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.


Although I do not have a great deal to contribute to a debate over what this might have meant to the authors and early audiences, I do think it is worth noting that other folk traditions of antiquity appear to echo a similar theme. Perhaps others can come up with more examples, but I am going to cite one illustration from Pipil mythology which has been preserved in the limited corpus of extant Nawat folk literature. The theme seems to have been an important one in that culture too, which even possesses a special word, known in local Spanish as chimpe, for the youngest of a group of brothers. The usual story is that the chimpe is smarter than his siblings and gets into competitions and rivalries with them in which he ends up winning and they are the losers. The best-known Pipil story cycle is that which revolves around a group of beings who were born magically and are called brothers, known collectively in Nawat as the Tepewa. They are in charge of the process which brings about rain, and that pretty much gives them power over the cycle of life, which in Central America consists of yearly alternations between dry seasons (tunalku) and rainy seasons (shupan). The only member of the Tepewa who is named in the stories is the youngest fellow, called Nanawatzin, who acts as their leader because of his superior intelligence, as demonstrated time and again in their "adventures". When they are small they are in the care of a grandmother who cheats them out of their food, and Nanawatzin is the only one who realises this and organises the brothers to do something about it. Later on, they find out how to acquire maize, which is the staple of the native diet, but Nanawatzin is the only one who figures out how to grow it by planting it; the older brothers just want to eat it, and then when they run out, they see that Nanawatzin has fields of maize so they come and steal his. Nanawatzin tries to get them off his back by giving them some with instructions about what to do with it, and then he washes his hands of them saying that he won't give them any more, so it's up to them if they learn to grow it themselves or not.

One way to read this story in anthropological perspective is as a collective memory or re-enactment of the prehistoric process where human groups moved from being hunter-collectors (who just roamed about finding or running after their food) to being farmers (who grew their own food). Another step in the development of human culture, which took place in some parts of the world and notably in the part to which the Israelites belonged, but in which the Pipils did not participate, was to go from farming crops to raising livestock. Each of these technological advances was accompanied by the emergence of new economic activities and new forms of human culture and civilization, and it is the latter that were perhaps caricatured in ancient folk tales which dramatized conflicts between the competing lifestyles of rival human groups personified as brothers who go about things in different ways: do you get food by "stealing" it from where you see it growing or by being "smart" and getting it to grow yourself? The tellers of such stories are naturally the more advanced group so in them the representatives of the older way are dumb, stupid and losers, and the one who teaches the new way is smart, has our empathy and is a winner. The new way is the winning way, the old way is the wrong way; hence the young brother is the smart guy, the older brothers are the losers. In other versions, such as the Genesis ones, the economics may be different, they may not reflect the same transition from hunting-collecting to agriculture, but the younger-brother-older-brother theme seems to persist.

The first story of sibling rivalry in Genesis is the story of the first siblings, of course: Cain and Abel (ch. 4). This story illustrates another feature of some Genesis sibling stories which seems to fit the theory I just outlined, namely the different lifestyles and economic activities associated with different brothers:

Habel cared for the flock 

and Kain worked the field (4.2, NBIE)

This is clearly a significant detail because the whole conflict that arises between the brothers has to do with it:

the days passed, Kain brought
fruit of the field to offer Our Lord
Habel also brought his gift
lambs of the flock and their fat
Our Lord looked at Habel and his gift
and Kain and his gift he did not see
Kain was very angry, his face fell

This first story of an encounter between brothers does not follow the standard script that later emerges; on the contrary, Cain turns bad and murders his younger brother. In consquence, the murderous older brother is banished "from the sight of God", and yet God agrees not to let him be killed in spite of his crime; instead, he is doomed to roam the "land of Nod":

said Kain to Our Lord:
so heavy is my load
that it cannot be borne

on this day you have chased me off
from my land you have expelled me
I will hide away out of your sight

I shall travel far away
to wander around the world
and anyone who sees me will kill me

said Our Lord: in that case
anyone who kills you
will suffer vengeance sevenfold

and Our Lord put on Kain
an identifying sign
so that whoever would meet him should not strike him

and Kain went far from Our Lord
to reside in the land called Nod
east of Eden

Where is Nod? It is a land as mythical as the Eden which it is east of. And it is a name with a meaning: the verb root נדד (n-d-d) means 'flee, wander around' and a passive form of it means 'to be banished'.

The next part of the saga involving brothers is the story of Noah's sons Shem, Ham and Japheth (ch. 9), who find themselves in an embarrassing situation when their virtuous father, having planted a vineyard, has a bout under the influence. It is a rather strange story and it doesn't quite fit the standard mould. I won't try to analyse it in detail, but the theme of sibling rivalry is involved, given that when Noah finally wakes up from his stupour he curses one of the brothers and blesses the other two.

Abraham was not directly involved himself in a sibling rivaly story, but he was one of three brothers, and the only one of the three to undertake the migration to Canaan; one of his brothers died, leaving his son Lot who accompanied Abraham for a time, later went his own way and got himself into some trouble through a bad move concerning real estate; while the other brother was the grandfather of Laban, who would play a somewhat ambivalent role in the lives of Abraham's son Isaac and particularly his grandson Jacob. The story about Jacob and Laban is one of a rivalry not between brothers but between a nephew, who plays the part of the smart young guy who wins in the end, and his uncle (see the story that culminates in ch. 31).

Ishmael and Isaac are half-brothers. They don't fight, as far as we know, but their respective mothers, Hagar and Sarah, do, and the upshot is that the older brother Ishmael is sent away and does not inherit God's covenant with Abraham, the heir to which turns out to be the younger brother Isaac, who was a good guy and a patriarch (ch. 21). Ishmael gets one more mention as Isaac's brother in the account of Abraham's burial (ch. 25).

Isaac's twin sons Esau and Jacob are already fighting in Rebecca's womb (ch. 25), and we know they are going to be bad news. This is one of the best known and most emblematic sibling-rival stories in the book (the other being the story of Joseph and his brothers, of course). Of the two, Jacob and Esau fits the paradigm most closely. Esau is a hunter (red and hairy), Jacob is a breeder of livestock, smooth-skinned and peace-loving. And clever. He fleeces his brother of his birthright (ch. 25) and their father's blessing (ch. 27), although the latter is at the cost of twenty years of exile. When he eventually returns, he succeeds in handling Esau so as to avoid a major conflagration, and they go their separate ways, founding different nations (Israel and Edom, ch. 32).

Perhaps the story of Leah and Rachel may be seen as a secondary sibling-rivalry story embedded in the main thread, as well as being a tale of competition between wives, of course. Rachel, the youngest, comes across as the stronger and better defined character. She first comes to our attention at the well outside Padan-Aram, where Jacob first meets her (ch. 29), and it is she, not Leah, that Jacob wishes to marry, though he ends up with both (ch. 29). We are not told in as many words if Rachel is smart or not, only that she has the looks; perhaps we can settle for calling her resourceful. But despite her name (raxel means 'ewe'), Rachel is not a dumb lamb but gutsy enough to steal her father's gods and get away with it by guile (ch. 31). Frankly we know less about Leah, but what we do get from the story is that she is older, and doesn't get the best deal (except that she lives longer). If Jacob's marriages involved trickery, the births of his children are narrated like some sort of race (ch. 29-30). The two competitors are Leah and Rachel; Leah soon takes the lead, while Rachel is left behind, unable to conceive, until she hits on the solution of getting her servant Bilha to run in her stead. It's a sort of teamwork: Bilha gets to have the children and Rachel picks up the points. Leah decides that two can play at that game and puts her own maid Zilpa in the race. At last, Rachel's womb is opened and she gives birth to Joseph, and finally to Benjamin, though she dies having him. It is not clear who has won, but the rivalry is undeniable.

The story of Joseph and his brothers need not be repeated in detail here. Joseph plays the role of the youngest (even though he has a younger brother of his own), he is his brothers' rival from the start, he is intelligent and resourceful, and he is successful and ultimately heroic. In the end he forgives his brothers for their many faults (ch. 50), and is actually instrumental in saving them. His dream of his brothers bowing down to him turns out to have been prophetic.

God's covenants

From a comparative viewpoint perhaps one of the most salient features of the Israelites' God is that he does bargains. When he addresses the humans he has created he says: Here's the deal: this is what I can do for you, and this is what you have to do for me. The name given to this kind of deal or pact with God is b'rit, which is traditionally translated into English as covenant. There are also covenants between humans or groups of people, but it is the ones that God makes with people that I identify as one of the big themes of the book of Genesis.

The verb that is associated with the noun b'rit is k-r-t 'to cut'; the reason why one 'cuts a covenant' presumably has to do with ritual ceremonies, involving animal sacrifices, which accompanied them in a way functionally parallel to 'sign an agreement' in our culture, which alludes to the ritual writing of one's name on a certain part of a certain piece of paper as a ceremonial indication of such an agreement. I wonder if male circumcision, which God demanded of Abraham to signal his covenant with him (ch. 17), and which is today often referred to in Jewish jargon hyponymically simply as b'rit, metaphorically involves the same concept, with the idea of animal sacrifice transferred to a part of one's own body. But there are other signs of God's covenants too, such as the rainbow which God placed in the sky at the end of the Flood as a reminder of his deal with Noah never to destroy all life again (ch. 12). A covenant is like a promise, but God's covenants are tit-for-tat arrangements between God and his people, and there is a ritual act (the "cutting") to mark it ceremonially.

There are also passages in Genesis which lack all the trappings of a full b'rit but we might want to consider as quasi-covenants: these would include blessings and commands. The first example of a blessing by God, and one of the best known, is the p'ru ur'vu formula, 'be fruitful and multiply...'. In the initial creation story God blesses the birds and fishes on the third day, telling them p'ru ur'vu, and men and women on the sixth day, and said to them (NBIE):

bear fruit, proliferate
fill the earth
become its masters
rule over the fishes
the birds of the air
and all that moves on the ground

It's a blessing but it isn't a covenant, a b'rit. In the story of Adam and Eve (ch. 2-3), God plants a garden, and putting Adam in it, tells him:

from all the trees of the garden,
he told him, you may eat
and the tree for knowing good and not good
do not eat from it
for if you do you’re going to die

That's a command but it also isn't a b'rit. A b'rit has a more complex script. The first covenant we hear of in Genesis is with Noah after the Flood (8:15 - 9:17, JPS except for the Hebrew bits):

God spoke to Noah, saying, "Come out of the ark, together with your wife, your sons, and your sons' wives. Bring out with you every living thing of all flesh that is with you: birds, animals, and everything that creeps on earth; and let them swarm on the earth and be fertile and increase on earth." So Noah came out, together with his sons, his wife, and his sons' wives. Every animal, every creeping thing, and every bird, everything that stirs on earth came out of the ark by families.
Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and, taking of every clean animal and of every clean bird, he offered burnt offerings on the altar. The Lord smelled the pleasing odor, and the Lord said to Himself: "Never again will I doom the earth because of man, since the devisings of man's mind are evil from his youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living being, as I have done.

So long as the earth endures,
Seedtime and harvest,
Cold and heat,
Summer and winter,
Day and night
Shall not cease."

God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, "Be fertile and increase, and fill the earth. The fear and the dread of you shall be upon all the beasts of the earth and upon all the birds of the sky — everything with which the earth is astir — and upon all the fish of the sea; they are given into your hand. Every creature that lives shall be yours to eat; as with the green grasses, I give you all these. You must not, however, eat flesh with its life-blood in it. But for your own life-blood I will require a reckoning: I will require it of every beast; of man, too, will I require a reckoning for human life, of every man for that of his fellow man!

Whoever sheds the blood of man,
By man shall his blood be shed;
For in His image
Did God make man.

Be fertile, then, and increase; abound on the earth and increase on it." And God said to Noah and to his sons with him, "I now establish My covenant with you and your offspring to come (waani hin'ni meqim et b'riti itt'khem w'et zar‛akhem axareykhem), and with every living thing that is with you — birds, cattle, and every wild beast as well — all that have come out of the ark, every living thing on earth. I will maintain My covenant with you (w'haqimoti et b'riti itt'khem): never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth."
God further said, "This is the sign that I set for the covenant between Me and you (zot ot habb'rit asher ani noten beyni uveyneykhem), and every living creature with you, for all ages to come. I have set My bow in the clouds, and it shall serve as a sign of the covenant between Me and the earth (w'hay'ta l'ot b'rit beyni uveyn haáretz). When I bring clouds over the earth, and the bow appears in the clouds, I will remember My covenant between Me and you (w'zakharti et b'riti asher beyni uveyneykhem) and every living creature among all flesh, so that the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures (lizkor b'rit ‛olam beyn elohim uveyn kol néfesh xaya), all flesh that is on earth. That," God said to Noah, "shall be the sign of the covenant that I have established between Me and all flesh that is on earth."

Now that's a b'rit.

But when God really goes to town making covenants is with the patriarchs, and particularly with Abraham, who probably holds the record. Note that the covenants that God makes cover one's descendants as well as the direct covenant-ee. That means that when God makes a covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are actually covered in the policy, but that doesn't stop him from ratifying the arrangement from time to time. And it is through this process that it is clearly established that there is a covenant between God and the children of Israel, i.e. all Israelites.

The first rather informal covenant with Abraham takes place right at the start of the Abraham story (ch. 12:1-7, JPS, my emphasis):

The Lord said to Abram, Go forth from your native land and from your father's house to the land that I will show you.

I will make of you a great nation,
And I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
And you shall be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you
And curse him that curses you;
And all the families of the earth
Shall bless themselves by you."

...The Lord appeared to Abram and said, "I will assign this land to your heirs." And he built an altar there to the Lord who had appeared to him.

Abraham receives further confirmation after Lot leaves him (ch. 13:14-18):

And the Lord said to Abram, after Lot had parted from him, "Raise your eyes and look out from where you are, to the north and south, to the east and west, for I give all the land that you see to you and your offspring forever. I will make your offspring as the dust of the earth, so that if one can count the dust of the earth, then your offspring too can be counted. Up, walk about the land, through its length and its breadth, for I give it to you." And Abram moved his tent, and came to dwell at the terebinths of Mamre, which are in Hebron; and he built an altar there to the Lord.

The third time God repeats his promise, it is in a more solemn setting (15:17-20):

Then He said to him, "I am the Lord who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldeans to assign this land to you as a possession."And he said, "O Lord God, how shall I know that I am to possess it?" He answered, "Bring Me a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old she-goat, a three-year-old ram, a turtledove, and a young bird." He brought Him all these and cut them in two, placing each half opposite the other; but he did not cut up the bird. Birds of prey came down upon the carcasses, and Abram drove them away. As the sun was about to set, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a great dark dread descended upon him. And He said to Abram, "Know well that your offspring shall be strangers in a land not theirs, and they shall be enslaved and oppressed four hundred years; but I will execute judgment on the nation they shall serve, and in the end they shall go free with great wealth. As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried at a ripe old age...."
When the sun set and it was very dark, there appeared a smoking oven, and a flaming torch which passed between those pieces. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, "To your offspring I assign this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates: the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites."

Covenants could be heavy stuff. Abraham didn't have exclusive rights on covenants. Hagar got one too, when an angel intercepted her as she ran away from an irate Sarah. Hagar was expecting Ishmael. The angel tells Hagar to go home, but also tells her "I shall greatly increase your offspring and they will be too many to count", which was apparently meant to be motivating.

It is only after all these pre-covenants, or covenant previews, that we finally get to the Mother of all Covenants that God makes with Abraham (ch. 17), which I suppose constitutes the climax of the book of Genesis in covenant terms, and in any case may be taken as a paradigm covenant:

When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, "I am El Shaddai. Walk in My ways and be blameless. I will establish My covenant between Me and you, and I will make you exceedingly numerous."
Abram threw himself on his face; and God spoke to him further, "As for Me, this is My covenant with you: You shall be the father of a multitude of nations. And you shall no longer be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham, for I make you the father of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fertile, and make nations of you; and kings shall come forth from you. I will maintain My covenant between Me and you, and your offspring to come, as an everlasting covenant throughout the ages, to be God to you and to your offspring to come. I assign the land you sojourn in to you and your offspring to come, all the land of Canaan, as an everlasting holding. I will be their God."
God further said to Abraham, "As for you, you and your offspring to come throughout the ages shall keep My covenant. Such shall be the covenant between Me and you and your offspring to follow which you shall keep: every male among you shall be circumcised. You shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin, and that shall be the sign of the covenant between Me and you. And throughout the generations, every male among you shall be circumcised at the age of eight days. As for the homeborn slave and the one bought from an outsider who is not of your offspring, they must be circumcised, homeborn, and purchased alike. Thus shall My covenant be marked in your flesh as an everlasting pact. And if any male who is uncircumcised fails to circumcise the flesh of his foreskin, that person shall be cut off from his kin; he has broken My covenant."
And God said to Abraham, "As for your wife Sarai, you shall not call her Sarai, but her name shall be Sarah. I will bless her; indeed, I will give you a son by her. I will bless her so that she shall give rise to nations; rulers of peoples shall issue from her." Abraham threw himself on his face and laughed, as he said to himself, "Can a child be born to a man a hundred years old, or can Sarah bear a child at ninety?" And Abraham said to God, "O that Ishmael might live by Your favor!" God said, "Nevertheless, Sarah your wife shall bear you a son, and you shall name him Isaac; and I will maintain My covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his offspring to come. As for Ishmael, I have heeded you. I hereby bless him. I will make him fertile and exceedingly numerous. He shall be the father of twelve chieftains, and I will make of him a great nation. But My covenant I will maintain with Isaac, whom Sarah shall bear to you at this season next year." And when He was done speaking with him, God was gone from Abraham.
Then Abraham took his son Ishmael, and all his homeborn slaves and all those he had bought, every male in Abraham's household, and he circumcised the flesh of their foreskins on that very day, as God had spoken to him. Abraham was ninety-nine years old when he circumcised the flesh of his foreskin, and his son Ishmael was thirteen years old when he was circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin. Thus Abraham and his son Ishmael were circumcised on that very day; and all his household, his homeborn slaves and those that had been bought from outsiders, were circumcised with him.

And we're still only on chapter 17! So to cut a long story short, when Hagar and young Ishmael are sent away from Abraham's home, Hagar has another meeting with an angel in the wilderness who confirms the forecast that Ishmael will be the father of many nations (ch. 21), but as has now been made clear, Abraham's special covenant applies to the Isaac line, from whence it will be transmitted to Abraham's grandson Jacob (alias Israel, remember). Jacob gets several confirmations of this. The first time is when he is fleeing and spends the night at Bethel (ch. 28); in a dream, God promises to protect Jacob and not to abandon him. In the morning, Jacob sets up a monument, names the place beyt el (house of God), and makes a promise. But Jacob's big covenant moment comes years after this when he is returning to Canaan with his family, and stops off once more at Bethel (ch. 35). God appears to Jacob, announces himself as El Shaddai, tells Jacob to adopt the name Israel, blesses him and renews his promise.

The covenant with Israel is renewed once more to Jacob when, now an old man, he prepares to move to Egypt. In Beersheba, before he leaves Canaan for good, let us recall God's words to Jacob (46:2-4, JPS):

God called to Israel in a vision by night: "Jacob! Jacob!" He answered, "Here." And He said, "I am God, the God of your father. Fear not to go down to Egypt, for I will make you there into a great nation. I Myself will go down with you to Egypt, and I Myself will also bring you back; and Joseph's hand shall close your eyes." (46:2-4, JPS)