A full discussion of the use of myth in the Bible would take a book of its own. Here, we want merely to look at one of a number of mythical characters that one finds in the Bible almost wherever one might wish to open it. Within this story world, one finds a series of interacting characters. Taken together, they form a broad spectrum of wonderful creatures. In fact, one can well describe the Bible – and especially the stories in that long chain of narrative extending from the opening pages of Genesis’ creation account to the fall of Jerusalem at the end of II Kings – as a chain of such heroes. They display a wonderful variety of the semi-divine, the miraculous and the wondrous, with an ever-recurring theme of divine presence in the world of humans. All take their part in the tragic dissonance of the union of the human and the divine. This world of Bible history is throughout a mythological world.
We find eponymous heroes, founders and fathers of cities and states; inspired craftsmen, builders of beautiful things; wise men possessed of divine understanding and judgement; seers and prophets, those who know God’s will and speak with his voice; judges, charismatic warriors and saviours of Israel against its enemies; anointed kings and messiahs, servants of God, carrying out his will on earth, representatives of the people before God’s judgement; sons of God, sharers in the divine essence, heroic figures who bring God present to his people; angels, mythological divine messengers through whom the divine communicates with this world, and finally Yahweh himself, the ancient God of Palestine who is God’s name and representative for old Israel, and the God in most of our stories. All of these characters are defined by the theme of destiny, and by the need of humans to accept this expression of divine will. God’s action in the world is to establish human destiny and history. Accepted, this is a destiny of grace and mercy. The narratives turn on motifs of faithfulness and loyalty to the divine patron. The acceptance of one’s fate is the definition of wisdom and righteousness. The reiterative play of biblical stories, where God establishes and humanity rejects its destiny, centres on a variable, shifting balance of human and divine intermediaries. The central characters of biblical stories play out a recurrent ‘Immanuel’ motif, illustrating how God is with us. The stories develop in the contrast of a distant, absent and uncaring God with an intimate, ever-present and loving God. The role of the divine in human affairs is an issue about which biblical tradition is most ambivalent. God is with Israel for good, but he is also there for evil. He is ever there for Israel’s protection and salvation, and he is there for its destruction and condemnation.
In this chapter, I have chosen the motif of ‘the birth of a son of God’ because it plays such a central role in the Bible’s theology, a role that is continued in later traditions. The role of this ‘son(s) of God’ motif develops t very clear and specific function in our stories. It is one that has a quite wide range of narrative type, but is surprisingly coherent through most of its appearances. This is partially due to the existence of a story world of the gods that seems relatively common throughout the Semitic world and is familiar to us in the Bible. The song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32, for instance, calls its hearers back to the old myths of the past to give its account.
Think of the days of yore; consider the years: generation upon generation past. Ask your father; let him narrate it; let the old one recount it for you. When El, the Most High, divided the nations, when he separated the children of humanity from each other, and when he established the borders of peoples according to the number of the messengers of God, so Yahweh’s part became his people; Jacob became his inheritance, (Deut. 32: 7–9)
Here we have a picture of God, called for antiquity’s sake ‘El the Most High’, with his court of messengers, each of which is a god who is given one of the nations on earth for his own, for his ‘inheritance’. The fact that Yahweh gets Israel creates an aetiology for Israel, identified as the people of Yahweh, which is so central to the theology of the Pentateuch. The original Hebrew of the phrase ‘messengers of God’ has not survived. I translate from, the early Greek version of the Bible. This well its the metaphors of the wilderness stories. Many scholars, however, prefer the translation. According to the number of the sons of God’ because the scene called up is very similar to scenes of a divine court of God and his sons, which is found elsewhere in the Bible. The motif of the ‘sons of God’ appears frequently in the Psalter in close connection with the figure of the messiah.
In the story that frames the operatic arias of Job, for example, we have a picture of Yahweh’s court Job 1–2). In this story, Yahweh assembles all of the sons of God. When they meet, they talk and gossip about what is happening on earth. Some of the gods travel to and from heaven and earth, and talk to the others about their travels and experiences. Among the sons of God in the divine assembly is one who has the cue-name Satan, Satan in the Job stories takes his name’s role as ‘prosecutor’ – a fitting role among the many courtroom metaphors of Job’s songs. Satan plays the role of divine prosecutor, the ‘devil’s advocate’ of the heavenly court.
Many songs and proverbs, especially in the Book of Psalms and Ezekiel, set a scene in a similar divine court or assembly of the gods. Psalm 2, for example, speaks of Yahweh as enthroned in his heavens mocking the mere kings of nations on earth. It also speaks of Yahweh’s son, whom Yahweh has established as king ‘on his holy mountain’. It is a clear reference to a mythological figure – Yahweh’s messiah – who rules from a heavenly Jerusalem and judges the world. A very similar picture is found in Psalm 110, where this messianic son of Yahweh is described as the ‘lord’and ‘patron’ of the singer, a heavenly David, whom Yahweh gives birth to as life-giving dew from the womb of the dawn. This divine messiah, priest and king, fights a cosmic battle against kings. He judges the nations from his heavenly throne. The cosmic role of this messianic war also appears in Psalm 8, but nowhere is the mythological colour richer than in the ancient Psalm 89. Such mythic imagery is found again in the opening chapters of Ezekiel, as well as in both the Apocalypse of John 19–20 and the apocryphal works of the Songs of Solomon and the First Book of Enoch. In these poetic explosions of metaphor, we find a rather complex understanding of the divine.
It is in the context of such imagery in the Bible’s story world that the brief episode about the sons of God who marry with ‘daughters of Adam’ in the beginning of chapter 6 of Genesis has its place. The theme of intermarriage between the divine and human is a classic of both Greek and ancient Near Eastern mythology. The Bible’s entry in this tradition is brief and unadorned;
And so it was that when humanity began to spread itself out over the world, daughters were born. The sons of God saw that the women were beautiful and they married them, every one that they desired. So Yahweh declared: ‘My spirit will not reside in people forever. After all, they are only flesh and their life-span but 120 years.’
The text allows that these marriages were taking place everywhere and often. Also clearly implicit in this account of such romantic adventures of the gods is that human cooperation and complicity play no role: beautiful women are taken. This contrasts strikingly with the Book of Jubilees form of this same story. Jubilees understands this misalliance as sin. For Jubilees this sin is moral justification for the flood story, which unlike the story in Genesis is understood as justifiable divine punishment for this sexual adventure with the gods.
It is in Yahweh’s declaration that Genesis’ treatment of the sons of God episode takes on emphatically different direction from Jubilees’. The role Yahweh plays is not that of a judge, and certainly not that of the punishing God of the flood story. Unlike Genesis, Jubilees has integrated the flood story with this story of divine and human sexual intercourse. In Genesis, the story is placed before, but remains independent of, the flood story. Genesis seems aware of the tradition of association between the two tales, but instead of making the more instructive connection that Jubilees does, it seems satisfied with gathering tradition. Rather than the doom-saying judge of Jubilees, Yahweh is portrayed as a philosopher, an observing interpreter; he becomes the story’s implied reader. He is not involved in the story, he analyses and evaluates it. The union of the human and divine is neither evil nor sinful. We read, rather, a remarkably neutral observation about the intrinsic difference between what is divine and what is only human. The brief speech of Yahweh is not part of the story. The story itself is obviously already known to the reader. Genesis hardly bothers to relate details. What is the result of this divine/human miscegenation? Has humanity become divine? The answer is a very interesting ‘not quite’. Yahweh’s breath – that wonderful gift of life – does not stay with us for ever. We live for only 120 years. Miscegenation, we are told, poses no threat to Yahweh. People remained unchanged in God’s eyes. Because they are only human, they are gone so quickly that they are hardly seen as either bad or harmful. They are far worse; they are uninteresting.
Yahweh’s words are those of a philosopher who has been asked to give his judgement about some unsavoury incident: this scandal resulting from unfettered divine lust for a woman’s beauty. His words are reticent words of realistic acceptance of the inescapable nature of being human: ‘After all, they are only flesh. My breath won’t live with them forever, their days are but 120 years.’ This opens an argument that the text takes up again in the flood story. In contrast to Jubilees’ moralizing interpretation, Genesis presents us with an entirely unhistorical, metaphorical understanding. The philosopher Yahweh cites a proverb: ‘Humanity is merely flesh . . .’ This comment links humanity not with the gods but with the essence of animals, ‘flesh’. God can afford to ignore these marriages. People don’t live long enough to compete with gods. The underlying, philosophical argument of the implied discourse is found in Ecclesiastes 3: 19; ‘The fate of humans and animals is the same. As one dies, so dies the other. They both have the same spirit, and a human is no more than an animal.’
One finds this same kind of thinking in Genesis 9:11, where humans are included in the reference to ‘all the living creatures’, and ‘all flesh’, which the deity of the story repents of having destroyed by a flood. In this passage of the flood story, the story’s God also plays the role of philosopher for the story-teller. The discussion turns on the close association of the two phrases; ‘all living souls’ and ‘all flesh’. The flood story echoes both the language and plot-line of the garden story. It also expands on the garden story’s theology. When humanity has been created in this tale, the narrator tells us: ‘When Yahweh’s God shaped the human out of the soil of the land and breathed into its nostrils the breath of life, the human became a living being’ (Gen. 2: 7). When the woman of this story finally does win wisdom for people by eating from the tree of knowledge, the creator prevents them from becoming gods themselves (Gen, 3; 22). He puts them outside the garden, and places invincibly armed monsters, ‘cherubim and a laming sword, turning in all directions at once, guarding the way to the tree of life’ (Gen. 3: 24). Why? To prevent people from getting back to ‘the way of the tree of life’. If they could, they would eat from this tree, become gods, and live forever. The same theme had been expressed long before in the Old Babylonian Gilgamesh epic: ‘When the gods created man, they kept life in their own hands.’ This the barmaid tells Gilgamesh, trying to discourage him from his hopeless quest for immortality. It is t standard philosophical distinction of ancient philosophy between the human and the divine. In the Bible, such philosophical writings find a central focus in the irony of Ecclesiastes: ‘He has put eternity into human thought so that it cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end’ (3: 11).
In fact it is this issue that the garden story centres on, not that of sin. In the opening of the garden story, focus is placed on an ‘everyman’ figure called in Hebrew ha-adam. This is well translated as ‘earthling’ as it means ‘human’ in Hebrew, and is derived from the Hebrew word for ‘earth’: adamah. The story describes Yahweh, like a potter, making this humanity out of clay. It is only after woman is made from the human’s rib – the scene is of a form of cloning, much as many plants are reproduced – that this human takes on the role of the male person of the story, namely Adam. A similar punning play on words is used when this lump of clay is made into a living being. As in so many languages the Hebrew word for ‘breath’, ruach, can also signify ‘spirit’ and ‘wind’. This ‘earthling’, becomes a ‘living being’ because it is given the divine spirit as its breath. This polarity between the insignificance of humanity, ‘mere flesh’, ‘earthlings’ that we are, and the life and wisdom of the divine that we are not is the very heart of the story. When the woman of our story looks on the ‘tree of knowledge’, and desires its fruit ‘to make her wise’ the ancient reader knows from the very start that her quest will fail. The author is citing Solomon in Ecclesiastes for us. The role the woman plays is a perfect dramatization of a famous proverb. Wise King Solomon, hiving spent a lifetime of philosophical study, turns his critical irony upon himself, and confesses with a deconstructive double entendre: ‘I spent my life seeking wisdom, (seeking the spirit), only to discover that I was chasing the wind.’ So too, Eve, in seeking to become wise, ended in ‘chasing the wind’. Back in the garden story, it is also in the ‘spirit of the day’ that Yahweh comes to determine the fate of the conspirators. When the story closes with Yahweh’s declaration of humanity’s destiny (Gen. 3: 19) – that humanity is to return to the dust from which it was made – the story again turns to the Book of Ecclesiastes for its inspiration, where, at the close of his collection, the philosopher lists a string of euphemisms about human death (Eccles. 12: 5–7):
When the human goes to his eternal home, and the mourners go about the streets, when the silver cord is snapped, the golden bowl is broken, or the pitcher at the fountain, when the wheel is broken at the cistern, and the dust returns to the earth from which it was and the spirit to God from which it came.
While the stories about old Israel are stories about the dark side of human nature, these narratives are recurrently punctuated by closures and responses about mercy and hope. Few stories are as dark as the garden story’s mate, the tale of Cain, and few are touched more by a motif of divine grace. This story too is about ‘humanity’ and together with the garden story it forms t paired thematic introduction between humanity’s creation and the opening of the book with its title in chapter 5: 1: ‘This is the book of humanity’s development.’ The Cain story is a very important bridge, as it intensifies the already dominant narrative theme of differences between the gods and men.
In the story’s opening, all of our characters bear cue-names. There is Adam ‘the human’ of the garden story (Gen. 2: 7) and Eve, his wife, whose name is interpreted: ‘the mother of all living’ (Gen. 3: 20), Adam has sex with his wife, who bears a child whom she names ‘Cain’ (Gen. 4; 1). Adam’s involvement, as far as the story is concerned, is not terribly important. It provides only the occasion of Eve’s pregnancy; human fertility is not his to give but God’s. When she gives birth Eve tells the audience: ‘I have made a man with Yahweh!’ Eve creates her children with God! Eve, the great mother of all, makes men. Her child ‘Cain’ whose name puns with Eve’s word qaniti (‘to make’), has the name of ‘creature’. Human life is born of god and woman. The child who is born is the creature, divine and human; he is us.
Abel is also a cue-name. This name (‘mist’, ‘dew’) reflects the frailty of all human life as momentary, passing, merely a breath1 – an intensely compassionate name to attach to the life of a murder victim. Both Cain and Abel are from their births, like their father Adam, everyman. When we watch them, we watch ourselves. Their experience is our experience, and their understanding our own. The two brothers of our story, however, do double duty in the roles they play. Cain plays also the Canaanites, whose sacrifices in the Elijah story of I Kings 18: 20–40 go unaccepted, as Abel plays the role of Israel as Canaan’s brother, a fleeting role of a nation that god once chose.2
As the story opens, Cain does what is proper for a farmer. It is important to recognize that Cain does nothing wrong at this point. He offers his crops as sacrifice and pays respect to his god. It is Yahweh who does not recognize or accept Cain and his offering. This is the story’s plot and problem. The plot opening can be compared to the story of Jonah, and especially to the scene in which Jonah’s shade tree grows overnight to provide him comfort from the sun. Yahweh causes it just as quickly to wither. The reason that Jahweh does what he does is hidden from Jonah. Just so, the reason that Yahweh does not accept Cain and his sacrifice is unknown. Cain’s behaviour and sacrifice is every bit as good as Abels. The theme, like that in the Jonah story, emphasizes divine freedom: both our inability to know god’s purposes and his freedom to do what we least expect. God chooses not to accept Cain and his offering. The story’s crisis is in its essence an intellectual debate. On one hand, the theological demand, even definition, of divine freedom is that it be complete and untrammelled. On the other hand, religious traditions assume that we know something about the divine. We expect – perhaps demand – that God does certain, things in certain ways. Our stories engage this debate on the side of divine freedom. Like Cain’s, the expectations of all who offer worship to god are that he will accept them, and accept their offerings. Why else worship? The story gives the lie to such expectation as but a human conceit. The story as told in Genesis is both sympathetic and compassionate in its presentation of Cain’s reaction. The plot takes a well-travelled road in world literature. In Bizet’s Carmen, for example, one of the central motifs is hatred born of unrequited love.
In Genesis, it is Cain’s love for god that goes unacknowledged and unaccepted. The tragedy of our story has nothing to do with a lack of piety in this our representative. The story is rather about our needing (and needing absolutely) freely conceived acceptance. And it is also about the nature of love as freely given. How can such a demand be met except gratuitously: by grace? And so our story is also about the graceful quality of acceptance and love.
Like Jonah, who is scolded for being angry and depressed at the loss of his shade tree, Cain is called upon to abandon his anger. ‘Why should you be angry?’ At this point of the exchange, Yahweh expresses a studied lack of sympathy for Cain’s perspective. This brings Cain’s frustration to the centre of the stage, and exposes it to ridicule in god’s eyes for its human frailty! Of course, Yahweh, as pedant, is correct. Every philosopher knows this. If one ‘does what is right’, it is enough for self-respect. Yet the pedantry also opens to view the vulnerability and implicit ambivalence of our all-too-human virtue of self-respect. After all is said, this is not why humans do ‘what is right’. We need ulterior motives for ‘self-respect’. We need acknowledgement and recognition ‘to hold our heads up high’. This we all know. This is what lies at the root of Cain’s anger. It is this creature’s bad faith that Yahweh’s cold logic exposes.
At this point, Yahweh’s script-writer complicates the story by seemingly forgetting the plot-line. Yahweh momentarily becomes not the debating pedant, but the absent-minded professor. He loses himself in a footnote’s excursion into a complex variable of scholarly proverbs. He has just told Cain that ‘if you do what is right, you can hold your head up high.’ This obviously has brought to mind the alternative: ‘if you don’t do what is right’, what then? This is the way a scholar’s mind works, not a story! It is hardly an issue that involves a story’s plot. It is an aside. Yet it causes another pedantic citation of the well-known variant of the first. ‘If you don’t do what is right, sin will crouch at your door, and it will want to have you. Yet you must master it!’ All thoughts of sacrifice, even of unrequited love, are long gone. The professor is lost inside one of his many parentheses. We have not gone back into the story but are involved in a moral sermon of a wholly different context. Up to this point, we had been given good old-fashioned theology of grace. Divine acceptance is not something earned. We cannot expect it. Nor can we demand it. It is god’s free gift. In practice, goes the implied lecture, people should behave as is proper, without reference to what they might gain from their good behaviour. The sermon story was clear to that point. But now, suddenly, we find ourselves well outside of the Cain/Abel sacrifice story and are wandering somewhere within chapters 11, 14 and 29 of the Book of Proverbs! We are now trying to find our way through some of the finer distinctions separating the ‘path of righteousness’ and the ‘way of all mankind’. Even Cain is momentarily forgotten as we try to wrestle with our teacher’s question about the perennial choice between wisdom and folly.
This momentary excursion into other worlds intimates some of the issues that our text has at stake in its progress. We find ourselves wrapped in three different metaphors simultaneously evoked by Yahweh’s speech about not doing what is right: threat, temptation and conquest. The temptation is, indeed, to murder. This, our author has interpreted as ‘desire’. In fact, the text has turned itself into a commentary on the coining narrative and the author has become an exegete. Conquest is tentatively interpreted as self-conquest, as the narration engages his effort to unlock the scholarly riddle that his own divine character sets for him.
However, just as we, the reader, intimate so much, our author takes his interpretation of the wisdom saying in still another direction, which pairs itself with the spurned sacrifice episode: if we as Cain cannot assume God’s acceptance of our sacrifices, what is god for us? Cain must overcome not the temptation so much as its threat to himself. This is not a conquest over himself. Certainly it does not deal with any conquest of Cain over sin. That issue plays no role at all in Genesis’ account of the story. The story focuses once again on Cain, on his anger and on his depression. Cain up and murders Abel! Not because of Yahweh’s not accepting Cain, but rather because of Cain’s – everyman’s – passion fir murder. No motives are involved, but sin, crouching like a lion at his door: murder endangers the murderer. Abel’s death opens a new plot-line, announced by the last part of the proverb cited. Cain’s murder of his brother is now the point of departure. What is to happen now that the choice has been made, the temptation followed? ‘What if one does evil?’ Well, it has been done. What now? Cain has killed Abel. What now? A teacher’s direct challenge to his own proverb.
‘And Yahweh asked Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” and Cain answered, “I have no idea. Am I the watcher of my brother?”’ The emphasis is placed not on Cain’s answer and protest, but on the interrogative: Who is the watcher, the caretaker? Having placed this question in the forefront, the author then turns to a debate scene with Yahweh determining Cain’s destiny. Cain, like Adam, is the first farmer, and so his fate is the farmer’s hard lot. The ground itself shouts out its distaste of man’s preference for blood-soaked earth. It is not Yahweh who curses Cain here. This is not the garden story. It is the earth’s anger itself that curses Cain. Yahweh delivers the message and waits to play another role. As the story’s opening dealt with the theme of divine freedom, its closure turns to the question of human responsibility. With the earth’s curse on him, Cain is no longer the farmer standing in contrast to Abel’s shepherd. Cain has become the fugitive from the land. He is without land and without protection, helpless and afraid. The story presses its pivotal question: not so much the direct question of who is Abel’s brother, but who is Cain’s caretaker? Cain is us; everyman. The story asks: who cares for us? Who is our patron, our godfather? Faced with this question, the narrator cannot play Yahweh in the same role that he played in the garden story. He cannot here be one to curse humanity with all of its tragic alienation, Yahweh must take up a different role to play.
Confronted with the earth’s curse, Cain complains. His punishment is too much to bear. Cain’s terror is palpable. He does not ask for forgiveness. He is beyond that. Cain has done evil in large measure. For him the issue is one of survival. Everyone in his eyes – even god himself- is against him. The story turns back to Cain’s question about Abel. Now it is rephrased by events: Who cares about Cain? And if god’s love and recognition is not to be measured – as Yahweh taught us at the story’s opening – who now cares for us? For if there is now no one to care for Cain, for whom is there anyone to care? Can one now abandon Cain the murderer and still hold to the divine demand of freedom that the story set out with equal logic against an innocent Cain? The intellectual rigour of the story’s question is inescapable. The story’s answer is unflinching. Yahweh is mankind’s keeper, he is our keeper, and he accepts his role as Cain’s protector. The story is pacifist. The mark of Cain, the murderer, is the mark of guarantee of one who is protected by God: even he, even us.
It would hardly be surprising if anyone were to protest against this pacifist’s reading of the story of Cain. We have already a tradition of what the story of Cain and Abel is about, and we already ‘know’ what the story says. What I have presented of Genesis’ story is not that. One might have a similar reaction in reading the Hebrew bible’s garden story and looking for paradise there. One would as well look for original sin there, or for the devil – all in vain. With the garden story, we are familiar with other traditions and other interpretations. With their help we have learned about our paradise story and about our story of temptation and fall, which tells us what Genesis is supposed to say. Ezekiel, Ben Sira and Jubilees all have had a part in developing our understanding. Most important have been Paul’s Letter to the Romans and Augustine, especially in his song, Te Deum which praises Adam’s fall as a ‘happy fault’. Without it, Christian salvation – and its joy – would be unnecessary. What forms our conviction of a right reading of the garden story’s tradition is a complex issue. With the bible’s tale of Cain, however, we need merely to point to the apocryphal Book of Jubilees. In its story of Cain we read the tale that long ago supplanted the less imposing and more subtle tale of Genesis.
In Jubilees’ version of the story, the theme is historicized. The narration recounts an event as of the past. The murder by Cain is central, and Yahweh takes up his expected role as judge of the sinner. In this version of the story, the ‘mark of Cain’ is no mark of divine protection. It is synonymous with ‘the curse of Cain’. It is a terrible branding, marking not only him but his descendants as cursed:
And in the third week in the second Jubilee, she bore Cain. And in the fourth, she bore Abel. And in the fifth she bore ‘Awan his daughter. And at the beginning of the third jubilee, Cain killed Abel because the sacrifice of Abel was accepted but the offering of Cain was not accepted. And he killed him in the field, and his blood cried out from the earth to heaven, making accusation because he killed him. And Yahweh rebuked Cain on account of Abel because he killed him. And he made him a fugitive on the earth because of the blood of his brother. And he cursed him upon the earth. And therefore it is written in the heavenly tablets, ‘Cursed be one who strikes his fellow with malice.’ And all who have seen and heard shall say, ‘So be it.’ And the man who saw and did not report it, shall be cursed like him. Therefore when we come before Yahweh our God we will make known all of the sins which occur in heaven and earth, and which are in the light or in the darkness or in any place.
It is particularly interesting that Jubilees, like Genesis, also cites texts, namely ‘the heavenly tablets’, in support of its interpretation. The text referred to by Jubilees, ‘Cursed be one who strikes his fellow with malice,’ is very close to one of the proverbs that has been collected in Deuteronomy 27: 24: ‘Cursed be one who kills his enemy in secret.’ Similar proverbs show up in Exodus 21: 12: ‘Whoever strikes one that he dies, will be put to death,’ and again in Leviticus 24: 17: ‘He who kills a man will be put to death.’ Very generally speaking, these proverbs are all variations of one of the Ten Commandments we find in Exodus 20: 13 and again in Deuteronomy 5: 17, namely, ‘Thou shall not kill.’
Jubilees’ interpretation of the Cain story is, I think, particularly strong in the Christian tradition because of its closeness to the discussion about these proverbs cited in Matthew 5: 21 ‘You have heard that it was said to the men of old: “You shall not kill, and whoever does kill will be liable to the court.”’ The writer of Matthew, very much like both the authors of Genesis and Jubilees, while perfectly willing to cite authority, has no difficulty in standing by his own interpretation: ‘But I tell you that anyone who is even angry with his brother should be liable to the court.’ The use of the motif of a ‘brother’s’ anger suggests that the story is implicitly aware of Cain’s story. In fact, when we look at the way each of our texts deals with this subject, it becomes clear that they are involved in a literary discussion. They add comments to the story. They suggest corrections, they disagree and, they affirm other readings.
It is, however, in the small collection of texts centring on this discussion, which we find in Numbers 35: 9–34 dealing with the motifs of light and places of refuge, that we really first see the context of our stories clearly. This could well be a text the Cain story in Genesis illustrates. Let us begin with a proverb that discusses the difference between murder and manslaughter: ‘And if he struck him down with a stone . . .’etc. (Num. 35: 17). While we are presented here – as in Jubilees – with a stone as the murder weapon, Numbers also offers a variant murder weapon, an ‘iron tool’. Numbers 35: 20–22 offers three farther possible contexts and means that would lead to a judgement of murder; stabbing someone one hates, lying in wait and hurling something, and striking someone with one’s hand out of hatred. Here, quite clearly, the principle of premeditation is at the forefront of the discussion. Clarifying the principles further, the text offers three comparable alternatives of killing that would not be judged to be murder; stabbing suddenly without hatred, throwing something but without the premeditation of an ambush, and innocently throwing a stone without seeing a man who happens to be killed by it. One finds yet other variants in other collections. In Exodus 20: 12 we find listed variables relating to seeking refuge from blood revenge. In verse 18 of the same chapter, the text takes up attempted murder. Verse 20 deals with the killing of a slave and verse 22 with the killing of a foetus. This chapter of Exodus is dealing with material relating to the same intellectual discussion with which both Jubilees and Genesis are involved. It is the world that the stories of the bible illustrate.
Yet not all texts present the arguments as obviously driven by logic or a particular perspective on the issues. Often the text seems to be driven by a collector’s motives. Texts are linked together in a very free-floating association of words, images and ideas. Such freely compiled collages are often much influenced by associations with stories. For example, the scribe collecting the traditions of Genesis has brought together variant stories of the flood. In Genesis 9: 4–7, the text, which begins within the flood story where God is instructing Noah about what he can and cannot eat, turns to broader intellectual issues. The collector introduces a thesis concerning a food taboo against eating meat with its blood. He draws conclusions regarding blood revenge, citing both the Cain and the food narratives in the process. The text brings together known proverbs from different sources and about different issues. In doing so, it strings together pieces of tradition related more by language than by logic. The citation of the proverb: ‘You shall not eat flesh with its life; that is, with its blood,’ leads to what seems to be a confluence of this citation regarding a food taboo with both an anti-murder proverb and an aetiology for animal sacrifice: ‘For your lifeblood I will surely require a reckoning, of every beast I will require it, and of every man.’ The citation of the proverb related to punishment required for killing is an implicit reference to the Cain story. It offers perhaps an alternative answer that is implicitly addressed to Cain’s question about whether he was responsible for his brother. Certainly, it seems to support the blood revenge that Cain feared would be raised against him: ‘Of every man’s brother I will require the life of man.’ The text goes on to cite yet another reference and yet another argument, with reference to the creation story. ‘Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man will his blood be shed, for god made man in his own image.’ This argument – apparently supporting capital punishment – directly disagrees with Genesis’ pacifist rendering of the Cain story. It is much more in line with the story as told in jubilees.
The text draws on the flood story and cites once again the blessing of the creation story: ‘be fruitful and multiply’. This is the same quotation that has marked the closure of the flood story as a new creation and a new beginning. This citation, echoes Genesis 9: 1’s citation of the same blessing. Together the double rendering of this blessing marks off Genesis’ use of proverbs about life and blood as a discussion in its own right. This brief collection of different perspectives and even different discussions referring to the motifs of life and blood has nothing to do with the plot of the flood story. The flood story rather has offered what the story’s collector obviously understood as a good context for this collage of loosely related proverbs. As the blessing concerns life and fertility, the discourse explores the value of life. Having said this much, however, we then must conclude that the motivations for writing such texts are far distant from merely recounting any traditions about food taboos or the death penalty. They are even further from telling a story. Even the interests of an implied reader seem to be ignored in this assemblage of citations. The motives of the text are much closer to those of a teacher or librarian concerned about how different aspects of a tradition might be organized, understood and preserved.
It is very important for our discussion of history to notice that neither Genesis nor Jubilees is interested in recounting events. Nor are they engaged in telling stories that they themselves made up. Both take part in a common, discussion about the Cain story. Each supports an understanding and an interpretation of the story. Perhaps it might be put better: each projects and reconstructs a story in support of an interpretation of specific moral values, arguments and principles. The tale is not used merely as anecdotal evidence. It is too freely manipulated and openly appropriated. The story serves as an illustrative example. Jubilees presents it as an etiology for capital punishment, while Genesis offers instead an etiology of a divine protection.
Jubilees’ account of the Cain story is more helpful than the tale in Genesis for giving us some insight into the way a story can be used to illustrate the author’s philosophical principles. In closing its account of the garden story, which asserts that the tree of wisdom has brought death to Adam, Jubilees argues how this death was appropriate. Then it also tries to show how Cain’s death was governed by an equally appropriate fate:
And at the end of the nineteenth Jubilee in the seventh week, in the sixth year, Adam died. And ail of his children buried him in the land of his creation. And he was the first who was buried in the earth. And he lacked seventy years from one thousand years, for a thousand years are like one day in the testimony of heaven and therefore it was written concerning the tree of knowledge, ‘In the day you eat from it you will die,’ therefore he did not complete the years of this day because he died in it.
At the end of that Jubilee Cain was killed one year after him. And his house fell upon him. And he died in the midst of his house. And he was killed by its stones because he killed Abel with a stone, and so with a stone was he killed by righteous judgement. Therefore it is ordained in the heavenly tablets: ‘With the weapons with which a man kills his fellow he shall be killed. Just as he wounded him. Thus shall they do to him.’
It is highly significant that in Jubilees’ own account of the story of Cain, Cain does not kill his brother with a stone, but rather with ‘malice’, with ‘hatred’. We have already learned that both enmity and stones belong to the Bible’s larger discussion about murder and capital punishment. Jubilees’ argument then makes quite good sense as an argument built not so much on the tale alone but on the related discussion, in the greater world of scholarship that its account implied. Jubilees seals its discussion with a poem. The point is to mark the text as fitting and traditional. Jubilees’ rationalization proceeds on the basis of logic, authority and – most important of all – balance. Genesis does the same in its version. It gives the story; interprets the issues of the story with citation of proverbs of authority, and seals its story with a song, marking the whole with a sense of balance and propriety. Genesis closes its argument with the song we find in chapter 4: 23–24, just at the end of the aetiologies relating to Cain’s sons:
Lamech said to his wives: Adah and Zillah, hear my voice; you wives of Lamech, hearken to what I say: I have slain a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain is avenged seven-fold, truly Lamech seventy-seven-fold!
The argument in Genesis is oriented towards the collection of tradition. The presentation of Genesis’ values is often designed to surprise the reader. In presenting as Genesis does a ‘lost and forgotten’ tradition, representing the divine foundations of the community, the collector takes as a cardinal principle the thesis that ordinary human understanding is both in error and undependable. Hence, truth, to be convincing, needs to be surprising.
When we compare Genesis with Jubilees as we have, it becomes clear that the murder story and the proverbs cited are a given of the narrative. They are what the two accounts have in common. The same story is used by both. Both cite proverbs as the central focus of their exegesis, and both use songs to close their arguments! The structure of this three-part technique is a common tool of both commentaries. The tales give the framework, the proverbs the interpretive focus, and the songs close and support conviction. The common ground between the composition of Jubilees and Genesis is impressive. We have a common ideological perspective in the narratives, the same mixture of genres: tale, proverb, and song. We have common techniques of both argument and presentation; and, just as importantly, the same expectation of rationalizing satisfaction! There are also other characteristics held in common. The stories and their plots are destroyed by both the narrators’ erudition and by their strong grasp of the tradition. In both Jubilees and in Genesis, the story, as a story, does not hold the author’s attention. Their interest lies elsewhere in the discourse, and in the scholarly commentary on tradition, not on the traditions themselves. Jubilees and Genesis must be seen as sharing a common intellectual world.
While the early chapters of Genesis centre on stories and discussions about the relationship between the human and the divine in general, and so talk about all of humanity in terms of the characters in the stories, the use of the motif of divine parentage, much like that of divine image and the different ways in which humans try to be like the divine, served its function as a means of dramatizing both the closeness and the distance of the human and the divine. Authority, life and knowledge are all seen as essentially divine values within the world we know and live in. This perception finds expression in the Bible’s stories. Similarly, the stories reflect a conception that humans play the role of God in this world. All of these stories equally share a theme of loss and pessimism. The stories create a contrast that repeatedly comes to the fore: the similarity of humanity to the divine is the source of a conflict in which people are too much like gods to ignore. God created the world good; and then he created man. The Bible rarely avoids the irony of this perspective. While the stories are wholly comfortable with mythical characters such as gods, angels, monstrous cherubim, half-divine and divine-like humans and the like, these story characters reflect a recurrent theme of possibility lost. The implicit discussion is ever about how the human and the divine are fundamentally opposite and even contrary.
When we enter the patriarchal narrative both the number and type of stories multiply rapidly. The plots take on a greater importance. The characters are drawn more fully and more satisfyingly. In the use of the motif of a son of God, and particularly in the traditional birth episode of a son of God, the dominance of the theme about the interrelationship between men and the divine comes to the forefront of the story’s presentation. The motif, in fact, takes on the fixed function of specifically exemplifying God’s presence in the world. This develops into one of the main ways that the biblical stories develop to talk about divine immanence. The variety of these stories quite consciously explores the potentially startling implications of piety’s belief in God’s presence, as well as such ideas of popular religion as that the gods control events in this world. Examples will tell far more than I can paraphrase about some of the rich literary possibilities that this motif opens.
Stories that open with the birth of a son of God, or with a comparable ‘birth of a saviour’ episode, are what you might call epitomizing stories. This type of story is presented to interpret and foreshadow the kind of role that the child is to play in later life. In a story form, the birth acts much like a cue-name. It performs the same function that the naming aetiologies do. Certainly the ironic wit of the punning explanation given to Noah’s name in Genesis 5: 29, is an appropriate preparation for the flood story’s destruction of humanity; “and he called his name Noah, for this one shall bring us relief [yenachmenu: a pun on the Hebrew name Noach) from our work, from the toil of our hands and from the ground that Yahweh has cursed.’ Such useful puns help us understand how the text and the tradition understood the story or character represented. Another type of epitomizing episode in biblical stories is also a common feature of most legend-building. This is the pattern of telling a story of a character’s childhood that captures something of importance in his or her later life. The theme can be straightforward, even historical, as in the account of Mozart’s great successes as a concert pianist at an early age. They can also be ironic and apocryphal, as in the story of Einstein flunking his first algebra examination. Two short biblical legends stand out in this regard because they each epitomize their hero role in representing the divine presence in their life.
In Exodus 2: 11–15, we find a dramatic miniature that acts as a bridge between two groups of Moses tales: between the stories surrounding his birth and rescue and the more complex narrative about the sending of the saviour that begins with Moses going out into the wilderness in Exodus 2: 16. Exodus recounts but the bare bones of this tale. It would be nearly incomprehensible except for its striking, dramatic presentation in two scenes, each a contrast to the other in their polarity, First scene:
Time passed, and Moses was grown up. Once he approached his brothers to observe their slave labour. He saw an Egyptian kill one of the Hebrews, his brothers. He looked about, and as there was no one there, he killed the Egyptian and buried him in the sand.
Note the stress to identify Moses as ‘brother’ of the enslaved Hebrews he avenges. Moses is portrayed as the revolutionary saviour: the scourge of the oppressors of his people. He stands in solidarity with the oppressed. Second scene:
The next day, Moses again went out. He saw two Hebrews fighting. ‘Why are you hitting your comrade?’ he asked the one who was to blame. But he retorted: ‘Who has set you up to be master and judge over us? Perhaps you will kill me too, just as you killed the Egyptian?’ And so Moses grew afraid, thinking: So, it has been found out after all! When pharaoh heard of it, he wanted to kill Moses. Moses fled from pharaoh and went to the land of Midian, stopping at a spring.
This story of Moses functions much like the story in Luke 2: 41–52 of Jesus in the temple as a twelve-year-old boy, Jesus is found among the learned teachers, listening to and questioning them. The brief tale epitomizes Jesus’ growth ‘in wisdom and years and he was well thought of by God and men.’ Both these stories in the Bible are predictive of their heroes’ later stature and epitomize their central role in the narrative. At the same time, both are used as a bridge between the hero’s childhood and his role as an adult. In Exodus, Moses is cast in his later role of saviour of the Israelites. The narrative’s polarizing contrast is between the saviour’s role that Moses plays and the image of the Israelites as feckless and protesting grumblers. This marks the role of these two scenes as two interpretive poles of the Exodus and wilderness stories to come. One cannot miss the prophecy implicit in the sarcasm of the Hebrew bully in scene two: ‘Who has set you up to be master and judge over us?’ Indeed, the audience is invited to ask, who? The question throws us ironically forward into the narrative of Exodus 18, where it is Yah web who makes Moses ‘master and judge’ over Israel. It also introduces us to the beginning of the story of Moses as saviour of Israel, a story that opens once Moses moves out to the wilderness: at the burning bush on the mountain of God. The Hebrew’s question to Moses introduces the audience to one of the central leitmotifs of the stories about Israel’s murmuring in the wilderness: ‘Who are you?’ It is not only a question asked of Moses by the Israelites. This is also Moses’ question of Yahweh at the burning bush: ‘Who are you?’ The question about who God is dominates the heart of the Pentateuch. The function of the bridge narrative of the Moses murder scene builds up and creates a discussion between the many originally independent stories that are tied together here. The story of Israel’s birth as a people, and its role as the chosen people of God, as Yahweh’s first-born and heir, begins when Moses enters the wilderness. It continues through the Pentateuch until Moses addresses the people in the farewell speeches that create the Book of Deuteronomy. The bridge narrative of Moses as revolutionary saviour links this narrative chain with the epitomizing tales of Moses’ birth and rescue. It presents us with one of the most popular roles of biblical legend.
We have stories about the birth of sons of God and of saviours already from early Sumerian and Akkadian texts, in the world’s first epic stories of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Such stories are still with us into Roman times. The story of Alexander’s birth was certainly the most popular of these in the Hellenistic period. The story told of Moses’ birth is in the mould of the Oedipus story, which is certainly the fullest tale of this type. The Moses tale is probably closest to the tale of the birth of the king of Akkad, Sargon the Great. This legend is known in a number of variants from the early sixth century BCE:
Sargon, the mighty king, the king of Agade, am I. My mother was a high priestess. My father I knew not . . . My mother, the high priestess, conceived me; in secret she bore me. She set me in a basket of rushes; with bitumen she sealed my lid. She cast me into the river, which rose not over me. The river bore me up and took me to Akki, the drawer of water. Akki the drawer of water lifted me up as he dipped his ewer. Akki the drawer of water reared me as his son. Akki the drawer of water appointed me as his gardener. While I was a gardener, Ishtar granted me her love, and for four years I exercised kingship.
Much like Genesis’ stories dealing with the mythical possibilities of blood, spirit, life and wisdom, legends about the birth of a son of God or of a saviour are remarkably common in the Bible. If one were to investigate the nature of biblical theology, this tale type offers an informative context for understanding the intellectual world that underlies it. To consider only the best-known of these stories, we find the pattern of this story already in Genesis 11: 29–30, when we are told that Sarah is barren. Although the divine promise to Abraham of many children – as many as the sands of the sea and the stars of the sky – stands at the very source of our plot-line, Sarah cannot have children. This motif of barrenness intensifies by chapter 18 when Abraham has reached ninety-nine years old. Then, in reward for hospitality, Yahweh, in the disguise of a traveller, promises the pious couple a child when he returns in the spring. The story takes full advantage of the humour of such a statement given by a stranger, as the narrator has Sarah pun predictively in her ‘laughter’.1 In chapter 21 we learn that the child is finally born when Abraham is a hundred years old. We read in verse 1: ‘Yahweh visited Sarah as he said he would, and he did to her what he had promised and she became pregnant, and she bore Abraham a son in his old age,’
We need to ask: what is it about Isaac that is like God, through which God’s presence is shown? Genesis 21: 6 gives a very nuanced rendition of the play on Isaac’s name: ‘laughter’. ‘Sarah said: “God has created laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh over me.”’ Laughter is divine. Yet it is in the Book of Jubilees’ story of Isaac’s birth that his divine paternity is most convincing. In chapter 14, Yahweh appears to Abraham in a dream and announces that he will have a child. Jubilees lays stress on Abraham’s (not Sarah’s) inability to have children with the purpose of emphasizing all the more Isaac’s divine paternity. Similarly in Jubilees 16, when Sarah is waiting for the child, the first quickening of the child and the counting of the months are emphasized.
And we told her the name of her son Isaac – just as his name was ordained and written in the heavenly tablets – and [that] when we returned to her at a specific time she would have conceived a son . . . And in the middle of the sixth month the Lord visited Sarah and did for her as he had said. And she conceived and she bore a son in the third month in the middle of the month [precisely nine months later!] in the rime when Yahweh told Abraham.
That Yahweh creates life and gives fertility to the patriarch’s wives, that it is by Yahweh that the wives are impregnated, is also clear in the story of the Leah-Rachel conflicts of Genesis 29 and 30. In chapter 29: 31, as Jacob no longer wishes to mike love to Leah (just prior to Leah’s giving birth to four sons by Yahweh), we are told: ‘When Yahweh saw that Leah was ignored, he opened her womb’ – that is, impregnated her. When Reuben is born to her, Leah hopes that ‘perhaps now my man will make love to me again.’ And also, as the story closes (Gen, 30: 22), the narrator tells us: ‘God didn’t forget Rachel; he heard her and opened her womb, that she became pregnant . . .’
A number of other theological roles related to the metaphor of the son of God intrude themselves strongly and create considerable variety and flexibility in these narratives. Particularly important are those of prophet, Nazirite and messiah. One story stands out for its strong exploitation of the humorous potential of the birth story’s plot-line. In the story of Samson’s birth that is found in Judges 13, the narrative takes full advantage of the massive human confusion that comes into pity whenever gods impregnate women. We saw this comic motif already in the Abraham and Sarah story of Genesis 18: 12, Behind Sarah’s laughter at the thought of her and her old man ‘having fun again’ lay the hidden prophecy of the divine stranger’s promise.
Matthew’s gospel takes up the theme briefly, but only in a serious manner; in order to present the husband Joseph in the favourable light of trusting piety.1 Luke’s episodes of the conceptions of John and Jesus both introduce this comic motif. Variants of Sarah’s question are voiced by both Zechariah and Mary: ‘How can I know this as I am an old man and my wife an old woman, advanced in years?’ and ‘How can this be, since I have never been with a man?’ The stock nature of the material becomes quite clear when Zechariah’s question is rebuked as doubt in order to draw the moral that nothing is impossible for God, Mary’s answer is used to offer the opportunity of describing Mary’s impregnation by the divine spirit and to make the argument that ‘therefore the child will be called the son of God.’
In the Samson story, the comic potential of this motif dominates. The story of Samson’s birth begins with the introduction of Manoah’s wife in the same manner that Genesis 11 had introduced Sarah; as a childless woman who was barren, ‘The Messenger of Yahweh looked at the woman and said to her: “You are barren and do not bear a child; now you will be pregnant and bear a son.”’ The divine messenger here is much like the same figure of Genesis 16, whom Hagar called ‘the God who sees’.
The divine speech of Genesis is highly reminiscent of traditional story patterns. One can hardly miss the mildly erotic overtones implicit in Yahweh’s messenger ‘looking at’ the woman. All women who get ‘looked at’ by gods in the Old Testament become pregnant, Notice also the emphasis of the angel’s speech; the impossible becomes possible. She who cannot bear a child will bear a child. This is Sarah’s miracle; it is Hannah’s and it is Elizabeth’s; it is Mary’s. It is the mark of the divine in this world. For God, everything is possible; especially the impossible.
In the opening chapter of the Samson story, this kind of joke grows to dominate the whole of the narration about Samson as son of God. Samson is a giant, like those born of the sons of God in Genesis 6, and Samson has divine strength. The story is a comic adventure of this figure of folklore, vigorously drawing on the amusement that the husband’s ignorance of divine intervention allows.
After Yahweh’s messenger visited Manoah’s wife, ‘the woman went to her husband and said: a man of God came to me. He looked like a divine messenger: terribly frightful! I didn’t ask him where he was from; nor did he tell me his name. He told me, “You are pregnant, and you will bear a son . . .”’ Judges 13: 6–7). The scene needs to be imagined dramatically. In the interpretation of Manoah’s wife here, she recounts the previous third-person narrative about her encounter with the divine visitor. At the same time, her interpretation casts the encounter itself in the light of her own perspective. ‘I didn’t ask him where he was from; nor did he tell me his name.’ Told this way, the wonder story distances itself, as the audience hears of the meeting from her human perspective. The implications of the woman’s ambiguous ‘a man of God’ are exposed through her contrasting doubts about a ‘divine messenger’. What did the husband hear? A man who his wife thought ‘was like a messenger of God’ visited her, and from this meeting she is expecting a child. Only the fact that the narrator’s audience was also at the scene protects Manoah from a cuckold’s horns.
Theologically, the narrative is hardly pious. It plays dangerously with, both people’s understanding and their evocations of the divine. The woman’s description of her visitor, ‘divine and frightful’ – is this a supplement to the narrative or her woman’s commentary? Would our interpretation be different if it were one or the other? Does our narrator imply that the difference between cuckoldry and divine blessing is precisely interpretation?
The story lays stress on this perspective in the next scene, where Manoah prays to Yahweh to send the ‘man of God’ back once again. Manoah’s absence is offered in evidence that his wife’s impregnation was indeed divine. ‘Therefore, God’s Yahweh visited the woman once more, when she was in the field and her husband Manoah was not with her,’ The woman is spin portrayed as naive. ‘She hurried hence to tell her husband of it,’ What she says to her husband is important. ‘The man who came to me the other day has visited me once again.’ Her husband follows his wife to meet the man. Manoah, who never interprets anything in this story, now chooses his words carefully: ‘Are you the man who talked to the woman?’ His politeness is such that he does not even speak of her as his wife! This politeness and clarity sets the tone for what follows. When the man admits that he was the one, Manoah leaves all unnecessary elements out in his request for assurances.’ When your word comes, what will the boy’s family be and what is to be his destiny?’*1
The next scene introduces the well-known motif of trying to learn a deity’s name. Themselves already an implicit answer to his questions, Manoah’s words bear literary allusions regarding the boy, which yield a surprisingly rich reward from Manoah’s role as our story’s dumbling. The euphemism of ‘talking with the woman’ now presents us with its implication in the ‘word’ that is to be made flesh in the child Samson. This motif, echoing Genesis 1: 3’s creative word, is picked up by the prologue to John’s gospel John 1; 14), where it is applied within a comparable context to Jesus. Samson’s family, of course, is known to John’s audience. He is one of the sons of God. This question about the boy’s family and therefore about his destiny is an important one within the plot of the greater story. It leads to the angel repeating the requirements of the Nazirite. It is upon obedience to these that Samson’s destiny depends.
These are two quite different nuances in the story’s opening. The divine engagement in the plot opens the story to the stock motifs of the larger tradition about sons of God. There is also the comic perspective of the implicit author. This is again clearly obvious when the divine messenger first gives the woman instructions concerning Samson’s role as a Nazirite ‘from his mother’s womb’: ‘Take care to drink neither wine nor beer, and don’t eat anything that is unclean, for you are pregnant and shall bear a son. A razor must never be used on, his head; for the child shall be God’s Nazirite from his mother’s womb.’ There is much in this divine speech that allows the story to play with nonsense. The sense of the instruction to the woman seems to be that she should comport herself like a Nazirite in her son’s stead. He will be a Nazirite even before he is born; ‘from his mother’s womb’.1 Only the traditional pattern in our narrative’s motifs could bring the instruction about the razor and the woman’s pregnancy together. Yet, given that these elements of the tradition do come together here, the compiler of our text doesn’t hesitate to use their incongruence to comic effect.
When the woman tells her husband in verse 7 that the ‘man of God’ has told her that she is with child and shall bear a son, and again when the angel repeats the Nazirite instructions to Manoah, variations of the instructions are given. While Samson, as scourge of the Philistines, fills out the heroic role of saviour much as Saul and David do in their turn, he is something quite different from what one might normally understand as a Nazirite. No Samuel or John the Baptist this man! It is in the context of such a contrast with the expected that the story builds its playful motif of Samson’s magic hair. The concentration on this ‘hippy-motif draws us away from the theophany. It brings us to concentrate on the central leitmotif of the Samson story: his hair. For all of the Samson story’s comic relief, its theme is tragic. He is a Nazirite from his mother’s womb to his death. He must not cut his hair! His hair is his Achilles’ heel. Of course, the instruction concerning the razor could not be left out. This is the one divine commandment, the obedience or disobedience to which determines Samson’s fate in the story. His magic hair, the narrative basis for seeing him as a Nazirite, gives him a share in the divine spirit. That is his strength. The function of the Nazirite is just as it is expressed with John in Luke’s gospel. He is filled with the holy spirit from his mother’s womb. Likewise in judges, Samson’s strength is a function of the divine spirit.
In chapter 14, at the Timnah vineyard, a lion attacks Samson. ‘Yahweh’s spirit took him and he ripped the lion in two with his bare hands as if it were a kid.’Of course, it is unnecessary to accept the bravado of the author’s implicit assertion concerning how easy it might be to tear a kid in two. What is clear is that Yahweh’s spirit lies behind Samson’s heroic strength. Again, when the Philistines have extorted the answer to Samson’s riddle about the lion and the honey by threatening his wife, ‘Yahweh’s spirit grabbed him and he went down to Ashqelon where he killed thirty men of the town.’ This ‘big bow-wow’ motif comes up again in chapter 15, where in yet another battle with the Philistines, Yahweh’s spirit grabs him and he kills a thousand with the jawbone of an ass. With the story’s closure in chapter 16, the motifs of the Nazirite, of Samson’s strength through Yahweh’s spirit, and of his uncut hair all come together.
The story’s understanding of Samson in the ascetic role of a Nazirite is very limited, and even amusing. Far from an ascetic, monk-like Nazirite, Samson is a lover of women and a brawler among men. Of all the biblical stories involving the figure of the Nazirite, it is Luke’s John the Baptist who is the best-known of any who play this role, even though Luke does not use the title itself for John. In fact, it appears that few of our stories understand much about what a Nazirite was in history, though they obviously refer to it. According to the Book of Numbers a Nazirite’s oath was a promise that could be made by both men and women, a pledge to withdraw from one’s normal life for a limited time. This separation from ordinary society was marked by not cutting one’s hair or drinking alcohol. The references to Nazirites in the Bible’s stories, however, are full of fantasy and hardly refer to any social reality. One story does not even understand the Nazirite as an ascetic. In Matthew 2: 23 the motif is used as a minor joke. When Jesus’ family returns from Egypt, they settle in the town of Nazareth because of the ‘prophecy’that he should be called a Nazirite. Apart from the fact that no such prophecy is known, other biblical narratives are generally not much better at dealing with this role. It is apparently only known from literature. This is no more clear than in the story of Samuel, where the young Samuel fills out the role of the Nazirite. As in the Samson story, the child Samuel is given in an oath by his parents as t Nazirite to God. Accordingly, Samuel grows up in the temple, where he waits, like John in the desert, for Yahweh’s call. However, as John the Baptist does not drink wine or beer because he is filled with the holy spirit ‘from his mother’s womb’ so too it is Samuel’s mother (I Samuel 1: 15) who declares to the priest Eli that she has not drunken wine or beer – and therefore is not drunk. Rather she is filled with the spirit (the implied pun’ belongs to the text!), and thus she becomes impregnated! Rather than a reference to social realities of ancient Palestine, the Nazirite motif is one of the Bible’s many saviour motifs that is closely tied to the son of God motif.
There is a much greater use of the son of God motif in the stories and songs of the Bible than we can discuss. There are also many more variants of it in which the divine is described as being present, and as affecting the world, than this one mythological figure. Yet the wide range of such stories makes it very useful to bring out the interests and purposes the stories have served. In this section, we look at four miraculous birth stories. Together they portray the basic motifs of the mythology. They portray metaphorically the presence of God in a role that is both positive and necessary.
a) Exodus 1–2. Unlike most of the narratives of our discussion, the Pentateuch’s tale of Moses does not develop the role of son of God in favour of the very human figure of Moses. Only very briefly, in one of the many variants of this narrative that occur in the books of Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, does Moses become God for Israel. Such a metaphor of the divine is attached to Moses only once, in a quite elegant aetiology of the role of the prophet. Moses is described as one who is unable to speak properly. He is told by Yahweh that Moses will be God for Aaron and that Aaron will be Moses’ prophet (Exodus 4: 16). Moses plays a whole complex of roles: prophet, judge and saviour. It is in the story of the golden calf of Exodus 32, however, that this plot theme of Moses as God for Aaron is played out. The story has been put together from three quite distinct, variant responses to the golden calf. In Exodus 32: 1–14, Yahweh becomes angry over the making of the golden calf and decides to destroy the people. Moses plays the role of talking Yahweh out of his anger. The episode closes with the narrator’s comment: ‘And so, Yahweh regretted the evil which he had intended to do to his people.’ The second part of this story immediately follows (32: 15–29). It is Moses who now plays the angry role. His anger is played out instead of Yahweh’s, as Moses speaks the words of condemnation to kill those who ‘do not stand in Yahweh’s path’. In the story’s third part, Moses goes up the mountain to Yahweh with the hope of obtaining redemption for the people’s sin. Why this particular word ‘redemption’ is used is at first puzzling. It can be clarified if we pay attention to what Moses actually does. When he first speaks to Yahweh, he tells Yahweh what the people have done and asks Yahweh to ‘forgive’them. But then Moses takes on himself the role of redeeming saviour for the people’s sin: ‘But if not, then erase me from the book you have made.’ Yahweh refuses this role of redeemer to Moses, Citing a first principle of justice, Yahweh argues that those who have sinned against him will be the ones erased. Accordingly, the third variant closes with Yahweh sending a plague against the people.
Although Exodus has little hesitation in dealing with Moses in a divine role, there are, nevertheless, good reasons that the specific role of son of God is not given to Moses and does not play a role in the tale of his birth. In the narrative tradition of the Pentateuch as a whole, Yahweh plays this role, while Moses plays more the role of his prophet. It is with Yahweh of the Pentateuch that we find the closest integration of the metaphor of the son of God with its function expressing divine presence in the world. The essence and meaning of Yahweh in Exodus, and his function within the related stories, is as the representation or revelation of God to and for Israel. As we have seen in Exodus 3: 12, when Moses is asking the God of the burning bush who he is, God answers by making a sound pun on the name Yahweh: ehyeh imak which in English means ‘I am with you’. Yahweh is the divine presence for Moses and for Israel. This distinction between God and Yahweh is consistent throughout these stories. Yahweh is God’s name, God’s presence on earth, not God himself. It is the perspective of the Old Testament that Yahweh was the means by which old Israel knew God. In the closure of the Pentateuch, at the end of Moses’ life, when Moses looks back at the entirety of his narrative and epitomizes it with the song we find in Deuteronomy 32, it is as ‘angel’ or son of God, that is as representative of the divine for Israel, that Yahweh is described.
Perhaps of even greater importance in the plot development of the Moses story is that Israel as a people takes on the metaphor of divine son. Israel is Yahweh’s ‘first-born son’ (Exodus 4: 22–23), and the murderous contest between Yahweh and the pharaoh that marks the plot of the plague and wonder narratives, is a struggle over Yahweh’s and the pharaoh’s first-born. Theologically, Israel’s role as son of God is understood as the principal means by which God is immanent in the world.
Although the motif of son of God is not used, the birth of the saviour story chain of narrative, which opens the Moses story, marks the Book of Exodus’ first two chapters as belonging to the same intellectual and literary context as other son of God birth stories. The story itself is tightly structured and highly traditional. As I have mentioned, comparable examples have been found throughout ancient Near Eastern and Hellenistic literature. The birth story comes within the context of Israel’s enslavement. The Israelites have become more numerous than the Egyptians (Exodus 1: 9). To deal with the threat they pose to the Egyptians, the pharaoh recommends that ‘we deal wisely with them to prevent them from growing yet greater’. This motif of ‘dealing wisely’ places the pharaoh in the ironic role of a would-be wise man. Everything he does therefore causes the Israelites to increase even so. He forces them into slave labour. But the more they are enslaved, the more they increase. He then instructs the midwives to kill all the male children born among the Hebrew. But the midwives ‘fear God’ and this leads to the Israelites becoming a yet greater people. Finally, the pharaoh makes his third attempt: ‘Every boy child will be thrown into the Nile.’ Moses, however, lives. This leads to the pharaoh’s greatest fear’ that the Israelites will escape from the land. When Moses is born, his mother hides him in a basket and sets it adrift on the Nile. He is found by the pharaoh’s daughter and becomes her son. The story doesn’t end here but extends itself ironically into two further scenes. After Moses is grown and kills the Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew, the pharaoh seeks to kill Moses, forcing him to flee Egypt. Later, among the variants of stories in which Yahweh sends Moses back to Egypt to confront the pharaoh in a contest which is to end in the death of the pharaoh’s own irst-bom son, one variant (Exodus 4: 19) has Yahweh tell Moses that ‘all those who had sought to kill you are now dead.’ Moses returns to demonstrate Yahweh’s presence in Egypt.
b) Matthew 1–2. In the first chapters of Matthew’s gospel we find a double story told about Jesus. This gospel offers a son of God birth story and then follows it up with a variant of this tale type. The miraculous birth story begins with the clarification that the child’s mother was engaged to be married. However, ‘before they had come together, she became pregnant by the holy spirit.’ When the ‘messenger of the lord’ explains to Joseph why his bride is pregnant, he instructs Joseph; ‘Give him the name Jesus, for he will save them for their sins,’1 Here we have a good contrasting variant on the Moses story. Matthew cites the Greek form of Isaiah 7;14 as if the announcement of a child to be born were in the future tense, obviously interpreting it as t prophecy. The motif of miraculous birth that belongs to this story type is emphasized in the choice of the word Virgin’; ‘A virgin mill become pregnant and give birth to a son and you will name him Immanuel, which means, “God with us”.’ Matthew is engaged in complicated interpretation and discussion of the tradition. With the ‘translation’ of the word Immanuel for his audience by reference to Yahweh’s explanation of Exodus 3: 12’s ‘I am [God] with you,’ Matthew links Exodus to the Isaiah passage and both to the aetiology of Jesus, as one who saves the people from their sins. The role of Jesus in this gospel will be that of an Immanuel who is not only God with us, but will represent God, in the manner of Moses and Joshua before him, as saving people: not from Egypt nor from the Canaanites, but this time from their sins. The scene closes with a doubling of the assurance that it was God who had impregnated the girl; ‘He [Joseph] did not lie with her until she had given birth to her son.’
The continuation of the birth story in Matthew’s second chapter presents a thematic variant of the Moses saviour story. In the context of the story of the three wise men who come to give honour to a new king, old King Herod plays the role of Moses’ pharaoh and orders all the male babies to be killed. After being warned in a dream, Joseph escapes to Egypt with the child and his mother. After Herod dies, Joseph has another dream. They can return because – and here we have a near verbatim quotation from the Moses story – ‘those who had sought the child’s life are dead.’ While there is no question that Matthew is well aware of the stories of ‘sons of God’ in the Old Testament, he is not offering a new interpretation of them. Although it is clear that Matthew knows and shares much of the tradition with Moses, he does not refer to it in any way as belonging to his narrative’s past. Nor does he offer a contrast between the Moses of old and the Jesus of the future. Rather, Moses and Jesus play the same metaphorical roles. They both give literary portrayals of divine salvation. The story in Matthew centres itself no more in a Jesus of the author’s past than the Exodus story centred itself in a Moses of his past. Both present theologically motivated fictions, using a common birth-story structure and the Immanuel motif to evoke the traditional understanding of divine immanence.
c) I Samuel 1–2, The story of Samuel’s birth begins with a motif common also to the Jacob story’s contest between Leah and Rachel, Elfewiah had two wives. Peninnah had many children, Hannah none. As Jacob had loved the childless Rachel, Elkanth loved the similarly barren Hannah. The story opens with Hannah’s personal, internal conflict. Her rival mocks and humiliates her, and her husband is distressed that his love is not enough for her. In her distress she cries bitterly and prays to Yahweh at the annual feast in the temple at Shiloh. As she prays silently, her lips moving but her voice unheard, the priest Eli thinks her drunk, rebukes her, and orders her to put the wine away. She tells him that she has ‘drunk neither wine nor strong drink’ but has prayed out of distress. Eli prays that her petition will be heard, and she returns home. There, her husband has intercourse with her and ‘Yahweh remembers her,’ And so she becomes pregnant and in due time bears a son. After the child is weaned, she returns to the temple and dedicates the child to the temple, where the child is to grow up.
The story fits well into the miraculous birth stories we have seen. The story’s vocabulary itself Its it to this context: her prayerful ‘spirit’ her Nazirite-like abstinence from wine and strong drink, her becoming pregnant because Yahweh has remembered her and the dedication of the child to God all mark the story strongly. With the story’s emphasis on the virtuous parents and the piety of the childless wife, the tale reads well as one of virtue rewarded. The theme of selfless piety is all the stronger in the woman’s return to the temple and in her decision to give her son back to Yahweh.
But far more than the details of the birth, the mythological song of fertility that Hannah sings as she dedicates her child to the temple epitomizes the birth of the child and interprets it as a story of the messiah. This song introduces the theme of Yahweh’s messiah as the leitmotif of the books of Samuel. In these opening chapters, a chain of narrative begins that leads from Samuel to Saul to David. It centres on the choice of David as Yahweh’s messiah. This is the one who will carry out Yahweh’s will for Israel, He is also a mythological figure, who fights Yahweh’s wars and establishes his power cosmically. It is to this purpose that Hannah’s song is sung, recurrently echoing the messianic Psalm 132. Hannah’s reinterpretation of Psalm 132, to it the context of her story of natural barrenness and God-given fertility, enhances the song’s celebration of messianic potency. The theme of salvation, of the hungry being fed, the rich overturned, the poor made rich – these pious praises are ubiquitous themes of the Psalms, referring to the messiah. Theologically central is the praise of Yahweh’s cosmic power that belongs to the figure of David, Hannah’s song opens in a celebration of the joy of her own sexual fertility and closes with the royal celebration of potency and salvation in David’s rise, Hannah paraphrases the erotic phallic imagery of Psalm 132 where Yahweh declaims: ‘I will make a horn grow for David; prepare a light for my messiah; I will cover his enemies in shame, but his crown will glow.’ Hannah’s song begins; ‘My heart rejoices in Yahweh; for Yahweh has raised my horn.’ (Ski) Here Hannah claims this potency on her son’s behalf. It is Samuel’s story that leads to David’s rise as a metaphorical illustration of divine potency, ‘Yahweh will judge the ends of the earth; he will give his king strength and raise his messiah’s horn,’
d) Luke 1–2, The double story of the miraculous births of John and Jesus, which Luke’s gospel recounts, is by far the most complex of this type of narrative in the Bible. The central story is found in chapter 1 and centres in John’s birth and the expectation of Jesus’. This is followed by three lightly attached closing stories that deal with Jesus’ birth, his dedication at the temple, and Jesus teaching there as a young boy. Only the first two stories need concern us here.
The story opens with a scene that belongs to the side of tradition, with stories like those of Isaac and Samuel’s birth. There was the priest Zachariah and his wife Elizabeth. They were pious and without fault in living by the torah. But they were childless: Elizabeth was barren and both were very old. One day, an angel visits Zachariah in the temple. Zachariah is startled and frightened. The angel tells him not to be afraid, as his prayer has been heard. His wife will bear a son. The child’s name is John. As in all of our stories where this motif of naming the child occurs, John’s is a cue-name, identifying the child, John is the ‘gift of God’. That the naming of the child presents John as a son of God, as in the tradition, is clear from the following instruction and prophecy. The child must not drink wine or beer – that is, he will fulfil the Nazirite role – and he will be filled with the divine spirit from his mother’s womb. He will have the spirit of Elijah and create a people prepared. This predicts the scenes of chapter 3 where John is given the role of prophet preaching repentance. Zachariah then echoes Sarah’s astonishment: ‘How can I know this to be true: I am an old man and my wife is up in years?’ In a classical folktale manoeuvre to delay the plot with a test, the angel hears only the doubt and takes offence. ‘I am Gabriel, who stands before God’s face!’ And then he punishes Zachariah by making him dumb until the time all that he has said comes true. Zachariah’s inability to talk or tell anyone of his vision plays a function in the plot. Zachariah and the story’s audience understand, but no one else does. This is to emphasize the even greater wonder that is expressed through Elizabeth’s understanding that the child is God’s.
The next lines are filled with the son of God tradition: ‘From that time, Elizabeth his wife was pregnant. For five months, she hid herself saying, “So has the lord done to me, when he looked at me in order to take away my reproach among men.” ‘ This motif of Elizabeth’s understanding of her child as God’s son is capped at the child’s birth. Zachariah is still unable to speak and has not yet communicated anything of his vision. Yet, when Elizabeth is asked what the child’s name is to be, she names him John; that is, ‘gift of God’. When Zachariah confirms this by writing John’s name on a tablet, the angel’s second prediction is confirmed and Zachariah regains his speech.
The first prediction is equally weighted by the tradition. When Elizabeth is in her sixth month of pregnancy, this same angel Gabriel visits her cousin in Nazareth. Her name is Mary and she is a virgin engaged to be married. The angel comes to her and says: ‘The Lord is with you, you who have been given his pace.’ The poor girl doesn’t understand, thinking only that this is an odd greeting, so the angel explains what he means by declaring the child a son of God and messiah: ‘Don’t be afraid, for you have found grace with God. You will become pregnant and give birth to a son whom you will call Jesus.*1 Like Yahweh of Deuteronomy 32, the child will be called the ‘son of the most high’. The ‘lord God will give him his father David’s throne.’ A second time the girl fails to understand; ‘How can this happen; I have never been together with a man?’ Now the angel gives his message for this third time with unmistakable and graphic clarity; The holy spirit will come over you and the power of the most high will cover you. For this reason, the child born will be called holy, a son of God.’ The scene closes with Gabriel giving the girl proof that the impossible has been possible for God. Her barren cousin is now in her sixth month. This invites Mary to the story’s next scene when she goes to visit Elizabeth. As soon as Elizabeth hears Mary’s greeting, her baby jumps in her womb and she ‘became full of the holy spirit’. The use of the same wording as for Mary’s impregnation is important. It fulfils the angel’s prediction to Zachariah that the child will be full of the holy spirit from his mother’s womb. Apin, Elizabeth, without having been told anything by either Zachariah or Mary, understands both that Mary is pregnant and the identity of the child she herself bears.
Mary now sings her song. In the very next scene, when Zachariah regains his voice at John’s birth, he sings its matching pair. Together, these two songs recast the central themes of Hannah’s song. They interpret that song within the traditional theme of messianic response to the poor, and make it the centre of the Jesus birth story.
Luke’s well-known scene of Jesus’ birth is found in the second chapter. Dramatically, it is quite sentimental, but like the previous scenes it is carried off with considerable ability. A census calls Joseph and his family to Bethlehem to mark again that this son of God is David’s successor. There Mary gives birth in an animal shed because there was no room for them at the inn. This is told very simply, without any motif of rejection or exclusion by the good people of Bethlehem, Luke’s point here is not one of class. It is rather a romantic and pious celebration of poverty. This messiah will fulfil Luke’s proverb of chapter 6; 20: ‘Blessed are you who are poor; for God’s kingdom is yours.’ An angel announces the birth of a saviour in the city of David. He is messiah and lord. ‘With the angel there came immediately a heavenly army singing praise to God and declaring peace to men,’These poor shepherds then become Luke’s first witnesses,1
1 Psalm 39: 12 uses the Hebrew word for Abel’s name, hebel, to express just this transience of human life. ‘For I am your passing guest, a migrant like all my fathers.’ Psalm 94: 11 captures another nuance of this same human fragility that Abel’s story mirrors: ‘human thoughts, that are but a breath.
2 Seth, whose name echoes the Akkadian shutu, ‘the wilderness’ promises a new beginning to mankind at the close of our story. He plays the role of Israel redidivus.
1 The Hebrew verb for ‘she laughed’ is titzchaq, a pun on the name Isaac (in Hebrew, yitzchaq).
1 See Matthew 1: 18–19. Contrast Luke 1: 18–23.
1 The normal translation of this in most English Bibles is obscure. Few translate this plain meaning of the Hebrew.
1 This reading is confirmed by the variant episode in the story of Elizabeth’s pregnancy in Luke 1: 14–15, where we find this motif of the Samson story cited as the angel’s prediction that John (described as a Nazirite) will be filled with the Holy Spirit ‘from his mother’s womb’. This prophecy is dramatically fulfilled in the marvellous aetiology of a baby’s first quickening, when Elizabeth goes to meet the pregnant Mary in Luke 1: 41.
1 ‘Jesus’ is clearly a cue-name. It is the Greek form of the name Joshua, which translated, means ‘saviour’
1 Here too, the name Jesus is a cue-name, signifying ‘saviour’.
1 The theme of eye-witness is an important theme of Luke’s narration, with which he opens his gospel.