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.