hope from a personal deity, a household god. Making an anointed stone His house is a miscalculation of the same kind. None of this suggests that Jacob, to this point, has given any real thought to God or to the covenant. This is another instance of assurance that the covenant can be in any degree of apparent peril and still be firm and safe because it is the will of God toward the patriarchs and their descendants, and toward all the families of earth. The covenant is much more the heritage of Jacob than it could ever be if he had had to deserve it.
* * *
I say this with all possible respect and reverence: The text has a sense of humor. Jacob, to escape the consequences of his trickery, flees to his mother’s brother Laban, that is, into the arms of another trickster, one who is not at all above exploiting the necessitous state Jacob’s mother has brought him to. Jacob has gone along with a plot instigated by Rebekah, lying disgracefully, true, but doing no more than she has told him to do. This clan of Padan-aram folk are a slippery lot. Jacob might be said to have come by his foibles honestly.
The character of Laban begins to emerge in his response to the arrival of Abraham’s emissary, the nameless servant who will bring Rebekah home to Isaac. When Laban sees the gold ring and bracelets the stranger has given Rebekah, and sees him standing with his camels, he welcomes him effusively. “Come in, thou blessed of the LORD; wherefore standest thou without?” It is as if the wealth and munificence were the servant’s, though the servant, so scrupulous in carrying out his mission, makes clear that he is only acting for Abraham. When Jacob arrives with nothing but kinship to recommend him, Laban runs to embrace him, kisses him, and brings him into his house, saying, “Surely thou art my bone and my flesh.” Then we learn that for a month Jacob has been making himself useful, serving Laban in ways for which he would normally receive pay. Since he has no gifts to offer the family this would be a form of compensation for their hospitality, the best equivalent he can offer to the servant’s costly ornaments. Laban formalizes the situation. “Because thou art my brother, shouldest thou therefore serve me for nought?” Jacob, perhaps still thinking of himself more as kinsman than hireling, says he wishes to marry Rachel, the daughter of Laban whom he has met at a well, as happened with the servant and Rebekah. Laban agrees that this would be highly appropriate, and Jacob, in the exuberance of love, offers to serve Laban seven years for Rachel. Rebekah has sent him to Padan-aram with the search for a bride as pretext for leaving his family. He actually, in his own person, finds the love of his life, and the prospect of marriage to her functions for him, and for Laban, as a form of debt that must be paid in full before they can be married. When that day, or evening and morning, comes, Jacob the supplanter will find that his chosen bride has been supplanted by her older sister, Leah, with whom he has consummated marriage. Laban has arranged this, he says, on the grounds that custom in his country did not allow a younger daughter to be married before an older one, and this could be true, though he might have mentioned the problem to Jacob seven years earlier. In any case, Jacob—a surprisingly trusting man—agrees to serve Laban another seven years, still for the hand of Rachel. Unfavored Leah will be the mother of most of Jacob’s children. She will be essential to the emergence of a Hebrew people and the unfolding of the covenant. Providence is active in all this, perhaps itself the ultimate trickster. It even drops the veil of misfortune from time to time to show an unexpected face.
The Lord has compassion on an unloved wife, and great names enter history—Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah. This is a beautiful detail, the kind of thing that is to be found only in the Hebrew Scriptures. God is not so engrossed in His own will that eponyms of the twelve tribes are not first of all the pride and comfort of a sorrowful woman. The interactions of human circumstance, providence, and grace are pure mystery, but great futurity does not minimize the power of Leah’s sorrows or her hopes by exposing the workings of inevitability.
Rachel, whom Jacob loves, is childless. As Sarah had done, she gives him her maid as a wife, to bear children for her. From this marriage came Dan and Naphtali. Leah does the same, and her maid gives him Gad and Asher. After a quarrel between Rachel and Leah over mandrakes, the Lord “hearkened unto Leah,” and she bears Issachar, then Zebulun, and finally a daughter, Dinah.
The text says, “And God remembered Rachel, and God hearkened to her, and opened her womb.” The word remembered seems strange in contexts like this. To say that someone is at some point remembered implies to us that he, she, or they were, up to that point, forgotten. After four hundred years in Egypt the Lord “remembered” the Hebrew people. But He told Abraham in his dark dream that the Hebrews would pass those years in Egypt. So, difficult as it is to speak of God in terms of time, it might be useful to consider a paraphrase that could take into account the role of time in the eventuation of God’s intentions and promises, which are not contingent but are constant over time. Joseph is set apart from his brothers as the cherished only son of a favored wife. His relationship to his brothers, like the relationship of Esau and Jacob, will become a factor in the history of Israel. If this sounds like contingency, this is a consequence of the fact that God realizes His purposes in and through the lives of human beings. Scripture is centered on human lives.
The infant patriarchs of the next generation enter the story in a kind of competition for the love of Jacob, which Leah cannot win no matter how many sons she has and Rachel cannot lose although she is angry with him out of grief at her childlessness. If the passage sets these women in an unflattering light that might not seem to serve the interests of the narrative, it also poses a philosophical question, or perhaps suggests a philosophical answer, having to do with causality. First, from the point of view of the women, births or barrenness are matters of the body, whence the quarrel over mandrakes. Second, the text speaks of them in terms of God’s kindness to a despised wife, then to a childless one. Third, the very names of their children invoked here recall the covenant and the imminent, crucial movement of sacred history into Egypt and beyond. The etiologies of these names associate them with the old grief and struggle in Jacob’s household when he had not yet extricated himself from the snares of Laban. They record detail as quotidian as dust. Yet the fact that there was once a child whose mother named him Judah has had far-reaching consequences, an instance being my writing this book, one of hundreds or thousands with the same ultimate origin, Israel and Judea, being produced in any given year. This is objectively remarkable.
