Reading Genesis, page 7
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“Good and evil” can be read as a merism, a figure of speech in which opposite extremes imply everything between them, here the whole of experience. The Hebrew can be translated “good and bad.” So can the Latin, though theology seems indifferent to the moderating possibilities this translation would offer. Yfil, the Middle English word that became evil, can also simply mean “bad,” without the very dark overtones for which the modern word is virtually unique. Choosing between these meanings appropriately takes account of the world Adam can anticipate and the children of Adam will know. A great deal that has happened here is far worse than bad, appalling at the level of motive in a degree the merely bad does not approach. Bad does not always suggest a motive or an adversary—bad harvest, bad accident—but evil certainly does. The “knowledge of good and bad” means we have had wide experience. The “knowledge of good and evil” means we are competent moral actors. I think it is clear from which of these understandings the biblical epic flows.
The way concepts like evil and fallenness have been received in Christian culture—the only branch of the Abrahamic tradition for which I can speak—has tended to set the Old Testament in opposition to humanism, though passages like the one quoted above express an extraordinarily lofty view of Adam, humankind. As in the tale of Babel, they/we must be inhibited, in this case through the expulsion from Eden and by consignment to a life of toil and to death. Also as in the tale of Babel, nothing is done to disable humankind or to deprive them of the brilliance and knowledge that make them “like one of us.” The obstacles God sets to His Adam’s strange grandeur are external. This is consistent with His unvarying loyalty to His creature.
All this is seen in another light in Psalm 8, a psalm of David, which asks, “What is man, that thou art mindful of him?” The psalmist sees this singular bond as an exaltation, owed to God wholly, that brings humanity within this same high sphere, almost “like one of us.” He says, “Thou hast made him [humankind] a little lower than the angels.” This is how it appears when it is quoted in the New Testament book called Hebrews. This seems like more than sufficient praise.
However, sometimes these words are translated as “a little less than God.” In the Hebrew Scriptures, the word in question here is Elohim, a word closely associated with the Tetragrammaton, the name of God, and often paired with it. In the first great statement in Genesis it appears alone: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Throughout the first Creation narrative the word translated as God is Elohim. The verbs in the passage are singular, which suggests that the plural form of the noun here is honorific, like a royal plural. The word can mean authority or power, even in secular contexts.
David, whom I take to be historical and also the writer of Psalm 8, has the first Creation narrative in mind, clearly. It is Elohim in whose image we are made, God in the widest, least anthropomorphic sense of the word. “So Elohim created man in His image, in the image of Elohim He created them, male and female He created them.” David’s language proceeds very naturally from these verses. We are not the images of angels or lesser gods but of the Creator Himself. And we are crowned “with glory and honour.” I propose that our conception of humankind is too anthropomorphic, too narrowly defined—as physical, mental, or moral—as mortal, either damned or saved, but not as the overwhelming power we are as a creature, a species. Every day we are confronted with the actual and potential effects of this power, but we are never properly in awe of it. As the tale of Babel tells us, it is collective, collaborative. None of us alone could by any means approximate the complexity of our presence on this planet, and none of us can materially effect its tendency toward change that exceeds our control. Only God Himself could alter Creation as we threaten to do and have done.
Psalm 8 takes account of the sun and moon, “the work of thy fingers,” and also of the gift of “dominion over the works of thy hands,” including our fellow creatures, the beasts of the field and the birds of the air. How vast is our dominion? Have we found our way to its limits? Shall we bring back the dinosaurs? Shall we colonize the moon? We know that humans somewhere are devising possibilities that will escape the laboratory, so to speak, and sweep the planet, and for weal and woe obstacles will fall and our dominion will have new expression. If we could step back from the dread we now stir in ourselves and look at all this with some objectivity, would we not feel awe? Would we not be struck by how absolutely unlike everything we are, excepting God Himself? What account can we make of humanity that does not imply another order of being than the brilliant natural order can contain? This granted, the grandeur of God can be assumed to exceed the honor and glory and the dominion of humankind in an infinite degree. They do, after all, derive from Him. Earth is a small theater for this great drama of encounter of God with humankind and of Adam with Adam, reality scaled to our capacities, which are immense within the profound limits of our creatureliness.
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After Babel comes a genealogy of the descendants of Shem. Lives are very long by our standards but not nearly as long as they had been in Noah’s day. The list of generations arrives at the family of Abram, who will be Abraham. Nahor was his grandfather, Terah was his father. He had two brothers, Nahor and Haran. Haran died, leaving a son, Lot. Abram’s wife Sarai was childless.
We have arrived at a recognizable world where genealogy gives way to biography. We are introduced to a family on its way to Canaan but delayed in their travels at Haran, where Terah, Abram’s father, dies. There were no doubt any number of families more or less like this one, wandering Aramaeans. But the family of Abram are singled out among humankind for all time to come, by a command and an extravagant promise: “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee: and I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing. And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.” The God of History sounds ebullient, full of that first joy, full of vast and generous intent that can only unfold over centuries of human time. Where do these words come from? The story of Abram from this moment forward makes much of the fact that for him these words were not fulfilled, nor did they seem likely to be, even when at last he had been given his promised son.
Paul in the New Testament book of Romans says, “Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness.” People often say that they believe in God, as if His existence were a hypothesis they are willing to accept. Abram has been told something directly by God, something unbelievable, and believed it. He leaves his father’s house, takes his family to Canaan, where he cannot stay because of drought and famine, and drifts on into Egypt, where he does a thing that comports oddly with the promise that has been made to him. Sarai, who will be renamed Sarah, is so beautiful that Abram is afraid the Egyptians will kill him to take her from him. So he tells them she is his sister, which is half true. She is taken into Pharaoh’s house, the Lord plagues his house, and Pharaoh understands the problem—Sarai is another man’s wife. He is quite appropriately angry at Abram for deceiving him and sends them away in what must have been disgrace.
Would a man who believes he has a great destiny awaiting him fear for his life? Would a righteous man deceive Pharaoh and put his wife in a deeply compromising situation? This story must be important. The same situation occurs three times, twice involving Abram, once involving his son Isaac. If it tells us anything about Abram, it must be that after God has spoken to him, he is still an ordinary man, liable to fear and deception. About Egyptians it tells us that they honor marriage and that they expect divine punishment if it is violated. In all three recurrences of the story, the patriarchs act badly and the pagans act well.
The same point is made more dramatically when Abram again passes off his wife as his sister, this time to Abimelech, a Philistine king. In this story God speaks to the Philistine in a dream, saying bluntly, “Behold, thou art but a dead man, for the woman which thou hast taken; for she is a man’s wife.” Abimelech says he was misled and “in the integrity of my heart and innocency of my hands have I done this.” God says, “Yes, I know that thou didst this in the integrity of thy heart; for I also withheld thee from sinning against me: therefore suffered I thee not to touch her.” Nevertheless he warns him again that he and his will die if the woman is not returned to her husband.
Then Abimelech, full of indignation, summons Abram. “What have I offended thee, that thou hast brought on me and on my kingdom a great sin? Thou hast done deeds unto me that ought not to be done … What sawest thou, that thou hast done this thing?” Abram’s reply is weak, but very meaningful: “Because I thought, Surely the fear of God is not in this place; and they will slay me for my wife’s sake.” We learn that God is aware of this Philistine’s integrity and knows that his sense of sin is strong and controlling. Abram again shows little understanding of the nature of God. In imagining his relationship with God as exclusive, he denies respect to these strangers whose righteousness God Himself recognizes, values, and protects.
The moral appears to be that fear of outsiders, which amounts to contempt for them, leads to unrighteous behavior, and also that God is attentive to them, too, and will not let them be deceived into acting in a way they consider wrong. The encounter with the Egyptians comes immediately after Abram is told that he will become a mighty nation. Clearly this should not be taken by him to imply disrespect for other nations.
Considering the claim made in Genesis for the ancestor of the people who recorded and preserved the tradition of the Abrahamic covenant, and for themselves as his descendants, these stories must be seen as an impressive correction against a narrow conception of God and of humankind as well. Readers can be shocked by the fallibility of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But the patriarchs are not offered as paragons. And when they err, the generous consequence of the text’s attention to the fact is an assertion of the breadth of God’s loyalty to all the descendants of Adam.
God’s intention for Abram/Abraham is that he should be a blessing to all the families of the earth, very much including the Egyptians. Centuries on, when the history of Israel and the surrounding nations will have become long and painful, conflicts by no means resolved, the prophet Isaiah foresees a time when Israel will be “a blessing in the midst of the land; whom the LORD of hosts shall bless, saying, ‘Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel mine inheritance.’” This vision proceeds very naturally, as prophecy will, from the blessing God placed on Abraham.
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This interest in the outsider arises in another narrative that raises troubling questions, the expulsion by Abram of the Egyptian servant woman Hagar with Ishmael, Abram’s son by her. Abram and Sarai are childless, and Sarai says to Abram, “I pray thee, go in unto my maid; it may be that I may obtain children by her.” This was a recognized form of surrogacy at the time, formally and properly arranged: “Sarai Abram’s wife took Hagar her maid the Egyptian … and gave her to her husband Abram to be his wife.” Hagar’s pregnancy and then her child make Sarai jealous, and Abram, regretfully, casts them out. There is a tendency among modern readers to retroject onto our ancestors the faults for which we blame ourselves, and to blame them or to find them crude by our enlightened standards. However, there is no reason to think of Hagar’s ethnicity as stigmatizing. For Hebrew hearers or readers, the association of the word Egyptian with the word slave would surely bring to mind the memory of their long passage as slaves to the Egyptians, just foretold in Abram’s vision. It is notable that the behavior of Abram and, especially, Sarai is by no means idealized in the story, and notable, too, that Sarai has chosen this woman as her surrogate, and that Abram will ask God to accept her child as the long-awaited son. None of this suggests anything invidious in Ishmael’s having an Egyptian mother. As the story of Hagar develops, it becomes even clearer that Hagar the Egyptian, Hagar the slave, is singularly valued by God. The story, which knows utterly more than Abram and Sarai can know, tells us this very clearly.
There are two episodes centered on Hagar, each describing her encounters with an angel. They are so similar in form and substance that they might be two versions of one story. That they were once at least continuous is suggested in the fact that Ishmael seems to be an infant in the second telling, though the chronology provided for Abram would make the boy an adolescent when he and his mother are cast out. The text says, “Abram was fourscore and six years old, when Hagar bare Ishmael to Abram,” then that he was ninety-nine when the Lord appeared to him, promising him a son by Sarai within a year. Certainly, if there were any intention to minimize the importance of Hagar, the two stories about her could have been combined. Hagar is important and is recognized as important in figuring in the first of the biblical annunciations. An angel who speaks for God finds her near a spring in the wilderness where she has gone to escape Sarai’s ill-treatment. He tells her, the handmaiden, “I will multiply thy seed exceedingly, that it shall not be numbered for multitude,” and, “Behold, thou art with child, and shalt bear a son, and shalt call his name Ishmael.” These words resonate through both Testaments. This is the first appearance of an angel in the Bible.
In the second narrative Hagar is not a runaway but an outcast, this time stopping near a well, though she is not aware of this. The two parts of the story allude to each other so strongly that they might be two parts of an inclusio, the framing by repetition or parallelism of a section of narrative for consideration on its own terms. Several disparate and important events pass between them, making any significance they might have as interpretive markers less than clear. In any case, this placement of the stories of Hagar among major events elevates her. If, at a minimum, they tell us, as the Abimelech story does, that God is lovingly aware of the lives of pagans, kings, or slaves, this by itself is full of meaning with regard to the nature of God and His relationship with humankind.
Readers can feel that Hagar is unvalued because she is a woman, a maid, a foreigner, and these are indeed the conditions that make her vulnerable to mistreatment by Sarai and Abram. But what actually matters is the value the text finds in her, and in her life, which, humble as it may seem to us, can be called her destiny. People behave badly here. Abram and Sarai are not being held up to us as models of righteousness, even reasonableness. Hagar can’t help gloating when she conceives a child, as her barren mistress cannot. Sarai turns her resentment of her maid against Abram, saying “the LORD judge between me and thee,” though the arrangement was her idea. Abram does nothing to intervene when Sarai is so harsh to her maid—pregnant with his child—that she runs away. They all must be aware of her pregnancy, since it is the reason for Sarai’s cruelty.
This is another situation in which it seems the judgment of God might be looked for. Wrong is being done, as in most human turmoil. Like Abimelech’s justified rage against Abram, this moment, highly imaginable as ordinary household conflict and misery, has the inflection of the human. Its realism puts before our eyes the two tiers of being that are interacting when the immortal God works His will among mortals. He is bestowing blessings that will shape the history of humankind. He is giving universal meaning to obscure lives that might not feel much changed in being made bearers of divine intention, of promises that will work themselves out over millennia. Abram will still be childless, Hagar will still be serving a barren and resentful mistress.
Abram’s great covenant blessing occurs in the text immediately preceding the first story of Hagar’s surprising encounter with the angel, whom she calls God: “Have I also here looked after him that seeth me?” This encounter of Abram with the Lord has the quality of an archaic ritual. He is told to bring to the Lord, then to cut in half, a heifer, a she-goat, and a ram, all three years old, and to lay each half “one against another.” A turtledove and a young pigeon are brought but are not cut in two. When the sun is fully down, “behold a smoking furnace, and a burning lamp that passed between those pieces.” This cryptic event is traditionally called “the covenant between the pieces.” It is the moment in which Abram is set apart to take his singular role as father of nations and blessing to all the families of earth. It is also the moment in which he is made aware that a great burden of grief will be entailed upon his descendants in their living out of this blessing. “When the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram; and, lo, an horror of great darkness fell upon him. And he [the LORD] said unto Abram, ‘Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years.’” Remarkably, this great scene closes with a reason for the long sojourn in Egypt. Abram’s descendants “in the fourth generation they shall come hither again: for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.” The Amorites are the Canaanites. The implication is that God is on terms with them, which He will honor until they have become excessively sinful, as He knows they will. Until they do, the Hebrews will remain in Egypt.
And after this second scene of Hagar and the angel, or the Lord, God appears to Abram again, renames him Abraham, and tells him when a child will finally be born to him and to Sarah, the new name He has given Sarai. The placement of these scenes side by side, the interlacing of them, is an instance in which the literary character of the text is especially clear and important. The extreme compression of biblical narrative is achieved in part by the setting or framing of its stories to invite comparisons among them. How are these encounters with God alike, and how are they different? They are alike first of all in that they involve promises made by God to women. Though the Lord speaks always to Abraham and only once to Sarah, in the last of these visitations, in Sarah’s skeptical hearing, He promises her a child, celebrating the vast consequences over time of this birth: “I will bless her, and give thee a son also of her: yea, I will bless her, and she shall be a mother of nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.” Hearing this, each of the two ancient half-siblings laughs at God’s assurances, a striking response He might be expected to reprove. They are like a couple who have been married so very long that they react to things almost as one person. As His promise requires, God rejects Ishmael as the child of the covenant in favor of the son old Sarah is yet to bear. Ishmael’s descent from Abraham, though God is attentive to him, and though he is destined to have a dozen princes among his own descendants, does not make him the fulfillment of the promise. This awaits the utterly impossible birth of the son who will be Isaac, the least interesting of all the patriarchs.
