Notes 38: Goats and sheep (30:25-42)

SYNOPSIS: Jacob would like to return to Canaan now, and he broaches the subject of a monetary settlement with Laban. Rather than a direct payment, Jacob asks to receive whatever animals have unusual markings on them. Laban agrees, and thereupon has his sons remove all the speckled, spotted and streaked animals from the flocks and keep them at a distance. Not to be outdone, however, Jacob sets going a special breeding program which will work to his benefit.

• Text of the passage in Nawat

A familiar type of popular character found in folklore and mythology in many different eras and cultures is that of the trickster who uses his intelligence and lack of scruples to bend the rules and wrestle personal benefit away from his adversaries without resorting to physical force, in fact often despite his manifest physical inferiority. Folktales about a trickster may be highly protypical (as when the trickster is represented by a rabbit or a monkey), but they may also be based loosely on a historical character to whom are attributed a multitude of fictional deeds and exploits. The trickster's strategems are often comical and delight audiences through their clever resourcefulness, but it has been shown that such figures also perform an important role in oral literature by symbolizing an underdog, a potential victim, who gets the better of his would-be oppressor by playing according to the latter's rules but adding an unexpected "twist" of his own, which always takes the "boss" character by surprise and ends in his ridicule or demise. The underlying concept is thus that it is possible for the weaker party in a given situation to turn the tables and win the day through intelligent maneouvring and an ability to think outside the box. Is Jacob, one of the patriarchs of the nation of Israel, portrayed as a character of this type in Genesis? I think he is, some of the time anyway, and nowhere more clearly than in this passage and the narrative context in which it appears.

Now of course, our foreknowledge as "educated" readers of the glorious future that awaits Jacob as a patriarchal figure naturally makes us reluctant to view him in this not quite so flattering light. But if we read Genesis as it is, taking it at face value and with due caution against projecting our own assumptions onto the text, the latter both tells us that Jacob is a deceiver (through name games, Esau's observations etc.) and shows us that he is (already, as a youngster in Canaan, in his dealings with his brother Esau and his father Isaac). It is precisely his trickery which makes it necessary for him to flee from his parents' house and take refuge in that of his uncle in far-off Padan-Aram. Once installed there, a new narrative cycle commences in which the trickster theme is played out more fully than ever, and it goes like this: Laban dupes Jacob into working for seven years to marry the daughter he isn't interested in, and even gets him to then work yet another seven years so that he can marry her sister. (We saw earlier that it probably was against the customs of the Israelite audience for a man to marry two women who are living sisters, but that doesn't seem to matter unless we take the narrative seriously rather than as a story in which some of the rules of reality are allowed to be suspended for the sake of the tale.) So, Jacob is swindled by Laban, twice, we might think. In narrative terms, the stage is now set for Jacob to get his comeuppance and turn the tables on Laban, and he will do it by out-smarting him in obtaining for himself a handsome fortune in the shape of a goodly proportion iof Laban's flocks. How? By making Laban a proposal which, on the face of it, sounds fair enough to Laban, but he doesn't know that Jacob has a trick up his sleeve  that will make things turn out a little different than Laban expects and give Jacob the last laugh. In narrative terms, this is a classic pattern: the master abuses of the trickster but the trickster shows himself to be tricker than the master and turns things around in the end.

That much is clear, but what is very hard for us to fathom out is what it is that Jacob is supposed to have actually done to achieve this purpose: the technicalities of Jacob's action. And if Genesis were just to tell us that Jacob was very clever and found a way to breed lots and lots of speckled sheep or whatever he was looking for, we would take its word for it, but no, the book tries to tell us exactly how he managed this and goes into great detail, but unfortunately it doesn't actually make sense to us. 

One part of the problem here is no doubt that we simply do not share the same background assumptions, and in particular the same "science", assumed by the original authors and audiences. True, people in those days had not achieved the understanding of how genetic engineering in livestock breeding works, but neither are we privy to the beliefs (correct or incorrect) that determined how people might go about things in their time. In particular, it seems to have been assumed in the text that there was a belief in the efficacy of what we might term "visual conditioning" to bring about the birth of animals with visible markings, as explained in CB (p. 299):

Jacob prepared rods which presented the appearance of the colouring and marking of the animals which were to belong to him. These he set before the ewes at the moment of conception. The impression of the image of this colouring on the minds of the ewes is supposed to have caused them to bring forth offspring coloured in the same fashion.

Another source of confusion was believed by commentators who support the documentary hypothesis, such as CB and EAS, to have been the conflation of different versions of this story in the text that has come down to us. This might explain apparent contradictions and non-sequiturs within the text. A third problem might have been that the editors of the Genesis text we know were confused themselves because of unfamiliarity with the science of breeding in general or with the techniques referred to in particular. To quote EAS (p. 239):

The biblical writers, however, operating as they did in a different cultural environment, may well have been puzzled by some of the transmitted detail. Yet, they managed to put down the involved details that tradition had handed down in a form that still lends itself to plausible reconstruction.

What we really need to do here as readers is not allow that issue to distract us, because the point of the story is clear. Jacob is always up against someone with more privileges but he nevertheless always comes out on top, whether what is at stake is his father's birthright or his uncle's estate. He does not achieve these things by force but by "trickery" but hey, it works. So, here is Speiser's summing up of the essence of the passage:

Jacob consents to remain in Laban's service, in return for all such increase in Laban's flock as may prove to have abnormal coloring - black or dark brown lambs and parti-colored kids. Laban is delighted with the terms, and promptly proceeds to violate the spirit of the bargain by removing to a safe distance all the grown animals that would be likely to produce the specified sports. Neverhteless, Jacob finds a way to outwit his father-in-law, through prenatal conditioning of the flock by means of visual aids - in conformance with universal folk beliefs.

30:25 shall'xéni w'el'kha
The first of these verbs is the piel (intensive) of the verb root sh-l-x, whose qal (simple) form generally means 'to send'. The intensive verb has among its senses that of 'to send off' but also 'to release, let someone go'. The second verb form, el'kha, is the cohortative, 'let me go.' Therefore the overall meaning is an emphatic 'give me leave me to go.'

30:27 nixáshti
The piel verb n-x-sh means 'to seek & give an omen, practise divination' (CHALOT).

30:28 noqva
Imperative (with -a) of the verb n-q-b 'to stipulate', which only occurs here in Genesis but is found in 24 verses in the Bible.

30:30 l'ragli
That the intended meaning of this (lit. '(according) to my foot') is uncertain may be deduced from the disparate translations and suggestions by commentators: 'since my coming' (KJV), 'whithersoever I turned' (Revised Version), 'as a consequence of my coming' (CB), 'for my actions' (EAS) which Speiser explains by means of an intermediate sense such as 'in my wake' or perhaps 'since I have set foot here', and 'at my every step' (EF) which seems to work well. The LXX epi tôi podi mou 'on my foot' is literal; cf. also Vulg. ad introitum meum whence obviously RV con mi llegada (which is equivalent to the KJV rendering).

30:31 lo titten li m'uma im ta‛ase li haddavar hazze
Here, according to BC, "we have the second stage of the attempts of Jacob and Laban to outwit one another." 


30:32-33
The full meaning of Jacob's proposal as set out here is unclear. The commentaries discuss some of the details and expound their theories (see Speiser in particular), but at the end of the day we are still somewhat in the dark about just what was supposed to be going on here. Clearly the general idea has to do with animals in the flocks of sheep and goats which were the less usual types as regards colour or marking; Jacob offers to take such animals as flock in payment for his years of service to Laban. Laban thinks it a good deal, but Jacob is planning to outwit him through some scheme which probably has to do with selective breeding. So far so good, but the details of the story appear to have become mangled.

30:34 hen lu y'hi khidvarékha
'Thus let it be as you have said.' The gist seems to be that Laban is being duped, as was Jacob when he agreed to serve Laban for seven years for Rachel and got Leah.

30:39 hattzon
EAS points out that tzon may refer collectively to goats (as it apparently does), not only to sheep (though the latter seems to be its default meaning).