Notes 48: Wrap-up (35:21-29)

SYNOPSIS: Further along in their journey, Jacob learns that his son Reuben has had sex with Bilha, Jacob's concubine. Then we have a quick run-down of Jacob's twelve sons. Jacob goes to see his father Isaac in Mamre. When Isaac passes away he is buried there by his two sons.

• Text of the passage in Nawat

When Jacob left Padan-Aram in ch. 31, his purpose was to return home. Some doubt exists about whether it is reasonable to think that his parents could still have been alive even then, especially considering that in the scene leading up to Jacob's departure from Isaac and Rebecca's home Isaac appears as an old man whose health is already failing, if not his mental faculties too! However, we have already known Genesis to be quite vague about such matters; remember how inexplicit the story was about when exactly Abraham passed away a generation back! But of course Jacob, away in Mesopotamia before the advent of the internet or a relilable postal service, may simply not have known, in those twenty years, how things were back home (or whether there still was a "back home").

So off he went, but rather than go straight home when he reached Canaan, he set up house up north in Shechem, and stayed there while his children grew up. Now that he has left Shechem with his family and visited Bethel to keep an old promise, he is heading home to Mamre at last. Sadly, Rachel never got that far, but departed this life leaving Jacob with a farewell gift, the new-born Benjamin, Joseph's only full brother and Jacob's last child. Why Jacob had delayed so long in returning to his family in Hebron is unexplained, and it is even more surprising to read that when he finally got there, apparently Isaac was still living! Of course, these difficulties are attenuated considerably if we decide either not to take everything so literally, or to accept the well-known hypothesis that what we are reading is an amalgam of snippets collected together from several source documents. But anyway, however we want to deal with that, now Jacob's clan (minus Rachel and plus baby Ben) are heading south in the direction of the oaks of Mamre.

As the company progress along their way, the narrator fills us in on a juicy bit of gossip (v. 21a) about an affair between Jacob's son Reuben and his step-mother Bilhah (just in case we thought Genesis was all about the straight and narrow), and then gives us a rundown of the list of Jacob's sons, which is helpful even though the information was already provided earlier (when they were born) and helps to bridge the story and get us through the famly's journey up to their arrival at Mamre.

The homecoming ought to have been exciting, or at least newsworthy, but Genesis is as austere on the matter as it was concerning the death of Rachel. We are told that Jacob arrived in as many words (v. 27): wayyavo ya‛aqov el yitzxaq aviv 'and Jacob came to his father Isaac.' This is followed immediately (v. 28-9) by the standard notice of the years Isaac lived and his eventual passing, to which is added the information that Esau and Jacob buried him. Thus the narrative substance of these lines is sparse and their principal function, in terms of the story, seems to be to gather up the loose ends and wrap up this cycle of the saga in order to begin setting the stage for what's coming next (Joseph's Story).
 
There are other levels on which the variegated components of this hotchpotch may be read.

Reuben was Jacob's firstborn son and therefore ought to have inherited the birthright, but in the event he seems to have fallen from grace at some point: was the Bilhah scandal it? Information is lacking, but like several recent episodes, this one is read by some commentators as an encoded recollection of tribal history. As a tribe, Reuben does not figure in later Israelite history as a protagonist, so, the reasoning goes, it must have done something or something must have happened to it. Perhaps there was a political falling-out; maybe what the Reubenites did involved the Bilhah tribal grouping (i.e. Dan and Naphtali). Whatever it was, other parts of the Hebrew Scriptures make it clear that the Reuben tribe did fall from grace, both through the words spoken of it and its absence from a leading role in subsequent history. A note in Etz Hayim goes further, suggesting that even the description of Reuben's and Bilhah's personal "infidelity" is not to be taken on its face value as a love affair at all but as a "calculated challenge to his father's authority... a political, not a lustful act." 

The last two words in this ultra-concise account of something unsavoury (whatever it was) are equally enigmatic: wayyishma‛ yisra'el 'Israel found out.' For one thing, is this Israel the father and husband, a.k.a. Jacob, or Israel the clan, people or nation? For another, nu, so he found out; what did he do about it? As EH says, "There is certainly much more to this story than is revealed here, but the narrator chose to omit the unpleasant details. The episode ends abruptly." And that is about as abrupt an ending as you can have!

The checklist of Jacob-Israel's sons which comes next groups the sons according to their mothers, and concludes with the comment (v. 26b) élle b'ne ya‛aqov asher yullad lo b'faddan aram 'These are the sons of Jacob who were born to him in Paddan-aram', which is not strictly one-hundred-percent true according to the story of the birth of Benjamin we just finished reading. Perhaps it's a slip; if it isn't, then there was an alternative tradition which this reflects.

The sudden appearance of Esau at Isaac's funeral (v. 29) would be fine in the Hollywood version, but I wonder how long it took for word to get to him in Seir and then for Esau to get from there to Hebron. But however he did it, it is convenient that Esau should be mentioned at this point because it gives the narrator a chance to do an "And speaking of Esau..." transition and so to add the last bit of wrapping that is needed before we can turn the page and start reading about Joseph.

Notes 47: Good news and bad news (35:16-20)

SYNOPSIS: Then on the road from Bet-El to Efrat, Rachel goes into labour and it doesn't go well. Her second son and Jacob's youngest, Benyamin, is born and Rachel names him 'son of my affliction', and then she dies. Jacob buried her there and erected a monument to her.

• Text of the passage in Nawat

According to some, Jacob unwittingly predicted Rachel's death in Gilead when Laban accused him of stealing his idols, to which Jacob retorted, since he was unaware that his wife Rachel had taken them (31:32): ‛im asher timtza et elohékha lo yixye 'Anyone with whom you find your gods shall not remain alive!' I think there are abundant reasons for scepticism about this theory. For one thing, while Jacob's heated challenge adds palpably to the dramatic tension of the search scene, in the event Laban did not find his gods with anyone, even though the audience knew who had them; if it were really to be believed that such a serious event as Rachel's death had been provoked by the literal interpretation of Jacob's highly rhetorical utterance, surely by the same token the interpretation should stick to its own priniciple of literalness and thereby result in Rachel's being saved, since literally the premise did not come about? My objection concerning this is that if it had been the intention of the narrative to imply such a connection, I think the authors would have been rather more meticulous about the details. Secondly, everybody has to die some time, and for women in the past death in childbirth was common enough, but if we follow the chronology of Genesis (the end-product at least), Rachel doesn't die until years after the scene with Laban when, now living in Canaan, Jacob's other children had grown into adult men and women in Shechem before their removal to Bethel and on towards the south. Again, I would object here that if the narrative was trying to establish a cause-effect relationship, it could have tried to do so somewhat more effectively.

Furthermore, there is considerable reason for doubt about exactly what it was that Jacob said to Laban, because in the absence of punctuation the verse is really ambiguous. Jacob's words in full were: ‛im asher timtza et elohékha lo yixye néged axénu hakker l'kha ma ‛immadi w'qax lakh which, in an unpunctuated English rendering, read something like: 'anyone with whom you find your gods shall not live in the presence of our kinsmen go and discover what I am holding and take it'; the question is whether néged axénu 'in the presence of our kinsmen' is to be parsed with what precedes ("shall not live in the presence of our kinsmen") or with what follows ("go and discover in the presence of our kinsmen"). If the former, then Jacob was possibly not suggesting the death penalty for the person with whom the idols were found (even if they had been found)! The translators of the Septuagint read the verse in a way which implies they parsed néged axénu as the complement of lo yixye: Παρ᾿ ᾧ ἐὰν εὕρῃς τοὺς θεούς σου, οὐ ζήσεται ἐναντίον τῶν ἀδελφῶν ἡμῶν.

Moreover, independently of that syntactic uncertainty, it is a known fact that many of the characters of Genesis are given to outbursts of fiery rhetoric and hyperbole at times, and this does seem to be one such time; Genesis is the more precious as literature for having preserved some specimens of this kind of talk in its dialogues, and it is not as if every time somebody produces such emotional verbal manifestations their words are automatically translated into real events. People say things like What am I living for?! without dropping dead; although of course all such people do die, some day, but surely nobody thinks that if they hadn't spoken in such terms they would still be alive today? A comment in Etz Hayim asks, specifically, about the intention of Laban's words in the scene under consideration (EH p. 183-4):

It is uncertain whether the phrase here has judicial or merely rhetorical force. Sacrilege was severely dealt with in the ancient Near East, but it did not always incur the death penalty.

Just as some scholars interpret the Dinah story as tribal history, so also the present notice about the birth of Benjamin and the death of Rachel have been so explained (CB p. 324):

The story is generally regarded as a piece of tribal history. The birth of Benjamin takes pace in what was later on the territory of the tribe of Benjamin, and this 'birth' is really the formation of the tribe. The meaning of the statement tht Rachel died when Benjamin was born is that the formation of the new tribe Benjamin broke up the old tribe Rachel.

Whatever the real story is about that, Genesis reads as a saga concerned about people, and it is perfectly legitimate for us to treat it on that level. And as a personal history, the news of Rachel's passing comes as a bit of a shock, both because it is unexpected and because the narration of the circumstances probably seems too austere in proportion to Rachel's emotional significance, though the latter impression perhaps should be qualified. First of all, if we think about it, all the allusions to Rachel in the foregoing story have tended to be on the short side: she is painted with quick, fleeting strokes, a little like the sprightly ewe that she is. And for another thing, the death scenes of Genesis are few and those found are rarely drawn out. Indeed, all we know about the way the lives of most of the characters ended, including some of its central personalities, is that wayyámot 'he died' or wattámot 'she died.' The amount of information surrounding Rachel's decease compares favourably with what we are told about that of other members of the family such as, for example, Abraham, Sarah or Isaac (see the next passage). Jacob's own obituary, when we come to it, will be the only main exception to this pattern. Seen in that light, Rachel cannot really complain; at least we know how she died.

Jacob created a memorial at Rachel's grave, which is described as surviving "until today" (v. 20); it would of course be very interesting to know when today is. In a note, EH adds:

"The tomb of Rachel" was a famous landmark from the time of Samuel, ca. 1020 B.C.E. (1 Sam. 10:2). The traditional site lies about 4 miles (6.5 km) south of Jerusalem and 1 mile (1.6 km) north of Bethlehem.

Notes 46: Bethel revisited (35:1-15)

SYNOPSIS: God tells Jacob to go to Bet-el, the place where he had had a vision while fleeing from Esau, and build an altar there. Jacob tells all his family to hand over their foreign gods and any other trinkets, which he buries. Jacob names the altar he builds El-bet-El 'God of the House of God'. An obituary appears for Rachel's nurse Debora who dies and is buried there. God appears to Jacob and tells him he is no longer to be called Jacob, but Israel, and announces himself as El-Shaday, and proceeds to bless Jacob and renew his promise. Jacob sets up a monument and (again) names the place House of God "because God spoke to him there".

• Text of the passage in Nawat

According to the premises of the source critics, multiple tellings of similar events sometimes represent not the repetition of such acts so much as the repetitive telling in variant traditions which later redactors are assumed to have sewn together into the narrative tapestry called Genesis, so we might well wonder how many times "the real Jacob" went to Bethel. After all, when the text says that Jacob went to bed twice, we feel we should ask if he went to bed twice or we are just seeing two variant tellings? And indeed, if Jacob's name was changed to Israel when he was at Penuel and now this will happen at Bethel, does this really mean his name was changed to Israel twice? Nevertheless, it does actually look like Jacob really did go to Bethel twice (as did his grandfather before him). But when?

We have read that Jacob returned from Padan-Aram to Canaan, dealing along the way with Laban, supernatural beings and his estranged brother; then he went to Shechem and stayed there until his sons and daughter were grown up. In the last chapter his family committed an act of war against the local population, and now God tells Jacob to get up (qum, the usual opening formula when God tells people in Genesis to set off for somewhere) and go to Bethel. Taken at face value, then, Jacob and his family's departure to Bethel seems to have happened after the Dinah incident and we assume that the place he is departing from is Shechem. All of that, however, hinges rather critically on the assumption that the text isn't doing one of its habitual switches between sources at this juncture; if it is, then actually, in the source document from which this story of a trip to Bethel came, these things can no longer be automatically assumed, for it might be that as far as the present source is concerned Jacob has just crossed the Jabbok or has just said goodbye to Esau. But that is all speculative and all we really have to go on is the Genesis account as we know it, which places the present journey to Bethel after the Dinah story.


We don't know for sure where Bethel was, but it is believed to have been some nineteen miles south of Shechem. Back in the time of Jacob's grandparents, after Abram arrived in Canaan from Haran, following an initial stay at Shechem, he camped in a place described as being between Bethel and Ai (12:8), and that is the first mention of this name in Genesis; at a later time, he returned to that place (13:3); returning to his altar, he invoked YHWH by name according to one strand of tradition, at least. The next time we hear about Bethel is when Jacob is on the run after duping his father Isaac into blessing the wrong son. At first the place is not named: it is simply where he stopped to spend the night while fleeing to Padan-Aram to get away from Esau's wrath. He went to sleep and had a dream about a staircase going up to heaven, where God appeared. When he awoke he exclaimed (28:19): This is the house of God! (bet el, 'house of El' or 'house of God'). This story implies the existence of a tradition according to which it was Jacob who gave Bethel its name; it is stated that in former times it had been known as Luz. 

Jacob set up as a pillar the stone that he had used as his pillow and promised to return there if God would protect him. Twenty years later when Jacob was about ready to leave Laban's house, God gave him a gentle nudge, telling him in a dream (31:13): I am the God of Bethel where you anointed a pillar and made me a promise. So off Jacob went, with his wives, his children and his flocks, all the way to Canaan... yet he didn't stop at Bethel as far as we know (which is odd). Provided our chronology is in order and not compromised by the combining and switching of sources referred to above, then it is only now, at a considerably later time in Jacob's life, and following another reminder from God who comes to him again and says: Get up and go to Bethel where you have unfinished business (35:1), that he finally goes back to Bethel. (For more help sorting out the geography and sequencing of events, check my post about the places of Genesis.)


This place Bethel, wherever it was, must have been an important centre before, during and after the period when Genesis was written. Following the breakup of David's and Solomon's united kingdom, it constituted an important religious centre in the Kingdom of Israel; later it was destroyed by the king of Judah, Josiah, though it was inhabited again by the time of the Maccabees. Bethel's ritual importance was clearly ancient and great, and must have been surrounded by a great deal of sacred lore, some of which has found its way into Genesis, according to which it constituted a landmark for the young Jacob, on both worldly and spiritual planes, at the time of his outward journey from Canaan, and to which the mature Jacob now returns, perhaps again for a combination of worldly and spiritual reasons. Possibly the worldly reason was to get away from Shechem. Spiritually he must keep his promise to the God-of-the-House-of-God, el bet el.

In any case, the way in which Jacob prepares for the journey to Bethel this time round makes it sound more like a solemn and deliberate pilgrimage than a hectic scramble to get away from someone. He gives instructions to those of his household: 'Rid yourselves of the alien gods in your midst, purify yourselves, and change your clothes' (v. 2). The elohe hannekhar 'foreign gods' might have included the idols that Jacob's wife Rachel had taken from her father Laban's house giving rise to a memorable scene (ch. 31), but there is no compelling reason why that has to be the specific reference here, given how many years have since passed; and note that v. 4 says wayyitt'nu el ya‛aqov et kol elohe hannekhar asher b'yadam 'they gave to Jacob all the alien gods that they had', which doesn't make it sound like this was only about Rachel at all. What it does show is that there were still idols in the family, which is an interesting insight we might otherwise have lacked. Jacob buried them, together with everyone's earrings, under the terebinth tree that was near Shechem (for safekeeping? for some other particular reason? why there?).

That it was a perilous journey is suggested by the remark (v. 5) that God protected them from the cities they passed along their way (perhaps this was necessary on account of what they had done in Shechem?). They reach Bethel, which is referred to as Luz here. Jacob built an altar and called it el bet el because of God's appearance to him there years earlier, thereby finally keeping his promise. However, commentators have noted that the verb of which ha'elohim is the subject in this statement, niglu 'revealed themselves', is plural, as if on the previous occasion the gods had shown themselves to Jacob here. Perhaps these plural elohim refer to the mal'akhim (messengers) whom he saw going up and down the staircase. The trouble now, however, is that this is given as the reason (ki...) why Jacob called this place el bet el (singular: El of the house of El), so how does that work?

The sequence of events is interrupted abruptly by the death of Deborah (only named here), Rebecca's nurse, who must have been very old by then, with a notice about her burial.

Then at v. 9 there occurs a more radical break in the flow of the narrative, which is assumed to originate from the fact that we are changing source documents at this point, since what comes next is completely disjointed if read as a continuation of the same scene or indeed even in the established timeframe: wayyera elohim el ya‛aqov ‛od b'vo'o mippaddan aram wayvárekh oto 'God appeared again to Jacob on his arrival from Paddan-aram, and He blessed him.' According to adepts of the documentary hypothesis, the Elohist has been speaking so far in this chapter, but what follows comes from the Priestly document. Is this an alternative account of what happened to Jacob upon his return to Canaan which does not assume any of the events from Penuel onwards of which we have read?

If we adopt the assumption that this notice of God's new appearance to Jacob at Bethel is not in origin an integral part of the preceding narrative of Jacob's arrival there from Shechem, then we might also note that in what now follows there is no reference to the altar that Jacob supposedly just built and called el bet el. Instead of any of that, we will now find out what God said to Jacob, and after God leaves (v. 13, wayyá‛al me‛alaw elohim bammaqom asher dibber itto 'God parted from him at the spot where He had spoken to him'), Jacob will set up a stone pillar and dedicate it to God who has just spoken to him! And now we read that Jacob gives the place where God has just spoken to him a new name: he decides to call it bet el, Bethel.

Unless Jacob (or the reader) suffers from amnesia, it is difficult indeed to evade the conclusion that there was some mixing of accounts in the process of writing Genesis.

Let's go back to God's appearance to Jacob, because we still haven't talked about what he told him. This consisted of two parts. First of all, God informs Jacob of something that we, the readers, thought we already knew but Jacob, apparently, didn't (though he should have): lo yiqqare shimkha ‛od ya‛aqov ki im yisra'el yihye sh'mékha 'You shall be called Jacob no more, but Israel shall be your name.' The way this verse is worded in full is very emphatic and leaves very little room for any doubt that this was supposed to be "news" to Jacob and not just a reminder of something that Jacob would, supposedly, have known about for many years by now: God begins with the preamble shimkha ya‛aqov 'Your name is Jacob [understood: until now]', and for still more emphasis, the narrator steps in after these words of God to underscore its consequence: wayyiqra et sh'mo yisra'el 'Thus he named him Israel.' (For the first time Jacob was renamed Israel, see ch. 32.)

The other part of Gods message to Jacob on this occasion is the renewal of Abraham's covenant. There is not much new to mention there; on the contrary it is perhaps interesting to note how much there is in common between these instances of covenant making. As in 17:1, God commences by declaring himself to be el shadday. Here the blessing is preceded by a name change, and in ch. 17 it was followed by one (Abram became Abraham). As soon as the blessing is finished, God takes his leave, whereupon (v. 14)) Jacob dedicates a pillar and (v. 15) names the place house of El.

Notes 45: Dina's story (34:1-31)

SYNOPSIS: While at the town of Shechem, one day when Jacob and Leah's daughter Dina went out, a local young man also called Shechem takes it into his head to abduct her, rape her, fall in love with her and ask to marry her (apparently in that order). So Shechem's father Hamor went to see Jacob to talk about it, and there was a big row. Jacob and his sons are outraged, but Hamor suggests it would be to their mutual advantage to agree to accept intermarriage between the two communities. Jacob's sons come up with a counter-proposal: "On one condition," they say: "only if you circumcise all your males." It is a ruse. Shechem and Hamor agree, talk the population into it, and they all get circumcised at the same time. While they are all still unrecovered, Simeon and Levi walk into the town armed with swords and massacre all the males, including Shechem and Hamor, and rescue Dina. Then their other brothers go in and plunder the whole town, even capturing the wives and children. Jacob doesn't seem too pleased about this, fearing retribution from his more numerous neighbours. "Serves them right for treating our sister like a whore", they retort.

• Text of the passage

There is a big difference between writing about the whole of the book of Genesis chapter by chapter or only discussing selected passages or "bible stories": the latter allows you to cheat! There are parts of Genesis that we all love and enjoy talking about, and there are bits that are... weird. When selections are made, these are the parts that are always skipped, and the trouble with that is that doing this repeatedly tends to generate a false idea of what the whole of Genesis is like. With false expectations created, we find the weird bits even more shocking, not just in their own right but because they don't fit in with our preconceived idea of what we think Genesis should contain; now those bits become plain embarrassing and people will try even harder to sweep them under the carpet. 

The story of Dinah is a sort of reverse Romeo and Juliet. In Romeo and Juliet the love story derails when it runs up against a great feud with a tragic outcome; Dinah is a love story that goes wrong and creates a great feud, one with an even more tragic outcome. It is "difficult" for modern sensibilities in more ways than one: first, there is the subject matter (rape and "forced" circumcision); secondly, the revengers' behaviour (pretending to act on good faith as a trick followed by vicious mayhem); and thirdly, the discomfort of hearing such things about one's own family (the perpetrators are after all the children of Israel). All of these issues are fraught with many complications.

We'll start with the rape theme. When we look into it, a number of (awkward) questions soon pose themselves. Was what Shechem did actually rape, and how is rape going to be defined for the purpose? Jacob's sons call it rape to justify their macabre act of vengeance, but was it physical violation or just "statutory rape" from their viewpoint (i.e. illicit sex according to their own laws and customs, which allowed her family to consider themselves the gravely injured party)? We don't know and we only have one source, the narrative before us, although it is true that this source reports the words of several of the involved parties which, if the reports are trustworthy, might be considered witnesses of a sort.

Let's note first of all that Dinah herself is not one of the witnesses on the stand; her views on the matter are not reported! So in a real sense the story is not all that much about Dinah, she is little more than the real story's pretext, and the real story is about conflict, trickery and vengeance. But hang on, let's try and sort Dinah out first. 

Dinah goes out one day to visit with the women of the town, when Shechem (the son of one of the most powerful men in the town, Hamor) falls in love with her and "forces her." For modern readers this is all fine until we get to the word forces which makes it sinister, and therein lies the crux of the matter. For ancient readers, however, it seems that the focus might have been elsewhere, because an unmarried woman in those days had no business, it seems, going out like that without a chaperone, "so whose fault is it?" they might ask. The problems this asks us to address, from our point of view, are downright painful, but if we are to be historical, they are a fact, like it or not. Therefore, the moral nature of the initial premise of the story (traditionally known as "the rape of Dinah") is, in historical and cultural perspective, unclear, for we cannot be quite certain whether this was intended as an unambiguous indictment of Shechem's actions or whether, on the contrary, in earlier audiences' eyes, Dinah shared some of the "blame". It is all very well reading the story as if it took place in late twentieth-century Paris or New York, but it didn't, and the rules were probably different. The rules we can criticise on our own moral terms all we like, but that doesn't tell us how this episode was actually being understood by an ancient audience (and in fact, by generations of ancient rabbis, even). 

Now the reason why this might be important for our understanding of this passage as literature is that it may not be a story about just revenge, which is questionable on other grounds in any case: is wiping out an entire city in revenge for one wrong committed by a single individual just? Rather, it may have been seen as a story about unjust revenge, taking the law into one's own hands, an unreasonable, disproportionate and unwise (see Jacob's point of view at the end) response to a perceived transgression of one's own behavioral norms. 

Since it is our privilege to do so from our chronologically and morally distant vantage point, let us adopt a broader view of things and observe that, whatever the gruesome details and the different possible "takes" when interpreting them, the initial premise is about a clash between the conflicting cultural assumptions, social practices and ethnic attitudes of two groups in contact, the Hivites of Shechem on the one hand and the Hebrews of Jacob's clan on the other. Over and above the specifics of the incident, it was an intercultural misunderstanding. However, while we are making a bid to see them from a position of neutrality, there is little reason to think that the writers who transmitted the story that is our source of information were equally committed to maintaining such a balanced objectivity, since they had their agenda after all. What was it? 

Well, first of all, there is the widely held theory that this part of Genesis is to be read as a history of tribal events in the form of an allegory:

Narratives which seem at first sight to be concerned with individuals may really be setting forth, in this somewhat figurative fashion, the relations and fortunes of tribes. For instance, the account in chapter xxxiv of the seduction of Dinah, and the revenge taken by Simeon and Levi, is often interpreted as referring to an attack on Shechem by the two tribes of Simeon and Levi. (CB intro., p. 47)

So also Speiser:

Most important of all, the history of Jacob has hitherto been in the main a story of individuals. This time, to be sure, personalities are still very much in the forefront of the stage; but their experiences serve to recapitulate an all but lost page dealing with remote ethnic interrelations. The account, in other words, presents personalized history, that is, history novelistically interpreted. (EAS p. 266)

Some analysts suggest that the original motivation for telling Dinah's story in the first place was to record the circumstances which led to an ancient event that is not recorded but assumed to have occurred: the demise of the tribes of Levi and Simeon (the names of the sons of Jacob who led the slaughter of the Shechemites). It looks like these tribes must have suffered a calamity because they do not figure in later accounts of the allotment of Canaanite territory to the Israelites, but were dispersed among the territories of other tribes, and also because they are cursed rather than blessed by Jacob in his deathbed speech. We don't know what happened to them, but perhaps this piece narrated what they did to deserve or provoke it. At the end of the passage itself, Jacob rebukes them; it seems that he was not impressed by their story (the rape of Dinah) justifying their atrocious actions, so probably the audience isn't supposed to be either. 

If this interpretation is correct, then, the point of the story actually centred damningly on Simeon and Levi's crime rather than on the anecdote that triggered it, and Hamor, Shechem and the rest of their people, not Dinah, are the real victims. The reason for considering the story important to the Israelites, in that case, would be to distance themselves from the excesses committed by their brethren, which is certainly an interesting twist if nothing else. Thus, by this theory, the story does not necessarily aim to justify Shechem's abduction of Dinah (there is no hint of such a thing) but rather to put it in a larger perspective in which "other things are going on." No wonder Dinah was not sought for an opinion; it would have been more or less irrelevant.

If a larger moral teaching is be found in this reading of the passage, it surely has to do with the futility of violence for purposes of revenge, which is neither useful nor ethically justified and, what is more, usually results in a backlash which may have even worse consequences than the punishment one was trying to inflict. But I don't know if the authors of Genesis were overtly seeking to drive home such a message; usually Genesis doesn't read much like a handbook expounding a moral code of conduct, so I don't see why we should expect this passage to be an exception.

There is another broader reading that can be and has been made of this story: as a cautionary tale against intimate relations with people from a different religious, cultural or ethnic background than one's own. In the case of the Israelites that would translate in practice into a warning against intermarrying with gentiles. Such a reading has been made, but it is unlikely to be one that dates back to the time when this story was first being recited.

If we were able to deconstruct all these layers of possible ulterior motives for the telling and reinterpretations of the meaning of the story, what might we be left with? An intercultural incident gone badly wrong was the conjecture I annotated earlier. On such an account it is unnecessary to attribute initial blame to any of the parties involved: we can assume that whatever each character did, according to the mores of their own community they had done nothing wrong. The trouble is that the mores did not coincide, and according to each other's ground rules they had stepped out of line. The question is not raised, in an absolute sense, of whose mores or rules were "right" or "wrong" within some more universal framework; no such supra-ethnic plane of morality is invoked in this narration. If it had been, we might have expected it, in the symbolic language of Genesis, to have entailed references to "God's will" (as the closest approximation to a universal moral standard), but God was not brought into it; this is an issue between man and man (quite literally) and it is left to be resolved by men. Nobody asked God's opinion, any more than they asked the offended woman's. The "retribution" which falls on Shechem's entire community in punishment for their "sinful" behaviour was also not meted out by God in this instance but rather by men, and it is not necessarily implied that their way of dealing with things was righteous. On the contrary, there is room for reading the entire episode as an indictment of bad human judgment which fails to ensure that the punishment fits the crime, as it clearly doesn't in this case, according to common sense.

This view of Dinah's Story as essentially being about the tragic outcome of a head-on collision between two culturally different human groups occupying roughly the same physical space seems to be correct as far as it goes. The passage says that the local inhabitants were Hivites (xiwwim). Scholars today remain uncertain about the identity of the xiwwim but some at least think they were probably Hurrians. The Hurrians were an important Bronze Age people who formed part of the population of the Near East and spoke a non-Semitic, non-Indo-European language. Their main area of settlement in pre-Old Testament times (see map) was in northern Mesopotamia and southeastern Anatolia; some scholars believe that they had an important cultural influence on the ancestors of the Hebrew patriarchs prior to their migration to Canaan, since Har(r)an was a Hurrian town. If the Hivites were Hurrians, then they would have constituted an exotic ethnic and cultural presence in Canaan, most of whose indigenous, pre-Philistine (i.e. Canaanite) population was of Semitic stock. One detail that is consistent with this theory would have been the fact, which occupies centre-stage in the story we are reading, that unlike Canaanite people in general, who all practised universal male circumcision, the Hivites evidently did not.

Were the Hivite inhabitants of Shechem Hurrians? Source of map: Wikipedia

That the issue of contrasting cusoms is involved in the troubles between Hebrews and Hivites is stated explicitly by Jacob's sons when they come from the field and hear what Shechem has done with Dinah (v. 7, JPS): 'The men were distressed and very angry' ki n'vala ‛asa v'yisra'el 'because he had committed an outrage in Israel by lying with Jacob's daughter -' w'khen lo ye‛ase 'a thing not to be done.' Yet Shechem for his part shows no sign of any awareness that he has acted sinfully (n'vala means 'grave sin, sacrilege', CHALOT) and actually talks as if he were acting innocently on good faith all along. The two groups don't seem to be speaking the same cultural language!

But although this view of the story is correct as far as it goes, it is too two-dimensional as a summing up of the whole episode because it overlooks the "internal contradictions" that are evident within each camp: neither the Hivites nor Jacob's clan act in unison, en bloc. In particular, there are generational differences on both sides, as Speiser pointed out:

The story before us is a tale of sharp contrasts: pastoral simplicity and grim violence, love and revenge, candor and duplicity. There is also a marked difference between the generations. Hamor and Jacob are peace-loving and conciliatory; their sons are impetuous and heedless of the consequences that their acts must entail. The lovesick Shechem prevails on his father to extend to the Israelites the freedom of the land - with the requisite consent of his followers. But Dinah's brothers refuse to be that far-sighted. After tricking the Shechemites into circumcising their males, and thus stripping the place of its potential defenders, they put the inhabitants to the sword. Jacob is mournful and apprehensive. But his sons remain defiant and oblivious of their future. (EAS p. 268)

Particularly noteworthy is the restraint and low profile maintained by Jacob in this story. He seems to have ceded the initiative to the younger generation now, and perhaps he has gained in wisdom too, for unlike his sons he expresses no eagerness for aggressive action that will lead to a conflagration, perhaps because he is aware that this would ultimately lead to unfavourable consequences for himself and his family. He comes across as a changed man in comparison to his youthful time with Laban, which is sometimes put down to the profound impact that was made on him by the supernatural episode of his struggle with the "angel" who injured him at Penuel; but we should also bear in mind that there his sons and daughters were still children and now they are fully grown, so Jacob must also be considerably older. His first reaction to the news about Dinah was to wait until his sons returned, and after they had gone berserk the message he conveys is one of disapproval and concern. The story has arrived at the grim reality of life in a complicated world.

Everett Fox in Genesis and Exodus notices the particularly human dimension of each of the characters who play roles in this short dramatic piece which we now realise is packed with tension and unanswered questions:

The chapter is notable for the latitude it allows its characters to express their thoughts and emotions: Shekhem's desire and love, the sons' anger and cunning, the Hivvites' gullibility and greed, and Yaakov's fear. Like other stories in the Yaakov cycle, it presents us with a somewhat ambiguous situation, where right and wrong are not always simple and the putative heroes are not always heroic. (EF p. 145)

Putting the generational differences among the patriarchs into a wider perspective, Fox also makes the following interesting observation:

Whereas Avraham and Yitzhak had been able to conclude treaties with the inhabitants of Canaan, Yaakov winds up in the opposite position... Interestingly, Yaakov's sons act somewhat like their father had, "with deceit"... The vengefulness and brutality of Yaakov's sons in this story anticipates their later behavior in the Yosef story (Chapter 37); surprisingly, it is for the present crime and not for the sale of Yosef that their father condemns them on his deathbed (49:5-7). (EF p. 145)

34:2 wayyiqqax otah wayyishkav otah way‛annéha
The first of these predications, wayyiqqax otah, says that Shechem "took" Dinah, which for all its potential ambiguity does not imply, in the way the English verb take might, any sort of specifically sexual act (cf. my previous comments here and there about the equivalence this verb sometimes has with marry, though here it doesn't mean that either!); in this context it is probably little more than a semantically quasi-neutral manner of introducing the object of the following predicates (rather as ba in Mandarin, when used in a similar manner, doesn't really reference the notion of striking): if I am right about this, then wayyiqqax otah per se doesn't mean that he literally did anything to her, any more than the colloquial English expression 'he went and died' really means that he went somewhere, at least not in geographical terms. The next predication, wayyishkav otah, on the contrary, does: it says that he slept with her, and while that clearly was intended to mean that they had sex, it still doesn't say a thing about whether it was consensual. The last of the three predications, way‛annéha, is the one that does that. This looks like the same verb root, ‛-n-h, which in the qal form (suffixing stem ‛ana) means 'to answer', but the two verbs may be mere homophones, etymologically unrelated (EK); this other ‛-n-h means 'to be bowed down, afflicted' (EK), 'to bend down, be wretched, pitiful' (CHALOT), and it is the root of the adjective ‛ani (fem. ‛aniyya) 'poor, wretched, humble' and the noun ‛oni (possessed: ‛onyi etc.) 'misery, affliction' (cf. 16:11 ki shama‛ YHYH el ‛onyekh 'for the Lord has paid heed to your suffering'). But in this case the verb is a piel (i.e. transitive and "intensive": suffixing stem ‛inna), the range of meanings of which includes 'oppress, humiliate, subdue, overpower, force oneself upon.'

34:3 wattidbaq nafsho b'dina bat ya‛aqov wayye'ehav et hanna‛ara waydabber ‛al lev hanna‛ara
Lit. 'His [i.e. Shechem's] soul clove to Jacob's daughter Dinah, and he loved the girl and spoke to the girl's heart.' This verse gives us some interesting material by way of biblical Hebrew romantic talk. The last clause (waydabber ‛al lev hanna‛ara) might be better rendered 'he wooed her (heart)', actually. It is only too bad for everyone concerned that this took place after he had lain with her and forced her (v. 2), and before asking permission through the correct channels (which would presumably have been denied initially, since he was uncircumcised).

34:4 qax li et hayyalda hazzot l'ishha
Shechem seems unaware of his imprudence, let alone the magnitude of his offence, for in asking his father to intervene on his behalf to obtain consent for Dinah to become his lawful wife he seems to be acting in good faith in accordance with what was no doubt the socially accepted procedure in his time and his community (and many others), where marriages were supposed to be decided upon and arrangements carried out by the parents. Notice too the "normal" use of qax 'take' (the imperative of the same verb as wayyiqqax in v. 2).

34:5 w'ya‛aqov shama‛ ki Timme et dina vitto
(JPS) 'Jacob heard that he [i.e. Shechem] had defiled his daughter Dinah.' The verb T-m-h means, in the qal, 'to become unclean', and as used here in the piel it means 'to defile, profane.' Thus it is clear that from the viewpoint of the narrator and the protagonists, Shechem had done wrong, but there is no indication of whether the basic wrong from their perspective consist of wayyishkav otah or of way‛annéha.

24:6 wayyetze xamor avi sh'khem el ya‛aqov l'dabber ito
The pace of the narrative is unhurried but relentless in its progress step by step towards impending disaster. Shechem's father Hamor, heeding his son's supplications, makes the necessary social visit to Jacob, Dinah's father, to discuss matters and, no doubt, try to smooth ruffled feathers. In v. 8, Jacob responds by delaying the interview until his sons have returned from the field so that they may also be involved in the negotiations.

34:7 ki n'vala ‛asa v'yisra'el lishkav et bat ya‛aqov w'khen lo ye‛ase
(JPS) '...because he had committed an outrage in Israel by lying with Jacob's daughter - a thing not to be done.' See my notes above regarding the word n'vala 'outrage' and the central significance of the unassuming phrase w'khen lo ye‛ase 'a thing not to be done', which is what, from one perspective, this whole story is really about: conflicting rules of conduct. But to tease out the strands of meaning here, I think it is important also to notice what it is that is spelt out at this point in the text as being, to "Israel", an outrage and a thing not to be done, namely lishkav et bat ya‛aqov 'to sleep with Jacob's daughter.' Simeon and Levi did not put the whole Hivite community of Shechem to the sword in vengeance for the rape of Dinah, not according to this: the "outrage" the Hivite had committed is explicitly said to have been the fact of his having sexual relations with one of them, that was the "thing not to be done." No doubt the rape made it worse, certainly not any better, but there is not much evidence that this was uppermost in their minds, or the minds of the ancient rabbis who analysed the story, and we should not try to read Genesis as if it were about events taking place today in our neighbourhood. Thus when, in v. 31, Jacob's sons respond to their father's angry berating for what they had done, their defence will be hakh'zona ya‛ase et axotenu 'Should our sister be treated like a whore?' The definition of zona is a prostitute or an "easy woman", a woman with whom a man may have sexual access (see the story of Tamar in ch. 38 for an illustration of the concept in Genesis). To be honest, this concluding comment doesn't exactly mean that Shechem's perceived offence, or the story's underlying "problem", was specifically that Shechem had raped Dinah; the language used throughout the story all suggests that it was more about the issue of illicit sexual relations between members of the two mutually alien communities without following the pertinenit protocol.

34:8-10 waydabber xamor etc.
The whole of Jacob's household having gathered, Hamor begins by speaking to the family. First he requests Dinah's hand for his son. This is clearly not a mere routine procedure in the present case because they belong to distinct communities unaccustomed to intermarriage, so Hamor proposes they agree to allow this in the future, an arrangement which he presents as being to their mutual advantage, which would go beyond the matter of mere marriage and involve the establishment of closer ties all round between the Hebrews and the Hivites of Shechem.

34:11-12
After his father has finished speaking, the suitor puts in a few words of his own. His little speech paints a picture of Shechem as a man considerably less dignified and at the same time more overbearing than the older (and probably wiser) Hamor; what he says boils down to "I will give you whatever you like if you let me marry Dinah, and remember I'm very rich."

34:13-17
Now it is the turn of the other party to speak, but it is Jacob's sons rather than Jacob himself who do so. The wayya‛anu with which this section begins means 'they answered' and is not to be confused with the other wayyá‛an 'he forced', using a homophonous verb, with which Shechem's behaviour had been described in v. 2 (I don't know if this irony was deliberate). It is at this point in the narrative that the story takes a turn for the worse, as Jacob's sons decide to get their own back on what they view as the offending party, and practising a kind of elaborate trickery which commentators have compared to the younger Jacob's own use of cunning but which strike me as being of quite a different calibre in their premeditation and sinister purpose, begin to set Hamor and Shechem up for what was really a singularly heartless plan quite unworthy of decent human beings, much less the patriarchs of one's own people (and as such they were seen by the authors and audience of this book, let us remember). It hardly seems likely that we are supposed to condone this scheme; not even Jacob did, let us recall. In the clause asher Timme et dina axotam 'because he had defiled their sister Dinah' and in the similar one in v. 27, asher Timm'u axotam, however, it seems that the conjunction asher (unusually) must mean 'because', unless it means 'on the pretext that' or (as Speiser has in v. 27) 'in reprisal for.'

34:14 lo nukhal la‛asot haddavar hazze latet et axoténu l'ish asher lo orla ki xerpa hi lánu
This premise is absolutely true and unremarkable (which only serves to make the ultimate outcome all the more shocking). Circumcision would indeed make or break the deal from the vantage point of the Israelites' logic, and by asking Shechem to undergo circumcision Dinah's brothers seem to be doing nothing other than give him a free pass. They speak the truth: ki xerpa hi lánu, for it is a disgrace among us for our daughter to marry an uncircumcised man. Unfortunately, the trap is already being set, for we are told already in v. 13 that the brothers have decided to reply b'mirma 'with guile'. Using the selfsame kind of tactic common among the "best" modern criminals, they are mixing truths with falsehoods to bamboozle their mark and lay him open to a frontal attack.

34:15 l'himmol lakhem kol zakhar
The wording is taken from God's instruction to Abraham to circumcise every male (cf. 17:10 himmol lakhem kol zakhar 'every male among you shall be circumcised'). As is characteristic, the schemer poses as one full of virtue, quoting God's commandments, no less, to achieve a goal for which those words were never intended.

34:16 w'natánnu...
In this textbook example of malicious manipulation, having told the victim what they want him to do, they now go on to coax him with generous but insincere promises: 'we will give our daughters to you and take your daughters to ourselves; and we will dwell among you and become as one kindred'...

34:17 w'im lo...
...followed by a threat regarding the consequences of non-compliance.

34:20 wayyavo xamor ush'khem b'no el shá‛ar ‛iram waydabb'ru el anshe ‛iram
At this point the transition from a personal (or family) vendetta to a political issue (i.e. one of city policy) is completed, because Hamor takes the matter to the town assembly (that is the real meaning of shá‛ar ‛iram 'the town gate'). What follows is Hamor's speech to the village elders, in which he proposes a pact with "these people" (ha'anashim ha'élle).

34:21-24
As in politics then and now, he emphasizes all the reasons why it would be a good thing to do what he wants, and gets them to agree to the deal (v. 24: wayyishm'‛u el xamor w'el sh'khem b'no kol yotz'e shá‛ar ‛iro), which involves all the men in the town getting circumcised (wayyimmólu kol zakhar).

Notes 44: Jacob and Esau meet (33:1-20)

SYNOPSIS: Esau reaches where Jacob is waiting. His family disperse for safety. Jacob approaches Esau, bowing repeatedly. But Esau runs over to Jacob and hugs and kisses him. Esau asks him what all this is about, and assures Jacob he doesn't need his gifts, but Jacob pleads with him to accept them anyway. Esau suggests they should travel together but Jacob declines with a plausible excuse. So Esau goes back to Seir and Jacob journeys to Sukkot, where he stops and erects huts for the animals, whence the place's name (sukkot means 'huts'). From there he carries on to Shechem. Jacob builds an altar and names it 'El the God of Israel'.

• Text of the passage in Nawat

The name Jacob-Israel gives to the altar he raises in v. 20, el elohe yisra'el, represents the third occurrence of the name Israel. The name within which it is embedded, the curious term el elohe yisra'el lit. 'god of the gods of Israel', is open to multiple interpretations, with readers generally opting to give it the reading that fits best with their own conceptions of what it ought to say, such as the "El, the God of Israel" of many commentators or the JPS's "God, the God of Israel." 

The former of these implicitly concedes what is obvious, from this expression in situ as well as from the hard linguistic evidence (el is not elohim, elohim is not el; one has two letters, the other has five) and also from all the other verses in which el occurs (of which Genesis has a further eighteen, ten of which precede this one and the other eight will come later): namely, that El must be a name (as I already noted in my post about the names of God). In the face of the evidence, the JPS translation has "God, the God of Israel", which can only be described as a semantic enigma, in other words, what is that supposed to mean?

Many translators, however, craftily sidestep this minefield by transliterating the name, which they can get away with because it is a name, and names need not be translated (thankfully), so they just say that he called the altar El-Elohe-Israel.

Unless we act equally wisely and do the same, I think there are two intellectually honest ways to handle the translation. One is to follow Speiser (who, to tell the truth, only gives this in a footnote; in the body of the translation he also transcribes the name), and go with "El, the god of Israel" (or perhaps "El is the god of Israel"); this time I am deliberately using a lower-case g to remind us that the actual sense of the expression, so understood, is something like: "Different peoples may have other gods; El is that of Israel."

The other option I can imagine is to take the position that el is not a proper name but a common noun meaning "god", and that elohim (and elohe in the construct state) is used as its suppletive plural (which is plausible because elohim is indeed used for 'gods' sometimes, and this is supported by the the further consideration that the regular plural of el, i.e. elim, hardly ever occurs, and in Genesis never). If then, el means 'god' and elohim is its plural, then el elohim means '(the) god of gods'; in this context, if we're going to read the first el as construct, the second elohim could hardly have its common singular sense as this makes even less sense. What could 'god of god' ('god of God', 'God of God'...) mean? And anyway, if you were, for some unfathomable reason, intent on saying that, you wouldn't change the word for 'god' between the first and the second time, would you? So el elohim as a construct phrase has to mean 'god of gods'.

That would make it parallel to many similar phrases which are strewn all over the Hebrew bible and post-biblical Hebrew texts, such as the siddurim or Jewish prayer books, where things like mélekh m'lakhim 'king of kings' are a dime a dozen, and especially refer to the Jewish God, albeit metaphorically. The meaning of mélekh m'lakhim is not that we non-royals have our kings and those kings have their own king (who is God), and that idea is actually repugnant to a truly monotheistic ideology in that it would seem to imply that the relationship The One God has with kings is different to that which He has with non-kings, a notion that may indeed have suited the ambitions of the great imperial kings of the ancient world, with their elaborate priestly classes surrounding them to mediate access to divinity and bolster the privileged position of a divinely appointed ruling class, but does not speak in the least to the Jewish idea of a more democratic God who is equally accessible to all who can pray to Him.

Nor does it mean, needless to say, that mélekh is to be understood as a king and m'lakhim as (all) kings, and God is like the king among kings, since this metaphorical construction would then seem to be saying that God is the god among gods. But there are no gods, there is only God, so that surely can't be what is meant either.

No. What mélekh m'lakhim means, as we all know, is 'great king', y ya está. The function of the construct phrase doubling the term of reference (mélekh) is to express a superlative: rey-ísimo. And if el elohim here is to be interpreted along the same lines, it is equivalent to saying 'great god', dios-ísimo. So that could be what Genesis is saying when it says that Jacob called the altar el elohe yisra'el.

Except that el elohe is itself in the construct state and is followed by a third noun, the newly introduced yisra'el, and this calls for a further layer of interpretation: so what does this mean? And I fear we may be back in the minefield again, but never mind, let us tread fearlessly on.

If el elohe yisra'el is a construct chain, with the structure A of B of C ('god of gods of Israel'), the question arises as to whether this is to be parsed as [A of B] of C ('[god of gods] of Israel') or A of [B of C] ('god of [gods of Israel]'). Let's take the second possibility first in order to dismiss it. Grammatically this way of understanding el elohe yisra'el is impeccable; there is nothing wrong with it. Theologically, it is awful in its implications if you are an adept of Mosaic Law, for it contradicts the first of the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt have no other gods...

So to recap so far, we can't have el elohe yisra'el meaning 'god of [gods of Israel]' because "gods of Israel" isn't allowed; and as seen earlier, it can't mean 'god of [god of Israel]' in the singular because that makes about as much sense as... because it doesn't make sense, and ditto for '[god of god] of Israel' (god of god????), so by a process of elimination, we are left with '[god of gods] of Israel', and as we have also seen, 'god of gods' is an idiomatic way to say 'the great god', so this phrase must surely mean 'the great God of Israel', or 'Israel's great God.'

So the next question is: Did the Jacob who set up an altar after he and Esau took their leave and named it so think of Israel as being him, since this was his new name, and did this name which he attached to the altar, el elohe yisra'el, mean "my great God"? Or is this, on the other hand, an anachronistic slip on the part of the writers of Genesis who have Jacob not only refer to the as yet unborn Israelite people as "Israel" but dedicate a monument to them with the foresight to call it "Israel's great God"? Or on the other hand (there is always another hand), is this a secret message from the great God Himself who made Jacob name the altar "great God of Israel" believing he was naming it after himself whereas he was really, unbeknownst to him, naming it after the great people destined to issue from him, so that we should realise how really great this great God is?

I don't know.


33:19 b'ne xamor avi sh'khem
Shechem is both the name of the town and, here, that of one of its inhabitants, Shechem son of Hamor, who will figure prominently in the next passage.

Notes 43: Jacob becomes Israel (32:23-33)

SYNOPSIS: During the night he sends his wives and children ahead, and tarries behind on his own. Then "a man" comes and fights with Jacob all night, and dislocates his hip. Jacob knows he is an angel and demands to be blessed; in response, the angel changes Jacob's name to Israel because he has striven with gods (yisra El). Jacob/Israel then asks: "What's your name?" but his adversary evades the question. The story ends with a pun about the name of the place, Peniel or Penuel ('face of God'), and an explanation about Jewish dietary laws.

• Text of the passage in Nawat

Well, I said that Jacob spent the night in the camp twice (after all it does say wayyálen in v. 14 and again lan in v. 22), but on this second occasion he didn't sleep through the night. Indeed he had the most restless of nights; not many of us can say we spent the night wrestling with an angel. The surreal picture that this paints somehow manages to ring true in a dreamy, eerie sort of way.

Note that unlike the various dream scenes in which Jacob and others are depicted here and there in Genesis, this one is not called a dream. Jacob gets up in the middle of the night, and first of all sends his family ahead to cross the river (náhal, elsewhere 'stream'), while he himself stays behind alone (v. 25) wayye'aveq ish ‛immo ‛ad ‛alot hassháxar 'and a man wrestled with him until the break of dawn.'

Now in several other places Genesis speaks of "a man" (ish) only to reveal afterwards that he is actually an angel, or rather God's messenger (mal'akh YHWH, mal'akh [ha]elohim). Other times, the ish is later referred to even more surprisingly as God himself, as in the story of Abraham and the warning about Sodom and Gomorrah. Thus as we read Genesis we come to be suspicious when reading in a scene that "a man" pops up out of nowhere and interacts with the protagonist; we develop "angel-dar." Here, Jacob is alone at night when, out of nowhere, "a man wrestled with him." But in this scene the text never actually tells us explicitly that he was an angel. 

Whatever he was, the anecdote has some clearly supernatural overtones to it, and we are given enough clues to figure out that he wasn't just a man. But because it is never indicated outright who or what this ish was, some commentators have suggested that perhaps the original story was about some other kind of divine or supernatural being, whether we want to call it an imp, sprite, demon or something else. So notice how the scene goes: they wrestle until dawn, and then the ish, seeing that he can't win the fight (!), gets his revenge by deliberately injuring him. Then he asks Jacob to let him go (!!) because the sun is rising (!!!), and Jacob's reply is just as startling: "I will not let you go (!!!!) unless you bless me (!!!!!)." 

It doesn't get any less weird after that, though I will desist from adding more exclamation marks: wayyómer elaw ma sh'mékha wayyómer ya‛aqov 'He said to him: What is your name? And he answered: Jacob.' This, as far as I know, is the only instance of an angel asking a human their name. Next, however, the ish does something which is consistent with what angels do (in Genesis): he changes Jacob's name: lo ya‛aqov ye'amer ‛od shimkha ki im yisra'el 'Your name will no longer be Jacob but Israel.' This is accompanied by the etymology de rigueur: ki saríta ‛im elohim w'‛im anashim wattukhal 'because you fought with God (or gods?) and with men, and prevailed.' At first this looks like it is providing a clue as to the identity of Jacob's interlocutor, but it turns out to be inconclusive because you can use what the "angel" says to support any thesis you like: Jacob has fought successfully with both gods and men... so which is this?!

Next Jacob (now Israel) goes on to ask the ish what his name is. The spirit gets out of answering that question by replying with another: "Why are you asking me my name?"... wayvárekh oto sham 'and he blessed him there.' As I read this it sounds to me as if the concession of the blessing is consequent on Jacob's question about his name. So we have this sequence of events: (i) Jacob asks the ish to bless him, (ii) the ish asks Jacob his name (maybe he needs the name for the blessing?), (iii) Jacob tells him, (iv) the ish gives Jacob a new name, (v) now Jacob asks the ish what his name is, (vi) the ish sidesteps the question and blesses Jacob. I would imagine that the mysterious character cannot bless Jacob unless he knows his name, but the odd part is that if he were God's messenger he must have known whom he had been sent to, and surely his name too; either the question has some other function (rhetorical?), or this is no normal angel (just as normal angels do not need to leave at dawn, and they don't need to be allowed to leave either, they just go when they feel like it). But anyway... if this ish is not your garden-variety angel but some kind of night-sprite, then it is plausible that knowing someone's name is a form of power that it can hold over people, and perhaps, in that case, humans can also wield power over them if they know their name. The reason why I say this is plausible is that I believe very similar beliefs may be found in the supernatural lore of many folk ("pagan") cultures, so that it would be typologically plausible if nothing else. If so, this would provide the clever (and tricky, remember) Jacob, who by now realises what kind of a being he is dealing with if he didn't know before, with a reason for asking him his name (and notice that angels in Genesis do not have names!); it would also explain not only why the ish refrains from answering the question (or rather, he "answers" without telling him his name), but also perhaps why at this particular point in the story he gives Jacob the blessing he has asked for, if the ish felt pressured into it by Jacob's gambit of trying to get the ish to reveal his name.

Speiser thinks that (v. 30) wayvárekh oto sham does not really mean that the ish literally blessed Jacob but rather that he simply said goodbye and left (interpreting b-r-k to mean 'to take one's leave'), but while that would also fit the story as I am (re)constructing it - Jacob asked the sprite its name, whereupon the sprite vanished - I think that in the context of Jacob having said to the ish a few moments before (v. 27) lo ashallexakha ki im berakhtáni 'I won't let you go unless you bless me' (where b-r-k certainly can't mean 'to take leave'), it is begging the question to propose that wayvárekh oto doesn't mean that he blessed him.

Leaving aside now the frivolous aspects of what this passage is about and coming to its actual meaning (literary and otherwise), we may be caught here between two pitfalls to be avoided: that of taking the episode too seriously and of not taking it seriously enough. A further danger is that of being too dogmatic in our opinion, so I shall begin by quoting Speiser's sobring advice, which might well be applied to the whole enterprise of reading Genesis without reading into Genesis (EAS p. 256): "The reader, of course, should not try to spell out details that the author himself glimpsed as if through a haze." That said, let me also quote Speiser's suggestion about what the episode might mean (p. 257):

One may conclude, accordingly, that the encounter at Penuel was understood as a test of Jacob's fitness for the larger tasks that lay ahead. The results were encouraging. Though he was left alone to wrestle through the night with a mysterious assailant, Jacob did not falter. The effort left its mark - a permanent injury to remind Jacob of what had taken place, and to serve perhaps as a portent of things to come.

32:25 wayye'aveq
The verb '-b-q 'to wrestle' may have been part of a name game related to the stream near which Jacob was encamped and which he had sent his family to cross, called yabboq.

32:29 yisra'el
The suggested etymology of the name Israel is no less preposterous than most of those peppered all over Genesis. And as with the vast majority of those names, the real historical and scientific origin is unknown and stands a good chance of forever remaining so. Naturally, theories abound. One which is referenced in CB is, even if not probable, at least sufficiently fascinating to merit my attention: it is the suggestion that yisra'el (the spelling is with sin, שׂ, which is identical in form to shin, שׁ, in consonantal spelling) is a "corruption" of ish raxel 'man of Rachel'. According to the biblical genealogy, Rachel was the mother of Joseph. The insinuation is that the "real" Israelites (b'ne yisra'el, sons of "Israel") are the offspring of Rachel, Jacob's most loved and favoured wife. The change of Jacob's name to Israel might also be interpreted as meaning that Jacob because the man (husband) of Rachel, a notion with strong matriarchal overtones. Linguistically, I am sad to say that this is all rather forced. Granted, most of the etymologies that appear in Genesis are also forced, but nobody is saying they are true, and this one doesn't even figure among those that Genesis saw fit to preserve.

32:31 p'ni'el
Jacob names the place (again?) and calls it Peniel (or Penuel, in v. 32) which is explained as meaning 'face of God', and Jacob says ki ra'íti elohim panim el panim wattinnatzel nafshi 'for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved' (KJV), meaning that he has survived an encounter with God. Now that could be interpreted as "evidence" that the ish was God (or in other words, that he was an angel, since in other Genesis passages an angel first presented as a man is later described as God), or at least, that the editor who penned these words was convinced (or wanted to be convinced) that the mysterious ish, who has now departed the scene, had been an angel. But there are lots of ways in which that might not be what this means, too. The JPS translation provides one escape route, by translating elohim not as 'God' in this instance but as 'divine being.' But if we accept the hypothesis of mutiple sources, this statement might indeed mean 'God', only not be referring to the scene with the ish but to previous events. Again, turning the whole thing around, perhaps this brief notice came from a place or sanctuary called Peniel (or Penuel) with a local tradition about its origin and its deity. Indeed, maybe the whole episode formed part of that local tradition (as suggested in CB, from whence I have taken some of the other ideas mentioned above).

32:32 w'hu tzoléa‛ ‛al y'rekho
Jacob is now described as having acquired a limp which is attributed to the injury he received from his supernatural visitor.

32:33
This verse uses the same story of the injury to Jacob's thigh to explain a dietary law forbidding the eating of the sciatic muscle. This is the only place in the Bible where such a law as this is mentioned. It is curious that just four verses after the introduction of the name yisra'el, in the name's second ocurrence ever, it already appears in the collocation b'ne yisra'el 'children of Israel' referring to the Israelite people which did not yet exist as such, obviously, at the time of the narrative. This is justified on account of the etiological function of this verse.

Notes 42: Appeasement (32:4-22)

SYNOPSIS: Jacob sends a message to Esau in Seir to say: I'm back. The messenger comes back with one saying: "Your message has been seen. He's coming. With 400 men." That last bit makes Jacob slightly nervous, so he splits his camp into two halves to cut his losses if worst comes to worst. Then he prays. Finally, he organises a parade of goats, sheep, camels, cows, bulls and donkeys, which he orders his servants to lead in blocks with gaps between each group, and if Esau asks what's going on as they're filing past him they are to answer that Jacob is just behind them. And that it is a present. This was meant to put Esau in a better mood by the time Jacob, coming up in the rear, finally reached Esau.

• Text of the passage in Nawat

Source critics suggest that what we have here was originally two accounts of Jacob's preparations to meet Esau, which would have come from different original sources and later been combined. Each of these accounts describes a different stratagem adopted by Jacob: in the first he splits his camp into two halves, in the second he sends his belongings ahead of him to appease his brother with gifts before they come face to face. Each of these two accounts ends with Jacob spending the night in the camp, so we seem to have him going to bed twice: (v. 14) wayyálen sham balláyla hahu 'he slept there that night', (v. 22) w'hu lan balláyla hahu bammaxane 'and he slept in the camp that night.'

In addition to these two strategies, Jacob also deals with his predicament in a third way: with a prayer (vv. 10-13).

We have already had one story explaining the origin of the name maxanáyim, but now we find another one: Jacob split his people into two camps.


32:7 w'gam holekh liqrat'kha w'arba‛ me'ot ish ‛immo
The fact that the messenger reports Esau to be coming to meet Jacob need not imply anything sinister; he might just as well be coming to greet him hospitably. On the other hand, we may well wonder (as Jacob perhaps did) whether Esau is bringing "four hundred men" along with him just to say hello?

Notes 41: Peace talks (31:43 - 32:3)

SYNOPSIS: Laban proposes they make peace, since they are, after all, family. They make a stone mound to commemorate their pact, which is named. Jacob swears by the Fear of Isaac (another name of God). Jacob makes a sacrifice. The next morning, Laban takes his leave. Jacob names the place Two Camps.

• Text of the passage in Nawat

This passage reports a covenant between Laban and Jacob. It is a sort of non-aggression pact: I promise not to tread on your toes, and you won't tread on mine. It is commemorated through a stone monument where they perform a ceremony to solemnize their agreement. Now of course this event fits in well with the development of the narrative and it is a fitting resolution to the conflict that has been building up between the two relatives. "Let's stop arguing, shake hands, bid each other farewell and each go on his way." Maybe that is all there is to it, but it is also possible that traditions about such an event could have been drawn, by the compilers of Genesis, from other sources, such as a narrative associated with a sanctuary which would have been the site of the altar that Jacob and Laban build at Gilead. Unfortunately nobody is very sure about the exact place where this is supposed to have happened. It seems that gil‛ad is really the name of an entire region and a mountain, not of a precise location. And as I already mentioned in the notes on the last passage, there is also a problem with the geography of this whole story, because Gilead is not really so close to Padan-Aram that Jacob's flight there and Laban's pursuit could have occurred as described within anything like the timeframe given (a week, ten days...).

According to source critics, the passage relates the establishment of this pact between Jacob and Laban twice, suggesting that possibly two traditional accounts of it were collated side by side. The seam or fault line is between verses 50 and 51 (the documentary hypothesists ascribe the first version to J and the second to E). It does rather read as if there were such a repetition (if understood literally in sequence, we have Jacob not only building two monuments but eating two ceremonial meals on them, cf. vv. 46 and 54), so maybe they are right. At the same time, the content of the "two pacts" is different as expressed in the text (I'm not sure if that provides or neutralizes an argument for multiple sources!): in v. 50 Laban is concerned that Jacob should treat his daughters well, while the subsequent verses focus on non-aggression between the two parties.

When negotiations are completed, monuments built and consecrated and all have supped at least once, it is bed time. In the morning the two parties set off in their separate directions and at that point the place is given a name: Mahanaim (maxanáyim), an important city in the region, it would seem. The word means 'two camps', and what is really offered in the concluding verses of the parasha is another folk etymology. The narrative occasion for this naming is an inconsequential anecdote about an encounter with messengers of God (or as some would have it, angels). They don't actually do anything, or even say anything; Jacob just sees them. But just as in Jacob's dream, back at Beth El , the opening scene of this parasha, the sight of God and his messengers led him to exclaim (28:16): akhen yesh YHWH bammaqom hazze w'anokhi lo yadá‛ti, so now he sees angels and says in the last verse of the section (32:3): maxane elohim ze 'This is God's camp,' and he named that place Mahanaim. Curtain falls.


31:46 wayyómer ya'aqov l'exaw
Now it is Jacob's turn to have the same term (exaw 'his brothers') applied to his "people" with him that was employed earlier in reference to Laban; in the present instance the word cannot mean blood brothers!

31:47-8 y'gar sahaduta
In Aramaic, paraphrasing H gal ‛ed. This is interesting to biblical and linguistic historians as a metalinguistic testimony (and such are rather scarse in the Pentateuch) which clearly implies that Laban the Aramaean spoke Aramaic (and also that Jacob's language was Hebrew). This is consistent with the internal narrative of Genesis which often tells us that Laban's family were Aramaean and lived in Padan-Aram, and that this was the general area where Abraham's line had originated from (Haran...). Unfortunately, this whole setup is not so consistent with what is known by historical linguists, according to whom there is a gross anachronism here: in the period of history in which the patriarchal story is set, the Aramaic language did not exist! That is, it is belielved that the divergence and consolidation of different West Semitic languages out of which Aramaic crystalized as a separate branch did not occur until several centuries later than the setting for the patriarchal narrative (although probably earlier than the possible time of composition of the extant text of the Pentateuch as we know it). That is to say: in the time of the people writing Genesis, so to speak, Aramaic existed as a different language from Hebrew and the other Canaanite dialects, but at the time when Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were supposed to have been around it hadn't come into existence yet. Naturally, this is something that the writers would be unlikely to be aware of: all they knew was that Laban was from the region where, eventually, Aramaic would be spoken. These writers would themselves be familiar with Aramaic as the upcoming lingua franca of the entire Middle East, eventually displacing both Assyrian and Egyptian, the ancient languages of the two regional empires; and it was in that lingua franca that the latest parts of the Old Testament would be written, because it also displaced Hebrew as the Israeliltes' own vernacular. They therefore would have been in a position to put two and to together and make... five.

w'ya‛aqov qara lo gal‛ed; ‛al ken qara sh'mo gal‛ed
Working backwards: gal‛ed is identical in consonantal script to the name Gilead (vocalized gil‛ad) and there can be little doubt that it is an allusion to the name of the mountain district where this scene is depicted as taking place. It is possible that the two words are ultimately the same one, and even if not, the text is still providing a folk etymology (no more likely to be "true" than the rest of the name games in Genesis) to explain the name Gilead. 

31:49 w'hammitzpa
Not content with two names (actually the same "name" in two languages), the narrative provides another name for the monument they have erected, deriving it from a verb root tz-p-h 'to keep watch', hence 'The Watchtower.' However, it is probably questionable that a sacred mound of stones should actually be a watchtower (or that the name of a tower should mean "mound"), nor that the same artifact would serve both as a "witness" and as a watchout post. A possibility suggested by Speiser would be that here there were originally two variant traditions or two places vying for a similar origin, which came to be "harmonized" over time: one was a monumental stone mound (gal ‛ed), and the other a watch tower (mitzpa). Perhaps the mound commemorated the promise of non-aggression, while the tower was a place to keep watch just in case the promise was broken!

31:53 elohe avraham welohe naxor yishp'Tu venénu
The plural verb form yishp'Tu implies either that elohe avraham and elohe naxor are two different gods (the god of Abraham and the god of Nahor) or else that they are multiple ones (the gods of Abraham and Nahor).

elohe avihem
This throws a spanner in the works as far as the syntax of this verse goes. The safest reading is of elohe avihem 'the god(s) of their father' (or rather, 'their ancestral god(s)') as an explanatory apposition to elohe avraham welohe naxor. But it is Laban who says elohe avraham welohe naxor, whereas this can only be said by the narrator, so it must be understood as a parenthetical editorial note, and perhaps, as Speiser suggests, a scribal gloss which found its way into the main text by mistake. In the gloss it is tempting to read elohe as singular, and maybe that was even the intention of the author of the gloss, but it clashes with the conclusion just drawn on the basis of the jussive plural yishp'Tu, so maybe we need to go with "gods" to keep the sentence internally consistent.

wayyisshava‛ ya‛aqov b'fáxad aviw yitzxaq
Jacob is having none of it. These sparse five words state that he swore by the Dread (páxad) of his father Isaac.

32:1 waynassheq l'vanaw
Laban's banaw might either have been all his offspring (daughters and grandchildren) or else his grandsons, since 'his daughters' is livnotaw, but since after l'vanaw the word w'livnotaw appears (but why after l'vanaw??), the latter assumption is forced on us.




END OF SECTION 7

The place of this seventh parasha in the narrative structure is very clear: it tells of the first half of the story of Jacob as an adult, from the day he leaves his parents' house onwards, covering the twenty years he spent under Laban's care and protection, up until his departure on his return to his native Canaan.

The internal narrative structure of this section is equally tight and clearcut. As it begins, Jacob is en route from Canaan to Padan-Aram; as it ends, he is once again en route in the reverse direction. His outward journey commences with an encounter with angels at Bethel, and on his return he has another brush with them at Mahanaim (both times he exlaims that he has been in the place where God resides, and names each place accordingly). There are also other opposites besides the directions of the two journeys. When he left home he was escaping from Esau; on his way back, he is headed towards a meeting with his estranged brother. But when he left Canaan he was young, alone and empty-handed; now, on the other hand, he is more mature, the owner of a large flock and wealth, and accompanied by a harem and a large family. Much has happened in Jacob's life in these twenty years: he has worked, got married, acquired a family, quarrelled with his uncle and father-in-law, and now he is coming back home.