When you get around to reading this grandiose work as a complete book, you may feel you are at last coming to the original text, the primary source. But that depends on what we mean by "original text" and "primary source", because this text itself originated from a process. And although we do not know everything about that process (in fact it now seems like we may know a little less for sure than scholars thought they knew some years ago, as increasing doubt has been cast on the detailed theory of the documentary hypothesis), we can surmise some basic things at least, and it is almost impossible to envisage a way in which the text we know could have developed without a complicated process of compilation of smaller elements which had a prior existence, and that would include the stories I was talking about. But it stands to reason that the chicken-or-the-egg question regarding Genesis versus the stories in Genesis can confidently be resolved in favour or the egg: the stories existed first!
This means that we can, if we wish, reframe the initial question. As a person who has heard the most famous bible stories coming to a complete reading of the whole of Genesis for the first time, instead of wondering: What is the original narrative context of the familiar stories I have so often heard separately? one might well ask instead: How did the authors of Genesis create a single narrative context into which they incorporated all my favourite stories? since that is what someone, at some stage, must have done. And the answer, of course, is: Brilliantly!
Naturally, I am simplifying. The direct authors or compilers of Genesis did have to work this set of stories into a fuller narrative framework and make everything fit into it, but they also had to incorporate other given elements, utilise additional materials. One such material, it seems, would likely have been local traditions. Consider how modern ethnographers work. That's the people who go around collecting folk tales from mostly elderly country folk who remember, for them, the old, traditional tales that people of their grandparents' generation had recited, and then publish them in scholarly journals or collect them in books. There is an annotation along with each story informing readers when the story was collected, who the informant was, the informant's age at the time and where the informant is from. Some stories will only have been collected in a single place; others in several towns or regions, but there are usually variations of one sort or another between these. Quite often, such stories include references to specific places, and those places are almost always ones familiar to the inhabitants of the place from where a given version of the story comes; hence if the story is widespread, the geographical locations given often vary accordingly even when the overall story as such remains the same or essentially similar. Each place or each area within a country has a local tradition with particular stories or variants of stories, until modernization, globalization or other changes cause that local tradition to be lost. This is surely universally so in countries and societies which have maintained traditional lifestyles (at least in some regions, e.g. the more rural ones) and we can be sure it was so among the Israelites when Genesis was taking form too. This means that the compilers were not just confronted with stories to weave into a coherent text, but different local traditions, which often incorporated their own versions of such stories.
Now if that is so, then it is more than likely that when in a particular passage of Genesis reference is made to a particular geographical place - a town, a geographical feature, a well, a monument of some sort - then that local reference signals a local origin for the story version that the compiler is working from. If the story says Shechem or Bethel or Hebron or Beersheba, it is practically a certainty that this story (or something out of which our present story evolved) was once traditionally told in that vicinity. Thus, if the story talks about a certain well or an altar or a hill, there would have been a well, altar or hill about which this story was traditionally told in the area mentioned. Where the story also contains a "name game" purporting to explain the origin of a place name, we can surely assume that such a naming myth once circulated in that area, since people are naturally likely to be fascinated by stories about the origin of the names they know, names of places they are familiar with, such as the name of their own town, for example. And last but not least, if such a story reflecting a local tradition introduces a particular name of God such as El Lahai Roi, it is extemely likely that this was a local tradition too, perhaps implying that there was a cult to a deity with this denomination in the place from where the story came; indeed, it is all but necessarily so, for why else would the compiler have wished to insert a name for God at such points in the text, had it not been so?
Therefore, we may conclude that in the process of creating the Genesis we know, materials collected from different local traditions were incorporated, and so in different tales the characters of the book find themselves now here, now there, according to where each story locates the action. In terms of narrative, this would imply that the patriarchs needed to move around quite a lot, since they need to show up in the right place for the next geographically specified anecdote. Does that account for so much movement from place to place of each of the patriarchs and their kinfolk? Well, it may, to some degree, but we must also accept the premise that (conveniently for the authors, as it happens) they were the sort of people who moved about a lot anyway. So it wouldn't have been so much of a problem coming up with a pretext for them to stay so mobile, but there would still need to be some logistical work to come up with a particular itinerary which fits the need for all the people to be in all the places they are described as being in at different stages in their lifetimes.
Now I'm not assuming that nothing at all was known a priori about those movements and that the authors of the book just invented them to fit the needs of each chapter of the story. Probably there was already a tradition which spoke of their wanderings, at least up to a certain point of detail. We know there was an overall scheme of things: in Abraham's time, the family moved from Mesopotamia to Canaan; during the lives of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob there was a considerable amount of moving back and forth both within Canaan, and between Canaan and Mesopotamia (e.g. Jacob), and on various occasions between Canaan and Egypt too; then at the end of Genesis, there is a great, long-term migration of the whole group to Egypt. This much could not just have been "invented" out of convenience to make the stories fit. What about the details, though? In particular, the frequent mentions of moves from one town to another inside Canaan? Did those moves and those reports of periods of residence here and there derive from an early tradition which described all those movements, or did the traditions that were gathered from different localities in Canaan oblige the authors to assume that the patriarchs must have made some such movements in order to find themselves in the right place at the right time for each tale that was included?
I am going to assume we cannot obtain a categorical answer to that question, and I am going to discuss things now which can be talked about without an assumption that such an answer is ever going to be forthcoming. So, we don't fully know how the patriarchs' lifetime "itineraries" took shape, but what we do know is that both the movements and periods of residence described, and the stories that are told of them in different places, mean either that the patriarchs, as historically living individual people, were present in those places, or else that the stories about them as people imagined at least to have been individuals who lived in history were told in those places and the characters involved were depicted as being in the places concerned. One way or the other, what I am going to ask, very simply, is: And what places were those? Because Genesis, as a book, is (like a modern novel would be, for instance) set in certain places and articulated around statements about going from A to B. The narrative is linked to a set of geographical coordinates. And as when we read a novel that talks about comings and goings and first being here and then being there we appreciate it if we have some inkling, at least, of what and where the places mentioned are, so when we read Genesis it would be nice to have some such notion too.
Hence my idea of writing about the places of Genesis. Note that I am not going to attempt to plot an itinerary of the patriarchs or any such thing. Rather then try to run after them as they move about the country, pop down to Egypt or run away to Padan-Aram, let's just do a simple tour of our own, stopping at the relevant places, and take the large-scale direction of the patriarchs' migratory movement as a starting point: from Mesopotamia to Canaan and from Canaan to Egypt. The route from Mesopotamia to Canaan follows the Fertile Crescent which goes up to Syria, entering Canaan from the north, while to get from Canaan to Egypt you go first south and then west. Logically, then, our progress through Canaan, when our tour bus gets there, will be from north to south with stops at the relevant places in Canaan along the way.
Mesopotamia
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| The Fertile Crescent (Wikipedia) |
In Chapter 11 of Genesis it is stated that Abraham's family came from a place called Ur Kasdim (traditionally translated into English as Ur of the Chaldeans). It is not entirely clear from the text if Abraham himself was born there, though this is often claimed; and he may have been. But the family moved from there to a place called Harran (xaran in Hebrew), and it is from there that God tells Abram at the beginning of Chapter 12 to 'go (lekh l'kha) to a place that I shall show you', namely Canaan; so this is where the journey of Genesis begins. Now both Ur Kasdim and Harran are in Mesopotamia, although there is a lack of agreement and certainty among scholars over just where Ur Kasdim is.
Harran (or Haran in Genesis, since Hebrew doesn't possess a double r) was "a major ancient city in Upper [i.e. northwestern - ARK] Mesopotamia" (Wikipedia), in other words it pertained to the region that was once called Assyria. This places Abram's family somewhere near the "top" of the Fertile Crescent; further to the east is the great and powerful Babylonia, to its west was the Levant bordering the Eastern Mediterranean, also known as Canaan. It is the same place, apparently, that is usually referred to elsewhere in Genesis as Paddan-Aram and also as Aram Naharaim (naharáyim means 'two rivers'). The approach to Canaan, coming from Ha(r)ran, was from the north, since further south there was nothing but desert.
What of Ur Kasdim? Ur was the name of an important Sumerian city-state located at what was once the coast of the Persian Gulf, near the mouth of the River Euphrates, at the opposite end of Mesopotamia from Harran. Others have suggested Ur Kasdim may be a different Ur. We can't be certain.
The word kasdim is spelt in Hebrew כשׂדים, with the letter sin. This is one way to write /s/ in Hebrew, the other being with the letter samekh. The letter sin is the same letter shape which sometimes represents /s/ but more often means /š/. This orthographic situation suggests that these instances of ש = /s/ probably were once pronounced /š/, since the same letter is used for them. This can only be reconciled by reconstructing two dialects and probably three proto-phonemes, which may be represented as */s/, */ś/ and */š/. Orthographically these correspond, respectively, to samekh, sin and shin. Since sin and shin are written identically, we may assume a dialect in which these two phonemes merged; but since in our pronunciation it is samekh and sin that are pronounced identically, and distinctly from shin, this implies a different dialect in which the first two merged. Nowhere is a form of Hebrew attested with three distinct phonemes. Hence the question is, before the reconstructed merger, what sound did */ś/ have? While this is not known, it seems to correspond to [l] in the European translation (English) Chaldee, Chaldean. Was */ś/ then originally a voicless lateral?
Be that as it may, Genesis thus states that the first patriarchal ancestor of the Israelites (Hebrews, Jews) came originally from somewhere in Mesopotamia, and it is usually accepted as plausible that the Hebrews may indeed have been in Mesopotamia before reaching Canaan, as suggested. However, the Hebrew language is a dialect of the kind of West Semitic spoken in and around Canaan, and clearly doesn't come from Mesopotamia; what this would imply is that if the people came from Mesopotamia, they adopted a variety of Canaanite as their language after their migration; this Judeo-Canaanite then evolved into the Hebrew we know.
From a linguistic viewpoint, that scenario doesn't seem unrealistic considering how many times their descendants would later adopt a form of the language of the people among whom they came to reside, whether it be Aramaic, Greek, Mediaeval Spanish, Mediaeval German (whence Yiddish) or modern English - not to mention, of course, modern Israeli Hebrew! So why wouldn't they have adopted and adapted a form of Canaanite when they settled in Canaan! What did they speak prior to that? Abram's relative back in Harran, Laban, is quoted as speaking Aramaic (31:47), a language of northern Mesopotamia, and is referred to as an Aramean (25:20 and 31:24), as is his father Bethuel (Abraham's nephew: 25:20 and 28:5); was then the original language of the Jews, before (and also again after) Hebrew, a form of Aramaic?
The question of Mesopotamian origins is important from several perspectives. Linguistically, it can explain the presence of Akkadian influence on Hebrew. Akkadian is a cover term for the East Semitic official language of the post-Sumerian Mesopotamian empires in its dialects, including both Assyrian and Babylonian; although Akkadian belongs to the Semitic family, it is in a distinct branch from Hebrew and the other Canaanite languages and the Aramaic languages which are all in the Northwest Semitic branch. Akkadian was the imperial language, related to but also different from either Aramaic or Hebrew; if the ancestors of the Israelites had been in Mesopotamia they would have been exposed to it even if they spoke a different language, and some of that influence might later have been carried over to the "Judeo-Canaanitic" language Hebrew which they developed. None of this is far-fetched if we realise that Yiddish has evolved in an analogous way in our era.
Likewise, the ancestors of the Israelites would have been exposed to Mesopotamian culture and this would account for the numerous observations of reflections of such influences in the Old Testament, including some of the oldest myths such as the creation story or the flood story.
Both of these influences (linguistic and cultural) are sometimes linked, as when a particular word used in a Hebrew story is an apparent borrowing from an Akkadian word that is used in the Mesopotamian myth to which the bible story seems to be related! One example of this is the word ed, almost a hapax legomenon (a word only occuring once), which is found near the beginning of the Adam and Eve story, when describing the beginining of the world (2:6): w'ed ya'ale min haáretz w'hishqa et kol pne haadama 'But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground' (KJV). According to scholars, the translation mist that is found in the King James (and similarly un vapor in the Spanish Reina Valera translation, for example) is dubious. The Septuagint here says πηγὴ δὲ ἀνέβαινεν 'a fountain (or spring) went up' and the Vulgate similarly has fons. Scholars think that this ed is actually an Akkadian word (according to Speiser the source word is edû which is in turn a borrowing from the more ancient and linguistically unrelated Sumerian tongue). But most interestingly, Speiser, who suggests the translation 'flow', adds: "The sense would be that of an underground swell, a common motif in Akkadian literary composition' (my emphasis). In other words, the Hebrew story not only contains an Akkadian (i.e. Mesopotamian) word hardly used elsewhere, but it uses it in a way that shows Mesopotamian literary (not just linguistic) influence. Both the notion and the word were probably borrowed together, as a cultural "package".
If the forefathers had spent a long formative period in Mesopotamia before their Canaanite migration, and if they brought their myths along with them, the occasional appearance of that sort of clear evidence of an eastern cultural "baggage" would be expected. This, and similar examples that have been recognised here and there, supports the possibility that the Genesis account (ch. 12) of the patriarch's migration from Mesopotamia to Canaan is something more than a mere legend.
However, this "proof" of Mesopotamian origin is countered by some who point out that there are other sources of Mesopotamian cultural influence to which the Hebrews might have been exposed even if this ethnic group had originated in Canaan. Throughout Canaan, we are reminded, Mesopotamian influence was long present, since after all Mesopotamia was one of the two great powers between which Canaan was sandwiched (Egypt was the other). And let's not forget that at a much later time in the history of the Israelites, they underwent a Babylonian diaspora. And the debate over just when Genesis was really written is still ongoing!
Canaan
Genesis 10:19 states: way'hi g'vul hakk'na‛ani mittzidon boakha g'rára ‛ad ‛aza boakha s'dóma wa‛amora w'adma utz'voyim ‛ad lásha‛ 'The Canaanite territory extended from Sidon as far as Gerar, near Gaza, and as far as Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboiim, near Lasha.' |
| By Briangotts on en.wikipedia and Slashme on en.wikipedia [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons. Note that this map represents a later stage than the period covered by the Torah, at which much of Canaan has become the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and the Philistines were also already settled in their historical area. |
The population of this region was culturally, ethnically, linguistically and politically heterogeneous, complex and often unstable. This complexity is reflected in the ways the neibouring peoples are referred to in Genesis and the result is quite confusing at times; some points have been more or less clarified by archaeologists and historians but some details remain uncertain. The chronological dimension and the multiple layers in the way the Genesis text evolved adds a great deal more complication. Against the backdrop of a changing human and political landscape we need to consider that the narrative of Genesis refers to one period of time (and a demographic situation contemporary with it), but that this narrative was produced and written down over a subsequent period of centuries, and given final form at a much later time when the ethnic landscape of the region in question was completely different, a different set of names were in use and the same terms might not even be used in the same sense any more. Finally, of course, that second landscape is again totally different from the one we are acquainted with in the modern world or which was known to readers of Genesis at different periods in the two thousand years of the Common Era. Indeed, during the first "time gap" (between the time of the events narrated and that of their narration) even Canaan itself ceased to be the term used to refer to the area we are interested in, which came to be called the land of Israel (éretz yisrael). In Genesis, however, it is consistently called éretz k'ná‛an, and it is the usage in Genesis that we must understand to read Genesis.
In Genesis, then, éretz k'ná‛an 'the land of Canaan' is a geographical term which, as such, covers the whole territory described. But when, on the other hand, k'ná‛an is used as an ethnic term, such as when Isaac, in ch. 28, enjoins Jacob not to take a wife mibb'not k'ná‛an 'from the daughters of Canaan' (i.e. not to marry a Canaanite woman), it is used as a cover term for the various peoples among whom the patriarchs lived but always excluding the patriarchs' own people. What Isaac tells Jacob means the same thing exactly as when someone is told in modern Yiddish not to marry a shikse (i.e. a woman who is not Jewish). So, the patriarchs live in Canaan but they always consider themselves non-Canaanite. Canaanite seems to work as a cover term encompassing a varying set of local ethnic groups, whose specific reference might therefore vary depending on the context of its use, and the text often contains other more detailed information about the groups concerned, which involves all sorts of other names. The question of the identities and backgrounds of those groups is in itself a very interesting and complicated one, and I would get bogged down if I tried to address it here, so let's leave it at that for now.
(Footnote for the geekier readers: There is yet another way in which Canaanite can be used, too. The ethnic makeup of ancient Canaan was complicated, but what are generally understood today to have been the indigenous population of the region, among the mixed array of groups moving through the area, were for the most part the ancient speakers of Northwest Semitic languages, a group of closely related language varieties the speakers of which include among others the Amorites, Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites, Phoenicians and the Israelites, since Hebrew is also one of these languages! These were all, more or less, dialects of a single language, the autochthonous Semitic language of the area, distinct from other Semitic languages (Aramaic, Akkadian, Arabic and so on) and most certainly distinct also from the non-Semitic languages spoken by other ethnic groups who were present, such as the people referred to in Genesis as Hittites, the Jebusites, the Hivites, the Hurrians, the Philistines and what have you. At least linguistically, then it is appropriate to refer to the Hebrew-speaking Israelites also as speakers of a "Canaanite language.")
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| Source: T. Dowley, The student Bible atlas (1991) |
Dothan (Hebrew dotan) is mentioned in just one place in Genesis, early in the Joseph cycle (37:17). Jacob and his family are probably living at Mamre in the valley of Hebron (the main family residence), but most of his sons are tending the flock up north, around Shechem. Jacob asks young Joseph to go to his brothers, so off he goes. But he meets someone there who tells him that his brothers are no longer in Shechem; they have moved to Dothan (which according to Speiser is about a day's journey away): wayyómer haish nas‛u mizze ki shamá‛ti omrim nel'kha dotáyna wayyélekh yosef axar exaw wayyimtz'am b'dotan 'The man said: "They have gone from here, for I heard them say: Let us go to Dothan." So Joseph followed his brothers and found them at Dothan' (JPS). Joseph goes to Dothan to find them, but they ambush and kidnap him.
Shechem (Heb. sh'khem) is the first location in Canaan that is referred to in the narrative of Abram's arrival in the land from Haran (12:6, NBIE): wayya‛avor avram baáretz ‛ad m'qom sh'khem ‛ad elon more 'Abram crossed into the land and reached a place called Shechem by the great tree of Moreh.' God appears to Abram at Shechem and promises (12:7): l'zar‛akha etten et haáretz hazzot 'I am going to give this land to your descendants'. Abram builds an altar there.
Shechem doesn't come up again in Abraham's story, but after his grandson Jacob, returning from Padan-Aram, crosses the Jordan he also proceeds to Shechem and takes up residence there (33:18, JPS): wayyavo ya‛aqov shalem ‛ir sh'khem asher b'éretz k'ná‛an b'vo mippaddan aram wayyíxan et pney ha‛ir 'Jacob arrived safely in the city of Shechem which is in the land of Canaan - having come thus from Paddan-aram - and he encamped before the city.' According to the narrative, this is following Jacob's encounter with his twin brother Esau (at Succoth, in the Jordan Valley, see the map); after they part ways, Esau goes south to found the kingdom of Edom.
The source critics see a seam here, and it may be that in the development of the text, we originally had separate accounts of Jacob's encounter with Esau on the one hand and his arrival in Canaan on the other, which the redactors stitched together in the order given. It does seem strange that, given the context of these dramatic events, the narrator should feel the need to specify b'vo mippaddan aram 'having come from Paddan-aram', as if we didn't already know that, yet also omitting in that phrase any allusion to the events at Succoth!
Another strange jump in the text occurs next, for in the following verse (33:19) the name of Shechem is again mentioned but now it is the name of a person: the son of Hamor, from whom Jacob purchased the plot of ground where he had pitched his tent 'before the city' for a hundred q'sitas (whatever they are). It is not that it is impossible for someone to have the same name as the town he lives in, it's just that the way the text runs is odd, with the same name one moment being a place and then without warning it's a person. It is enough to make one wonder if the first occurrence of Shechem might not have referred to this person too, since ‛ir sh'khem asher b'éretz k'ná‛an is potentially perfectly ambiguous: 'in the city of Shechem which is in the land of Canaan' might be construed to mean 'in Shechem's city', in which case the text would no longer be jerky. And maybe that is what it means, but we know independently that the name of that town is Shechem. It is also possible that the redactor stitched the two pieces together at that place precisely because the shared proper noun Shechem seemed to make it hang together somehow. Or again, how about if Shechem, the character in the story, is a personification of the town of the same name, as Esau is the personification of Edom and so on and so forth? In that case, the narrative as a story is about the person Shechem, though symbolically his persona alludes to the city.
Jacob erects an altar there too (remember that Abram erected one). So, either two altars, or an altar with two divergent traditions about who erected it. The God to whom Jacob dedicates his altar is named as el elohe yisrael 'El God of Israel'. According to the theory of local sanctuary traditions, that would be the name of the God worshipped long ago at Shechem, as well as one of the traditions preserved there about the origin of the sanctuary.
What comes next in the text (ch. 34) is Dinah's story, which I have already discussed sufficiently elsewhere so there is no need to comment on the events of the story. It involves very prominently both the person of Shechem son of Hamor and his town, which is not named a single time in the whole chapter but is assumed to be Shechem on the strength of the preceding context (according to which Jacob has now moved to Shechem and bought the land on which he is living there from this same Shechem son of Hamor).
However, in the source analysis those preceding remarks are attributed to a different source than the story of Dinah, so the seemingly implied geographical localization could be spurious, and this would then only be a story about someone called Shechem and his town, not necessarily about the town named Shechem (albeit the town of Shechem). All the same, I suppose there is a good chance it is Shechem since at the beginning of the next chapter (ch. 35) God tells Jacob to move to Bethel, which is a few miles south of Shechem and would imply a coherent north-to-south itinerary if Jacob were now coming from Shechem (the town).
At the end of his life, just after blessing his grandchildren Ephraim and Manasses, Jacob makes a disjointed remark which has given scholars a few headaches. The remark and the way it just crops up out of the blue are weird enough to merit a full quote of these words of Jacob to his son Joseph (48:21-2, NBIE): 'I am going to die. God will be with you all. He will take you back to your fathers' land. I give you Shechem, as one over your brothers, for I freed it from the Emorites with my iron and my bow.' Because of several incongruities, scholars have gone so far as to wonder if the translation of the last sentence is wrong, but on the face of it this would seem to allude to the events of Dinah's story.
Bethel (bet el, literally 'House of El') was the next stop in Abraham's southward route. We are told twice in Genesis (ch. 28 and 35) that the name of Bethel "at first" was Luz; both times, and also the one other time it is mentioned in the book (ch. 48), the name bet el is associated with Jacob.
According to the Collins Atlas of Bible history (London, 1991), the distance from Dothan to Shechem was fourteen miles, that from Shechem to Bethel was nineteen, while there were thirty miles between Shechem and Jerusalem (called shalem, the English Salem, in Genesis). The distance from Bethel to Jerusalem is not given there, but according to Zondervan's compact Bible dictionary (Grand Rapids, 1993) it was twelve miles. The site of the ancient Bethel has not been identified with certainty.
After Abram has built his altar at Shechem we are told that (12:8, NBIE): wayya‛teq missham hahára miqqédem l'vet el wayyeT oholo bet el miyyam w'ha‛ay miqqédem wayyíven sham mizbéax lYHWH wayyiqra b'shem YHWH 'He left that place and reached the mountain to the east of Bet-El. He stretched out his tent in a place where Bet-El was to the west and Ay was to the east. He built there an altar for Our Lord and called in the name of Our Lord.' So, Abram camped near Bethel and built an altar there, and it is stated as explicitly as possible that the name of God with which this was associated was YHWH.
Next comes the episode of Abram and Sarai in Egypt, following which they return to Canaan and retrace their steps: from the Negeb in the south of Canaan they head north until they reach Bethel, regarding which the text here clearly reaffirms all the particulars we have gleaned (13:3-4, JPS): 'And he proceeded by stages form the Negeb as far as Bethel, to the place where his tent had been formerly, between Bethel and Ai the site of the altar that he had built there at first; and there Abram invoked the Lord [i.e. YHWH] by name.'
But Bethel has a very strong Jacob tradition too; indeed it is with Jacob that the most memorable stories about Bethel are associated. It is at Bethel that Jacob, in flight from his brother Esau, spends the night and dreams of a stairway to heaven; God speaks to Jacob in the dream. In the morning he exclaims (28:16, JPS): akhen yesh YHWH bammaqom hazze w'anokhi lo yadá‛ti 'Surely the Lord [YHWH] is present in this place, and I did not know it!' Jacob set up the stone that had served as his pillow, turning it in to a pillar which he ceremonially anoints and calls 'El's house' (bet el). This might mean that the denomination el was used for God at Luz.
This is reaffirmed a few chapters later. In the intervening chapters Jacob has completed his journey to Laban's house in Paddan Aram and lived there for twenty years. In a conversation with his wives, Jacob tells them how, in a dream, he has been told to go back to Bethel by God, who speaks to him in the following terms (31:13, JPS): anokhi hael bet el asher masháxta sham mattzeva nadárta li sham néder 'ata qum tze min haáretz hazzot w'shuv el éretz moladtékha 'I am the God of Bethel, where you anointed a pillar and where you made a vow to Me. Now, arise and leave this land and return to your native land.' They agree to go back to Canaan but their journey is an eventful one. After dealing rather successfully with confrontations, first with his father-in-law Laban and then with his twin brother Esau, Jacob finally gets to Succoth (sukkot) in the Jordan river valley and then goes on from there to Shechem (ch. 33).
If you look at the above map you'll see that this route from Succoth to Shechem does not pass through Bethel, so that divine command is still pending at this point. But that's alright because God just tells Jacob again. In the period intervening between Jacob's arrival at Shechem and his getting this gentle reminder, the Dinah incident has happened, which it will be remembered is assumed to have taken place in Shechem given the sequence of events narrated; the relative chronology may not have always been part of the plot, however, since the source critics believe that the Dinah story and the following scéance with God come from different original sources. Anyway, now God says to Jacob (35:1, JPS): qum 'ale vet el w'shev sham wa'ase sham mizbéax lael hanir'e eléykha b'vorx'kha mipp'ne esaw axíkha 'Arise, go up to Bethel and remain there; and build an altar there to the God who appeared to you when you were fleeing from your brother Esau.' And so Jacob does. First, interestingly, he tells everyone in his household to 'rid yourselves of the alien gods in your midst' (which may or may not be referring, inter alia, to Rachel's father's idols), so they give him all their alien gods, he 'buried them under the terebinth that was near Shechem' (a terebinth is apparently a kind of tree), and off they go to Bethel. They get to Luz and (35:7) 'there he built an altar and named the site El-bethel [i.e. el bet el "El of the House of El"], for it was there that God had revealed Himself to him when he was fleeing from his brother.'
My guess is that "naming the site el bet el" amounts to the same idea, really, as renaming the town of Luz bet el, so that this is yet another variant of the legendary story of how the town came to be called Bethel. Rather than a multitude of stories which happen all to lead up (redundantly) to the naming of the place as Bethel, I would say we have a multitude of variant local traditions from the Bethel district all attempting to provide a narrative about where the town got its name from and all making this narrative somehow involve a patriarch (mostly Jacob but sometimes Abraham).
Now Jacob receives from God a blessing and a renewal of the promise for his descendants, and has his name changed to Israel; then he (again) sets up a stone pillar, (again) anoints it and (once again!) names the place bet el.
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| Source: W.H. Bennett (ed.), Genesis, Caxton, London, [1904?] in the Century Bible: A Modern Commentary series |
The first mention of either Mamre or Hebron in Genesis comes in ch. 13 after the separation of Abram and Lot. God tells Abram (13:17, JPS): 'Up, walk about the land, through its length and its breadth, for I give it to you.' Curiously, the text does not tell us whether Abram did so, it merely goes on to say (13:18): wayyeehal avram wayyavo wayyéshev b'elone mamre asher b'xevron wayyíven sham mizbéax lYHWH 'and Abram moved his tent, and came to dwell at the terebinths of Mamre, which are in Hebron; and he built an altar there to the Lord.' Once more, we have here an ambiguity: is Mamre the name of a place or of a person? Is it the terebinths at Mamre, or Mamre's terebinths? Possibly both, it seems. In 35:27, for example, when it says: wayyavo ya'aqov el yitzxaq aviw mamre qiryat ha'arba hu xevron asher gar sham avraham w'yitzxaq 'and Jacob came to his father Isaac at Mamre, at Kiriath-arba - now Hebron - where Abraham and Isaac had sojourned,' we would agree that Mamre denotes a place, not a person. But in the war story which immediately follows the first mention of Mamre I have referred to just now, in which the patriarch is referred to unusually as "Abram the Hebrew", suggesting a non-Israelite source document, it says this (14:13): wayyavo happaliT wayyagged l'avram ha'ivri w'hu shokhen b'elone mamre haemori axi eshkol waaxi 'aner w'hem ba'ale b'rit avram. 'A fugitive brought the news to Abram the Hebrew, who was dwelling at the terebinths of Mamre the Amorite, kinsman of Eshkol and Aner; these being Abram's allies.' This leaves little room for doubt that "Mamre the Amorite" (notice the parallellism with "Abram the Hebrew") is understood to have been a person. In most mentions of Mamre, however, the phrase 'elone mamre 'the terebinths of Mamre' is used, in which mamre might be either a location or the owner of said terebinths, but the phrase as a whole, 'elone mamre, clearly does designate a place. If Mamre really was originally a person, over time the phrase could still have become shortened until eventually Mamre was used simply to identify a place. And this is the place where Abraham and his offspring often resided in Canaan: [the terebinths of] Mamre in Hebron (which used to be called Kiryath-arba).
Abraham moves around the country (and even goes to Egypt for a spell), but when he is not on the move he seems to be most at home at Mamre. He is sitting in the door of his house (as many a Nawat-speaker might often be found doing, in their country) when the travellers pass by who turn out to be God's angels and tell him about Sarah giving birth to Isaac (ch. 18). When his wife passes away, Abraham buries her in a cave that forms part of a plot of land at Machpelah which he buys from a local man (ch. 23), and he himself is buried there (ch. 25). After him, his son Isaac will also live at Mamre, that is where Jacob returns to visit his father Isaac at the end of his life (ch. 35), it is where Isaac was buried together with his wife Rebeka. Jacob is still living at Mamre when he sends Joseph from there to pay a visit to his brothers up in the north (37:14). At the end of his life (and the end of the book of Genesis), now residing in Egypt, Jacob's last words are (49:29-32): 'Bury me with my fathers in the cave which is in the field of Ephron the Hittite, the cave which is in the field of Machpelah, facing Mamre, in the land of Canaan, the field that Abraham bought from Ephron the Hittite for a burial site - there Abraham and his wife Sarah were buried; there Isaac and his wife Rebekah were buried; and there I buried Leah - the field and the cave in it, bought from the Hittites.'
Beersheba (b'er shéva') was the most important town of Canaan's southern desert (the négev, Negeb). According to the Collins atlas, Beersheba is located 25 miles southwest of Hebron and 53 miles away from Bethel.
It is first referred to in the story of the expulsion of Ishmael and his mother Hagar from Abraham's household (ch. 21). The region is described in general terms as the midbar, conventionally translated in English as 'the wilderness' (21:14, NBIE):
early in the morning, Abraham
took tortillas and a skin full of watergave them to Hagar, set on her backthe boy, and sent them awayshe went wandering in the dry-land by Beer-Sheba
(...wattélekh wattéta' b'midbar b'er sháva').
In the passage immediately following, Abraham and the king of Gerar, Abimelech (avimélekh), meet at Beersheba to discuss a dispute over wells. They formalize an agreement, and it is suggested that this is the origin of the name. And then (21:33, JPS): wayyiTTa' éshel biv'er sháva' wayyiqra sham b'shem YHWH el 'olam '[Abraham] planted a tamarisk at Beer-sheba, and invoked there the name of the Lord, the Everlasting God.' What is translated here 'Everlasting God' is no doubt a name of God: El Olam. So this may be a local name of God, and a local tradition no doubt about the origin of its name.
The next passage after that, which tells the story of the testing of Abraham (the "sacrifice of Isaac"), also contains a passing reference to Beersheba at the end, since it concludes with the words (22:19, NBIE): wayyáshov avraham el n''araw wayyaqúmu wayyel'khu yaxdaw el b'er sháva' wayyéshev avraham biv'er sháva' 'Abraham returned to his servants. They rose and went together to Beer-Sheba and Abraham remained in Beer-Sheba.'
Isaac also goes to Beersheba, after his falling out with the same king Abimelech of Gerar in the third of the wife-or-sister episodes (ch. 23). Maybe he stayed there. If the implied chronology and sequence of events across passages is significant, then the story of Jacob's theft of Esau's blessing took place in Beersheba: even though the text doesn't say where this happened, the sequence in which Jacob flees to Padan-Aram (stopping to spend the night in Bethel, at a distance of 53 miles) commences with the sentence (28:10, JPS): wayyetze ya'aqov mibb'er sháva' wayyélekh xarána 'Jacob left Beer-sheba and set out for Haran.' (This is the sentence that gives its name to the seventh parasha of Genesis: wayyetze.)
Until, near the end of the book, Jacob and his family commence the final move to Egypt, they probably are still living in Hebron, where we know they were when the Joseph story begins because we are told that Jacob sent Joseph from Hebron to Shechem. Now, when an older Jacob leaves Canaan for the last time, he can't be starting his journey from Beersheba because we are told that as the first stage of the journey he went to Beersheba (46:1, JPS): wayyissa' yisrael w'khol asher lo wayyavo b'éra sháva' wayyizbax z'vaxim lelohe aviw yitzxaq 'So Israel set out with all that was his, and he came to Beer-sheba, where he offered sacrifices to the God of his father Isaac.' Then God appears to Jacob (here referred to as Israel) and tells him not to be afraid to go down to Egypt, for there he will make him into a great nation. Then they leave Beersheba and continue on their way to Egypt.
Gerar (g'rar) is a town that appears in Genesis and was evidently located in southwest Canaan, cf. (10:19, JPS): way'hi g'vul hakk'na‛ani mittzidon boakha g'rára ‛ad ‛aza... 'The Canaanite territory extended from Sidon as far as Gerar, near Gaza...' It is assumed to have been located between Beersheba and the Mediterranean coast (see the above map). Although somewhat off the "main [Shechem to Beersheba] route", it was frequented by Abram (ch. 20) and Isaac (ch. 26), who both had dealings with the king of Gerar, Abimelech.
In Genesis, the people of Gerar are often referred to as p'lishtim 'Philistines', that region as éretz p'lishtim 'the land of the Philistines', and Abimelech is mélekh p'lishtim 'king of the Philistines' (ch. 21 and 26). The Philistines were not ethnically Canaanite and were newcomers to the area. Their Hebrew name, p'lishtim, means 'people of p'léshet'. Their origin and characteristics remain uncertain, although various hypotheses have been debated by scholars. It had been suggested that they might have come from European marauders of Indo-European stock, an element of the sea peoples, who were tall and clean-shaven (Goliath was a Philistine, remember) in contrast to the Semitic Canaanites; they showed up in Egypt and later settled the coastal strip of Canaan, around Gaza. There are historical and archaeological traces of their presence, but there is a problem regarding chronology, for while p'lishtim clearly were settled in Canaan in later biblical times (in fact, their presence gave rise to the geographical term Palestine which has surived long after the disappearance of the Philistines as an ethnic group), the Philistine invasion of Canaan and their role as the main threat to the Israelites does not go back historically to the period in which the patriarchs are assumed to have been in Canaan, but belong to a later time. Some scholars have concluded that the references to p'lishtim in Genesis are anachronistic (and hence a late interpolation).
Various proposals attempt to address these difficult questions. It may be that, as used in the Bible, p'lishtim is not really a designation of a particular ethnic group but rather a term referring to non-Israelite inhabitants of the area in general.
A different approach to the problem is that suggested by I.M. Zeitlin in Ancient Judaism. It is believed that the p'lishtim invaded Egypt but were successfully repelled. "The defeated groups settled along the Palestinian and Syrian sea coast and ultimately formed the series of city-states sometimes referred to as the Philistine pentapolis: Ashkelon, Gaza, Gath, Ashdod and Ekron" (op. cit. p. 42). That is agreed to have happened no earlier than the 12th century BCE, which is too late for Abraham. But as Zeitlin points out, in fact Genesis "nowhere mentions or even hints of the pentapolis; nor does it allude to any single one of the city-states known from the later era." It only mentions Gerar. His hypothesis is: "It is entirely possible that a small Philistine community settled in the area of Gerar long before the larger waves arrived, which resulted in the five city-states. This small Philistine community was strong enough to put pressure on Isaac's group, but not strong enough to overwhelm it."
Egypt
The word for 'Egypt' (mitzráyim) occurs 75 times in Genesis, and that for 'Egyptian' (mitzri, plural mitzrim, feminine mitzrit) 18 times. Now admittedly, the last third of Genesis, the Joseph cycle, is all about Egypt and mostly set in Egypt, so the frequency of references to it there might not be so surprising. But if we factor that out by looking only at the other two-thirds of Genesis (ch. 1 to 36), in this part which is not primarily about Egypt it says:- mitzráyma 'to Egypt' four times,
- mimmitzráyim 'from Egypt',
- b'éretz mitzráyim 'in the land of Egypt',
- meéretz mitzráyim 'from the land of Egypt',
- k'éretz mitzráyim 'like the land of Egypt',
- 'al p'ne mitzráyim 'over Egypt', and
- n'har mitzráyim 'the river of Egypt' all once each,
- (ham)mitzrit '(the) (female) Egyptian' four times,
- and hammitzrim 'the Egyptians' twice.
Of course, after the fact, we know that Egypt was to play an especially large part in Israelite national consciousness and in the subsequent stage of its early history, all of which was a fait accompli and taken for granted by the time (whenever it was) when Genesis, and the rest of the Torah, was written, so that is one reason for not being surprised that there should be a constant interest in Egypt in this text. Another, obviously, is that Egypt was the young Israel's most important neighbour in terms of size, power and influence. For most of the period that concerns us Canaan was in reality an Egyptian colony, and while this fact is not given undue emphasis in our story (and later on in its history, the country gravitated towards other spheres of influence: Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman...), it certainly helps to explain how Abraham should have gone from Canaan to spend a few years in Egypt (ch. 12-13). However, one gets the sense that in their minds Egypt was still a foreign country, contrasting with a certain affinity that they must have felt to Mesopotamia, whence their own ancestors had come and where they still had family.
Even so, as viewed from Canaan, Egypt was an important foreign country, and it was a rich country (to which people in Canaan could turn as a destination for temporary emigration in times of famine) - witness the higher frequency, in this part of the book, of the word mitzráyma 'to Egypt', which is distributed between two passages: the one I've referred to where Abram and Sarai go and stay there on account of a famine in Canaan, and a "negative" context where, during another period of famine, God tells Isaac not to go to Egypt (26:2, JPS): wayyera elaw YHWH wayyómer al tered mitzráyma sh'khon baáretz asher omar eléykha 'The Lord had appeared to him and said, "Do not go down to Egypt, stay in the land which I point out to you."' The text goes on to say that Isaac stayed put where he was and according to the preceding verse that was Gerar, unless that was just meant as a temporary abode while sitting out the famine (and it was temporary, as it turned out). In any case, the subtext is the supposition that Isaac had been thinking of going down to Egypt at the time.
Notice by the way that by a convention which has survived, in part, to this very day, movements from Canaan to Egypt were referred to as going down (with the verb root y-r-d 'descend'), and conversely, those in the opposite direction, from Egypt to Canaan, whether temporary or permanent, were spoken of as going up (using the root '-l-h 'ascend'). The same was true when the action was transitive: you took something down to Egypt, you brought something up to Canaan. This usage is constant throughout the Hebrew Bible, I think. Why Israelites have spoken of people going up to Israel since Biblical times is less clear to me, but they consistently do, and going from there to Egypt was going down from the viewpoint of the Biblical authors.
(It is also true that in England people living outside London always talk of going up to London as a matter of course, and people living in London call it coming up. I once told an English friend and colleague on the phone who lived in Gasteiz, the new capital of the Basque Autonomous Community that I would be going down to Gasteiz on Thursday of the following week, from where I lived on the coast; he corrected me, pointing out that since Gasteiz is now the capital, I should have said going up, rather than going down. That was when I noticed that it makes a difference.)
Egypt might have been a country of power and riches; however that obviously didn't mean that everyone who came from Egypt was rich and powerful. Sarai had a servant, Hagar, who was an Egyptian, a fact that is often mentioned, who also eventually married her son Ishmael to an Egyptian woman (ch. 21). Abraham, on the other hand, had a servant, Eliezer, who was a Syrian from Damascus.
That Egypt was seen from Canaan as a place of abundance and prosperity, and as such came into their conversation even when not actually talking about Egypt, is seen in the description of the Jordan Valley when Abram and Lot decide to part company and they survey the land, observing the choices before them (13:10, JPS, my emphasis): 'Lot looked about him and saw how well watered was the whole plain of the Jordan, all of it - this was before the Lord had destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah - all the way to Zoar, like the garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt.'
Geographically, the defining landmark of all landmarks that quite literally made Egypt Egypt was its great river which made the surrounding land fertile in the midst of what was otherwise a vast desert. Perhaps that was also part of the analogy that was applied here to the fertile plain of the river Jordan, on a much smaller scale of course. And back on a much vaster scale, let us not forget that this was also similar to the decisive role of those other great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, which defined Mesopotamia, as we saw at the beginning of this essay. In a real sense, the entire life of Israel in its formative centuries could be thought of as being within the coordinates of a "world" defined as the space between the tremendous, life-giving rivers of Mesopotamia and Egypt, while within those maximum bounds, Israel's focus of interest was a small land area delimited by yet another, locally significant river, the Jordan. The meaning of the great rivers to their west and east seems to be expressed in God's words to Abraham when their covenant was cut (15:18): l'zar'akha natátti et haáretz hazzot minn'har mitzráyim 'ad hannahar haggadol n'har p'rat 'To your offspring I assign this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates.'
Very informative article. Thank you so much for writing!
ReplyDeleteThis is very nice, informative and expository. Thank you so much!
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