I had no intention of translating Genesis until, on the day before the Fourth of July, 1994, Bill Moyers called and invited me to participate in his PBS series. I told him I would think about it and get back to him in three days.
Actually, it wasn’t thinking that I did during those three days. It was a kind of alert waiting.
Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself?
I knew that much of Genesis spoke to me without intimacy, in the tones of a stranger; much of it didn’t speak to me at all. If the fellow inside who makes my decisions required a wholehearted love for the book as a prerequisite, I would have to say no.
I soon realized that this was a matter of affinity. If I could find even one passage in Genesis where I had the kind of umbilical connection that I felt with the Job poet, or with Rilke or Lao-tzu, that might be enough. During the first hour of musing on the question, I found five. There was the verse at the end of chapter I when God calls the world “very good”: a verse that had lit up for me in the mid-seventies, after several years of intensive meditation, as the perfect metaphor for the spaciousness of a mind in which repose and insight are synonymous. Then, Abram’s response to the call in chapter 12, a paradigm for every spiritual departure. There was the story of Jacob and Rachel, especially 29:20 (“And Jacob served seven years for Rachel; and they seemed to him just a few days, so great was his love for her”), a verse that described a crucial aspect of my own inner practice and was — is — for me the most moving verse in the entire Bible. “Jacob and the (So-Called) Angela an enormously important story while I was training with my old Zen master, showed me that not only wrestling with but defeating God is a necessary rite of passage to spiritual freedom. And finally the great “Joseph and His Brothers,” a story of descent, transformation, and mastery, with an insight-filled, all-embracing forgiveness at its core. In addition, I had long been fascinated with Adam, Eve, and the serpent, and with “The Binding of Isaac”: profound, brilliant stories that rise from the depths of the unconscious mind, uncensored, unfiltered, dark, rich, unassimilable, compelling, and dangerous if taken at surface value — the first one, as interpreted by the Church, a catastrophe in the history of our culture; both of them crying out for midrash, creative transformation, to make them true.
So the deep connections were there, and I knew that I could accept the invitation with a sense of integrity. But the process felt incomplete, as if one more step was necessary. That step appeared at the end of the second day. If I agreed to talk about Genesis, I would first have to translate it: to confront it in its entirety, immersemyself in it, live with it in the kind of intimacy that the process of translation requires. Once I had done that, I would know it through and through, the way Adam knew Eve. Even if there were things about it that I disliked, it would have become part of me, and I could dislike these things from the inside.
I had no illusions about the actual work of translation. Some of it would be interesting. Some of it would be exquisitely dull — the genealogies written by P, the Priestly Writer (that adding machine among poets); the absurd patchwork of “Abram and the Kings,” which I would have to translate into an equally clumsy English; the late, shoddy accounts of Joseph in power that are stapled onto what Tolstoy called the most beautiful story in the world. None of the work would have the fascination of what’s difficult, the passionate challenge of translating great poetry. But I was sure that I would learn a lot.
The mud had settled, considerately on schedule. I called Bill Moyers and said yes.
The great Russian poet Boris Pasternak identified the central issue in the art of translation when he said, “The average translator gets the literal meaning right but misses the tone; and tone is everything.” This is just as true of prose as of poetry. Tone is the life-rhythm of a mind. Reading a translation that renders a great writer’s words without re-creating their tone is like listening to a computer play Mozart.
My method in establishing the tone of this Genesis was to listento the Hebrew with one ear and with the other ear to hear into existence an equivalent English. In the process I had to filter out the sound of the King James Version, insofar as that is possible. English-speaking readers usually think of biblical language as Elizabethan: magniloquent, orotund, liturgical, archaic, full of thees and thous and untos and thereofs and prays. But ancient Hebrew, especially ancient Hebrew prose, is in many ways the opposite of that. Its dignity comes from its supreme simplicity. It is a language of concision and powerful earthiness, austere in its vocabulary, straightforward in its syntax, spare with its adjectives and adverbs — a language that pulses with the energy of elemental human truths.
My job was to re-create this massive dignity and simplicity in an English that felt like it was mine. Dignity is not, I think, a quality you can aim at; it is a function of a writer’s sincerity, and it arises on its own in a translation if you have listened deeply enough to the original text and have at the same time been faithful to the genius of the English language. Simplicity is a bit easier to talk about. It doesn’t only mean using as few words as possible. It is also a matter of finding a language that sounds completely natural, unliterary, in some sense unwritten: the words of a voice telling ancient stories without adornment and without self-consciousness. This biblical style is a creation of the highest literary intuition and tact. No other Western classic has anything like it. It is worlds away from the exquisitely precise, elaborated, gorgeous language of the Homeric poems, the other great texts at the source of Western culture.
The translation of prose, almost as much as of poetry, requires an ear finely attuned to the sound of words. It is fatal when a contemporary Genesis confuses the natural with the vulgar or imitates the cadences of the King James Version. Stiff formality is one extreme, vulgar breeziness the other; in Dryden’s terms, you must be neither on stilts nor too low. But finding the right tone is not a question of testing the levels of diction the way Goldilocks tested the mattresses, of finding the midpoint between high and low. You can’t measure tone with a ruler or a compass. You have to find the sound of the genuine.
It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time.
Over the next few months, as I worked on Genesis and began to talk about it, people kept asking, “How is your translation different from other translations?” (I felt I was always responding to the question of the youngest son on the first night of Passover.) I tried to explain by quoting Pasternak on tone. If someone persisted and showed real interest, I would sit him down with three other versions of some central passages and let him compare for himself. This is the most direct way.
In the following excerpts the first entry is from the Revised English Bible, the best of the committee versions; the second is from E. A. Speiser’s Anchor Bible Genesis; the third is by Everett Fox; the fourth is mine.
The first passage is the beginning of the dialogue between Eve and the serpent. Here everything depends on the genuineness of the spoken word. The serpent must sound colloquial, offhand, devious almost in passing. He is not asking Eve a question; he is, delicately, insidiously, arousing her curiosity; his first speech is nothing but a raised eyebrow. Eve, on the other hand, has to speak with the syntax and the innocence of a child.
The serpent, which was the most cunning of all the creatures the LORD God had made, asked the woman, “Is it true that God has forbidden you to eat from any tree in the garden?” She replied, “We may eat the fruit of any tree in the garden, except for the tree in the middle of the garden. God has forbidden us to eat the fruit of that tree or even to touch it; if we do, we shall die.” Of course you will not die,” said the serpent; “for God knows that, as soon as you eat it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God himself, knowing both good and evil.” The woman looked at the tree: the fruit would be good to eat; and it was pleasing to the eye and desirable for the knowledge it could give. So she took some and ate it; she also gave some to her husband, and he ate it.
REVISED ENGLISH BIBLE [3:1-6]
Now the serpent was the sliest of all the wild creatures that God Yahweh had made. Said he to the woman, “Even though God told you not to eat of any tree in the garden …” The woman interrupted the serpent, “But we may eat of the trees in the garden! It is only about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden that God did say, ‘Do not eat of it or so much as touch it, lest you die!’” But the serpent said to the woman, “You are not going to die. No, God well knows that the moment you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be the same as God in telling good from bad.”
When the woman saw that the tree was good for eating and a delight to the eye, and that the tree was attractive as a means to wisdom, she took of its fruit and ate; and she gave some to her husband and he ate.
E. A. SPEISER,GENESIS
Now the snake was more shrewd than all the living-things of the field that YHWH, God, had made. / It said to the woman: / Even though God said: You are not to eat from any of the trees in the garden … ! / The woman said to the snake: / From the fruit of the (other) trees in the garden we may eat, / but from the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, / God has said: You are not to eat from it and you are not to touch it, / lest you die. / The snake said to the woman: / Die, you will not die! / Rather, God knows / that on the day that you eat from it, your eyes will be opened / and you will become like gods, knowing good and evil. / The woman saw / that the tree was good for eating / and that it was a delight to the eyes, / and the tree was desirable to contemplate. / She took from its fruit and ate / and gave also to her husband beside her, / and he ate.
EVERETT FOX, The Five Books of Moses (the diagonal lines used here do not appear in the Fox version; they indicate where new lines in that version begin, as if the passage were verse)
Now the serpent was more cunning than any creature the Lord had made. And he said to the woman, “Did God really say that you’re not allowed to eat from any tree in the garden?”
And the woman said, “We are allowed to eat from any tree in the garden. It’s just the tree in the middle of the garden that we must not eat from, because God said, ‘If you eat from it, or even touch it, you die. ”
And the serpent said, “You will not die. God knows that as soon as you eat from it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil.”
And when the woman saw that the tree was good to eat from and beautiful to look at, she took one of its fruits and ate, and gave it to her husband, and he ate too.
STEPHEN MITCHELL
My second example is from “The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.” This story is horrifying in several ways, not the least of which is the author’s unconsciousness of the casual brutality of Lot’s offer; Lot is, after all, considered a righteous man and a paradigm of hospitality, and the prose barely shudders when he volunteers his virgin daughters to be raped by the mob. Here again, for the dialogue to work, the English has to be natural and passionate: Lot must make his offer, in the panic of the moment, with the simplest of words; the mob must sound like a mob, shouting real threats, not phrases that would never be heard except in the soundproof chambers of a translator’s mind.
But before they had lain down to sleep, the men of Sodom, both old and young, everyone without exception, surrounded the house. They called to Lot: “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, so that we may have intercourse with them.” Lot went out into the doorway to them, and, closing the door behind him, said, “No, my friends, do not do anything so wicked. Look, I have two daughters, virgins both of them; let me bring them out to you, and you can do what you like with them. But do nothing to these men, because they have come under the shelter of my roof.” They said, “Out of our way! This fellow has come and settled here as an alien, and does he now take it upon himself to judge us? We will treat you worse than them.” They crowded in on Lot, and pressed close to break down the door. But the two men inside reached out, pulled Lot into the house, and shut the door. Then they struck those in the doorway, both young and old, with blindness so that they could not find the entrance.
R. E. B. [19:4-11]
Before they could lie down, the townspeople, the men of Sodom, young and old —all the people to the last man — closed in on the house. They called out to Lot and said to him, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us that we may get familiar with them.” Lot met them outside at the entrance, having shut the door behind him. He said, “I beg you, my friends, don’t be wicked. Look, I have two daughters who never consorted with a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you may do to them as you please. But don’t do anything to these men, inasmuch as they have come under the shelter of my roof.” They answered, “Stand back! The fellow,” they said, “came here on sufferance, and now he would act the master! Now we’ll be meaner to you than to them!” With that, they pressed hard against the person of Lot and moved forward to break down the door. But the men put out their hands and pulled Lot inside, shutting the door. And the people who were at the entrance of the house, one and all, they struck with blinding light, so that they were unable to reach the entrance.
SPEISER
They had not yet lain down, when the men of the city, the men of Sedom, encircled the house, / from young lad to old man, all the people (even) from the outskirts. / They called out to Lot and said to him: / Where are the men who came to you tonight? / Bring them out to us, we want to know them! / Lot went out to them, to the entrance, shutting the door behind him / and said: Pray, brothers, do not be so wicked! / Now pray, I have two daughters who have never known a man, / pray let me bring them out to you, and you may deal with them however seems good in your eyes; / only to these men do nothing, / for they have, after all, come under the shadow of my roof-beam! / But they said: / Step aside! / and said: / This one came here to sojourn, and here he would act-the-judge and adjudicate?! / Now we will treat you more wickedly than them! / And they pressed exceedingly hard against the man, against Lot, and stepped closer to break down the door. / But the men put out their hand and brought Lot in to them, into the house, and shut the door. / And the men who were at the entrance to the house, they struck with dazzling-light, (all men) great and small, / so that they were unable to find the entrance.
FOX
Before they had gone to bed, the men of Sodom surrounded the house, young and old, down to the last man. And they called out to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out here, so we can sleep with them.”
And Lot went out into the entrance and shut the door behind him. And he said, “Friends, I beg you, don’t do this wicked thing. Look, I have two daughters who have never slept with a man. Let me bring them out, and you can do whatever you want to them. But don’t do anything to these men, because they have come under the shelter of my roof.”
And someone said, “Out of our way!” And someone said, “This fellow just got here, and now he is telling us what to do! Watch out, or you’ll get it even worse than them!” And they pressed hard against Lot and moved in closer, to break down the door. But the beings reached out and pulled Lot inside and shut the door. And they struck the men at the entrance with a dazzling light, so that no one could find the door.
MITCHELL
The last passage I will quote for comparison is the climactic scene in the Joseph story, one of the most moving passages in the entire Bible. Joseph’s reaction is conveyed in the Hebrew withimmense power, yet with the greatest delicacy imaginable. An error in tone here, a weak noun, an unconscious rhyme, falsifies the deep emotion and brings the scene perilously close to melodrama or farce.
When Joseph looked around, he saw his own mother’s son, his brother Benjamin, and asked, “Is this your youngest brother, of whom you told me?” and to Benjamin he said, “May God be gracious to you, my son.” Joseph, suddenly overcome by his feelings for his brother, was almost in tears, and he went into the inner room and wept. Then, having bathed his face, he came out and, with his feelings now under control, he ordered the meal to be served.
R. E. B. [43:29-31]
As his eye fell on Benjamin, his mother’s son, he asked, “Is this the youngest brother of whom you spoke to me?” And he added, “God be gracious to you, my boy.” With that, Joseph hurried out, for he was overcome with feeling for his brother, and wanted to cry. He went into a room and wept there. Then he washed his face and reappeared and — now in control of himself again — gave the order, “Serve the meal!”
SPEISER
He lifted up his eyes and saw Binyamin his brother, his mother’s son, / and he said: / Is this your youngest brother, of whom you spoke to me? / And he said: / May God show you favor, my son! / And in haste — for his feelings were so kindled toward his brother that he had to weep—/ Yosef entered a chamber and wept there. / Then he washed his face and came out, he restrained himself, and said: / Serve bread!
FOX
And Joseph looked at his brother Benjamin, his own mothers son, and said, “This must be your youngest brother, whom you said you would bring to me.” And he said, “May God be gracious to you, my son.” And he hurried out: his heart was overwhelmed with love for his brother, and he could no longer hold back his tears. And he went to his room and wept.
Then he washed his face, and composed himself, and came out and said, “Serve the meal.”
MITCHELL
Gradually, as I settled into the scholarly research essential for translating a biblical text, I realized that there was an item on my agenda that I had barely been conscious of when I began the project. This item became clear for me one day when my friend Diana said, “You’re writing a new translation of Genesis? Well, do everyone a favor and for God’s sake change that awful story about Eve being to blame for all our misery.” “I wish I could,” I said. And suddenly I felt how much I really did wish I could.
But translating a biblical text is a very different venture from creating an adaptation of it, as I had done in A Book of Psalms. An adaptation of the Genesis stories, while it might be a worthy venture, was not this venture. My job was to translate Genesis, using all the considerable help that Hebrew philology and contemporary textual scholarship could provide. But in the back of my mind, as I realized when Diana made her request, I was hoping for discoveries. Especially about Eve. Perhaps in the standard Hebrew text there was a passage that scholars had identified as a much later addition, and once it was removed, the whole story would be radically transformed. Or a Hebrew word that had been misunderstood for two thousand years, and once the correct understanding was reached, Eve, the mother of us all, would be revealed, naked, innocent, chewing with delight on the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, her eyes opened to a live and sinuous wisdom, with no culpa (felix or otherwise) projected onto her.
That kind of discovery had happened a number of times as I worked on the Book of Job — most dramatically in Job’s last words, which are the last words of the great poem that forms the central panel of the book. The King James, followed by all the other versions, translates verse 42:6 as “Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” I had a powerful intuitive sense that this could not be right, that Job’s vision was worth nothing if it had not illuminated his heart, and that a supremely great poet like the author of Job would never have had his hero end up in a puddle of self-abasement. And this intuition was confirmed when I discovered that three Hebrew words had been consistently misunderstood, and that the verse actually meant “Therefore I will be quiet, / comforted that I am dust.” Thus, as I had felt sure, Job’s final speech issues not from mere capitulation to superior force but from wholehearted spiritual surrender, and is an appropriate conclusion to the Voice from the Whirlwind’s fierce, compassionate, dazzling nonanswer.
I made no discoveries of this importance in the Eve story, alas. But I did find, throughout Genesis, a considerable number of words that had been elucidated in the pages of scholarly books and journals, words that most translators had not understood with enoughprecision. These clarifications change the texture of some of the most important stories.
Three examples. In chapter 16, Hagar runs away into the wilderness.
And Sarai treated her harshly, and she ran away. And the Lord found her near a spring
in the wilderness, the spring on the way to Shur. [16:6-7]
In all translations it is “the angel of the Lord” who finds Hagar; and, in fact, the word mal’akh always does mean “angel” in later Hebrew. But in early Hebrew, when the word was more fluid, it means something like “manifestation,” which can take the form either of a being who is separate from the Lord or of the Lord himself. We know that the character here is not an angel because of verse 13, in which Hagar acknowledges that she spoke with and saw the Lord himself. And there are a number of other texts in Genesis and Exodus where the word has the same meaning; sometimes the mal’akh even says “I am the God of Beth-El” or “I will make him into a great nation.” So the precisely accurate translation here is “And the Presence of the Lord found her” or “And the Lord-as-manifested (on earth) found her” or, more simply, “And the Lord found her.” The whole story seems more intimate, more poignant, when it is the Lord himself rather than his messenger who comes down into the wilderness to help the abused slave-girl. This is true also in “The Binding of Isaac,” where, in spite of Rembrandt, in spite of a thousand Renaissance paintings, it is God himself who at the last moment calls to Abraham to prevent him from slaughtering his son.
This clarification is related to another philological nicety in “Abraham and the Three Visitors” and “Jacob and the ‘Angel.’” The Hebrew word ‘ish usually means “man.” But in the context of chapters 18 and 19 it means “(superhuman) being,” and it is important to translate it that way.
And the Lord appeared to Abraham by the great oaks of Mamre as he sat before his tent in the heat of the day. And he looked up and saw three beings standing near him. [18:1-2]
Though their appetites are capable of doing justice to Abrahams huge feast — an entire roast calf, yogurt, milk, and several hundred pita breads — these three beings are not human; one of them is actually the Lord himself. In the same way, it is God whom Jacob defeats in the famous wrestling match.
And Jacob was left alone; and a being [‘ish] wrestled with him until dawn. [32:25]
We learn that the being is neither a human nor an angel when he tells Jacob, “Your name will … be … Israel [He Who Has Struggled with God] because you have struggled with God and you have won.” (In this verse, after “struggled with God,” a scandalized editor added the phrase “and with men” to weaken the assertion of a victory over God.) Realizing who his opponent is, Jacob names the place Penuel [The Face of God]: “because I have seen God face to face, yet my life has been spared.”
A more subtle clarification occurs at the end of “The Betrothal of Rebecca,” when, arriving in the Negev after her journey from Mesopotamia, Rebecca sees Isaac for the first time.
And Rebecca looked up, and when she saw Isaac, she leaned down from her camel and asked the slave, “Who is that man walking toward us?” [24:64-65]
In understanding this verse I have used the erratic but sometimes brilliant philological intuition of the early-twentieth-century German-Jewish scholar Arnold B. Ehrlich, whose Randglossen zur Hebräischen Bibel is both a treasure trove and a junk heap. Ehrlich wrote:
The verb va-tipol does not mean “she dismounted,” as people usually translate it, following the Septuagint (the primary ancient Greek version of the Bible — s. M.). This translation is mistaken, because no woman can dismount from a camel (unassisted, because of its height and her clothing—s. M.), especially when the animal is moving, as it is here. Onkelos (another ancient translator, into Aramaic — s. M.) gave the correct translation: “she leaned down.” … Isaac had already come fairly near, and so that he might not hear what she said, Rebecca leaned from her high seat on the camel down to the slave who was walking beside it, in order to whisper the question to him.
It is a lovely refinement in the story if—rather than see Rebecca jump or slide down from the camel, an action that, even granted its possibility, would surely have been considered crude and improper — we see her leaning down over the camel’s neck to whisper her passionately interested question to the slave.
The third example is a crucial verse in “Cain and Abel.”
And the Lord accepted Abel and his offering; but Cain and his offering he didn’t accept. And Cain was very troubled, and his face fell. [4:5]
Most translations say that Cain was “very angry.” But the Hebrew phrase here, harah l-, indicates mental anguish, not anger, which is expressed by the similar phrase harah ‘of. Cain is not angry: his facehas fallen, he is troubled and depressed, as well he might be. This makes him a slightly more sympathetic character.
There are many such philological subtleties in Genesis, and they are important to recognize in the spare vocabulary of ancient Hebrew, where the same word can have dozens of different nuances. A clearer understanding of even one word can change the whole texture of a story.
When people asked how this translation is different from the others, there was one other matter that I would sometimes explain to them. This explanation involves a lesson in textual scholarship. I will make it brief.
The stories in Genesis were composed, some of them from ancient folk material, by a number of different writers, as biblical scholars have established beyond a doubt. There are at least four writers, and probably half a dozen more: J, the author of many of the most famous stories in Genesis (J for Yahwist, or Jahwist in its German spelling, so called because he almost always uses the name YHVH, “the Lord,” for God); E, whose greatest story is “The Binding of Isaac” (E for Elohist, because he uses the name Elohim, “God” in a curious, seemingly plural form, for God); P the Priestly Writer; the author of “Joseph and His Brothers”; and a number of other writers whom I call “early sources” and “late sources.” In addition, there was an editor, known as R (for Redactor), who collected all these texts and tried to reconcile them and make one continuous narrative out of the disparate sources. The (very approximate)dates of these writers are: J, 950-800 B.C.E.; E, 850-750; P, 700-500; the Joseph author, 1000-900; early sources, 950-750; late sources, after 587; and R, 450-400.
If there is any author of Genesis as a whole, it is R. He was in certain ways a very skillful editor, and I will discuss the shape of his book in the last section of this essay. But Genesis as it is presented to us in R’s recension — as we read it in the Hebrew text and in all the translations, except for a few scholarly ones — is a disservice to the original authors. That is why in this book I have separated the text into its sources, printing each story as a distinct work by a particular writer. (For many of these attributions, there is general scholarly consensus. Much of the time I have agreed with the contemporary German scholar Claus Westermann, whose three-volume commentary on Genesis is one of the great works of Hebrew textual scholarship.)
A peculiarity of the text that the present format makes much more obvious is what scholars call doublets: two (sometimes three) versions of the same story, by different authors. There are many doublets in Genesis: “The Creation” according to P and according to J; “The Flood” according to J and according to P; “Wife and Sister” (three versions: J, E, and a late source); “The Promise to Abram” (J and one or possibly two late sources) and “The Covenant with Abraham” (P); “Hagar and Ishmael” according to J and according to E; “Beer-sheba” (three versions: E, J, and a late source); “Why Jacob Was Sent to Laban” according to J (“Esau Cheated of the Blessing”) and according to P; “Jacob at Beth-El” according to J and according to E; and “Jacob Becomes Israel” according to J (“Jacob Wrestles with God”) and according to P.
In one instance, “The Floods R took the two versions and combined them into a single text (see Appendix 2). This accounts for the various discrepancies in the composite story as it is usually translated. In J’s story, the Lord commands Noah to bring seven pairs of all the ritually clean animals and one pair of all the unclean animals into the ark, so that afterward Noah can perform an animal sacrifice without causing the extinction of a species; in P’s story, God commands Noah to bring just one pair of each into the ark. In J’s story, it is rain that causes the flood; in P’s, the floodwaters issue from both the upper reservoir (“the floodgates of heaven”) and the subterranean source (“the wells of the great deep”). In J’s story, the flood lasts for forty days; in P’s, for a hundred and fifty. When the two strands are unwoven, each version becomes clear and self-consistent. We can also see more easily the distinctive elements in each: in J’s story, the regretful Lord, sorry that he ever created humans, like a righteous but not wise man who feels heartsick at the corruption and suffering on the front page of his morning newspaper and can barely repress a wish to blow up the whole world and be done with it, the ridiculous yet touching detail of having the Lord shut the door of the ark behind Noah after he has entered with all the animals, the three flights of the dove (the raven is a variant that I have relegated to the Textual Notes), and the lovely last sentence—“For as long as the earth endures, these will not end: seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night.” While in P’s story we find the detailed instructions for building the ark, the various stages of the rising and subsiding of the waters, the landing on Ararat, and the promise of the rainbow.
Sometimes one story in the doublet is a very inferior version.
This is true, for example, of two of the P stories, “Why Jacob Was Sent to Laban” and “Jacob Becomes Israel.” The J versions are among the greatest stories in the Bible, in all literature; but they made an orthodox mind like P’s extremely uncomfortable. Just as the early rabbis of the Midrash (and all the later rabbinic commentators, for that matter) change Esau into a villain and rationalize away Jacob’s dishonesty and disrespect, P eliminates all the brilliant, troubling, morally ambiguous elements of J’s story. “No, no” he seems to be saying, “it wasn’t like that at all. Jacob wasn’t sent to Mesopotamia because, God forbid, he deceived his father and cheated his brother and was in danger of being killed. It all happened because Esau married two Canaanite women, against the wishes of his parents. So Esau was the bad son. Jacob was the obedient one; he went to Mesopotamia out of filial piety, because his father commanded him to. And he didn’t steal the blessing, God forbid; Isaac gave it to him knowingly.” In the same way, P’s version of “Jacob Becomes Israel,” a clumsy story in an indifferent style, eliminates all mention of the wrestling match and simply states the new name without even trying to explain its meaning.
Some of the doublet stories, though very different from each other, are written with almost equal skill. This is most obviously true of the two creation stories. It is also true of the lesser-known “Hagar and Ishmael.” E’s revision of this story is even more moving than +J’s original. Like the P version of “Why Jacob Was Sent to Laban,” it was written by an author who knew the earlier story and wanted to correct it. What seems to have bothered E most are the portrayals of Sarah and Abraham. J’s Sarah is manipulative, insecure, selfish, and harsh to the point of cruelty, while Abraham is awimp who capitulates to his wife’s jealousy and washes his hands of the whole business. Hagar herself, while an object of pity and admiration in her escape to the wilderness, is also seen as the partial cause of her own misfortune. The only character who comes off well is the kindly Lord.
In E’s version, Sarah’s jealousy and anger are more arbitrary, though just as unpleasant; this immediately establishes Hagar as a more sympathetic figure. But it is especially Abraham whom E is concerned about. He can’t change the basic facts, as they were given to him by an already ancient tradition: that Sarah caused Hagars flight or banishment into the wilderness, that Abraham did nothing to intervene, and that God rescued and comforted Hagar. But E wants to make Abraham less passive and callous, and more of a father to Ishmael. He does this brilliantly, in one sentence: “And this troubled Abraham very greatly, because Ishmael too was his son.” The subsequent visit or vision from God achieves two purposes: it legitimizes both Sarah’s demand and Abraham’s acquiescence, and it takes the danger and therefore Abraham’s moral responsibility out of the banishment, since he knows from the start that God “will make (Ishmael) too into a great nation.” The next part of E’s story, the description of Hagars departure and of her rescue in the wilderness, is a triumph of tenderness and skill. (Ishmael is obviously a young child here, small enough to be carried on his mother’s shoulder, although the story has been spliced into the Genesis narrative four chapters after P’s “The Covenant with Abraham,” in which Ishmael is already thirteen years old.) And it ends with a version of Ishmael that is strikingly different from J’s. Rather than portraying Ishmael as a wild and warlike savage, E makes the remarkable statement that “God was with the boy as he grew up,” a statement about a kind of blessedness and charmed existence that is almost unique in Genesis: only of Ishmael and Joseph is this said.
In another doublet, the strange” Wife and Sister” (actually a triplet), E is clumsier in his revisions, probably because the material is more refractory. It is easy to see what disturbed him in J’s portrayal of Abram. We can understand the instinct for self-preservation that makes Abram ask Sarai to lie, but self-preserving here is indistinguishable from self-serving. And when J says that Pharaoh took Sarai as a wife, he strongly implies sexual consummation. Abram is well rewarded for his complaisance and seems, to the great discomfort of some contemporary readers, very much like a pimp. In E’s revision, the king (not Pharaoh now, but Abimelech of Gerar) takes Sarah into his harem but doesn’t have sex with her, as E emphatically states. Not only does he not have sex with her: he can’t have sex with her, since God has made him impotent. Thus E assures his readers that no impropriety resulted from Abraham’s lie. Not only that: according to E the lie wasn’t really a lie, since Sarah is Abraham’s half-sister. This relationship is unattested in the older tradition; E invents it here, purely for the purpose of defending Abraham’s truthfulness. Furthermore, according to E, the king gives Abraham his reward after he learns that Sarah is Abraham’s wife; it is a compensation and a proof, rather than a finder’s fee. (The author of the third and still tamer version is bothered even by hearing that E’s Abimelech takes Sarah into his harem; his Abimelech gets no closer to Rebecca than seeing her from an upper window.)
As I separated the stories into their sources, I came to feel thatthere was another, greater disservice that had been done to them and to their authors. By the time they arrived on R’s desk, some of the stories —J’s, E’s, and the Joseph author’s — were four or five hundred years old, and much material had been added to them by various scribes in the course of half a millennium. (Westermann’s nose for these additions is particularly acute, but there is general scholarly consensus about the more important ones.) The most extraordinary example is “The Rape of Dinah”: though the original version ended in the relatively tame murder of the rapist and his men by Simeon and Levi, the later version, taking its cue from the genocidal hatred of Deuteronomy 7, has Jacob’s sons murder all the males in the Canaanite city and enslave the women and children (see Appendix 3). But there were many other additions, small and large. R could have had no way of knowing about them or about any original versions. What he had to work with were the texts he was given, which he would have considered sacrosanct.
His sense of the sacred did not, however, prevent him from doing the job of a good editor. He wove together the J and E strands of the Flood story, as we have seen, and in many other instances tried to reconcile the different versions by proper placement and with editorial insertions. To J’s version of “Hagar and Ishmael,” for example, R added two very clumsy verses.
And the Lord found her near a spring in the wilderness, the spring on the way to Shur. And he said, “Hagar, where have you come from and where are you going?” And she said, “I am running away from Sarai, my mistress.” And mal’akh YHVH (which to R would have meant “the angel of the Lord”) said to her, “Go back to your mistress, and submit to her harsh treatment.” And mal’akh YHVH said toher, “I will multiply your descendants very greatly, and they will be too many to be counted.” [16:9-10] And the Lord said to her, “You are pregnant, and you will give birth to a son, and you will name him Ishmael….”
R’s reason for adding the first of these two verses is clear: J’s story left Hagar in the wilderness; R had to get her back to Sarai so that she could be banished in chapter 21, in E’s version, which R would have considered a later incident in a continuous story.
Often R would splice one or several verses from P into a J story to establish the chronology, as in J’s “The Promise to Abram.”
And Abram went, as the Lord had told him to; and Lot went with him. And Abram was seventy-five years old when he left Haran. And Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother’s son, and all their possessions that they had obtained, and the people that they had acquired in Haran, and they set out for the land of Canaan [12:4b-5], and they arrived in Canaan and passed through the land as far as the sanctuary at Shechem, the great oak of Moreh.
The insertion here is skillful enough, but elsewhere R’s splices can be awkward, interrupting the flow of the narrative and interpolating P’s dull prose into the brilliant concision of J, as at the beginning of J’s “Hagar and Ishmael.”
Now Sarai had not borne Abram any children. And she had an Egyptian maid whose name was Hagar. And Sarai said to Abram, “See how the Lord has prevented me from bearing children. I beg you now, go and sleep with my maid, and perhaps I will have a son through her.” And Abram did what Sarai had asked: And Abram’s wife Sarai took Hagar the Egyptian, her maid, after Abram had lived tenyears in the land of Canaan, and gave her to Abram her husband as his concubine. [16:3] He slept with Hagar, and she conceived. And when she knew that she was pregnant …
Early on in the work of translation, I decided to omit all these additional verses, whether they had been added by R or by some scribe centuries before. I felt obliged to do this out of loyalty to J, E, and the Joseph author, who are the great writers of Genesis. What author would want his work presented to the public cluttered with the second and third thoughts of second-and third-rate writers? As I relegated these accretions to the Textual Notes, the stories took on a stunning clarity. It was like removing coat after coat of lacquer that had obscured the vibrant colors of a masterpiece. This was most impressive in the Joseph story. But there are many other striking examples.
In the original version of “The Binding of Isaac,” for example, God calls to Abraham just once, after which Abraham sees the ram, sacrifices it, names the place, and leaves. Some scribe, copying passages from elsewhere in Genesis, appended a second heavenly intervention (scholars are virtually unanimous that this is a later addition).
And the angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time from the sky and said, “ ‘I swear,’ says the Lord, ‘that because you have done this, and have not withheld your son, your darling, I will greatly bless you, and I will greatly multiply your descendants so that they are as many as the stars in the sky and the sands on the seashore. And your descendants will seize the gates of their enemies, and in your descendants all the nations of the earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed my command.”’ [22:15-18]
This awkward and anticlimactic passage is a blot on a story of the greatest economy and tact.
Another clumsy addition occurs at the end of J’s “The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.” It is a silly passage, written in a style obviously different from the rest of the story, and it interrupts the high drama of the climactic moment.
And as soon as dawn came, the beings said to Lot, “Hurry, take your wife and the two daughters who are here, or you will be crushed in the punishment of the city.” And he still lingered. And the beings took him by the hand, and his wife and the two daughters also, since the Lord was merciful to him, and they led them out and left them outside the city. And one of them said, “Run for your lives! Don’t look back, don’t stop anywhere in the plain: run to the hills or you will be crushed!”
And Lot said, “Please don’t, sir. You have been so good to me and have shown me such great kindness in saving my life, but if I try to run to the hills, the destruction will overtake me and I will die. Look, that town over there, I can go to it, and it is so small. Please let me go there: it is so small, and my life will be saved.” And he said to him, “I will grant you this favor too, and I will not obliterate the town. Hurry, go; for I can’t do anything until you get there.” That is why the town was named Zoar [Small]. The sun was rising as Lot entered Zoar. [19:18-23]
And the Lord rained sulfurous fire on Sodom and Gomorrah, and he obliterated those cities, and the whole plain, and all the cities’ inhabitants, and everything that grew on the ground.
And Lot’s wife looked back, and she turned into a pillar of salt.
And in the morning Abraham went back to the place where he had stood in the Lord’s presence. And he looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah, across the whole plain, and the smoke from it was rising like the smoke from a furnace.
Ehrlich points out that not only is this passage awkward, it makes nonsense of “Lot’s Daughters,” also by J, which follows it.
The statement in 19:31, “there are no men left on earth to lie with us,” clearly shows that everything that is said about Zoar proceeds from a later hand. Only according to the original story, in which Lot fled directly from Sodom into the hills, can the daughters believe that the whole world had perished as in the Flood; they could not believe this, however, if they had in the meantime been living in Zoar and seen its inhabitants quite alive.
In “Jacob and Esau,” two verses have been inserted near the beginning, for a particular purpose.
Now Rebecca was barren, and Isaac prayed to the Lord for her. And the Lord answered his prayer, and Rebecca conceived. And the children fought inside her womb; and she said, “If it is like this, why do I live?” And she went to consult the Lord’s oracle. And the Lord said to her:
“Two nations are in your womb,
two peoples inside your body. But one shall be stronger than the other
and the elder shall serve the younger.” [25:22-23] And when it was time for her to give birth, twins came out of her womb. And the first one was red and hairy like a fur cloak; so they named him Esau [The Shaggy One]. And then his brother came out, with one hand grasping Esau’s heel; so they named him Jacob [Heel-Grasper].
The continuation of this story, “Esau Cheated of the Blessing” causes problems for any reader who wants to see Jacob as a decent, honest man. Whether or not Rebecca and he are right in thinking that the end justifies the means, their deceit is deeply unsavory. The authorof these two inserted verses must have felt so troubled by the story that he had to authorize Rebeccas preference for Jacob by enlisting God on her side. But in its original version, with the oracle removed, it is a simpler, more powerful story of how Rebecca loved Jacob and Isaac loved Esau. God plays no part in it at all.
Of all the texts, “Joseph and His Brothers” is the one that most dramatically benefits when we leave out the accretions. Unlike the rest of Genesis, the Joseph story seems to be a unified whole, by a single author of genius. As Westermann has written, “The Joseph narrative as far as chapter 45 runs its course in a continuous, coherent, and clearly arranged sequence of events; the conclusion, chapters 46-50, is complicated. It contains expansions, doublings, breaks in continuity, and much that does not seem to belong immediately to the Joseph narrative.” I have relegated these additions to Appendix 1. They are all dull or awkward (except for “The Testament of Jacob,” which is a skillful early poem, though not nearly as good as the best biblical poetry), and they seriously interfere with the flow of the narrative. The worst of them are “Joseph’s Land Policy,” in which Joseph’s enslavement of the Egyptians is an unconsciously, chillingly ironic precursor of Exodus 1, and the ludicrous “Joseph and His Brothers Reconciled.”
And when Joseph’s brothers realized that their father was dead, they said, “What if Joseph still bears a grudge against us and takes revenge on us for all the harm we did to him?” So they sent this message to Joseph: “Your father gave us this message before he died: ‘Say this to Joseph: “Forgive, I beg you, the crime and sin of your brothers, who did you harm.’” So now, please, forgive the crime of the servants of the God of your father.” And Joseph wept at their words to him. [50:15-17]
It is indeed hard to keep from weeping at these words, so clumsy and bathetic are they How any writer could have had the gall to add them to the impeccable prose of the Joseph story is beyond comprehension.
The God of Genesis is a human creation, not the God at the center of the universe. Whenever God is presented as a character, that presentation is partial, therefore false. God is not a character in a story. God is the whole story.
Words such as God and Tao and Buddha-nature only point to the reality that is the source and essence of all things, the luminous intelligence that shines from the depths of the human heart. The ancient Jews named this unnamable reality YHVH, “that which causes (everything) to exist,” or, even more insightfully, ehyéh,”I am.” Yet God is neither here nor there, neither before nor after, neither outside nor inside. As soon as we say that God is God, or even that God is, we have missed it. Lao-tzu said, in his wonderfully forthright way:
There was something formless and perfect before the universe was born.
It is serene. Empty.
Solitary. Unchanging.
Infinite. Eternally present.
It is the mother of the universe.
For lack of a better name,
I call it the Tao.
All words about God are inadequate, but some words are more adequate than others. The Genesis stories have much to teach us about the soul but little to teach us about what the soul longs for. Like all soul stories, they use the character called “God” or “the Lord” to suggest another dimension to this human life of ours. God here is a kind of depth perspective.
There are three presentations of God as a character in Genesis that seem less inadequate than the others. The first is, amazingly, the God of chapter i. Amazingly, because P is usually a dullard, excessively concerned with external form, genealogy, and ritual. But P’s Elohim is not yet quite differentiated into the patriarchal God who appears in the other Genesis stories. The human analogy for this God is the artist. The impetus to create comes in the first verse, suddenly, without reason, out of the blue, from an unstoppable urge to make something beautiful or good (the Hebrew word for “good” includes what we would call “beautiful” as well). And at the end of the story, we have the sense of the whole as being more than the sum of its parts. After calling most of the parts “good,” God ends the sixth day and enters the Sabbath mind by calling the whole world “very good.” But the Hebrew word that we translate as “Sabbath” and “rest” implies more than ordinary repose. It implies the overbrimming fullness and joy that a woman feels after she has given birth, the deep fulfillment that an artist has after creating a work of art that perfectly expresses his sense of the world: when he looks at what he has imagined and is astonished at how utterly it is him and yet other than him, something he always knew and yet could never have known before he created it. (When, several years ago, I adapted the creation story for children, rather than being literal with 2:3 as Iwas in this translation, I tried to suggest this deeper sense of fulfillment by saying, “And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy And in God’s joy was all the work of creation.”)
The other presentations of God that reflect spiritual truths are also images of Abraham, since God appears to him as two almost impossibly painful demands: the voice tells him to leave his family, his land, everything he knows, and later tells him to sacrifice his beloved child. “The Binding of Isaac” is an especially rich and difficult story. On its surface, as a story about someone who is commanded by an external God to kill his son as a test of loyalty, it is, for all its great beauty, a lie. God does not command murder. Nor is unquestioning obedience necessarily a spiritual virtue. On this level the story is an authoritarian fable that could have been written by Eliphaz, Bildad, or Zophar. But at a deeper, metaphorical level it is a blood-chilling depiction of what surrender can be like: the central story of any spiritual practice. Anyone can say, “Let go of everything, even of what you love best”; it is a rare achievement for a writer to shape that truth into the flesh and blood of human characters and to bring us into the center of the experience, the dead center, absolute zero.
A story that is like it, though much gentler, is the episode in the life of Guatama when the Buddha-to-be is about to slip out of the palace. He knows with great certainty that he has to leave his wife and son behind, knows that if he can wake up to the ultimate truth, all beings on earth, all beings in infinite dimensions, will benefit from his awakening, and that if he doesn’t leave this won’t be possible. So his heartbreaking, compassionate choice is to abandon the two people whom he loves with all his heart. He stops at the threshold of his wife’s bedroom and looks at her sleeping form. He can barely keep himself from stepping into the room and kissing her cheek one last time, one last time taking the child into his arms. But if he stays lor even one more moment, he knows he will never leave.
That story has a sweet poignance to it; it is acceptable in a sense in which the Abraham story goes deeply against the grain. We can without too much difficulty imagine what the Buddha had to endure. But we can’t imagine the Abraham story unless we have lived it. It comes from a deeper level of the soul; it is richer than the Buddha story because it is darker. It is not simply a story about letting go of attachments. It is about being able, in our depths, to kill what we love best, to snuff out our dearest hope for the future of the world because our dearest hope is still an illusion, to surrender to sheer horror if life swerves into the horrible, to love God with all our heart even when God seems as cruel as the devil. The point at which what we are given is difficult beyond enduring is a point that pierces and refines the soul. And (though this may be hard to believe) it is possible to be so fluid and centered, so filled with trust in the intelligence of the universe, that even horror can pass through us and eventually be transformed into light.
As I hope you will see, the stories in Genesis gain immeasurably in clarity and power when they are separated into their sources rather than read as the artificially continuous narrative created by the Redactor. E’s Abraham is not J’s Abraham; but while it is inappropriateto think of E’s as the same character grown more compassionate in the course of a few years, the two have family resemblances as important as their differences. And simply by being placed beside one another in the same book, all the stories become part of a larger story. It is important to understand what that story is.
Genesis as we know it, that patchwork of disparate styles, has an overall shape that reflects R’s keen editorial intelligence. His splices may often be awkward; his inclusion of some material may be ill-judged; but his esthetic intuition is in certain ways admirable. When we consider Genesis in its entirety, we can see that it takes the form of the central story of the human spirit, progressing from original harmony through brokenness and suffering to a deeply moving reconciliation at the end.
It is arbitrary, of course, to consider Genesis as a separate book. Genesis is meant to be a part of a larger whole: of the Torah, or of the entire Hebrew Bible, or of the Christian Bible, or of the Muslim holy books, or of the canon of Jewish sacred texts. As the first book of the Hebrew or the Christian Bible, it concludes with either Second Chronicles or Revelation, both of them unworthy conclusions. A much more appropriate conclusion to Genesis would be either the Book of Job, with its magnificent final vision, or, even better, the Song of Songs — a reentry past the kerubs (those human-headed bulls with eagles’ wings), past the fiery whirling sword, into the garden of innocence and sexual joy; a book with not a single mention of God, because God is the garden, God is the joy.
Genesis was never meant to exist by itself, as a self-contained text. However triumphantly and harmoniously it ends, trouble waits just beyond the horizon. Joseph forgives his brothers, thefamine is contained, Jacob dies in peace, and everything turns out happily. But not happily ever after. If we take even one step past the last verse of chapter 50, we find ourselves immersed in the slavery and suffering of darkest Egypt. The solution of one problem has sown the seeds of the next.
Nevertheless, if we look at Genesis as a book complete in itself, we will find that it has a shape of remarkable significance and beauty. This was the element that excited and moved me most deeply as I was finishing the translation: the harmony with which Genesis ends, its sense of its own torn beginnings, the metaphorical awareness with which it comes to closure.
R wisely chose the P account of creation as chapter 1. (It is hard to see how he could have reversed the order of the two stories and moved from J’s kindly, jealous, bungling god to the relative majesty of P’s creator — though the move from P to J is itself bumpy.) There is no sense here of Before the Beginning, of “something formless and perfect / before the universe was born.” The curtain rises at In the Beginning. God is already a character, the world has been divided into creator and created, and the divisions proceed from one day to the next. The mood is one of great, methodical exuberance. Everything is in order, everything issues from the immense creative power of God, as if we were living in a world where there is only one I Ching hexagram: the first. When we enter the Sabbath mind at the end of the sixth day, all is serenity and joy.
Eden is a different story, of course. It begins with the Lord’s curiosity and tenderness, continues with the hilarious episode of his trying to find a mate for Adam (“How about this giraffe? No?
Hmm … Okay, how about this ocelot?”), and ends in transgression and banishment. The ending is not a cosmic disaster, though; J and the other writers of Genesis, who were comfortable with death and found Abrahams trust in God perfectly sufficient, would have been appalled, as Jesus himself would have been, at the narrowhearted Augustinian interpretation of this story, which Christianity is only now recovering from — that Adam’s transgression was an original, all-inclusive sin and that from then on all human beings were corrupt and damned to hell unless they believed in Christ.
Eve is the character in the story who makes the rest of Genesis possible, who acts out of a love for God, if God is wisdom. It is significant that the Lord puts the tree right in the middle of the garden, that he creates the serpent, that he creates Eve with her curiosity. It is a setup for something to happen, as in those fairy tales in which the hero is warned about The One Forbidden Room. God doesn’t hide the jar of magic cookies in the attic, he puts it right on the kitchen table. Consciously he hopes his children will obey, but unconsciously he is making it very unlikely. The intelligence of the story wants something to go wrong. In this sense, the serpent is cousin to Job’s Accuser, who is, after all, one of the loyal functionaries in God’s court. Each in his own way is a truth-teller; each is the dynamic presence who gets the story moving, the dark, unconscious mind of a very unconscious god. You can see them as evil, but that is just a moralized view. As Blake said, “Energy is eternal delight.” And it is appropriate that it should be a serpent who embodies this distrust of prohibitions and authority: in many cultures the snake is a wisdom figure and a symbol of immortality, since it sheds its skin and thus is born again. It is a figure for the sinuous, ferociously intelligent vital energy — kundalini — that can flow through a human body and be experienced as a great opening into God.
J’s Eden story is meant to explain a fundamental human question: how did it come about that we lost the radiance of childhood, the clouds of glory; how is it that, after living so close to God when we were born, we somehow find ourselves in a consciousness of separation and loss? In truth, if there is any fall, it is a fall into adult consciousness, and that is as much a rise as a fall. We may feel nostalgic for childhood, but the departure from Eden is a necessary one. If we try to be too safe, we can’t find our wisdom; we have to be initiated into the world, to enter it and be damaged; people who haven’t fully risked that damage can’t even begin to develop as spiritual beings. We have to go through the intense pain of separation and somehow integrate that, and then we have to walk into the fiery sword and be burnt or hacked to pieces before we can reenter the garden, not only with a regained innocence but with our adult awareness as well. (That is what Jesus meant when he said, “You must become like children to enter the kingdom of God.” He didn’t say you must become children.)
After Eden, Genesis presents us with a world of great discord and suffering. Almost immediately, jealousy gives rise to fratricide, the first murder. This sets the theme for the rest of the book. The human drama of Genesis centers upon the favoritism of parents and the resulting enmity of brothers.
J’s “Cain and Abel” originated as a folktale in a culture of nomadic shepherds, who felt superior to farming cultures and projected thatfeeling onto their tribal deity as a preference on his part. Even after the story’s cultural roots have disappeared, this intensely partisan god remains.
After a while Cain brought the first fruits of his harvest as an offering to the Lord, and Abel brought the fattest pieces of the firstlings from his flock. And the Lord accepted Abel and his offering; but Cain and his offering he didn’t accept. And Cain was very troubled, and his face fell. [4:3-5]
Of course Cain was troubled. There was nothing wrong with his offering. Daddy didn’t love him.
There are two particularly striking elements here. One is the Lord’s partiality, which, uncaused by the goodness or badness of the brothers or of their offerings, is the direct cause of Cain’s distress and the indirect cause of the murder. This is the first instance in Genesis of the parental favoritism that is responsible for so much suffering and conflict throughout the book. The Lord favors Abel over Cain, Sarah favors Isaac over Ishmael, Isaac loves Esau while Rebecca loves Jacob, Jacob himself loves Joseph above his other sons. All of them, the Lord included, are blind to the first rule of parenthood: that however much you may personally prefer one of your children to the others, you must love them all equally. This favoritism makes its destructive way from one generation of patriarchs to the next, breeding jealousy and near-violence in every generation.
The second element is J’s portrayal of Cain. He is not an unsympathetic character. On the contrary, his hurt and, after the murder, his grief are given eloquent voice.
And Cain said, “My punishment is greater than I can bear. You have banished me from this land, and I must submit to you and become a restless wanderer on the earth, and anyone who meets me can kill me.” [4:13-14]
J presents Cains anguish and restlessness of spirit not as an object of moral condemnation but with a clear-sighted perception of the inner consequences of his crime. (“Men are not punished for their sins, but by them.”) In the same way, later in the book, we feel the pain of Esau when he cries out loudly and bitterly and says, “Bless me, bless me too, Father.” That cry echoes down through the families of all generations.
The largest consciousness in the book of Genesis is not the consciousness of its God character but the consciousness of its great writers, who include everything, and who don’t see the opponent as the enemy. These writers have a generosity of spirit that always embraces the perspective of the unchosen, the defeated. There are no villains in the book; the unfavored brother can indeed, as in “The Meeting of Jacob and Esau,” be portrayed as more sympathetic than the hero and morally superior to him. This generosity of spirit, which doesn’t see people in terms of good and bad, us and them, is a rare and deeply admirable quality of mind that, as I worked on the translation, moved me more than I can say. It is a mark of spiritual maturity, and we find its radiant presence in J, in E, and in the Joseph author, as we find it in the Iliad, the other great ancient text that treats the opponent with princely impartiality. In this sense, Genesis is a book that is filled with God’s own generosity.
Although there are many themes that run through the stories of the patriarchs, the central theme is the conflict between brothers.
This theme finds a magnificent resolution at the end of the Joseph story. But before it is resolved, there is another, more subtle resolution in “Judah and Tamar.” If Joseph is the answer and mirror image to Cain, Judah is the mirror image to Adam.
One not wholly midrashic way of reading the Eden story is as a story about the consequences of blaming someone else for your mistake. If to the Lord’s question Adam had answered, “Yes, I did eat the fruit,” then he might still be in Paradise. But rather than taking responsibility, he turns the blame onto Eve, who turns it onto the serpent (who, not being asked, is too polite to point back to the Lord and thus complete the circle).
“Judah and Tamar” corrects Adam’s failure. At the end of the story, Tamar, a woman of remarkable courage, shows Judah his pledge and says, “The man who got me pregnant is the owner of this seal and this staff; see if you recognize whose they are.” And in the most dignified way, with the greatest forthrightness and integrity, Judah says, “She is in the right and I am in the wrong.” It is as simple as that. In Judah’s admission, both he and his daughter-in-law are healed. No explanations, no excuses; nothing further is necessary. There is no blame, not even self-blame.
Judah’s acknowledgment is the mature adult response to a mistake, in contrast to Adam’s childish shirking of responsibility. If Adam could have reacted with that kind of integrity, there would have been no split between his wife and him, and that oneness would have led to forgiveness, which leads to Paradise itself. Thus the second-to-last story in Genesis ends in a major chord that resolves the book’s first dissonance (Adam and Eve), while the last story ends in an even greater major chord that resolves its seconddissonance (Cain and Abel). For these connections, this sense of profound harmony, we should feel deeply grateful to R. Once we see them, we see the true shape of Genesis.
“Joseph and His Brothers,” like Job, is a story of alienation and return. The Joseph author tells the same story in a different mode, narrative rather than metaphysical, with no grand vision at its climax. In fact, the very absence of God as a character in the Joseph story testifies to the spiritual insight of its author, whose motto, after all the shallow theophanies of the rest of Genesis, might be Job’s next-to-last words turned upside down: “I had seen you with my eyes, / but now my ears have heard of you.”
Joseph is the shaman of the tribe, the dreamer of visionary dreams, the son gifted with seemingly invulnerable charm, the image, in male form, of his father’s only beloved wife. Here, once again, because the father’s love is partial, it leads to disaster — apparent disaster. Joseph revels in the favoritism, unconscious of his brothers’ jealousy, completely enclosed in his self-delight. In blurting out his dreams, he seems to be flaunting them in his brothers’ faces, even in his father’s face, as if he were saying, “Not only does Daddy love me best, God loves me best.” But God doesn’t accept the sweet smell of his offering; God is not that kind of god here; God is in the disaster. When the brothers throw Joseph into a pit and sell him, their action seems cruel but appropriate, a reaction to the imbalance in his own character. Joseph has to fall into darkness and slavery and great suffering, he has to learn a deeper humanity and become a clearer vessel of God than his favoredness has thus far permitted. He has to sit at the feet of his own suffering, the Buddha’s first noble truth. There is a ferocious, compassionateintelligence at work here behind the scenes: the intelligence of the universe that we can appropriately call “God.”
When we next hear Joseph talk about dreams, it is in prison, and it is about the dreams of others. He speaks with humility but with great confidence. His “I” has stepped out of the way. Now, rather than dreaming dreams, he can understand them. This leads directly, though with two more years’ lag time, to his audience with Pharaoh and to his sudden, dreamlike advancement. Thus Joseph becomes the only character in Genesis to undergo a transformation into mastery, from the charming but arrogant brat of the beginning to the wise leader at the end. He arrives at such a depth of maturity that he can open his heart and completely forgive the brothers who almost murdered him. His compassion for them arises from his insight into the way things are, his profound and grateful understanding that, however desperate life may seem, there’s a divinity that shapes our ends. When he reveals himself to his brothers in the great climactic scene, he reveals himself to us.
Don’t be troubled now, and don’t blame yourselves for selling me, because God sent me ahead of you to save lives. For two years now the famine has gripped the land, and there will be five more years without a harvest. But God sent me ahead of you, and he has made me a father to Pharaoh, and master of all his household, and ruler over all Egypt. So it was not you but God who sent me here. [45:5-8]
“Joseph and His Brothers” is the resolution of the stories of Cain and his brother and Isaac and his brother and Jacob and his brother. The sins of the fathers and mothers are remedied in the forgivenessof the son. But in its radiant, tearful, joyous climax, it is also a further resolution of the Eden story. Forgiveness is not only a return to Eden but an entrance into a world that is deeper and more serene than Adam and Eve’s garden. It is the adult counterpart to the unconscious happiness of childhood where all humans begin. It is a sabbath of the heart.
NOTES TO “ON TRANSLATING GENESIS”
p. xi Do you have the patience to wait: Stephen Mitchell, Tao Te Ching: A New
English Version, HarperCollins, 1988, chapter 15. p. xiv straightforward in its syntax: Robert Alter calls J’s (and E’s) style “wonderfully compact, beautifully cadenced Hebrew, using a supple, predominantly paratactic syntax” (The World of Biblical Literature, Basic Books, 1992, p. 155). Whenever possible, I have kept this syntax in my English. And unlike most contemporary translators, I have kept the many ands of the Hebrew (except where and equalled but or then), since that is an essential quality of its storytelling style. “What is important … is not this word or that but the overall rhythm established by the simple conjunction’and’ (wa)…. Readers of the AV, as of the Hebrew, find themselves rocked into a mood both of acquiescence and of expectation, grasping’what is going on’ and assenting to it, long before they have understood precisely what this is” (Gabriel Josipovici, The Book of God: A Response to the Bible, Yale University Press, 1988, p. 60).
p. XV It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place: Wallace Stevens, “Of Modern Poetry,” in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, Alfred A. Knopf, 1954, pp. 239f. p. xvii the Lord had made: The term YHVH Elohim, “Lord God” (literally, “YHVH God”), which is used only in this story, seems to have been created by an editor, not the original author (see the note to 2:4b, pp. 123f.). The other term usually translated “Lord God” is Adonai YHVH (literally, “Lord YHVH”); it occurs in 15:2,8 (pp. 27f.) p. xvii and beautiful to look at: I have omitted the third phrase, usually translated “the tree was desirable for acquiring wisdom),” because it is probably a manuscript variant. See the note to 3:6, p. 124. p. xxii whom you said you would bring to me: See note to 43:29, p. 157. p. xxiii the verse actually meant: Actually, the first half of the verse is truncated in the Hebrew text. The verb, ‘em’as, means “to reject” or “to regard as of little value,” never “to abhor or despise.” Since the object has somehow dropped out of the text, it must be supplied by the translator. “Myself” is based on a misunderstanding of the verb. A sounder interpretation, first proposed in the ancient Syriac version, would be: “Therefore I take back (everything I said).” In the second half of the verse, the verb, as used in Job, always means “to comfort.” The phrase nihamti ‘al means “to be comforted about” or possibly “to repent of,” but not “to repent in or upon.” Nor does ‘afar va-‘efer indicate the place where Job is sitting. This phrase, which occurs once before in Job and twice elsewhere in the Bible, always refers to the human body, which was created from dust and returns to dust. So the literal meaning is: “and I am comforted about (being) dust.” p. xxiv 16:6-7: Chapter and verse numbers throughout this book are those of the Hebrew text, which occasionally differ from those of the standard English translations.
p. XXV several hundred pita breads: The Hebrew says “three seahs of our best flour,” which has been estimated to equal approximately one bushel (sixty pounds of wheat flour): an extravagantly generous amount for three guests.
p. xxvi indicates mental anguish: As also in 1 Samuel 18:8 and Jonah 4:1,9. p. xxxi thirteen years old: According to P’s genealogy, Ishmael is fourteen when Isaac is born (16:16, 21:5). If the weaning (21:8) takes place at its customary time, when Isaac is three, Ishmael is seventeen at the time of this story.
p. xxxii only of Ishmael and Joseph: “And the Lord was with Joseph” (39:2). P’s statements about Enoch and Noah, that they “walked with God,” have a slightly different sense.
p. xxxvii why do I live?: The Hebrew phrase is obscure. For these two verses, see the note to 25:22-23, p. 140. p. xxxviii the Joseph story seems to be a unified whole: R’s most famous interruption is “Judah and Tamar,” an independent story that he inserted after chapter 37.1 have placed it before the Joseph story. Whatever interesting resonances it may have in its traditional place, it is inappropriate there, since the Judah of “Joseph and His Brothers” is a considerably younger man, who in chapter 43 is still living with his father and brothers.
p. xxxviii “Joseph and His Brothers Reconciled”: Some readers find this story touching in spite of the clumsiness and bathos of its style, because it shows the brothers feeling guilty even after many years. In any case, this is a different story, with a different chronology, from the original author’s, who has Joseph’s forgiveness given and received once and completely. P stares that Jacob lived in Egypt for seventeen years; in the original story he dies shortly after arriving in Egypt. Only according to this original chronology does Jacob’s deathbed statement that “I thought I would never see you again, and now God has let me see your children too” make sense.
p. xxxix ehyéh, “I am”:And God said to Moses, “I am what I am.” And he said, “This is what you should say to the Israelites: ‘I am has sent me to you’” (Exodus 3:14).
p. xxxix There was something formless and perfect: Tao Te Ching: A New English Version, chapter 25.
p. xli God does not command murder: In “The Dispute between the Philosophical and Theological Faculties,” Kant wrote, “There are some cases in which you can be absolutely certain that it is not God whose voice you hear; when the voice commands you to do what is opposed to the moral law, though the phenomenon may seem to you more majestic than the whole of nature, you must count it as a deception. The myth of the sacrifice of Abraham can serve as an example: Abraham, at God’s command, was going to slaughter his own son — the poor child in his ignorance even carried the wood. Abraham should have said to this supposed divine voice: ‘That I am not to kill my beloved son is quite certain; that you who appear to me are God, I am not certain, nor can I ever be, even if your voice thunders from the heavens.’”
p. xliv In the Beginning: It is common in contemporary translations for the first three words of Genesis to be rendered “When God began to create …” But there are excellent reasons, both grammatical and substantive, to prefer the more familiar interpretation, which dates back to the Septuagint. See Westermann’s exhaustive, meticulous exegesis of 1:1.
p. xliv great, methodical exuberance: For a wonderful elaboration of P’s account, see Book VII of Milton’s Paradise Lost.
p. xlv he creates the serpent: Christians later identified the serpent with Satan, but in J’s story he is simply an animal (though a clever and persuasive one).
p. xlv Each in his own way is a truth-teller: The serpent tells the truth when hesays that Eve will not die when she eats the fruit, whereas the Lord’s statement in 2:17 is plainly untrue. Interpreters sometimes fudge this point by supposing that what the Lord meant was “you will become mortal”— a meaning that the Hebrew phrase can’t possibly have. But death was in the garden from the beginning. We know that Adam and Eve weren’t created immortal because, as the Lord says in 3:22 (presumably to the other Elohim), the only way they can live forever is if they eat from the Tree of Life.
p. xlviii Men are not punished for … : Elbert Hubbard.
p. xlviii as in “The Meeting of Jacob and Esau”: When the brothers meet, Esau, who has been wronged, throws his arms around Jacob, bursts into tears of joy, and shows himself to be a much more openhearted character. Jacob remains rather shifty and calculating, stuck in the karma of his deceit.
p. xlix both he and his daughter-in-law are healed: The national importance of this story lay in a fact known by everyone: that Perez, one of the twins born from the union of Judah and Tamar, was the ancestor of King David. Thus, in Jewish and Christian terms, Judah’s acknowledgment literally as well as metaphorically leads to the birth of the Messiah. p. 1 his father’s only beloved wife: Though he never mentions Rachel, the Joseph author implies that she is alive at the beginning of the story when he has Jacob say, “What is the meaning of this dream of yours? Do you really think that I and your mother and your brothers will come and bow down before you?”