Jacob and Esau
Isaac Blessing Jacob by Govert Flinck.
SCHEMATIC NARRATIVES. AN ETIOLOGICAL RIVALRY. ESAU = ROME. JACOB’S DREAM.
Abraham’s grandsons Jacob and Esau never seemed to get along. One of them became the immediate ancestor of the people of Israel, the other the forefather of Israel’s southern neighbor the Edomites.
By now, of course, it should be clear how different are the approaches of ancient and modern interpreters; I hope it is also becoming clear that my purpose in surveying both is not to favor one approach over the other, but to try to understand each on its own terms—and this, as already pointed out, is largely a matter of understanding the assumptions that each group brought to the act of reading the Bible. These assumptions have essentially created two different Bibles, the ancients’ and the moderns’. The words of each Bible are exactly the same, but they turn out to mean something quite different.1
Everyone is aware of the role that assumptions sometimes play in the understanding of ordinary speech, though most people do not devote a great deal of thought to the matter. Yet even something as simple as the two-word greeting “Good morning” sometimes means quite different things—for example (1) “Hello,” or (2) “Why are you just getting up now? I’ve been up for hours,” or (3) “I beg your pardon, I don’t believe we’ve ever met”—depending not so much on the tone of voice (though that can help) as the precise circumstances or context in which these two words are uttered. Meaning number 1, for example, will probably be automatically understood if the speaker of “Good morning” is an office secretary answering the telephone; number 2 might be inferred if these words are being spoken to someone in a bathrobe by a disgruntled spouse who has just returned from dropping the children off at school; number 3 might be understood if the words are spoken by a stranger at, say, some business breakfast. It is not the words alone that carry the meaning, but the situation in which they are spoken, a particular context that creates expectations on the part of the listener. No matter what the tone of voice, the person hearing the secretary answer the phone will probably never think of substituting meanings number 2 or number 3 for number 1. The same is true for the bathrobed spouse or the executive—the context will likewise create expectations that make substituting the wrong meaning impossible.
To say this much is to approach one of the great findings of modern philosophers and students of literature, namely, that meaning is never inherent solely in the words of a text. Rather, meaning derives from an interaction between text and reader, or speaker and listener; that is to say, the meaning of a text always depends in some measure on the set of assumptions about the text that a particular reader/listener carries with him or her.
If meaning were inherent solely in the written words, I would certainly be puzzled by a piece of paper I found in my university mailbox last week. It was a letter from the dean and began, “Dear Professor Kugel.” “Dear?” I would say to myself, “but I hardly know you!” Still more puzzling would be the words just above his signature, “Sincerely yours.” Actually, I could not identify a single word in the whole letter that could properly be described as heartfelt or sincere, and if he really meant that he was “mine,” well, how about giving me a large raise next July? But of course I didn’t misunderstand any of these things, because I know perfectly well the conventions of a business letter, and the assumptions I bring to the reading of such a letter will guide me in properly understanding it. It is never just a matter of the words themselves.
Literary scholars have remarked on the same phenomenon with larger units, even whole books. How do we know, for example, that Jonathan Swift was kidding when he wrote his famous 1729 pamphlet, A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public? In it, Swift proposes to solve the problem of widespread hunger in Ireland, especially among the young, by taking a certain proportion of one-year-olds and turning them into food for the rest of the population, since (as he observes):
A young healthy child well nursed is, at a year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.
We know he was not serious first of all because this is indeed sometimes an option in everyone’s speech and writing, and second because most of us are acquainted with a certain literary genre called “satire.” So it won’t take a reader long—even if he doesn’t know that Swift was himself a famous satirist, the author of Gulliver’s Travels—to activate the assumptions that accompany the reading of a satire and properly understand this Modest Proposal. Beyond that, most readers would probably also be able to detect in Swift’s words a not-too-subtle dig at English indifference and even cruelty (though certainly of a lesser order than that advocated by the pamphlet) in the face of Irish sufferings. But imagine, for a minute, some creature from Mars who has no notion of satire as an option. To such a person, these same words would necessarily appear to be the writings of a maniac.
In considering our two groups of interpreters, it is important to remember that both carry a set of assumptions about the biblical text. In saying this, I do not intend to reduce everything to some kind of mushy relativism: it is certainly not the case that one set of assumptions is just as good as the next. After all, people can sometimes be wrong in what they have assumed, and we are in any case never altogether free to choose our assumptions. But the point of juxtaposing ancient and modern interpretations is not to show that one way of reading is right and the other mistaken, or that one is scientific and the other fanciful. What truly separates these two groups of interpreters is the set of unwritten instructions that guide them in reading the biblical text. Accept the one’s, and the other’s interpretations appear irrelevant at best, at worst a willful and foolish hiding from the obvious. It is thanks to this crucial difference in assumptions that these two groups can read exactly the same words and perceive two quite different messages.
With regard to the stories of Genesis that we have been reading, readers thus far are likely to have concluded that the main contribution of the ancient interpreters consisted of their specific interpretive creations: “Original Sin,” “Abraham the monotheist,” and so forth. But these are only the surface manifestation of something much deeper, the assumptions that created the very approach of these interpreters in the first place—for example, their way of reading the Genesis narratives as stories about individual people, and stories with a lesson to impart. One need not read these narratives as either. Indeed, if modern scholars are to be believed, many of these tales were automatically understood by their original Israelite audience in the etiological sense, in which individual heroes really stand for whole nations and the purpose of the story is not to impart some moral lesson but to account for some aspect of present-day life. If this is so, then the transition from this original, corporate-and-etiological understanding of these texts to the individual, moral reading of them must be seen as an enormous change wrought by the Bible’s earliest interpreters.
Jacob the Good
After Abraham, the story of Israel’s ancestors continues with Abraham’s son Isaac. Isaac married Rebekah, and in due time she gave birth to twins, Jacob and Esau. From the time they were in their mother’s womb together, these two did not get along; in fact, their moving about within her was so violent that Rebekah sought out a divine oracle to explain what was happening. The answer she received was a portent of the future:
Two [future] nations are in your womb, and two peoples will split off from inside you. But one will be stronger than the other—the older will end up serving the younger.
This prophecy proved to be true: Jacob and Esau did go on to found two different nations, Israel and Edom respectively—and ultimately, Esau’s nation (though he had been the privileged brother at first) ended up in a position inferior to that of Jacob’s.
Since Jacob was their people’s immediate founder, Jewish interpreters were naturally interested in celebrating his virtues—and in stressing the faults of his rival, Esau. This approach was very much in keeping with the way ancient interpreters approached all the stories of Genesis. Believing that the purpose of biblical narratives was to present readers with moral exemplars and role models (either positive or negative), interpreters naturally had a tendency to exaggerate the virtues and vices of the people involved. As a result, readers soon came to expect biblical figures to come with a clear label: “altogether righteous” or “completely wicked.” Anyone who has taken a very young child to the movies is acquainted with this phenomenon. Every time a new person appears on screen, the child has only one question, but a burning one: “Is he good, or bad?”
This was a difficult question to ask about Jacob and Esau, since at first glance, neither of them really seemed to fit these categories. Jacob, as the ancestor of the people of Israel, ought to have been good—but he did not seem so in some of the stories about his youth: he takes advantage and outmaneuvers, even lies and cheats. One of the jobs of ancient interpreters, therefore, was to look deeply into the biblical text itself, whose every detail might conceal some important, possibly mitigating, information. Their attention eventually fell upon one particular verse in Genesis, which seemed to contrast the two brothers:
The two boys grew up, and Esau became a man skilled at hunting, an outdoorsman, while Jacob was a quiet fellow, staying in tents. Isaac loved Esau, because he liked eating game, but Rebekah loved Jacob.
At face value, the contrast seems to be between a rugged sportsman and a homebody, the former beloved by his father, the latter by his mother. This in itself hardly seemed to tip the scales in Jacob’s favor. But one apparently insignificant detail caught the eye of ancient interpreters: Jacob is described as “staying [or dwelling] in tents.” Why is “tents” in the plural—how many tents does one person need?2 Obviously, only one. If, therefore, the text says “tents,” it must be hinting at something unusual, something that is not being stated outright.
Of course, ancient interpretation was never merely a cold, objective search for the truth about the text: the interpreters had a stake in what the text would end up saying. If they had been out to sully Jacob’s name, they might have used the mention of “tents” in the plural to suggest that he was a philanderer, going from tent to tent while the other menfolk were off hunting or shepherding. But of course they were not out to sully Jacob’s name—quite the contrary; so instead, they immediately thought that something good was being hinted at in the plural “tents.” Thus was born the figure of Jacob the scholar, the one who—while his brother was out killing animals for game—frequented someone else’s tent, the home of an unidentified teacher who instructed him in reading and writing:
And Rebekah bore to Isaac two sons, Jacob and Esau, and Jacob was a smooth and upright man, while Esau was fierce, a man of the field, and hairy; and Jacob dwelt in tents. And the youths grew, and Jacob learned to write; but Esau did not learn, for he was a man of the field, and a hunter, and he learned war, and all his deeds were fierce. And Abraham loved Jacob, but Isaac loved Esau.
Jubilees 19:13–15
And the two boys grew up, and Esau was a skilled hunter, a man who went out to the fields, but Jacob was a perfect man who frequented the schoolhouse.
Targum Onqelos, Gen. 25:27
And Jacob was a man perfect in good work, dwelling in schoolhouses.
Targum Neophyti, Gen. 25:27
Esau the Wicked
The alert reader will notice that, in the Jubilees passage cited above, it is not only Jacob who has been transformed, but Esau as well. Here Esau has moved from being an apparently harmless outdoorsman to someone who was “fierce . . . and he learned war, and all his deeds were fierce.” Part of Esau’s reputation for violence among ancient interpreters derives (as usual) from their reading everything available on him in the Bible and not just the passage in question. For example, when the text describes the twins’ birth, it does so in these terms:
When [Rebekah’s] time to give birth was at hand, it turned out that there were twins in her womb. The first came out red, his whole body like a fur coat; they named him Esau. Afterward his brother came out, with his hand grasping Esau’s heel; he was named Jacob.
Apparently, the narrative mentions Esau’s “furriness” in order to prepare us for a later detail in the story: Esau’s hairy arms will ultimately help Jacob deceive his blind father. But in the Jubilees passage cited above, as well as in the writings of later interpreters, Esau’s hairiness becomes symbolic of his animal nature; he is little better than a beast of prey himself.
Particularly significant for ancient interpreters was a certain verse in the book of Malachi, one of Israel’s latest prophets:
“I have loved you,” says the LORD. But you [Israel] say, “How have you loved us?”
“Is not Esau Jacob’s brother?” says the LORD. “Yet I have loved Jacob, but I have hated Esau. I have laid waste his hill country and left his homeland to jackals of the desert.”
If God is said to have “hated” Esau, this was a clear sign that the biblical description of his youth was not telling all. From his earliest youth, interpreters reasoned, Esau’s life must have been a series of bad deeds, such as to bring down on him God’s hatred:
There were born two sons, Jacob and Esau. And God loved Jacob, but He hated Esau because of his deeds.
Pseudo-Philo, Biblical Antiquities 32:5
Or perhaps Esau’s wickedness was determined even before his birth, as part of God’s master plan for Jacob and his descendants:
When Rebekah had conceived children by one man, our ancestor Isaac—even before they had been born or had done anything good or bad (so that God’s purpose of election might continue, not by works but by his call)—she was told, “The elder shall serve the younger.” As it is written, “I have loved Jacob, but I have hated Esau.”
Elsewhere in the Bible, Israel’s ancient prophets seemed actually to have described some of Esau’s bad deeds that were not mentioned in Genesis:
Thus says the LORD: For three transgressions of Edom, nay, for four, I will not revoke the punishment;
He [Esau] chased after his brother with the sword, and he cast aside all pity;
His anger ripped at his prey,3 and his wrath stormed forever.
For the violence done to your brother Jacob, shame shall cover you [Esau], and you shall be cut off forever.4
If so, interpreters reasoned, there could be little doubt that Esau’s relations with his brother had always been characterized by physical violence. He was a wicked man.
One final twist in Esau’s reputation came about starting in the first century or so of the common era. Now Judea was ruled by the Roman Empire. The Romans were the dominant military power of the day: they had conquered peoples from the westernmost corners of Europe to the eastern Mediterranean and beyond, and the nations they had subdued writhed under the Roman boot. Executions (by crucifixion or equally cruel measures) and collective punishment were the rule of the day. Esau already had his reputation among ancient interpreters as a heartless warrior who took pleasure in killing animals and men; he was a hairy, bloodthirsty monster. It was not much of a stretch for interpreters now to identify such an Esau not simply as an evil individual, but one who had a great deal in common with the whole Roman military apparatus.5 In describing Jacob’s struggle with his brother in Genesis, the Bible might thus have been hinting as well about Rome’s violent oppression of the Jews—and holding out the hope that, someday, the younger brother would succeed in overthrowing Rome’s military might.
Jacob’s Back Pages
Even to Jacob’s most determined supporters, however, some of his early deeds must have seemed questionable. Prominent among these was his treatment of Esau with regard to the sale of his birthright.
As we have seen, Esau was the first to emerge from his mother’s womb, and this circumstance automatically granted him the privileged status of firstborn son. To be the firstborn was no trifle: with this title came the birthright of the oldest son—a double portion of the father’s estate (Deut. 21:17). Thus, Esau stood to inherit twice as much property as Jacob after Isaac’s death. For Jacob, apparently, Esau’s rank rankled, and one day he found the opportunity to wrest it from him:
Once, when Jacob was cooking a stew, Esau came in from the field completely famished. Esau said to Jacob, “Give me a mouthful of that red stuff, since I am famished!” (Therefore he was called Edom [that is, “Red”]). Jacob said, “First sell me your birthright.” Esau said, “Look, I am on the verge of death. What good is a birthright to me?” Jacob said, “Swear to me first.” So he swore to him and sold his birthright to Jacob. Then Jacob gave Esau bread and lentil stew, and he ate and drank, and got up and went his way. Thus it was that Esau thought little of his birthright.
The passage did not seem to speak well of Jacob. After all, his brother (who presumably “came in from the field” because he had been hunting food for the whole family, including Jacob) was truly famished. “I am on the verge of death” might sound like an exaggeration on Esau’s part, but perhaps it wasn’t; sometimes tracking game may lead a hunter to stay out overnight and on into the next day, or perhaps even longer. Under these circumstances, Jacob’s demand that the starving Esau sell his birthright seemed to many readers downright mean, an act of exploitation. True, the text ends by saying that Esau “thought little” of his birthright, and some interpreters seized upon this to justify Jacob’s conduct: he knew all along that Esau could not care less about his birthright. Still, under the circumstances described, did Esau have any choice but to sell?
The Stolen Blessing
If interpreters were troubled by this incident, they were still more disturbed by the one that came two chapters later. Isaac, by now blind and infirm, tells Esau to go out and hunt some game for a festive meal, after which, Isaac says, he will give Esau his fatherly blessing. Rebekah overhears the conversation and decides to arrange things so that her favorite son, Jacob, will receive the fatherly blessing instead of Esau. First, she cooks up some goat meat taken from the nearby herds while Esau is still out hunting. Then she dresses Jacob up in his brother’s pungent-smelling clothes and covers his arms and neck with goat skins to mimic his brother’s hairy physique. So equipped, Jacob goes in to his blind father bearing the food:
[Jacob] went in to his father, and said, “My father”; and he said, “Here I am; who are you, my son?” Jacob said to his father, “I am Esau your firstborn. I have done as you told me; now sit up and eat of my game, so that you may bless me.” But Isaac said to his son, “How is it that you have found it [the animal] so quickly, my son?” He answered, “Because the LORD your God made it happen upon my way.” Then Isaac said to Jacob, “Come near, that I may feel you, my son, to know whether you are really my son Esau or not.” So Jacob went up to his father Isaac, who felt him and said, “The voice is Jacob’s voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau.” He did not recognize him, because his hands were hairy like his brother Esau’s hands; so he blessed him. He said, “Are you really my son Esau?” He answered, “I am.” Then he said, “Bring it to me, that I may eat of my son’s game and bless you.” So he brought it to him, and he ate; and he brought him wine, and he drank. Then his father Isaac said to him, “Come near and kiss me, my son.” So he came near and kissed him; and he smelled the smell of his garments, and blessed him.
If Rebekah was responsible for initiating this deception, Jacob himself comes off little better. After all, he tells an outright lie: “I am Esau your firstborn,” he says. Then he tells another one, still more disturbing, explaining that he was able to find the game he was hunting so quickly “because the LORD your God made it happen upon my way.” (This pious-sounding explanation was sure to soften Isaac up!) How pathetic is the picture of this blind old man desperately trying to rely on his other senses to figure out if it is Esau or not—and then being deceived precisely by the manipulation of those senses. Thus, Isaac hears the voice and recognizes it as Jacob’s, but then he is confused by the apparently hairy hands and arms that go with that voice (“The voice is Jacob’s voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau”). Apparently not persuaded by the conflicting data (sense of hearing versus sense of touch), Isaac asks again, “Are you really my son Esau?” Then he smells the characteristic smell of Esau’s clothes, and this (perhaps along with the mind-dulling wine that Jacob has kindly also supplied) is enough to convince him to go ahead with the blessing.
If all this seemed to portray Jacob in a negative light, interpreters nevertheless found that the case against him was not absolutely watertight. The Hebrew Bible, it will be recalled, was transmitted for centuries without capital letters or punctuation. Where a sentence began and ended was thus often a matter of speculation. In this case, an interpreter sympathetic to Jacob might choose to understand Isaac’s opening question, “Who are you, my son?” as if it were really two questions: “Who are you? My son?” Jacob’s apparently lying answer, “I am Esau your firstborn,” could then be analyzed as two quite separate, and truthful, statements. “I am,” he says in answer to Isaac’s second question, but then adds, as if reminding his addled father of another fact: “Esau is your firstborn.” (Note that, in normal present-tense sentences, Hebrew has no equivalent of “is,” so such an understanding is altogether grammatical.) It is hard to know how seriously to take such a reading of the text. Perhaps, as sometimes happened, it was offered a bit whimsically at first—but soon enough it came to be transmitted with a straight face:
He [Jacob] went in to his father and said, “I am your son. I have done as you told me; come and sit down and eat of what I have caught, father, so that you may bless me.” . . . And Jacob went close to his father Isaac, and he [Isaac] felt him and said, “The voice is Jacob’s but the hands are Esau’s,” and he did not recognize him, because there was an order from heaven to turn his mind astray . . . And he said, “Are you my son Esau?” and he said, “I am your son.”
Jubilees 26:13–19
And Jacob said, “I am Esau your firstborn” [Gen. 27:19]. He stopped in the middle, [that is,] he said “I am,” but “Esau is your firstborn.”
Midrash Leqah Tov ad Gen. 27:19
It is to be noted that the Jubilees passage above offers a further explanation for the events, and this explanation constituted a more serious argument: “He did not recognize him, because there was an order from heaven to turn his mind astray.” In other words, if Jacob succeeded in this shabby deception—despite the fact that his father was perfectly well aware that it was Jacob’s voice and not Esau’s—then it must be that God had wanted Jacob to succeed: He purposely led Isaac’s mind astray and caused him to bless the younger son. If so, it followed that the deception itself was simply part of the divine plan: Rebekah, Jacob, and Isaac were all pawns on the divine chessboard, moved about in such a way as to get the desired result, Isaac’s blessing Jacob.
The Etiological Twins
These same stories look quite different to biblicists nowadays. In fact, it was Gunkel’s concept of the etiological tale that provided scholars in the twentieth century with a wholly new way of understanding the rivalry of these two brothers.
To begin with, the fact that Jacob and Esau are said to be the ancestors of two different nations—the peoples of Israel and Edom, respectively—effectively announces the etiological dimension of the stories right off the bat.6 For modern biblicists, a narrative about Jacob and Esau will have been created in order to explain something having to do with Israel and Edom at the time of the story’s composition, a kind of projection of later reality back to the “time of the founders.” Indeed, it will probably do more than that—it will seek to say something about the national character (or national stereotype) of these two people in the way it portrays their eponyms.
In this etiological reading, the fact that Esau and Jacob were brothers, nay, twins, would appear to be an explanation of the close connection between Israel and its southern neighbor. In biblical times, these two peoples probably spoke two very similar dialects (archaeologists have not uncovered a great deal of Edomite writing, but from what has been found it seems clear that Hebrew and Edomite were closely related) and had deep cultural and even kinship ties; the reason, the Genesis narrative suggests, is that both peoples ultimately derive from ancestors who were themselves twins. At the same time, the off-and-on enmity between Israel and Edom that existed in the biblical period is also explained by the Jacob-Esau tales: these later nations did not get along because the original brothers did not get along; in fact, they even hated each other in utero.
As we have seen, Genesis actually relates three distinct stories about the brothers in their youth—the story of their birth (25:19–26), Esau’s sale of his birthright to Jacob (25:29–34), and Jacob’s acquiring a fatherly blessing intended for Esau (chapter 27). Each of these seems to embody a certain theme with regard to Israel and Edom—in fact, that theme is announced almost from the very beginning of the first story, in a verse already examined above:
When [Rebekah’s] time to give birth was at hand, it turned out that there were twins in her womb. The first came out red, his whole body like a fur coat; they named him Esau. Afterward his brother came out, with his hand grasping Esau’s heel; he was named Jacob.
Gen. 25:25–26
To a modern scholar, these verses contain some obviously etiological markers: Esau comes out red as a cue to readers, in case they did not already know, that he is the founder of Edom, a name which sounds like “red” (’adom) in Hebrew.7 His furriness is mentioned not so much to prepare readers for the role that hairy arms will play in the “stolen blessing” story, but as a reference to the name of Edom’s great mountain, Seir, which sounds as if it might mean “hairy” (sa‘ir). “Esau,” both these details seem to cry out, “is the Edomites.” Similarly, on their way out of their mother’s womb, Jacob tries to grab Esau’s heel. This too is etiological: the word for heel, ‘eqeb, sounds as if it might be the root of the Hebrew for Jacob, ya‘aqob. But beyond these points is the striking image of the younger brother trying to overtake his older sibling, as if, even on their way to being born, the younger one was saying, “I deserve to come before you!”
A similar message seems to underlie the story of the sale of Esau’s birthright. Rightfully, the firstborn’s portion belonged to Esau, but he gave it up in exchange for some stew: here again, the younger brother overtakes the older, ending up with what really should not have been his. Strikingly, the same theme is the basis of the third story as well, whereby Jacob masquerades as Esau and gets the blessing that rightly belonged to his older brother. To a modern scholar, the similar theme of all three stories can hardly be coincidental.
What later reality might have caused these three stories to be told? Some biblical scholars spotted a possible analogue in Israelite history. Esau’s descendants, the Edomites, had, according to the Bible’s own history, been a sovereign nation while the future Israel was still a collection of disparate, and sometimes warring, tribes (Gen. 36:31).8 In this sense, Esau was definitely the “older brother.” But then, in the tenth century BCE, David succeeded in unifying those tribes and, in short order, conquering Edom (2 Sam. 8:13–14; cf. 1 Kings 11:15–16 and the heading of Psalm 60; also 1 Chr. 18:12–13): Edom was now under Israel’s thumb. That is the real reason, scholars believe, that the oracle given to Rebekah during her pregnancy had said that “the older will end up serving the younger.” That prophecy (or as a modern scholar would say, that vaticinium ex eventu, a nice Latin phrase meaning a pseudoprophecy that was written after the event it predicts had already taken place) was carried out in the time of David.
If so, then the various stories of Jacob and Esau in their youth were actually created to reflect a political reality that came about only centuries later, in the time of David. In fact, the stories seemed to offer scholars a chronological clue as to the original date of these narratives, since Israel’s rule over Edom was relatively short-lived. By the end of the reign of David’s son Solomon, the Edomites had succeeded in throwing off their Israelite overlords. Thus, it would seem that these three stories about the kid brother overtaking the firstborn must have originated in the flush of Israel’s subduing of Edom under the rule of David, that is, at the start of the tenth century BCE. It was precisely at that time that Israel in general, and the tribe of Judah in particular (since it was the one that bordered directly on the Edomites), might indeed feel like a little kid who had ended up with a prize that was not legitimately his.9
When Edom did subsequently manage to regain its independence, a new wrinkle was added, according to this same line of thought. The last Jacob-overcoming-Esau episode, the stolen blessing story, seems to have undergone a change (or perhaps was created out of whole cloth to reflect Edom’s resurgence after a period of subservience). After all, while Israel still dominated Edom, the story ought to have ended with the words of blessing spoken by Isaac to Jacob:
May God grant you the dew of heaven and the bounty of the earth, with much grain and wine. Let other peoples serve you and nations bow down to you. Be lord over your brothers, and may your mother’s sons bow down to you. Cursed be everyone who curses you, and blessed be everyone who blesses you.
The indicated phrase appears to have been aimed specifically at the Edomites, descendants of Jacob’s brother (here they are presented in the plural as Israel’s “brothers” and “mother’s sons”). This note of triumph would well fit Israel’s ascendancy over its neighbor.
But, as scholars note, this is not where our present story ends. Instead, Esau shows up at his father’s side after it is too late. “Haven’t you saved some little blessing for me?” he plaintively asks Isaac (Gen. 27:36). The father does the best he can, concluding:
By your sword you will live, and you will indeed serve your brother; but then it will happen that you will break loose and throw his yoke from off your neck.
It seems hardly conceivable to scholars that these lines could have been written during the time when Israel still dominated Edom. The original stories may indeed belong to the early tenth century, scholars say, but the stolen blessing narrative appears to have been reformulated (or perhaps created out of whole cloth) in the light of a new reality that developed half a century later: eventually, it says, Edom will indeed “break loose” and regain its independence.
Schematic Narratives
For modern scholars, Gunkel’s notion of the etiological narrative thus appears to account for these Jacob-Esau narratives, as indeed for a great many stories in Genesis. These include not only the ones highlighted thus far—Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, the Tower of Babel, Lot and the wicked Sodomites, the near-sacrifice of Isaac, Jacob and Esau, and so forth—but some that we have omitted or passed over lightly. For example, Abraham’s second covenant with God (Genesis 17) explains a present-day reality (Israel’s practice of infant circumcision) by narrating an event from the distant past.
At the same time, most scholars would agree that it is wrong to think of these stories as merely etiological. The Tower of Babel narrative, for example, appears to be as much an attempt to discredit the Babylonians as it is a way of explaining the name Babel or the dispersion of Semitic languages. As for the story of Abraham’s covenant in Genesis 17, it is not merely an attempt to explain current reality—the practice of infant circumcision—but a legitimation of it: God ordered Abraham and his descendants to be circumcised as a sign of the eternal connection between him and Abraham’s progeny, and so this is a wonderful thing and we must continue it forever.
Scholars thus find relatively few purely etiological narratives in Genesis. Nor, they add, should the etiological elements in these stories blind us to another of their salient characteristics. One of the most striking things researchers have noted about the stories we have been reading in Genesis is their spare, bare-bones quality. Indeed, one would not be wrong to highlight this quality in referring to them collectively as the Bible’s schematic narratives.
A schematic narrative has a point to make, and the entire text is designed to make it. That is, every detail in this sort of spare little story is aimed at showing that this is what the Kenites are like, and how they got that way; or that God is not impressed by the sophistication of Babylonian civilization; or that there is a reason why child sacrifice is not practiced in Israel. In such narratives, according to this approach, the various people who are portrayed are often less than “characters,” at least in the sense in which this term is used by literary critics. They have none of the complexity of a character in Shakespeare or Flaubert. In fact, very little is ever said about their thoughts or feelings; usually, they have no inner life at all. What was Abraham thinking on his way to sacrifice his son? How did Cain feel after he had murdered his own brother? Such questions, for a schematic narrative, are simply irrelevant. What matters is what the people did and the results of their actions, or the conclusions to which their actions led.
In a sense, according to this view, some of the Bible’s schematic narratives might be compared to jokes or fairy tales in our own culture. No one cares what sort of people the three sailors in the bar were, or what Goldilocks had done before that fateful day; the priest, the minister, and the rabbi, if they have any traits of character at all, will turn out to be altogether stereotypical—which is just how we like it! The point is that not every narrative, just because it tells a story, is ipso facto literature, nor is every person in a tale necessarily a “character”; some may actually be more like stereotypes, or mere ciphers.10
At the same time, the schematic quality of these narratives can be misleading. Since they are pared down to relatively few sentences, every detail in them—even something that looks like an aside or a random observation—is likely to be significant. This is true not only of the events that are related, but of how the people themselves are presented. Precisely because Mr. X or Mrs. Y is the ancestor of an entire people and is thus expected to correspond perfectly to his descendants’ stereotype, listeners or readers were expected to pick up on every slight detail in the narrative, every little wink of the text, and say: “Oh I see! Their ancestor was just as much of a skinflint [or numbskull, or whatever] as they themselves are.” In schematic narratives, a little characterization goes a long way.
So it is, according to this approach, with the Jacob and Esau stories. The two brothers are not really “characters,” at least not in the same way as the characters of later European or American literature. But there is no mistaking the somewhat obvious message that each brother seemed designed to embody; again, this is set forth at the very beginning of the Jacob-Esau narratives:
The two boys grew up, and Esau became a man skilled at hunting, an outdoorsman, while Jacob was a quiet fellow, staying in tents. Isaac loved Esau, because he liked eating game, but Rebekah loved Jacob.
Gen. 25:27
Throughout these narratives, Esau is a happy-go-lucky, not-too-intelligent sportsman—the proverbial “dumb jock.” Jacob is just the opposite, a momma’s boy who stays at home but who ends up outsmarting his more powerful sibling. A modern scholar would say that this is a reflection not merely of the political reality described above, but of a certain projection of national stereotypes (or would-be stereotypes) back to the time of the founders. Israel’s Edomite neighbors are not dismissed—as the Ammonites and Moabites were—as a “bunch of bastards.” But neither is the portrait of Esau altogether flattering: he is just not very smart, and certainly no match for his cleverer, sometimes scheming, younger brother, Jacob.11
We began this chapter by observing that the most significant contribution of the ancient interpreters consisted not of their specific interpretive creations (“Original Sin,” “Abraham the monotheist,” and so forth) but of their very approach to these texts—reading them as stories about individual people, and stories with a lesson to impart. We are now in a position to understand better at least one of the factors that helped to create this approach. The etiological side of these tales was not likely to interest ancient interpreters (if they spotted it at all). Their own historical circumstances were so distant from those of the stories’ original audience that almost anything having to do with Israel’s day-to-day reality in early biblical times—cruel Kenites and child sacrifice and Israel’s first victory over Edom—would seem quite irrelevant to them. On the other hand, they deeply believed in the Bible’s relevance. What was important was what it had to say to them, particularly any eternal teaching about proper behavior or God’s ways with mankind or the special destiny of Israel. As a result, the etiological side of figures like Cain or Abraham or Jacob simply faded out; after a while, they were no longer thought of as representatives of later peoples. Instead, they were individuals in their own right, whose virtues and foibles, ancient interpreters believed, had been depicted in order to provide us later human beings with a lesson in how to behave.
A Ladder with Angels
Fleeing his brother’s anger, Jacob sets out for his uncle Laban’s house, but on the way he has his famous dream of a ladder reaching up to heaven (Gen. 28:10–22).12 This episode was certainly an important turning point in Jacob’s life: it marked the first time that God spoke to him directly and thus, in a sense, signaled the start of his career as a chosen servant of God. The actual words that were spoken seem no less meaningful. God tells the immediate ancestor of Israel, “I will be with you and will keep you wherever you go,” and Jacob reciprocates by expressing his fealty and devotion: “You will be my God.” Beyond all this was the vision itself—the eerie nighttime appearance of a great ladder with angels ascending and descending upon it has struck readers in every age as saying something profound about a reality beyond our everyday ken. Surely what Jacob saw was an image of the connection between heaven and earth, between the world that we know and all that is normally unseen but present nonetheless. Here is the passage in its entirety:
Jacob left Beer-sheba and went on toward Haran. He chanced upon a certain place and spent the night there, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in the place. And he dreamed that there was a ladder stuck into the earth, whose top reached to heaven, and the angels of God were going up and down on it. The LORD stood over him and said, “I am the LORD, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you are lying I will give to you and to your offspring; and your offspring will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east and the north and the south; and all the families of the earth will be blessed in you and in your offspring. Know that I will be with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, “Surely the LORD is in this place—and I did not know it!” And he was afraid, and said, “How fearsome is this place! This is the very house of God and this is the gate of heaven.” So Jacob rose early in the morning, and he took the stone that he had put under his head and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it. He called that place Bethel [that is, House of God], but the name of the city had earlier been Luz. Then Jacob made a vow, saying, “If God is with me, and preserves me on this journey I am on, and gives me bread to eat and clothing to wear, so that I return safely to my father’s house, then the LORD will be my God, and this stone, which I have set up as a pillar, will become [part of] God’s temple; and of everything that You give me I will give back one-tenth to You.”
Gen. 28:10–22
It is no wonder that this passage was lovingly explicated (in various ways) by ancient Jewish interpreters. To some, the ladder and angels embodied a message about the future of the Jewish people, specifically, their survival despite the domination of their homeland by foreign empires; to others, the ascending and descending angels were a mark of the special esteem in which Jacob was held on high; indeed, according to one ancient interpretive tradition, this passage hinted that Jacob’s portrait was etched on God’s heavenly throne.13 This same passage was also alluded to, in passing, in the New Testament:
Jesus answered, “Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these.” And he said to him, “Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”
To modern scholars, however, the passage in Genesis has, once again, a distinctly etiological ring. One of its apparent purposes is to explain how Bethel got its name: when he awakes, Jacob says, “How fearsome is this place! This is the very house of God.” (The Hebrew phrase “house of God”—beth ’elohim—does indeed sound a bit like beth ’el, that is, Bethel.) The passage also explains how Bethel, which apparently had a long career as a sacred site (Gen. 35:7–8; Judg. 4:5; 1 Sam. 7:16, etc.) and ended up being chosen for one of two royal temples in the time of Jeroboam (1 Kings 12:29–33), first came to be considered holy.14 It all goes back, the story seems to say, to our illustrious ancestor Jacob and the dream he had there.
But once again, this story of origins was found by modern scholars to have a less obvious side to it. Especially after archaeologists unearthed the epic Canaanite literature of Ugarit (in northern coastal Syria), starting in 1929, it became increasingly clear to biblicists that some uses of ’el in the Bible are actually not intended in the generic sense of “deity” or of “[Israel’s] God” (one meaning of ’el), but rather are references to the proper name of the head of the Canaanite pantheon, ’El. (See below, chapter 24, for a fuller account.) This discovery in turn seemed to suggest something about the real origin of the ancient site of Bethel and its sacredness: perhaps, long before its association with the God of Israel, Bethel had been a sacred place for the Canaanites,15 a shrine to their god El. That, they said, is why it is called Bethel—house (beth) of El.16
Another interesting fact: the kind of stone pillar that Jacob sets up in the Genesis story, a ma
ebah, is mentioned in the laws of the Torah, but always in a negative way:
You shall not make for yourselves any idols nor set up any statue or pillar (maebah); nor shall you place a carved stone in your land to bow down to it; for I am the LORD your God.
You shall not plant for yourself any tree or sacred pole beside the altar that you make for the LORD your God, nor shall you set up any stone pillar (maebah) for yourself, since this is abhorrent to the LORD your God.
The reason for this prohibition is that setting up a maebah was apparently deemed to be a form of worship associated with the Canaanites. Indeed, according to the Bible one of the first things the Israelites were instructed to do when they entered the land was to tear down all the Canaanite sanctuaries and objects of worship—including their maebot:
[God said to the Israelites:] Carry out what I am commanding you today. For I am casting out the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites [to make room] for you. Be sure not to make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land to which you are going, lest it become a snare in your midst. [Instead,] you must tear down their altars, break their pillars (maebot), and cut down their sacred poles. You must not worship any other god, because the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is indeed a jealous God.
For modern scholars, the implications of all this are clear. Here is a story in Genesis that apparently goes to great lengths to deny the obvious—the connection of Bethel with “Canaanite” practices. Instead, it stresses that Jacob just happened to end up there one night; he “chanced upon a certain place” and had to sleep there because the sun was setting and it was getting dark. In other words, there was nothing special about this place until then, and it certainly was no well-known holy site; our ancestor just chanced to spend the night there and dreamt his dream. It was the dream itself, this story seeks to claim, that converted the place from ordinary to sacred. The next morning it was Jacob who set up the maebah, and no pagan Canaanites—and if that stone pillar is still there today, the story says, that is only because it is a relic, the stone on which our honored ancestor had once rested his head. It is certainly not an object of pagan worship! Finally, if the place is called Bethel, this does not mean that it was ever a shrine to El; on the contrary, before that fateful night, the name of the place was Luz (Gen. 28:19).17 Rather, the name Bethel goes back to Jacob’s exclamation upon awakening (even though he does not quite use the Hebrew word ’el but the related term more commonly used of Israel’s God): “How fearsome is this place! This is the very house of God [beth ’elohim].”