Ten major themes (2): sibling rivalry, God's covenants

Sibling rivalry

We can see "fighting" and rivalry between brothers within the context of general issues concerning the rank of siblings (and also the often related issue of relative status between different wives or concubines of the same father), but confrontations between brothers or half-brothers in particular recur so persistently in the stories of Genesis that I would suggest they are one of its major themes. Moreover, these sibling rivalry stories display certain recurrent features. It nearly always seems to be the young brother who acquires the greatest protagonism or comes out on top one way or the other, and in fact the whole list of patriarchs seems to consist of young brothers, which challenges the default assumption that, by tradition, firstborn males are the heirs. The list of little brothers who prevail in Genesis most obviously includes Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, and in each of these cases Genesis offers not just one but several scenes telling how they get the better of or somehow unwittingly come out ahead of an older half-brother (Isaac versus Ishmael), a firstborn twin (Jacob versus Esau) or, in the big climax, ten older half-brothers (in the case of Joseph). The ways in which these rivalries play out is varied, but the "winner" is always the little one.

Ten major themes (1): migration and name games

Now I'm going to look at ten themes which pervade the book of Genesis and will indicate where, within the book, these themes appear. This is a purely literary exercise with no philosophical or theological ambitions; I am simply following the oft-repeated motto of this blog and letting the text speak for itself. From this viewpoint, a major theme is a major theme if it shows up repeatedly and if (according to my analysis) it is not merely there as a background assumption, part of the landscape or setting, in which case it was listed in last week's post.

My list of the top ten themes of Genesis, then, is as follows: migration, name games, sibling rivalry, God's covenants, deception, neighbourly relations, sterility and continuity, dreams, not messing with the locals and God's names. Some of these may seem closely related, and undoubtedly they are, but in the discussion below I shall try to establish a definition of each "theme" that is clearcut enough to warrant treating these as separate items. I actually found more than these ten themes, so I will add some further ones at the end, calling them secondary themes: all that means is that they are not brought up quite so often, but still often enough to be noticed. The five runner-up themes I have identified are name changes, crimes, sin-and-destruction stories, sins against God generally and tests.

Ten recurring topics

Before I launch into today's main subject, this is a good time for some stock-taking followed by a look ahead to the immediate future of the blog. Things are actually moving quite fast and will continue to, and although I am aware that my readership does not number in the thousands or even hundreds, every reader is individually important to me and I want to make sure that from where you stand I am seen to be staying coherent, on-topic and going somewhere. so let's take stock.

In the eight blog posts to date, I have touched on a variety of aspects of my subject. My subject being, really, two things that are almost inextricably intertwined, and yet not the same: (1) Genesis as a literary work, a work of literature, a book in the fundamental (non-biblical) sense of the word; (2) translating Genesis, i.e. practically anything about translation that is pertinent to translating Genesis, and practically anything about Genesis that is pertinent to translating it. In theory or "officially" my approach route to all this is 2 because I have a job to do: to translate Genesis. The excuse, then, for getting involved with 1 is that a translator is supposed to have an understanding of what she or he is translating, both on the micro-level of understanding the words and sentences of the text and on the macro-level of knowing the genre and recognising the purpose and characteristics of the document.

Nawatizing Hebrew proper names

On this page I talked in general about how I am transcribing Hebrew into the "English" alphabet in this blog when citing Hebrew words or passages. Here my subject is rather different: what to call people and places in Genesis with Hebrew names in my Nawat translation (and how to spell them). How do you say "Noah", "Joseph" or "Edom" in Nawat?

Given that I am engaged in the first translation of the Bible into the Nawat language and there is no previous native tradition (the church never adopted Nawat as a language of Christian worship), we have a tabula rasa regarding how to render the proper names of the Hebrew bible into Nawat. Now one option would be to work not from the original Hebrew forms of names that occur in the (Hebrew) text we are translating from, but rather from the shapes that have been given to those names by twenty centuries of (primarily Christian) transmission through European languages. Given that one particular European language, Spanish, is the dominant language of El Salvador, and hence also that of all forms of Christian presence in El Salvador, in practice this would mean adopting the Spanish forms of biblical names in Nawat: calling asher "Aser", efráyim "Efraín", esaw "Esaú", xanókh "Enoc", yitzxaq "Isaac", xawa "Eva", m'nashe "Manasés", naxor "Nacor", nóax "Noé", panuel "Fanuel", par‛o "Faraón", péretz "Fares", raxel "Raquel", r'uven "Rubén", shem "Sem", shet "Set", shim‛on "Simeón", s'dom "Sodoma", térax "Taré", ya‛aqov "Jacob", yarden "Jordán", yosef "José", y'huda "Judá", etc.

Leaves from the author's notebook: character sketches

The conceit behind the first part of this week's post's title is that the hypothetical author of Genesis (or was it Moses?), in the persona of a modern novelist, set apart a couple of pages in a notebook to sketch out the main features of each of the important characters in this saga: God, Adam, Eve and their sons, Noah and his sons, Abram, Sarai, Lot, Hagar and her son Ishmael, Isaac, Laban, Rebecca, Esau, Jacob, Leah, Rachel and Joseph.

Whether we choose to think of the book of Genesis (the literary entity) as if it were a novel, a TV series or just an ancient saga, it has a cast of important characters which are an essential part of the story. Today, I thought it would be interesting to review the cast. I will try to state in a simple and straightforward manner what we all know about each character as presented in the book, basing my information on what the text itself tells us about them, how they are portrayed or what their actions appear to intend to suggest about them. Many if not all of these characters have entered into world culture and practically become entities in their own right; consider, for example, the fact that they each have a whole Wikipedia article devoted to them (below I have given links to those articles for anyone interested in comparing notes)! However, here what most interests me is not the place they occupy in world culture but their place in the story that unfolds in the book of Genesis.