Reading Genesis, page 18
I have argued that the Flood is the working through of a philosophical question raised in another belief system, an excursus that reshapes a Babylonian thesis to serve Hebrew purposes. So I take it that the human world forming before the Flood should not be thought of as swept away as if it were wholly condemned. These primordial tales tell us the origins of the world we know: Jubal gave us musical instruments, Noah was the first vintner.
The very Hebrew coda added to the Flood story responds to the evil to which humankind is prone with a set of laws, notably one that allows and restrains violence. Whoever kills a man will be killed by a man. Adam kills Adam for killing Adam, an image of God destroys an image of God for having destroyed an image of God. Even in permitting condign punishment, the law makes clear the fundamental absurdity even of punishment limited by strict equivalence. It views the matter from the perspective of Creation, the great expression of divine intent that so radically sanctified humankind. The law expresses a terrible anomaly that takes its power from the fact that even in the miserable business of homicide, criminal or judicial, this sanctity is undiminished.
In the story of the Flood, God Himself might be said to have modeled revenge and its consequences. Extinction would be just punishment for the abuse of existence. But He repented of the destruction He had caused, and even though, being God, He could have remade the world so that evil and violence were excluded from it, He forgave, or forbore, the corrupt thoughts of human hearts, setting certain bounds around human conduct insofar as law and covenant have that effect. He chose to let us be, to let time yield what it will—within the vast latitude granted by providence. Joseph’s brothers are epochal figures. The narrative records little about any of them that redounds to his credit. But their mere existence as the sons of Jacob/Israel, with the multitudes of their descendants, makes them crucial to the unfolding of human and sacred history.
To speak of these events as providential might seem to lift them out of the world of human meaning and experience. This is a problem that always attends the idea of providence, especially when it is called by its other name, predestination. The story of Jacob and his sons proceeds entirely on human emotion and motivation even while it tends always toward the descent of Israel into Egypt foreseen in Abraham’s nocturnal vision. Jacob’s supplanting Esau, stealing his father’s blessing, is understandable as rivalry between brothers. His flight to Padan-aram in fear of Esau’s wrath brings him to Laban’s household, to Rachel and Leah. His great love for Rachel and his favoring of her child helps stir the resentment of Joseph’s brothers and their abandonment of him. Tamar appears in the tale, absolutely intent on producing sons for her two dead husbands. The famine comes, threatening survival, stirring fears of divine retribution, making the brothers assume correctly that events are more than meet the eye, even while their great fear and guilt lead them to misunderstand the sense in which this is true. Joseph is surpassingly businesslike in his various roles—officious as he was as a boy. He yields finally to the great burden of emotion that builds up in his manipulative dealings with his brothers. At no point are the actors’ motives insufficient to account for events, and at no point are their actions out of character. Few elements in this story suggest that divine providence has a part in them, though we know it is active in them all. The story could, no doubt should, function as a theological proof that the earthly and the providential are separate things in theory only. In fact neither can be distinguished from the other or exist apart from the other. The text anticipates a thousand questions about this view of human life, in which for most of us little seems like providence. It does this by reminding us that, from the time of Abraham’s dream of “an horror of great darkness,” the children of Israel are bound for Egypt and slavery. To the extent that these events might be called providential in a purely positive sense, this would be true for the thousands of generations of Abraham’s children, for all the families of earth. As for the Israelites who will live out the time of Egyptian oppression, little escapes the darkness of those four hundred years.
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After Joseph has revealed himself, “he kissed all his brethren, and wept upon them.” This recalls another meeting of estranged brothers, when Jacob, returning home to Canaan, encounters wronged Esau, who “embraced him, and fell on his neck, and kissed him: and they wept.” This might be conventional language or behavior in such circumstances, but it does not detract from the richness of the text, since in neither case are those who are embraced by their erstwhile victims wholly persuaded of the authenticity of the gesture. Jacob deploys a bit of his famous guile to put distance between his people and Esau’s troops of fighting men. Joseph’s brothers are alarmed to discover him alive, more concerned for their safety than moved by an alleviation of their guilt. They will worry that after Jacob’s death Joseph will turn on them and avenge himself. Convention is the politesse of ambiguous relationships. Both of these moments look, and in some degree must feel, like grace. Grace, being apart from the calculus of deserving, is often suspect.
Here is another pattern that recurs through Genesis. The first instance of it is found in the second Creation narrative when the Lord tells Adam and Eve that if they eat the fruit of the forbidden tree they will surely die. This is a simple statement of an offense and its punishment, if this then that, casuistical in its finality. Adam and Eve taste the fruit—and they do not die. Satan is right to reassure them. They live on, chastened, in a harsher version of the created world. The Flood narrative begins with the Lord’s resolve to end all life and ends with a great relenting, and a changed, harsher world that is nevertheless again the place of seedtime and harvest, where the children of Noah can still be fruitful and multiply. The text raises the prospect of punishment that would be appropriate to transgression or corruption and then steps away from the execution of it, though not entirely. Grace tempers judgment. In this way the text conceptualizes the justice of God together with His mercy or grace or His loyalty to Creation. The anomaly of His restraint or His repentance in these stories is not evidence of flaws in the text or in the theology of the writers but of the difficulty of expressing the simultaneity of these qualities in Him. As in the matter of Cain, the tacit withholding of expected punishment may be the primary point of these stories. When Jacob wrestles all night with a man at the Jabbok River, he emerges from the encounter lamed. He is given a name, Israel, for which the text provides an etymology—“for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.” The mysterious figure has crippled him with a touch, which suggests power that is not wholly brought to bear on this struggle. Jacob says when day comes that he has looked on the face of God and lived. When Hagar had her encounter with an angel rescuer, she expressed this same amazement—not that she had seen His face but that the force of the experience did not destroy her. In other words, it is not the near presence of God Himself that is primary in their reactions but the restraint that allowed her and her child’s survival and Jacob’s long struggle as if with an equal. They are amazed by the restraint that allows the Lord to interact with them. The great metaphysical statement of the first Creation narrative might seem to evoke a God who would not, perhaps could not, comfort a desperate servant woman or challenge the strength of a frightened man and let him feel he had prevailed. But a given of the text is that God is interested in human beings. If they are to be granted individuality, agency, freedom, meaningful existence as human beings, then God must practice almost limitless restraint. My language is entirely insufficient to my subject, but I hope to draw attention to an important consistency to be found in Genesis. To refrain, to put aside power is Godlike. Jacob says that seeing Esau is like looking on the face of God. Presumably this would not be true if Esau had met him with the vengeance Jacob feared, and of which his troops would have made Esau capable.
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There will be other pharaohs who do not know Joseph, but this one is pleased to hear that Joseph’s brothers have come and is eager to settle his whole family in Egypt, sending wagons to ease the journey for the women and little ones, and for Jacob. He says they “shall eat the fat of the land,” and to tell them “the good of all the land of Egypt is yours.” Joseph urges his brothers to come to him so that he can provide for them through the five years of famine that remain. He sends them back to Canaan and to Jacob with lavish gifts that will persuade his father that he really is alive, and a great man in Egypt. As these men, fathers and grandfathers, heads of households, leave for Canaan, he makes a little joke, reminding them of the irksome boy he was once. “See that ye fall not out by the way.”
“And Israel took his journey with all that he had.” He will see Joseph before he dies. At Beer-sheba he offers the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob a sacrifice, and God appears to him in “visions of the night,” assuring him that he should go down to Egypt, that He will be with him and will “make of thee a great nation” there, covenant language, which means that Jacob is not leaving his God or his heritage behind in leaving Canaan. The Lord, Who, in Hebrew dreams, speaks, tells Jacob, “Joseph shall put his hand upon thine eyes.” There is no aggrandizement of these epochal mortals, but sometimes a tender attentiveness to them.
Joseph presents his father to Pharaoh. Jacob blesses this mighty man, a gentle assertion of his own dignity. Pharaoh asks his age, and Jacob replies that his life has made him old. At one hundred thirty, he knows he will not attain to the great age of his ancestors. “Few and evil have the days of the years of my life been.” Here is the realism that sets Scripture apart. Jacob has found Joseph, not only living but in a position to preserve the lives of his whole family. Benjamin is safe and favored by Joseph. But the days of many years have been full of dread and loss and grief and suspicion, and no ending can be happy enough to change this.
After Joseph’s family is well situated, given grazing land where presumably they will be unmolested because their way of life as shepherds is an abomination to Egyptians, there comes the long passage in which Joseph dispossesses the people of Egypt of all money, then all cattle, then all land and their own persons. This might broadly reflect a state of things that was characteristic of Egypt at some time. But this does not account for the attributing of it to Joseph. Under the law of Moses, land, which is owned collectively by each tribe, cannot be alienated permanently but must be restored to the original owners every fifty years. Slavery, likewise a recourse of poverty, is not a permanent status but is to be limited to a period of seven years with a bonus for the slave at the end of it. Moses, whoever he was, clearly wished to create a property system antithetical to the one thought to prevail in Egypt. Since Genesis would have been written, or have received its last refinements, long after the time of Moses, the standards he established for land tenure would have been known if not adhered to. All this could have gone unmentioned, or Joseph given no role in it. But it is characteristic of Joseph, always shrewd in someone else’s interest, to exploit an opportunity. “Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh … The land became Pharaoh’s. And as for the people, he removed them to cities from one end of the borders of Egypt even to the other end thereof.” Thou shalt not abhor an Egyptian. The Egyptian has grievances, too.
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The ending of Genesis brings to a close two sustained narratives, one the story of Joseph and his brothers, the other the story of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the patriarchs, men with whose names God ever afterward chose to identify Himself. Before the rise of Joseph, the children of Abraham drifted through the world as their flocks and their little ones allowed, as drought required, as God directed. They were dwellers in tents and keepers of cattle, unexceptional, perhaps, even in having a conception of God unique to them, drawn from the dreams and visions of the most revered among them. Abraham stood in the door of his tent and saw the heavens shining with their multitudes of stars, which were all the families of earth. Now we know that there are vastly more stars than he would have seen, even allowing for the purity of earth’s darkness on an ancient night. And the earth has indeed been fruitful, bearing and nurturing families enough to justify the Lord’s promise. That radiant futurity had nothing to do with grandeur of any kind beyond its own singular magnificence. Abraham was told that he would be a blessing to humankind. We can’t well imagine that there was such a man, brought out into the night by his friend the Lord to consider the ongoingness of Creation at its most spectacular and to be told by Him that he has a part in its unfolding. This moment is like nothing I know of in any other literature or myth system. It is worldly in that the vision sees the glory of the heavens as like the families of earth, which are and will be numerous and also glorious. In this moment it might be possible to say that Abraham saw as God sees, valuing humankind as God does.
The book of Genesis begins with the emergence of Being in a burst of light and ends with the death and burial of a bitter, homesick old man. If there is any truth to modern physics, this brings us to the present moment. Disgruntled and bewildered, knowing that we derive from an inconceivably powerful and brilliant first moment, we are at a loss to find anything of it in ourselves. God loved Jacob and was loyal to him, no less for the fact that Jacob felt the days of his life, providential as they were, as deep hardship.
After the passing of Jacob/Israel and his son Joseph no more will be heard of the Israelites for four hundred years. Their descent into Egypt is carefully prepared in the stories of both Jacob and Joseph, and when it comes it is a descent into utter silence. This is remarkable. Captivity in Egypt is a very central part of Israelite identity, yet no tales of pathos or of heroism are given a place in Scripture before the birth of Moses. Historical, literary, or both, this dark passage defeats every question that might be asked about its place in the working of providence.
For the purposes of the law it rooted compassion in experience, as for example in Deuteronomy 24:17–18: “Thou shalt not pervert the judgment of the stranger, nor of the fatherless; nor take a widow’s raiment to pledge: but thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee thence.” Or the beautiful Exodus 23:9: “Thou shalt not oppress a stranger: for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Laws based on compassionate identification with those most vulnerable to abuse are vanishingly rare, in antiquity and in every subsequent era. It is a comment on human nature, presumably, that a captivity so long and profound would be required to introduce this kind of empathy into personal and social morality. And it is another comment on human nature that such a harsh experience could yield an ethic of justice and generosity rather than of insularity and resentment. If Israelites fell short of this high standard, notably after their entry into Canaan, so do we all, and in much less exigent circumstances. As always, to their great credit, they cherished their mingled heritage and preserved it.
Redemption is another central idea that emerged for scriptural purposes from the centuries in Egypt. To be redeemed means literally to be “bought back,” to be freed from trouble, especially bondage, by a kinsman or benefactor. Poverty or debt often led to slavery, so to pay the debt was to restore the debtor to freedom. God presents His intervention in these human terms that, like a covenant, involve loyalty to the relationship on the part of the stronger party. The word and the relationship retain the memory of slavery and of a gracious act of liberation. This understanding of the bond between God and Israel remains important through the whole of the Hebrew Bible. Its significance to the New Testament can hardly be overstated.
There is a moment early in the story of Moses that might have been the beginning of his career as a revolutionary leader. “He went out unto his brethren, and looked on their burdens: and he spied an Egyptian smiting an Hebrew, one of his brethren.” A young man brought up in the circles of power and privilege one day realizes his identity with an oppressed people and reacts to an act of violence with violence, no doubt thinking that in killing the Egyptian and concealing his body he has done something just, worthy of respect. Perhaps assuming this, when he sees two Hebrews fighting, he asks the aggressor, “Wherefore smitest thou thy fellow?” The solidarity he has begun to feel he wants to encourage in them. The Hebrew makes a startling reply. “Who made thee a prince and a judge over us? Intendest thou to kill me, as thou killedst the Egyptian?” Moses is not admired for the violent act but taunted with it. Farther on in the story Moses does indeed emerge as a prince and judge, but not as the leader of an insurrection. His killing of the Egyptian, personification as the man may have been of the brutality suffered by the Hebrews, does not at all redound to his credit. So Moses will become the leader of an exodus, not an insurrection. This exchange with a nameless man, long before Moses is given his role by the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is remembered in the text, an isolated Hebrew voice speaking out of the Egyptian silence, expressing in his way the old belief that to kill any human being is to kill Adam, God’s image. Clearly Moses, who goes into hiding, understands his words to mean he will be seen by the Hebrews as a murderer and not a hero—and perhaps not as a Hebrew, either, since he has violated this prohibition. This is remarkable in the circumstances and crucial to the form resistance will take. We are told that the Egyptians feared the Hebrews because they had become so numerous. But rather than turning to force, through Moses and Aaron they ask Pharaoh for leave to be gone, and only when they have received it—granting spectacular coercions—do they depart. This is a moment in which some Spartacan act of heroic rebellion would be satisfying. And this is an instance in which God repays evil for evil. But the Hebrew people simply gather themselves up and walk out of Egypt.
