Friday, April 24, 2015

Notes 28: Moving on (25:1-18)

SYNOPSIS: A miscellany of facts about Abraham and Ishmael's last days and their wives and offspring. Abraham remarried but left everything to Isaac. He was buried with Sarah in Machpelah by Ishmael and Isaac.
Speiser (EAS p. 189) says:
...the passage as a whole cannot have been intended as a chronological sequel to [ch. 24]... It is thus evident that the various details of this chapter have been grouped in such a manner as to interfere as little as possible with the progress of the narrative. All of which lends independent support to the assumption that, according to J's timetable, the death of Abraham occurred prior to Rebekkah's arrival.
Speiser and other commentators analyse the chronological information in Genesis to show that something is out of step or out of sequence here; we will take their word for it. We have other worries: there are statements or suggestions here that we might find a little bit jarring. Such as the apparent idea that, after a seemingly aged Abraham sends his servant off on one last mission to find the right wife for Isaac, the old man goes on to remarry and produce a whole slew of further descendants. Besides the biological questions this raises, this comes as a mild affront, in our minds, to Sarah and Isaac, and even Hagar and Ishmael, after all that they (and we) have been through: how could he?? I'm not saying stranger things haven't happened, but this is Abraham! Several thoughts come to mind. This was a period when polygamy was socially "normal" if you could afford it, and it doesn't actually say that he married Keturah after Sarah died, so that might explain the biological issue. Another thought is that we are probably dealing with accounts and traditions about Abraham originating from different sources, which have all been collected here so as not to miss anything, but which we may find make a little more sense if we don't assume that all the things that happen in all those accounts belong to the same narrative timeline: there may have been a tradition about an Abraham who marries Sarah, and another where he marries Keturah, for example. And another way to approach this is to point out that the present bit of genealogy, at least, is accounting allegorically for the existence of various tribes and symbolically depicting the relationships believed to have existed between these. The commentaries agree that, for the most part, the sons and grandsons of Keturah listed are actually Arab tribes. Thus Speiser goes on to say:
The descendants of both Keturah and Ishmael represent sundry elements from the northern peripheries as well as the interior of the Arabian peninsula. Some (Sheba and Dedan) were cited in the Tabe of Nations (10:7); others are listed here for the first time.
In any case, apart from the occasional reappearance of a name or two (Midianite!) in a very different context later on, the events referred to here do not play a part in the subsequent narrative that unfolds, which continues to focus exclusively on the Abraham-Isaac line. What we have here is a footnote to that story, one whose inclusion must clearly have been felt necessary, either to clarify certain points perceived as important, or because the traditions here included were ones that existed and it was not the way of the editors of Genesis to leave out any potentially relevant information.

As a personal reflection, I also wonder whether we might not also wish to consider that, by all accounts, in the ancient world within which this story unfolds, a man's importance and status seems to have been measured by his ability to procreate and even by the number of wives or concubines he recruits into this project. Isaac, the relatively unremarkable middle patriarch, will not be portrayed as engaging in this, but his heir Jacob (alias Israel) certainly will, as are several secondary characters in the story. Perhaps, then, it was felt at one time that, whatever the requirements of the central plot, we couldn't have Abraham only begetting two sons as his stature was clearly greater than this would symbolically imply.

Having disposed of Abraham, another loose end is taken care of next by running through the list of Isaac's half-brother Ishmael's offspring, and his obituary, leaving us free in the following parasha to focus all our attention on Isaac's sons.

25:6 w'livne happilagshim
'The sons of the concubines', but which concubines are those? It is usually assumed that this must refer to Keturah - except that (a) it clearly says in v. 1 Abraham married again, and (b) even if not, Keturah would only be one concubine. Is Hagar to be included here too?

25:8 b'seva Tova
A conventional phrase, 'at a good old age', already found at 15:15. God's promise was fulfilled.


wayye'asef el ammaw
Lit. 'he was gathered unto his people': this is a standard formula providing a solemn expression signifying death, comparable to 'he passed away' in modern English parlance. In the corresponding part of 15:15, the variant found is w'atta tavo el avotékha.

25:9 yitzxaq w'yishmael banaw
Coming in such close proximity to the statement above about all Abraham's other sons, the exclusive mention of these two here points to different understandings about Abraham's offspring. Either the list above was never intended as a real account of Abraham's biological children, or else we are again dealing with contrasting sources. It is also hard not to notice the order: although younger, Isaac is listed first.

makhpela
Thus the burial cave in Hebron purchased by Abraham for his wife (ch. 23) eventually became the family tomb.

25:11 b'er laxay ro'i
Which is of course where Rebecca and the servant encountered him in 24:62-65! See also 16:14. 

25:12-16 tol'dot yishmael
We already know that Ishmael was the father of twelve tribes, because an angel foretold this to his mother Hagar in ch. 21. Here the twelve are named. The parallel with the future twelve sons/tribes of Israel is obvious.

25:18
A summary is given of the area settled by the tribes which Ishmael is said to have fathered. The geography seems to be wrong: ‛al p'ne mitzráyim boakha asshúra makes little sense!


‛al p'ne khol exaw nafal
What this meant is open to speculation. Lit. 'He fell on the face of all his brothers.' Speiser suggests: 'Each made forages against his various kinsmen.' Cf. 16:12.



END OF SECTION 5

So ends the last section of the Abraham cycle, and hence the cycle itself. We are halfway through the book of Genesis, immersed in the world of the patriarchs, in Canaan. Abraham has passed, and now the heads of the patriarchal household are Isaac and his young wife Rebecca. Their main task in what follows will be to give birth to Israel.

Thursday, April 23, 2015

Notes 27. Search for a bride (24:1-67)

SYNOPSIS: An aging Abraham is worried that Isaac shouldn't marry a local Canaanite girl. He sends his trusted servant Eliezer on a mission to Padan-Aram, in the "old country", where his relative Laban lives, to find a bride for Isaac and bring her back to Canaan. Eliezer is concerned the girl may not wish to come back with him. Abraham gives him full istructions: if she won't come, so be it, but on no account is Isaac to go back to Padan-Aram, since God has promised that his offspring will inherit the land of Canaan. Off Eliezer goes with some camels. When he reaches a well at Padan-Aram he prays to God to give him a sign, and God obliges by having the first girl he asks for some water to drink offer to water his camels too. When Eliezer learns that she is none other than Rebecca, Laban's sister, he knows his prayer has been heard. He tells his story to Rebecca, who runs home to tell Laban, who comes running out to invite Eliezer into his home. At dinner Eliezer retells the whole story yet again for the benefit of his hosts who haven't heard it yet, and he concludes with a request for him to be allowed to take Rebecca back to Canaan with him to marry his master Isaac. Laban says Rebecca must be asked if she wishes to go, and she does. Laban blesses Rebecca and they leave. They arrive back, Isaac and Rebecca meet and the match is consumed.
By way of introduction to this chapter-long episode, I will quote CB (p. 247):
The bringing of Rebekah to Isaac may be a picturesque way of describing the incorporation of Aramaic clans in Israel; but the narrative is much more than this, it is a graphic story of the fortunes of individuals. The various features reproduce well-known experiences of the nomads of the desert; the seeking of a wife from some distant but kindred tribe; the trust reposed in a favourite slave; the meeting of travellers, as in the case of Jacob and Moses, with the women at the well; and the negotiations that led up to a betrothal. In a few graphic touches these familiar scenes of ancient days are lived over again before our eyes. Throughout there is manifest a simple faith in the continual presence and activity of a benevolent Divine Providence.
As Speiser (p. 183) points out, "the chapter as a whole, the longest in the book by far, is a self-contained unit and an unsurpassed literary masterpiece of its kind." Yet it is well integrated into the larger narrative framework, from which it draws its broader significance. It is a kind of story that is still popular to this day, almostly childishly naive in the form of the telling, which invites the listener to anticipate or even recite with the story teller the recurrent passages which repeat information the audience has already heard, as it narrates first what the protagonist is going to do, then what he does, and finally replicates his telling in the first person to another character of what he has done.

Told in the manner it is, this may, on the surface, look like a rather inconsequential story, but we can also read it as an allegory of quite profound importance: see the notes.

24:2 ‛avdo z'qan beto
There is a tradition that identifies Abraham's unnamed head servant in this story with the eli‛ézer who is referred to in 15:2, but that is uncertain and in any case the sentence in ch. 15 where the name appears is itself quite obscure. Therefore the name cannot be assumed by any means.

sim na yad'kha táxat y'rekhi
The strange-sounding instruction to the servant to place his hand under Abraham's thigh is supposed by commentators to have been a gesture which solemnized an oath, as is fairly obvious from the narration. They also suggest that "thigh" may really mean "genitals" here. This ritual act also appears in 47:29, but nowhere else in the Tanakh.

24:3 bYHWH elohe hasshamáyim welohe ha'áretz
This formula seems to echo the use (three times) of the collocation hasshamáyim w'ha'áretz in the first Creation passage (1:1, 2:1, 2:4). It is partially repeated in v. 7, where however it is abbreviated to YHWH elohe hasshamáyim. Note too that in the present verse the formula is used by Abraham, and in v. 7 by his faithful servant.

mibb'not hakk'naani asher anokhi yoshev b'qirbo
I have already commented elsewhere on the term Canaanite. In the present context it may simply mean the local inhabitants all around Abraham whom he clearly considers to be ethnically distinct, and with whom he has no desire to have his family intermarry. The only thing remotely resembling an explicit reason for this wish to remain apart that I can see in the foregoing narrative is the b'rit, the covenant made specifically between God and Abraham and his descendants. Of course, the preference for one's children to marry one's "own kind" is a widespread cultural phenomenon that can be observed in many places and at many times in history, and so in a sense there is nothing all that remarkable really about the existence of and emphasis on such an attitude in Genesis. It is also a necessary motivation in the narrative framework of the present story and a notion which also finds a place in other parts of its plot line, although it must also be said that, from the start, it fails to be adhered to consistently; indeed, Abraham's own first child is the son of Hagar the Egyptian (whatever the "attenuating circumstances"), and Joseph will also marry the Egyptian woman Asenat.

24:4 el artzi w'el moladti
This is clearly a hendiadys meaning 'the land of my birth', and it was also seen in ch. 12, which it seems to echo, perhaps a literary gesture harking back, near the end of Abraham's long life, to the day when his story began (12:1 lekh l'kha me'artz'kha umimmoladt'kha umibbet avíkha).

w'laqaxta issha livni
Again the use of l-q-x in association with marriage.

24:7 mal'akho
We have already encountered the enigmatic figure of the messenger/angel (mal'akh, angelos) several times now, see ch. 16, 19, 21, 22. No mal'akh makes any personal appearance at any point in the present story, but one is referred to by Abraham here, and his words are recollected by the servant in v. 40.

24:8 raq et b'ni lo tashev shámma
Here an explicit hierarchy of priorities is established in what turn out to be Abraham's last reported words: don't let my son marry a Canaanite woman, but above all, do not return him to the land from which I came. It is not that the descendants of Abraham cannot ever leave Canaan, because that is precisely what they will do at the conclusion of the book! But they move forward towards their destiny, never back to the old life away from which Abraham has already progressed, showing the way forward. In a nutshell, then, Abraham says: try to stay "pure", but most important of all, go forwards, not backwards. Manifested in a multitude of different ways, this is the same dilemma facing all ethnic groups everywhere, always, and the present scene seems to be offering a solution to just that question. The integrity of ethnic identity is valuable and to be protected where possible, but the one thing that it does not override is the call to move forward towards one's calling or destiny, also known as "a better world." We must make every effort to make the two compatible! Today, these desiderata are spoken of, respectively, as culture and progress, and this resolution of the apparent contradiction, translated into terms we now understand, remains as pertinent as ever! Continue being who you are, cultivate your specific identity, yes, but never try to turn back to the primitive ways that your ancestors left behind for good reasons. Does this not, at the mid-point of our book and the turning point of the imminent death of the founding patriarch, encapsulate the essential Abrahamic message?

24:10 el aram naharáyim el ir naxor
Perhaps we may translate the geographical term aram approximately as "Syria"; the added epithet naharáyim is a dual and means 'two rivers', so this might mean the part of Aram/Syria that is in the region of the two big rivers of the area (the Tigris and the Euphrates). As pointed out in CB, that is not really the same thing as saying Mesopotamia which refers to the entire greater region dominated by these rivers (as opposed to just the Syrian or "Aram" part). As for the city of Nahor, this is traditionally assumed to mean Haran (xaran), Nahor being the name of Abraham's late brother, but Nahor is also the name of a place in the district of Haran. Acc. to Speiser (p. 183), the trip "must have taken at least a month."

24:27 xasdo wa'amito
The collocation xésed we'emet is a cliché, a conventionalized hendiadys for which CB suggests the gloss 'faithful lovingkindness', Speiser 'steadfast kindness', JPS 'steadfast faithfulness' (which last seems slightly deficient: where is xésed?). The important thing is not to go with mechanistic traditional renderings such as KJV 'his mercy and his truth'. In Genesis alone there are two more occurrences of the idiom (in v. 49 of this ch. and in 47:29), in both of which it forms part of a longer formula for expressing a request, in a construction that amounts to something like 'if you would be so kind.'

24:40 YHWH asher hithalákhti l'fanaw
Abraham described himself to his servant, according to this, as having walked before God (MB p. 34). 

24:48 axi adoni
Here as elsewhere ax does not always mean a literal brother but may signify 'kinsman.' Cf. 13:8, 14:14 etc.

24:49 w'efna al yamin o al s'mol
Lit. 'I will turn to the right or the left.' Clearly idiomatic and not necessarily to be translated literally. Perhaps something like: 'I will go my way.'

24:56 al t'axaru oti
'Do not delay me.' I would echo the comment in CB:
It was certainly startling that Rebekah's family should be asked to let her leave them at once, that very morning, for a distant land with a man whom none of them had ever seen till the previous evening, to marry a cousin whom they had never seen.
On the other hand, (1) it's a story, and (2) there are some clues that Abraham may have been nearing death and the servant was anxious to get back in time with Isaac's bride. (True, there are also contradictory hints elsewhere, such as the notice in ch. 25 that Abraham remarried (or took a concubine) and had more children! The solution obviously will refer to conflicting sources and/or relative chronology.)

24:57 w'nish'ala et píha
Lit. 'let us ask her mouth', which again obviously should not be replicated literally.

24:58 elekh
This reply (lit. 'I will go') is pragmatically the BH equivalent of 'yes' rather than 'I will go.'

24:59 meniqtah
The death notice of Rebecca's nurse is given in 35:8, where she is named as Deborah (d'vora).

24:60
Rebecca's blessing is, one might say, a reduction to its most essential elements of the standard scheme of such blessings in Genesis: have lots of descendants (hayi l'alfe r'vava) and may they vanquish all their enemies (w'yirash zar‛ekh et shá‛ar son'aw).

24:62
Something funny seems to be going on with the narrative here. Didn't the servant return to Abraham with Rebecca first, before going off to look for Isaac? (And how did he know where to look for him?) It has been suggested that perhaps Abraham had already passed away. Why then does the account omit this? Maybe because the account of that has been delayed until the next chapter?

b'er laxay ro'i
See 16:14.

24:63 lasúax
Meaning very uncertain, which is a nuisance because the meaning of this part of the story is not at all clear.

24:65 mi ha'ish hallaze haholekh bassade liqratenu
Rather then read too much into this question in terms of what it tells about whether or not they knew that they would find Isaac there, I prefer to think that this is perhaps just a dramatic dialogue, a piece of fine conventional story-telling that does not need to be over-interpreted. "Who is that man coming towards us?" "He is your future husband." Great lines, and remember that even in Golde's time love was part of a new world.

wattiqqax hattza‛if wattitkas
I quote EH:
Israelite women normally were not veiled. In the ancient Near East, the veiling of the bride was part of the marriage ceremony, but wives generally went about unveiled. By veiling herself now, as a sign of modesty, Rebekah signals Isaac that she is his bride.

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Notes 26. The cave at Machpelah (23:1-20)

SYNOPSIS: When Sarah passes away, Abraham buys a piece of land from the locals ("Hittites"), and a detailed account follows of the purchase. It is a field near Mamre which contains the Machpelah Cave, which is sold to Abraham by Ephron son of Zoar for four hundred silver shekels.
We now begin the last of the three parashot or sections that make up the Abraham cycle. The major events of his life have already been dealt with and it remains to tell how he wrapped up his business, first with the burial of his wife and then the arrangements he made for the marriage of his son Isaac. This section, xaye sara 'Sarah's life', takes its name from the fact that it begins by informing of her death in the conventional manner, by telling us her age when she dies, i.e. how long she lived.

I already discussed this passage here. Abraham lived in Hebron at a place called Mamre. The narrative refers to the locals as xittim 'Hittites' or, in typical biblical style, as b'ne xet 'sons (or children) of Het' (just as, for example, the Israelites will later be referred to as b'ne yisra'el 'sons (and daughters, i.e. "children") of Israel'.

Scholars agree that these were not "the Hittites" of general history, but some other (unrelated) people referred to by the same name. However, they were also not the indigenous Semitic peoples of the area usually referred to as Canaanites; like the Israelites themselves (apparently), they were more recent settlers, presumably with their own culture and even language.

In this passage we are first informed very briefly (vv. 1-2), without further ado, that Abraham's wife Sarah passed away in Hebron at the grand old age of 127. Abraham grieved for her, and then got down to the business of acquiring a small piece of property so that he could bury his wife in land that he owned. This is the only description in Genesis of a commercial transaction in which a patriarch buys land from local inhabitants, and nearly all the passage is a description of this proceeding, in which Abraham "bargains" with the sons of Heth. The talk that is reported sounds cordial enough, but probably should be understood as the language of diplomacy, and the most likely explanation for the inclusion of such a passage in Genesis is not that it is to show what nice people the local Hittites were or what good friends they were to Abraham, but rather to lay emphasis on the fact that the burial place of the patriarchs is property that rightfully belongs to Abraham's descendants and nobody else; it has even been suggested that the passage itself constitutes a legal document to that effect.

Speiser (EAS, p. 171-2) points out the importance of this passage "in retrospect" since this is the first testimony of the legal acquisition of land ownership in Canaan by ancestors of the Israelites, although so small as to be merely symbolic. The occasion was the death of the first matriarch, and the circumstances put both her person and the anecdote of the land purchase in a very special position in the unfolding story of their history. Genesis later also tells of the burial of Abraham, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Leah, all at Machpela.

23:2 qiryat arba‛ hi xevron
We met the name Hebron (xevron) early in the Abraham cycle (13:18, JPS): waye'ehal avram vayyavo vayyéshev b'elone mamre asher b'xevron 'And Abram moved his tent, and came to dwell at the terebinths of Mamre, which are in Hebron.' The name has been glossed as 'confederacy', assuming it is related to the noun xaver 'companion' and other manifestations of the same root. As for the first name that appears here, qirya (of which qiryat is the construct state) means 'town, city'; a variant, qéret, which comes from *qart-, is the same word as in Phoenician known from e.g. Carthago, a Phoenician colony in what is now Tunisia (ultimately < Phoenician *qart ḥadašt 'new city', corresponding to H "qéret xadasha"); and arba is H for 'four'. Thus a possibility is that qiryat arba originally meant 'city of four' (perhaps meaning an alliance of four, cf. xevron??); another, defended by Speiser, is that the name might really be of an unknown non-Semitic origin, and was later reanalysed as meaning that. It seems unlikely that we shall ever know.

23:3 el b'ne xet
See the comment at the top.

23:4 ff.

Notice the rigid formality of the dialogue between Abraham and the "children of Het", which comes over clearly to us even across the thousands of years since this text first crystallized. It reads like a court hearing or something similar (a kalpuli proceeding, perhaps, for Nawat speakers), with an elegant redundance of explicit concepts.

23:4-6 
The crux of the "negotiation" seems to be this: the Hittites offer to let Abraham bury his wife in any of their graves that he likes (b'tokhénu b'mivxar q'varenu q'vor et metékha 'Bury your dead in the choicest of our burial places'), but Abraham insists that what he wants is to acquire a property of his very own on which to make a tomb for Sarah (t'nu li axuzzat qéver 'Sell me a burial site among you'); he is not interested in sharing or receiving the use of a grave as a favour, he wishes to buy. The obstacle may have been a legal one, alluded to by Abraham as a preamble to his request: ger w'tashov anokhi ‛immakhem 'I am a resident alien among you.' Quite possibly "resident aliens" were not permitted to own real estate. In this light, the Hittites' reply conveyed something more than polite hospitality, perhaps. Note also the modesty of Abraham's request, in such a context: he makes it clear that he is only asking for enough land to bury his dead.

23:7 wayyáqom avraham wayyishtáxu
The verb q-w-m 'to arise' is very often used in BH as an auxiliary of sorts in a kind of serial construction in narratives: '(he) arose and (he) VERBed' just seems to emphasize the performance of the action and is scarcely translatable. So, wayyáqom wayyélekh might be rendered 'he upped and went' (which basically means: 'he went'), but there is something comical about this way of rendering it in the present sentence, since 'he upped and bowed down' sounds like some sort of joke if taken too literally. This verse then is a good example of the value of q-w-m in such constructions, which it is quite unnecessary, here or elsewhere, to translate mechanically as 'he arose and...'.

23:9 makhpela
This must have been the name of a district of Hebron.

23:15 sh'maéni éretz arba‛ meot shéqel késef beni uven'kha ma hi
One is forced to smile at the phrasing here which shows how little change there has been in bargaining styles over the millennia: 'Listen, a piece of land worth four hundred silver sheckels, what's that between you and me?' Was Abraham extorted; was it a wildly excessive price for what he was getting? Commentators range in their opinions from "we can't be sure what a sheckel was worth in those days" to "yes, definitely!!

23:16-18
This reads like a legal document, a receipt for a sale of real estate.

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Notes 25: Nahor's descendants (22:20-24)

SYNOPSIS: A minor genealogical footnote brings to a close the parasha "wayyera", the fourth of Genesis and the second of the three concerned with the story of Abraham.
This tiny passage updates us about the offspring of Abraham's brother Nahor back in Paddan-Aram. Interestingly, this brief notice does not have the standard format of a regular tol'dot passage, and so probably isn't one in origin. Instead, it is formulated as what purports to be a "dialogue" of sorts in which somebody informs Abraham "how the family is getting along". Together with Abraham, we get to hear a list of his nephews: some are the children of Nahor's wife Milcah (milka), others of his concubine Reumah (r'uma). While most of the list of names is of no consequence for the Genesis narrative as such, the passage has a function as a "historical" note since it provides a conventionalized reference to the presumed tribes of the Aramean people who, in this cosmology, are attributed to the family of Abraham's brother. Israelites and Arameans are viewed as related peoples, and their relationship is symbolized here through the brotherhood of their respective patriarchs, Abraham and Nahor. And then there is the family saga side of things, which will only be concerned with one of Abraham's many nephews.

Most of the names recited here will not be heard of again, but there is one important exception, Nahor and Milcah's eighth and last son Bethuel (b'tu'el). Not that we know much about Bethuel himself as a character, whom Speiser calls "a shadowy figure" (EAS, p. 167). The only time he ever does anything in the Genesis narrative, he does it in unison with his son Laban (lavan) in 24:50, and even then the son is mentioned before the father (JPS): wayyá‛an lavan uv'tu'el wayyom'ru meYHWH yetze haddavar lo nukhal dabber elékha ra‛ o Tov 'Then Laban and Bethuel answered: 'The matter was decreed by the Lord; we cannot speak to you bad or good."' All the other times Bethuel is mentioned it is to indicate who someone else is, e.g. "Laban son of Bethuel." Nonetheless, he is important in this capacity at least, for he was the father of two characters who both play important roles in Genesis: the aforementioned Laban and his sister Rebecca (rivqa). 

When Rebecca appears as a young woman still living at home in ch. 24, we shall see that she rarely speaks for herself but seems to be under the tutelage, not of her father Bethuel, but of her brother Laban, with whom Abraham's servant negotiates about Rebecca's future marriage to Isaac. Both Rebecca and Laban will continue to play significant roles later in the Genesis plot, too. This is surely the reason why Bethuel is singled out in the present genealogical notice, and it may be one reason why this notice is included: listeners to Genesis loved to know all the details about who was related to whom and how. 

It is however very odd, in that case, that the passage now to be read only mentions Bethuel's daughter Rebecca but doesn't mention her brother, Bethuel's son Laban. This may have something to do with differing source traditions, unless the entire mini-passage was inserted into the book later than most of the surrounding materials, and the concern of whoever added it was simply to establish the position in the family tree of Rebecca as one of the Israelite matriarchs and Isaac's future wife. 

Perhaps there is another logic underlying the inclusion of this little text, which comes immediately after the dramatic scene which must have made a deep and formative impact not only on Abraham but no less on the patriarch-to-be Isaac, and now we turn briefly to some information which introduces the matriarch-to-be Rebecca. Soon we shall be reading the story of how the two met...

In addition to naming Bethuel's sons that are specifically stated to have been born of his wife Milcah, the text also lists Bethuel's sons with his concubine; see my note below about the concept of pilégesh. Nothing more is known of most of these sons of Bethuel; to us they are mainly just names. But for some perspective, notice that a few chapters from now (ch. 29-30) we will be reading about the sons of Bethuel's grandson Jacob, and in his case too the list includes the sons Jacob had with his two wives (Leah and Rachel) and his two concubines (Bilhah and Zilpah). 

And here's another thing: Bethuel's sons with Milcah number eight, but those with Reumah are four; and eight plus four makes...? Even though not much is known about most of the names mentioned, commentators (e.g. Speiser) view this as an allegorical list of the twelve tribes of the Arameans, comparable to the lists we shall later encounter of the twelve tribes of Ishmael (ch. 25) and of course those of Israel.

22:22 w'et késed
The name Chesed (késed), a segolate evolved from a protoform like *kaśdu, would be related to the ethnonym kaśdim which is rendered in English as 'Chaldeans' or 'Chaldees' and which occurs in the place name ur kaśdim ('Ur of the Chaldeans') in 11:28 qv.

22:24 ufilagsho
Reumah is spoken of as Bethuel's pilégesh, which is glossed as 'concubine', i.e. a lower-ranking wife. One gets the definite impression from Genesis that this was a commonplace institution and that there was no disgrace associated with it, beyond the simple fact that, by definition, the "official wife" (or wives, cf. Jacob) ranked higher than them. We will be told that Abraham himself had pilagshim (25:6), and Jacob's concubine Bilhah is referred to as his pilégesh in 35:22. It would seem that when counting one's children (or sons), those of one's wives and pilagshim are all listed normally. This perspective surely has a bearing on the story of Hagar and Ishmael; we need to be careful not to read it through a cultural filter that is not inherently pertinent to the text. Hagar was a pilégesh; that did not imply dishonour for her or her son, although it did have implications about the rank of Hagar within the family relative to Sarah; in view of the quandary Abraham finds himself in, the relative status of Isaac and Ishmael seems to have been a more problematic question in their particular circumstances. The origin of the word pilégesh is uncertain but it is not Semitic and clearly is related to Gk. pallakis 'concubine, mistress' and Lat. paelex, pelex or pellex 'ditto'; but since the origins of those words is equally uncertain, we don't know what the relationship between them is (as noted by EAS, p. 167).


END OF SECTION 4

In the third parasha, lekh l'kha, we got to know Abram (later Abraham), a man to whom God spoke; who, having come to the land of Canaan with his kinfolk and herds, took up residence and established relations with the new neighbours; and who received from God a covenant, a b'rit, or pact which established God's promise of a multitudinous offspring (zéra) who would inherit the land before him. None of this was a present reality, for Abraham neither possessed the land in which he lived, nor had he resolved the issue of his "seed". In the fourth parasha which we have now concluded, wayyera, we have followed Abraham as his wife Sarah gives birth to Abraham's heir (and heir to God's covenant), Isaac; neighbouring towns anger God with their evil ways and suffer catastrophe; in his own house, his other son Ishmael and his mother Hagar are forced to part ways, to give rise to a people of their own; and lastly, God's understanding with Abraham and his "only son" (y'xido) Isaac is ratified through the most terrible ordeal, or test, of Abraham's trust in God, and so they have clinched the deal: Abraham's the man. Seemingly as an afterthought, at the last moment we have been brought up to date with things over in the other side of the family, the "Aramean" side, seemingly for no particular reason, but there really is one because Isaac is destined to marry a woman from Paddan, who is in turn destined to become the Israelites' second matriarch. Enter Rebecca.

Monday, April 20, 2015

Notes 24. "Now I know" (22:1-19)

SYNOPSIS: God asks Abraham to make a sacrifice of his son Isaac. Abraham sets out to the place God has told him with Isaac, two servants and an ass. They reach the place, Abraham builds an altar, and when he is about to kill Isaac, an angel tells him not to hurt his son, for now he knows that Abraham will hold back nothing from God. A ram appears and is sacrificed instead. Abraham names the place YHWH-yir'e. The angel promises that Abraham will be blessed for his obedience. Abraham returns to Beer-Sheba.
And so we come to what is in many ways one of the central passages of Genesis, so famous, so talked-about and so unforgettable that it has been given a name of its own in Jewish lore: the aqeda (Akedah), i.e. The Binding. Morally and symbolically, this is the most climactic event in the life of its central figure, Abraham. After this, in fact, his story is nearly over, for it only remains to tell of the passing of his wife Sarah and the aged father's concerns over whom his son would marry; then the narrative will quickly move on to other matters. Before any of that, however, there is this awful, terrifying, heart-rending scene. At this place in the book, like no other, time itself seems to stand still for a moment; the world we have known (or which the book has brought to life for us) hangs in the balance; the literary entity of Genesis stops, freezes, becomes immobile for a fraction of a second, and so, indeed, does the reader's or listener's respiration.

But hang on a moment (OK, breathe!): doesn't this whole story contain a massive, unresolved contradiction? Yes it does. The central point of the story is, at least on the surface, a sacrificial act that is, in the last resort, cancelled. Sacrifices are nothing new in Genesis or throughout the Old Testament, but this story talks about a human sacrifice: how many of those are there? The historical reality is that cultures all over the place at that time did practise human sacrifices, but Israel was the exception, and God (by which I mean the God of the people who wrote Genesis) had expressly forbidden it. Today many of us may even find animal sacrifices repugnant; in their immediate context, on the other hand, given that human sacrifices were rife, animal sacrifices can be seen in a very positive light if their function is to replace and hence to avoid the worse evil. This seems likely, since the whole concept of transferring a ritual act onto a surrogate victim is a familiar one in Jewish customs: witness the scapegoat. In context, then, the Hebrew Bible condones animal sacrifice but absolutely forbids human sacrifice, contrasting in this with the Canaanites and other neighbours. The point of the scapegoat is that it is a goat (rather than a person); its moral function is for the person or community performing the ritual of casting out the scapegoat to recognise their own faults (sin, guilt, blame) and, in demonstration thereof, to offer "payment" to square off their debt; God's benevolence consists of accepting a lesser "fee" in lieu of the one really owed, and thereby cancelling the debt. Christianity seems to have reversed the whole point of this with its portrayal of God's son (presumably more, not less, than a "mere human") playing the part of the goat (or lamb: same difference) to expiate human sin. The crucifixion is represented in the Christian texts as a real human sacrifice symbolizing a ritual sacrifice: the business of choosing between which Jesus to crucify (Barabbas or the one from Galilee) even mimics the ancient custom of deciding by lot on a scapegoat out of two candidate animals. Reading this in a Jewish framework, the allusion could hardly be missed, but also the reversal of the whole original idea: animals were meant to stand in for human victims, not vice-versa! The association between the old tradition of the scapegoat and today's passage about the near-sacrifice of Isaac is also inescapable, once we know what the baseline is: the sacrifice of a human (for whatever reason, for we are never told) is here contemplated, exceptionally, only to lead up to the order given to Abraham in v. 12: al tishlax yad'kha el hanná‛ar w'al ta‛ase m'úma 'Don't stretch out your hand against the boy or do anything [to him]', followed by the provision of another candidate, a mere animal, which will take the brunt of it: a ram! Perhaps, then, this is a story meant to impress on everyone the requirement that animals must replace humans as sacrificial victims. Perhaps... who knows! It is a matter of debate, in a religion that not only permits but encourages individual affiliates to argue and wonder about the meaning of its tracts, rather than binding believers through the imposition of obligatory dogmas.

The austerity, the economy of words and images that tell this short but gripping story is an amazing literary feat. The feeling of unease and angst it produces in us can only have been intended. Even when we know how it will end (and some commentators believe that the passage tells us as much in its first sentence [22:1, JPS]: wayhi axar hadd'varim ha'élle w'ha'elohim nissa et avraham 'some time afterward, God put Abraham to the test' - so, we're warned that it's just going to be a test!), it is still hard to read and infinitely poignant.

But, after the spine-chilling account is finished and we recover ourselves, what is this about? What is it's point? Why do they (the narrators, the creators of the tradition, God...) do this?? Morally, psychologically and historically, how should we read this? The questions seem interminable and so is the discussion, both in time (this debate has been going on forever!) and in the ideas that have been suggested. Let me copy a few quotes from here and there in my books (and you might like to check out the article about it on Wikipedia - yes, it has its own article!).

We'll start with Buber (MB, p. 145):
This paradoxical story of the second in the line of the patriarchs, of his being born and very nearly being killed, shows what is at stake: a begetting, but the begetting of a people standing at the disposal of God; a begetting, but a begetting commanded by God.
Next, Speiser (EAS, pp. 165-6):
What is the meaning of this shattering ordeal? In this infinitely sensitive account the author has left so much unsaid that there is now the danger of one's reading into it too much - or too little. Certainly, the object of the story had to be something other than a protest against human sacrifice in general, or child sacrifice in particular - an explanation that is often advanced... The object of the ordeal, then, was to discover how firm was the patriarch's faith in the ultimate divine purpose. It was one thing to start out resolutely for the Promised Land, but it was a very different thing to maintain confidence in the promise when all appeared lost.
And now Everett Fox (EF, p. 87):
This story is certainly one of the masterpieces of biblical literature... Chapter 22 is a tale of God's seeming retraction of his promise (of "seed") to Avraham.... Coming just one chapter after the birth of the long-awaited son, the story completely turns around the tension of the whole cycle and creates a new, frightening tension of its own. The real horror of the story lies in this threatened contradiction to what has gone before. Most noticeable in the narrative is Avraham's silence, his mute acceptance of, and acting on, God's command. We are told of no sleepless night, nor does he ever say a word to God... In many ways this story is the midpoint of Genesis. It brings the central theme of continuity and discontinuity to a head in the strongest possible way. After Moriyya, we can breathe easier, knowing that God will come to the rescue of his chosen ones in the direst of circumstances. At the same time we are left to ponder the difficulties of being a chosen one, subject to such an incredible test.
Having read the passage carefully while pondering on the different commentaries and on my own thoughts collected below about some of the details, the idea I finally come away with is that the function of this important scene is some sort of final ratification ritual regarding God's covenant with Abraham. In this passage he is subjected to the most terrifying ordeal of his entire life: what could have been more awful for him than to have to bring to a sudden end, by his own hand, everything we have seen him strive to achieve, spurred on by God's promises, and now ordered by that very same God to abandon and destroy? The outcome of that act would surely have been much worse for Abraham than death itself: to do away with all that is meaningful in his life, and through a voluntary act which he has the power to obey or not!

Yet is there not also something unreal about the whole thing? Is Abraham actually going to kill Isaac? No; we know that, though perhaps he would have. (But then there would have been no Israel, no patriarchs and no Genesis to read and discuss.) Did God truly want him to? No; we trust him not to, because he loves his people, and in any case we know the story's end and there he reveals the fact that he doesn't. If the death of Isaac at his father's hands is not real, then what does that make it? Symbolic! So this is a ritual, in which, maybe a little like the mabbul when the world was young, everything that has been "created and made" is brought right up to the brink of disaster, the edge of the cliff, but then God says: stop! Enough. Now live, and don't take for granted what you have, because I am giving it to you.

It has also been called a rite of passage, a deliberately traumatic, life-changing ceremony whose purpose is to prepare an adolescent for adult life. A coming of age for Isaac (by the way, we have no idea how old he is supposed to have been when this occurred, so we can use our imagination, but he had to be at least old enough to carry the firewood), or perhaps symbolically a collective rite of passage also for the great people who would emerge one day from Abraham's seed in accordance with the covenant now reaffirmed.

A barmitzvah! Mazaltov!

22:1 wayyómer hinnéni
'And he said: Here I am.' That this is a story about devout obedience is confirmed by the three quasi-symbolic occurrences of the word hinnéni 'here I am' in the passages, always on the lips of Abraham, the protagonist. In this verse God calls him (saying: avraham) and Abraham simply responds: hinnéni. Then in v. 7, when Abraham and his son have left the servants behind and are walking alone, Isaac addresses his father (saying: avi 'My father'), and Abraham likewise responds: hinnénni v'ni 'Here I am, my son.' Lastly, when God's messenger (or angel) intervenes in v. 11 as Abraham stands knife in hand, he calls: avraham avraham; and Abraham's only word is: hinnéni. This word is sometimes used in the same way elsewhere in Gen., though not so insistently, e.g. when the aged Isaac wishes to summon his oldest son Esau he calls his name, and Esau responds: hinnéni. This is the story of Jacob's deception of Isaac to steal Esau's blessing, and when Esau later comes back and addresses his father (avi), Isaac replies: hinnéni mi atta v'ni 'Here I am; who are you my son?'

22:2 et y'xid'kha asher ahávta
KJV: 'thy only son Isaac, whom thou lovest'; Vulg. ...unigenitum quem diligis Isaac; LXX ton agapêton hon agapêsas [sic!]; EAS 'your beloved one, Isaac whom you hold so dear'; JPS: 'your favored one, whom you love.' Speiser justifies his translation of y'xid'kha as 'your beloved one' on the grounds that the word yaxid of which this is a possessed form "is not the regular word for 'one,' but a noun meaning 'the unique one, one and only.' Isaac, of course, was not the only son... The correct rendering is already found in LXX, and the meaning is reinforced in Heb. by the phrase that immediately follows." I beg to differ with Speiser (and the JPS translation which follows the same line) on this interpretation. To me it seems that, whether we like it or not, the dictionary meaning of yaxid is (CHALOT) 'only; one's only son/daughter', (EK) '(adj.) alone, only one.' Nobody says its dictionary meaning is 'beloved' or 'favored', and the only way I can see to interpret it as "really meaning" that here is via metaphorical extension - which is fine, but in the H original it is left to the reader to carry out, if wished, that extrapolation of meanings; it is not hard-wired into the text. Shouldn't the translation follow suit? I am not denying that yaxid can be understood in some such sense, I'm just pointing out that the primary meaning of what the text says is not that. Yiddish speakers may recognise the term בן־יחיד benyokhed  'only son' (UW), perhaps from the beloved song Rozhinkes mit mandlen which commences thus: אין דעם בית המקדש / אין א ווינקל חדר / זיצט די אלמנה בת ציון אליין / איר בן יחיד’ל יידעלע’ן / וויגט זי כסדר / און זינגט אים צום .שלאפן א לידעלע שיין In dem beys hamikdash / In a vinkl kheyder /
Zitst di almone Bas Tsioyn aleyn. / Ir ben yokhidl Yidele / Vigt zi keseyder / Un zingt im tsum shlofn a lidele sheyn
, 'In the temple, / In the corner of a room, / The widow Daughter of Zion is sitting alone, / As to her only son Yidele / She sings a pretty lullaby.' I think we would all agree that the way we interpret the diminutive benyokhidl in this context is essentially analogous to the meaning suggested by yaxid in the Genesis text (and that is no coincidence; Yiddish folklore has always drunk from such sources!): namely, the primary meaning is 'only son', but the idea conveyed is also one of special love and tenderness. The trouble is, of course, that as Speiser and other commentators are quick to point out, Isaac isn't Abraham's only son; there is Ishmael! Well, that may well be but I don't see it as the translator's job to sweep the contradiction, if there is one, under the carpet. I imagine that the source critics can't admit an assumption that the source of the present passage doesn't know about Ishmael, not because that is impossible a priori but rather because following their methods they have assigned this passage to the same source as the Ishmael story, so the source has to know about Ishmael. Once again, if that is a problem, it isn't the translator's job to solve it. God says y'xid'kha (and will say it again, for good measure, in v. 12, and yet again in v. 16), and it means 'only son'! I expect that God knows why.

w'lekh l'kha
There is surely some irony in the fact that God here uses the exact same phrase, lekh l'kha 'Go!', which he first spoke to Abraham in 12:1; regarding the idiomatic use of l'kha, see my note below on 22:8.  Furthermore, there he said: lekh l'kha... el ha'áretz asher ar'ékka 'Go... to the land which I will show you', and here he goes on to say ...‛al axad heharim asher omar elékha 'on one of the hills which I will tell you.' The irony seems to be that there, God's command opened up to Abraham a new life and introduced a promise; here, his orders seem to be aimed at putting an end to that same promise! Buber (MB, p. 41) notes that on both occasions when God tells Abraham lekh l'kha, the text goes on to tell us that wayyélekh - 'and he [i.e. Abra(ha)m] went.'

22:8 elohim yir'e lo hasse l'‛ola b'ni
JPS: 'God will see to the sheep for His burnt offering, my son.' KJV: 'My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering.' Vulg. 'Deus providebit sibi victimam holocausti fili mi.' A highly charged and magnificently poignant utterance, displaying Genesis at its literary best. First a word about yir'e lo, a BH idiom. Literally it means (almost untranslatably): 'God will see for himself a...' The lo, which is literally 'to him(self)', formed from the prepositional clitic l' and the pronominal suffix -o, is used here as l'kha is in the phrase lekh l'kha (see 12:1 and 22:2), in an idiomatic fashion to impart to the verb a nuance resembling a middle voice: so lekh is 'Go!', while lekh l'kha (with l'kha 'to you(rself)') is somewhat more emphatic, perhaps 'get thee!' In the present case, the verb that is being so reinforced, yir'e, literally means '(he) will see', but r-'-h is here being employed with what appears to be an extended, idiomatic sense of 'provide' (cf. the etymological makeup of this English verb: Latin pro-video, and see the Vulgate rendering above), or perhaps as suggested in CHALOT, 'choose'; or again, it may be best, after all, to stick with the idiomatic English translation offered in JPS ('see to'), which agrees with Speiser. Note that the H doesn't say 'his burnt offering' and I assume this possessive has been introduced in an attempt to compensate for the apparent absence of a literal equivalent (which is impossible anyway) of the H lo; but I am doubtful that this is necessary or an improvement of the translation, since this use of lo, as just explained, has the idiomatic function of nuancing the "voice" of the verb (perhaps to something like 'will see/choose for himself'), and that sense is in no way replicated by making the burnt offering 'his' instead of 'the'. But even if the ultimate meaning of the H verb in this context is something like 'provide' or 'choose', it still remains, literally, the verb 'to see', and that, in the H text, is significant. First of all, because it is the basis for the name game in v. 14. Buber takes the matter further, and believes that this very verb, r-'-h 'to see', is thematic to the entire Abraham cycle and therefore symbolic on a higher level (see MB, pp. 40-43); the argument he develops culminates with this (p. 43): "the symbols of this 'seeing' in all the stories become united for us in one mighty theme-word, not stated in Scripture precisely because it is so fundamental that we are expected to read it between the lines: Abraham the Seer." However, whatever we may make of that, let us return to the immediacy of the text as it is presented to us at this point and read it in all its simplicity: Isaac asks his father: Where is the animal for the sacrifice? and Abraham replies: God will see to the animal for the sacrifice, my son. There is no special vocative form in H: b'ni 'my son' might just as easily be a part of the answer to Isaac's question, a sort of coded admission of the truth; but I think Speiser is right to emphasize that, above all else, b'ni is used both here and in v. 7 (hinnénni v'ni) "as a mark of great tenderness." But what is perhaps most salient of all in Abraham's reply, from a literary viewpoint, is its calculated weakness: what sort of an answer is that?! For all that God will see and all that, it isn't much of an answer to a straightforward question! He might as well have said: "We'll see." In the dynamic of human verbal interactions, such an answer to such a question invites the addressee to ponder on what the speaker could possibly mean; it is the subtlest of hints, communicatively appropriate where the truth is pragmatically unspeakable. The delicacy with which all these implications have been artfully sown into a minimalistic dialogue that is superficially simple to the point of starkness can only be described as exquisite.

wayyél'khu sh'nehem yaxdaw
The repetition of the same clause exactly, 'and the two of them walked [on] together', at the end of vv. 6 and 8, which might normally be eschewed in modern prose and even thought "clumsy", is a perfectly calculated device in this narrative which draws on the standard resources of oral literature, turning the words into a sort of refrain which at the same time as it seems innocuous enough on the surface, acquires increasingly troubling overtones in the listener's mind with each enunciation because of the listener's foreknowledge of what is on Abraham's (and Isaac's??) mind. Because the text is thus, so to speak, "playing with us", and this seems to be an important psychological feature of the passage, I think it was a mistake of the JPS translation, which shows a lack of sensitivity to the true feel of the text, to disguise the drumbeat-like repetition of the identical words through stylistic variation, albeit minor: 'and the two walked off together', 'and the two of them walked on together.' (Incidentally, I commited the same error myself in the NBIE draft translation!)

22:9 
I can do no better than quote Etz Hayim (p. 119-120) at this point: "The narrative busies itself with the details of the preparatory procedures. Both Abraham and Isaac are silent. The anguish of this moment is beyond words." This is the result of highly controlled verbal art. The text at this critical point is simultaneously verbose and reticent. A word less would not make the story better; a word more would risk diminishing the pathos of the scene! (Translators take note.)

wayya‛aqod et yitzxaq
'And he bound Isaac.' This is the verb root (‛-q-d) which gave rise to the traditional name for the story, aqeda (see comment).

22:12 ki ‛atta yadá‛ti ki y're elohim atta
'For now I know that you fear God' (lit. '...that you are God-fearing' or '...that you are a fearer of God' or something similar; it is a participial construction) is the crucial reason given for stopping the function. In other words: You have passed the test. We always knew he would, of course; and so did God. As for Isaac, he was perhaps hopeful. In that case, it might be thought that the "for now I know" is a bit of a poor reason, almost untrue even (the now part): how could God not have known, since he's God? And since he already knew what the trial was set up to "find out", isn't this ordeal excessively cruel and unnecessary for a good man past his hundredth winter, not to mention the beloved son and future patriarch? Such questions have been asked through the ages and great sages have given their views on them, so I'm not going to say anything new. But we might wish to at least make sure we understand the verb yadá‛ti 'I know' which is at the heart of this conundrum. BH doesn't have an explicit present tense; in the indicative mood verbs have two tense-aspects, called perfect and imperfect, either of which can and do, in different contexts, convey a present but often with potential ambiguity. Stative verbs in particularly tend to adopt the perfect form to refer to the present time and this makes them aspectually as well as temporally ambiguous: among the possible meanings that can be read into yadá‛ti are 'I know' (stative, describes a resulting state) and 'I have found out' (dynamic, describes a current situation resulting from a completed "action"). I knew but I just thought I'd check, maybe?

22:13 w'hinne áyil axar
This and the next verse contain several awkwardnesses in terms of syntax: things just don't flow, and it is believed highly likely that some corruptions or other oddities have crept into the text. Here is one: as Speiser points out, literally this means 'and behold, a ram after'. Which, as he observes, makes about as much sense in Hebrew as it does in English. Some translations have tried to wrestle this into some sort of acceptabe shape by turning 'after' into 'behind', but apart from the fact that 'and behold, a ram behind' is only marginally a syntactic improvement, as Speiser notes, in terms of narrative context it is still pretty disastrous. If, against all the odds, we assume that the narrator had wished to say that the ram was behind Abraham, in H the expectation would be for the personal form axaraw 'behind him', not the bare axar. The most likely guess is that axar (which in consonantal writing is אחר, i.e. 'xr), was a "scribe-o" (or whatever they had instead of typos in those days) for exad 'one' (written אחד, i.e. 'xd; notice the similarity between the letters dalet and resh) so that the text must originally have said w'hinne áyil exad ne'exaz bass'vakh b'qarnaw 'and behold: one ram caught in the thicket by its horns.' Now nearly all copies of the Hebrew text do contain the unlikely axar, which means, since copyists were extremely meticulous when it came to the Torah, that the miscopying must have taken place a long, long time ago; once the mistake had been committed, later copyists were bound to repeat it by their code of not changing a jot or a tittle. Evidence for the assumed original, however, comes from LXX which says here kai idou krios heis 'and behold one ram', exactly as we hypothesize. The Vulg. is having none of it, and if the H text says 'behind' then 'behind' it shall be - but inserts tergum after post to improve the sense: viditque post tergum arietem 'and he saw a ram behind his back', which is not what usually happens when you raise your eyes as Abraham just did (a fuller quote is: levavit Abraham oculos viditque post tergum arietem), and in any case this can hardly be called a more literal rendering when the Hebrew says nothing about tergum. Onk. endeavours to get to the same place without mentioning anyone's back by saying that Abraham looked batar illen 'behind them'. KJV follows along, smoothing things over as much as it can: 'And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns.' On this occasion Speiser recommends we go with LXX and common sense, reading áyil exad (which is something) rather than áyil axar (which is nothing) and translating accordingly, and JPS likewise has: 'When Abraham looked up, his eye fell upon a ram, caught in the thicket by its horns.' It is true that 'a ram' is not exactly the same as 'one ram'; H does not use exad 'one' as an indefinite article in the manner of many languages, so that this means 'one ram', which miraculously was exactly the number Abraham needed for his purpose.

22:14 YHWH yir'e, YHWH yera'e
YHWH yir'e means 'YHWH will see (future)' or 'YHWH sees (consuetudinal present)', which may be taken on face value but of course harks back to v. 8 where Abraham said to Isaac elohim yir'e lo hasse 'God will see to (or provide, or choose) the lamb' (see note above). Thus the story incorporates a name game; except that this is not a very conventional kind of name for a hill. At the beginning of the narrative (v. 2) the region is named as éretz hammoriyya 'the land of Moriah' (the identity of which is uncertain), and it has been conjectured that perhaps (by a certain amount of implied sleight of hand) the present allusion to the verb form yir'e (or the root r-'-h) might have been intended as a clever (albeit obscure) presumed etymology for that name. Since there is a bit of apparent confusion in this part of the text, anything is possible. And the confusion continues with the comment added in the second part of the verse which changes both the syntax and the pointing in יראה to give a second version: (b'har YHWH) yera'e, meaning '(on God's mountain) it will be seen' or '...will appear' (or '...will be provided/chosen'?). If we can pick out anything in the haze, it is perhaps that there was a cluster of different, though similar, traditional folk explanations (such things happen) mixing up YHWH yir'e, elohim yir'é lo hasse, b'har YHWH yera'e, éretz hammoriyya... and the writers, who couldn't make their mind up which one to go with, attempted to stick them all in together and let us, the listeners or readers, worry about it. Talk about a translator's nightmare!

22:15 ff.
At first glance, the statement (v. 15) that "the angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time from heaven" appears to usher in a repetition of the praise we have heard in 22:12, when "the angel" spoke to him for the first time, but as it turns out, what follows, although based on the event that has just occurred, is in reality a (as it turns out, final) restatement, in vv. 17-18a, of God's promise and covenant with Abraham, which has been documented over the past ten chapters, and is thus a rounding off not just of this passage but of the main part of the whole Abraham story (although we have yet to read a little about his latter years in the fifth parasha to which we are now coming).

22:16 bi nishbá‛ti
This formula, lit. 'I swear by myself', appears to be simply a solemn announcement of God's ratification of his promise.

n'um YHWH
This is also a conventional formula, used nowhere else in Gen. but common in the prophets, which usually either introduces or concludes the words of God; KJV 'saith the Lord.' The word n'um is perhaps the construct state of na'um, passive participle of the verb n-'-m 'to utter, speak, utter a prophecy' (EK); this would make the formula rather close to the Spanish Palabra de Dios. 

‛an asher
'Because.' Only occurs this once in Gen. but nearly a hundred times in the Tanakh. Derived from the verb root ‛-n-h 'to answer (etc.).' 

22:17-18a
This is the recap of Abraham's covenant. See my note higher up.

22:18b ‛éqev asher
Another compound subordinating conjunction, only occurring in Gen. here and in 26:5, which may contain a deliberate (though not a verbally explicit) reference to this very event, thus emphasising its function as a ratification of the covenant: Isaac will be told there that the covenant is renewed in him ‛éqev asher shama‛ avraham b'qoli 'inasmuch as Abraham obeyed Me' (JPS). There are a dozen occurrences of this conjunction elsewhere in the Tanakh. The meaning is 'in consequence of the fact that, on account of (etc.), because'. The noun ‛éqev is literally 'heel' (cf. the name games around Isaac's son ya‛aqov 'Jacob' playing on the word 'heel'); thus it means '[on] the heel of (the fact that)...', so to speak.

Friday, April 17, 2015

Notes 23. Negotiations (21:22-34)

SYNOPSIS: Abraham complains to king Abimelech that the wells he dug have been expropriated from him. As a result of these negotiations they swear a pact; Abraham gives Abimelech seven ewes, and plants a tree. The place is named Beer-Sheba, with the expected name play. God is this time called El Olam.
With regard to its narrative content, this passage does not seem especially interesting or important for the progress of the story, establishing anything of moral significance, or the provision of relevant information. Yet it does bring together several of the more typical themes and topics of Genesis: a story about wells, and about a pact. So what is it really about? Well, it probably records a local tradition or two that we might otherwise never have known of: an explanation (one of several) for how Beersheba got its name - a question which must have fascinated someone to have listed so many, and a local God's name not heard elsewhere, el ‛olam. Moreover, Fox (EF p. 85) points out that this "interlude" seems to play a role in the overall rhythm of the narrative by giving the listeners' minds a rest from the drama of the fate of Ishmael which has just been told, leaving a space between it and the next, even more melodramatic scene that will constitute the climax of this parasha. But no spoilers this time!

There are also no doubt historical references in the story that are lost to us, thereby reducing our ability to make a great deal of sense out of the incident. Remembering that this takes place in Beersheba whereas Abimelech was the ruler of Gerar, apparently a Philistine stronghold at the time some distance away in the direction of Gaza and the coast, Speiser suggests that this might have been the scenario (EAS, p. 160):
Following his encounter with Abimelech ([ch. 20]), Abraham found a promising base of operations in the oasis of Beer-sheba, a number of miles inland from Gerar. Evidently, the ruler of Gerar sought to extend his jurisdiction to the district of Beer-sheba, but could not back his claim with an adequate show of force. When a dispute over water rights at Beer-sheba threatened to get out of hand, Abimelech deemed it wiser to conclude a treaty with the local settlers, which would assure him a certain degree of authority. It is such a mutual non-aggression pact that the story before us commemorates. Abimelech brings with him his army chieftain, and perhaps also his political councillor..., to strengthen his position as the stronger party, a claim which Abraham, as a newcomer, does not appear to dispute.
There is some confusion about the ritual side of the ceremony which has been interpreted by some commentators as self-contradictory, leading to the usual hypothesis of a conflation of distinct sources. Speiser (ibid.) disagrees:
What follows is a description of the ceremonies. The first group of animals symbolizes the basic pact... The second group, on the other hand, which consists of seven ewe-lambs, is clearly labeled as a gift, the acceptance of which by Abimelech is to constitute validation (‛eda) of Abraham's claim to the well. In other words, there is only one formal occasion with two parts to it, instead of two separate pacts - or two different sources.
The ritual sacrifice of the first group of animals is described in v. 27; the additional gift of seven ewe-lambs is described in vv. 28-30.

21:23 im tishqor li
The verb sh-q-r, glossed as 'to lie, deal falsely', occurs half a dozen times in the entire Tanakh, and just this once in Gen.

ul'nini ul'nekhdi
Synonyms used together for effect rather than to increase the information in the proposition, and always in the same combination (3 times in the Tanakh): nin 'descendant', nékhed 'ditto.' The Onk. gloss uvivri uv'var b'ri 'or my son or my son's son', the LXX mêde to sperma mou mêde to onoma mou 'nor my seed nor my name', the Vulg. et posteris meis stirpique meae and so on are approximations; but it is not compulsory to have two conjoined nouns in the translation.

asher gárta bah
Regarding the meaning of g-w-r, see my brief note on shev in 20:15.

21:24 w'hokhíax... ‛al odot b'er hammáyim
The hiphil of the root y-k-x together with a complement introduced by ‛al, as here, is glossed as 'reproach'; other glosses of hokhíax are (CHALOT) 'to set someone right, reprove, requite, give judgment, settle quarrels' or (EK) 'to decide, judge, show to be right, prove, convince, reprove, correct, rebuke'. The participle mokhíax can mean 'arbitrator.' For al odot see note on 21:11.

gaz'lu
The verb g-z-l means 'to take away by force, seize' and occurs again in 31:31.

21:27 wayyikhr'tu sh'nehem b'rit
It is interesting to consider this example of a formal b'rit (pact, covenant) between people, since it gives us a basic paradigm with which to be able to compare the various accounts in Gen. of covenants between God and people. Notice again the use of the verb k-r-t 'cut' for the act of formalizing the b'rit and the corresponding physical ritual of cutting animals in half, which must surely have been a tradition with very ancient roots in a primitive symbolism that is somewhat lost to us, I'm afraid, whatever the theories might propose! Speiser suggests we shouild translate b'rit as 'pact' when it is between humans, as here, and reserve 'covenant' as the translation when it is between humans and God, but I can see no justification for any such thing since no such distinction is made in the H, where a b'rit is a b'rit, and if this implies that God can do what humans can, so be it!

21:28 wayyattzev... l'vadd'hen
The verb n-tz-b means 'to stand, place' (cf. 18:2); here the hiphil (causative) is employed. This seems to refer to a separate group of animals from those just sacrificed; see the comments.

21:30 l'‛eda
As a witness (see comment above). Cf. also 31:52 where the ‛eda between Jacob and Laban is a mattzeva, a pillar - a word derived from the same verb root n-tz-b!

ki xafárti et habb'er hazzot
In Gen., the verb x-p-r means 'to dig' and is always used in reference to wells (b'erot).

Thursday, April 16, 2015

Notes 22. Expulsion (21:1-21)

SYNOPSIS: Sarah becomes pregnant and gives birth to their son Isaac (amid more punning relating to laughter). Further conflict ensues between the mothers of Abraham's two children, which culminates in Hagar being sent away with her son. Wandering in the wilderness, she runs out of water and prepares for the worst, when an angel materialises, points out a well she hadn't noticed, and forecasts that Ishmael is to "become a great nation". Ishmael lived in the desert and married an Egyptian.
Genesis reads as if it were the saga of an actual family: Abraham the grand old man, Isaac the favourite son, Jacob the smart grandson, Joseph the brilliant great-grandon, the wives, the brothers... And some think such a story is what the book is about. Others have suggested it is really a tribal history dressed up as a family epic, and that these much-loved characters and the rest of the cast - Lot, Laban, Hagar, Ishmael, Esau, Joseph's brothers and so on - are really just personifications of tribal groups and nations. Still others think there may be a bit of truth in both views and no need to be too inflexible about it: Abraham sounds more like a real person than a tribe, which is not to say he might not have been followed about by a fair-sized group of people including his family and "staff" (a.k.a. servants back then), but within this narrative framework there are some anecdotes that do smack of tribal legends.

Take today's passage: surely it is most easily read by assuming it contains a mix of different story dimensions and invites us to understand it on a variety of levels rather than just one.

There is one moment in particular in this story that I personally find one of the most touching in all of Genesis, and which does not, at that point at least, bring to mind tribal origins but rather raw human drama. After some trouble in Abraham's household, Sarah's servant and Abraham's surrogate wife Hagar has been kicked out together with her little boy. (How little? Never mind, that's a detail we'll come to later. Just enjoy the story.) They have gone off into the wilderness, just the two of them, in the blazing heat, and their supply of water has run out. Her beloved child is in danger of getting dehydrated, he is going to die and there is nothing she can do about it. Finally she gives up hope; there is nothing to be done, it is the end. Hagar lovingly places the boy under a bush. Even though it might give a little shade, it won't save his life. She kisses her beloved child farewell and walks away. Where is she going, why is she leaving him alone? Because the thought in the crazed, grief-stricken mother's mind is: If there is nothing else I can do to keep my baby alive, I cannot bear to watch him die. So... (21:16, KJV) wattélekh wattéshev lah minnéged harxeq kimTaxawe qéshet ki am'ra al er'e b'mot hayyáled wattéshev minnéged wattissa et qolah wattevq 'And she went, and sat her down over against him a good way off, as it were a bowshot: for she said, Let me not see the death of the child. And she sat over against him, and lift up her voice, and wept.' The mother weeps in desperation - wattéshev minnéged wattissa et qolah wattevq - and we all weep with her, for who would not be moved by this terrible scene? The tale unfolding, at this point at least, is not of tribal history, it is of human pathos.

Curiously this, one of the most movingly human passages in all of Genesis (though not the only one, that is true) and one of its literary wonders, is not told of one of the Israelite patriarchs or matriarchs but concerns, rather, the part of the family that was cast out, the other branch, not di undzere but di andere. But the story is not told for the purpose of gloating, nor is it told in such a way as to encourage any such thought; quite the contrary, our heart goes out to Hagar and we too grieve for Ishmael. In case you haven't read the whole story yet, SPOILER ALERT: he doesn't die under that bush, for God also cared about him and sent an angel to Hagar to tell her not to give up hope. Her son was destined to be the father of many nations. Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well nearby, and they were saved. As the lad grew up, God kept him in his sights. He carried on living in the desert, became a great bowsman, and when he grew up he married a woman from Egypt, like his mother.

That is where this particular passage about Hagar and her son ends, but we know a little more from another passage we've already read (ch. 16). As a matter of fact, the story told there and the one we are reading now have enough in common to make it almost certain that, in origin, we once again here have two versions of one story, no doubt elaborated somewhat differently in variant traditions but with a common core. In the first story, Hagar also goes into the wilderness but her son hasn't been born yet. In that story, an angel also appears to Hagar, but tells her to go back to Sarah and to give birth to the child she is already expecting (unless we adopt the theory expounded in CB, p. 231, that verses 16:9-10 were invented by the editor who put Genesis together so that both versions might be inserted into a single narrative thread). On that occasion too, the angel foretells Ishmael's future (16:12, JPS): w'hu yihye pére adam yado vakkol w'yad kol bo w'‛al pne khol exaw yishkon 'He shall be a wild ass of a man; / His hand against everyone, / And everyone's hand against him; / He shall dwell alongside of all his kinsmen." The meaning of that prediction is a little uncertain, but that need not concern us now. Scholars believe that J was the source of the chapter 16 episode and that the passage we are now reading was largely the work of E (like the preceding passage).

An interesting point worth noting about this story is that in the E version we are now reading, Ishmael is never mentioned by name. He is referred to as ben haama 'the slave woman's son' (v. 13), ben hagar hammitzrit 'Hagar the Egyptian woman's son' (v. 9), ben ha'ama hazzot 'this slave woman's son' (v. 10), b'nah 'her son' (v. 10), hannáar 'the lad' (vv. 12, 17-20) or hayyéled 'the boy' (vv. 14, 15, 16), but his name is not once mentioned, which suggests that the name of Ishmael was not part of the variant of the tradition from which this version came. Now as a matter of fact, the name Ishmael hardly appears in the other story either, but for a rather different reason: in that story he hasn't been born yet! It is only at the very end of that story that an angel appears to Hagar and foretells (16:11, JPS): hinnakh hara w'yoladt ben w'qarat sh'mo yishma‛el ki shama‛ YHWH el ‛onyekh 'Behold you are with child / And shall bear a son; / You shall call him Ishmael, / For the LORD has paid heed to your suffering.'

So both these stories are really about Hagar, the lowly servant of Sarah, who will be the mother of a great people thanks to the fact that her son, who almost died (or might not even have been born), survived through a divine intervention. That boy was the son of Abraham, and it is intimated that Abraham's concern and solicitude for his firstborn (apparently much to his wife Sarah's annoyance) weighed on God's decision to protect Ishmael.

Come to think of it, the parallel (along with the differences, obviously) between this schema and the story of the "sacrifice of Isaac", which we shall be coming to shortly (ch. 22), is also striking. Hagar loves nothing more than her son Ishmael; Abraham loves nothing more than his son Isaac. Both find themselves with their beloved sons in an inhospitable place (Hagar in the wilderness, Abraham on a mountain), in a situation where the boy comes very close to death. Then an angel appears, speaks words of hope and foretells greatness for the boy and his offspring, and points to the remedy for their immediate problem (in Hagar's case, a well with water; in Abraham's, a ram caught in the thicket). They give thanks to God and name the place where this has happened. In 16:14, Hagar names the well b'er laxay ro'i (perhaps meaning 'Well Of The Living One Who Sees Me', cf. EF). In 22:14, Abraham names the place where he almost sacrificed Isaac YHWH yir'e, i.e. 'YHWH Sees'. Even the names are similar! Even though both stories focus on the fate of the sons (and they are both Abraham's sons), dramatically these are really chiefly stories about the figures of Hagar and Abraham, respectively, and about God's protection of them, sending angels to avert catastrophe with the same message in both cases: "Don't give up!"

Literalists must contend with some difficulties of chronology surrounding this passage, which clearly depicts little Ismael as a baby at the time of the action (try depositing a thirsty adolescent under a bush in the middle of the wilderness), and yet he was thirteen already when he was circumcised (17:25), and that was well  before the glint in old Abraham's eye (or rather, the courteous smile when he looked up and greeted three travellers who predicted Isaac's birth a year thence, a remark which made Sarah laugh, remember). We are assured by those with patience to do the sums that if you take all the age indications into account (remember that Abraham was 100 when Isaac was born), that makes Ishmael sixteen years old at the time. How did old Abraham have the strength to get the lad onto poor Hagar's back (see v. 14)?? Here CB has a point when he tries to take a sensible approach: "If we had to take Genesis as a continuous narrative there would be a contradiction, but all difficulty disappears when we realize that the statements as to the age of the patriarch belong to a different story."

21:1 
The two halves of this verse form an obvious parallellism, a BH poetic device:
waYHWH paqad et sara ka'asher amar
wayá
‛as YHWH l'sara ka'asher dibber
 'Now YHWH took account of Sara as he had said,
YHWH dealt with Sara as he had spoken' (EF)

wYHWH paqad et sara
The meaning of the verb p-q-d is a complicated matter. CHALOT gives the following glosses just for the qal form: 'to miss (someone), make a search, have a look, hunt up, seek out, take care of, long for, call up, muster, entrust, commission, appoint, call (someone) to account, avenge, put (something) away, list by name', all in addition to the meaning obviously intended here which occurs when the verb's subject is God: 'to take care of, take up the cause of.' This clause is translated in KJV 'And the LORD visited Sarah', which is copied by some subsequent translation; this obviously must have been taken from the Vulg. which has visitavit, which in turn I assume was based on the LXX which says epeskepsato, which I suspect might have originally been intended in a different sense from that misread into it by all these subsequent renderings. EAS has 'Yahweh now took note of Sarah', and JPS is similar. I suppose the idea is that God said to himself something along the lines of: "Right, time to do something about poor old Sarah." So he did.

ka'asher amar... ka'asher dibber
(JPS) 'as He had promised', 'as He had spoken' because in 17:16 (JPS) God said to Abraham w'gam natátti mimménna l'kha ben 'I will give you a son by her' (i.e. by Sarah).

21:2 lammo‛ed asher dibber oto elohim
(JPS) 'at the set time of which God had spoken' refers of course to (17:21) lammo‛ed hazze basshana ha'axéret 'at this season next year', (18:10) ka‛et xayya 'next year' and (18:14) lammo‛ed ashuv elékha ka‛et xayya ul'sara ven 'I will return to you at the same season next year, and Sarah shall have a son' (all translations JPS).

21:4 ka'asher tziwwa oto elohim
I.e. exactly as God had commanded Abraham in 17:12 (JPS): uven sh'monat yamim yimmol lakhem kol zakhar 'every male among you shall be circumcised at the age of eight days'.  

21:6 tz'xoq ‛asa li elohim kol hasshoméa‛ yitzxaq li
The usual superabundance of excuses for using the verb root tz-x-q surround any mention of the birth of Isaac (yitzxaq). See (once more) my comments on name games. I'm not sure if we can go so far as to read shoméa as a veiled jab at yishma‛el; it does seem a bit of a coincidence...

21:7 mi millel l'avraham
EAS points out that the verb m-l-l 'say, declare' is only used in poetry. One is reminded of the traditional Chanukah song: mi yemallel g'vurot yisra'el, otan mi yimne. This is the only occurrence of the verb in the whole Torah; it occurs in just four verses in other parts of the Tanakh.

21:9 m'tzaxeq (and following verses)
The piel of tz-x-q, used here, means 'to joke, play, amuse oneself, etc.' (CHALOT). The JPS translation of the verse is thus: 'Sarah saw the son whom Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Abraham playing.' So also the LXX (idousa de Sarra ton huion Agar tês Aiguptias... paizonta) and the Vulg. (cumque vidisset... ludentem). That is, m'tzaxeq means 'playing'. It does not, apparently, mean 'mocking' as in the KJV and translations that follow suit, or RV with se burlaba; it doesn't even mean 'laughing', an apparent attempt to "compromise" while still leaving the door open to negative interpretations of what Sarah saw Ishmael do in this scene (ESV, EF). The LXX adds ...meta Isaak tou huiou autês 'with her son Isaac', which confirms that the translators were clearly thinking of them playing, not acting nastily, but it looks like an addition. Thus, modern commentators seem to agree that the unwarranted interpretation of m'tzaxeq as 'mocking' distorts the text and should be removed. Speiser thinks this insinuation was borne of a desire to put Sarah in a better light by giving her a cause for grievance, but the real narrative seems to have the intention of making the situation far more subtle: Ishmael has not wronged Isaac but Sarah is troubled by seeing him play (by the side of her own son, we may probably assume) because she is anxious to reaffirm the difference in status between them. And she makes herself perfectly clear when she speaks to Abraham about it (v. 10, JPS): she says garesh ha'ama hazzot w'et b'nah ki lo yirash ben ha'ama hazzot im b'ni ‛im yitzxaq 'Cast out that slave-woman and her son, for the son of that slave shall not share in the inheritance with my son Isaac.' That was the problem; it wasn't about "Ishmael mocking"; let's be clear. Now morally, we may well think that that perhaps does not put Sarah in the most flattering of lights. But in terms of life it is believable, and in terms of character it turns Sarah into a real, three-dimensional character, no longer a cartoon figure in a Victorian children's story. No wonder Abraham is unhappy about Sarah's attitude (v. 11), but what can he do? He is caught in the middle and hesitant about how to handle this growing feud between two headstrong women - which in turn makes him a little more rounded as a literary creation too! In the end, it is God who steps in, has a word with Abraham and puts his divine foot down, and the deal he offers Abraham (vv. 12-13) is this: don't worry about Ishmael, do as Sarah says because after all Isaac is the one who's going to inherit the business, but I'll make sure (since I'm God) that Ishmael doesn't get such a raw deal, he'll do alright for himself too - I promise. And we readers of Genesis are the winners here because we gain a far superior piece of literature by it than the shoddy moralizing pamphlet that is the product of changing playing to mocking.

21:11 ‛al odot b'no
The complex preposition ‛al odot means 'on account of'; it occurs twice more in Gen. (21:25, 26:32). 

21:14 sam ‛al shikhmah
EAS points out that we should not think of shikhmah as literally 'her shoulder', but rather think of her carrying these things on her back. The word translates 'back' when applied to animals, so this is perfectly reasonable.

21:17 wayyishma‛ elohim
Literally 'God heard', this is understood in the sense of 'God heeded' but is also, without any doubt, a nod towards the name game for yishma‛el interpreted to mean 'God hears.' 

hanná‛ar
The meaning of ‛ar is 'lad', but what age range can it cover? A very wide one, it seems. For the benefit of anyone still pulling their hair out over the vexed question of how old Ishmael could have been in this story, CB points out that in Exodus the term will be used of Moses at the age of three months (Exod. 2:6, JPS): wattiftax wattir'éhu et hayyéled w'hinne ‛ar bokhe 'When she opened it, she saw that it was a child, a boy crying.'

21:20 rove qashat
This is obscure in the H, but is usually assumed to mean that he became a skilled bowman. Perhaps a subtle textual irony might have been inserted here: he was to grow up to be a bowman, and back in v. 16, where a variety of ways were available to describe Hagar choosing a place to sit at some distance from her baby, the phrase chosen was harxeq kimTaxawi qéshet 'a bow-shot away.' Let us take note: the text of Genesis, while based on popular oral tradition, is nonetheless exquisitely constructed; these little things do not happen by chance.

21:20 wayyéshev b'midbar paran
Paran was the area to the west of Edom (south of Canaan).