Notes 73: Jacob foretells the fortunes of the Israelite tribes (49:1-27)

SYNOPSIS: Jacob summons all his sons so that he can foretell the fortune of each, or rather of the tribes they represent.

I decided to leave this passage's commentary, and indeed its translation too, until the rest of Genesis was out of the way. I can give one reason for this by quoting directly from Everett Fox (EF, p. 207):

The chapter is among the most difficult in the Torah. Many passages are simply obscure, leaving the translator to make at best educated guesses.

Another reason is that scholars all agree that this text has a different origin from all the rest of the book of Genesis; in one sense, it is not part of the same book at all, but an independent poem that was inserted here. It is not the only part of Genesis widely thought to be of "extraneous" origin; remember ch. 14. The difference there is that, as texts go, this one is much harder to understand.

According to many scholars Genesis as a whole was pieced together by combining and incorporating a variety of source materials, but even accepting that, the sources used and the text that resulted (aside from this bit) make up a coherent entity in many senses, in terms of genre, theme and narrative continuity. Genesis minus ch. 49 is the story of the patriarchs; chapter  49 is a poem (or a collection of sayings in verse??) about the tribes of Israel. As regards dates, this poetic material is believed to be more archaic than the rest of the book.

As compared to the list of Jacob's sons,
in the list of tribes Levi is absent, while
Joseph is represented by his two sons,
Ephraim and Manasseh, thus maintaining the
total of twelve. Reuben's banishment to the
fringe area, Simeon's domination by Judah
and Levi's dispersal amongst the other tribes,
and on the other hand the rise to dominance
of Judah in the south and the Josephite tribes
in the north, are among historical developments
symbolized and motivated allegorically in this
cryptic poetic text. Map: Wikipedia

Its genre can perhaps be described as oracular poetry, whose subject matter is the prediction of the fate of each of the twelve tribes. The format into which this oracle (or these oracles) is cast is that it is supposed to have been recited by their eponymous father, Israel (alias Jacob). Although composed long ago (even in relation to the writing of Genesis!), the date of composition must have been late enough to be able to create an oracle a posteriori which "predicts" events known or supposed by the author to have occurred to these tribes. Not all of the author's knowledge about the tribes' histories is available to us today, but to the extent that we can understand them the "oracles" are largely compatible with what we do know.

Unfortunately, though, the information embedded in the poem is couched in a poetic, formalistic and symbolic language our command of which is limited; this is not a history of the twelve tribes but a poem about that history which is supposed to make sense to us if we already know that history! Not only do scholars not know as much as they would like, but I am not privy to most of what they do know, and my ambitions in the following comments are therefore modest, and as all my other comments, nearly always derivative from materials I have been fortunate enough to be able to read. For anyone interested in taking this further than I can take them, hopefully what I provide will serve as a point of departure.

To a limited extent, we can make some use of the rest of Genesis to clarify and contextualize this poem's allusions. So when the poem says of Reuben (v. 4) 'you mounted your father's bed' we know this is not a misreading thanks to another brief mention of the same incident in ch. 35. We are able to understand the motivation of Jacob's anger at Simeon and Levi thanks to our knowledge of the details of the story of Dinah narrated in ch. 34, and so on. Therefore, while the texts are autonomous, the background story-line is either directly shared or clearly related. But how? Is it just that they are both reflecting the same history or the same narrative tradition? Or, since the poem is the older text by all accounts, could it be that a part of Genesis grew out of the poem as an extended "novelization", rather as books about the life of Jacob, Moses, Jesus etc. are built by mediaeval or modern-day authors out of the biblical accounts, taken as a baseline; or to take another analogy, as some scholars suspect the Christian gospels themselves may have been elaborated out of sketchier primitive sources?

We might have expected to find stronger connections between this text and the chapter about the birth and naming of Jacob's sons by their (legal) mothers (ch. 30). The traditions look like they were independent and only overlap at all by chance. So for instance, when Gad was born his name was said to have come from the word gad meaning 'luck', but the present poem connects it instead to another assonating word, g'dud 'marauding band'.

The custom of referring to this poem as "The Blessing of Jacob" is a misnomer, for as Speiser points out (EAS, p. 370), these are not blessings but prophesies. Indeed, if the favourable prophesies made of some tribes were "blessings", the unfavourable ones about others would surely be curses! The external narrative framework in which the poem is presented uses the assumption or conceit that Jacob's sons all gather around him and he tells each in turn "what is to befall you in days to come." If there is a colophon at the end, it is verse 28: 'All these were the tribes of Israel, twelve in number, and this is what their father said to them as he bade them farewell, addressing to each a parting word appropriate to him.' I commented on the first part of this verse here.

There are some striking differences between the "oracles" dedicated to different brothers. One, obviously, is that while some are clearly complimentary (Judah and Joseph come to mind), most are not, and some at least are unabashedly derogatory. This may reflect the bias of the author or authors; it may also allude to historical circumstances of which we are only vaguely aware, if that. Another difference is that Reuben's and Judah's oracles (i.e. those of his firstborn son and of the one who attains leadership of the confederation) are expressed in the second person, and that fact is made all the more salient by the prominence of the pronoun atta in both their initial statements. The other oracles are in third person throughout except Joseph's, which is mostly in the third person but contains a second-person bit in the middle (v. 25).

Because of the length of my notes on this passage, I am going to publish the detailed comments separately and break them up into several posts, since some readers may find it hard to digest everything in a single sitting. Tomorrow we will begin with the oracles of Reuben, Simeon and Levi.