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.