Notes 48: Wrap-up (35:21-29)

SYNOPSIS: Further along in their journey, Jacob learns that his son Reuben has had sex with Bilha, Jacob's concubine. Then we have a quick run-down of Jacob's twelve sons. Jacob goes to see his father Isaac in Mamre. When Isaac passes away he is buried there by his two sons.

• Text of the passage in Nawat

When Jacob left Padan-Aram in ch. 31, his purpose was to return home. Some doubt exists about whether it is reasonable to think that his parents could still have been alive even then, especially considering that in the scene leading up to Jacob's departure from Isaac and Rebecca's home Isaac appears as an old man whose health is already failing, if not his mental faculties too! However, we have already known Genesis to be quite vague about such matters; remember how inexplicit the story was about when exactly Abraham passed away a generation back! But of course Jacob, away in Mesopotamia before the advent of the internet or a relilable postal service, may simply not have known, in those twenty years, how things were back home (or whether there still was a "back home").

So off he went, but rather than go straight home when he reached Canaan, he set up house up north in Shechem, and stayed there while his children grew up. Now that he has left Shechem with his family and visited Bethel to keep an old promise, he is heading home to Mamre at last. Sadly, Rachel never got that far, but departed this life leaving Jacob with a farewell gift, the new-born Benjamin, Joseph's only full brother and Jacob's last child. Why Jacob had delayed so long in returning to his family in Hebron is unexplained, and it is even more surprising to read that when he finally got there, apparently Isaac was still living! Of course, these difficulties are attenuated considerably if we decide either not to take everything so literally, or to accept the well-known hypothesis that what we are reading is an amalgam of snippets collected together from several source documents. But anyway, however we want to deal with that, now Jacob's clan (minus Rachel and plus baby Ben) are heading south in the direction of the oaks of Mamre.

As the company progress along their way, the narrator fills us in on a juicy bit of gossip (v. 21a) about an affair between Jacob's son Reuben and his step-mother Bilhah (just in case we thought Genesis was all about the straight and narrow), and then gives us a rundown of the list of Jacob's sons, which is helpful even though the information was already provided earlier (when they were born) and helps to bridge the story and get us through the famly's journey up to their arrival at Mamre.

The homecoming ought to have been exciting, or at least newsworthy, but Genesis is as austere on the matter as it was concerning the death of Rachel. We are told that Jacob arrived in as many words (v. 27): wayyavo ya‛aqov el yitzxaq aviv 'and Jacob came to his father Isaac.' This is followed immediately (v. 28-9) by the standard notice of the years Isaac lived and his eventual passing, to which is added the information that Esau and Jacob buried him. Thus the narrative substance of these lines is sparse and their principal function, in terms of the story, seems to be to gather up the loose ends and wrap up this cycle of the saga in order to begin setting the stage for what's coming next (Joseph's Story).
 
There are other levels on which the variegated components of this hotchpotch may be read.

Reuben was Jacob's firstborn son and therefore ought to have inherited the birthright, but in the event he seems to have fallen from grace at some point: was the Bilhah scandal it? Information is lacking, but like several recent episodes, this one is read by some commentators as an encoded recollection of tribal history. As a tribe, Reuben does not figure in later Israelite history as a protagonist, so, the reasoning goes, it must have done something or something must have happened to it. Perhaps there was a political falling-out; maybe what the Reubenites did involved the Bilhah tribal grouping (i.e. Dan and Naphtali). Whatever it was, other parts of the Hebrew Scriptures make it clear that the Reuben tribe did fall from grace, both through the words spoken of it and its absence from a leading role in subsequent history. A note in Etz Hayim goes further, suggesting that even the description of Reuben's and Bilhah's personal "infidelity" is not to be taken on its face value as a love affair at all but as a "calculated challenge to his father's authority... a political, not a lustful act." 

The last two words in this ultra-concise account of something unsavoury (whatever it was) are equally enigmatic: wayyishma‛ yisra'el 'Israel found out.' For one thing, is this Israel the father and husband, a.k.a. Jacob, or Israel the clan, people or nation? For another, nu, so he found out; what did he do about it? As EH says, "There is certainly much more to this story than is revealed here, but the narrator chose to omit the unpleasant details. The episode ends abruptly." And that is about as abrupt an ending as you can have!

The checklist of Jacob-Israel's sons which comes next groups the sons according to their mothers, and concludes with the comment (v. 26b) élle b'ne ya‛aqov asher yullad lo b'faddan aram 'These are the sons of Jacob who were born to him in Paddan-aram', which is not strictly one-hundred-percent true according to the story of the birth of Benjamin we just finished reading. Perhaps it's a slip; if it isn't, then there was an alternative tradition which this reflects.

The sudden appearance of Esau at Isaac's funeral (v. 29) would be fine in the Hollywood version, but I wonder how long it took for word to get to him in Seir and then for Esau to get from there to Hebron. But however he did it, it is convenient that Esau should be mentioned at this point because it gives the narrator a chance to do an "And speaking of Esau..." transition and so to add the last bit of wrapping that is needed before we can turn the page and start reading about Joseph.