The places of Genesis

Just about all of us, before reading Genesis in any language, had already heard several of the stories in it. However, we didn't know, until we read the whole book, how exactly they all are woven together in the complete fabric of the book as a whole: how they fit together, how they are ordered and so on. We knew them, and often loved them, as self-contained tales or as fragments. Genesis, the book, binds them all together, along with other parts we no doubt hadn't learnt, into a larger entity, a kaleidoscopic symphony of scenes, actions and characters arranged into a single narrative thread: a grandiose work of literary art.

The names of God

At the risk of saying something that will be felt by some almost to be a tautology: Genesis talks a lot about God. In Leaves from the author's notebook: character sketches I suggested that in a certain sense God is one of the "main characters" of the book of Genesis. Several of the over-arching topics and themes of Genesis that I have discussed or will touch on involve God as an essential component: blessings, monuments and sacrifices, covenants, stories of sin and destruction, God's tests and so on. Notwithstanding the chapters about the beginning of the world, there is no explanation in Genesis of what or who God is, it is just taken for granted that God exists, "w'hu haya w'hu howe w'hu yihye b'tif'ara". Other things about God also seem to be taken for granted in Genesis, for example, his uniqueness. Notice that it doesn't say anywhere in Genesis that there is only one God, any more that it properly defines or identifies that God. We only know that monotheism is assumed by the Genesis text from strong "circumstantial evidence": the rest of the Torah and the Hebrew Bible as a whole speaks of a single God, oral tradition also says that the Israelites (or Jews) were and are monotheists, and there are also very many textual and grammatical indications in Genesis itself which imply one God, in the singular. And yet, having said that, there are also numerous details in the text that make us wonder if that has always been the case. It is a vast subject about which a huge literature exists to which I cannot hope to do justice.

Ten major themes (4): continuity, dreams, the locals

Sterility and continuity

Throughout the Genesis story we find frequent expression of both the importance and the precariousness of continuing the bloodline. Men and women need each other to procreate, but even then offspring does not always ensue, or not immediately, and the fear of a wife turning out to be barren or sterile, having a "closed womb", of reaching old age without having begotten or menopause without producing children caused anguish to many of the Genesis protagonists.

The themes of continuity and discontinuity, as a human concern in general or as it affects the need to transmit the inheritance of God's covenant with Abraham in particular, have some sort of bearing on several other themes of Genesis that we have identified. In a society where it was taken for granted that men might have several wives at the same time (by the way, our own society also lets people choose to have several spouses, you're just supposed to finish with one before starting on the next to make it kosher), and where fertility was at a premium, it follows that women were very anxious to improve their standing by being fruitful and multiplying, if possible faster than their fellow wives; nowhere is this played out more graphically than in chapters 29-30 on the birth of Jacob's first eleven sons and one daughter. This rivalry among wives rubs off on the ensuing roost in which issues of inheritance rights, seniority and all the rest of it come to the fore, the big question being who is going to carry the family forward, be its legitimate heir and run the show in the next generation. In Genesis, all this is virtually inseparable from God's covenants, which are not just with the individual recipient of the promise but chiefly with that person's descendants, whether the promise is being made to Abram and Sarai, Jacob or Hagar. Arguably, the greatest test to which God subjects Abraham, the command to sacrifice the young Isaac, was probably not originally such a big deal only because of the human pathos of a child's life hanging in the balance and depending on the action of his own loving father, but rather on account of the dynastic challenge it entailed: Abraham was being asked to truncate his own hope of having a legitimate heir!! The very future of God's covenant was on the line: what could be worse than that?

Ten major themes (3): deception, neighbours

Deception

At the moment I am re-reading Irving M. Zeitlin's Ancient Judaism (Polity Press, 1984). In chapter 2, "The Patriarchs and their God", the author discusses various ways in which historical information which has been brought to light by archaeology can have a bearing on the way we understand Biblical passages, and he mentions three interesting points which all have the potential to throw new light on parts of the Genesis narrative.

The approach he is using in this section is based on the following general idea: according to Genesis, Abraham originated from Mesopotamia and would certainly have participated in at least some of the cultural assumptions that were current at the time in that area. Fortunately, we now know a lot more about that culture thanks to the discovery of many ancient documents that were previously unknown, so we can reconstruct the general milieu in ways and with a degree of detail that were formerly unthinkable. This helps us to comprehend that there are things that the patriarchs are reported to have said and done which had one meaning to them in their time or in terms of their own culture, which might well seem not to make any sense or to mean something quite different from the perspective of people with a different set of customs. That is pretty obvious as a general doctrine, but one exciting thing about this is that now we can actually possibly pin down specific instances where this may be happening and reconstruct, at least hypothetically, explanations for some things. But here's another thing: it may perhaps not be just us, today, who tend to lose our bearings when we interpret certain things narrated of the patriarchs in Genesis; the compilers of the book we know may themselves already have become a bit disoriented. This stands to reason if we think about it: we are talking about cultural assumptions and customs which the patriarchs, assuming that they were ever historical figures or representative of people who did exist, brought with them from Ur Kasdim or Haran to Canaan more than three thousand years ago. The stories were presumably passed down over many generations, perhaps gradually becoming embellished and otherwise modified, yet those old customs and assumptions which the protagonists of the stories once had need not have been passed down without change, so that there would have come a time when the transmitters of the stories, no matter how faithful they were, either no longer understood certain things in the stories they told, or understood them in a new, changed fashion, as did the people who put the material into writing and those who eventually gave the book its final form.