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.
In reality or motivationally, I'm actually coming from 1 because I have enjoyed a passionate love affair with the book of Genesis for about half of my life (the half in which I have had a reasonable degree of ability to read and appreciate the language the book was written in, Biblical Hebrew). Even though I am a translator and think of myself as rather good in my field, I never saw myself as fit to try my hand at translating my favourite and most admired book: what, me?? But somebody came along (or was it providence, or the hand of the God of my Fathers?) and told me to do it. So I coyly refused for what seemed like a dignified length of time and found ways to put it off until I simply couldn't stand the suspense any longer, and then caved in and so here I am. But as it happens, translation is a subject that also fascinates me, so there is really no favouritism: I am perfectly happy to talk about both my favourite book and translation forever.
Most of what I have written in the posts so far has been generalities or illustrative examples, specific in themselves, intended to demonstrate and clarify generalities. I felt it both necessary and appropriate to begin by discussing some such general issues first, and so I have done, but honestly one could go on forever talking in general and the subject would never ever be exhausted, and so now, to a certain extent, I have decided to stop. We are going to start getting more specific, and the way I want to do that is by focusing more on content. And my approach to doing that is, once again, going to be primarily literary.
Like any literary work, Genesis has a number of themes. In fact, I have found that Genesis has a lot of themes, more than I expected to find when I began looking. So in what follows, today and then in the weeks to come, I am going to explain first of all what we will mean by themes and how I have identified some, and then explore the themes of Genesis one by one.
Before I proceed, some announcements. Speaking of content, I recently finished my initial translation of Genesis into Nawat. For several months I will continue to work on learning more about Genesis through study of commentaries, translations and relevant literature to make sure I have done my best not to miss anything, and will fine-tune the translation as suggested by anything I learn in the process. I can't promise not to leave any stone unturned but I will keep my eye out and of course will use this blog to pass on anything juicy I find out. But the first draft is done, and is currently being placed on line at a rate of one passage per day on the sister blog Pewalis Tik Nawat. Publication of PTN began on January 1st, so today for example was the 16th day and the sixteenth passage of Genesis is out. This is based on my home-grown division of Genesis into 76 passages. So as you can see, publication of the whole book at that rate is going to take two-and-a-half months, or until mid-March.
Right now I am not planning to render the entirety of the Nawat Genesis into English because of several practical considerations, but I have now added renderings of a much wider selection of passages than those so far offered. I have also relocated the English versions; the present "Sample translations" page is about to be phased out. If you have that page bookmarked, you will want to change the bookmark as the page is going to be scrapped. It is replaced by a much nicer presentation housed on the Pewalis (Nawat Genesis) blog, with a separate page for each passage, and each page is linked to the corresponding Nawat passage (and vice-versa) for those who want to compare languages. The English passages are also linked to each other in a chain so that you can comfortably read through the entire English selection, or any part of it, proceeding from each passage to the next (or the previous one). To see the passages in English, use the links in the "Index of Genesis passages in English" in the right-hand panel or in the Plot outline of Genesis. (Note that some of the passages have not yet been published in Nawat, and if you try to link to one of those you will get an error message for now.)
End of announcements. Back to today's subject: themes and topics of Genesis. So as I was saying, in the coming weeks I am going to explore what I suggest are some of the major themes of the book, Genesis. How do I identify what the themes of Genesis are, or how, for that matter, do I define theme? I will talk about that now, but before I do, let's start from the practical side and I'll just tell you some examples of what I consider to be some of Genesis' notable themes. These are all points I intend to expand on extensively in coming blog posts, so this is just a lightning survey.
Ever notice how the patriarchs (the human characters who are at the centre of Genesis) hardly ever continue living in the same place for more than a couple of chapters? Not only do they move about a lot but the book is constantly telling us about their moves. So one of the most frequent themes repeated throughout Genesis is migration. Some people have said, ah, that's because they must have been nomads, but that turns out not to be the case, the type of life they led was not that of nomads. Something else we are constantly reading about all over Genesis is language oriented: the reason why so-and-so is called such-and-such. The explanations found are often blatantly unscientific, but maybe it wasn't their point to be scientific; compare the role of puns in our culture. I call these name games. Or here's another one: ever notice the amazing amount of squabbling that goes on in Genesis between brothers and sisters? It's like they can't ever stop, and it isn't limited to childhood; sibling rivalry is just the way life always is, apparently. When it comes to relationships between a man or woman and their God, on the other hand, Genesis tells of moments as sublime as the rows between brothers are mundane, and one particular format of human-divine interaction that is really characteristic of this book is that of the covenant. When it comes to human character, however, there is nothing sublime at all about cheating, though in Genesis' view "everybody does it", or at least some of the central characters seem to be addicted to practising deception. It happens between enemies but also between members of the same family, within the community. When it comes to relations without outsiders, though, there is a need to be a bit more careful and so another theme often mentioned in Genesis is that of neighbourly relations. But never mind the neighbours, surely one of the highest of all priorities is survival, and in Genesis that means above all that the family must carry on, keep going, there must be heirs to inherit not just one's worldy possessions but, more significantly, the promises received from God (see covenants), and so there is a constant preoccupation with one of the biggest threats to continuity which is sterility or barrenness (always viewed, it seems, as a defect to which women are prone, as if men had nothing to do with it). On the whole Genesis has little of what we would consider out-and-out superstition or magic, but one thing that does play a big part is dreams, which are considered to be sent by God, who alone knows for sure what they mean, although God does help certain people at times to guess their message. The patriarchs of Genesis, like the Jews of a much later age, did not have a country in the sense of a geographical entity they could call their own, although God (through his covenants, again) did promise to give Abraham's descendants the land of Canaan. Their policy in general seemed to have been to maintain polite relations with neighbouring groups of people but not to get too close to them or too deeply involved in "issues": their motto seems to have been, if you can help it, don't mess with the neighbours and there are plenty of illustrations of this in the pages of Genesis.
That makes nine themes. A tenth major theme I would add is the names of God. Of course God is a "main character" who pops up throughout the book (as we have seen), but if you listen carefully, he keeps getting called different things, whether it's elohim 'God' or YHWH 'the Lord', el 'elyon or el shaday, el 'olam or el beyt-el, the God of Abraham or the Fear of Isaac, the God of my father, your father, our fathers or their fathers. What's all that about? I will write a blog post even about that - some day.
Anyway, my point is that it if you pick a couple of pages anywhere in Genesis, you are unlikely to get very far before you realise that the text has already touched on two or three of these themes, at the very least. One gets the impression that the authors were really very interested in talking about these things; such discussions formed part of the intentions of the text, no doubt. That is what makes them themes.
I italicized that last point because I think it's an important one to bear in mind. A theme of a book is not just something that is mentioned a lot. Rather, it is something that the authors have on their mind and are actively trying to say something about, explicitly or implicitly, or if you prefer, something that they want their audience to think about. There are things that are mentioned because they are there but they are not the point (or not the main point, anyway).
So imagine there is an eatery somewhere that has a menu which lists ten dishes: hamburger, steak and kidney pie, breaded plaice, fried eggs, avocado salad... At the bottom of the menu under the list it says: "All served with chips." When someone asks you what you ordered, you could say, in a sense, "chips" and be right, but that's not what the question was about. There are chips on the menu but the menu is not "about the chips".
This is a bit like someone asking "What was today's passage of Genesis about?" and answering, for example, "God". Since we could pratically say that there is God with everything in Genesis, that's not terribly informative; it is also not, in a certain sense at least, what that passage was "about".
The trouble for us, of course, is that this is largely a matter of culture, whether it be material culture, customs of a certain time, place or type of society, or ideology and beliefs. Making the distinction between what a passage is about and what is merely mentioned in the passage is a matter of interpretation and of cultural knowledge. Asking a computer, for example, to say accurately and appropriately what a text is about is asking a lot more than just requiring to be told what it says. Our difficulty is that the cultural coordinates of Genesis are so different from those of our own lives today that we might be thrown off the scent and not "get" what some passages are supposed to be about, from the perspective of their authors and original target audiences, at all. I believe that the subjects I mention above as themes are things that the text of Genesis not only talks about but means to talk about as part of its literary purpose, whereas there are no doubt other subjects which just form part of the inevitable background of those stories (they are the chips), but are not to be viewed in the same way as major pertinent distinctive objectives of the narrations. To facilitate our understanding, I will now call these latter chip-like subjects of Genesis topics (as apposed to themes).
For example, Genesis is forever talking about animals: it is full of sheep, goats, cows, donkeys, camels and the occasional pigeon and the like. So, is Genesis a book about animals? Hardly. But the occupation of most of the members of the main cast is animal husbandry; hence, animals wander into the story - repeatedly, and we even hear about details regarding these animals which would be second nature to tenders of livestock but not to many of today's readers of the book: camels drinking, goats mating, sheep being sheared. They're all just part of the setting.
Here is a quick run-through of some other topics (not themes) of Genesis, in my opinion. Wherever you are at in Genesis there is probably going to be someone being blessed, or blessing someone, or blessing something. It's just what people did back then; it is not what the focus is usually on. Even the story of Jacob and Esau (the stealing of the blessing) is more about the stealing than about the blessing, primarily and in terms of the superficial narrative, anyway. Likewise for the building of monuments and performance of sacrifices. Here's another one: back then it was apparently normal to have several wives if you could afford them, and that meant plenty of children, and sometimes your wives got into contests as to which wife was the boss, or else their respective children jostled for the position of top sons, or perhaps sons of the top wife. This goes on a lot in Genesis, but I don't see it as a theme of the book, it's just a touch of realism which we notice for reasons for which the authors, in their time, were not resonsible. Another thing that is often noticed as being omnipresent in Genesis is the genealogical trees which tell you who begat who and all that; is it a theme? Contrary to what some think, I don't think it is what Genesis is primarily about as a literary work, but it was important background information for the original audience because genealogy and "pedigree" were socially very important in those days. Another thing that people back then seemed to like to know about someone in a story, perhaps as a check that it's a real, true story, besides who they were born to, was where they are buried? So there are frequent mentions of burials in Genesis. Then there are a number of aspects of social life that must have played a prominent role in people's existence and are often reflected in Genesis: one of these is hospitality, inviting someone into your house and treating them with generosity and consideration. Something that could have more negative effects, but also happened, it seems, was favouritism, personal predilections, not treating everybody equally. And within the family, then as now, there is absolutely no doubt that relatives quarrelled with each other. Turning finally to material culture, and again as a reference to the kind of activities in which the main characters engaged, there is no doubt about the importance of something most of us hardly ever encounter now: wells and springs. Many a scene in Genesis occurs at a well, or concerns an argument about a well. Genesis, a book about wells? Well, no...
So these are some of the most recurrent topics in Genesis, about each of which I shall have a few more words to say below, but before I start with that, let me just run by you a short list of other topics that I have noticed which, when counted, turned out to be not quite as frequent as those just mentioned. So here is my list of...
Some not-so-recurring topics
- The wilderness
The wilderness, hammidbar, figures prominently in the Exodus story, but in Genesis it is chiefly associated with the two passages involving Hagar: before Ishmael's birth she runs away to the wilderness to get away from Sarah (ch. 16), and again when she is expelled from Abraham's home because of frictions with Sarah she wanders in the wilderness, where she and Ishmael nearly die of thirst until an angel appears to Hagar. This is a tough one to translate into Nawat. First of all, what is a wilderness anyway? At school I think I remember being taught in Scripture class that it's another word for desert, but I'm not so sure; the thing is, in and around Canaan the wild countryside could be dry and desert-like, but in El Salvador there are no deserts and untamed nature tends to be full of trees. I think that the primary idea about wilderness is that it stands in contrast to cultivated and densely inhabited areas; what you find in the uncultivated, uninhabited parts depends on the climate and terrain. Now in Nawat, the general word referring to countryside that is not colonised, not peopled or domesticated, is kojtan whose root meaning is a wooded area; it isn't dry because nothing is dry in El Salvador (except in the dry season, when it's dry everywhere). In some contexts that seems sufficiently relevant; in others, we really need to say "dry area", so I have pressed into service the expression waktal literally 'dry-land', although as I said there are no deserts in El Salvador and in normal parlance waktal, where used, is just dry land.
- Faithful servants
There is a story that comes just about in the middle of Genesis; coming at the end of the Abraham cycle it serves to bridge us over to the next stage of the narrative which involves his son Isaac, and it does so by taking us away, temporarily, from the presence of the patriarchs and the place of their abode, Canaan, since the action is set in Padan-Aram and the main character is Abraham's faithful servant. This story is considerably longer than most others, and is fun to read. This is the story of the search for a bride for Isaac which occupies the whole of ch. 24. But although this story is memorable, outside of it there is not all that much attention paid to the idea of faithful servants in Genesis. However, there is an honourable mention of Rachel's nurse Deborah when we are informed of her death and burial in the beginning of ch. 35.
- Children in old age
One topic that seems to have interested the authors of Genesis is that of children who are born to characters at a very late stage in their lives. The text dwells on this quite insistently when it comes to the birth of Abraham and Sarah's son Isaac. Abraham is already an old man, and his wife is well past menopause, when an angel visiting them tells Abraham that his wife is going to give birth to a boy; given their age, this is considered somewhat miraculous (see ch. 17 and 18). (There seems to be an echo of this theme in the telling of the story of the birth of John the Baptist, in the Gospel According to Luke, ch. 1: here, the angel Gabriel first visits the future father, Zechariah, and it is he who verges on disbelief on account of their age; later Gabriel goes to see his wife Elizabeth (eli-shéba‛), who is less doubting than Sarah, and once again, at the due time, a son is born.) This is not the only mention of "late arrivals" in Genesis, for let us remember that Joseph and Benjamin, Rachel's sons, are also described as products of Jacob's old age (ch. 37), but I don't think too much of a big deal ought to be made of that.
Now on to the top ten recurring topics:
Livestock
The economic activity and way of life of all three patriarchs was animal husbandry, as was that of their relative Laban, and so in the course of things the references to livestock in one way or another are almost constant through the book. They specialised in sheep but also kept goats and cattle. The term tzon 'flock' may be specified as referring to goats (as in the Jacob story), but by default is taken to man sheep. There were also plenty of beasts of burden: usually donkeys, sometimes camels. Apart from the creation of animals in the initial chapters, the first notable appearance of animals is of course their special role in Noah's ark (ch. 6-9).Abraham is described several times as the owner of flocks: he acquires livestock in Egypt (ch. 12) and Gerar (ch. 20), and the separation between Abraham and Lot (ch. 13) had a lot to do with competition between their flocks. Camels enter the picture with the story of Eliezer's search for a bride for Isaac in Padan-Aram (ch. 24). Isaac is less associated with pastoral activity. When Jacob runs away, his arrival in Padan-Aram is ushered in by a briefly described scene among shepherds bringing their flocks to a well covered by a large stone, and Rachel shows up as a shepherd leading Laban's flock to the same well (ch. 29). Tending the flocks is clearly Laban's main activity, so when Jacob stays with him this is the work that he does too. After twenty years, when Jacob gets ready to leave Laban he takes it for granted that Laban is going to give him a flock of his own to take home with him in payment for his service (ch. 30). The elaborate intrigue which follows involves Jacob embarking on some poorly understood breeding programme or other; ownership of flocks is clearly the measure of prosperity in their milieu (ch. 31); and when Jacob finally gets back to Canaan and his path crosses with that of his estranged brother Esau, he offers him a generous gift of livestock as appeasement (ch. 32).
When Jacob sends the young Joseph to Shechem it is to reconnoiter with Jacob's other sons who are herding the flocks in that area (ch. 37). One of Pharaoh's dreams has to do with cattle (ch. 41). When Joseph finally reveals his identity to his brothers (ch. 45), he urges the whole family to move to Goshen in Egypt "where there is room for your flocks and your cattle". Consequently the scenes of Jacob and his sons setting out from Canaan and arriving in Egypt involve bringing their animals with them (ch. 46-7).
Livestock comes into the picture in Genesis one more time in the account of Joseph's administration of the famine in Egypt: when the people have no more money to pay for the food that has been stored up by the government, he accepts their animals as payment and continues to feed them. When they have no more animals left, the government takes their land as payment (ch. 47).
Blessings
In the opening creation poem Elohim, in five days, creates light, the sky, land, ocean, vegetation, the lights in the sky, birds and fish; then he blesses the birds and fish (ch. 1). On the sixth day he creates animals and humans, and blesses them too. On the seventh day he rests and blesses the day of rest (ch. 2). After God wipes out nearly all life on earth with a great flood, saving only Noah and his family, he blesses them (ch. 9).
God blesses Abraham and his future descendants several times in the course of the second cycle (ch. 12, 15, 17, 22), and he later similarly blesses Isaac (ch. 26, twice) and Jacob (ch. 28, 32, 35, 46). God also blesses Ishmael (ch. 16).
People also bless: Laban blesses his daughter Rebecca (ch. 24), Isaac unwittingly blesses Jacob (ch. 27), then blesses him again (ch. 28), and Jacob, nearing death, blesses Joseph and Joseph's sons (ch. 48). Whether what Jacob says to his other sons, or the tribes they will represent, in ch. 49 constitutes blessings or something else is a matter we shall have to consider elsewhere.
Monuments and sacrifices
The practice of ritual sacrifice was so familiar to the writers of Genesis that even Cain and Abel did it; each sacrificed what they grew, so Cain made a vegetable sacrifice and Abel an animal one, but only the latter impressed God (ch. 4). And when the waters had subsided and Noah was able to get out of the ark, the first thing he thinks of doing is building an altar and making a sacrifice of some of the animals he has worked so hard to save. God finds the aroma of the burnt offering so pleasing that he decides never to destroy the worlds again (ch. 8).
Besides sacrifices, another kind of ritual act mentioned repeatedly is the building of altars and other kinds of monuments to celebrate an important event. When Abraham (then still Abram), directed by God, reaches Canaan, he builds an altar there before beginning a journey through the country (ch. 12).
When God again talks to Abraham to assure him that he and Sarah will have children, and that his descendants will be as numerous as the stars, he tells Abraham to carry out an animal sacrifice (ch. 15). This time it is associated with yet another ritual phenomenon: Abraham falls into a stupor and sees visions. And on one occasion God even tells Abraham to perform a human sacrifice, that of his own son, but withdraws the command at the eleventh hour and has him offer up an animal instead (ch. 22).
Abraham's son Isaac and grandson Jacob inherited the predilection for building altars and memorials too. After sorting out a misunderstanding with the king of Gerar, Isaac goes to Beersheba where God appears to Isaac and blesses him, after which Isaac builds an altar and invokes YHWH by name (ch. 26). Jacob, when fleeing from his brother, stops to spend the night at a place that will subsequently be called Bethel, and in a dream is blessed by God, so in the morning he erects a stone monument (ch. 28, and also 35).
Such memorials are also associated with pacts or agreements between individuals. Back in ch. 26 when Isaac builds his altar, the king of Gerar comes back for a surprise visit and they strike a deal, which is one of the reasons why the place was called Beersheba (the well of the oath). And Jacob, many years later, after a falling out with his father-in-law Laban, makes peace and then they build a stone mound to celebrate, and Jacob makes a sacrifice (ch. 31).
Monuments and sacrifices also commemorate sad or otherwise momentous occasions, such as the death of Jacob's beloved wife Rachel (ch. 25), and when Jacob and his sons are leaving Canaan to settle in Egypt they stop along the way at Beersheba for one last sacrifice (ch. 46).
Rank among wives and siblings
In the world of Genesis, it seems that whenever there are two brothers or two sisters, they end up fighting. (How different can you get from real life!) Apparently, if there's one thing that's worse than two squabbling siblings, it's two squabbling wives. (We can't imagine why.) Sometimes both issues combine, when rival wives give birth to rival half-brothers, as in the case of Isaac and Ishmael, or when Joseph (son of Rachel) is pitted against the sons of his father with different mothers. Life was complicated! And part of the trouble was figuring out who was boss. Problems of rank affected wives and siblings equally, it would seem.
For example, the issue of relative status arose between Sarah, who was Abraham's official wife, on the one hand, and Hagar, who was the mother of Abraham's child, on the other, and things got so bad for Hagar that she ran away once (ch. 16) and later was sent away (ch. 21). Even Abraham was confused: at first he thought that Hagar's son Ishmael would be his heir, only to find out that it was his younger but legitimate son Isaac who would inherit the birthright. This must have been hard on Ishmael, although he was given his own twelve tribes (ch. 25).
Isaac got into his own kind of trouble when his wife gave birth to twins (ch. 25). By right, the first to emerge got the birthright, and that was Esau, until he sold it to his technically younger brother Jacob for a bowl of beans, of all things. Still, Esau would have received the aged Isaac's blessing, at least, if it weren't for Jacob's astuteness in getting their father to bestow it on the wrong brother (ch. 27).
But Jacob the deceiver was himself deceived on his wedding day. He is tricked into marrying his fiancée's sister, and rightly complains; as a result he gets saddled with both sisters (ch. 29). Some threesome that must have been! Now he has two wives, the one who he wanted to marry, and the other who is having all the children. Then to make a complicated situation more complicated, both his wives move to improve their standing by having their husband make babies with their maids (ch. 29-30). At long last, Rachel's prayers are answered and she gives Jacob his last two sons, Joseph and Benjamin. That makes twelve brothers and one sister, all told, and lo and behold, Joseph, who is almost the youngest, has dreams of becoming the ruler of the roost (ch. 37), which believe it or not, eventually come true in the course of the drama which occupies the rest of the book.
Then there is one last crazy twist at the end. Joseph, now the greatest man in Egypt save only Pharaoh himself, brings along his two sons when he visits old Jacob who is near death. Like his father Isaac whom he fooled into giving him his older brother's blessing long ago, Jacob is now old and blind, but deliberately repeats the old story, placing his right hand on Joseph's younger son Ephraim instead of the older brother Manasseh and giving Ephraim the best blessing (ch. 48).
Genealogy
At the very end of Genesis, in a passage considered by scholars to be more archaic by far than the rest of the text, the dying Jacob refers to the tribes of Israel, not just to the (literal) children of Israel (aka Jacob), whom we may think of as representing, in the perspective of the authors of Genesis, the Israelite (later Jewish) nation. That may be considered the notional end-point of the book of Genesis (and also the point of departure for the second book, Exodus), whose basic starting point is Abraham, the first patriarch, and back beyond Abraham, the origins of the whole world. So one of the "points" of the string of stories that constitute much of the book of Genesis is to trace, in a way its intended readers can somehow grasp, how we got from A to B, where B is the nascent Israel (the nation). One way in which people who have not studied history as we now do at school can understand getting from A to B is through genealogy: Who were my grandparents? Who were their grandparents? Where did they come from? Who are the people I can see over there and how are they and we related, if at all? Today we still often do this, talking in terms of family relationships between different peoples even when such sibling nations are known to have a history of mutual distrust and conflict. We just don't confuse the notions of relatedness with regard to whole peoples (whether genetic, linguistic or ethnic ) and family bonds between individual members of those groups. The authors of Genesis had their own rough idea about how they and the nations and peoples around them could be classified into smaller and larger groupings, implying certain relationships, which in the view of current historical scholarship might be seen as correct or incorrect, but the idea of such a classification does not seem strange, and such questions are not without interest for us either.
Scattered around the book of Genesis are a number of passages which basically amount to verbal family trees. These are often called the toledot (tol'dot), a plural noun in Hebrew which is derived from the verb root w-l-d (or y-l-d) meaning 'to give birth'. Traditionally translated into English as generations (as in e.g. 5:1 ze séfer tol'dot adam... 'This is the book of the generations of Adam...'), the word tol'dot has acquired the extended meaning of 'history' or 'story', and so does not always introduce a genealogy, as in 2:4: éle tol'dot hashamáyim w'haáretz b'hibbar'am 'This is the story (not "the generations") of the heaven and the earth when they were created'. The genealogical lists are usually placed in the "seams" between different stories, like rows of stitches sowing the sections together. Some scholars suggest that these tol'dot are the real point of the whole book: Genesis is essentially one big genealogical table which is adorned, hence periodically interrupted, with interesting stories about the people occurring in them and the times in which they lived. But if Genesis were only that, it would not present the coherence and structure that it does as a narrative work. This may be one aspect of what Genesis is, perhaps, but that dimension is not quite as central as that idea suggests to what Genesis is to us.
The first major genealogical section (ch. 5) traces a line of direct male descendants from Adam via his third son Seth to Noah. Coming at the end of the first of the twelve portions or sections of Genesis and ending at Noah, it forms a bridge between that section which tells of events before the Flood, and the Flood story with which a large part of the second section is concerned. That is typical of the way the genealogical sections are placed and how they function.
At the end of the Flood narrative, there is a special genealogical section usually called the Table of Nations (ch. 10) which explains how, after all of humanity was wiped out except for one family, all the known nations of the world can trace their parentage to one of the three sons of Noah: Shem, Ham and Japheth. Unlike the straightforward genealogies, this one is really concerned not with family members as individuals but with the origins of nations or peoples.
The second section of Genesis (Noah), which concludes the prelude leading up to Abraham and the start of the "story proper", ends with another genealogy of the regular kind (ch. 11), which continues on from the first genealogy (ch. 5). The first genealogy goes from Adam to Noah; this one, taking up the line of Noah's son Shem, goes on from there to Abraham.
Apart from the "main line" which thus connects, in two long stages, Abraham back to Noah and from Noah all the way to Adam, and the rest of the main line which will now proceed from Abraham forward to the twelve tribes of Israel, there are also several genealogical side branches, bifurcations which tell us about the descendants of one of the siblings who split away from the line that leads to the Israelite nation, before returning to the main thread of the story. The significance of these different branchings is that they are used to account for the various neighbouring nations and peoples, each of which is thus given a place and associated with certain (mostly more or less unflattering, it must be said) roles withing the grand narrative. After all, if the Israelites had a beginning, everybody else must have one too.
Thus we find a tol'dot section informing us of the descendants of the banished brother Cain (ch. 4), prior to the main genealogy in ch. 5 which follows the line of the third brother Seth. Again, in addition to the descendants of Shem who are covered in ch. 11, we also are told about the lines of Shem's brothers Ham and Japheth in the Table of Nations (ch. 10).
Likewise, the rest of Genesis lists and gives details about the main patriarchal line from Abraham down to Jacob's children, but other branches along the way are not neglected. Abraham has two brothers, Haran and Nahor. Haran's son Lot followed Abraham to Canaan, where they parted ways. Lot was saved from the destruction of Sodom together with his two daughters, whose names we do not know, who each had a son (from Lot himself, long story) who became the fathers of two neighbouring nations, Moab and Ammon (ch. 19). Nahor and his descendant Laban remained in Padan-Aram (Syria), although Laban's sister Rebecca and his daughters Leah and Rachel all married members of the patriarchal family in Canaan. The rest of that branch of the family, i.e. the descendants of Nahor, is the subject of another bit of genealogy (ch. 22).
Abraham had two sons with different wives, Ishmael and Isaac. Although already an old man when Sarah died, he remarried and had other children. Neither they nor Ishmael were included in the patriarchal line; again, they are bifurcations from the main stem. But the offspring that issued from these branches are nonetheless accounted for (ch. 25).
Now that we have them out of the way we can return to Isaac, who had twins, Esau and Jacob, of course. Although Esau was technically the firstborn, his rights of patriarchal inheritance were usurped by Jacob, who eventually acquires the name Israel, so what of Esau's side of the family? Well, Esau also got a new name: Edom, from whom stemmed another neighbouring nation of the same name. In fact, we even have a list of important Edomite families thrown in (ch. 36).
With that sorted out we come back to the main character at this stage of the story, Jacob-Israel, and the story of his sons which in the end centres, as was foretold in his early dreams, around one of the youngest sons, Joseph. Being very central to the story, the birth of Jacob's sons and daughter is told more or less as it happens (ch. 29), but they and their dependants are summed up again as part of the narrative of their moving to Egypt (ch. 46).
Scattered around the book of Genesis are a number of passages which basically amount to verbal family trees. These are often called the toledot (tol'dot), a plural noun in Hebrew which is derived from the verb root w-l-d (or y-l-d) meaning 'to give birth'. Traditionally translated into English as generations (as in e.g. 5:1 ze séfer tol'dot adam... 'This is the book of the generations of Adam...'), the word tol'dot has acquired the extended meaning of 'history' or 'story', and so does not always introduce a genealogy, as in 2:4: éle tol'dot hashamáyim w'haáretz b'hibbar'am 'This is the story (not "the generations") of the heaven and the earth when they were created'. The genealogical lists are usually placed in the "seams" between different stories, like rows of stitches sowing the sections together. Some scholars suggest that these tol'dot are the real point of the whole book: Genesis is essentially one big genealogical table which is adorned, hence periodically interrupted, with interesting stories about the people occurring in them and the times in which they lived. But if Genesis were only that, it would not present the coherence and structure that it does as a narrative work. This may be one aspect of what Genesis is, perhaps, but that dimension is not quite as central as that idea suggests to what Genesis is to us.
The first major genealogical section (ch. 5) traces a line of direct male descendants from Adam via his third son Seth to Noah. Coming at the end of the first of the twelve portions or sections of Genesis and ending at Noah, it forms a bridge between that section which tells of events before the Flood, and the Flood story with which a large part of the second section is concerned. That is typical of the way the genealogical sections are placed and how they function.
At the end of the Flood narrative, there is a special genealogical section usually called the Table of Nations (ch. 10) which explains how, after all of humanity was wiped out except for one family, all the known nations of the world can trace their parentage to one of the three sons of Noah: Shem, Ham and Japheth. Unlike the straightforward genealogies, this one is really concerned not with family members as individuals but with the origins of nations or peoples.
The second section of Genesis (Noah), which concludes the prelude leading up to Abraham and the start of the "story proper", ends with another genealogy of the regular kind (ch. 11), which continues on from the first genealogy (ch. 5). The first genealogy goes from Adam to Noah; this one, taking up the line of Noah's son Shem, goes on from there to Abraham.
Apart from the "main line" which thus connects, in two long stages, Abraham back to Noah and from Noah all the way to Adam, and the rest of the main line which will now proceed from Abraham forward to the twelve tribes of Israel, there are also several genealogical side branches, bifurcations which tell us about the descendants of one of the siblings who split away from the line that leads to the Israelite nation, before returning to the main thread of the story. The significance of these different branchings is that they are used to account for the various neighbouring nations and peoples, each of which is thus given a place and associated with certain (mostly more or less unflattering, it must be said) roles withing the grand narrative. After all, if the Israelites had a beginning, everybody else must have one too.
Thus we find a tol'dot section informing us of the descendants of the banished brother Cain (ch. 4), prior to the main genealogy in ch. 5 which follows the line of the third brother Seth. Again, in addition to the descendants of Shem who are covered in ch. 11, we also are told about the lines of Shem's brothers Ham and Japheth in the Table of Nations (ch. 10).
Likewise, the rest of Genesis lists and gives details about the main patriarchal line from Abraham down to Jacob's children, but other branches along the way are not neglected. Abraham has two brothers, Haran and Nahor. Haran's son Lot followed Abraham to Canaan, where they parted ways. Lot was saved from the destruction of Sodom together with his two daughters, whose names we do not know, who each had a son (from Lot himself, long story) who became the fathers of two neighbouring nations, Moab and Ammon (ch. 19). Nahor and his descendant Laban remained in Padan-Aram (Syria), although Laban's sister Rebecca and his daughters Leah and Rachel all married members of the patriarchal family in Canaan. The rest of that branch of the family, i.e. the descendants of Nahor, is the subject of another bit of genealogy (ch. 22).
Abraham had two sons with different wives, Ishmael and Isaac. Although already an old man when Sarah died, he remarried and had other children. Neither they nor Ishmael were included in the patriarchal line; again, they are bifurcations from the main stem. But the offspring that issued from these branches are nonetheless accounted for (ch. 25).
Now that we have them out of the way we can return to Isaac, who had twins, Esau and Jacob, of course. Although Esau was technically the firstborn, his rights of patriarchal inheritance were usurped by Jacob, who eventually acquires the name Israel, so what of Esau's side of the family? Well, Esau also got a new name: Edom, from whom stemmed another neighbouring nation of the same name. In fact, we even have a list of important Edomite families thrown in (ch. 36).
With that sorted out we come back to the main character at this stage of the story, Jacob-Israel, and the story of his sons which in the end centres, as was foretold in his early dreams, around one of the youngest sons, Joseph. Being very central to the story, the birth of Jacob's sons and daughter is told more or less as it happens (ch. 29), but they and their dependants are summed up again as part of the narrative of their moving to Egypt (ch. 46).
Burial
Genealogies are, by definition, concerned with people's births and origin. What of their deaths and end? Where are all these people buried? This aspect is not neglected in the Genesis narrative either! What comes as a bit of a surprise is the amount of detail provided about the business transaction between the newly bereaved Abraham and the local population of Shechem (remember that Abraham was a foreign settler) which led to his purchase of a cave that he wished to acquire as a burial site (ch. 23). I get the impression that perhaps this account is based on an original legal document establishing ownership of the piece of land. At this site, known as the cave of makhpela, Abraham himself was later buried beside his wife, as were his son Isaac and his grandson Jacob and their wives (ch. 25, 35, 47, 49-50).
Other burials (not at Machpelah, or not of the patriarchs and matriarchs) are also mentioned in Genesis, including those of Rachel's nurse Deborah and of Rachel herself (both in ch. 35), and that of Joseph who was embalmed and buried in a coffin (in other words, in the Egyptian style, ch. 50).
Other burials (not at Machpelah, or not of the patriarchs and matriarchs) are also mentioned in Genesis, including those of Rachel's nurse Deborah and of Rachel herself (both in ch. 35), and that of Joseph who was embalmed and buried in a coffin (in other words, in the Egyptian style, ch. 50).
Hospitality
The norms of hospitality towards visitors and travellers were clearly a salient part of Israelite customs, as they are illustrated fairly frequently in Genesis. In ch. 18 first Abraham and then Lot show hospitality to passing travellers (who turn out to be angels, but they don't know that at first). These acts are not described in a way that suggests the hosts' behaviour was exceptional; both show themselves eager to make their unexpected visitors comfortable. First they beg the passers-by to stay and spend the night, then they offer them water to wash their feet, and lastly they provide a good meal and conversation. Laban is similarly hospitable when he receives a visit from Abraham's servant (ch. 24), and years later, from Laban's nephew Jacob (ch. 29).
We might also mention the hospitality shown by Joseph to his brothers once they realise his identity (ch. 43). He invites them to eat in his house. Joseph expresses his special affection for Benjamin by heaping up his plate. Even Pharaoh himself is shown acting courteously and hospitably towards Joseph's family, inviting them to move to Egypt and offering them land for their flocks (ch. 47).
We might also mention the hospitality shown by Joseph to his brothers once they realise his identity (ch. 43). He invites them to eat in his house. Joseph expresses his special affection for Benjamin by heaping up his plate. Even Pharaoh himself is shown acting courteously and hospitably towards Joseph's family, inviting them to move to Egypt and offering them land for their flocks (ch. 47).
Favouritism
One of the ways in which Genesis comes across to modern readers as non-PC, I suspect, is in its frequent blatant admission that favouritism exists (or as we might now call it, discrimination, I suppose), without ever suggesting a value judgment about the fairness, or otherwise, of parents simply liking certain of their children more than others and letting them benefit from it.
Indeed, if God is the ultimate parent figure, this is not beyond even him. At least to the modern reader it is not clear why else, when Cain has the idea of offering a sacrifice of the fruits of his exertion, and Abel copies him by sacrificing the fruits of his, a fair God would accept one offering and not the other just because he likes the fragrance of a burning animal (ch. 4). When Cain, who thinks he has been slighted, throws a tantrum, all God has to say to him amounts to "now, now".
Trying to make sense of such scenes in Genesis and fathom some kind of positive teaching, all I can come up with is: (1) Sometimes things don't fall out in your benefit, but everything has a reason so you should learn to take it with resignation. (2) In such scenes it is generally the younger of two siblings who is held in higher esteem, for whatever reason, than an older brother. In ancient society the older sibling was expected, by default, to get the best cut.
Ishmael, for instance, was Abraham's first child; surely then he should inherit the birthright? Abraham himself seems to think so, until God instructs him otherwise (ch. 21). Why did God favour Isaac? Because his mother was Abraham's legitimate wife? But wasn't the whole point of their arrangement that it was a legal way to give Abraham an heir? Was Hagar perhaps justified after all in making faces at her mistress? Hadn't Hagar played her part in the bargain? What had Ishmael done wrong, or the baby Isaac done right, to tip the balance?
In this and similar examples, a general legal principle (that of primogeniture) is flouted, presumably for some other reason even if it isn't spelt out. Is this, then, a way of saying: just because you happened to be born first doesn't mean you necessarily deserve all the breaks in life? Is it perhaps even a metaphor for the (self-perceived) position of Israel among other nations: a dwarf among giants, a mouse that roared?
Then there is Esau and Jacob. In this case, Esau, the first to be born, a hairy hunting type, is his father's favourite from the start (ch. 25). Ah yes, but Jacob was his mother's pet, and I have a feeling that Rebecca was the one who wore the pants in the family, if pants had been invented. In the event, Jacob and Rebecca worked together as a team, they declared all to be fair in love, war and blessings, they got their way, and Isaac and Esau were outmaneouvred (ch. 27). Nor was Jacob ever punished for having done anything wrong. And he had done something wrong and he knew it twenty years later when he had his next encounter with Esau (ch. 32); he knew that Esau was mad at him and he knew exactly why!
Indeed, if God is the ultimate parent figure, this is not beyond even him. At least to the modern reader it is not clear why else, when Cain has the idea of offering a sacrifice of the fruits of his exertion, and Abel copies him by sacrificing the fruits of his, a fair God would accept one offering and not the other just because he likes the fragrance of a burning animal (ch. 4). When Cain, who thinks he has been slighted, throws a tantrum, all God has to say to him amounts to "now, now".
Trying to make sense of such scenes in Genesis and fathom some kind of positive teaching, all I can come up with is: (1) Sometimes things don't fall out in your benefit, but everything has a reason so you should learn to take it with resignation. (2) In such scenes it is generally the younger of two siblings who is held in higher esteem, for whatever reason, than an older brother. In ancient society the older sibling was expected, by default, to get the best cut.
Ishmael, for instance, was Abraham's first child; surely then he should inherit the birthright? Abraham himself seems to think so, until God instructs him otherwise (ch. 21). Why did God favour Isaac? Because his mother was Abraham's legitimate wife? But wasn't the whole point of their arrangement that it was a legal way to give Abraham an heir? Was Hagar perhaps justified after all in making faces at her mistress? Hadn't Hagar played her part in the bargain? What had Ishmael done wrong, or the baby Isaac done right, to tip the balance?
In this and similar examples, a general legal principle (that of primogeniture) is flouted, presumably for some other reason even if it isn't spelt out. Is this, then, a way of saying: just because you happened to be born first doesn't mean you necessarily deserve all the breaks in life? Is it perhaps even a metaphor for the (self-perceived) position of Israel among other nations: a dwarf among giants, a mouse that roared?
Then there is Esau and Jacob. In this case, Esau, the first to be born, a hairy hunting type, is his father's favourite from the start (ch. 25). Ah yes, but Jacob was his mother's pet, and I have a feeling that Rebecca was the one who wore the pants in the family, if pants had been invented. In the event, Jacob and Rebecca worked together as a team, they declared all to be fair in love, war and blessings, they got their way, and Isaac and Esau were outmaneouvred (ch. 27). Nor was Jacob ever punished for having done anything wrong. And he had done something wrong and he knew it twenty years later when he had his next encounter with Esau (ch. 32); he knew that Esau was mad at him and he knew exactly why!
When we are told, then, that Jacob loved Joseph more than all his other (older) sons (ch. 37), we are not in the least surprised. The only obvious reasons at first are that his mother was Rachel (who had since died) and that Joseph and Benjamin were the fruits of his old age, i.e. his youngest offspring. While these reasons are understandable in sentimental terms, they hardly seem to make it fair. What had the other brothers done wrong? Was it their mothers' fault - what had they done? We can hardly avoid the conclusion that what Genesis tells us about this is that that's simply the way it is.
I don't know if this is applicable to God (who not only favours Abel over Cain, but Abraham over everyone else, and even seems to have chosen the children of Israel as his people just because). But have you noticed that most of the humans practising favouritism in this story were favourites themselves? Abraham (God's favourite) has a soft spot for Isaac, once he is born. Isaac in turn favours Esau, not that it does him much good, because Rebecca backs his brother Jacob. Jacob's favourite is clearly Joseph. As for Joseph, he has a favourite too: his little brother Benjamin (ch. 43).
Family quarrels
I started to learn at an early age (and so, I suspect, did most of us) that there are two readings to the dictum family is family (mishpokhe iz mishpokhe). Sure there are frictions, and worse, at different times and of varying kinds between us and them; this is almost to be expected in the nature of things, and we will have occasion to discuss the manifestations of this in Genesis elsewhere. But when the Fiddler's Tevye goes on to say with emphasis that "among ourselves we get along perfectly well", we already know that we are in for some irony. Not only has it evidently been so since time immemorial, but Genesis has no qualms whatsoever about admitting it. Domestic squabbles abound everywhere! Some of them were covered earlier under the heading "rank among wives and siblings"; here are a few others to add to the list.
When the young Abram, on being instructed at the beginning of ch. 12, sets out with his family and his belongings from Haran to Canaan, he takes his orphaned nephew Lot along with him and we think, That's nice. One chapter later, when their flocks have grown so large that the new land isn't big enough for both of them (sic), and so Abraham takes Lot up the hill and tells him to choose where he wants to go "and if you say right, I'll go left" (ch. 13), we may be disappointed, but this rings true to life now, and then too, it seems.
Jacob goes to his uncle Laban's house and stays there. He helps out with the work, tending Laban's flocks, and Laban agrees to pay him a wage, for "why should you work for nothing just because we're family". Twenty years pass. Laban's wealth has grown considerably and Jacob is still a shepherd with nothing to show for his effort: "Laban has changed my salary ten times," he complains. But when Jacob is smart and starts to acquire his own big flock, Laban's sons grumble: "Jacob has taken everything that was our father's, and he has grown rich from our father's wealth." Sounds familiar. To make matters worse, there are the looks he feels he is getting lately, and "Laban isn't acting towards me the way he used to". Over-familiarity with the story may make it harder to notice just how realistic a picture of a typical and all-too-familiar situation is being portrayed here through a few deft and efficient brush-strokes. To make it worse, his uncle is by now also his father-in-law! And in the end, what is to be done? First Jacob has a frank talk with his two wives (ch. 31), no doubt just as you or I would in a similar situation, and makes sure they are on his side in this (which they are). Seeing that there is nothing else to be done, off they go, husband, wives, children and flocks, without so much as a goodbye to Laban. As soon as he finds out, he comes running after them, but after God has had a few words with him he raises his hands and says, "So, what can you do? Alright, you want to go? So go. But why have you stolen my gods?" "What are you talking about?" says Jacob, genuinely puzzled. They conduct a search and luckily the gods are not found because Rachel is sitting on them. "Alright," says Laban, quickly regrouping, "so you haven't got my gods, okay, but why didn't you let me kiss my grandchildren goodbye? That wasn't nice," he grumbles. "But anyway, let's let bygones be bygones and shake hands and build a stone mound and promise not to fight about such a silly thing, and you go visit your father like a good son, and have a good life."
Which is out of the frying pan and into the fire for Jacob, because now he has to deal with his brother Esau, who is still broygez about that business of the blessing twenty years ago (ch. 32-33)!
Wells
The only likely explanation for why there are so many scenes involving wells in Genesis is that wells must have formed a significant part of daily life. People dug wells, used them, met at wells and fought over them. Wells were important for survival; they could be a matter of life or death.
When Hagar and Ishmael are sent off into the wilderness, Hagar runs out of water and sits down under a tree to await death (ch. 21); when God sends an angel to rescue her, the angel speaks encouragingly to Hagar, tells her not to fear and points out a well nearby. This scene gives way to another in which Abraham and Abimelech negotiate over a disputed well (ch. 21).
When the aging Abraham sends Eliezer off to Padan-Aram to find a bride for Isaac, the first place the faithful servant comes to upon arriving is a well, and he stops there. The scene where he meets Rebecca, Isaac's future wife, is at the well (ch. 24).
Later, Isaac meets Abimelech and they have another dispute over rights to wells (ch. 26).
Finally, when Jacob runs away to Padan-Aram, he also stops at a well where the local shepherds gather to water their flocks. It is there that he meets his own future wife Rachel (ch. 29).
The Hebrew word for a well, b'er, forms part of some place names in Canaan (transcribed as Beer in English: Beersheba, Beer-lahai-roi), thus showing how important wells were to life in the biblical period.
Another question is whether a character, whether historical or fictional, is "literarily real": I would not, for example, describe a name which only appears as a name, with nothing else, somewhere in the middle of a long genealogical list such as those which occur in some parts of Genesis, as real to us because the information we have is below the threshold of what is minimally useful for us to construct any sort of idea of who this person was. But the same would be true if someone assured us of the name of one of our own ancestors, outside of living memory, about which we could be told nothing more: how real can such a person be to us? On the other hand, there are characters of great novels who were never flesh and blood as described, yet who we feel we know, and in that sense they exist for real in our minds. And without passing any final judgment on the absolute historicity of anything described in Genesis, without demanding to know that truth, I do believe that Genesis is a great work of literature and that, for reasons that are not independent of that fact, many of the main characters and many of the events of this book do sound real.
I am of the opinion that part of the reason why this is so is that the people described are very imperfect and the stories that are told are morally quite questionable. This, I think, is sometime a source of embarrassment and an inconvenience, obviously for people who for whatever reason feel that it should not be so: the heroes of Genesis, they think, ought to be impeccable and their deeds always exemplary. And indeed, there is a huge literature that has developed around the endeavour to twist things around and around until at last it can be shown that so they are. Well they're not! And the way in which they are not adds, surely, to the literary greatness of the product. But if we are fully to enjoy Genesis as literature we need to free our minds from any obsessive tendency to take what it says in Genesis and mentally photoshop it to remove the pimples on the faces and the stains on the walls. The great lessons of Genesis, if there are great lessons, do not necessarily depend on the world depicted in it being a world which is so unobjectionable that it surely never existed. The droppings of the camels in Genesis still smelt like camel dung, didn't they?
Or to look at it from a different perspective: Genesis purely as an artistic product (again, that says nothing either way about whether it has historical veracity, or how much). Look at the artistic products of our own days: do they show a perfect world full of perfect people behaving perfectly? I don't think that means that none of it has any value whatsoever as inspiring and edifying "material for discussion". Is there any reason why Genesis shouldn't be subject to the same yardstick? Cannot even a story of evil carry a message for good? And besides, discussion material is also a valid way to view everything in Genesis, because even when (probably I should say particularly when) it tells of things that we think are not right, it thereby succeeds in raising ethical and moral questions that can be usefully discussed. Dinah's story might be taken as an example. What a terrible story! Dinah is raped by a member of the local community; her family, in retaliation, deceive the locals into thinking they are disposed towards a reconciliation, make it a condition that all the males must be circumcised, and when they have not yet recovered from the operation they go in and slaughter them all. Is this acceptable? Why, or why not? Isn't this a great exam question for philosophy students?! Just as the argument between God and Abraham over how many just people there should be in Sodom for it to be saved from destruction: discuss in 500 words! The story of Tamar, same thing: did Tamar act as a prostitute (a zona) in the circumstances, if so why and if not why not? (Of course, the rabbis and the yeshiva students have been doing just that for over two thousand years, so this isn't exactly something new.) And the Genesis stories, on the whole, do raise good ethical questions. And by saying that some of them make us feel uncomfortable, perhaps that's another way of saying the same thing: they raise questions.
As translator, it is not up to me, thank goodness, to answer the questions, only to render faithfully what the text says so as to ensure that the questions remain intact.
When Hagar and Ishmael are sent off into the wilderness, Hagar runs out of water and sits down under a tree to await death (ch. 21); when God sends an angel to rescue her, the angel speaks encouragingly to Hagar, tells her not to fear and points out a well nearby. This scene gives way to another in which Abraham and Abimelech negotiate over a disputed well (ch. 21).
When the aging Abraham sends Eliezer off to Padan-Aram to find a bride for Isaac, the first place the faithful servant comes to upon arriving is a well, and he stops there. The scene where he meets Rebecca, Isaac's future wife, is at the well (ch. 24).
Later, Isaac meets Abimelech and they have another dispute over rights to wells (ch. 26).
Finally, when Jacob runs away to Padan-Aram, he also stops at a well where the local shepherds gather to water their flocks. It is there that he meets his own future wife Rachel (ch. 29).
The Hebrew word for a well, b'er, forms part of some place names in Canaan (transcribed as Beer in English: Beersheba, Beer-lahai-roi), thus showing how important wells were to life in the biblical period.
Genesis, a true-to-life story
When we allow for the immense distances in time, space, language, knowledge and culture separating the ancient text from present-day readers, it seems to me that whether we look at Genesis as a whole by sketching out the deeds of its main characters or by surveying its most recurrent topics and major themes, there emerges a story that is at the same time internally coherent, notwithstanding the puzzles in the details, and "real". The characters of Genesis are alive to us, and the closer we get to listening to the original, the more alive they become. Among reputable scholars the jury is still out over whether Moses or Abraham were ever actual historical individual people. It is not a black-or-white question because in all such reports of putatively real people and events there is always some distortion of "truth" in the process of perception, comprehension and transmission, and the correct answer may very well be somewhere in between a full "yes" and a full "no" - but from a certain point of view, even that is a kind of "yes".Another question is whether a character, whether historical or fictional, is "literarily real": I would not, for example, describe a name which only appears as a name, with nothing else, somewhere in the middle of a long genealogical list such as those which occur in some parts of Genesis, as real to us because the information we have is below the threshold of what is minimally useful for us to construct any sort of idea of who this person was. But the same would be true if someone assured us of the name of one of our own ancestors, outside of living memory, about which we could be told nothing more: how real can such a person be to us? On the other hand, there are characters of great novels who were never flesh and blood as described, yet who we feel we know, and in that sense they exist for real in our minds. And without passing any final judgment on the absolute historicity of anything described in Genesis, without demanding to know that truth, I do believe that Genesis is a great work of literature and that, for reasons that are not independent of that fact, many of the main characters and many of the events of this book do sound real.
I am of the opinion that part of the reason why this is so is that the people described are very imperfect and the stories that are told are morally quite questionable. This, I think, is sometime a source of embarrassment and an inconvenience, obviously for people who for whatever reason feel that it should not be so: the heroes of Genesis, they think, ought to be impeccable and their deeds always exemplary. And indeed, there is a huge literature that has developed around the endeavour to twist things around and around until at last it can be shown that so they are. Well they're not! And the way in which they are not adds, surely, to the literary greatness of the product. But if we are fully to enjoy Genesis as literature we need to free our minds from any obsessive tendency to take what it says in Genesis and mentally photoshop it to remove the pimples on the faces and the stains on the walls. The great lessons of Genesis, if there are great lessons, do not necessarily depend on the world depicted in it being a world which is so unobjectionable that it surely never existed. The droppings of the camels in Genesis still smelt like camel dung, didn't they?
Or to look at it from a different perspective: Genesis purely as an artistic product (again, that says nothing either way about whether it has historical veracity, or how much). Look at the artistic products of our own days: do they show a perfect world full of perfect people behaving perfectly? I don't think that means that none of it has any value whatsoever as inspiring and edifying "material for discussion". Is there any reason why Genesis shouldn't be subject to the same yardstick? Cannot even a story of evil carry a message for good? And besides, discussion material is also a valid way to view everything in Genesis, because even when (probably I should say particularly when) it tells of things that we think are not right, it thereby succeeds in raising ethical and moral questions that can be usefully discussed. Dinah's story might be taken as an example. What a terrible story! Dinah is raped by a member of the local community; her family, in retaliation, deceive the locals into thinking they are disposed towards a reconciliation, make it a condition that all the males must be circumcised, and when they have not yet recovered from the operation they go in and slaughter them all. Is this acceptable? Why, or why not? Isn't this a great exam question for philosophy students?! Just as the argument between God and Abraham over how many just people there should be in Sodom for it to be saved from destruction: discuss in 500 words! The story of Tamar, same thing: did Tamar act as a prostitute (a zona) in the circumstances, if so why and if not why not? (Of course, the rabbis and the yeshiva students have been doing just that for over two thousand years, so this isn't exactly something new.) And the Genesis stories, on the whole, do raise good ethical questions. And by saying that some of them make us feel uncomfortable, perhaps that's another way of saying the same thing: they raise questions.
As translator, it is not up to me, thank goodness, to answer the questions, only to render faithfully what the text says so as to ensure that the questions remain intact.
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