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.

In addition to brief character sketches, I will also mention in many cases something about the possibe "meaning" of their names. The reason why we care about this is that the authors of the text seem to care about it (and presumably so did the original audience). As I said somewhere before, there is a lot of punning and word play in Genesis, and much of it has to do with the names of people or places. You can't translate a pun. It only makes sense as a pun in the language it was told in, and sure you can explain it in other languages, but since when was a joke funny when you had to explain it?

Abraham's wife Sarah, an old woman well past menopause who had never managed to have children, overheard an angel telling her husband Abraham, also well past his prime, that she is going to get pregnant and give birth to a child. From behind the door (or the tent flap, or whatever they used back then), she snickered. "Why is your wife laughing?" she hears God's messenger ask Abraham. "Doesn't she know that God can make anything happen that he likes?" "I didn't laugh!" protests Sarah. "You laughed," insists the angel. The angel's prediction comes true: a year later, Sarah has a baby boy and called him yitzxaq. In Hebrew that name is (or sounds like) a form of the verb 'to laugh'.

It's like somebody who is called Sandy Beach. Sandra's friends may well start telling a story, for fun, about how she was born or conceived on the beach - and they might mean the story to be taken with a grain of sea salt. People do delight, after all, in such things, now and certainly then. It is the way lots of stories get started - why not these too? In any case, in non-English-speaking countries the story about their friend Sandra won't work very well as conversational ice-breakers for her friends and acquaintances. It's dependent on knowing the language. I have added this information about what the names of Genesis characters sound like they mean (whether they actually mean that is not important) because it is useful background information.

The theory is often bandied about that the stories of Genesis are not really about real people called Abraham, Joseph, Lot or Esau: these names, so the theory goes, actually represent tribes. It is all an allegorical way of telling the "history" of the Abraham tribe, the Joseph tribe, the Lot tribe and the Esau tribe. Now I am not a specialist qualified to talk authoritatively on this subject, but I hear some people asserting this with great confidence as if it were a known fact and applicable across the board. And frankly, I find their confidence as absurd as that of other people who are willing to put common sense on hold and believe unquestioningly that every single thing it says actually happened as described in real life. First of all, there is nothing certain about that at all, it is just a theory (and there are other theories). Secondly, as formulated in that simplistic fashion, it doesn't convince me at all. Abraham tribe? Really??? I've never heard of an Abraham tribe. Perhaps what you meant to say is that there may have been a tribe whose mythical patriarch was called Abraham? Quite possible! In any case this has no particular bearing on the narrative of Genesis as a literary entity, not as history but as literature. The story is about a man called Abram (and later Abraham).

GOD

God is not portrayed as a person in Genesis, but I will mention God for completeness. He does not act like humans act, his view of things is not the view of humans, he does not share our limitations and his purposes are different from ours, whatever they are. And yet I think it's fair enough to see God as one of the "characters". He creates and destroys. He makes decisions about what to do in the face of situations, and acts on them. He warns and he punishes. He listens and he helps. He promises and he blesses. He causes and he repents. He knows and he remembers. He grows angry and he exercises patience. He talks to human beings, and answers their prayers and protects them. He is terrible, and he is awesome. He gives people freedom to make mistakes, but he watches over them and nudges them in the right direction when they need nudging.

He is not always the same, and he is not always referred to by the same name. He has a name that cannot be spoken (YHWH) and yet he can simply be called "god" (elohim). At different times, in different places, he may be El Shaddai, El Elyon, and so on. In Exodus it is stated very clearly and on the highest authority possible that there is only one God: the Lord is one. The book of Genesis does not contain, as far as I know, such a clearcut statement of the position, though it may perhaps be assumed and implied by default. There is never the least suggestion of different Gods fighting or competing against each other, and at any given time only one God is referred to, even though sometimes he is referred to as such-and-such and elsewhere by a different designation.

God is constantly being referred to all through the book. He makes his first appearance in the very first line of Genesis, and he is the subject of the first clause. No introduction is supplied, no explanation of who or what God is, where he came from or how he got there. He just is, from the start; he is the first given. Since he is never defined or identified (except perhaps in Exodus), the only references in the book of Genesis that somehow characterize God are the statements of all the things that God does, which fill the entire book! God, in Genesis, is the one who creates the heaven and the earth, who makes light and darkness, birds and fishes, animals and humans, trees and serpents, good and evil, life and death, destruction and renewal, and interacts as he sees fit with his creation.

Or is it she? God is not presented as a human and there is no explicit indication of gender attributes of God. All nouns have grammatical gender in Hebrew and the names that refer to God are masculine (and sometimes, masculine plural), but grammatical gender does not imply sexual characteristics and there is no compelling reason for assuming any. In some languages such as Nawat, there is no need to suggest any gender for God, grammatical or semantic, because none is expressed grammatically. English insists on referring to all entities as either a male individual (he), a female individual (she), an individual thing (it), an undifferentiated mass (it) or a plurality of entities (they). None of these is really appropriate for referring to a non-gender-specific deity. The custom in English has always been to refer to God as a male individual, which no doubt reflects somehow a historical ideological backdrop but is also a by-product of the nature of the grammatical system. My use of English masculine pronouns to refer to God is not an intentional statement concerning the gender of God, who I repeat, does not appear in the narrative as a person and yet is a character in the story.

ADAM

The first man, shaped by God out of clay and placed in the Garden of Eden, from where he and Eve are later expelled and moved to the East of Eden. He and Eve eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge and realise that they are naked. His name, adam, may be cognate to adama 'earth'.

EVE

The first woman, shaped from one of Adam's ribs; he calls her ishsha 'woman' because she is from ish 'man' (a false etymology). She is tempted by the snake to eat the forbidden fruit and expelled from Eden with Adam as a result. She is the mother of all life. Her name, xawwa, is related to the words for 'life' (xayyim) and 'alive, living' (xay).

ADAM AND EVE'S SONS

Their first two sons are Cain (qáyin) and Abel (hável or hével; on names with alternative transcriptions like these, please see my postscript to Transcribing Hebrew). Cain practises agriculture; Abel tends the flock. Cain murders Abel out of jealousy, and is himself banished by God from his sight but allowed to live, and has descendants. Adam and Eve have another son, Seth (shet).

NOAH

Noah is the only worthy man of his generation, when the earth is full of sin. When God destroys nearly all life on earth through a great flood, Noah and his family are spared and he is given the task of collecting specimens of every kind of animal and food plant, avoiding their extinction in the flood. His name (nóax) is related to a verb meaning 'to rest' when intransitive and 'to place' when transitive (e.g. hinnáxta 'you placed'); the latter is the verb used to describe God placing Adam in the garden of Eden.

NOAH'S SONS

Noah has three sons, called Shem (shem), Ham (xam) and Japheth (yáfet or yéfet). They accompany Noah in the ark during the flood. Afterwards their children repopulate the earth. Since nobody else survived but them and their wives, all people today are their descendants, and Genesis classifies them into different nations according to their ancestry. The Israelites belong to the Shem branch (hence they are "Semites").

ABRAM (ABRAHAM)

Abram was the son of Terah (tárax or térax). He had two brothers, Nahor and Haran. Nahor married Milcah and their son, Bethuel, was Laban and Rebecah's father. Haran died leaving a son, Lot, who accompanied Abram, his uncle, for a time. Abram married Sarai, who later in the story is revealed to have been his half-sister. The family came from Ur Kasdim but moved to the town of Haran, where Abram's father dies. Abram later moves from Haran, together with his own family and Lot, on direct instructions from God to go "to the land that I will show you", which was Canaan. In one unusual chapter (14), Abram is depicted as a warrior; otherwise he seems to be a nomadic herder moving about the country, even sojourning in Egypt for a time. God makes a covenant with Abram, promising that his descendants will inherit the land of Canaan, and he changes his name to Abraham. He and Lot part ways because of frictions over their competing flocks. Abraham often has conversations with God, such as when he pleads with God not to destroy the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah if ten worthy people live there. Sarai is unable to have children and she tells Abraham to sleep with her maid Hagar, who then gives birth to Ishmael. Subsequently Sarai is able to conceive and she gives Abraham another son, Isaac. Abraham almost kills Isaac as a sacrifice to God, but an angel tells him not to. When Sarai (now Sarah) dies, Abraham buys land from the local Hittites where he buries his wife in the cave of Machpelah, where he himself is eventually buried too. The meaning of his names (avram, avraham) is uncertain, but av ram may mean 'high father' or something similar.

SARAI (SARAH)

Sarai (saray) was Abraham's first wife and the father of his son Isaac. She was also Abraham's half-sister, her father having been Terah though they had different mothers. Sarai had no children until she was very old, at which point she miraculously gives Abraham a child. She is involved in some scenes with God's angels in which she initially laughs at the prediction that she will give birth so late in life and one way or another she is repeatedly associated with laughter, which is reflected in her son's name Isaac. The angel chides her for having doubted, and renames her Sarah (sara). Sarai (or Sarah) doesn't get along very well with Hagar, her maid and the father of Abraham's first son Ishmael. When Sarah dies she is buried at Machpelah. Her name means 'princess'.

LOT

Lot (loT) is Abram's orphaned nephew who migrates together with him from Haran. Eventually they part ways and Lot chooses to live in the town of Sodom. Sodom is later destroyed by God because of the sinfulness of the ways of its inhabitants (whence the term sodomy), but an angel warns Lot and he and his family are made to escape just in time. He and his two daughters flee to the hills; his wife doesn't make it, having turned around to look at Sodom whereupon she was turned into salt. Lot's daughters practise incest with their father when he is drunk and conceive, for they believe that this is necessary to keep the race going. These descendants of Lot will give rise to various nations.

HAGAR AND ISHMAEL

Hagar (hagar), a woman of Egyptian origin, was Sarai's maid. When Sarai herself is unable to have children she tells Abram to sleep with Hagar and she gives birth to a son, Ishmael. But frictions soon arise between Sarai and Hagar, which are made worse when Sarai becomes fertile and gives Abraham another son (Isaac). In the end God resolves matters by establishing that it will be through Isaac, Sarah's son, not Ishmael, that's God's promise to Abraham about his future descendants will be fulfilled, and Hagar and Ishmael are sent away to the wilderness. Ishmael is also to become the father of many tribes, however, and later in Genesis there is actually a mention of the "Ishmaelites". Ishmael's name (yishma‛el) is interpreted to mean 'God listens'.

ISAAC

Isaac is the son of Abraham and Sarah, half-brother to Ishmael, and the father of Esau and Jacob. His name (yitzxak) seems to contain the root meaning 'to laugh' and several passages that relate the circumstances of his birth incorporate mentions of laughter. The personality of Isaac is not profiled in as much detail as Abraham, his father, or Jacob, one of his sons, although these three are counted as the three patriarchs and often mentioned together in later passages, as Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. God is sometimes referred to as the God of Abraham, or as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but may also be called the God of Abraham and the fear (or terror, páxad) of Isaac; I don't think it's very clear why this is. Abraham did not want Isaac to marry a Canaanite woman so he sent his faithful servant Eliezer to his relative Laban's house, back in the old country (Padan-Aram), to find Isaac a wife from his own people, and he brings back Laban's young sister Rebecca. Rebecca gives birth to twins, Esau and Jacob. Later Isaac appears as an old man who is blind and is deceived by Jacob, who pretends to be Isaac's favourite Esau, in order to steal his blessing.

LABAN

Laban appears as the representative of the branch of Abraham's family that stayed behind in Padan-Aram, so he is sometimes referred to as the Aramaean. Laban's father was Bethuel, his grandfather was Nahor and his great-grandfather was Abraham's father Terah. Laban appears prominently in two separate parts of the Genesis story. The first time round he seems to act as the head of the household when Abraham's servant Eliezer turns up on his mission to find a wife for Isaac. This ends with Laban's younger sister Rebecca going back to Canaan with Eliezer and marrying Isaac. Years later, Rebecca and Isaac's son Jacob, now grown up, runs away to Laban's house on his mother's instructions to escape with his life from Esau, who is furious with him for stealing his birthright and blessing. The result this time is that Jacob stays with Laban for twenty years, tends Laban's flocks and marries two of his daughters. When Jacob finally wants to return home, he runs into problems with Laban as they quarrel about Jacob's entitlement to his part of the animals that he has helped raise. In the end Jacob makes a run for it with his wives, his children and his flocks, but Laban pursues him and they have a showdown which ends with Laban suggesting they shake hands and end their feud; Jacob accepts and they set up a monument to commemorate the pact. Laban's name (lavan) seems to mean 'white'.

REBECCA

Rebecca (rivqa) comes into the story as a lovely girl, the younger sister of Laban, who goes to the well in Padan-Aram where they live to draw water and is seen there by Eliezer, who has just arrived with a pack of camels after his long journey from Abraham's house back in Canaan. Eliezer asks her to please give him some water to drink from her jug and she obliges, also offering to water his camels who are thirsty. Eliezer takes this act of kindness as a sign from God, and when he asks her who she is, is overjoyed to learn that she is none other than the daughter of Abraham's grandnephew Laban. Thus she is the perfect bride for Abraham's son Isaac, and he asks Laban for permission to bring his sister back with him to Canaan. They end up deciding to ask Rebecca herself, and she agrees. When they arrive back at the end of the long journey, Rebecca sees Isaac from afar, asks who he is, and goes to him "and he was consoled" (he had been grieving the death of his mother Sarah). Rebecca gives birth to twins: Esau and Jacob. Rebecca also figures strongly when Isaac, now a blind old man, wishes to give the family's blessing to his son before he dies. He arranges to bless the older of their two twins, Esau, but Rebecca overhears their conversation and talks Jacob, evidently her favourite, into deceiving his father and tricking him into blessing him instead, all with Rebecca's prompting and assistance. But once the deed is done, Esau starts to speak threateningly about what he is planning to do to Jacob. Rebecca, fearing lest she is going to "lose both [her sons] on the same day", makes up an excuse and urges Jacob to run to her brother Laban's house until the storm has passed. She promises to let him know when the coast is clear, but apparently never does and twenty years pass before Jacob's return.

ESAU

Esau (‛esaw) is the firstborn of Rebecca's twins. Described as red and hairy, he likes to go out hunting. He doesn't come across as very clever, in fact he appears repeatedly in the role of a foil to his brother Jacob's ruses and the victim of his none-too-ethical antics. He comes home from hunting one day so hungry that when he sees that Jacob has cooked lentils he begs him to give him some of the "red stuff". Jacob offers to serve him lentils in exchange for Esau's birthright, which was his by right as the firstborn, and Esau readily agrees. It is hard to say whether this strange story serves to demonstrate Esau's careless stupidity or Jacob's ruthless approach to getting what he wants. And so it is again years later when Jacob, egged on by his mother, robs Esau of his blessing. Esau becomes enraged and talks about killing his brother once his ailing father is in his grave, which leads Jacob to run away to Padan-Aram to escape his brother's anger. Twenty years later, on his return home, Jacob encounters Esau and is still very wary of the reception he may get, but in the event Esau embraces his brother emotionally, and it seems all is forgiven. He offers to accompany Jacob but Jacob is none too eager and makes excuses, which Esau finally accepts and they part ways, Esau heading for Mount Seir and the country called Edom, of which he is referred to as "father", and Edom is also said to be the same as Esau, i.e. Esau was also named Edom. Thus Esau is associated with the Israelites' neighbours, the Edomites. Edom sounds almost the same as adom which means 'red', so there is plenty of name-punning going on here.

JACOB (ISRAEL)

Jacob is the second of Isaac and Rebecca's twins, and the brother of Esau. They were born so close together that Jacob was actually grabbing Esau's heel on their way out into the world. There is name-play at work here: his name (ya‛aqóv) sounds like it means 'he will grasp by the heel' which conveniently also means 'he will cheat'. Unlike Esau the hunter, Jacob was a stay-at-home type and a mamma's boy. True to his name, he was also frequently a deceiver. He tricks Esau out of his birthright and his blessing. In Padan-Aram he seems to have thought up some complicated breeding scheme to multiply the proportion of the flocks with special colouring, after first having got his host Laban to agree that the animals with the marking would be for Jacob. (However, he may have met his match in Laban, who tricked Jacob into working for him for seven years to earn a dowry for Laban's daughter, only to find out the morning after the wedding that he has got married to the wrong daughter!) But however he achieves it, Jacob does well for himself, witness his two wives and two concubines, twelve sons and one daughter, and many animals and other possessions, by the time he returns to his father's house. God changes Jacob's name to Israel, and his sons are the beginning of the twelve tribes of Israel (making all those tribes literally the "children of Israel"). In terms of plot, Jacob (= Israel) is the central pivot of the Genesis story: what precedes him is all leading to him, and all of Israel after him follows from him in terms of name, genealogy and story line. And his name is Israel (hint)! He has a romantic side, seen in his great love of Rachel with whom he seems to have been stricken by love at first sight, and shows almost supra-human patience and perseverance in his determination to make her his wife. Her sister Leah is not amused in the least, and between wives and concubines there is quite a bit of domestic friction, it seems, not to mention the echoes thereof in rivalries among the twelve brothers, and at the centre of it all is Jacob, who just seems to do the best he can in this unenviably complicated situation. Nor are his sons entirely to be trusted and they give him all sorts of headaches. In a quirky bit of irony, towards the end of his life Jacob adopts his son Joseph's two sons Manasseh and Ephraim as his own, and when he is very old and blind he blesses them both but gives precedence to Ephraim, the youngest son, despite the protests of their father. The death of Jacob coincides with the end of Genesis. Towards the end, more and more of his children make their way to Egypt until finally they talk him into moving there to be close to his family (quite like many a family's history of immigration, if we think of Canaan as "the old country" in hard times and Egypt as "the land of opportunity"). Jacob dies surrounded by his large family and, with apparent awareness that they represent the future tribes of the Israeli people, forecasts the fate of each one in a passage which is believed to constitute one of the most ancient of all texts that have were eventually integrated into the Hebrew Bible.

LEAH

I feel a bit sorry for Leah (lea) because she has been cast as the "ugly sister", though I am not quite convinced that this is what the text really meant to say; if it did, it puts it in a politely vague way. We may read it to mean that Leah had kind, gentle eyes. Perhaps even back then, this was a way of implying she was no sex goddess. In any case she had a younger sister who was probably sassy and buxom and certainly caught the young Jacob's eye very fast. But by hook or by crook, Leah actually got him first, and she was also more successful at giving him lots of children, which seems to have been widely seen as a strong point for women in those days. Besides, her sister may have stolen some of the thunder (and the house gods), but Leah quietly outlived her. She would have been the head of the roost in Jacob's household, the balaboste, and she probably has had to contend with a bad press, rightly or wrongly. Poor Leah.

RACHEL

Rachel is the darling of the story, hands down. She must have had something going for her, for Jacob to have worked for fourteen years to get her. Her older sister Leah may have bedded Jacob first, but once Rachel's turn came round she eclipsed her sister effortlessly, and boy was Leah mad. Rachel probably had something else besides looks to appeal so permanently to Jacob; they must have got along well personality-wise. If Jacob was a consummate trickster, Rachel was not averse to slipping her father's "gods" into her backpack while he's away shearing, and never mind that, what about the cheeky way she outmanoeuvrs her Dad when he comes searching for them? Can't you just see her giving Jack a knowing wink? Rachel gives Jacob his last two sons, and they are the ones he loves the most. Sadly, she doesn't make it all the way home with Jacob; she dies in childbirth during the journey. What a devastating way to end their story, and yet how very real, I'm sure, in those times. They never did grow old together but Rachel lived on in Jacob's heart as she does in ours. Her name (raxel) means 'ewe'.

JOSEPH

Joseph (yosef), the older of Rachel's two sons (Benjamin is his only full brother), is the star of the last, longest and most fully developed story within the whole Genesis saga. Taking up the last quarter of the book, this has been described as a complete novella, full of drama, pathos, excitement and emotions. Its chapters are cliff-hangers. It brings into play the whole cast of characters who were likely to still be alive at this point in the action. For listeners and readers it is an unforgettable story. It is Genesis at its most brilliant. This is the story of Joseph, who was a difficult child. I think he was too intelligent for his age and a lot brighter than most of his older brothers. He was a dreamer, and he knew that he was destined for big things. His brothers couldn't stand him. Perhaps his social skills were a little deficient and he didn't help his cause by grating so much on everyone's nerves; Jacob was the only one who understood that his darling son Joseph was special. So the world turns against him, whether by design or luck: he loses his mother at a tender age, his brothers plot to kill him and end up kidnapping and selling him to human trafickers instead, he is taken to Egypt but instead of becoming a common slave he comes to the notice of a powerful Egyptian, only to fall from grace because of the spiteful lies of a treacherous unfaithful wife. In jail, with an outlook every bit as bleak as that he had in the pit where he was placed by his brothers, he climbs his way out of this other hole and not only saves his skin but becomes Pharaoh's right-hand man, believe it or not. And so the fun begins! In the story that now unfolds, Joseph's stature rises to that of a folk hero, acting with both wisdom and guile as required by the circumstances but always doing good, and we watch in wonder as he saves the empire that has adopted him, the Pharaoh who has patronized him, his own family (forgetting, forgiving and letting bygones be bygones in what has to be the most classic tear-jerker of all tear-jerking scenes) and also saves himself in the process. Joseph is a role model, not of meek submission but of intelligent, bold action, not playing by the rules but rewriting rules, not accepting defeat but standing up high, and in the last resort, no longer acting through the magic of dreams but through rational, creative initiative. Perhaps he is a self-perceiving idealization of the quintessential Jew? (He even marries out: oy-oy-oy.)