- Text of the passage in Nawat
There is no denying that this makes for a slightly less than credible complete narrative. Rather than dwelling on that, let us consider what it tells us about the process whereby this complete narrative has been pieced together. Clearly there was an endeavour to conserve everything, whichever the source of information, and the way all the information was integrated into Genesis varied depending on the way it fit together. If the information was identical in form and content, it was simply superimposed and conflated. When two stories were completely different but obviously pertained to the same place on the timeline, they were juxtaposed (like the two stories of creation). When they were recognisably the same story but some things were said in two different ways, we often find both statements more or less side-by-side; we have seen several examples of this. When they contradicted each other on a point of detail, we sometimes find both versions of the data with no attempt in the text to explain the mismatch, such as when God tells Noah both to take two and to take seven specimens of each "clean" animal.
Most of the time, this works. The basic principle in this procedure might be summed up as: conflate when you can (there may have been two versions of the flood story; that doesn't mean there were two floods!), but don't omit (if one source says two by two, and the other says seven by seven, then play safe and say both!). Here, however, is a story the different versions of which, for narrative coherence, cannot be conflated without omitting details on the one hand or producing nonsense on the other. There were three versions: an Abe-Sarah-Egypt-Pharaoh version, an Abe-Sarah-Gerar-Abimelech version and an Isaac-Rebekah-Gerar-Abimelech version. How could you possibly make them the same story without leaving anything out? Did they go to Egypt and deal with Pharaoh, or to Gerar and deal with Abimelech? They couldn't be in both places at the same time and deal with both rulers simultaneously; these had to have been different sojourns. Was it Abraham and Sarah or was it Isaac and Rebekah? It couldn't have been all four of them together! Separate stories were the only way to go, in this particular case. It was the only option left open to the compilers by their rules and methods of compilation. In that respect, at least, it is coherent.
So tell us the story again of the man who went somewhere with his wife and they thought she was his sister...
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| Kadesh (qadesh, here shown as "Kadesh-barnea") was far off to the south of Beer-sheba; Shur (not shown) was near the coastal border area. Gerar (g'rar, also not shown) is believed to have been located between Beer-sheba and Gaza - not "between Kadesh and Shur." Source: T. Dowley, The student Bible atlas. |
The geography of this verse is awkward. Source critics observe that since this is where the E document makes its entrance, if the second word, missham 'from there', belongs to E then we cannot be certain that the sham refers to where the preceding narrative (from J) last left Abraham (which was at home in Mamre). But where he was coming from is the least of our worries, what we'd like to know is where he went. We read that he went ártza hannégev 'to the land of the south (the Negeb)', which is fine, but then the text adds ben qadesh uven shur 'between Kadesh and Shur.' Both have been mentioned before. In 14:7, qadesh was equated with ‛en mishpaT, a place name not occurring elsewhere, and then in 16:14 the well associated with Hagar, b'er laxay ro'i, is described as located between Kadesh and Bared. Shortly before this (16:7), the angel appeared to Hagar ‛al ha‛áyin b'dérekh shur 'by the spring on the Shur road.' Kadesh was located well to the south of Beer Sheba, at the southern edge of Canaan within what would become the kingdom of Edom, while Shur is thought to have been located at the northeastern edge of Egypt, roughly to the northwest of Kadesh. That's fine, except that it then says wayyágor bigrar 'and he stayed at Gerar', which throws the spanner in the works because Gerar wasn't between Kadesh and Shur, it is thought to have been between Beersheba and Gaza, quite a bit further north. The solution suggested by Speiser is that the clause wayyágor bigrar is to be interpreted as a preposed time clause: 'When he was staying in Gerar...' For the verb, cf. v. 15 below.
20:2 wayyómer avraham el sara ishto axoti hi
For this sentence to make sense, here the preposition el can only mean 'of, about, concerning' rather than 'to' (although usually wayyómer avraham el sara ishto would mean 'Abraham said to his wife Sarah'): 'Abraham said of Sarah his wife, "She is my sister"' (JPS). We already saw a similar use of the prefixed preposition l' (which is often synonymous with el) in 17:20 (ul'yishma‛el sh'ma‛tíkha 'and regarding Ishmael I have heeded you.' This sense of el probably goes back to the basic meaning of the preposition which, acc. to CHALOT, is 'toward.' The same use (but of l') is seen again in v. 13 (el kol hammaqom asher navo shámma imri li axi hu).
avimélekh
Enter king Abimelech of Gerar, a Philistine, who if frequently mentioned in this and the next chapter and also again in ch. 26 (in connection with Abraham's future son Isaac).
wayyiqqax et sara
The sense in which Abimelech took Sarah is ambiguous except inasmuch as the text that follows will clarify it. Most of my commentators are silent about this sticky issue; CB suggests that "...into his harem" be understood. I discussed the use of l-q-x, the verb occurring here, to mean 'to marry' in my note on 16:2 (re: bo na el shifxati).
20:3 baxalom
All the commentators are quick to point out that E is particularly fond of dreams as a means of communication with God. For a discussion of this and other dreams in Genesis, see my post here.
20:6 mexaTo li
This is the first occurence of the verb x-T-' which is conventionally translated as 'to sin.' It also occurs here in v. 9 (me ‛asíta lanu ume xaTáti lakh), and will return in ch. 31, 39, 40 and 42-44. Acc. to EK the first (and primary?) gloss is 'to miss the mark', the second is 'to wrong [someone]' and the third is 'to sin.' Other translations given in CHALOT include 'to be at fault' and 'to be guilty.' The English verb 'to sin' which almost always implies or entails sinning against God thus only represents one specialized subset of the range of the H word, and the same is true, of course, of other languages which (most likely through Christian influence) possess a verb translating the specific religious concept of "sin" (as opposed to the general notions of not getting something right, failing at something, injuring someone's rights or causing someone offence), and if such a term is not readily available, we perhaps should not jump to the conclusion that we absolutely must provide one in order to translate sentences which in H only contain x-T-'.
20:7 ki navi hu
Although navi 'prophet' is a very frequent word in the Tanakh as a whole, its distribution among its parts is uneven, and this is the only occurrence of the word in Genesis. EK thinks it is probably derived from the verbal root n-b-' meaning 'to call, proclaim'. The idea seems to be that a navi is someone who has access both to people and to God and is therefore in a position to intercede in favour of one or the other before the opposite party.
20:8 wayyashkem avimélekh babbóqer
I.e. 'In the morning, Abimelech...' (see note on 19:27.)
20:9 me ‛asíta lanu ume xaTáti lakh
JPS: 'What have you done to us? What wrong have I done...' See my note on v. 6 above.
20:12
Bible scholars receive a new set of problems to worry about now, because marrying a half-sibling is forbidden in the Torah. However, Abraham could not be subject to Mosaic law because it hadn't come into existence yet. Nonetheless, we would not expect such a tradition about Abraham to come about among people who observed the laws of the Torah, so if this story was taken at all seriously, it may date from an earlier period when such marriages were still considered permissible. But there would seem to be a good chance, at any rate, that this statement about Sarah was not too deeply rooted in the traditions about the patriarchs since no mention of such a relationship is made in ch. 11, when the family tree of Abram and his relatives is set out. On the other hand, that genealogical sketch does say that Milcah, the wife of Abram's brother Nahor, was Nahor's cousin since she was the daughter of their other brother Haran (i.e. she was Lot's sister) (11:29): w'shem éshet naxor milka bat haran. If the text tells us that and doesn't say anything about Sarah being Abraham's half-sister, either the author of the passage had no such information, or, as some commentators intimate, possibly it was censored - precisely, one assumes, because this is forbidden in the Torah.
20:13 ka'asher hit‛u oti elohim mibbet avi
The verb form hit‛u is a hiphil (causative) form of the root t-‛-h 'to wander', meaning 'they caused to wander.' The literal meaning of the phrase is 'when elohim caused me to wander from my father's house...'. Unusually, the verb form hit‛u is marked for a plural subject (-u), which implies that the subject, elohim, is here regarded as semantically plural. That is a problem because, while elohim sometimes does mean "gods" with a plural referent, it usually refers to the semantically singular Israelite "God", and that is the God who, acc. to ch. 12, told Abram to leave his father's house and "wander" to Canaan. Here, then, we have a challenge to commentators and rigorous translators.
imri li axi hu
See note on v. 2 (wayyómer avraham el sara...).
20:15 shev
This is the imperative of y-sh-b 'to sit, reside', which contrasts with the verb g-w-r 'stay (without permanent residence rights)', which is the verb used at the beginning of this narrative in v. 1: wayyágor bigrar.
20:16 hinne lakh k'sut ‛enáyim
Much has been written and suggested about the full meaning of k'sut ‛enáyim which lit. means a 'covering of eyes.' It must have a conventional or symbolic meaning (or both), but it is still debated what exactly that meaning is.
l'khol asher ittakh w'et kol w'nokhaxat
It is very uncertain what this means and the possibility that the text is corrupt must be entertained.
20:17-18
These verses are mysterious. They say that the illnesses that had struck the king's household were cured, but we haven't been told of any illnesses until now. Even now, v. 17 only tells us they were cured; then, as if it were an afterthought, v. 18 informs us that YHWH (a name that hasn't occurred throughout the narrative until now) had struck all the women with sterility on account of Sarah. All a bit fishy to say the least.
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