Construction of Gender and Identity in Genesis: The Subject and the Other 9780567673763, 9780567673787, 9780567673770

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Subject and Knowledge in Genesis 2–3
1. Defining the Problem
2. The Overture: To Eat or Not to Eat
3. Yahweh and the Institution of Gender (Gen. 2.18-22)
‘Let us make for him a helper’
The making of the animals and woman
‘And he brought her to hā’ādām'
4. hā’ādām and the Interpretation of Gender (Gen. 2.23-24)
The emergence of man
From one’s flesh to one flesh
5. The Human Beings and Knowledge (Gen. 2.25–3.7)
The serpent and the subversion of Yahweh’s voice
Woman and the tree
‘They knew that they were naked’
Two kinds of knowledge
Knowledge, gender and the image of God
The ambiguities of knowledge
6. The Subject on Trial (Gen. 3.8-13)
7. The Final Balance: Judgement and Expulsion (Gen. 3.14-24)
The serpent’s curse
Woman and gender roles
hā’ādām and hā’adāmāh
Gender Relationships and the World Order in Genesis 2–3
The Strategies of Closure (Gen. 3.22-24)
8. The Two Plots of Yahweh Elohim
Chapter 2: The Subject and the Land in the Abraham Cycle (Gen. 11.27–25.18)
1. The Patriarchal and Matriarchal Successions
2. The Call of Abraham: Ambiguities of Election
3. The Land as Own and Foreign
4. The Gendering of the Land
5. The Wife–Sister Ruse: The Subject in Search of Fertility
6. The Separation of Abraham and Lot
7. ‘There Is No Man in the Land’
8. Sarah, Hagar and the Project of Dominance (Genesis 16)
9. Hagar and Ishmael: Expelling the Other (Genesis 21)
10. Final Observations
Chapter 3: The Mothers and the Mother’s Land in the Jacob Narrative (Gen. 25.19–37.1)
1. Binary Structures in the Jacob Narrative
2. Father’s Land vs. Mother’s Land
3. Rebekah’s Plot
4. Rachel, Leah and the Twists of God
5. The dûdā’îm of Reuben
6. The Father’s Gods and the Way of Women
7. Forms of Binary Relationships in the Jacob Narrative
The Subject vs. the Twin: Antagonistic relationship
The Subject vs. the Double: Complementary relationship
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index of Authors
Index of Biblical References

Citation preview

LIBRARY OF HEBREW BIBLE/ OLD TESTAMENT STUDIES

647 Formerly Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series

Editors Claudia V. Camp, Texas Christian University Andrew Mein, Westcott House, Cambridge

Founding Editors David J. A. Clines, Philip R. Davies and David M. Gunn

Editorial Board Alan Cooper, Susan Gillingham, John Goldingay, Norman K. Gottwald, James E. Harding, John Jarick, Carol Meyers, Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, James W. Watts

CONSTRUCTION OF GENDER AND IDENTITY IN GENESIS

The Subject and the Other

Karalina Matskevich

T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 This paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Karalina Matskevich, 2019 Karalina Matskevich has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-0-5676-7376-3 PB: 978-0-5676-9551-2 ePDF: 978-0-5676-7377-0 eBook: 978-0-5676-8618-3 Series: Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies, ISSN 2513-8758, volume 647 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS List of Illustrations Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations INTRODUCTION Chapter 1 THE SUBJECT AND KNOWLEDGE IN GENESIS 2–3 1. Defining the Problem 2. The Overture: To Eat or Not to Eat 3. Yahweh and the Institution of Gender (Gen. 2.18-22) ‘Let us make for him a helper’ The making of the animals and woman ‘And he brought her to hā’ādām’ 4. hā’ādām and the Interpretation of Gender (Gen. 2.23-24) The emergence of man From one’s flesh to one flesh 5. The Human Beings and Knowledge (Gen. 2.25–3.7) The serpent and the subversion of Yahweh’s voice Woman and the tree ‘They knew that they were naked’ Two kinds of knowledge Knowledge, gender and the image of God The ambiguities of knowledge 6. The Subject on Trial (Gen. 3.8-13) 7. The Final Balance: Judgement and Expulsion (Gen. 3.14-24) The serpent’s curse Woman and gender roles hā’ādām and hā’adāmāh Gender Relationships and the World Order in Genesis 2–3 The Strategies of Closure (Gen. 3.22-24) 8. The Two Plots of Yahweh Elohim

vii viii ix 1

5 5 9 12 12 16 19 21 21 22 25 25 31 34 36 39 42 44 51 53 58 64 68 73 76

vi

Contents

Chapter 2 THE SUBJECT AND THE LAND IN THE ABRAHAM CYCLE (GEN. 11.27–25.18) 1. The Patriarchal and Matriarchal Successions 2. The Call of Abraham: Ambiguities of Election 3. The Land as Own and Foreign 4. The Gendering of the Land 5. The Wife–Sister Ruse: The Subject in Search of Fertility 6. The Separation of Abraham and Lot 7. ‘There Is No Man in the Land’ 8. Sarah, Hagar and the Project of Dominance (Genesis 16) 9. Hagar and Ishmael: Expelling the Other (Genesis 21) 10. Final Observations

83 83 93 97 101 105 114 125 131 143 149

Chapter 3 THE MOTHERS AND THE MOTHER’S LAND IN THE JACOB NARRATIVE (GEN. 25.19–37.1) 1. Binary Structures in the Jacob Narrative 2. Father’s Land vs. Mother’s Land 3. Rebekah’s Plot 4. Rachel, Leah and the Twists of God 5. The dûdā’îm of Reuben 6. The Father’s Gods and the Way of Women 7. Forms of Binary Relationships in the Jacob Narrative The Subject vs. the Twin: Antagonistic relationship The Subject vs. the Double: Complementary relationship

153 153 158 166 175 184 196 203 203 205

Conclusion Bibliography Index of Authors Index of Biblical References

209 213 227 230

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1.1

Semiotic structure of Yahweh’s speech in Gen. 2.16-17

11

Figure 1.2

Semiotic structure of the discourses of Yahweh and the serpent (Gen. 2.16-17; 3.1)

28

Figure 1.3

The parallel semiotic sequences in Gen. 3.5-7

33

Figure 1.4

Three perspectives on the consequences of transgression in Gen. 3.5, 7, 22

35

Figure 1.5

Knowledge and differentiation in Genesis 3

38

Figure 1.6

Structural relations between earth, hā’ādām, man and woman

70

Figure 1.7

Cycle of creation and return in Genesis 2–3

71

Figure 2.1

Symbolic transfers in the wife–sister stories

113

Figure 2.2

The lexical antithesis between Gen. 13.10 and 19.28

124

Figure 2.3

Structural parallels between Gen. 12.10-20 and Gen. 16.1-6

139

Figure 2.4

Transactions between Self and Other in the Abraham cycle

150

Figure 3.1

Progression of oppositions in the Jacob narrative

154

Figure 3.2

Levels of structural binarity in the Jacob narrative

156

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book is a revised version of my doctoral dissertation, accepted at the University of Sheffield in 2013. Among all the people who have made this work possible, my greatest debt of gratitude is to Cheryl Exum, in whom I found my ideal supervisor. Her insightful comments on my initial proposal suggested the lines of enquiry that opened up for me a whole new perspective on the biblical text. Cheryl’s insights as a feminist biblical scholar have significantly influenced my thinking and her work has been a constant source of inspiration. Her encouragement, patience and support as well as her selfless intellectual and personal investment have helped me at every stage of this work. I am deeply grateful to Ann Jeffers for her generous friendship and support and for her leadership in difficult times and to all the Biblical Studies staff at Heythrop College for the wonderful working environment and for accommodating my months of research while I was revising this book. I thank the late Fr Alexander Nadson for his interest, encouragement and support and for his initial suggestion to look at Jacob’s night struggle at Penuel that led me to undertake specialist studies of the Hebrew Bible. I am grateful to him and Fr Serge Stasievich for their friendship and hospitality. Many thanks go to the late Vera Rich, whose playful love of words and literature coloured my work. I am deeply grateful to my friend and colleague Iryna Dubianetskaya, to whom I owe my fascination with the Bible and countless other things, for many hours of fruitful discussions and for her unflinching faith in me and my work. I owe a particular debt to my family. My heartfelt thanks goes to Jim, my husband, for his love and unlimited patience, and to my daughters, Eileen and Eva, for their cheerful presence and encouragement, which have helped me throughout all the highs and lows of this journey and allowed me to keep going to the end.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS BDB BibInt BJRL BR BTB CBQ CBQMS DCH HTR ICC Int JB JBL JJS JPS JSOT SS JSOT JTS NIB NICOT NIV NRSV RelArts RSV StTh TDOT

ThTo VT

Francis Brown, S. R. Driver and Charles A. Briggs, Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906) Biblical Interpretation: A Journal of Contemporary Approaches Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library Bible Review Biblical Theology Bulletin Catholic Biblical Quarterly Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, ed. David J. A. Clines (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 1993–2011) Harvard Theological Review International Critical Commentary Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy Jerusalem Bible Journal of Biblical Literature Journal of Jewish Studies Jewish Publication Society Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Journal of Theological Studies New Interpreter’s Bible The New International Commentary on the Old Testament New International Version New Revised Standard Version Religion and the Arts Revised Standard Version Studia Theologica G. Johannes Botterweck, Helmer Ringgren and Heinz-Josef Fabry (eds), Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1974–2012) Theology Today Vetus Testamentum

INTRODUCTION

Genesis is a book about identity and difference. It tells stories about the origins of the earth, humankind, nations and Israel, joining them into an account of the ‘generations’ of chosen identity that is constantly renewed and recreated through separation. From the creation of the world in Genesis 1 and of woman in Genesis 2 to the formation of the chosen lineage from Adam to Jacob/Israel, separation here is a way to create meaning that is adopted by both God and the narrator. As a result, the world of Genesis is populated with a multitude of social, gendered and ethnic identities that are not included in the main storyline and remain in the narrative as a background presence. By virtue of sharing space, on the page as well as in the collective memory of Israel, with the subject of the story, these ‘other’ identities form a relationship with it. This relationship of difference, it has been argued, is what constitutes the identity of the subject. The present study looks at the construction of identity in the narratives of Genesis through the lens of the constitutive relationship between the subject and the other as developed in continental philosophy. The philosophical concept of the other is essentially paradoxical: it constitutes the self by virtue of being wholly different from it. Hegel was the first to use it in the context of a dialectic relationship, whereby one’s self-consciousness is mediated by one’s experience of the ‘other’. Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949) used the Hegelian dialectic of ‘self ’ and ‘other’ to define male and female gender positions in Western androcentric discourse, where man is posited as the universal transcendent subject, and woman, as the ‘absolute Other’.1 Following de Beauvoir, the concept of the other was firmly established as part of the last century’s philosophical, ethical, political and literary discourse on subjectivity. In particular, the concept of the other has been successfully used in postcolonial studies to demonstrate exploitative ideology of Western neo-colonial discourse built on the binary relation ‘us’ versus ‘them’. A significant feature of postmodern theoretical debate on subjectivity is the idea of ‘decentring’ the subject. Determined by class positions, gender roles and psychic and linguistic mechanisms, the subject is no longer seen as an autonomous self1. ‘Humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him. … She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the unessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other’ (Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949], 18).

2

Construction of Gender and Identity in Genesis

identity, the ‘I’ that is prior to speech and action. To be a subject is to be subjected to various systems of significations.2 An ample representation of it is the literary subject – a narrative identity constructed as the plot unfolds through the interplay between individual choices and the external forces acting on the subject. In this study, I draw on Julia Kristeva’s theory of subjectivity, which views the subject as a dynamic signifying process, an unstable identity that never reaches definitive resolution, being ‘constantly called into question, brought to trial, over-ruled’.3 The ever-changing boundaries of this identity are shaped by the subject’s continuous abjection of what is different and threatening to the existing order.4 In this process, subjectivity is constructed as a function and a product of its abjection of the other. Applying Kristeva’s model of the ‘subject in process’ to the narratives of Genesis,5 one can distinguish here two processes of signification that run on different levels – the construction of the androcentric subject, which starts with the emergence of the character hā ’ā dā m in Genesis 2–3, and the formation, throughout the stories of the patriarchs, of the ethnocentric subject of Israel.6 In both cases, unified subjectivity is perceived in relation to and over against the other, represented respectively as female and foreign identity. This structural, ontological dependence on the other lies at the heart of the gendered identity of ’iš , ‘man’ (Gen. 2.23) and defines Abraham’s identity as the father of multitudes (Gen. 17.5). Arguably, there can be no Abraham without the multitude of (non-chosen) nations – the ones out of which he is elected and the ones which he engenders so that Israel could be elected again and again. This study concurs with recent biblical scholarship in recognizing the fundamental tension between the dominant patriarchal discourse and the subversive voices underlying biblical narrative. Here I adopt a synchronic, or, borrowing the term of Mieke Bal, ‘text-internal’ perspective,7 exploring the ambiguities created by the andro- and ethnocentric argument from the vantage

2. Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 109. 3. Julia Kristeva, ‘A Question of Subjectivity: Interview with S. Sellers’, Women’s Review 12 (1986): 19. 4. Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (trans. L. S. Roudiez; New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4. 5. In this I follow Exum, who has used the concept of abjection to illuminate the formation of the subject in the story of Hagar (see ‘Hagar en procè s: The Abject in Search of Subjectivity’, in From the Margins 1: Women of the Hebrew Bible and Their Afterlives, ed. Peter S. Hawkins and L. C. Stahlberg [The Bible in the Modern World 18; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2009], 1–16). 6. Referring to Israel, I mean the image and identity of Israel, constructed in the biblical text. 7. Mieke Bal, ‘Sexuality, Sin and Sorrow: The Emergence of the Female Character’, in Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader, ed. Elizabeth Anne Castelli and Rosamond C. Rodman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 154.

Introduction

3

point inside the narrative. Looking at the text as a whole, I aim to examine the effects patriarchal structures have on the identity and the psyche of the subject. In doing so, my enquiry shares methodological ground with feminist criticism, which, in the words of Cheryl Exum, steps outside the dominant ideology of the text, reading it ‘against the grain’.8 Without disputing the ideological conditioning of the text, I shall examine the impact the patriarchal claim has on the functioning (and the dysfunction) of the narrative mind within the world of the text. The question that guides this enquiry is how the text accommodates and accounts for the social and political assumptions built into its texture. To a certain extent, the exercise is deconstructive, allowing the reader to see the patriarchal argument deconstruct itself from within, through the semiotic structures of the very texts that are seen as ideological documents of patriarchy. I do not suggest that these compensatory structures reflect female-oriented or egalitarian concerns of the narrator. The biblical narrative is by and large a narrative of patriarchy. David Jobling attributes the occasional favourable light shone on femininity in the biblical narrative to ‘the patriarchal mindset tying itself in knots trying to account for woman and femaleness in a way which both makes sense and supports patriarchal assumptions’.9 Along similar lines, Bal speaks about traces of ‘a problematization of man’s priority and domination’ that comes from the fundamental insecurity of the patriarchal claim.10 Reflecting a distorted view of reality, of the self and the other, the unified (male) subjectivity is vulnerable and in constant need of reaffirmation by the normative voice of the narrative. This vulnerability, this trauma of dominance along with the resilience of the repressed presents a considerable interest to this study. The study adopts a multidisciplinary approach, using the tools of semiotic analysis, narratology and psychoanalysis to uncover the presence and function of alterity, suppressed by the dominant discourse. My approach to the text is structuralist inasmuch as it aims to identify the literary, psychological and semiotic structures that underlie the construction of subjectivity. It is also poststructuralist in that it uncovers the constitutive incompleteness of self-identity and the innertextual critique of the autonomous subject. I am particularly indebted to the work

8. J. Cheryl Exum, Plotted, Shot, and Painted: Cultural Representations of Biblical Women, 2nd rev. edn (1996; Classic Reprints; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2012), 89; see also J. Cheryl Exum, Fragmented Women: Feminist (Sub)versions of Biblical Narratives, 2nd edn (1997; London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016), 9. 9. David Jobling, The Sense of Biblical Narrative: Structural Analyses in the Hebrew Bible II (JSOT SS 39; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1986), 43. Roland Boer observes along similar lines that ‘any ruling ideology perpetually faces the contradictions of its own position’ (Marxist Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 2nd edn [London and New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015], 32). 10. Mieke Bal, Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories (Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 110; see also Exum, Fragmented Women, xxii.

4

Construction of Gender and Identity in Genesis

of Mieke Bal, Cheryl Exum, Ellen van Wolde, Mark Brett and Francis Landy.11 Owing to the restraints of space, I shall limit my examination to a number of narratives foundational to the development of the biblical models of gender and identity: the narrative of Gen. 2.4–3.24 (referred to in what follows as Genesis 2–3 or the garden narrative) and selected texts belonging to the narrative cycles of Abraham and Jacob in Gen. 11.27–37.1. Chapter 1 looks at the construction of woman as the other in the garden narrative and the ambiguity of her role as helper in the human attainment of knowledge. Particular attention in this chapter is given to the double discourse of Yahweh Elohim, reflected in the interplay of two narrative plots, which leads the human couple out of the garden. The subject’s structural and functional dependence on the other is examined here both with respect to the gendered identities of man and woman and the relationship between humankind and the earth as its metaphorical counterpart. In Chapter 2 I examine the formation of the ethnocentric discourse in the narrative cycle of Abraham and the role of the matriarchs in the construction of the identity of Israel. The concept of the promised land is looked at as a metaphor of identity, which emerges in the presence of the ethnic other. Particular attention is given here to the recurrent pattern of separation, through which the subject’s identity is shaped by excluding what is perceived as different. The stories of Lot and Hagar are read in the context of Israel’s conflicted attitude to Egypt as the national other. Chapter 3 deals with the Jacob cycle. The dichotomy of the self and the other unfolds here on more than one level through the structures of conflict and separation. The concept of ‘mother’s land’ is seen as a foundational metaphor that conveys the transforming role of the other in the formation of Jacob’s identity as Israel. Chapter 3 looks at the characters of the three matriarchs, Rebekah, Rachel and Leah, and concludes with an examination of binary relationships between the protagonists, revealing two levels of othering in the cycle. Some portions of this book have appeared previously. Parts of Chapter 1 appeared originally in Doubling and Duplicating in the Book of Genesis: Literary and Stylistic Approaches to the Text, edited by Elizabeth R. Hayes and Karolien Vermeulen (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2016), pp. 167–182. Some of the material in Chapter 3 was previously published in The Survival of Myth: Innovation, Singularity and Alterity, edited by P. Hardwick and D. Kennedy, (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), pp. 5–30.

11. Bal, Lethal Love; Exum, Fragmented Women; ‘Hagar en procè s’, 1–16; Plotted, Shot, and Painted; Ellen van Wolde, A Semiotic Analysis of Genesis 2–3: A Semiotic Theory and Method of Analysis Applied to the Story of the Garden of Eden (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1989); Words Become Worlds: Semantic Studies of Genesis 1–11 (Biblical Interpretation Series 6; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994); Mark G. Brett, Genesis: Procreation and the Politics of Identity (London: Routledge, 2000); Francis Landy, Paradoxes of Paradise: Identity and Difference in the Song of Songs, 2nd rev. edn (Classic Reprints; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2011).

Chapter 1 THE SUBJECT AND KNOWLEDGE IN GENESIS 2–3

Defining the Problem A story of origins dealing with the creation of humankind and the institution of gender, the garden narrative in Genesis 2–3 has influenced social and religious perceptions of women and femininity in Western culture more than any other biblical text. Throughout the history of biblical reception, the creation of woman out of man and her subsequent role in human disobedience to God’s will gave rise to many misconceptions, providing a particular framework for the interpretation of woman’s position and identity. One of the most striking examples of such misconceptions is the statement on the subordination of women in 1 Tim. 2.1114, which to a large extent has shaped the traditional Christian exegesis of the narrative.1 Regarded in both Jewish and Christian interpretation as derivative in substance and subordinate in status with respect to man, the woman of the garden narrative has also been branded as a morally flawed being, responsible for the fall of man, the loss of paradise and for bringing painful toil and death into the range of human experience.2 Feminist scholarship has demonstrated various approaches to the construction of gender in Genesis 2–3. The first wave of feminist critics with Simone de Beauvoir and Kate Millett, while rejecting the Bible’s ideological assumptions, agreed in essence with the traditional interpretations of the garden narrative, which for them was designed ‘in order to blame all this world’s discomfort on the female’.3 Later literary readings refused to take the text as a monolithic document of patriarchy. Phyllis Trible in her close literary analysis of Genesis 2–3 has argued that most misogynous ideas associated with the garden narrative are more a product of its later interpretation than of the biblical text itself.4 Trible claims Genesis 2 presents 1. See Bal, Lethal Love, 109–12. 2. Phyllis Trible lists eleven most common arguments for misogyny that are based on the narrative of Genesis 2–3 in God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), 72–3. 3. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (London: Granada Publishing, 1969), 75; see also de Beauvoir, The Second Sex. 4. Phyllis Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, 72–143.

6

Construction of Gender and Identity in Genesis

an egalitarian model of gender, which becomes corrupted by dominance and hierarchy only after the ‘fall’, in consequence of human disobedience.5 Following Trible, a number of scholars pointed to the inner tensions, gaps and inconsistencies of Genesis 2–3, stressing the complexity of the story and its unequivocal perspective on gender and hierarchy.6 Resisting the text as irredeemably patriarchal or affirming the positive elements in its portrayal of female subjectivity, most early feminist interpretations of Genesis 2–3 did not question the negative character of its central transformation. However, the transfer of knowledge to the humans is far from being unequivocal and lends itself to a range of interpretations. How one understands woman’s role depends largely on whether one regards the human ascent to knowledge as primarily an act of disobedience and a fall from grace or as a stage in the process of human maturation where gender is a fundamental feature of the evolving subject.7 Traditionally, the second creation account has been read as a story about the human ‘fall’ and its consequences, telling how the first human beings, by disobeying God, bring disharmony and chaos into the initially perfect universe.8 In the new world order, the relationships between the earth, the human and the animal worlds as well as between the sexes are affected by dominance, and human existence becomes marred with pain, toil and eventual death. At the centre of these negative and dramatic changes stands a human action, performed against God’s explicit order.

5. Phyllis Bird has argued along similar lines that the sexual equality in Genesis 2 is the ‘prelude to its negation in Genesis 3’ (see Phyllis Bird, ‘Genesis 1–3 as a Source for a Contemporary Theology of Sexuality’, Ex Auditu 3 [1987]: 39). 6. Bal, Lethal Love, 104–30; van Wolde, Words Become Worlds, 13–31; Brett, Genesis, 29–35; Anne Lapidus Lerner, Eternally Eve: Images of Eve in the Hebrew Bible, Midrash and Modern Jewish Poetry (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2007); Reuven Kimelman, ‘The Seduction of Eve and the Exegetical Politics of Gender’, BibInt 4 (1996): 1–39. 7. For examples of the latter approach see van Wolde, A Semiotic Analysis of Genesis 2–3, 216–29; Lyn M. Bechtel, ‘Rethinking the Interpretation of Genesis 2.4b–3.24’, in A Feminist Companion to Genesis, ed. Athalya Brenner (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), 77–117; ‘Genesis 2.4b–3.24: A Myth about Human Maturation’, JSOT 67 (1995): 3–26. 8. Claus Westermann, Genesis 1–11 (trans. John J. Scullion; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1984), 193; see also Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1–15 (Dallas, TX: Word Books, 1994), 90. Hermann Gunkel understands the narrative as an aetiology that first describes the ‘golden age’ of humanity and then gives an answer to the basic question ‘why are we not there?’ (Hermann Gunkel, Genesis [trans. Mark E. Biddle; 1977; Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997], 33). The aetiological interpretation has been adopted by many scholars (cf. Gerhard von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary [trans. John H. Marks; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1961], 87; Carol Meyers, Rediscovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context [New York: Oxford University Press, 2013], 67–8; Helen Kraus, Gender Issues in Ancient and Reformation Translations of Genesis 1–4 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011], 7–15).

1. The Subject and Knowledge in Genesis 2–3

7

What many feminist studies share with this traditional view is seeing Yahweh as a monolithic subject – the sole creator, lawgiver and judge of the human beings and the epitome of authority and power. In relation to such a God, woman plays a counter, rebellious role, transgressing his command and bringing about man’s fall from grace. But is Yahweh himself free from ambiguity? After all, the very fact of disobedience undermines his absolute authority and destabilizes his hierarchical position. In examining the construction of gender in Genesis 2–3 one needs to look not only at the places man and woman occupy in the story, but also, crucially, at the role played by Yahweh as a character. Reflecting on the need to apply the same critical methodologies to the biblical text as to any other literary composition, Exum has recently stated that for feminist criticism to succeed as an academic enterprise, ‘the god-character should be subjected to the same judicial analysis and critical evaluation as all the other characters’.9 Turning one’s attention to Yahweh reveals the inconsistency of his behaviour and poses a new set of questions. Why should Yahweh, the creator of the harmonious world of Genesis 2, set out issuing prohibitions and punishing his creatures for disobedience? If he wants to protect hā’ādām from death, why does he plant the tree of knowledge, associated with death, in full view of the human being? Since all the trees in the garden are functional in satisfying the needs of hā’ādām (‘every tree pleasant to the sight and good to eat’, Gen. 2.9), what is the function of the only tree the fruit of which is not to be eaten? The tree of knowledge represents the symbolic boundaries of the garden, points to its finality, and yet, remarkably, Yahweh places it, spatially, in the centre of the garden and, symbolically, at the centre of his discourse. Does Yahweh have any purpose for it other than to lead the humans out of the garden? And does the garden itself have any purpose other than to produce this tree and, with it, create the possibility for the human beings to choose and to act? Various scholars have observed the ambiguity of God’s actions in Genesis 2–3 and explored his possible ulterior motives in prohibiting knowledge. For James Barr, both eternal life and knowledge are exclusively divine attributes, and the texts of Gen. 2.17 and 3.22 show Yahweh’s reluctance to share those attributes with his creatures.10 Jobling and Terje Stordalen, on the other hand, place the divine-human confrontation in the context of a spatial opposition between inside and outside, the garden and the land. Thus, Jobling considers that Yahweh places hā’ādām in his private garden in order to stop the human from tilling the whole earth.11 Along similar lines, Stordalen argues that the overall programme of Genesis 2–3 – to provide a human being to till the land – contradicts Yahweh’s primary concern

9. Exum, Fragmented Women, xviii. See also Danna Nolan Fewell and David M. Gunn, Gender, Power, and Promise: The Subject of the Bible’s First Story (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1993), 19. 10. James Barr, The Garden of Eden and the Hope of Immortality (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1993), 14. 11. Jobling, The Sense of Biblical Narrative, 22.

8

Construction of Gender and Identity in Genesis

as a private landowner to have hā’ādām ‘to till and keep the garden’. From this point of view, God forbids the knowledge of good and bad because it can show the humans the way out of the garden.12 For Barr as well as for Jobling and Stordalen, the function of Yahweh’s order is preventative. In his detailed study of Genesis 2–3, Tryggve Mettinger advances a different view that draws attention to the crucial role that Yahweh plays in the human transgression. Mettinger defines the subject of the Eden narrative as ‘the divine test of obedience to the commandment’.13 He holds that by forbidding the tree of knowledge, God provokes the human beings or tests them in a similar way as he does in Gen. 22.1-19 and Job 1–2. In so doing, he aims ultimately to assert his authority. Similarly, Walter Brueggemann understands Yahweh’s prohibition as an exercise of authority.14 Seeing the prohibition as provocative raises in its turn the question of the ambiguity of Yahweh as a moral subject. Norman Whybray pays particular attention to the lack of consistency and moral integrity in Yahweh’s actions in the garden narrative, putting it alongside a number of biblical texts, including Gen. 18.22-33, Job 1–2, Exod. 32.7-14 and Num. 11, 14.11-25.15 All the above approaches share their emphasis on Yahweh’s motivation. The way one interprets the main transformations of the narrative – the institution of gender, the acquisition of knowledge and the expulsion from paradise – depends on how one understands Yahweh’s intentions; in other words, whether by prohibiting knowledge he seeks to protect the humans from death and keep them in the garden or, alternatively, to provoke their disobedience. This, in its turn, determines whether we interpret the main transformation as a fall from grace or as part of the divine design for human beings. But, perhaps, these possibilities do not have to be mutually exclusive. Could Yahweh’s subjectivity be composed of contradictory strands, making his intentions more complex than those suggested in the above models? To prove that would shift the story’s underlying tension from the divinehuman conflict to the tension between Yahweh’s own conflicting perspectives. Uncovering this tension by means of narrative and structural analysis might lead to a different understanding of the garden narrative and of the way it constructs subjectivity and gender.

12. Terje Stordalen, ‘Man, Soil, Garden: Basic Plot in Genesis 2–3 Reconsidered’, JSOT 53 (1992): 3–25. See also Edward L. Greenstein, ‘God’s Golem: The Creation of Humanity in Genesis 2’, in Creation in Jewish and Christian Tradition, ed. Henning Graf Reventlow and Yair Hoffman (London: Continuum, 2002), 219–39. 13. Tryggve N. D. Mettinger, The Eden Narrative: A Literary and Religio-Historical Study of Genesis 2–3 (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2007), 64. 14. ‘What counts is the fact of the prohibition, the authority of the one who speaks and the unqualified expectation of obedience’ (Walter Brueggemann, Genesis [Interpretation; Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982], 46). 15. R. Norman Whybray, ‘The Immorality of God: Reflections on Some Passages in Genesis, Exodus and Numbers’, JSOT 72 (1996): 89–120.

1. The Subject and Knowledge in Genesis 2–3

9

The Overture: To Eat or Not to Eat The narrative starts with a description of the earth, lifeless and uncultivated, with no rain to water it and no human to till it (Gen. 2.5). This situation of lack defines a need that guides Yahweh’s first creative action: in Gen. 2.7 he forms a human, hā’ādām, from the dust of the earth, hā’adāmah. With a breath of life from Yahweh, hā’ādām becomes nepeš ḥayyāh, a living being. At this stage, hā’ādām is a generic term referring, in the words of Mieke Bal, to an earth-creature with ‘no name, no sex, and no activity’.16 The use of the Hebrew word hā’ādām requires clarification. It has been widely recognized as a non-gendered term that is used collectively for ‘humanity’ and individually for ‘human being’.17 In Genesis 2–3, however, this generic term refers to the protagonist, who in the course of the narrative evolves from an ungendered human being (Gen. 2.7-21) to a male character, juxtaposed to woman (hā’ādām we’ištô, Gen. 2.25; 3.8, 21). As the continued use of the name hā’ādām suggests, the boundaries between the two stages are not definitive and allow a degree of ambiguity in interpreting the identity of the protagonist. Trible and Bal share the view that hā’ādām as a narrative subject remains ungendered until the creation of woman in Gen. 2.22. Susan Lanser has criticized this view from the perspective of speech-act theory. For her, the grammatically masculine form of hā’ādām defines the way the reader perceives the character as male by inference.18 A similar argument has been advanced by James Barr, Jobling and Ronald Simkins, who see the use of the term hā’ādām in juxtaposition to woman in Gen. 2.25; 3.8, 21 and the implicitly ‘male’ character of the agricultural work of hā’ādām in Gen. 3.17-19 as proofs that hā’ādām is semantically equivalent to ‘man’ and therefore must have been used as a gendered term from the start. In Jobling’s words, ‘the originality of

16. See Bal, Lethal Love, 112. 17. See Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, 80, 97–8; Meyers, Rediscovering Eve, 70–3; Robert Alter, Genesis: Translation and Commentary (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 5. James Barr’s argument that hā’ādām is essentially a male term that can only include women collectively when they appear together with men has been convincingly opposed by David J. A. Clines (see James Barr, ‘One Man, or All Humanity? A Question in the Anthropology of Genesis 1’, in Recycling Biblical Figures: Papers Read at a NOSTER Colloquium in Amsterdam 12–13 May 1997, ed. Athalya Brenner and Jan Willem van Henten [Studies in Theology and Religion 1; Leiderdorp: Deo Publishing, 1999], 3–21; David J. A. Clines, ‘‫אדם‬, the Hebrew for “Human, Humanity”: A Response to James Barr’, VT 53 [2003]: 297–310; see also Johannes C. de Moor, ‘The First Human Being a Male? A Response to Professor Barr’, in Recycling Biblical Figures, ed. Brenner and Henten, 22–7). Brett maintains that the generic term ’ādām is made specific by the use of the definite article (‘the human’) and as such can refer to a particular man (Genesis, 149 n. 19; see also Clines, ‘‫’אדם‬, 303–4). 18. Susan S. Lanser, ‘(Feminist) Criticism in the Garden: Inferring Genesis 2–3’, Semeia 41 (1988): 72.

10

Construction of Gender and Identity in Genesis

maleness over femaleness is affirmed in the text against logic’.19 Lanser’s argument is made from a reader-centred perspective that incorporates inferred meanings in the process of signification. While her approach is valid, it differs from the text-internal perspective, adopted in this study, which looks at gender as being gradually constructed by the narrator. Therefore, in what follows, I shall adopt the view of Trible and Bal and refrain from the use of masculine pronouns to refer to hā’ādām before the creation of gender. After the creation of hā’ādām, Yahweh plants a garden in Eden, and there he places the new human creature (Gen. 2.8). So far it would appear that the garden is planted for the sake of hā’ādām, and is subsequently filled with trees to satisfy human needs (‘all trees pleasant to the sight and good to eat’, Gen. 2.9). In return, hā’ādām receives the task ‘to till (‘ābad) and keep’ the garden (Gen. 2.15). The verb ‘ābad, which usually means ‘to serve’, places the human on a lower structural plane in relation to the garden. The use of ‘ābad reminds the reader about the initial need (‘there was no human to till [serve] the earth’, v. 5), and suggests its partial fulfilment. In fact, the garden represents an ideal situation, where all the initially lacking elements have been supplied. The garden is watered by the river that flows out of Eden (Gen. 2.10), and now it has a human to till it. Consequently, in contrast to the barren earth of v. 5 (‘no shrub’, ‘no plant’), the garden is now filled with vegetation (cf. ‘every tree’, v. 9). The state of the earth outside the garden is not specified; moreover, it is not clear whether there is an ‘outside’ at all, since the boundaries of the garden will not be established until the end of the narrative (Gen. 3.23-24). However, in serving and keeping the garden, hā’ādām clearly falls short of reaching a direct relationship with the earth. The programme ‘’ādām to serve ’adāmah’ remains unfulfilled, which creates a background tension for all that is going to happen in the narrative. The description of the plentiful and harmonious existence in the garden is disrupted with Yahweh’s discourse. In Gen. 2.16-17 Yahweh addresses hā’ādām for the first time, issuing a contradictory commandment: ‘From any tree in the garden you shall certainly eat, but from the tree of the knowledge of good and bad you shall not eat, for on the day you eat from it you shall certainly die.’ This speech is composed of four verbal clauses based on two verbs: ’kl, ‘to eat’, and mwt, ‘to die’. Together, they form a sequence that ultimately links the idea of eating with the possibility (or certainty) of death: ’ākōl tō’kēl, ‘you shall certainly eat’ lō’ tō’kal, ‘you shall not eat ’akālekā, ‘you eat’ môt tāmût, ‘you shall certainly die’

Gen. 2.16 Gen. 2.17

19. Barr, ‘One Man, or All Humanity?’, 11–12; Jobling, The Sense of Biblical Narrative II, 41; Ronald A. Simkins, ‘Gender Construction in the Yahwist Creation Myth’, in Genesis, ed. Athalya Brenner (A Feminist Companion to the Bible [2nd series] 1; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 40 n. 30. For a counterargument, see Clines, ‘‫’אדם‬, 302–4.

1. The Subject and Knowledge in Genesis 2–3

11

In this sequence, the emphatic expressions ’ākōl tō’kēl and môt tāmût stand out due to their grammatical uniformity (the infinitive absolute  +  the imperfect), as well as their parallel syntactic position at the end of a clause. Standing at the beginning and the end of the sequence, they frame the other two verbal forms – lō’ tō’kal and ’akālekā – which present the earth-creature with two mutually exclusive possibilities: ‘to eat’ and ‘not to eat’. The structure of this antithetical proposition could be drawn up as an incomplete semiotic square (Figure 1.1). The structure of Yahweh’s speech shows a double reversal, where the absolute sanction ‘you shall certainly eat’ (A) is contradicted by the specific prohibition or non-sanction ‘you shall not eat’ (Ā), which is then opposed by its hypothetical violation ‘on the day you eat’ (Ā1). The logic of this double reversal brings the commandment back to its starting point. As a result, the violation Ā1 not only echoes the sanction A but also appears to be structurally implied in it (see the dashed vertical arrow, Figure 1.1). Since eating of all trees presupposes eating of any one of them, a similar relation of implication exists between the respective objects of the action – ‘any tree in the garden’ and the ‘tree of knowledge’. In its simultaneous denying and implying the forbidden action, Yahweh’s communication becomes double, showing, in the words of Ellen van Wolde, ‘semantic openness or the possibility for change’.20 But being semantically open, God’s communication is also semantically selective, drawing attention to one particular meaning, and is, therefore, highly provocative. Based on an internal contradiction, the command also stands in tension with its wider context. As we already know from Gen. 2.9, all the trees that Yahweh planted are ‘pleasing to the eye and good to eat’, and he confirms it by allowing hā’ādām

from any tree in the garden you shall certainly eat (A) sanction all trees

-

on the day you eat from it (A1) violation tree of knowledge

-

(A) from the tree of the knowledge of good and bad you shall not eat prohibition tree of knowledge

opposition contradiction implication

Figure 1.1 Semiotic structure of Yahweh’s speech in Gen. 2.16-17.

20. Van Wolde, A Semiotic Analysis of Genesis 2–3, 137.

12

Construction of Gender and Identity in Genesis

to eat from all the trees in the garden (Gen. 2.16). Then he sets apart the only tree that is, apparently, not good to eat, as eating from it leads to death (Gen. 2.17). The later narrative, however, seems to refute this idea: in 3.6 woman sees for herself that the tree is ‘good for food, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable to make one wise’. What Yahweh says in v. 17 stands in opposition to the rest of the narrative, where the tree appears as good to eat from. Presented simultaneously as ‘good for food’ and ‘not to be eaten’, the tree of knowledge loses its pragmatic value and becomes a pure sign of prohibition as God’s way of communicating meaning. This sign occupies the centre of the narrative: the tree stands, spatially, in the centre of the garden (Gen. 3.3) and, symbolically, at the centre of God’s discourse. Yet, along with its structural centrality, the tree also signifies the symbolic boundaries of the garden, points to its finality. In the end, does the garden itself have any purpose other than to produce this tree and, with it, to create the possibility for the human beings to choose and to act?21 If so, could the couple’s ‘disobedience’ be what God had in mind for them all along? While the motives behind Yahweh’s double-edged discourse are not yet clear, its immediate impact is the loss of simplicity in the relationship between the creator and the earth-creature. It is at this point that Yahweh decides that hā’ādām is not self-sufficient and needs a partner.

Yahweh and the Institution of Gender (Gen. 2.18-22) ‘Let us make for him a helper’ The tensions and inconsistencies brought about by the prohibition are left suspended for the whole length of Gen. 2.18-25, where the tree of knowledge is not mentioned at all. In a soliloquy that appears to be wholly unrelated to his preceding speech, Yahweh observes, ‘It is not good that hā’ādām should be alone’, and decides to ‘make for him a helper corresponding to him’ (v. 18). Scholars generally take this sudden change of subject to indicate the beginning of an entirely new phase of creation, centred on the institution of gender (vv. 18-25).22 It is, however, possible to see the apparent gap between v. 17 and v. 18 as part of the narrator’s strategy 21. This question is particularly relevant since God’s purpose in planting the garden in 2.8 is never made clear. As Jobling has observed in The Sense of Biblical Narrative, 22, the existence of the garden is not accountable in terms of creation and interrupts its sequence; the aim of creation, formulated in 2.5 as ‘a man to till the earth’, can only be fulfilled outside the garden (3.23). 22. Most scholars agree that 2.16-17 and 2.18 belong to different scenes (cf. Terje Stordalen, Echoes of Eden: Genesis 2–3 and Symbolism of the Eden Garden in Biblical Hebrew Literature [Contributions to Biblical Exegesis and Theology 25; Leuven: Peeters, 2000], 218– 20; Jerome T. Walsh, Style and Structure in Biblical Hebrew Narrative [Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2001], 21–3; Wenham, Genesis 1–15, 50–1; Mettinger gives an overview of the discussion in The Eden Narrative, 16–18).

1. The Subject and Knowledge in Genesis 2–3

13

that leaves God’s plan indeterminable yet at the same time allows a space for its reconstruction – a textual gap that can, in Meir Sternberg’s words, ‘give rise to a fullness in the reading’.23 In what follows I propose a way to fill this gap by reading God’s assessment of hā’ādām in v. 18 in the context of his prohibition of knowledge in v. 17. In order to do so, we need to take a closer look at the formulation of v. 18. Like his prohibition, Yahweh’s negative assessment of hā’ādām in v. 18 seems puzzling. Until this point, Yahweh’s creative activity was always triggered by an initial lack (‘no shrub’, ‘no plant’, ‘no rain’, ‘no human being’, v. 5), and led to a situation of fulfilment: he plants a garden, watered by the river that flows out of Eden (vv. 8, 10-14), creates a human to till it (vv. 7-8, 15), and fills the garden with vegetation (‘every tree pleasant to the sight and good for food’, v. 9). In v. 18 for the first time it is not an external condition but God’s own creation that is seen as lacking or ‘not good’, and this assessment raises a number of questions regarding his purpose. If the single state of ungendered hā’ādām is fundamentally deficient, why did God not make the human ‘male and female’ to begin with (cf. Gen. 1.27)? And why should human deficiency become apparent at this precise point in the story? The phrase ‘not good’ might imply a lack of expediency with regard to a particular role or function. In this case, what is the role that, in Yahweh’s view, the lone human being cannot fulfil? It must be noted that the Hebrew term lebad does not necessarily stand for loneliness. As Anne Lerner observes, most of the 158 occurrences of the term in the Hebrew Bible stress singularity rather than loneliness.24 The fact that God seeks to resolve the problem of the lone hā’ādām by creating a ‘helper’ seems to indicate that his assessment is pragmatic. Edward Greenstein points out that the Hebrew term lebad, ‘alone’, is used in similar contexts in relation to a labour or task one cannot perform by oneself, without help.25 For example, in Exod. 18.1718 Jethro says that it is ‘not good’ that Moses should be the sole judge over the Israelites, since the task is too heavy and he cannot do it by himself (lebad). Jethro then recommends that Moses should appoint officials to help him (Exod. 18.21). Similarly, in Num. 11.14 and Deut. 1.9, 12 Moses says that he cannot carry the burden of his people’s problems by himself (lebad), and asks the Israelites to choose tribe leaders for themselves. On the basis of these parallels one could argue that in Gen. 2.18a Yahweh assesses hā’ādām with regard to a particular task and concludes that he cannot manage it alone. In this case, the required ‘helper’ carries the connotation of sharing the task of the human creature and not of alleviating its loneliness.

23. Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 230. 24. Lerner, Eternally Eve, 67. 25. Edward L. Greenstein, ‘God’s Golem: The Creation of Humanity in Genesis 2’, in Creation in Jewish and Christian Tradition, ed. Henning Graf Reventlow and Yair Hoffman (London: Continuum, 2002), 237.

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Construction of Gender and Identity in Genesis

The phrase ‘ēzer kenegdô is commonly translated as ‘helper, suitable for him’ (Gen. 2.18).26 Trible criticizes this translation for its sexist implications and suggests instead ‘a companion corresponding to it’.27 The term kenegdô, a prepositional form of neged, ‘in front of, in sight of ’, communicates the idea of facing and, therefore, opposing the subject.28 As such, it anticipates the creation of gender in Gen. 2.21-22 that shall ‘split’ hā’ādām into two. As Bal remarks, the use of kenegdô offers a deep insight into the nature of sexuality, which, being a form of binary relationship, is shaped by the ‘tension between the same and the different’ (emphasis: Mieke Bal). In order to create this tension the earth-creature needs to be faced with a part of itself, which explains why the animals later in the narrative will not be accepted as suitable helpers (Gen. 2.19-20).29 In Gen. 2.18, the term kenegdô introduces binarity as a characteristic opposite to lebad – the singular state of the earth-creature that has just been considered ‘not good’. By implication, one might perceive the new, binary state intended for hā’ādām as ‘good’, or as that which, in the eyes of Yahweh, fits the purpose of the human existence in the garden. The use of the word ‘ēzer, ‘help, helper’, in Gen. 2.18 is more problematic. In the Hebrew Bible this term often has the connotation of help received in mortal danger, of action that delivers from death. Taking this meaning further, van Wolde sees ‘ēzer as a prerequisite for life.30 In most cases, the term signifies divine assistance, or serves as a direct metaphor for God as saviour.31 However, in Gen. 2.18 none of these connotations of ‘ēzer is obvious, and neither is its literal meaning of ‘help’. Indeed, what sort of help does hā’ādām require? At the beginning of the narrative, he has to till and keep the garden (Gen. 2.15), and at the end, to toil on the earth (Gen. 3.17-19). In addition, halfway through the story he names the animals (Gen. 2.19-20). Of all these tasks hā’ādām is the sole agent, and woman, who will assume the role of his ‘ēzer, will never be shown to assist him with his work.32 What then is the nature of woman’s help? David Clines considers it in the context of the divine 26. So in NIV, NIB, NAU (cf. the RSV’s ‘helper fit for him’). 27. Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, 89–90. Bal takes the same view in Lethal Love, 115. 28. BDB, 617; DCH V, 603–4. 29. See Bal, Lethal Love, 115. 30. van Wolde, A Semiotic Analysis of Genesis 2–3, 177. 31. Cf. Exod. 18.4; Deut. 33.7, 26, 29; Pss. 33.20; 115.9–11; 121.2; 124.8; 146.5. Victor Hamilton stresses the connotations of superiority and strength attached to the notion of ‘ēzer in the biblical text (Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis: Chapters 1–17 [NICOT; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1990], 176); for a detailed analysis of the biblical usage of ‘ēzer see Jean-Louis Ska, ‘“Je vais lui faire un allié qui soit son homologue” (Gen 2,18): À propos du terme ‘ezer – “aide”,’ Biblica 65 (1984): 233–6. 32. Beverly Stratton questions the idea of woman’s agricultural role in the garden on narratological grounds. For her, if the narrator infers that woman is to help hā’ādām with tilling the soil, the logical place to introduce her would be following v. 15 and not after the prohibition (Beverly Stratton, Out of Eden: Reading, Rhetoric, and Ideology in Genesis 2–3 [JSOT SS 208; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995], 37).

1. The Subject and Knowledge in Genesis 2–3

15

mandate to ‘be fruitful and multiply’ (Gen. 1.28), which man cannot fulfil on his own.33 In Clines’s view, bearing children is the only ‘help’ expected from woman and the sole purpose of her creation in Genesis 2. If woman’s purpose in the narrative is procreation, then one can understand why God in Gen. 3.16 punishes her in her childbearing role, marring it with pain and male domination. Presented from the perspective of Gen. 1.28, this understanding of woman’s ‘help’ is also in keeping with the general tendency of biblical authors to construct women as mothers. It is, however, difficult to find a way in which this meaning of ‘ēzer could fit in with the logic of Genesis 2–3, since nothing in it indicates God’s intention to fill the earth (or even the garden) with humans.34 In addition, the need for procreation does not logically follow from the prohibition of knowledge in Gen. 2.17. Though it is in line with the general ideology of the Hebrew Bible, the procreation argument appears extraneous when applied to Genesis 2–3 as a literary unit. The difficulty with the interpretation of ‘ēzer has led some interpreters to suppress it altogether, using in their translations the word ‘companion’ instead of ‘helper’.35 In my opinion, however, the semantic connotation of help is crucial, because it holds a clue to the understanding of Yahweh’s motives as well as the overall logic of the narrative. For although woman does not help hā’ādām with any of his jobs in the garden, she undoubtedly assists him at another level. The only time that woman takes the initiative and acts – her only individual action – is when she eats of the forbidden tree and helps her husband to do the same: ‘she ate, and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate’ (Gen. 3.6).36 This moment is central to the plot, bringing about its main transformation in the sequence ‘ategave-ate’. From the perspective of the overall narrative, woman’s role is to make sure that both she and hā’ādām eat of the tree of knowledge. If this is what God has in mind in Gen. 2.18, then his decision to create a ‘helper’ shows that he intends his prohibition to be broken.37

33. Clines, What Does Eve Do to Help? And Other Readerly Questions to the Old Testament (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1990), 27–40. Here Clines concurs with Phyllis Bird’s earlier view on woman’s help (Bird, ‘Genesis 1–3’, 38). 34. See Stratton, Out of Eden, 36. 35. Trible and Bal both opt for the translation ‘companion’, albeit for opposite reasons. Trible rejects the word ‘help’, since for her it presupposes superiority of hā’ādām over the new creature, and therefore goes against the idea of equality implied by kenegdô (Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, 88–90). Bal, on her part, suggests that the translation ‘help’ trivializes the meaning of Hebrew ‘ēzer, which is associated with divine assistance (Bal, Lethal Love, 115). 36. Here I disagree with Clines, who states that the only things that woman does do in the story is converse with the snake and eat fruit from the forbidden tree (Clines, What Does Eve Do to Help?, 34). This observation overlooks the crucial phrase ‘she gave to her husband with her’, shifting the emphasis away from woman’s mediation. 37. To preserve this interpretative possibility, it seems important to translate ‘ēzer as ‘help’ or ‘helper’ rather than ‘companion’ or ‘partner’.

16

Construction of Gender and Identity in Genesis

Accepting this hypothesis allows us to close the gap between the two apparently unrelated pronouncements of Yahweh Elohim in vv. 17 and 18. Having given the human creature an ambiguous and provocative commandment in v. 17, Yahweh draws back and takes a look at it, as if to assess its aptitude for knowledge and for decoding the divine double-talk. The result is disappointing: the singular state of hā’ādām is lō’-ṭôb, which could be read as ‘insufficient’ or ‘inadequate’, and therefore, the human requires assistance. It is significant that in Gen. 2.18 Yahweh speaks to himself, leaving the purpose of his next act of creation hidden from hā’ādām. Excluded from sharing the divine perspective and assessed by Yahweh as ‘not good’, the ungendered human being is placed in a context of suspicion. The figure of the ‘helper’, on the other hand, receives a constructive role in Yahweh’s design from the onset. As a remedy to the ‘non-goodness’ of hā’ādām, the presence of the ‘helper’ is implicitly ‘good’ and so is the knowledge that it brings. The implicit purpose of the perfect counterpart, ‘ēzer kenegdô, is to enable the human creature to do what it cannot do in its singular state, that is, to attain knowledge. The inner contradiction of this role comes from its subordinate nature: despite her crucial importance, woman as ‘ēzer exists for the sake of hā’ādām and not for her own, and is functional rather than ontological. By contrast, hā’ādām, who is ignorant of the divine plan and unable to fulfil it, remains at the centre of Yahweh’s concerns. The making of the animals and woman The procedure of finding a helper takes two stages. In the first movement, Yahweh fashions out of the earth ‘every animal of the field and every bird of the sky’ (Gen. 2.19) and brings them to the human being to be named. The animals, however, do not match Yahweh’s image of ‘ēzer kenegdô, for they are not complementary to the human (Gen. 2.20). For the first time Yahweh appears to have failed to create what he intended.38 This unusual instance of trial and error in Yahweh’s otherwise purposeful activity poses a problem that could be addressed at two levels. On the one hand, as Gordon Wenham points out, the creation of the animals as part of Yahweh’s search for a helper heightens the narrative suspense.39 As a result, when woman finally appears, she is perceived as a culmination of the process of creation, its final stage that completes the world of Genesis 2. On the other hand, in creating the animals, Yahweh has a specific agenda. Despite their apparent inaptitude to be proper companions for hā’ādām, they will be indirectly linked to the function of ‘ēzer in the following episode. In Gen. 3.1-7 the serpent, the wisest of all the animals, persuades woman to eat from the forbidden tree. By helping woman – the ‘helper’ of hā’ādām – the serpent plays a crucial role in the human attainment of knowledge. That the creation of the animals is placed, alongside that

38. Umberto Cassuto points out the contrast between this failure and the rest of Yahweh’s successful acts of creation (Umberto Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Genesis I: From Adam to Noah [trans. Israel Abrahams; Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1961], 128). 39. Wenham, Genesis 1–15, 68.

1. The Subject and Knowledge in Genesis 2–3

17

of woman, in the context of help, endows them with a shared function that will lead in the end to a shared punishment (Gen. 3.15). Towards the end of the garden narrative, this association will be linguistically reinforced through the wordplay between woman’s name ‘Eve’, ḥawwāh (Gen. 3.20) and the word for ‘animal’, ḥayyāh, both of which stem from the same verb ‘to live’.40 When Yahweh finally comes to creating woman, he uses as his material not the earth, but the earth-creature. Having put it to sleep, he removes one of its ribs and shapes it into a woman. The narrator seems to emphasize the unconscious state of the human, using two different terms to describe it: tardēmāh, ‘deep sleep, trance’, and yāšēn, ‘to sleep’ (Gen. 2.21). Trible maintains that Yahweh does it to ‘anaesthetize’ hā’ādām before the subsequent surgical procedure.41 However, it seems more plausible that the deep sleep is meant to prevent cognition, or conscious witnessing on the part of the human. A similar usage is found in 1 Sam. 26.12. The narrative here describes how Saul’s companions do not notice – see or know – when David removes a spear and a jug of water from beside the sleeping Saul, ‘because they were all asleep (yāšēn), for a deep sleep (tardēmāh) from Yahweh had fallen on them’. Here Yahweh sends his tardēmāh on Saul’s companions to make them unaware of what happens during their sleep. If this is also the case in Gen. 2.21 and hā’ādām is put to sleep to be kept from witnessing the imminent separation of woman, what are Yahweh’s (and the narrator’s) motives in doing so?42 Is Yahweh intentionally concealing from hā’ādām the origin of woman and her essential, organic unity with the original earth-creature? From the jubilant speech in Gen. 2.23 one could conclude the opposite, since there man seems to be aware of woman’s ‘derived’ origin. So what is the reason behind the deep sleep of hā’ādām? I would argue that the deep sleep in Gen. 2.21 is needed to conceal from the subject not so much the origin of woman (it will be needed to back its project of dominance) as its own discontinuity, brought about by the creation of gender. Bal sees in the tardēmāh a symbolic death of the singular, undifferentiated creature, who then re-emerges as the new, gendered hā’ādām.43 But is the subject aware of its own death? The narrator insists on its permanence, referring to the new, differentiated creature by the same name. This would be consistent with the selfperception of hā’ādām: having missed the process of internal separation, the earthcreature would continue to perceive itself as the same being, essentially unchanged. At a semiotic level, the deep sleep of hā’ādām marks the beginning of a story of the

40. Wenham uses the parallel in the opposite sense to emphasize the inadequacy of the animals, who despite their name cannot become partners for the human being (Genesis 1–15, 68). 41. Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, 95. 42. Westermann quotes J. G. Herder, A. Dillmann and J. G. Thomson, who relate the sleep of hā’ādām to the philosophical idea that ‘the man ought not to be a witness of the work of creation’ (Westermann, Genesis 1–11, 230). 43. Bal, Lethal Love, 115.

18

Construction of Gender and Identity in Genesis

deeply ambivalent subject, which is simultaneously permanent and discontinued, transformed and left unchanged by the emergence of the gendered other. From the unconscious human, Yahweh takes ’aḥat miṣṣal‘ōtâw, traditionally translated as ‘one of his ribs’ (Gen. 2.21), and makes it into woman. This translation proved to be particularly attractive to interpreters from the perspective of human anatomy, because a rib, being one of many, might be considered an expendable body part. Beginning with Paul and the rabbis of late antiquity, Jewish and Christian interpreters used this narrative feature to justify the patriarchal view on gender, presenting woman as ‘derivative in substance and second in sequence’.44 In recent decades this view, however, has been challenged.45 While it has become normative to translate ṣēlā‘ as ‘rib’ in modern Hebrew, in the Hebrew Bible this meaning is not well attested. In fact, the scene of the creation of woman appears to provide the only example of such a usage, while, in all of the thirty-eight occurrences of ṣēlā‘ outside Gen. 2.21-22, it denotes ‘side’ or ‘side room’ and is used in the descriptions of sacred architecture. To read ṣēlā‘ as ‘side’ would also be consistent with the LXX translation of Gen. 2.21 (pleurōn, or ‘side’) as well as with some early rabbinic interpretations.46 Heinz-Josef Fabry argues that, given its semantic singularity in the biblical text, the reading of ṣēlā as ‘rib’ in Gen. 2.21-22 is unlikely to be correct.47 The term ‘side’ seems particularly appropriate to describe the institution of gender because of its connotation of duality. This connotation is certainly present whenever ṣēlā‘ is mentioned as part of sacred buildings. The tabernacle (Exod. 25.12, 14; 26.20, 26, 27, 35; 37.3, 5), the temple of Solomon (1 Kgs 6.5, 8, 15, 16, 34) and the temple in Ezekiel’s vision (Ezek. 41.5-9, 11, 26) are all constructed symmetrically, with the emphasis on their opposite sides, šenê ṣelā‘îm. The associated verb ṣāla‘, ‘to limp’, also has a semantic link to symmetry, albeit in its opposite form, as an upset balance between the two sides. Given this dual connotation of ṣēlā‘, the expression ’aḥat miṣṣal‘ōtâw in Gen. 2.21 could be taken to mean ‘one of his (two) sides’. And so, instead of woman’s subordinate status, the concept of ṣēlā‘ seems to point to the basic binarity and, therefore, to the equality inherent in sexual differentiation.48 Reuven Kimelman advocates a non-sexist reading of the scene, stressing that ‘male and female are coeval in the primordial earthling’ as its two sides.49 Made from one side, or one half, of hā’ādām, woman could be seen as a structural counterpart to the other, remaining side of the human creature. With respect to this ‘residual’ subjectivity of what is now left of hā’ādām, she literally becomes kenegdô, ‘corresponding to it’, and thus fulfils Yahweh’s purpose (Gen.

44. Lerner, Eternally Eve, 40. 45. H.-J. Fabry, ‘‫’ ֵצ ָלע‬, TDOT XII, 400–5; Hamilton, Genesis 1–17, 178. 46. Gen. Rab. 8.1. 47. Fabry, ‘‫’ ֵצ ָלע‬, 400–5. 48. This supports the idea of ‘anthropology of equality’ that Bird applies to the image of the male-female creation in Gen. 1.27 (Phyllis Bird, ‘“Male and Female He Created Them”: Gen 1:27b in the Context of the Priestly Account of Creation’, HTR 74 [1981]: 151). 49. Kimelman, ‘The Seduction of Eve’, 14–15.

1. The Subject and Knowledge in Genesis 2–3

19

2.18). However, the symmetry between the two is only a conjecture that should not be overstated. Here the use of the term ’eḥad, ‘one’, is notable. Outside Gen. 2.21, whenever ’eḥad is used in conjunction with ṣēlā‘, it is always followed by šēnî, ‘second’ or ‘other’, which indicates a clear opposition ‘one side: the other side’ (cf. Exod. 26.26-27; 37.3). However, in Gen. 2.21 the other side is not named. This could be seen as the beginning of a structural discrepancy in the narrator’s treatment of gender: out of the two presumably equal parts, only one undergoes separation and is acknowledged as a part, while the other retains the appearance of a whole. Yahweh’s action of separating one side of the human being is therefore iconic, the first in the long sequence of transactions that will construct woman as a bearer of difference and man as the bearer of unity. Next, Yahweh offers a different treatment to each of the sides of hā’ādām. In order to substitute for the missing side, Yahweh adds bāśār, ‘flesh’, to what is left of the human being.50 This gesture has important semiotic implications for the construction of the subject. First, as the substance that replaces the ‘woman’ side of hā’ādām, flesh is structurally dissociated from female reality. It alludes to the idea not of maleness, but of being-without-female, of a residual entity defined by the absence of one side. At another level, bāśār in Gen. 2.21 serves to imitate wholeness. By replacing the missing side of hā’ādām with flesh, Yahweh ‘patches’ him up, preserving an appearance of the former, ungendered being. But who is the viewer, for whom this appearance of continuity is intended? Neither Yahweh, who knows the old hā’ādām, nor woman, who does not know what existed before her, needs the original being to be ‘mended’. The only character for whom this apparent wholeness is meaningful is hā’ādām, who is, on his awakening, to make sense of his new self. For him, to the permanence of name is now added the permanence of appearance, which lays ground for a claim of permanent identity: being on the inside only a half of his former self, the new being perceives his appearance as that of the same, old hā’ādām. In contrast to this apparently unchanged, unified identity, the removed side of hā’ādām is further changed, ‘fashioned’ or ‘built’ into woman. The action of ‘building’ in v. 22 structurally opposes that of ‘replacing’ in v. 21, inasmuch as it creates a new, different identity instead of imitating the old one. Thus the physical construction of woman’s body and the semiotic construction of her subjectivity both imply her difference from hā’ādām. While the concept of man has not yet emerged, the concept of woman is already established, both for Yahweh and for the reader. ‘And he brought her to hā’ādām’ Having created woman, Yahweh brings her back to hā’ādām (Gen. 2.22). This brief statement carries important repercussions for the power dynamics of the account,

50. The term bāśār appears here for the first time, one of the four occurrences found in the narrative of the creation of woman (Gen. 2.21, 23, 23, 24). Before Gen. 6.3, the term is used exclusively in the context of sexual differentiation.

20

Construction of Gender and Identity in Genesis

not only by what it says but also by what it holds back. The phrase wayebi’ehā ‘el-hā’ādām forms a clear parallel with Gen. 2.19b, where God, having formed the animals from the earth, brings them to the human creature (wayyābē’ ’el-hā’ādām). Yahweh’s purpose in showings the animals to hā’ādām is clearly stated: it is to see what they are named. Since each animal has been created as a potential helper, the name it receives from hā’ādām could be seen as an indication of its suitability to the task and an expression of its relationship with the human. Notably, no such purpose is mentioned when Yahweh brings woman to hā’ādām. This leads Trible to conclude that woman ‘does not fit the pattern of dominion’ that characterizes the relationships of the earth-creature to the animals, as well as to the earth and the plants.51 Yet the distinction here is not so clear-cut. In itself, the fact of woman being brought to hā’ādām entails the latter’s semiotic superiority. Like the animals before her, woman is subjected to the human being as a reality in need of interpretation. What is different now is that hā’ādām names woman of his own accord and not following Yahweh’s wish. What is it then that Yahweh is seeking to achieve by bringing woman back to hā’ādām? In Gen. 2.19 the animals were brought to the human being so that Yahweh could see what the latter would call them, which implies that until then they had not been properly differentiated. Having given the human the freedom to name his (Yahweh’s) creatures, Yahweh himself becomes an observer. The naming of the animals clearly has an objective impact on the newly created world; in a way, it continues the process of its differentiation and structuring (‘and whatever the human called a living creature, that was its name’). Woman, however, has been fully differentiated from the onset and came on stage bearing her generic name (‘and Yahweh God built the side … into a woman [’iššāh]’, Gen. 2.22). The naming speech of hā’ādām (‘she shall be called ’iššāh’, Gen. 2.23) will not impart any new qualities to woman or communicate anything new about her to Yahweh or the reader. From a semiotic point of view, woman will remain untouched and unaltered by meeting her counterpart. On the one hand, she is totally objectified by Yahweh and hā’ādām; on the other hand, as an object she resists change, is immutable, while her mere presence effects a deep transformation on hā’ādām. Presumably, this is what Yahweh has meant all along. By bringing woman back to the human, he does not need to see what she would be called, neither does he expect anything to be done to her. Instead, Yahweh presents hā’ādām with ’iššāh and allows him to work out his own identity as a function of hers. If there is, therefore, any new identity emerging from the naming speech of Gen. 2.23-24, it should be that of man and not of woman. By bringing woman to hā’ādām, Yahweh hands over to man the power to recognize and to interpret female reality. To attribute the initial interpretation to man is representative of the Hebrew narrative, where the reader is constantly invited to share the male perspective on the female other. However, the narrator offers no comment or endorsement to the naming speech, like the one given to

51. Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, 97.

1. The Subject and Knowledge in Genesis 2–3

21

the naming of the animals (Gen. 2.19b). Neither does Yahweh linger around to see whether or not woman is recognized as the helper – in fact, he disappears from the narrative until after the transgression (Gen. 3.8). His task is completed, and the stage is set for the intended drama. All communication and agency in the narrative is now handed over to the subject, who will attempt to make sense of the other.

hā’ādām and the Interpretation of Gender (Gen. 2.23-24) The emergence of man At the heart of hā’ādām’s interpretation of gender lies the naming phrase: ‘She shall be called woman (’iššāh) for from man (’îš) she was taken’ (Gen. 2.23). According to this interpretation, woman derives her particular name and identity from man. The generic similarity between the two is expressed linguistically through the assonance of ’îš and ’iššāh. However, the use of the gendered term ’îš in this aetiology is problematic. Until this moment, there has been no mention of ’îš in the narrative, and yet hā’ādām refers to ‘man’ as an existing, familiar reality that mediates for him the new reality of woman. By saying ‘from ’îš she was taken’, hā’ādām clearly refers to Gen. 2.22, where Yahweh fashioned into woman ‘the side that he has taken from hā’ādām’. The two parallel actions of ‘taking from’ fuse together ’îš and hā’ādām and put both of them at the origin of woman. In making woman derive from ’îš, the subject formulates his own structural ambiguity: he keeps the name of the ungendered earth-creature, yet formally identifies himself as male. As Lerner observes, ‘the real naming that occurs here is the adam’s naming himself ish, man’.52 Bal offers a psychoanalytical explanation of the confused identity of hā’ādām, who for her ‘focalizes his earlier version from his actual state’. Having no memories of his ungendered existence, man here imagines that he has always been a sexual being. Bal ironically calls this character ‘hā’ādām the Second’, implying that the original name ‘is definitely lost to its previous meaning’.53 Although this reading is attractive in that it explains why the human perceives himself as male from Gen. 2.23 onwards, to draw a definite demarcation line between hā’ādām as human and as man seems to make away with the ambiguity, central to the semiotic construction of the implicitly dominant subject – a topic that will be discussed below. It is possible, as Bal points out, to understand the words ‘taken from’ in the sense of separation.54 Bal stresses that this interpretation of the origin of the sexes is consistent with the model of creation in Genesis 1, where God creates by separating different substances from each other – the light from the darkness,

52. Lerner, Eternally Eve, 133. 53. Bal, Lethal Love, 116–17. 54. ‘Out of hā’ādām Yahweh made ’iššȃ and ’îš by separating the one from the other’ (Bal, Lethal Love, 117).

22

Construction of Gender and Identity in Genesis

the waters below from the waters above, dry land from sea.55 That woman is taken from or out of man could therefore refer to the inner differentiation of hā’ādām, the separation between his two sides that leads to the emergence of gender. However, one should not overstate the similarities between the processes of creation in Genesis 1 and 2. In Genesis 1, the separation between the cosmic elements does not impose any hierarchy of value or status. Here the order of the elements could be reversed: the separation of the light from the darkness implies the separation of the darkness from the light. On the contrary, the separation of woman from man in Gen. 2.23 has an asymmetric connotation of provenance and therefore cannot be reversed. hā’ādām draws the sexual and linguistic identity of ’iššāh from ’îš, and sees her as his derivative and not the other way round. The concept of male subjectivity, formulated by the earth-creature that has already lost its female component, comes on stage endowed with a higher semiotic position. And yet, paradoxically, it depends on the already existing female identity. If there is anything that defines the male subject at this stage, it is his claim of precedence over the being that was created before him. From one’s flesh to one flesh In establishing the sexual identities of woman and man, the speech of hā’ādām in Gen. 2.23-24 stresses the unity of the two gendered beings. It starts with a declaration of the common nature of man and woman (‘this is, this time, bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh’) and concludes with an achievement of their final union (‘they become one flesh’). Biblical scholars have often read this text within the social and theological context of kinship, covenant and marriage.56 Claus Westermann sees in it a declaration of ‘personal community of man and woman’,

55. Van Wolde has produced a strong argument for interpreting the action of creation in Genesis 1 as that of separation. In her linguistic and textual analysis of the usage of the verb br’, commonly translated as ‘to create’, in the first creation account, she has concluded that the verb denotes spatial separation (van Wolde, ‘Why the Verb ‫ ברא‬Does Not Mean “to Create” in Genesis 1.1–2.4a’, JSOT 34 (1) [2009]: 3–23; for the subsequent debate see B. Becking and M. C. A. Korpel, ‘To Create, to Separate or to Construct: An Alternative for a Recent Proposal as to the Interpretation of ‫ ברא‬in Genesis 1.1–2.4a’, JHS 10 [2010], article 3, available online: http://www.jhsonline.org/Articles/article_131.pdf; van Wolde and Robert Rezetko, ‘Semantics and the Semantics of ‫ברא‬: A Rejoinder to the Arguments Advanced by B. Becking and M. Korpel’, JHS 11 [2011], article 11, available online: http://www.jhsonline .org/Articles/article_156.pdf). 56. Thus, von Rad describes the woman in Genesis 2 as a bride (Genesis, 84); Wenham sees Gen. 2.24 as a reference to marriage as a kinship relation (Wenham, Genesis 1–15, 71). See also Cassuto, Genesis I, 136–7; Nahum M. Sarna, The JPS Commentary: Genesis. The Traditional Hebrew Text with the New JPS Translation (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 23.

1. The Subject and Knowledge in Genesis 2–3

23

Trible, a rare statement of gender equality.57 N. P. Bratsiotis in his extensive TDOT article presents a similar view, relating Gen. 2.23-24 to God’s institution of marriage as an equal partnership between man and woman.58 This understanding has met with objections from a number of feminist scholars.59 Carol Meyers, in particular, has opposed the idea of reading social institutions into the archetypal literary setting of the garden story. Interpreting Gen. 2.23-24 from the perspective of love and marriage seems to lead away from the text’s central process of establishing narrative identities. Moreover, one could hardly effectively apply the idea of partnership and equality to a text that does not include woman’s point of view. The speech conveys hā’ādām’s perspective on woman and his interpretation of unity. His vision of gender is therefore essentially biased. I suggest that this bias is consistent with the structurally ambiguous identity of hā’ādām and might be seen as its expression. In other words, to understand better what is being said, one should look at who is speaking. So who exactly is naming woman in Gen. 2.23-24? The word hā’ādām here should be denoting a different kind of creature, since the original hā’ādām has lost one side in Gen. 2.21-22. In its place, the incomplete, lacking body of the human being receives a different substance, ‘flesh’, which restores the appearance of former totality. The semiotic implications of this procedure come to the fore when hā’ādām attempts to make sense of female reality. Remarkably, the prevailing notion in his speech is that of flesh. The term bāśār, used three times in the space of two verses, seems to encapsulate the subject’s attitude towards the gendered other. It marks both the starting point of sexual differentiation (‘flesh of my flesh’) and its outcome (becoming ‘one flesh’). Seen as hā’ādām’s preferred metaphor, bāśār can have several connotations. In its most literal sense, the term bāśār signifies flesh as animal and/or human musculature, body as a whole and, by extension, all living things, and emphasizes the physical, bodily aspect of living creatures.60 In Gen. 2.23-24, this first layer of meaning points to the physical nature of woman’s unity with man, both in her physical derivation from him and in the consummation of their union implied by the phrase, ‘they become one flesh’.61 At another level, used as part of the kinship formula ‘x is y’s flesh’, the term describes a relationship between brothers and, by extension, between any blood relatives (cf. Gen. 29.14; 37.27; Lev. 18.6; 25.49; Judg. 9.2; 2 Sam. 5.1; 19.12, 13; 1 Chron. 11.1).62 hā’ādām’s speech, according to Bal, holds this precise connotation,

57. Westermann, Genesis 1–11, 232; Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, 99. 58. N. P. Bratsiotis, ‘‫ש‬ ׁ ‫’ ִאי‬, TDOT I, 222–35. 59. See Meyers, Rediscovering Eve, 93; Bird, ‘“Male and Female He Created Them”’, 155; Lerner, Eternally Eve, 60–1. 60. DCH II, 277; BDB, 142. 61. Brett reads the idea of being ‘one flesh’ as the celebration of an intimacy (Brett, Genesis, 31). See also Bratsiotis, ‘‫ש‬ ׁ ‫’ ִאי‬, 227–8. 62. DCH II, 277 gives ‘relative’ as one of the meanings of bāśār. Cf. BDB, 142.

24

Construction of Gender and Identity in Genesis

stressing the common origin of man and woman as the son and daughter of hā’ādām and their ensuing equality as siblings.63 Overlying these general interpretations of the term ‘flesh’ is the particular perspective of hā’ādām in 2.23-24. Coming from the male subject whose body is partially made of flesh (Gen. 2.21), the emphasis on bāśār communicates more than mere physicality. On the one hand, the ‘flesh’, which emerged not as a thing in itself but as a replacement and a compensation for what later becomes woman, is a continuous reminder of the missing side and, as such, connotes lack, desire and longing. This longing for the lost wholeness moves man to ‘cling’ to his wife, so that the two become ‘one flesh’. On the other hand, flesh also points to the act of concealment, of hiding physical signs of lack, by which Yahweh imitates the totality and therefore, the permanence of hā’ādām. The notion of flesh in the speech is therefore loaded with double symbolism. It alludes to a range of contradictory motives that form the basis of male subjectivity in the narrative: it speaks simultaneously of longing and its denial, of an experience of separation and a claim of totality. By calling woman ‘flesh of his flesh’, hā’ādām commits a structural error, since bāśār as a signifier is exclusive to the semiotic construction of a male body. The unity of flesh is therefore a unity on man’s terms, bāśār ‘eḥād being a supposedly ‘common’ denominator, but that in which woman has no signifier of her own. Semiotically, the subject’s vision of wholeness is achieved by subsuming, that is, annihilating, woman as the other. Consequently, the formula ‘two become one’ communicates an idea of the unity based on suppression of the heterogeneous. Man in this picture carries all the unity, and woman, all the difference. Elsewhere in Genesis, the expression ‘x is y’s flesh’ displays similar ambiguity. In Gen. 29.14 Jacob’s uncle Laban welcomes his nephew in Haran, saying ‘you are my bone and my flesh’. Here Laban refers to the ties of kinship that unite the two men, but his subsequent exploitative attitude towards Jacob gives his words a double edge, turning them into a statement of bondage: ‘you are my flesh’ = ‘you are mine’. This position of Laban becomes particularly clear in the parting scene, when Laban attributes to himself Jacob’s family and possessions, saying ‘the daughters are my daughters, and the children are my children, and the flocks are my flocks, and all that you see is mine’ (Gen. 31.43). The words ‘you are my flesh’ in this context acquire a connotation of dominance or encroachment on the identity of the other. A similar usage occurs in the story of Joseph. In Gen. 37.27 Judah persuades his brothers not to kill Joseph but to sell him instead to the Ishmaelites, arguing that he is their brother, their own flesh. Here too, the phrase ‘he is our flesh’ expresses a deeply ambiguous stance of Judah: by alluding to the ties of kinship, he apparently seeks to save his brother’s life, yet at the same time, he symbolically eliminates Joseph, removes him from the stage by selling him into slavery to a foreign land. Judah’s entire argument about the humane disposal of Joseph has a connotation of personal gain (‘what profit is it if we kill our brother’, Gen. 37.26). Joseph is not

63. Bal, Lethal Love, 116. See also Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, 99; Walter Brueggemann, ‘Of the Same Flesh and Bone (Gen. 2, 23a)’, CBQ 32 (1970): 532–42.

1. The Subject and Knowledge in Genesis 2–3

25

annihilated; rather, his identity is taken up, subsumed by his brothers in the form of its symbolic equivalent – twenty pieces of silver. For Judah, as well as for Laban, the unity of flesh is underscored by a claim of totality, achieved by taking over the other. To conclude, the concept of flesh appears to be central both to the semiotic construction of a male body (Gen. 2.21-22) and to the formation of the point of view of the male subject (Gen. 2.23-24). As Lois Bueler remarks, along similar lines, ‘she is created out of his body so that he may simultaneously enjoy both identity with and primacy over her, for she makes possible the distinct, male, progenitive, dominant human figure Adam becomes’.64 In this sense, the creation and naming of woman lays the ground for what will become a prevalent vision of gender in the biblical narrative. How does this perspective of the male subject fit in with the overall plot, and in particular with Yahweh’s design? By bringing woman to hā’ādām, Yahweh invites man to recognize and assess her as his other and thus to answer the question whether or not she constitutes ‘ēzer kenegdô, a ‘helper corresponding to him’. As van Wolde rightly observes, man pays no attention to the ‘ēzer aspect of woman – which is not surprising, for Yahweh has not told him about it – yet he seems to recognize her other aspect, that of matching or corresponding, kenegdô.65 He takes the idea of correspondence too far, however, seeing the new creature not so much as his partner, but rather as part of himself. As a result, his stance is to subsume and dominate woman’s subjectivity. Ironically, he himself seems to disappear in the process, his own subjectivity exhausted by his striving towards appropriation, since from the moment woman is created, he has no preoccupations other than ‘clinging to his wife’. One could see this pattern of appropriation as part of Yahweh’s ruse. In order that his double play could work, man should regard woman as ‘flesh of his flesh’. Only in that case will woman’s action at the critical moment be repeated by man without thinking (‘and she ate, and she also gave to her husband with her, and he ate’, Gen. 3.6). Woman’s role here is deeply dichotomous: she is central to the main transformation of the narrative but peripheral to the subject and so has to be undermined. The perfect partner (or the perfect part?) of hā’ādām, woman is also a perfect instrument for Yahweh. The naming speech of hā’ādām in Gen. 2.2324 therefore implies Yahweh’s success: he has now found the helper needed for the drama of the human acquisition of knowledge to unfold.

The Human Beings and Knowledge (Gen. 2.25–3.7) The serpent and the subversion of Yahweh’s voice Following the naming of woman, the narrative describes the new couple as naked (‘arûmmîm) and unashamed (Gen. 2.25). This detail points to their perceived unity. Being naked, hā’ādām and his wife are nevertheless not exposed, for they are 64. Lois E. Bueler, The Tested Woman Plot (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2001), 17. 65. Van Wolde, Words Become Worlds, 19.

26

Construction of Gender and Identity in Genesis

not conscious of their exposure and therefore do not feel shame. By implication, their personal or gender boundaries do not yet exist. The humans are now two, yet they still perceive each other as one. As Landy observes, their ‘nakedness threatens immediate dissolution into “one flesh” (Gen. 2.24)’.66 For hā’ādām, this is consistent with his understanding of woman as his own flesh; for woman, who has yet no voice of her own, this merely reflects his vision. At this point, the serpent comes on stage, described as the most subtle (‘ārûm) of the animals that Yahweh has created (Gen. 3.1).67 The term ‘ārûm, ‘prudent, crafty’, in the Hebrew Bible manifests a range of meanings.68 In Proverbs, the root ‘rm is invariably positive and denotes prudence, wisdom and foresight.69 Along similar lines, the LXX translates ‘ārûm in Gen. 3.1 with the positive term phronimōtatos, ‘most sagacious’ – a superlative term used in the Greek Pentateuch only in Gen. 41.33, 39 to describe the wisdom of Joseph, which allows him to rule over Egypt.70 Outside Proverbs, however, the meaning of ‘ārûm has negative connotations of plotting, craftiness and deceit (cf. 1 Sam. 23.22; Josh. 9.3ff, Exod. 21.14; Job 5.12, 13; 15.5). Scholars have widely commented on the ambiguity of the term in Gen. 3.1, where it, on the one hand, points to the serpent’s association with knowledge and, on the other hand, anticipates the cunning nature it will show in its temptation of woman.71 The word ‘ārûm plays directly on ‘ārôm, ‘naked’, suggesting a link between the couple’s yet unrecognized distinctions, implied in the concept of nakedness, and the role the serpent is going to play in their transformation.72

66. Landy, Paradoxes of Paradise, 213. 67. Here I follow Landy’s translation of ‘ārûm as ‘subtle’, which is sensitive to the role the serpent plays in the scene (see Paradoxes of Paradise, 211). 68. DCH VI, 563–4. For an overview of the usage of ‘ārûm in the Hebrew Bible see H. Niehr, ‘‫’עַָרם‬, TDOT XI, 361–6. 69. Cf. Prov. 1.4; 8.5, 12; 12.16, 23; 13.16; 14.8, 15, 18; 15.5; 19.25; 22.3; 27.12. 70. See C. T. Robert Hayward, ‘Guarding Head and Heel: Observations on Septuagint Genesis 3:15’, in Studies in the Greek Bible: Essays in honor of Francis T. Gignac, ed. Jeremy Corley and Vincent Skemp (CBQMS 44; Washington, DC: The Catholic Biblical Association of America, 2008), 33. 71. See Hamilton, Genesis 1–17, 187–8; Wenham, Genesis 1–15, 72; see also Niehr, ‘‫’עַָרם‬, 363. Walter Moberly argues that the use of the term in 3.1 does not have the positive connotation of wisdom that characterizes it in Proverbs (R. W. L. Moberly, ‘Did the Serpent Get It Right?’, JTS 39 [1988]: 25). James Charlesworth demonstrates ideological changes in the interpretation of the term in his overview of ancient translations of 3.1 (James H. Charlesworth, The Good and Evil Serpent: How a Universal Symbol Became Christianized [The Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010], 291–2). 72. Notably, the word ‘arûmmîm, ‘naked’, in 2.25 shows a set of vowels, different from êrummîm, ‘naked’, in 3.7. This unusual vocalization is used to show more clearly the similarity between ‘arûmmîm, ‘naked’, in 2.25, and ‘ārûm, ‘cunning’ and thus to stress the link between the human couple and the serpent (see Cassuto, Genesis I, 143–4).

1. The Subject and Knowledge in Genesis 2–3

27

Notably, the serpent is the wisest ‘of all the animals of the field (mikkōl ḥayyat haśśādeh) which Yahweh God had made’. The text here makes a clear allusion to ‘all the animals of the field (kōl ḥayyat haśśādeh)’, created in Gen. 2.19. Being the wisest among them, the serpent serves as their collective representation, an animal par excellence. And since Yahweh conceives of the animals as potential ‘helpers’ for hā’ādām, the serpent too is structurally linked to the idea of ‘help’ and thus to the figure of the actual ‘helper’ – woman. Therefore it seems fitting that the serpent should discuss the meaning of God’s prohibition with woman, leaving hā’ādām out of the picture. In parallel to Yahweh, who first addressed hā’ādām with the prohibition, the serpent addresses woman with its paraphrase. In Gen. 3.1 the serpent says, ‘Indeed! And so God has said, “You shall not eat from any tree in the garden”!’ Although most modern and ancient translations, including the LXX, render the serpent’s speech as a question, some scholars have pointed out that the Hebrew text is more naturally a statement.73 In it the serpent exploits the ambiguity of God’s communication, rearranging the words of the prohibition to make it appear absolute, extended to all trees. Scholars have discussed at length the subversive character of the serpent’s speech, with descriptions ranging from ‘cunning’ (Phyllis Trible) and a ‘false statement’ (E. Speiser) to an ‘unadulterated distortion’ (Victor Hamilton) and a ‘total travesty of God’s original generous permission’ (Wenham).74 Walter Moberly has suggested a more nuanced approach. Although he admits that the serpent in Gen. 3.1 draws an unfavourable picture of God as unreasonably restrictive, Moberly also points at the serpent’s masterly use of God’s language, which makes the accusations of falsehood untenable. The serpent repeats God’s phrase kōl ‘ēṣ, which means either ‘every tree’ or ‘any tree’, but leaves its meaning open by putting it in a negative sentence. One can therefore read the serpent’s version of the prohibition as ‘you shall not eat of every tree in the garden’, which agrees with God’s banning just one tree in Gen. 2.17.75 Strictly speaking, the serpent in Gen. 3.1 does not contradict God’s command at all; instead, he plays on the contradiction inherent in God’s own discourse and covertly completes its logic.

73. Cf. Moberly, ‘Did the Serpent Get It Right?’, 5–6; Hamilton, Genesis 1–17, 186 n. 1; E. A. Speiser, Genesis (Anchor Bible 1; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964), 23. The present translation reflects John Skinner’s reading of the speech as ‘a half-interrogative, halfreflective exclamation’ (A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Genesis [ICC; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1910], 73). Charlesworth challenges this view, believing that to interpret 3.1b as a statement leads to a negative assessment of the serpent as a deceiver, and argues on the basis of the LXX translation of 3.1 that the serpent here is asking woman a question (Charlesworth, The Good and Evil Serpent, 289–91). Below we shall see that the serpent’s speech, seen as a statement, is not necessarily false. 74. Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, 109; Speiser, Genesis, 23; Hamilton, Genesis 1–17, 189; Wenham, Genesis 1–15, 73. 75. See Moberly, ‘Did the Serpent Get It Right?’, 4–6; Charlesworth corroborates Moberly’s argument in The Good and Evil Serpent, 291.

28

Construction of Gender and Identity in Genesis

from any tree in the garden (A) you shall certainly eat sanction all trees

-

on the day you eat from it (A1) you shall certainly die violation one tree

(A1 ) you shall not eat from any tree in the garden non-sanction all trees

(A) from the tree of the knowledge of good and bad you shall not eat prohibition one tree

opposition contradiction implication

Figure 1.2 Semiotic structure of the discourses of Yahweh and the serpent (Gen. 2.1617; 3.1).

The semiotic square in Figure 1.2 illustrates the structural connection between the two discourses, whereby the serpent’s voice (A1) completes the antithesis implicit in God’s command (cf. Figure 1.1). The serpent’s interpretation in Figure 1.2 supplies the missing element to the incomplete semiotic structure of Yahweh’s speech in Figure 1.1. From a semiotic perspective, the serpent’s discourse in Gen. 3.1 is inherent in God’s speech and is only subversive inasmuch as it brings to the surface the inherent subversiveness of the latter. The serpent contradicts Yahweh more directly in Gen. 3.4-5, questioning the motives behind his prohibition. But even here the contradiction is moderated, as the apparently opposite perspectives of God and the serpent seem to overlap. On the one hand, the serpent forcefully denies Yahweh’s death warning (‘You will certainly not die!’, Gen. 3.4; cf. 2.17); on the other hand, Yahweh himself later agrees with the serpent that eating of the tree makes the humans ‘like God, knowing good and bad’ (Gen. 3.5; cf. 3.22). At different points throughout the narrative, God, the serpent, or both of them are proven to be accurate. The serpent is correct, since the couple do not die when they eat of the tree of knowledge, and instead, their eyes are opened (Gen. 3.5, 7). Yet God is also correct in his death warning, since the knowledge of good and bad brings about eventual death of hā’ādām, symbolized by his return to dust (Gen. 2.17; 3.18-19). And finally, the humans experience the knowledge as something else again, since for them, ironically, what the serpent promises to be a godlike state turns out to be a realization of their own nakedness (Gen. 3.7; cf. 3.5). As the narrative unfolds, every statement about the knowledge of good and bad is simultaneously discredited and upheld, subverted and supported through the interplay of different points of view. With ambiguity pervading all levels of communication in the narrative, the question of who tells the truth cannot have a simple answer. Interesting in this regard is the debate between Moberly and Barr, centred on the problem of ‘a lying God and a truthful serpent’. Both scholars seek to demonstrate the validity of

1. The Subject and Knowledge in Genesis 2–3

29

God’s death warrant in Gen. 2.17. Thus, Moberly exonerates Yahweh from telling a lie by interpreting his words metaphorically: the statement ‘you shall certainly die’ is meant to warn hā’ādām about the ‘spiritual death’, which expects those who cut themselves off from God’s presence.76 Opposing Moberly’s reading, Barr defends the widespread view that the humans in the story do not die because God, being merciful, changes his mind or ‘repents’ his words.77 However, both interpretative solutions find little support in the narrative. A more sympathetic approach to the text would be to attribute the notion of truth or validity not to any particular character or proposition, but to the narrative communication as a whole. Seen in this way, God, the serpent and the narrator all participate in creating the complex and dynamic correspondences that together shape the narrative reality. God’s role here is central not because of his authority or reliability, but because he is the one who sets up the parameters of the fundamental ambiguity of the narrative world. Due to its subversive interpretation of Yahweh’s command and the consequences it has for the humans, the serpent has traditionally been blamed for humanity’s fall, being seen as a tempter of humanity, an evil force that corrupts the relation between the humans and their creator. It is in this capacity of the ‘deceiver’ who acts against God’s will that both the New Testament and the rabbinical writings associate the serpent with Satan. Westermann has opposed this inference on theological grounds, stating that in the Yahwist’s view, the serpent could not oppose God’s will, being itself one of God’s creatures.78 I suggest that the same applies on textual grounds. Until now, the narrative has presented Yahweh’s role as purposeful in every detail. Even when his motives are not revealed, they can be inferred, constructed from his internal monologue and his actions and appear to follow a certain logic. By stressing Yahweh as the creator of the serpent in the verse in which the serpent questions Yahweh’s words, the text suggests that this questioning is somehow related to Yahweh’s purpose. Moreover, since the same verse says that Yahweh has created the serpent as wise, it seems that an exercise of this wisdom through the serpent’s subversive voice might be exactly what Yahweh expects of it. A psychological and symbolic analysis by Landy attaches to the character of the serpent a connotation of rebellion, of the power of chaos that overthrows the established order. For him, the role of the serpent is ‘to introduce the plurality of meaning, the intrinsic ambiguity, and hence deceptiveness of the world’.79 To an

76. Moberly, ‘Did the Serpent Get It Right?’, 9, 18–19; see also ‘Did the Interpreters Get It Right? Genesis 2–3 Reconsidered’, JST 59 (2008): 22–40. 77. James Barr, ‘Is God a Liar? (Genesis 2–3) – and Related Matters’, JTS 57 (2006): 19; for similar interpretations see also Skinner, Genesis, 67; Johnson Lim, ‘Did the Scholar(s) Get It Right?’, in The One Who Reads May Run: Essays in Honour of Edgar W. Conrad, ed. Roland Boer, Michael Carden and Julie Kelso (London: T&T Clark, 2012), 69–79. 78. Westermann, Genesis 1–11, 322–7; similarly Cassuto, Genesis I, 142. 79. Landy, Paradoxes of Paradise, 223.

30

Construction of Gender and Identity in Genesis

extent, Landy’s reading, sensitive to the role of the serpent, downplays the image of Yahweh as the source of double meaning.80 While the subversive character of the serpent is hardly disputable, it is not the serpent that introduces ambiguity or deceptiveness into the narrative world. Rather, by virtue of being wise it sees beyond the established order and perceives its underlying ambiguity and plurality of meaning. The serpent not only recognizes opposite meanings, but reverses Yahweh’s pattern of repression, uncovering the meaning that has been hidden. What it tells woman is therefore not a lie but a secret: ‘You shall certainly not die! For God knows that on the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and bad’ (Gen. 3.4-5). The following narrative will prove most of these predictions to be accurate. First, the humans do not die on the day they eat of the tree. Although the concept of death is formulated in Gen. 3.19 as part of Yahweh’s punishment, hā’ādām will live to see his numerous descendants and will die at the ripe old age of nine hundred and thirty (Gen. 5.5). In her turn, woman’s death will never be mentioned. Second, the eyes of woman and man indeed are opened as they see each other’s nakedness (Gen. 3.7). Third, in Gen. 3.22 Yahweh admits that, having eaten of the forbidden tree, hā’ādām became like him (lit. ‘like one of us, knowing good and bad’). But if the serpent is right about the consequences of disobedience, then it must have been Yahweh who misguided the human by his death warning in Gen. 2.17. The logic of the narrative upholds the subversive interpretation of the serpent and renders problematic Yahweh’s authoritative command. The serpent ceases to be a disruptive and scheming enemy; instead, it seems to be rising out of the deeper layers of the narrative, invested with a superior knowledge of its moving forces. Knowing what God knows and revealing it to the humans, the serpent brings to the surface the other, repressed side of Yahweh, which arguably constitutes his real agenda. Similarly, for Landy, ‘the serpent symbolizes a side of God (the tempter; good-and-evil) he refuses to recognize’.81 In this, the serpent functions as Yahweh’s Shadow. It would, however, be a mistake to consider Yahweh’s repression as something unconscious. The deity is in control of the serpent – his own creature – having made it the wisest of all the other helpers and therefore fit for his purpose. The serpent’s rebellion against God – a fruitful motif in the history of reception – could be seen as a premeditated part of Yahweh’s ploy and an expression of his inner dichotomy. Dissociating from his Shadow, he simultaneously puts it to his service. In her insightful analysis, Bal has given a semiotic ground to the serpent’s subversive unity with Yahweh. In relation to the central action of the myth, the

80. Karolien Vermeulen has argued along similar lines, focusing on Yahweh’s speech in 3:15. She views ambiguity as the leading element in the discourses of both the snake and God, but, in contrast to the present study, sees the snake as the one who initiates the ambiguous communication which is then ‘multiplied’ by the divine character (‘Eeny Meeny Miny Moe Who Is the Craftiest to Go?’, JHS 10 [2010]: 12). 81. Landy, Paradoxes of Paradise, 178.

1. The Subject and Knowledge in Genesis 2–3

31

deity, the serpent and the tree share the actantial position of the destinateur: ‘the tree as a source of temptation, the serpent as the actual tempter, and God as the prohibitor of the action’.82 Despite their opposite points of view and the contrast in their narrative status, the deity and the serpent are structurally related by their collaboration. With respect to the transformation – the passing on of knowledge to the humans – one cannot function without the other. Woman and the tree As a character, woman stands at the centre of most of the contradictions of the narrative. She is united with hā’ādām as well as distanced from him, is part of the subject as well as his other. She is created to be the ‘ēzer, ‘helper’, of hā’ādām, but her ‘help’ leads to his expulsion from Eden. The narrative makes her responsible for bringing death into human existence, yet at the end of it she receives the name ḥawwāh, ‘life’. In the context of Yahweh’s law, her actions are impulsive and irresponsible, while from the perspective of knowledge they appear purposeful and consistent. This ambiguity of woman’s position comes from her semiotic association with knowledge. Although she plays a central role in Yahweh’s covert design to give knowledge to the humans, like the design itself, she is never openly acknowledged. From this perspective, the disavowal of woman and its ideological implications for the patriarchal discourse stem from Yahweh’s apparent repression of knowledge. But what about woman’s own point of view? Created, both narratologically and symbolically, in the ‘shadow’ of the forbidden tree, does she know about the role she has to play? Though the text does not record any communication between her and Yahweh, in Gen. 3.2-3 she gives the serpent an account of Yahweh’s commandment. Clearly, woman knows about the forbidden tree and its link to death. However, her version of Gen. 2.16-17 is slightly different from the original. She exaggerates the strictness of the taboo, saying that God has forbidden not only to eat but also to touch the fruit of the tree. More crucially, she identifies the forbidden tree not as the tree of the knowledge of good and bad but as ‘the tree in the middle of the garden’. In this, she contradicts Gen. 2.9, according to which the middle of the garden is occupied by the tree of life and the tree of knowledge alongside it. Which of the two trees is woman talking about? Is it possible that she would subsequently eat of the tree of life, the real ‘tree in the middle’? The narrative remains remarkably vague on this point. In fact, despite its focus on the acquisition of knowledge, Genesis 3 never explicitly names the tree of the knowledge of good and bad. Its identity is always inferred from the context, presented differently by different characters: ‘any tree of the garden’ (serpent, v. 1), ‘the tree in the middle of the garden’ (woman, v. 3), ‘the tree from which I commanded you not to eat’ (Yahweh, vv. 11, 17) or simply ‘the tree’ (narrator, v. 6). The different angle each character has on the forbidden tree points to its

82. Bal, Lethal Love, 124.

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Construction of Gender and Identity in Genesis

underlying instability as a semiotic object. Each description simultaneously emphasizes the tree as a sign and leads away from it as a concrete reality. The serpent questions the particularity of the tree, equating it to ‘any tree in the garden’. Yahweh, on the contrary, emphasizes one particular tree, yet avoids calling it by name and defines it by its tabooed status (Gen. 3.11, 17). Woman, in her speech, constructs the forbidden tree spatially as something she might have heard of but has never seen. She thinks it brings death, but this knowledge is clearly not firsthand. She locates it in the middle of the garden, but she must have never come close to it, otherwise she would have seen the other tree alongside it (cf. Gen. 2.9). How does she recognize the forbidden tree, or else how does it happen to be right in front of her when the dialogue is over? What is it that gives concrete reality to this shifting object which is simultaneously a non-tree and every tree, which brings death as well as imparts God’s knowledge of good and bad and which might even be confused with the tree of life? It seems that in the midst of all these varied and contradictory descriptions, the tree in question only becomes the tree of the knowledge of good and bad when woman experiences it as such. The instability of verbal communication causes her to move to direct experience, and her experience invests the unstable object with concrete and positive meaning: in Gen. 3.6a she looks at the tree and sees that it is ‘good for food, delight to the eyes, and desirable to make one wise’. Woman looks at the tree because looking, as opposed to eating or touching, is not forbidden. At another level, looking is emphasized because it serves to activate the mechanism of desire that drives the central transformation. From the onset of the garden narrative, looking has been linked with desire. In Gen. 2.9 Yahweh plants the trees that are ‘attractive to look at (neḥmād lemar’eh) and good for food’. The appearance of the trees is meant to arouse desire (the root ḥmd means ‘to desire, delight in’), to entice one to eat of their fruit. However, hā’ādām, for whose benefit the trees are planted, is only associated with the alimentary aspect of the trees (cf. Gen. 2.16-17). The visual aspect of reality seems to be lost on him, and so in Gen. 3.6b, he eats of the forbidden tree without looking and, apparently, without thinking. The forbidden tree arouses in him no desire, and he eats of it, as he will confess in Gen. 3.12, simply because it has been offered to him by woman, whom God gave him and whom he regards as ‘flesh of his flesh’ and an extension of himself. From this angle, woman provides a missing link, a connection between the subject, incapable of vision and desire, and therefore of reflection and choice, and the value object. She looks at the tree and sees it as desirable. One might note that the order in which woman perceives different characteristics of the tree reverses that of Gen. 2.9. There, the narrator constructed looking as a precondition of eating. By contrast, for woman in 3.6, the food aspect of the tree is its first and most apparent feature that leads to the delights of seeing and knowing. The tree is not only ‘good for food’ (ṭôb lema’akāl), but also ‘a desire to the eyes (ta’awāh lā‘ênayim)’ and ‘desirable to make (one) wise (neḥmād lehaśkîl)’ (Gen. 3.6). It is interesting that the language of desire is not applied to the alimentary properties of the tree: woman sees it as ṭôb lema’akāl and not neḥmād lema’akāl. She feels

1. The Subject and Knowledge in Genesis 2–3

eating

seeing

33

knowing

v. 5

when you eat of it

your eyes shall be opened

you will be like gods, knowing good and bad

v. 6a

good for food

delight to the eyes

desirable to make one wise

v. 6b-7

she ate …and he ate

the eyes of both of them were opened

they knew that they were naked

Figure 1.3 The parallel semiotic sequences in Gen. 3.5-7.

no desire to eat, but will eat in order to see and to know.83 Looking/seeing and knowing/understanding are therefore emphasized as the ultimate motives for woman’s action. It is notable that the same structural pattern ‘eating → seeing → knowing’ could be found in the serpent’s vision of events (Gen. 3.5) as well as in the description of the actual transformation in Gen. 3.6b-7 (Figure 1.3). Now that she has seen the tree for herself, whose point of view does woman come to share? Apparently, her vision of the tree disproves Yahweh’s warning, for nothing in what she has seen points to death. Instead, she sees that the tree gives understanding. The verb śākal, ‘to be prudent, wise, successful’,84 echoes both the serpent’s own wisdom (‘ārōm) and its allusion to God’s knowledge of good and bad (yāda‘), all of which seems to indicate that the serpent was right. Yet the use of the hiphil form of śākal ‘to make wise’ also points to woman’s uncertainty and her own search for meaning. In Gen. 3.6 she faces the discord between the authoritative voice of Yahweh and the subversive voice of the serpent and tries to make sense of the fragmented, contradictory world in front of her. Doing so, she invests ‘the tree’, a semiotically unstable object, with a new function and thus completes its construction. Arguably, her desire for understanding – a desire to be ‘made wise’ – turns the tree she is looking at into the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The act of seeing in Gen. 3.6 stands out as the only instance of direct sensory experience in the garden narrative. Here the omniscient narrator invites the reader to look at the tree with woman. Unlike what she has heard – words with their double meaning – what she sees resists doubt and equivocality. Bal observes that the Hebrew verb r’h, ‘to see’, has a strong connotation of truth: ‘To see is to have insight into what really is, behind false appearances or incomplete information.’85 In woman’s eyes, and therefore, in truth, the value of the tree is unquestionable, for it offers sustenance, beauty and insight. This positive evaluation both anticipates and justifies woman’s next move.

83. Kimelman stresses this anticipated gain from eating, which makes the tree first appeal to the palate and then to the eye (‘The Seduction of Eve’, 8). 84. DCH VIII, 150–1. 85. Bal, Lethal Love, 122.

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Construction of Gender and Identity in Genesis

Compared to the gradual build-up of suspense around the taboo object, the culmination of the narrative is brief: ‘She took of the fruit of the tree and ate, and gave also to her husband with her, and he ate’ (Gen. 3.6b). Jerome Walsh has demonstrated how the metre and the sonic composition of v. 6 emphasize the final word wayyō’kal, ‘and he ate’, making it the centre of the entire narrative structure.86 Thus, despite woman’s leading role, it is man’s breaking of the prohibition that is presented as the climax of the semiotic transactions of Genesis 2–3. In the verbal sequence ‘she ate … she gave … and he ate’, woman’s action of giving the fruit to man stands between the two symmetrical instances of eating and shows woman’s primary role as a mediator. And this mediation is the last thing she does. Never again will the narrator focalize on her experience or allow her to act independently. Created to be a helper suitable to hā’ādām, she has now fulfilled her task. It is notable that man reappears on stage as emphatically linked to woman (‘her husband with her’). For Umberto Cassuto, this use of pronominal constructions stresses woman’s leading role in the action.87 Lerner draws attention to the similar wording in Gen. 3.16, where woman is punished by desire for ‘her husband’, and interprets this linguistic link as an indication of a bond between woman and man.88 There is yet another way to look at the expression ‘with her’, since it might signify that man has been with woman all along, as her extension, and therefore must have heard her conversation with the serpent. The implications that man’s likely awareness of the preceding dialogue might have for his motives are, however, hidden from view. The same narrative strategy that makes woman a conscious subject, responsible for breaking Yahweh’s law, denies man the possibility to make a conscious choice, shifting the blame onto woman. ‘They knew that they were naked’ Once woman and man had eaten of the tree, ‘the eyes of both of them were opened and they knew that they were naked’ (Gen. 3.7). In the context of the serpent’s ambitious promise (‘you shall become like God, knowing good and bad’), this newly acquired knowledge appears thoroughly inadequate. Scholars have pointed out the contrast between the significant expectation attached to the forbidden tree and the questionable benefit that it brings to the humans. Cassuto describes the knowledge of nakedness as a bitter disappointment, a ‘wretched and grieving realisation’.89 Trible interprets the knowledge of nakedness as the opposite to what the serpent promised to woman. In her opinion, what the humans acquire through their disobedience is, ironically, not the divine knowledge, but the knowledge of

86. Jerome Walsh, ‘Genesis 2:4b–3:24: A Synchronic Approach’, JBL 96 (1977): 166. 87. Cassuto, Genesis I, 147–8. 88. Lerner, Eternally Eve, 95, 112, 198 n. 52. 89. Cassuto, Genesis I, 148; see also Talia Sutskover, Sight and Insight in Genesis: A Semantic Study (Hebrew Bible Monographs 56; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2013), 146.

1. The Subject and Knowledge in Genesis 2–3 serpent (v. 5)

1a your eyes will be opened

narrator (v. 7)

2a the eyes of both of them were opened

Yahweh (v. 22)

--

1b and you will be like God —

3 b the man has become like one of us

35

1c knowing good and bad 2 c and they knew that they were naked 3c knowing good and bad

Figure 1.4 Three perspectives on the consequences of transgression in Gen. 3.5, 7, 22.

‘their helplessness, insecurity, and defencelessness’.90 The humans, led by a desire to become godlike, become instead deficient and vulnerable, feeling ashamed of each other (Gen. 3.7; cf. 2.25) and afraid of Yahweh (Gen. 3.10). However, in this instance as elsewhere in the garden narrative, a different reading is possible. One should remark, to begin with, that the consequences of transgression in Genesis 2–3 are not clearly defined. We have already observed how the narrative destabilizes any attempt to identify the forbidden tree. The definition of its properties is similarly unstable. In fact, almost every character (except hā’ādām) has a different idea of what the tree does to the one who eats from it. According to Yahweh’s authoritative voice, eating of the tree of knowledge brings death to hā’ādām (Gen. 2.17), the idea with which woman initially agrees (Gen. 3.3). The serpent contradicts both woman and Yahweh (‘you will certainly not die’) and offers an alternative view (‘you shall become like God’, Gen. 3.5). This is followed by the narrator’s description of the actual event (Gen. 3.7) and Yahweh’s assessment of what has happened (Gen. 3.22). The last three statements in vv. 5, 7 and 22 display significant parallels (Figure 1.4). The serpent’s prediction in 1a is confirmed by the narrator’s report in 2a, which states, ‘the eyes of both of them were opened’ (v. 7). The rest of the serpent’s speech is strikingly similar to that of Yahweh in v. 22. Speaking respectively before and after the transgression, the serpent and Yahweh agree that, as a result of it, the humans become like God, ‘knowing good and bad’ (1b1c–3b3c). Under the double weight of this assessment, the discovery of nakedness in 2c becomes less ironic. The implications of the parallels between vv. 5, 7 and 22 are twofold. They suggest, first, that through the discovery of nakedness the human beings have come to know good and bad, and second, that by virtue of knowing good and bad they have indeed become like God. There is no clear confirmation of this from the narrator, and so 2b remains an ellipse that the reader can fill in on the basis of the existing parallels.

90. Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, 114; see also Edwin M. Good, Irony in the Old Testament (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1965), 84. Similarly, Lerner holds that the knowledge of nakedness ‘can hardly be what woman had imagined as divine knowledge when she took that risk’ (Lerner, Eternally Eve, 105–6).

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Construction of Gender and Identity in Genesis

Two kinds of knowledge How could one explain the analogy drawn between the knowledge of nakedness and the knowledge of good and bad? The connection is not obvious, and the idea of physical exposure is not easily translated into the terms of discernment indicated by the phrase ‘good and bad’. I would argue that the two notions are united by their semiotic structure, namely, that as an object of knowing, the nakedness of man and woman is shaped by the same fundamental principle of binarity as the idea of good and bad. On the one hand, the knowledge of good and bad could be understood as a capacity to make distinctions, to differentiate between the opposite phenomena that form empirical reality. According to van Wolde, the knowledge of good and bad ‘denotes a discriminating power, a knowledge based on experience which comprises everything, both persons and objects, and this is represented by the two halves of the merism: good and bad’.91 Here the formula ‘good and bad’ embraces not as much the categories of moral choice as, primarily, the whole world perceived as a unity of opposites, or, in the words of Dominic Crossan, as a ‘disjunctive totality’.92 Understood cosmologically, God’s knowledge of good and bad resonates with the process of creation in Genesis 1. There God established the world order by progressively manifesting distinctions and setting boundaries between the opposites – heaven and earth, light and darkness, dry land and sea. In the context of Genesis 1, God’s knowledge of good and bad reflects the discriminating power of God as creator. On the other hand, the knowledge of being naked that man and woman obtain in Gen. 3.7 implies an experience of physical distinctions imposed by gender. The couple make for themselves ḥagōrōt, loincloths, which suggests that it is their sexual difference that they have discovered and are trying to hide.93 In his structural interpretation, Edmund Leach identifies the forbidden knowledge with the knowledge of sexual differentiation.94 Like the knowledge of good and bad, the knowledge of gender has a strong binary connotation. It is strengthened by the dual form šenêhem, ‘both of them’, used in conjunction with ‘arûmmîm/‘êrummîm, ‘naked’, both at the beginning and at the end of the scene (Gen. 2.25; 3.7). The notions of nakedness and duality – ‘êrummîm and šenêhem – feature alongside each other and appear to be structurally related. Notably, the closer the couple 91. Van Wolde, A Semiotic Analysis of Genesis 2–3, 195. 92. John Dominic Crossan, ‘Response to White: Felix Culpa and Foenix Culprit’, Semeia 18 (1980): 110. 93. The word h.agōrāh meaning ‘belt, gird’, in the context of 3.7, stands for ‘loin-cloth’ (DCH III, 159). 94. See Edmund Leach, Genesis as Myth and Other Essays (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), 14. Many interpreters have seen the discovery of nakedness as an allusion to sex and procreation. For an overview of the main trends in the interpretation of ‘the knowledge of good and bad’, see Westermann, Genesis 1–11, 242–5. Westermann considers it untenable to restrict the knowledge acquired by the humans to sexual knowledge.

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come to realizing their nakedness, the clearer is the dual symmetry in the way they are presented. Thus, at the moment of eating, the implicitly hierarchical pair ‘hā’ādām and his woman’ (Gen. 2.25) becomes structurally and linguistically symmetrical, referred to as ’iššāh and ’îšāḥ, woman and her man (Gen. 3.6). And when their eyes are open in Gen. 3.7, the couple are described simply as a dual unit šenêhem, ‘both of them’. Collapsing social and narrative hierarchies, the knowledge of nakedness turns the couple, if only for the duration of one verse, into a pair of equal counterparts. Here sight plays a central role as a mediator between knowing and not knowing. The entire transformation has to do with the opening of the eyes of the humans (‘their eyes were opened and they knew’, Gen. 3.7). As Moberly has observed, elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible the expression ‘opening of the eyes’ carries positive connotations, being associated with a new God-given power of perception. Thus, God opens Hagar’s eyes and makes her see the well in Gen. 21.19; similarly, in 2 Kgs 6.17, 20 Yahweh causes Elisha’s servant to see the chariots of fire and makes the blinded Aramean troops see Samaria. Moberly argues that by using this expression in Gen. 3.5, the narrator presents the new sight offered to woman as positive and desirable.95 Brian Howell opposes this view, stressing the unique usage of the expression in Gen. 3.5, 7. While elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible God is behind the opening of the human eyes (cf. Num. 22.31; 2 Kgs 4.35; Ps. 35.21; Isa. 35.5), the new sight the human couple acquire in Eden is not God-given and is, on the contrary, obtained in rebellion against God.96 Together, both sides of the argument reflect the ambiguity of God’s role in the story: although the opening of the eyes appears to contravene Yahweh’s explicit law, implicitly, it still comes from Yahweh through the help, ‘ēzer, of the serpent and woman and serves his hidden agenda. In contrast to Eve’s looking at the tree in v. 6, in v. 7 sight becomes a faculty of a binary subject, which makes it reciprocal. In Gen. 3.7 the couple do not become any more naked than they were in 2.25, but once their eyes have been opened, each of them can see the nakedness of the other and therefore, in turn, becomes seen. Man and woman are now exposed to each other’s gaze, as man will later be exposed to the gaze of Yahweh (Gen. 3.10). The emergence of the other as the subject of seeing leads to the fundamental exposure and vulnerability of the self, manifested in the feelings of shame and fear (Gen. 3.7b, 10). The negative mood associated with exposure contrasts the joy and satisfaction that hā’ādām felt when he first saw woman. His speech in Gen. 2.23-24 celebrated totality, which hā’ādām could experience when he was the only subject of looking and therefore, figuratively, ‘unexposed’. From this point of view, the sense of insecurity that comes with the transgression reflects the existential anxiety of the subject who loses totality and, with it, the monopoly on vision.

95. Moberly, ‘Did the Serpent Get It Right’, 7–9. 96. Brian C. Howell, In the Eyes of God: A Metaphorical Approach to Biblical Anthropomorphic Language (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2014), 128–9.

38

Construction of Gender and Identity in Genesis ‘they knew that they were naked’, v. 7

‘knowing good and bad’, vv. 5, 22

binarity of the Subject (male and female, Self and Other) differentiated Subject

binarity of the world (good and bad) differentiating Subject

Figure 1.5 Knowledge and differentiation in Genesis 3.

The two kinds of knowledge, presented in the narrative, demonstrate binarity on different levels. While the discriminatory knowledge of good and bad concerns the relation of the subject to the knowable world, the knowledge of gender is directed back towards the subject and represents his/her self-awareness as a unity of opposites. Both the serpent and Yahweh interpret this self-knowledge as the knowledge of good and bad (vv. 5, 22), which links the qualities of being differentiated and being able to differentiate (Figure 1.5). By knowing their distinct sexual identities, man and woman become able to experience distinctions in creation, thereby acquiring an understanding of the world order – the knowledge of good and bad. The metaphor of nakedness communicates binarity as the fundamental principle of the knowing subject. To know the world as differentiated, the subject needs to realize his/her own differentiation, experiencing an inner tension between wholeness and fragmentation, between sameness and difference, between the self and the other. The epistemological process starts when man and woman direct their gaze at each other and see the pattern of creation reveal itself in their gender. On this point, I disagree with Jobling, who interprets the newly acquired knowledge as the ‘knowledge of the conditions of existence “outside”,’ of which sexual differentiation is only one aspect.97 Jobling’s otherwise attractive structuralist model asserts the priority of the knowable world over the knowing subject. For him, the world ‘outside’ the garden, characterized by differentiation, coexists with the world ‘inside’, characterized by unity. By learning to differentiate between good and bad, the subject becomes associated with the world ‘outside’ and assumes its binary characteristics. I would argue that the narrator of Genesis 2–3 does not seem to impose prior characteristics on the world outside the garden. Unlike Genesis 1, where the world, structured by oppositions, preceded the creation of binary humanity and therefore was posited as primary, Genesis 2–3 focuses largely on the construction of the knowing and experiencing subject. Here the outside world – hā’ adāmāh, which hā’ādām is to serve – in itself is not binary. In fact, one cannot presume the existence of ‘outside’ at all until the moment when Yahweh sets the boundaries of the garden, that is, until the expulsion of hā’ādām (Gen. 3.2324). Here the world ‘outside’ emerges as a domain of the differentiated subject and therefore itself is perceived as differentiated. Jobling’s argument could therefore be

97. Jobling, The Sense of Biblical Narrative, 31–2.

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reversed: instead of being an aspect of the outside world that the subject acquires together with knowledge, sexual differentiation is a fundamental feature of binary subjectivity that allows it to discriminate between good and bad and, by doing so, to shape the world of human experience. Knowledge, gender and the image of God Despite their opposite views on the tree as the source of death, the serpent and Yahweh agree that eating of the forbidden tree makes the humans like ’elōhîm, knowing good and bad (Gen. 3.5, 22). The reiteration gives validity to two ideas: on the one hand, the knowledge, embodied in the tree, is a divine quality, and, on the other hand, by sharing it, woman and man indeed become godlike. The notion of humanity’s likeness to God forms a distinguishable semantic parallel with Gen. 1.26-27, where hā’ādām is created in the image and likeness of ’elōhîm. Intertextually, the parallelism with Genesis 2–3 allows us to interpret God’s image in Genesis 1 in terms of discriminatory power. Conversely, the garden narrative may be seen as an elaborate account of how God created the humans in his own image and likeness. This is the argument of John Sawyer, who stresses the continuity between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2–3 on the basis of their thematic parallels, as both narratives speak of human dominion over the animals, eating of fruit, creation of ’ādām as male and female and, most importantly, human resemblance to God. Sawyer concludes that, while the ‘image of God’ story in Gen. 1.26-28 is complete in itself, Genesis 2–3 tells ‘the same story in much greater detail, explaining how it came about that a man made out of dust of the earth came to resemble God’.98 This intertextual reading renders the traditional ‘creation–fall’ model untenable. Instead of being a curse and a sign of disobedience, knowledge emerges as an aspect of Yahweh’s own nature, a divine quality that he shares with the human couple, thereby creating them ‘in his image and likeness’. Understood this way, the entire garden narrative and not only Genesis 2 can be called the second creation account. It is notable that the idea of rapprochement between divine and human subjectivity in both creation accounts is linked to the ideas of gender and differentiation. In the garden narrative, man and woman become godlike through their knowledge of gender, through seeing themselves as naked and therefore different from each other, as ‘male and female’. Similarly, the first creation account places the image of God alongside the notion of gender: ‘God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created it; male and female he created them’ (Gen. 1.27). Scholars have often pointed to semantic and structural

98. John F. A. Sawyer, ‘The Image of God, the Wisdom of Serpents and the Knowledge of Good and Evil’, in A Walk in the Garden: Biblical, Iconographical and Literary Images of Eden, ed. Paul Morris and Deborah Sawyer (JSOT SS 136; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1992), 66. Bal makes a similar observation about Genesis 2, saying that it is ‘a specified narration of what events are included in the idea that “God created them male and female”’ (Bal, Lethal Love, 119).

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correspondences between these three clauses. Karl Barth was the first to interpret the imago Dei in terms of relationality that is introduced by the phrase ‘male and female’. In Barth’s theology of relationality, God’s image is seen dialogically as an I-Thou encounter within the life of the Trinity – an encounter of which the male and female being is the prototype.99 Barth’s interpretation of the imago Dei has been influential among feminist scholars.100 Following his approach, Trible sees the phrase ‘male and female’ in Gen. 1.27 as a metaphor, pointing to God’s image in humanity, a vehicle for a different level of meaning. In her opinion, ‘to describe male and female … is to perceive the image of God’.101 Trible, van Wolde and more recently Paul Niskanen substantiate this argument on literary grounds, pointing to the parallel composition of Gen. 1.27. They have argued that the phrases ‘in his image’, ‘in the image of God’ and ‘male and female’ function as three parts of a narrative structure, where each successive part runs parallel to the previous one, clarifying and developing its meaning. As a result, the composition of the verse posits ‘male and female’ as a clarification of the meaning of ‘the image of God’.102 It is not surprising that linking God’s image in Gen. 1.27 to humankind’s being ‘male and female’ has met with opposition on both historical–critical and theological grounds. Adela Yarbro Collins, for example, refutes the possibility that the Priestly writer could ascribe to God ‘any quality corresponding to sexuality or sexual differentiation’.103 Along similar lines, Phyllis Bird upholds the Priestly portrayal of God as totally separate and unique, reading the imago Dei in the context of dominion (Gen. 1.26-27b) and dissociating it from the ideas of sexual distinction and reproduction that are related, according to her, exclusively to humans (Gen. 1.27c-28).104 Bird’s argument, which has become known as the ‘historical-critical consensus’, does not, however, account for the striking

99. For Barth, the unique structural differences between man and woman make their relationship ‘the prototype of all I and Thou, of all the individuality’, in which human beings ‘differ from and yet belong to each other’ (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.4 [trans. A. T. Mackay, T. H. L. Parker, Harold Knight et al.; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961], 150). 100. See Bird, ‘“Male and Female He Created Them”’, 131. 101. Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, 20. 102. See Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, 17; van Wolde, A Semiotic Analysis of Genesis 2–3, 198–9; Paul Niskanen, ‘The Poetics of Adam: The Creation of ‫ אדם‬in the Image of ‫’אלהים‬, JBL 128 (2009): 428. 103. Adela Yarbro Collins, ‘Historical-Critical and Feminist Readings of Genesis 1:26– 28’, in Hebrew Bible or Old Testament? Studying the Bible in Judaism and Christianity, ed. Roger Brooks and John J. Collins (Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity 5; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 197–9; see also James Barr, ‘The Image of God in the Book of Genesis: A Study in Terminology’, BJRL 51 (1968): 11–26; ‘Man and Nature: The Ecological Controversy and the Old Testament’, BJRL 55 (1972): 9–32. 104. Bird, ‘“Male and Female He Created Them”’, 129–59; Missing Persons and Mistaken Identities: Women and Gender in Ancient Israel (Overtures to Biblical Theology; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 144–73.

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parallelism that holds Gen. 1.27b and 1.27c together. To split v. 27 into two parts related to two separate contexts goes against the unity of its poetic composition, centred around the image of God. From a literary point of view, human dominion over the earth and its creatures seems to be a function that derives from their being created in God’s image, while sexual binarity appears to be a structural feature pointing to the differentiation of God himself. That differentiation is a feature shared by God and humanity is also demonstrated through the flexibility of number, associated with the creator and his creature in both accounts. In Gen. 1.26-27 the unmarked plural and the singular are both used, first, in relation to ’elōhîm (‘let us make a human in our image and according to our likeness’, v. 26; ‘and God created the human in his image’, v. 27) and then, in relation to ’ādām (‘in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them’, v. 27; emphasis added). Niskanen remarks that ‘‫ אלהים‬speaks as many and acts as one in creating ‫אדם‬, who is simultaneously one and many’.105 Thomas Keiser finds it significant that the uncommon feature of the divine plural only happens in Genesis 1 in the context of the creation of humankind, both singular and plural, in God’s image.106 Looking at a variety of approaches to the interpretation of the divine plural, Keiser concludes that it ‘portrays some unspecified type of plurality in the Godhead’.107 A similar flexibility of number characterizes the divine and human subjects in Genesis 2–3. Here, to begin with, hā’ādām exists as a singular subject (cf. lebaddô), and so does Yahweh (‘I shall make’, Gen. 2.18). Human duality (šenêhem, ‘both of them’) first appears in 2.25, after the creation of woman. Later, in Gen. 3.1-7, the tree and the knowledge it gives are consistently associated with the human subject in the unmarked plural form. Strikingly, the unmarked plural is also applied to God as the subject of knowledge: ‘you shall be like ’elōhîm, knowing (yōde‘ê, pl.) good and bad’ (Gen. 3.5); ‘the man has become like one of us (mimmennû, pl.), knowing good and bad’ (Gen. 3.22). The grammatically plural term ’elōhîm, which usually has singular meaning, takes either a plural verb (v. 5) or a plural pronoun (v. 22) whenever it relates to knowledge as the basis of divine-human likeness. Like Gen. 1.26-27, the garden narrative constructs both God and hā’ādām as ‘one and many’; however, here the plurality of the subject is correlated with his/her power to discriminate. The concept of the divine-human likeness that appears in the two creation accounts has repercussions not only for the human but also, potentially, for the divine subjectivity. Since Yahweh Elohim assumes a grammatically plural form only when he shares his knowledge with the humans, making them godlike (Genesis 3), does this indicate that divine subjectivity, too, is transformed in the process?

105. Niskanen, ‘The Poetics of Adam’, 426. 106. Thomas A. Keiser, ‘The Divine Plural: A Literary-Contextual Argument for Plurality in the Godhead’. JSOT 34 (2009): 135; see also Lyle Eslinger, ‘The Enigmatic Plurals Like “One of Us” [Genesis 1 26, III 22, and XI 7] in Hyperchronic Perspective’, VT 56 (2006): 173. 107. Keiser, ‘The Divine Plural’, 134.

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Does the arrival of a binary human subject capable of differentiation make Yahweh see himself and act as many? After all, as noted above, Yahweh was not plural before the transgression and neither was he described as ‘knowing good and bad’. To better understand the impact the sharing of knowledge has on Yahweh, it is necessary to look more closely at the two instances when he appears as its subject. First, in Gen. 3.5 the serpent describes ’elōhîm as knowing good and evil. The verse is composed symmetrically as a chiasmus that places two kinds of God’s knowledge at the beginning and the end of the transformation: yōdēa‘ (sing.) ’elōhîm kî ’akālekem … wenipqeḥû ‘ênêkem

yōde‘ê (pl.) ṭôb wārā‘ kē’lōhîm wihyîtem

At the centre of the chiasmus is the moment when the human couple eat of the tree and have their eyes opened. This transformation bridges the opposition between the omniscience of a singular transcendent creator (yōdēa‘ ’ elōhîm) and the discriminatory knowledge of the plural God (’ elōhîm yōde‘ê ṭôb wārā‘). Semiotically, the structure implies that the human transformation brings changes both to the subject of divine knowledge (’ elōhîm) and to its content. On the day the eyes of the humans are open, God is transformed from the ‘God who knows’ into the ‘gods who know good and bad’. Yahweh appears as the subject of knowledge for the second time in Gen. 3.22, where he confirms the truth of the serpent’s statement: ‘hā’ādām has become like one of us (pl.) knowing good and bad’. Speaking to himself, Yahweh admits both his differentiation (plurality) and his knowledge of good and bad. This confession presents a very different image of Yahweh: in contrast to the authoritative lawgiver of Genesis 2, the new, plural yhwh ’elōhîm is vulnerable and feels the need to protect himself from human freedom. The story brings a loss of totality to God as well as to humans. Bal describes this as a semiotic process of creating God in human likeness. In her view, woman realizes the transformation of the transcendent God of Genesis 1 into an anthropomorphic character who strolls in the shade of the garden, shows anger and fear and engages in dialogues and confrontations with the humans.108 From this angle, the transfer of meaning between the divine and human realms becomes mutual. As Danna Fewell and David Gunn point out, by gaining God’s knowledge, the humans lead God out of paradise.109 The ambiguities of knowledge Like all the significant concepts in the garden narrative, the human knowledge of nakedness is dichotomous on many levels. It presupposes the sexual binarity (male–female) and duality of the subject (self-other), and signifies an awareness of

108. Bal, Lethal Love, 125. 109. Fewell and Gunn, Gender, Power, and Promise, 37.

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the fundamental duality of the world, shaped by oppositions (good-bad). Finally, the knowledge of nakedness brings together the characteristics of the two nonhuman characters in the story, God and the serpent. While the narrative identifies the human knowledge of nakedness with God’s knowledge (Gen. 3.5, 22), it also links it linguistically to the wisdom of the serpent. This occurs through the wordplay ‘ārôm/‘ārûm. The two instances of ‘ārôm, ‘naked’, form an inclusion for the entire scene of transgression: at the beginning ‘the man and his wife were both naked (‘arûmmîm) and unashamed’ (Gen. 2.25); at the end ‘[both of them] knew that they were naked (‘êrummîm)’ (Gen. 3.7). Within this inclusion, the protagonists become conscious of their nakedness helped by the serpent who is ‘ārûm, ‘wise’. As Landy points out, the serpent mediates between the concepts of nakedness and shrewdness: the humans, who at the beginning are naked, become shrewd because of the serpent’s interference. The reverse is also true: the animals, represented by the serpent, start as being shrewd and end up being symbolically naked, stripped of their skins to clothe the humans (Gen. 3.21).110 The serpent’s wisdom is an iconic quality that makes it imminently suitable to transfer and distribute God’s knowledge. Its wisdom is never directly identified with the knowledge of good and bad – that is, after all, God’s prerogative – but seems to be an insight into the nature and the purpose of things, an understanding of the way life works. It serves to reveal what is hidden, manifesting the secret thoughts of Yahweh. The narrative interposes four kinds of knowledge: by knowing that they are naked woman and man become not only like God, who knows good and bad (wayyēde‘û, v. 7; cf. yōde‘ê, v. 5), but also like the wise serpent (‘êrummim, v. 7; cf. ‘ārûm, v. 1), who knows what God knows (yōdēa‘, v. 5). The dichotomy of sharing the likeness of both Yahweh and the serpent fits in with the idea of Yahweh’s double subjectivity: if the serpent is a manifestation of the repressed side of God, then becoming like God also means becoming like the serpent. There is yet another aspect to the knowledge of nakedness, which is its iconic correspondence to the overall symbolism of the story. In Genesis 2–3 human beings uncover the hidden reality of knowledge. Their own nakedness or being uncovered runs semantically parallel to this process, which exposes the meaning behind Yahweh’s authoritative voice. Symbolically, their exposure is also that of Yahweh. The serpent, being ‘ārûm, leads the human couple to uncover, make ‘ārôm, the world of possibilities secretly intended for them by Yahweh. Yet the newly discovered knowledge has a sense of illicitness about it. The prohibition still holds, and thus the exposure – symbolic as well as physical – is a violation that upsets the existing order and therefore needs to be rectified or compensated for. And so the couple perform a gesture that is semantically opposite to exposure: they cover themselves with ḥagōrōt¸ coverings, made from the leaves of a fig tree (Gen. 3.7). In the context of Gen. 2.25, this means that they

110. Landy, Paradoxes of Paradise, 213. For an analysis of the multiple meanings created by the wordplay ‘ārôm–‘ārûm see Lerner, Eternally Eve, 90–1; van Wolde, A Semiotic Analysis of Genesis 2–3, 165–6.

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are ashamed, bôš. Having discovered their distinctions, woman and man instantly feel the need to hide them from each other. Yet the fig leaves do not take away their nakedness, for in the following verse they still need to hide from Yahweh ‘among the trees of the garden’ (Gen. 3.8), and in Gen. 3.10 man admits that he is naked, ‘ērôm. The problem of nakedness seems to be resolved only at the closure of the narrative in Gen. 3.21, when Yahweh clothes the humans in garments of skin. Yet even this final gesture of concealing nakedness remains deeply ambiguous. The Hebrew term ‘ôr, ‘skin’, is semantically related to ‘ērôm, ‘naked’,111 and its use brings in the connotations of the wordplay ‘ārôm/‘ārûm. The skins must have been taken from the animals and so, by extension, from the wisest of them – the serpent (‘ôr – ‘ārûm). At the end of the story, Yahweh ‘clothes’ the humans in their knowledge, which carries the signs both of their nakedness and of the serpent’s wisdom. The garments of skin simultaneously cover their sexual distinctions and reveal their fundamental binarity. Like the fig leaves and the trees of the garden, which covered human nakedness in vv. 7, 8, the garments of skins – a sign of ashamedness and of hiding – are a response to the emergence of the other. Yahweh’s gesture confirms the changed semiotic status of the humans: the coverings become a permanent mark of the vulnerability of the subject, whose identity is from now on shaped by the presence of the gendered other. Although it is made invisible in the ungendered character of hā’ādām in the expulsion scene, the other is implicitly present in the ‘covered up’ state of the subject. Having become like God and like the serpent, the human couple will leave the garden being simultaneously covered and naked, united and differentiated, one and two.

The Subject on Trial (Gen. 3.8-13) At this point in the analysis, it is possible to identify in Genesis 2–3 two distinct narrative strands, governed by Yahweh’s contradictory perspectives. At the most immediate, explicit level, there is a familiar story of creation and fall. This leading narrative strand stems from Yahweh’s authoritative voice, which in Gen. 2.16-17 forbids the human to eat from the tree of knowledge. Knowledge here is an antivalue, associated with death, and by prohibiting it, Yahweh apparently seeks to protect human life. From this leading perspective, the serpent deceives woman by distorting Yahweh’s words, and woman rebels against the divine law, being led by the desire to become godlike. At a deeper level, the narrative shows the other, subversive side of God, who orchestrates the fall of hā’ādām, creating all the necessary conditions for his disobedience. By planting the tree of the knowledge of good and bad in the garden, he places divine knowledge within human reach, and by making it forbidden, he puts it in focus. Looking for a ‘helper’ for hā’ādām, God first makes the animals,

111. Both words come from the root ‘wr, which denotes being laid bare or stripped of outer layers (see BDB, 735–6; DCH VI, 316–17).

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and among them, the ‘wise’ serpent, who will expose the divine character of knowledge, and then creates woman, who will see that knowledge is desirable and will help hā’ādām obtain it. With this, a shadow strand of the narrative emerges, where the knowledge of good and bad, instead of being an anti-value, becomes a value object, a divine quality, intended for hā’ādām from the start. This shadow plot reaches its culmination with the opening of the eyes of the human couple in Gen. 3.7. The scene that follows it in Gen. 3.8-13 is marked by a clear change of tone. The sound of Yahweh’s walking in the garden announces the return of the leading plot, centred on the prohibition, which manifests itself in the fear and hiding of the humans (Gen. 3.8). The subsequent interrogation of the couple in Gen. 3.9-13 has all the appearance of a court hearing, in which Yahweh takes on the role of prosecutor.112 His questions seem to aim at a ‘reconstruction’ of the crime, from looking at its evidence (the fact that the couple have hidden themselves as well as hā’ādām’s awareness of being naked, vv. 9, 11a), to establishing the actual transgression (man and woman’s eating of the forbidden tree, vv. 11b, 13a) and naming the accomplices (woman and the serpent, vv. 12, 13b). And yet what follows is not so much a reconstruction as an interplay of different perspectives on the events, in which the characters, including Yahweh, reveal their respective positions. Accordingly, Yahweh’s questions appear rhetorical, as if he already knew the answers and just wanted man and woman to formulate their versions of the transformation. A similar example of rhetorical questioning is found in the story of Cain (Gen. 4.1-16). By asking Cain, ‘Where is Abel your brother’ (Gen. 4.9), Yahweh does not seek to find out the location or even the fate of Abel – which he already knows (cf. 4.10). Instead, Yahweh’s question appeals to Cain’s responsibility and prompts him to formulate his position (‘Am I my brother’s keeper?). Similarly, putting on trial the humans – who are now in possession of knowledge – Yahweh allows them to re-establish their relationship with him and with each other. From this perspective, it is interesting to examine the different tactics Yahweh shows in addressing man and woman. Significantly, from the beginning Yahweh is looking only for man and not for woman (v. 9). The question ’ayyekkāh, ‘Where are you?’, with the masculine singular ending, is addressed to hā’ādām, creating an ambiguity with respect to woman’s presence. Is God looking for man because he is concerned only about him and not woman, or, alternatively, because woman has not been hiding from him? Both possibilities hold. Although the previous verse suggests that man and his wife have hidden together, their action is described with the masculine singular verb wayyitḥabbē’, ‘and he hid’ (v. 8). Grammatically, the verb agrees with the proximate subject (wayyitḥabbē’ hā’ādām we’ištô), a feature commonly attested in the Hebrew Bible.113 However, this grammatical irregularity also has an iconic function since it marginalizes woman, who has until now played the main role in

112. See Mettinger, The Eden Narrative, 25. 113. See, for example, Gen. 9.23; 11.29; 24.61; 31.14; 33.7; Num. 12.1; 2 Sam. 12.2; Amos 8.13.

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the episode.114 Excluded from the conversation between Yahweh and hā’ādām in vv. 9-12, she reappears in v. 13 to reply to Yahweh’s question as if she has always been there (similar to man’s complementary position vis-à-vis woman in Gen. 3.6). This invisible presence is one of the signs of woman’s compromised subjectivity in the aftermath of the transgression. When her function has been fulfilled, she recedes into the shadows, becoming simultaneously present and absent, included and excluded, man’s counterpart as well as his mere part (cf. Gen. 2.23). Woman’s invisibility is consistent with the framework of the leading plot, which focuses on the relationship between Yahweh and hā’ādām. In Genesis 2 that relationship was characterized by God’s absolute authority and hā’ādām’s automatic obedience. Man was there a passive recipient of whatever God had done, said to, or given him. In this context, the fact that Yahweh in 3.9 does not know where hā’ādām is indicates a sudden change in their relationship. For the first time Yahweh addresses hā’ādām as an autonomous subject, capable of response. According to Joel Burnett, the rhetorical function of the phrase ‘where are you?’ is to emphasize the absence of the object or person in question.115 What matters for the speaker is not ‘where’ the required object is, but the fact that it is not ‘here’.116 Pointing to hā’ādām’s absence in relation to Yahweh, the spatial term ’ayyēh becomes a relational metaphor that connotes separation. Prompted by Yahweh, hā’ādām gives the reason for his breaking away (‘I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid myself ’, v. 10). The words wā’îrā’ kî-‘êrōm ’ānōkî run as a close syntactic parallel to the report of the couple’s transformation in v. 7: wayyēde‘û kî ‘êrummim hēm, ‘they knew that they were naked’. The parallel draws attention to a shift from the binary subject (hēm (šenêhem), v. 7) to the individual male point of view (’ānōkî, v. 10) that entails a change in the connotation of nakedness. In v. 7, ‘êrummim signified sexual distinctions of man and woman and their exposure to each other. In v. 10, ‘êrōm loses its gender connotation and indicates an exposure of the singular, implicitly male subject to the authority of Yahweh. These parallels signify the emergence of boundaries on two different levels: between male and female, and between human and divine subjectivity. In both cases, the subject is compelled to hide his/her nakedness from the other: with the fig leaves (v. 7) or among the trees of the garden (v. 8). But while the exposure to the gendered other brings with it the implicit experience of shame (Gen. 3.7; cf. 2.25), in the presence of the divine other nakedness becomes a source of guilt and

114. See Lerner, Eternally Eve, 106. 115. See Joel S. Burnett, ‘The Question of Divine Absence in Israelite and West Semitic Religion’, CBQ 67 (2005): 215. 116. Cf. Yahweh’s question in Gen. 4.9. Similarly, in 1 Sam. 26.16 David asks, ‘Where are the king’s spear and water jug’, knowing full well where they are, since he himself has removed them.

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fear.117 Facing each other, woman and man simply knew their nakedness; facing Yahweh, hā’ādām is afraid of it. Yahweh’s next question is directed at the source of man’s knowledge: ‘Who told you that you were naked?’ (Gen. 3.11a). Notably, the phrase kî ‘êrōm ’āttāh follows the syntactic structure used in the previous statements of nakedness (kî ‘êrummim hēm, Gen. 3.7; kî-‘êrōm ’ānōkî, Gen. 3.10). It is interesting that the personal pronouns hēm, ’ānōkî and ’āttāh first appear in the narrative in nominal sentences in conjunction with ‘êrōm/‘êrummim. This might support the idea, expressed previously, that in Genesis 2–3 the awareness of nakedness is fundamental to the construction of personal boundaries. By asking, ‘Who told you…?’, Yahweh implies that man should not have been able to see his nakedness for himself. In order to know oneself as naked, or distinct, man needs to become seen, exposed to the gaze of the other – the subjectivity he is both separated from and bound to by the act of seeing. In this sense, the other’s gaze is posited as the source of the subject’s boundaries, identity and knowledge. At one level, the question mî, ‘who?’, seems to point to woman, who alone, as part of the binary subject šenêhem, knows that man is naked (Gen. 3.7). At another level, the other from whom hā’ādām has tried to hide, whose presence has induced his fear and to whom he has just admitted his nakedness, is Yahweh himself. The question ‘Who told you?’ could also be read as ‘How did you know?’ (nobody actually tells hā’ādām about his being naked), figuratively pointing at the entire shadow plot as orchestrated by Yahweh. If the knowledge of nakedness comes from the other, then Yahweh’s question is ultimately pointing at his own role in communicating knowledge to man. Perhaps, this is why he does not wait for a reply and moves straight to his main concern: ‘Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?’ Alluding to the prohibition of Gen. 2.16-17, Yahweh speaks as a prosecutor, but his ominous tone does not ring true. First, Yahweh’s speech casts doubt on the accuracy of his own death warning in Gen. 2.17. In fact, Yahweh’s threat of death in Gen. 2.17 must only have been figurative, otherwise, seeing man alive in Gen. 3.11, he would have had no reasons to think that the prohibition had been broken. Instead, Yahweh admits not only that man can disobey him but also that man can do so and stay alive. Second, the fact that Yahweh relates man’s knowledge of nakedness to his eating of the forbidden tree means that Yahweh has known all along about the consequences of disobedience, but withheld them from hā’ādām. Reading Gen. 3.11b in the context of Gen. 2.1617 undermines the integrity of Yahweh the lawgiver, exposing the double meaning at the heart of his law. With the accusing discourse compromised, what Yahweh’s rhetorical question really achieves is making hā’ādām admit his disobedience and

117. Here I disagree with Trible, who maintains that the cause of man’s fear is his knowledge of nakedness and not the presence of God (God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, 118). Since man becomes afraid of being naked only when questioned by Yahweh, the link between the two is narratologically sustained.

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hence, his autonomy. This is reflected in the syntax of the Hebrew text, where the emphasis on the forbidden tree at the beginning of the sentence gives way to the tension between ‘not to eat’ and ‘eat’, and ultimately, between ‘I’ and ‘you’.118 By introducing boundaries, implicit in the idea of man’s nakedness (v.11a) and explicit in the idea of his disobedience (v. 11b), Yahweh’s questions point to the emergence of a new reality – a relationship between hā’ādām and Yahweh as autonomous subjects. The re-shaping of Yahweh’s relationship with man culminates in the next verse, where hā’ādām confirms that he has broken God’s command. Yet in doing so he does not accept sole responsibility and shifts the blame onto woman and Yahweh as the ultimate cause of his disobedience: ‘Woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me from the tree, and I ate’ (Gen. 3.12). Man’s fear of being naked or ‘exposed’ makes him try and ‘cover’ his own action, presenting it as an unavoidable result of the others’ interference. This reveals significant changes in the subjectivity of hā’ādām. He is no longer the exuberant and expansive self, the unified subject who in Gen. 2.23-24 saw woman as ‘flesh of his flesh’ and his own extension. After the transgression, hā’ādām sees woman as a heterogeneous reality imposed on him by Yahweh, and himself, as a victim of her (and Yahweh’s) actions. It is ironic that man’s weak attempt to shift the blame onto others is also an accurate account of the events. Indeed, it was woman who gave to man to eat of the tree, and it was Yahweh who had installed her as man’s helper in the first place. In man’s view, woman and Yahweh perform the same action towards him (nātattāh ‘immādî; nātenāh-lî, ‘gave me’), and his only move is to eat, accepting that which he is given. With the shame and the fear of being naked comes the sense of the other’s superior agency, of which the subject perceives himself a passive recipient. What he rightly confesses is that his action was determined by forces outside his control. Unwittingly, man recapitulates the entire mechanism of the shadow plot, from the institution of gender to the acquisition of knowledge, and by doing so, confirms that Yahweh’s plan has succeeded. The short interrogation of woman in Gen. 3.13 is strikingly different from the questioning of hā’ādām, for Yahweh is neither looking for her, nor looking at her (her nakedness is not discussed). Asking, mah-zō’t ‘āśît, ‘What is this that you have done?’, he treats woman as if she were still partly invisible, equating her subjectivity with her role in the transformation of man. Once again, Yahweh’s question appears rhetorical, for he already knows from man what she has done. However, since man has withheld the fact that woman too ate of the forbidden fruit before giving it to him, Yahweh’s question is not entirely pointless. As much as it seeks to verify man’s accusation, it also gives woman a chance to fill in the blanks with her own account. It is more difficult to access woman’s point of view precisely because of her ‘invisibility’ in the previous discussion. Was she there when hā’ādām spoke to

118. Here I agree with Trible that the significance of the tree in v. 11 pertains to man’s disobedience rather than the tree’s link with knowledge (Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, 118–19).

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Yahweh about her? If so, is she feeling resentful of her partner’s betrayal? Similarly, does she now realize that she has been used, objectified by Yahweh, who gave her to man in the same way she passed on to him a fruit of the tree? These questions remain open, adding to the ambiguity of woman’s position. Saying to Yahweh, ‘The serpent deceived me and I ate’, she does not show any knowledge of the previous dialogue and does not mention her giving the fruit to man – the action of which man has just accused her. In fact, her version of the event does not include man at all. For Trible, by ignoring man, woman indicates her separation from him, their unity of one flesh having been split apart by the disobedience.119 Another way of looking at it would be to suppose that woman’s sharing of the fruit with man was inherent in her role of ‘helper’, a part which Yahweh intended her to play from the start. The fact that she misses out her act of mediation when speaking to the deity could mean that she does not consider it to be the subject of mah-zō’t ‘āśît and an offence against Yahweh. The only action that woman admits to is eating. In doing so, she follows the pattern of man’s confession, blaming another for what she has done: ‘The serpent deceived me and I ate’. However, unlike the ‘accurate’ confession of hā’ādām, woman’s accusation is problematic. The reader knows that, although woman was provoked by the serpent’s subversive remarks, she did not eat until she had examined the tree for herself (Gen. 3.6). Ultimately, it was her own experience and her desire of understanding that made her break the divine command. Moreover, the serpent’s role could hardly be described as deception. Woman has seen that two of the serpent’s predictions – ‘you shall certainly not die’ and ‘your eyes will be opened’ – were accurate (Gen. 3.4-5; cf. 3.7). The fact that she and man are still alive suggests that the deceiver was not the serpent, but Yahweh with his death warning. What, in that case, makes woman say that the serpent has deceived her? The semantic range of the Hebrew verb nāšā’ in hiphil ‘to beguile, mislead, deceive’120 allows a nuanced interpretation of woman’s point of view. On the one hand, she indicates that the serpent lured her into disobedience. Unlike man, who receives the forbidden knowledge simply because it comes from woman, woman needs to be persuaded. The mechanism of her disobedience is rational and involves a change in her understanding of God. For what the serpent reveals to her is a God who knows good and bad and who therefore accommodates contradictory perspectives. This God has lost his totality, being split into two identities, one who creates and legislates and one who possesses hidden knowledge. It is the desire to be like this other God who knows – the desire of understanding – that draws woman to the tree. From this point of view, the serpent beguiles woman by showing her the seductiveness of knowledge. On the other hand, the verb nāšā’ connotes a false deal, a deception. Saying that the serpent has deceived her, woman might imply not only that she has been seduced but also simply that the serpent has lied to her and that she did not

119. Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, 120. 120. BDB, 674; DCH V, 775–6.

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become ‘like gods who know good and bad’. If this is the case, her statement might be read as an assessment of her position with respect to knowledge. This poses the question whether woman, seen as separate from man, really becomes the subject of divine knowledge of good and bad. As we have seen, the narrator uses the couple’s awareness of being naked as an iconic sign of their knowledge of good and bad. This iconic knowledge is first associated with man and woman together (‘they knew that they were naked’, Gen. 3.7), then only with hā’ādām, both in his own and in Yahweh’s speech (‘I was afraid because I was naked’, Gen. 3.10; ‘who told you that you were naked?’, Gen. 3.11). Finally, at the end of the narrative, Yahweh admits that hā’ādām has acquired the divine knowledge of good and bad (‘hā’ādām has become like one of us, knowing good and bad’, Gen. 3.22). Strikingly, at no point does the narrator refer to woman’s own, individual knowledge or awareness. In Gen. 3.7 the unmarked plural of wayyēde‘û, ‘they knew’, conceals her subjectivity. Unlike man, woman does not declare her nakedness to Yahweh. It is ironic that woman, who brings knowledge to hā’ādām and who herself explicitly desires understanding (cf. 3.6), does not seem to benefit from the consequences of her actions and does not come to possess knowledge of her own accord. Outside the garden narrative, the Hebrew Bible displays a similar trend of dissociating woman from knowledge. Linguistically, the verb yd‘ is usually attributed to a male subject.121 Man has the ability to know in all its different forms, whether it is cognitive, spiritual, sexual knowledge or practical skills. The omniscient God, being grammatically male, epitomizes the power of knowledge: he knows good and bad (Gen. 3.5), he knows the heart and the thoughts of human beings (1 Kgs 8.39; Hos. 5.3; Ps. 139.4; Job 11.11); he knows the ways of the righteous (Gen. 18.19; Deut. 34.10; Jer. 1.5; Pss. 1.6; 37.18). In parallel to God who knows good and bad, man’s ability to know is regarded as a virtue, a quality of an active and mature subject. On the other hand, the absence of knowledge in man is a negative characteristic, usually indicating deficient motivation and lack of responsibility. Thus, Cain renounces responsibility for his brother (‘I do not know,’ Gen. 4.9); Jacob admits his ignorance (‘God was in this place and I did not know’, Gen. 28.16), while Lot and Judah are oblivious of the identity of their sexual partners (‘he did not know’, Gen. 19.33, 35; 38.16). Unlike man, woman in the Hebrew Bible is very rarely ascribed the faculty of knowledge. On the few occasions when the verb yd‘ is applied to a feminine subject, it typically denotes sexual knowledge or intercourse and is presented as a vice or a deficiency. In Gen. 19.8 Lot’s testimony that his daughters have not known a man implies their higher value (cf. also the description of Rebekah in

121. DCH IV, 101–3. It is remarkable that the few cases where a woman is the grammatical subject of yd‘ are only found in dialogues, where a male speaker addresses a woman, passing information to her so that she may ‘know’ (cf. Abigail in 1 Sam. 25.17; Bathsheba in 1 Kgs 2.15; Rachel and Leah in Gen. 31.6; Oholah and Oholibah in Ezek. 23.49; Ruth in Ruth 2.11).

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Gen. 24.16). In Num. 31.17-18, 35, Moses commands the Israelites to kill every Midianite woman who ‘has known man’ and to spare the 32,000 women who ‘have not known man’. The massacre of the inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead in Judg. 21.1112 follows the same pattern. Similarly, the fact that Jephthah’s daughter in Judg. 11.39 ‘knew no man’ is a merit which makes her death more lamentable for the narrator. In what concerns woman’s carnal knowledge of man, not to know is an unquestionable virtue. The disjunction between feminine subjectivity and the verb yd‘ in the biblical text is not limited to the sphere of sexual experience. Whenever yd‘ is used in the sense of awareness and discrimination, it is predicated to a woman by a negative grammatical construction. Thus, the foolish woman in the Proverbs ‘does not know anything’ (Prov. 9.13), and Hosea’s unfaithful wife does not know who provides her with food and wine (Hos. 2.10). Even the prudent wife of the Proverbs, the most likely female figure to be credited with knowledge, is never characterized by yd‘. With woman’s sexual knowledge regarded as an anti-value, and her cognitive capacity mentioned only to be denied to her, the Hebrew Bible systematically dissociates woman from the ability to discriminate and experience. In the context of the garden narrative, this tendency of ‘gendering’ the ability to know has important implications. Woman, after all, appears to be right when she says that the serpent has deceived her. By giving knowledge and experience to humanity, she has succeeded in doing what Yahweh expected of her, yet her own subjectivity remains invisible. By herself, she does not become like God who knows. Without knowledge and boundaries of her own, she cannot assert her nakedness in front of Yahweh. That would mean coming out of the shadows, being seen, becoming the subject. Structurally, in the trial of the subject, she is confined to the figure of the other, the one in relation to whom boundaries are constructed and whose role is to give, be it knowledge, identity or a fruit of a tree.

The Final Balance: Judgement and Expulsion (Gen. 3.14-24) The trial of the human couple culminates in a series of judgements that Yahweh pronounces on the serpent, woman and man (Gen. 3.14-19). On the surface, the scene continues the theme of crime and punishment: Yahweh refers to the offences of the serpent (v. 14a) and man (v. 17a) and announces to the protagonists their respective destinies, which are marked by adversity and appear as punishments. Speaking as a judge, Yahweh sentences, one after another, all the participants of the shadow plot for the roles they played in the breaking of his commandment.122

122. Here I disagree with Westermann, who maintains that the punishments of Gen. 3.14-19, being a later addition to the narrative, ‘have no direct relationship with the offence’. Westermann holds that in the original plan of the narrative the only punishment for human disobedience was their expulsion from the garden (see Westermann, Genesis 1–11, 256–7).

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At the same time, Yahweh’s position as a judge is compromised by his own involvement in the human ‘fall’. It would be narratologically inconsistent to think that the originator of the shadow plot should punish the protagonists for playing the parts he has assigned to them in his drama. I would suggest to read his judgements as another instance of double communication. Presented as divine decrees that prescribe punitive conditions of life in response to the transgression, Yahweh’s judgements could also be seen as simply stating the fact, presenting the new order as a logical outcome of knowing good and bad. Following Westermann, scholars have stressed the descriptive rather than prescriptive character of God’s announcements.123 In Trible’s opinion, Yahweh does not prescribe punishments, but describes the consequences the serpent and the human couple have already brought upon themselves – ‘the disintegration that results when limits are exceeded’.124 Similarly, Bal interprets Yahweh’s punishments as an ‘explicit spelling out of the consequences of the human option, as another representation of the reality of human life’.125 In the light of the double-plot structure of the story, Yahweh’s judgement simultaneously acknowledges the new order of life brought about by the transgression (shadow plot) and condemns human disobedience to his command (leading plot). Yahweh, a master of ambiguity, who in Genesis 2 sets in motion the two opposing plots, at the end of Genesis 3 establishes their final balance, turning, as Fewell and Gunn observe, ‘natural consequences into divinely controlled repercussions’.126 In Gen. 3.14-19 the serpent, woman and man stop being characters and become archetypal roles, bearers of features, the validity of which, it is implied, transcends the world of the narrative.127

123. Westermann, Creation (trans. Scullion; Philadelphia/London: Fortress Press/ SPCK, 1974), 100. 124. Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, 123. Trible sees the consequences of transgression as chaos and living death, a view that appears simplistic given the complex relationships established between the elements of the new order. See also Bill T. Arnold, Genesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 69–70. 125. Bal, Lethal Love, 125. 126. Fewell and Gunn, Gender, Power, and Promise, 35. 127. Meyers has recognized the distinct character of God’s oracles in Gen. 3.14-19, describing them as independent aetiologies that stand out from the surrounding narrative of crime and punishment (Meyers, Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context [New York: Oxford University Press, 1988], 119; this analysis is missing in the revised edition Rediscovering Eve). The once prevalent aetiological interpretation of the scene (see Mettinger, The Eden Narrative, 6–9), in my view, simplifies the complex communication of the myth. I would agree with Calum Carmichael, for whom the aim of myth ‘is not, despite appearances, to explain anything, but to bring to consciousness matters that tend to pass without even minimal reflection’ (Calum M. Carmichael, ‘The Paradise Myth: Interpreting without Jewish and Christian Spectacles’, in A Walk in the Garden: Biblical, Iconographical and Literary Images of Eden, ed. Paul Morris and Deborah Sawyer [Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1992], 48).

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The serpent’s curse Of all the characters in Yahweh’s trial, the serpent is the last one to be named and the first to receive its sentence. This places it at the centre of the chiastic composition that spans the scenes of interrogation and judgement in Gen. 3.9-19:128 interrogation of man (vv. 9-12) interrogation of woman (v. 13) sentence of the serpent (vv. 14-15) sentence of woman (v. 16) sentence of man (vv. 17-19)

The serpent’s central position in the chiasmus underscores its role as instigator of the transfer of knowledge and the one who carries the final blame for the disobedience (v. 13). There is, however, an alternative explanation to the serpent’s centrality: one could see it as an obstacle that stops and turns round the course of the trial. Up until now, the offenders – first man, then woman – responded to God’s questions by shifting the blame on someone else, which in its turn led to the next stage of interrogation. In v. 14, however, God breaks this pattern by not questioning the serpent and moving straight to its sentence. This leaves the serpent’s version of events inaccessible, creating a gap, a silence at the very centre of the process. To make sense of the entire composition one needs to close this central gap by inferring the point of view of the serpent as well as God’s motives in suppressing it. So why should God pass over the serpent in his interrogation? Could this omission be connected to the uncertainty of the serpent’s crime? After all, it never received any prohibitions and did not eat from the forbidden tree. Does this mean the serpent has nothing to confess? Yahweh, on his part, appears certain of the serpent’s guilt: in v. 14 he points to its offence (‘because you have done this’), and issues a punishment (‘cursed are you’). However, the crime of God’s wisest creature is not made clear, which further problematizes God’s judgement. On the one hand, God treats the serpent as an offender, while on the other hand, he charges it without a trial for an undeclared offence. Bal has observed that by not asking the serpent what it has done Yahweh limits its position as a character, treating it as a speechless animal.129 Yet the scene in Gen. 3.1-4 has shown that ‘the wisest of all the animals’ not only has a voice, but also possesses a superior insight into the nature of things, including God’s own thoughts. If the purpose of God’s trial is to find out what has really happened, 128. Mettinger describes the structure of Gen. 3.9-19 as an inclusion with the serpent in the middle (The Eden Narrative, 25). 129. Bal, Lethal Love, 126. Speaking from a different perspective, Cassuto interprets this omission as a statement of the inferiority of the serpent vis-à-vis Yahweh, consistent with the general attitude of the Torah rejecting the mythological image of the serpent or primordial monster rising against the creator (see Cassuto, Genesis I, 158–9).

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surely the serpent would be a key witness to hear. But perhaps, by suppressing his creature’s voice, Yahweh seeks not so much to limit its position or lower its status as to avoid its testimony altogether. The gap in this case would indicate God’s reluctance to hear what the serpent has to say. This idea fits in well with the double-plot hypothesis. If, by inciting the desire of knowledge in woman, the serpent fulfilled Yahweh’s own hidden plan, it is hardly surprising that the latter should avoid bringing it to the surface. For Fewell and Gunn, God does not interrogate the serpent to avoid the cycle of blame coming to rest on himself with the counter question, ‘Why did you put that tree in the garden?’130 By treating the serpent as speechless, Yahweh Elohim silences his own shadow voice and keeps his leading position unchallenged.131 In the absence of a proper confession, God’s charges against the serpent are remarkably elusive: kî ‘āśîtā zō’t, ‘because you have done this’ (v. 14). It is implied that the serpent (and the reader) should know what God means by ‘this’. It would be logical to assume that he is referring to the serpent’s alleged deception, which woman reported in the previous verse. Yet this obvious solution raises new questions. Unlike man, who in his confession to God simply conveyed the facts (‘woman … gave me … and I ate’, v. 12), woman in her testimony presents her own interpretation of the event (‘the serpent deceived me and I ate’, v. 13). As we have seen, her interpretation sits at odds with the rest of the narrative, which demonstrates that the serpent has told no lies. Since God does not assert the charge of deception, which is also resisted by the narrative, it is left open to a wider interpretation. After all, the phrase ‘because you have done this’ may refer not to a specific lie but to the serpent’s generally subversive discourse and the transformation it has led to. In other words, while man and woman confess their specific offences, God holds the silent serpent responsible, in the long run, for the entire situation, as if to say, ‘because you have done all this’. In what follows I aim to show that the two implicit meanings of zō’t in God’s speech – as the general ‘all this’ and as a reference to the specific deception of woman – govern the two aspects of the serpent’s sentence, namely, its place in the cosmic order (v. 14) and its relationship with woman and her seed (v. 15). As a result of its unspecified crime, the serpent is cursed. The negative term ’ārûr, ‘cursed’, which apparently describes God’s punishment, has its own contextual depth. The serpent becomes ‘more cursed than any beast and any wild animal’ in a clear echo of Gen. 3.1, where it was said to be ‘wiser than any wild animal Yahweh God has made’. The words ’ārûr, ‘cursed’, and ‘ārûm, ‘wise’, are linked by their superlative form as well as by assonance and associated with ‘êrōm, ‘naked’ through the wordplay in Gen. 2.25–3.1. The paranomastic sequence ’ārûr-‘ārûm‘êrōm recapitulates the entire shadow plot, pointing simultaneously to the serpent’s

130. Fewell and Gunn, Gender, Power, and Promise, 33–4. 131. Alternatively, the silence might be seen as a sign of intimacy between God and his Shadow. If the serpent in the narrative has been doing God’s bidding, there is really no need for it to tell God what it has done.

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wisdom and to the human knowledge of nakedness, which this wisdom has brought about.132 In this context, the serpent’s curse could be interpreted in two ways. Seen as a punishment, the curse commits the serpent to the lowest structural position: brought down to the level of the ground, it has to walk on its belly and eat dust. Leviticus interprets this position as a permanent sign of abomination (‘whatever walks on its belly … is detestable’ (Lev. 11.42). Elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible the metaphor of licking dust describes the state of conquered enemies (Ps. 72.9; Isa. 49.23; Mic. 7.17). From this perspective, the serpent’s destiny is to carry the signs of its being defeated by God. Yet on the other hand, the physical closeness to the earth gives the serpent’s wisdom a new connotation, pointing to its chthonic character. Landy points to the serpent’s chthonic wisdom, which, like the fruit and the temptation of the tree, is the product of the earth.133 The narrative link between the earth and the serpent is reinforced in Gen. 3.17, where the earth, like the serpent, is cursed (’arûrāh) by God. One could state that the serpent is wise, or discerning, because of its closeness to the earth, the source of wisdom and the substance and origin of all differentiated life forms. Eating dust, ‘āpār, is a sign of this, as it manifests a renewal of the serpent’s symbolic function. The word ‘āpār here is reminiscent of ‘āpār min-hā’adāmāh, ‘dust from the earth’ – the undifferentiated and lifeless matter from which hā’ādām was created in Gen. 2.7. It also anticipates hā’ādām’s return to dust in Gen. 3.19. The serpent’s digesting or transforming of the dust symbolically unites the beginning and end states of hā’ādām and could be seen as a metaphor for the serpent’s transforming role visà-vis the subject. With the terms ’ārûr and ‘āpār forming multiple links with the key elements of the narrative, the serpent’s curse in v. 14 appears to be not so much a description of a new state – after all, the serpent’s former manner of walking and eating has never been detailed134 – as a recapitulation of its symbolic role in the structure of the story. By contrast, the second part of the sentence in v. 15 deals with the serpent’s specific relationship with woman. The broken relationship, or enmity, is established between the former accomplices: in the new world order woman’s offspring will

132. Laurence Turner offers an alternative interpretation of the wordplay. He sees the fact that the serpent comes on stage as ‘ārûm and leaves it as ’ārûr as an indication of its defeat, its failure to outwit God in the same way as it has beguiled woman (Laurence A. Turner, Genesis, 2nd edn [2000; Readings: A New Biblical Commentary; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2009], 24). 133. Landy, Paradoxes of Paradise, 251. 134. It remains a question whether God’s sentence implies that the serpent had a different form prior to God’s judgement. Some ancient Near Eastern images depict the serpent as a four-legged animal (see Charlesworth, The Good and Evil Serpent, 87–8; Hayward, ‘Guarding Head and Heel’, 21). These representations are consistent with the description of nāḥāš in 3.1 as an animal of the field and therefore, by implication, not a reptile (cf. the codification in 1.24–25, 28, 30, where wild animals are considered different from the creatures that crawl on the ground).

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crush (šwp) the serpent’s head, and the serpent, in return, will strike (šwp) them on the heel. Scholars have commented on the symmetrical structure of v. 15b, marked by the repetition of the verbal stem šwp and the contrast between rō’š, ‘head’, and ‘āqēb, ‘heel’.135 Yet, despite the clear parallelism of action, the precise meaning of v. 15b is hard to determine, since most of its terminology is semantically ambiguous. The first problem is posed by the rare verb šwp.136 Modern translations of v. 15 commonly read šwp in both instances as ‘crush, tread upon’ in illustration of the enmity between the two characters. Accordingly, the entire speech is often seen as an aetiological narrative explaining the present-day relation between humans and snakes.137 Yet the verb itself is semantically uncertain, occurring only twice in the Hebrew Bible outside Gen. 3.15 (Job 9.17; Ps. 139.11), each time with a different meaning.138 Furthermore, the LXX and other ancient witnesses including Targum Onqelos, Philo and the Palestinian Targumim describe the relationship between the serpent and woman using the positive verbs ‘watch over’, ‘guard’ or ‘keep’, which compromises the earlier proclamation of their enmity. Finally, the Vulgate attaches completely different meanings to actions of woman and the serpent: while woman ‘crushes’ the head of the serpent, the serpent ‘lies in wait’ for her heel.139 Due to the semantic uncertainty of šwp, the verb is often seen as parallel to a cognate root š’p, ‘gasp, pant, long for’, which can also mean ‘crush, trample’ (Jer. 14.6, Amos 2.7).140 Given that the prevalent meaning of š’p is ‘long for’, the antagonistic relation between woman and the serpent might connote, paradoxically, their drive towards each other. Cassuto spells out this ambiguity by using both meanings in his rendition of v. 15: for him, woman’s offspring ‘crushes’ the serpent, while the serpent ‘craves’ woman’s seed.141 However, given the narrator’s particular attention to parallel composition, the two verbs are likely to have the same meaning,

135. For comments on the poetic style and language of 3.15 see Wenham, Genesis 1–15, 79–81; Hamilton, Genesis 1–17, 197–200; Mathews, Genesis 1–11:26, 245–6; Vermeulen, ‘Eeny Meeny Miny Moe’, 2–13. 136. DCH VIII, 308 lists a range of possible meanings of šwp: ‘crush, break’, ‘conceal’, ‘sweep over’, ‘graze, rub’, ‘spy (on), watch’. 137. Carol Meyers, for example, sees in the serpent character a reflection of the ‘widespread human fear of snakes’ and regards the text of 3.14–15 as the aetiological outcome of the Eden story, which ends badly for the snake (Rediscovering Eve, 79; cf. also von Rad, Genesis, 90; Westermann, Genesis 1–11, 259). 138. In Job, the verb describes God’s ‘crushing’ of a human being, though the instrument of ‘crushing’ is uncertain (either ‘storm’ or ‘hair’), which makes the meaning of the verb less definite. In Ps. 139.11, where the action of šwp is attributed to darkness, the verb is usually translated as ‘cover, conceal’ rather than ‘crush’ (Hayward, ‘Guarding Head and Heel’, 18–19; Vermeulen, ‘Eeny Meeny Miny Moe’, 3–4). 139. For a detailed examination of the ancient versions of 3.15 see Hayward, ‘Guarding Head and Heel’, 17–34. 140. BDB, 983. 141. Cassuto, Genesis I, 161.

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whichever it might be, in order to preserve the symmetry between the actions of the characters. One might, therefore, treat the two instances of šwp as equally ambiguous, allowing aspects of both attack and desire. The concepts of rō’š, ‘head’, and ‘āqēb, ‘heel’, bring additional symbolism to the curse of the serpent. Both Hebrew terms are semantically polyvalent and connote respectively the ideas of top and bottom, beginning and end, front and rear.142 Targum Onkelos and Philo interpret rō’š and ‘āqēb in Gen. 3.15 in a temporal sense as a polarity between the ‘beginning’ and ‘end’ of time.143 The contrast between the two terms seems to be a defining structural feature of the verse, but even this has been called into question. Karolien Vermeulen has examined a range of possible readings of v. 15 that derive from its semantic and structural ambiguity. In her view, the traditional understanding of rō’š and ‘āqēb as the relative accusative that specifies in each case the direction of ‘striking’ is not the only possible interpretation. Vermeulen explores the implications of appositional or vocative reading of rō’š and ‘āqēb, translating them respectively as ‘poisonous’ (from the homonym rō’š, ‘poison, venom’) and ‘crafty’ (from the meaning of ‘qb as ‘supplant’, ‘cheat’).144 In this examination, the relationship between the serpent and woman appears elusive, unstable, unconstrained by fixed meanings – the features characteristic of the serpent and its function in the narrative. Here, as elsewhere in Genesis 2–3, ambiguity is used to communicate the complexity of the story’s symbolic transactions. Accepting the polyvalence of the terms rō’š and ‘āqēb, I would like to explore the interpretive possibilities offered by their traditional translation as ‘head’ and ‘heel’. On the one hand, the images of head and heel imply a vertical hierarchy. Walking on its belly, the serpent occupies a horizontal plane closest to the ground, while woman’s offspring walk on their feet (cf. ‘heel’), holding an upright, vertical position. As the serpent uses its head/mouth to strike at woman’s heel, she uses her foot/heel to strike the serpent’s head.145 It is as if the strikes were exchanged simultaneously, wounding both characters and tying them together. Yet the use of ‘āqēb, ‘heel’, could indicate a more complex transaction. Through its semantic association with ‘rear’, ‘āqēb connotes hiddenness and subversion of the normal order of things. The patriarchal narratives of Genesis use these symbolic implications of the ‘heel’ to construct the name and identity of Jacob, the supplanting brother (ya‘ aqōb literally means ‘takes by the heel’ or ‘deceives’, cf. Gen. 25.26; 27.36). The account of the

142. BDB, 784, 910–11; DCH VI, 540–2. 143. See Hayward, ‘Guarding Head and Heel’, 22–3. 144. See Vermeulen, ‘Eeny Meeny Miny Moe’, 2–13; cf. BDB, 912, 784; DCH VI, 540–1; VII, 376–7. In this reading, the two parallel lines of v. 15b could be understood as respective addresses to the snake (‘[O] poisonous one’) and to woman’s offspring (‘[O] crafty one’). 145. Early Christian commentators beginning with Irenaeus saw Gen. 3.15 as the first messianic prophecy, or Protoevangelium, with its image of the Virgin Mary crushing the head of the serpent. This reading implies a definite victory over the serpent, which contradicts the Hebrew narrative, in which the serpent’s attack follows that of woman.

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birth of Esau and Jacob in Gen. 25.25-26 is particularly interesting in this respect, since, like Gen. 3.15, it displays the semantic opposition between r’š and ‘qb, Esau is born first, ri’šôn, and is therefore associated with r’š. Jacob, in his turn, is linked to ‘qb, since he comes out after Esau, grasping his brother’s heel. The brothers’ respective positions at birth determine the dynamics of their future relationship, at the centre of which lies Jacob’s deception or taking ‘by the heel’. In the conflict between woman and the serpent in Gen. 3.15, the fact that the serpent strikes woman on the heel seems to parallel the eponymous action of Jacob. In this context, the manner of the serpent’s attack in Gen. 3.15 might signify its subversive role in the dialogue with woman in vv. 1-5, which she later describes to Yahweh as deception (v. 13). It is difficult to understand the meaning of woman’s gesture towards the serpent in the context of their previous interaction. It seems nevertheless significant that God puts these two characters in a symmetrical relationship, simultaneously mirroring (šwp/šwp) and contrasting each other (‘āqēb/rō’š). Their subversive interaction in Gen. 3.1-5 is a creative space where new meaning and knowledge is born; it is also the space where Yahweh Elohim reveals his other side. Woman and the serpent are cross-determined in their shared role of ‘helper’ and in the dialogical character of their communication. The association between the two is also implicit in the linguistic link between the Aramaic word for snake, ḥiwyā’, and the proper name ḥawwāh, which will be discussed below. Woman and gender roles Unlike the sentence of the serpent, the punishment of woman seems unrelated to her offence.146 Abruptly, without a causal clause, Yahweh assigns to her the task of reproduction and emphasizes the suffering it brings: ‘I will greatly increase your pains and your conceptions, in pain you shall bear children’ (v. 16a). The pain that taints woman’s life-giving power is twice conveyed by the same root ‘ṣb (‘iṣṣābôn, eṣeb, ‘pain, toil’).147 It is notable that neither ‘iṣṣābôn nor ‘eṣeb is commonly used in the Hebrew Bible to describe the pain of childbirth. In prophetic literature, for example, woman’s suffering in labour is conveyed by other terms, such as ḥûl, ‘to writhe (in pain)’ (cf. Isa. 26.17, 18; 45.10; 54.1; 66.7, 8; Mic. 4.10; Jer. 4.31; 6.24), hēbel, ‘pain, pangs’ (Isa. 13.8) and ṣîr, ‘distress’ (Isa. 21.3). The term ‘iṣṣābôn is not gender-specific and will reappear in v. 17, where it will characterize the hard toil of hā’ādām. It would appear that woman’s suffering, though linked to procreation, is rooted in the general adversity of the human condition after transgression and is something she shares with man. Two conclusions could be drawn here. On the one hand, the punitive vocabulary used in v. 16 (‘iṣṣābôn; eṣeb) conveys Yahweh’s negative attitude to the human

146. As Trible argues, Yahweh makes no charge against woman because he has already charged her during the interrogation, for his question, ‘What is this you have done?’ implies her guilt (God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, 126). 147. BDB, 780–1; DCH VI, 526–7.

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transformation, which is consistent with the leading plot. On the other hand, by choosing non-gender-specific terms to describe woman’s punishment, the narrator distances it from her role in procreation (hrh, ‘to conceive’; yld, ‘to give birth’). In other words, woman is punished with the pain in childbearing and not by childbearing as such. In itself, procreation could be seen as a logical consequence of the couple’s discovery of nakedness in Gen. 3.7 and thus belong to the shadow plot. Human knowledge of sexual differentiation is here translated into the task of life-giving. There is, however, an essential asymmetry to that process: although in Gen. 3.7 ‘the two of them’ shared the knowledge of gender, this knowledge, binary by nature, leads to the task of procreation only for woman. Gender and the creative function it implies become woman’s exclusive prerogative. By the same movement, man is dissociated from fertility and life-giving. The new structure of life lacks the concept of father.148 hā’ādām corroborates this in Gen. 3.20, naming his wife ‘the mother of all living’, without any reference to himself as father. With respect to the creative power of the female, the male functions only as its product – a son (cf. tēledî bānîm, lit. ‘you shall bear sons’). Eve articulates this idea in Gen. 4.1 when she says, ‘I have created a man (’îš) with Yahweh’. In this respect, the garden narrative contravenes the focus on the father in the genealogical accounts of Genesis, where the life-giving function is allocated to men (Gen. 5.3-32; ch. 10; 11.10-26). Verse 16 starts with the phrase harbāh ’arbeh, ‘I shall greatly increase’ – the emphatic form of the verb rbh, ‘to be great, many’, in hiphil. Yahweh’s authoritative statement is syntactically and semantically ambiguous. It governs a compound object (lit. ‘your pain and your conception’) that has been commonly treated by scholars as a hendiadys that relates a single idea of the pain of childbirth. The line has therefore been commonly read along the lines of ‘I shall greatly increase your pain of/in childbearing’.149 On the basis of a lexical analysis of the terms ‘iṣṣābôn, ‘pain, distress’, and hērôn, ‘conception’, Meyers has argued against the assumed hendiadys, denying the link between pain and childbearing.150 Following Meyers, a number of scholars have understood the Hebrew text to mean ‘I will greatly increase your pains/distress and your conceptions’, a view with which I agree.151 Seeing ‘iṣṣābôn and hērôn as separate objects of the verb helps to uncover both of Yahweh’s conflicting perspectives: his action is linked to the semantically

148. The word ’āb, ‘father’, is used only once in Gen. 2.24, where the phrase ‘his father and his mother’ points to man’s origins rather than his own ‘fathering’. 149. Speiser, Genesis, 24; Westermann, Genesis 1–11, 262; Wenham, Genesis 1–15, 81; Alter, Genesis, 13; Landy, Paradoxes of Paradise, 249. 150. Meyers, Discovering Eve, 106–9; Meyers develops her argument in Rediscovering Eve, 88–93. 151. See Lerner, Eternally Eve, 116–17; Stephen Andrews, ‘What’s the Matter with Eve: The Woman and Her Sentence in Ancient Judaism’, in Divine Creation in Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Thought: Essays Presented to Rev’d Dr Robert D. Crouse, ed. Michael Treschow, Willemien Otten and Walter Hannam (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2007), 2–3.

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negative concept of pain (increase of pain), as well as the semantically positive idea of reproduction (increase of conceptions). In the latter case, harbāh ’arbeh is reminiscent of God’s initial blessing of humankind, ‘be fruitful and multiply (rebû)’ (Gen. 1.28). The two voices of Yahweh come together in his address to woman, which, ironically, curses her with pain while renewing the blessing of Gen. 1.28. Altogether in the garden narrative, the emphatic construction ‘infinitive absolute + imperfect’ is used four times, drawing attention to the key propositions that drive the plot (Gen. 2.16, 17; 3.4, 16). The four instances of this construction could be presented as a rough chiasmus with the contradictory voices of Yahweh and the serpent at the centre: ’ākōl tōk’ēl, ‘you shall surely eat’, 2.16 môt tamût, ‘you shall surely die’, 2.17 ‘you shall surely not die’, 3.4 lō’-môt temutûn harbāh ’arbeh ‘I shall greatly increase’, 3.16

The sequence captures the multivocality that lies at the heart of the story. The concepts ‘eat’ and ‘die’ in the first two phrases oppose the concepts ‘not die’ and ‘increase’ in the second two. These emphatic markers help to demonstrate the subversive logic of the narrative, according to which dying becomes non-dying, and the eating of the forbidden fruit becomes a way to the divinely ordained increase of humankind. The two statements at the centre of the sequence – Yahweh’s môt tamût (2.17) and the serpent’s lō’-môt temutûn (3.4) – deserve closer attention. Standing in direct opposition to each other, they represent two contradictory perspectives on knowledge. However, these statements are not grammatically uniform, which opens a gap for interpretation. While Yahweh addresses the human being in its singular, undifferentiated state (tamût, 2ms), the serpent speaks of both woman and man (temutûn, 2cp). Yahweh’s warning could be accurate in the sense that knowledge is incompatible with a singular, undifferentiated subject, for whom the act of discernment would constitute symbolic ‘death’. Semiotically, the singular hā’ādām faces either the lack of knowledge (stagnation) or death (transformation), which explains why Yahweh considers its singular state, lebad, as ‘not good’ (Gen. 2.18). Consequently, he creates woman in order to ensure that the subject, by becoming plural, is capable of both knowing and not dying. This is precisely what the serpent says in Gen. 3.4. Its words ‘you shall certainly not die’ do not contradict Yahweh’s earlier statement, since they are applied to a different, plural subject. If Yahweh is right, so is the serpent: to the binary subject, the attainment of knowledge signifies experience and growth, the opposite of death and stagnation. The full implication of this argument becomes clear in Gen. 3.16. The semiotic process to which the serpent refers opposes death to the differentiation and discernment that are achieved through woman. The same process now gives woman the ultimate responsibility for the continuation of life. Her structural role of ‘helper’, who has brought knowledge and life to the undifferentiated, and therefore sterile and stagnant hā’ādām, is now epitomized in her ‘greatly increased’ conceptions

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and her childbirth.152 Accordingly, hā’ādām recognizes woman as the source of life for all when he calls her ḥawwāh as the ‘mother of all living’ (Gen. 3.20). However, alongside this universal aspect of ḥawwāh, woman is also specifically established as a source of renewal and reinstatement for male subjectivity. Through her births of sons, foretold in Gen. 3.16 and actualized in Gen. 4.1, 2, 25, ’îš is reborn. In this, woman’s position as man’s helper receives a new meaning: through her the male subject not only acquires divine knowledge, but is continually brought to life and therefore, symbolically escapes death. Following the description of woman’s pregnancies, Yahweh moves on to establish sexual roles for both woman and man: ‘your desire shall be for your husband (’îš), and he shall rule over you’. It introduces a radically new dynamic into the relationship of the primal couple, being, as Bird has stated, ‘the Bible’s first statement of hierarchy within the species’.153 One of the most direct statements of patriarchy,154 Gen. 3.16b has exercised enormous influence over social and cultural perceptions of gender, endorsing gender inequality by the authority of a divine decree.155 Although the androcentric message of this text seems obvious, some aspects of it stand in tension with the rest of the narrative and therefore warrant our attention. The first difficulty concerns the human, gendered as ’îš. In Gen. 3.16, as elsewhere in Genesis 2–3, his presence is problematic. Here ’îš is a semiotic object used to formulate the destiny of ’iššāh (notably, it is woman and not the gendered ’îš who is told about the male rule). Of all the aspects of subjectivity in the narrative, his is the least established and acknowledged. ’îš is not linked, like ’ādām, to the earth, or like ’iššāh, to the serpent, and is never specifically named or directly addressed by anyone. His only companion is woman: of the four times ’îš is found in Genesis 2–3, each time it appears in connection with ’iššāh (Gen. 2.23, 24; 3.6, 16). With respect to woman, he is an afterthought and – both literally and semiotically – her ‘son’ (Gen. 3.16; cf. 4.1). As a character, ’îš has proved to be weak and unmotivated, while ’iššāh has shown initiative and independent judgement.

152. Clines argues that childbearing is the only help that woman provides. In the narrative, he states, she ‘exists for the procreation of children. This is what Eve does to help’ (Clines, What Does Eve Do to Help?, 36). I only partly agree with this statement. Above, I have aimed to demonstrate that woman’s help is first and foremost to give to hā’ādām the knowledge of good and bad. Her procreation is an expression of this primary function. 153. Bird, ‘Bone of My Bone and Flesh of My Flesh’, ThTo 50 (1994): 527. 154. Meyers views this statement as ‘perhaps the most problematic in all the Hebrew Bible from a feminist perspective’ (Meyers, Discovering Eve, 113). 155. Trible disputes this evaluation, saying that ‘male supremacy is neither a divine right nor a male prerogative’. Instead, she sees both male supremacy and female subordination as signs of the unresolved tension, in which man and woman have to live as a result of their disobedience (Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, 128). Although this point is valid, it remains unclear why man’s transgression should lead to his superior position.

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Yet, paradoxically, the weak and schematic male subject is now given unequivocal ascendancy over woman. The narrator’s problematic approach to maleness is better understood in the light of linguistic conventions, underlying biblical narrative, that regard male subjectivity as primary. Here, as Fewell and Gunn indicate, ‘values associated with being a “man” (or “masculine”, “male”) are assumed to be a neutral standard or the norm, and are unmarked, while values associated with “woman” (or “feminine”, “female”) are negative, abnormal, inessential – in short, inferior – and are marked’.156 It is because of his primary position that ’îš does not have to be specifically established – he is the subject ‘pre-existent’ in hā’ādām and central to the implied reader’s point of view – whereas ’iššāh, the other, has to be characterized, named and renamed to reflect the subject’s changing perception. It is only through an act of defining woman’s place, in other words, of ruling over her, that the primary subject can establish and maintain his own identity. As Bal notes, ‘self is defined by exclusion of what is perceived as other’.157 The ambiguous identity of ’îš – superfluous and passive yet endowed, disproportionately, with power and authority – reflects the basic paradox of the patriarchal mind, defined by the same female reality that it dominates. Narratologically speaking, the idea of the patriarchal rule of ’îš over ’iššāh is consistent with an attitude towards woman that the implicitly male subject hā’ādām has demonstrated from onset. As we have previously observed, in Gen. 2.2324 hā’ādām sees woman as part of himself, flesh of his flesh. Later in Gen. 3.12, interrogated by Yahweh, he blames woman for his own actions, projecting his guilt onto her and dissociating himself from both. Whether man is moved by love or by fear, his attitude is ego- and androcentric, denying woman autonomy and thus negating her as a subject. It would appear that the relationship of dominance, mšl, of man over woman in v. 16 epitomizes this perspective of the self which, in its expansion, takes over the subjectivity of the other. Perhaps one of the reasons why ’îš is not told about his superior role is because he has been living it out all along. Benno Jacob comes to a similar conclusion about woman’s position. He argues that woman’s role as man’s helper, established before her creation, presupposes both her subordination and the dominating position of man. By proclaiming man’s rule in v. 16, Yahweh does not effect any real change, but endorses the gender hierarchy already at work.158 The second difficulty concerns woman’s desire that binds her to man (tešûqāh). Scholars have commonly interpreted the meaning of tešûqāh in Gen. 3.16 as sexual desire. Their readings range from ‘lust’ (Everett Fox) and ‘apparently unbridled sexual desire’ (Lerner) to sexual and loving desire (Athalya Brenner) or longing for

156. Fewell and Gunn, Gender, Power, and Promise, 17. 157. See Bal, ‘Introduction’, in Anti-Covenant: Counter-Reading Women’s Lives in the Hebrew Bible, ed. Bal (JSOT SS 81; Sheffield: Almond Press, 1989), 15. 158. Benno Jacob, The First Book of the Bible: Genesis (trans. Israel I. Jacob and Walter Jacob; Jersey City: Ktav, 2007), 30; see also Wenham, Genesis 1–15, 81.

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sexual intimacy (Terence Fretheim).159 For Trible, woman’s sexual desire expresses her yearning for the original unity of male and female as one flesh (cf. Gen. 2.2324), the unity that has been disrupted by disobedience.160 It is often argued that Yahweh introduces woman’s sexual desire in order to perpetuate procreation. Meyers has linked the institution of desire in Gen. 3.16 to women’s social-economic function of replenishing the community by repeated childbearing. Having procreation as her primary role, woman needs desire to compensate for the risks of pregnancy and birth.161 In this way, the pains of childbirth do not preclude her from further sexual relationship with her husband, to whom she feels relentlessly attracted. From this perspective, woman appears totally objectified, used as a tool of procreation, bound to man both socially, by his domination, and emotionally, by her own desire. Even more than man’s rule, woman’s desire for man epitomizes the patriarchal ideal.162 From a literary viewpoint, however, Meyers’s argument does not ring true. Unlike the concept of mšl that resonates with the male perspective throughout the narrative, the desire woman feels in Gen. 3.16 is inconsistent with her previous characterization. On the one hand, the reader knows woman as the one who desires. tešûqāh in v. 16 shows semantic continuity with ta’awāh, ‘desire’, and ḥāmad, ‘to delight in’, which communicated woman’s desire of seeing and understanding in Gen. 3.6 (cf. also the possible reading of šûp in Gen. 3.15 as ‘desire’). Woman’s desire for knowledge is her key characteristic on which the entire narrative is hinged, the feature that enables her to ‘help’ hā’ādām. Yet on the other hand, at no point in the story has woman desired man in any of his guises, either as hā’ādām or as ’îš. She has never addressed him and, apart from giving him the fruit to eat, she has not related to him at all. While hā’ādām is oriented towards woman from the moment he sees her (Gen. 2.23-24), she seems indifferent to her partner. One

159. Everett Fox, The Five Books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. A New Translation with Introduction, Commentary and Notes (Schocken Bible 1; New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 23; Lerner, Eternally Eve, 112; Athalya Brenner, The Intercourse of Knowledge: On Gendering Desire and ‘Sexuality’ in the Hebrew Bible (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997), 21; Terence E. Fretheim, ‘The Book of Genesis’, The New Interpreter’s Bible I, ed. Leander E. Keck (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), 363. 160. Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, 128. 161. Meyers, Discovering Eve, 111–17. This idea is virtually absent from Meyers’ recent book Rediscovering Eve, which, though based on its forerunner, has many of its ideas thoroughly revised. Here Meyers takes the word tešûqāh to signify ‘return’ rather than ‘desire’ in the light of the ancient versions of 3.16 (Rediscovering Eve, 93–5; cf. the discussion of Joel Lohr’s argument below, 64). 162. From a different angle, Bal sees the reversed order in which woman’s desire for man is placed in Gen. 3.16 after her labour as an indication that the relationships of desire and domination are judged ‘less important, perhaps less fatal, than the pain of labor’. Seen this way, the process of life-giving appears to be fundamental to woman’s nature and emphasized over sexual relations (Lethal Love, 126).

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might ask why woman, whose interests and desires belonged elsewhere before Gen. 3.16, should start feeling desire for man now, just after he has betrayed her to Yahweh (Gen. 3.12). If anything, the couple’s knowledge of nakedness gave rise to the feelings of shame and fear, not those of desire, making the overall mood of the narrative cold and non-affective. Joel Lohr questions the reading of tešûqāh in Gen. 3.16 as sexual desire and suggests a different way to approach woman’s role.163 In his view, the term tešûqāh, found only three times in the Hebrew Bible (Gen. 3.16; 4.7; Song 7.11), connotes the idea of ‘return’ and is therefore synonymous to tešûbāh. A number of early textual witnesses interpret tešûqāh in 3.16 as ‘turning’ or ‘return’: such is the translation of LXX (apostrophē),164 the Old Latin (conversio), the Peshitta and the Ethiopian version of Jubilees (megbā’, ‘place of refuge’ or ‘place of return’, Jub. 3.24).165 Among the examples of the early Hebrew usage of the term, Lohr quotes the non-biblical Community Rule (1QS 11.21-22). It first alludes to the creation of the human being out of dust and then describes human longing (tešûqāh) for dust. The meaning ‘return’ seems more appropriate here, especially in the context of the human return (tešûbāh) to dust in Gen. 3.19. All of the remaining six occurrences of the term in the Qumran manuscripts likewise suggest a nuanced meaning of ‘return’. Accordingly, Lohr understands tešûqāh as a movement ‘to an appropriate or natural place, almost as if part of the genetic makeup of the one (or thing) returning’.166 Woman’s tešûqāh in Gen. 3.16 might therefore signify her return to man as her origin in a movement that reverses the creation of woman from ’îš (Gen. 2.23; cf. 2.21-22). For Lohr, this return has a sense of finality and may signify a fulfilment of woman’s mission with respect to man. Indeed, woman’s role as helper for hā’ādām is now completed on both levels: as a provider of knowledge, she has brought about his transformation, and as a provider of sons, she is given the task of assuring his continuous existence. She has come a full circle, and there is no need, from the narrator’s point of view, to construct her character any further. With the non-sexual reading of tešûqāh, female subjectivity is subordinated or ‘returned’ to man not because of her intrinsic desire or need of him but due to her predetermined narrative and social role. Contextual repercussions of such a reading become clear when one compares woman’s ‘return’ to her husband to man’s return to the earth, announced in Gen. 3.19. hā’ādām and hā’adāmāh In contrast to the gender-specific destiny of woman, man’s sentence in Gen. 3.17-19 seems to be gender-neutral. It describes the general processes of human

163. Joel H. Lohr, ‘Sexual Desire? Eve, Genesis 3:16 and ‫’תשוקה‬, JBL 130 (2011): 227–46. 164. The LXX seems to be reading tešûqāh as tešûbāh in Gen. 4.7 (apostrophē, ‘return’) and in Song 7.11 (epistrophē, ‘turning, conversion’). Hamilton observes this in Genesis 1–17, 201. 165. For an examination of ancient translations of tešûqāh see also Andrews, ‘What’s the Matter with Eve’, 6–10. 166. Lohr, ‘Sexual Desire?’, 246.

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subsistence and death, marked with the same pain as woman’s labour: ‘in toil (‘iṣṣābôn) you shall eat of it [the earth]’, ‘thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you’, ‘by the sweat of your face you shall eat bread’. Van Wolde suggests that Yahweh’s words in vv. 17b-19 ‘also bear on woman and so on man in general’.167 Nevertheless, Yahweh clearly treats woman and hā’ādām as separate subjects (cf. ‘because you have listened to the voice of your wife’). This upholds the ambiguous status of hā’ādām: as a general human being, he is placed above gender, and yet he remains grammatically and structurally male. By the same token, woman is removed from the ‘general’ destiny of humanity. Instead, she is mentioned here as a mediator of man’s destiny, in echo of her original role of helper. Having conceived woman with a particular task in mind, Yahweh now recapitulates the role she played in his shadow plot and links it to the destiny of the human being. In this light, the sentence of hā’ādām, which results from his listening to woman’s voice, should reveal Yahweh’s real agenda – an idea that underlay his creation of humankind and gender. So what happens to man as a result of woman’s ‘help’? Once again, Yahweh declares a curse, but man, unlike the serpent in Gen. 3.14, is not cursed directly. In an unexpected twist, the earth, hā’adāmāh, is punished in place of hā’ādām (‘cursed is the earth because of you’, Gen. 3.19). Why should the earth, which did not play any part in man’s transgression, take on man’s punishment? The following verses provide an immediate explanation, describing how the earth’s curse has a knock-on effect on man’s mode of subsistence. The curse affects the fertility of the earth, which will from now on produce for him ‘thorns and thistles’. The abundant provision of the garden, where man could simply ‘take’ his food from the trees (Gen. 3.6), gives way to the meagre subsistence on the grass of the field, obtained by painful toiling.168 It would appear that Yahweh’s real target is not the earth, but man, who bears the consequences of the earth’s reduced fertility. hā’adāmāh is, however, more than a mere instrument of Yahweh’s judgement. The notion of the earth has a semiotic depth that one cannot access without going back to the narrative of the creation of hā’ādām in Gen. 2.5-7. In 2.5 the earth is a cosmic element which pre-exists humanity, and yet, without human services, its state is incomplete. The earth (’ereṣ) is lifeless, with no vegetation on it, because there is ‘no ’ādām to serve hā’adāmāh’.169 Even before the earth-creature is brought to life, the narrator determines its particular relationship with the earth, in which the latter has a higher semiotic status. It is in order to fulfil the earth’s need that Yahweh fashions hā’ādām from the dust of hā’ adāmāh (Gen. 2.7). The obvious linguistic association between the two terms marks their semantic correspondence. On the one hand, hā’ādām, the one who tills, or serves, the soil, is united by function to

167. Van Wolde, A Semiotic Analysis of Genesis 2–3, 182. 168. Notably, the sentence of man, as well as his guilt, is dominated by the concept of eating: the verb ’ākal is used here five times in the space of three verses. 169. In this translation I follow Brett, who takes the verb ‘bd in Gen. 2.5, 15; 3.23 in its more common meaning ‘to serve’, as opposed to ‘till’ or ‘work’, which are used in most English translations (Brett, Genesis, 30).

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hā’adāmāh as the arable land. On the other hand, hā’ādām is literally an ‘earthcreature’, a being of the same substance with hā’adāmāh, united to it by nature. For Westermann, this double correspondence ‘attests that human beings and earth belong together, that the earth is there for humanity and human beings are there to populate it, Isa. 45.18’.170 It also implies that being in a relationship with the earth presupposes a fundamental consubstantiality with it. Only as an ‘earth-creature’ can the human being serve the earth. Strikingly, both aspects of the earth-human relationship outlined in Gen. 2.5-7 reappear in the scene of the judgement of hā’ādām (Gen. 3.17-19). First, here man finally fulfils his role in relation to the earth. Vegetation serves as a link between the two, ensuring their mutual dependence: hā’ādām eats the plants that the earth yields for him, giving the earth his service (toil) in exchange (Gen. 3.17-19).171 The vocabulary of v. 18 clearly echoes that of Gen. 2.5 (cf. ṣāmaḥ, ‘sprout’, and ‘ēśeb haśśādeh, ‘grass of the field’), but in contrast to the initial situation, which described the lack of grass and of sprouting, both concepts emerge as part of the new structure of life. Retrospectively, the garden appears as a transitional domain where a direct relationship with the earth is not possible. While subsistence in the garden is mediated and regulated by Yahweh, who sprouts (ṣāmaḥ) fruit trees from the earth (Gen. 2.9) and issues dietary rules, subsistence outside the garden is mediated by the earth itself, which now can finally sprout vegetation. In Gen. 3.1719 Yahweh relinquishes his responsibility for feeding man, making the earth his direct source of food and his metaphorical ‘master’. At the closure of the narrative, when Yahweh sends hā’ādām ‘out of the garden of Eden to serve the earth from which he was taken’ (Gen. 3.23), hā’adāmāh appears to have taken Yahweh’s place in more than one respect. Second, Yahweh’s judgement in vv. 17-19 also refers to the human being’s origin as an ‘earth-creature’. For Devora Steinmetz, the curse of the earth in v. 17 connotes its organic unity with man: ‘Earth could be cursed through Adam’s sin because earth (’adamah) and Adam were of the same substance.’172 Earth is the undifferentiated substance of all the life forms God created in the narrative – human (Gen. 2.7), vegetal (2.9) and animal (2.19). It is also that which human beings return to in the end (‘till you return to the earth, for from it you were taken’, Gen. 3.19). Both at the beginning and at the end of his life, hā’ādām merges with hā’ adāmāh, assuming a state marked by the absence of form, differentiation and boundaries. This state corresponds to the earth’s initial ‘lifeless’ condition, symbolized by the notion of dust. Just as the lifeless earth – dust – became the raw material of humanity (‘for you are dust’), so the human being, in death, returns to its primordial unity with

170. Westermann, Genesis 1–11, 206. 171. See van Wolde, ‘Facing the Earth: Primaeval History in a New Perspective’, in The World of Genesis: Persons, Places, Perspectives, ed. Philip R. Davies and David J. A. Clines (JSOT SS 257; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 30. 172. Devora Steinmetz, ‘Vineyard, Farm and Garden: The Drunkenness of Noah in the Context of the Primeval History’, JBL 113 (1994): 196.

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the earth (‘to dust you shall return’, v. 19). Arguably, the perfect symmetry between the beginning and end positions suggests that the dominant idea in v. 19 is not the end of human life, but human unity with the earth. It is noteworthy that despite the clear connotation of death in Gen. 3.18-19 Yahweh does not mention the verb mût, ‘to die’ in his judgement of hā’ādām. This has interesting implications with regard to Yahweh’s death warning in Gen. 2.17. As elsewhere, the text is ambiguous. On the lexical level it seems to emphasize not the death of hā’ādām, but his life, ḥayyîm. The semantic sequence yôm–’ākal–mût, present in the prohibition (cf. ‘on the day you eat from it you shall certainly die’, Gen. 2.17), is replaced with the sequence ’ākal–yāmîm–ḥayyîm (‘in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life’, Gen. 3.17). In the last balance, instead of the certain and immediate death that hā’ādām should have experienced on the day he ate from the forbidden tree, he is given a lifetime of toiling (and eating!) on the earth that culminates in his return to earth as his origin. As the above analysis suggests, the narrator of Genesis 2–3 translates the linguistic association between ’ādām and ’ adāmāh into a relationship of both provenance and interdependence. On the one hand, the earth is presented as the ultimate foundation of human existence; on the other hand, it requires human service in order to produce life. The theme ‘man versus earth’ links the beginning and the end of the narrative, and the change in human status vis-à-vis the earth constitutes the main transformation of the story. From this perspective, the entire narrative structure of prohibition–disobedience–punishment appears to be constructed with the purpose of bringing the human being closer to the earth. Similarly, Jobling in his structural analysis of Genesis 2–3 defines its main narrative programme not as ‘creation and fall’, but as ‘a man to till the earth’.173 I disagree, however, with Jobling’s assessment of Yahweh as a villain who unsuccessfully tries to stop man from tilling the earth by prohibiting knowledge. In my view, Yahweh’s motives are more complex. Plotting on two levels, Yahweh simultaneously orchestrates the ‘fall’ of hā’ādām and distances himself from it. Repressed by the narrator and Yahweh himself, the programme that brings man to serve the earth is, nevertheless, what Yahweh (and the narrator) really wants. Accordingly, the judgement of hā’ādām in Gen. 3.17-19 demonstrates a success, rather than failure, of Yahweh’s plans. If this is correct, and Yahweh’s ultimate goal in Genesis 2–3 is to establish a relationship between humankind and the earth, then the thrust of the narrative moves from the moral to the cosmological domain. At the heart of it is not human transgression, but Yahweh’s progressive creation, in which hā’ādām and the earth come to occupy the precise places in the world order that Yahweh designed for them from the start. Looking from the opposite perspective, Paul Ricoeur pinpoints the ‘either – or’ choice required in approaching the ideas of creation and fall in biblical narrative. For Ricoeur, who reads the ‘Adamic myth’ as an irruption of the irrational into the perfect and complete universe of Genesis 1, ‘the idea

173. Jobling, The Sense of Biblical Narrative, 21–9.

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of a “fall” of man becomes fully developed only in a cosmology from which any creation-drama has been eliminated’.174 In my opinion, the opposite is true: since one cannot eliminate Yahweh’s crucial involvement from the drama of human disobedience, the idea of ‘fall’ loses its grounds. From this angle, what Ricoeur has seen as an irrational human choice disrupting the perfect creation could be treated instead as part of the ongoing process of creation, through which Yahweh – a God who knows good and bad – continues to organize the elements of the cosmic order and their relationships. The result is a world, in which the perfection of Genesis 1 is translated into a dynamic and complex interplay of good and bad, life and death, responsibility and freedom. Gender Relationships and the World Order in Genesis 2–3 In the new structure of life described in Gen. 3.14-19, the relationship between man and earth (’ādām –’adāmāh) displays a striking similarity to that between man and woman (’îš–’iššāh). Various degrees of that similarity have been observed in biblical scholarship. Landy, for instance, states that in Genesis 2–3 man’s ‘relationship with woman is a precise parallel to that with the earth’.175 In her detailed semiotic study of Genesis 2–3, van Wolde analyses different levels of correspondence between earth, man and woman.176 To begin with, ’îš shows the same phonetic resemblance to ’iššāh as ’ādām does to ’adāmāh. Next, at a grammatical level, the feminine ending -āh found in both ’iššāh and ’adāmāh points to a certain semantic analogy. Van Wolde interprets the morpheme -āh as an iconic sign of the lifegiving function that woman and earth have in common. The third, sememic level of correspondence exists between the pairs ’ādām–’adāmāh and ’îš–’iššāh. The two pairs demonstrate, each in its turn, a relation of interdependence. The earth brings forth hā’ādām (Gen. 2.7) and is the source of his sustenance (Gen. 3.18), while woman is destined to bear sons and therefore, implicitly, brings forth ’îš (Gen. 3.16; cf. 4.1). Neither woman nor earth can produce life without their partners, ’îš and ’ādām, who are respectively assigned the tasks of ruling over ’iššāh (Gen. 3.16) and tilling (serving) ’adāmāh (Gen. 3.17-19). For van Wolde, these tasks display constructive, governing involvement of the male character with respect to his partner, which she defines as management. The following formula formulates the relations of interdependence between the two pairs: ’ādām : ’adāmāh = management : giving life ’îš : ’iššāh

174. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (trans. Emerson Buchanan; New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 172. See also Mettinger, The Eden Narrative, 81. 175. Landy, Paradoxes of Paradise, 251. 176. Van Wolde, A Semiotic Analysis of Genesis 2–3, 183–6.

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Imaging the earth in its life-giving aspect as a female is universally recognized in world mythology. A prominent example of the mother earth image in the Ancient Near East is Ki, the Sumerian goddess of the earth, who, having espoused An, the sky god, gives birth to all the other gods and the vegetation and takes part in the creation of man. In the biblical story of creation the earth appears gendered too, but, due to the demythologizing concerns of the narrator, the attribution of gender happens on a different level, that is, through semantic associations between narrative elements rather than clear taxonomy. As a result, the earth is constructed as a ‘metaphorical female’ in its relationship with humanity, which is structurally parallel to that between woman and man. This process hinges on the ‘split personality’ of hā’ādām: being a figure of generalized humanity, standing for both male and female, hā’ādām is also a particular male character in the story. On the one hand, his subjectivity is defined by a disavowal of gender, and yet, on the other hand, it is reaffirmed as male in his relation to the earth. Similarly, the female reality, whether it is subsumed in the general definition of humankind or excluded from it, survives as a projection in the image of the metaphorical female – the earth. Because of this structural discrepancy, as Brueggemann has stated, ‘the natural partner of man is “’ādāmȃ”, not “’iššȃ”’.177 In addition to the sememic parallels demonstrated by van Wolde, earth, hā’ādām and woman are united by a hierarchy of provenance. They respectively occupy three levels of the creation/differentiation of the subject that took place in Genesis 2. There, in the first instance, Yahweh fashions a human from the dust of the earth, differentiating it from its larger environment (’adāmāh → ’ādām). In the next stage, woman was created from a side of hā’ādām (’ādām → ’iššāh). The diagram in Figure 1.6 modifies van Wolde’s formula in a way that takes account of the derivative links between its elements. In the hierarchy of creation in Genesis 2, the earth is the origin of humanity, and woman, its most differentiated form. Notably, each successive element of the progression ’adāmāh → ’ādām → ’iššāh fulfils a particular purpose with respect to its predecessor. Thus, hā’ādām has to till (serve) the earth to make it fertile, and woman has to be hā’ādām’s helper. As I have argued above, woman’s intervention or ‘help’ creates the conditions that enable man to serve the earth. In this, the entire progression is directed back towards the earth. This idea is finalized in Gen. 3.16-19, where the hierarchy of creation is traced back to its beginning. Here woman’s destiny is placed in the context of her relationship with her husband, whereas the lot of hā’ādām is defined by his association with the earth. Like woman’s labour with its pain (‘eṣeb, v. 16), the relationship between hā’ādām and hā’adāmāh is tainted by toil (‘iṣṣābôn, v. 17). If, as Lohr has argued, tešûqāh in v. 16 means ‘return’ and is used in parallel to šûb in v. 19, then, structurally, both woman and hā’ādām perform the same movement, returning to their beginnings: ’iššāh to ’îš, and hā’ādām to hā’adāmāh. Given its narrative association with ’îš, hā’ādām becomes a link in a progression ’iššāh →

177. Brueggemann, ‘Of the Same Flesh and Bone’, 538.

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’ a d a-ma-h

’a-da-m

’išša-h

’îš

derivation functional (sememic) analogy interdependence

Figure 1.6 Structural relations between earth, hā’ādām, man and woman.

’îš/hā’ādām → hā’ adāmāh that brings together woman and the earth. At the end of Genesis 3, Yahweh’s creation has come full circle, returning more differentiated forms of subjectivity back to their previous, less complex forms. The earth features at the end of this circle in its primal, lifeless state of dust (‘for you are dust and to dust you shall return’, Gen. 3.19). Complicating the chiastic relationship between earth, man and woman in vv. 16-19 is the serpent’s function. Defined by its closeness to the earth and by its enmity towards woman, the serpent does not fit into the pattern ‘derivation vs. return’. Still, the serpent relates in one way or another to each of the participants of the new cosmic order. Being a creature of the earth like hā’ādām, the serpent remains closely related to it. Like the earth, the serpent is cursed, and the curse closes up the distance between them, almost merging them together, for now the serpent has to walk on its belly and eat dust (of the earth). Similarly, the dust that the serpent consumes links it to hā’ādām and to his origin and destiny as an ‘earth-creature’ (cf. v. 19). Yet most graphic of all is the serpent’s relation to woman (v. 15). Due to the semantic uncertainty of the verb šûp, their mutual enmity is highly ambiguous: they either simultaneously attack each other, or are drawn to each other by desire. Notably, the verbs šûp (twice in v. 15), šûq (v. 16) and šûb (twice in v. 19), used respectively in the sentences of the serpent, woman and man, are linked by both alliteration and assonance. The striking repetition of sound draws attention to these three actions and suggests a certain degree of continuity between them. This has implications for how one understands the overall semiotic order constructed by the narrator of Genesis 2–3 (Figure 1.7). In this model, the serpent stands at the top of the functional hierarchy. By introducing duality of meaning into human experience, it acts as a refractor, turning the semiotic chain ’adāmāh → ’ādām → ’iššāh back onto itself. This role is not limited to the dialogue in the garden: it is perpetual, applied to zera‘, the progeny of both woman and the serpent. In the cosmic order that Yahweh announces at the end of Genesis 3, the subversive wisdom of the serpent is the force that turns the wheel of creation and makes it an ongoing process, returning woman to man, and man to earth, so that the cycle can start all over again.

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na-h.a-š strikes/desires (šûp)

strikes/desires (šûp)

’išša-h is taken from (lqh.)

desires/returns to (šûq)

’a-da-m/’îš is taken from (lqh.)

returns to (šûb)

’ ada-ma-h Figure 1.7 Cycle of creation and return in Genesis 2–3.

The naming of woman in Gen. 3.20 could offer additional support to the above interpretation. Here the narrator’s gloss derives woman’s name ḥawwāh from the root ḥāyāh, ‘to live’, describing her as the ‘mother of all living’. Nahum Sarna sees the name ḥawwāh as an archaic form of the participle ḥayyāh, ‘living’ (fs) and interprets it in the context of Gen. 3.20 as ‘living thing, i.e. life personified, or propagator of life’.178 In a narrow sense, this name simply designates woman’s reproductive function, her responsibility for the continuation of life, established in v. 16. Compared to the first, generic naming of ’iššāh in Gen. 2.23, ḥawwāh is a proper name and reflects man’s understanding of the identity of woman, who is from now on, in the words of Bal, imprisoned in motherhood.179 However, looking at the place v. 20 occupies in the composition of the scene, one might adopt a wider perspective on woman’s name. Although man learns about woman’s reproductive role in v. 16, he delays naming her ‘mother of all living’ until he has received his own judgement in vv. 17-19, the judgement that introduces death and return to dust as an inevitable part of his experience. This presents the proclamation of life in the naming speech of hā’ādām as a counterbalance to the death penalty he has received in the previous verse. Though man clearly needs to wait for Yahweh to finish his speech before any naming could be done, it is difficult to avoid looking at man’s discourse as a reaction to the entire series of judgements, or as a sort of digest. Seen in this way, the name of ḥawwāh not only points to woman’s life-giving in v. 16 but also plays on the general idea of life renewed through the cyclic rhythm of creation and return that underlies the judgements in vv. 14-19. The words ’ēm kol-ḥāy, ‘mother of all living’, support this universal connotation. In the light of the above, man’s naming of woman puts her at the centre of the new cosmic order as an epitome of life and renewal. The existential threat to

178. Sarna, Genesis, 29. 179. Bal, Lethal Love, 128.

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the subjectivity of hā’ādām – the threat of annihilation associated with the unity of hā’ādām and hā’ adāmāh in v. 19 – is made less urgent through ḥāwwah. Being a universal mother, she is also the personal saviour of hā’ādām, the one who redeems him from dust and restores, over and over again, his transient identity. In that respect, the structural role of ḥāwwah parallels that of Yahweh, who in Gen. 2.7 differentiated hā’ādām from the earth by breathing into him the breath of life (ḥayyîm) and making him a living being (nepeš ḥayyāh). Bal understands this parallel as a ‘functional analogy between the two creative forces’. For her, woman’s role as the climax of creation and as the future creator of ‘all living’ may be signified in the phonetic resemblance between her name and the name of Yahweh.180 The semantic ground for the rapprochement between the two names lies in the concept of life, with the sequence yhwh, ḥayyîm, ḥayyāh (Gen. 2.7) reflected in the sequence ḥāwwah, ḥāy (Gen. 3.20). Being aligned with yhwh as the giver of life, the name ḥawwāh also carries a linguistic link with the serpent. Scholars have observed close similarities between the Hebrew ḥawwāh and words for ‘snake’ in a number of cognate languages.181 The Aramaic ḥiwyā’, Syriac ḥewyâ, Arabic ḥayyatun and Persian ḥaiyat, all denote ‘snake’ or ‘serpent’ and resemble both the Hebrew ḥayyāh, ‘to live’ and woman’s name ḥawwāh in Gen. 3.20.182 In Genesis Rabbah, this association between the two is used to bolster a negative evaluation of woman. Here, Rabbi Aha describes ḥāwwah as Adam’s serpent, that is seducer.183 However, it is the concept of life and not that of seduction that forms the semantic basis for their relationship. In various cultural traditions, the image of the snake shedding its skin has been seen as a symbol of the renewal of life. In the Hebrew myth, the serpent’s role is similar: by introducing death as a means of renewal, the serpent, paradoxically, ensures the continuity of life. For woman and the serpent, ‘life’ is a shared signifier.184 It would appear that towards the end of Genesis 2–3 the narrative establishes a chain of semantic correspondences between the characters of woman, Yahweh and the serpent on the one hand, and the concept of life on the other. Having used the

180. Bal, Lethal Love, 129. 181. For a presentation of the discussion see Charlesworth, The Good and Evil Serpent, 450–1. 182. Cassuto, Genesis I, 170–1; Bruce Vawter, On Genesis: A New Reading (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977), 87; Charlesworth, The Good and Evil Serpent, 450. Wenham, following A. J. Williams, finds the etymology associating woman with the serpent improbable (Genesis 1–15, 84). 183. Gen. Rab. 20.11; 22.2. 184. According to Landy, the ‘surreptitious pun’ that links h.awwāh and the serpent mediates the associated contraries of life and death: ‘The woman and the serpent are antagonists between whom the pun suggests a transfer of power, of essence’ (Paradoxes of Paradise, 221). I would attach more nuance to the idea of mediation, since the serpent’s symbolic function is to introduce death as a renewal of life. Woman and the serpent both mediate life, being accomplices as much as antagonists.

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serpent to instigate, and woman, to actualize his shadow plot, Yahweh succeeds in establishing a new structure of life. At the centre of this structure lies a relationship between hā’ādām and hā’adāmāh, the desired outcome of Yahweh’s plotting. Structurally, in their reciprocal relationship both man and the earth absorb each other, as man incorporates the earth through eating and the earth incorporates man through death. While this unity is achieved through the narrative mediation, or ‘help’, of woman and the serpent, it is also constantly disrupted by their symbolic function. For it is only through the medium of woman, the creator of new life and the semiotic bearer of difference, and of the serpent as the agent of subversion and change, that man and the earth can remain differentiated, and their relationship renewed. Woman and the serpent keep the process going. As such, their role is indispensable. The Strategies of Closure (Gen. 3.22-24) Following the judgement episode is the scene of expulsion, which draws the boundaries of the garden and places the evolved human being outside. The entire scene is focused on hā’ādām and his definite separation from the tree of life. In Gen. 3.22 Yahweh admits to himself that hā’ādām has acquired the divine knowledge of good and bad and thus should not be allowed ‘to take also from the tree of life and live forever’. In Gen. 3.23 Yahweh sends him from the garden to serve the earth from which he was taken, and in Gen. 3.24 Yahweh drives hā’ādām out before stationing the cherubim to the east of the garden to protect the tree of life. The expulsion scene provides a resolution to the overall plot of Genesis 2–3. By expelling hā’ādām from the garden, Yahweh finally provides the earth with a human to serve it (Gen. 3.23; cf. 2.5). Wenham has observed the parallels between the opening scene in Gen. 2.5-17 and the scene of expulsion in Gen. 3.22-24, which give the narrative a rounded character. In both scenes, God is the sole agent while man is passive, and both scenes involve crossing the boundary between the earth and the garden.185 Both mention the knowledge of good and bad as a possibility, either implicit in the tree (Gen. 2.9, 17) or realized (3.22). This symmetry conveys a sense of completion, showing that the outcome has already been prefigured and predetermined in the opening scene. The expulsion, which in the story’s legalistic framework features as a punishment for disobedience, is at another level a fulfilment of the purpose of creation with its programme ‘a man to serve the earth’ (Gen. 2.5). In this light, how should we understand Yahweh’s motives in separating hā’ādām from the tree of life? Following the human ascent to knowledge, Yahweh appears vulnerable, afraid that the new, evolved human might eat of the tree of life and reach immortality (Gen. 3.22). Mettinger represents a widely held view when he says that the statements in Gen. 3.5 and 3.22 ‘point to the existence of a borderline,

185. Wenham, Genesis 1–15, 85.

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a sort of demarcation, between the divine world and the human – a border that Yahweh does not want the humans to pass’.186 With knowledge and life being divine prerogatives, Yahweh is threatened by the possibility that the humans, who now possess knowledge, could reach immortality and thus become fully divine. At a closer look, this interpretation appears simplistic. It disregards the fact that it is structurally impossible for hā’ādām to possess both divine prerogatives – by getting to know good and bad, the human beings have entered the cycle of birth and death and so, by definition, have lost immortality. But Yahweh’s fear is not without significance. It signals the necessity of boundaries and fragmentation in the differentiated world and the vulnerability inherent in it. Verse 22 does not impose a new boundary; rather, it re-inscribes the ontological boundary that has already been drawn in vv. 17-19 in the story’s symbolic space. At the same time, v. 22 poses questions with regard to Yahweh’s own perspective. Is Yahweh Elohim, the one who draws and maintains the boundaries, left unaffected by the new world order? The tree of knowledge, the symbol of his repressed subjectivity, seems to have disappeared from the text and from the garden. Could this signify the end of ambiguity in Yahweh’s discourse? What is the spatial position of Yahweh, who knows good and bad, with respect to the boundaries of the garden, which has been freed of distinctions and now contains only the tree of life? In short, does the end of the story find God inside or outside of Eden? It would appear from the subsequent narrative that Yahweh follows the humans in their life outside Eden if only ‘to enforce the continuation of the story they have begun’.187 Thus, immediately after the expulsion, Eve declares Yahweh’s involvement in the creation of Cain (‘I have created a man with Yahweh’, Gen. 4.1). That later Cain has to depart ‘from the presence of Yahweh’ (Gen. 4.16; cf. 4.14) implies Yahweh’s prior presence in a particular place outside the garden.188 In fact, never again in the biblical narrative is God found in the garden of Eden, a fact which Raanan Eichler interprets as divine self-expulsion or the ‘fall of God’, who decides to follow the ‘fallen’ humans whithersoever they went.189 It might be that the question of Yahweh’s location is left open intentionally, since the garden becomes irrelevant as the story of humanity unfolds. However, Eichler’s alternative reading of the expulsion narrative offers a new insight into divine spatiality. According to him, four targumic translations of Gen. 3.24 reflect a divergent vocalization, which changes the meaning of Yahweh’s action from ‘stationing the cherubim’ to ‘settling with the cherubim’. Eichler argues that the targumic reading – ‘and Yahweh settled with the cherubim and the spinning-sword-flame to the east

186. Mettinger, The Eden Narrative, 25–6 (citation on p. 25). See also Wenham, Genesis 1–15, 85. 187. Fewell and Gunn, Gender, Power, and Promise, 37. 188. See Raanan Eichler, ‘When God Abandoned the Garden of Eden: A Forgotten Reading of Genesis 3:24’, VT 65 (2015): 12. 189. Eichler, ‘When God Abandoned the Garden of Eden’, 13.

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of the garden of Eden’ – is closest to the original authorial intent.190 This reading has potential implications for understanding Yahweh’s spatial position: the idea of his settling with the cherubim outside the garden with the intention to guard the tree of life posits Yahweh not only on the boundary between the symbolic domains of knowledge and immortality but as the boundary itself, for Yahweh, the maintainer of boundaries, is also the maintainer of life, and as such has access to both sides – the differentiated world of hā’ādām and the unified space of the garden. This liminal position communicates a semantic openness that in the world of the narrative only Yahweh can possess. With hā’ādām out of the garden and Yahweh guarding its symbolic boundaries, where, at the closure of the narrative, does one find woman and the serpent? After its sentence in Gen. 3.14-15, the serpent has no further role to play. It belongs with the tree, and although its destiny, tied with that of woman and her seed, appears to lie outside the garden, the narrator of Genesis will never mention it again.191 With woman, things are more complicated. It is notable that the scene of expulsion, focused on hā’ādām, omits any mention of woman. That seems ironic, since she – the only one out of all the characters – has just received a name and has been solemnly declared the mother of all living (Gen. 3.20). Such an imposing presence could hardly be overlooked, unless the overlooking was intentional, and woman’s absence was a result of the narrator’s strategy. So where is ḥawwāh at the crucial moment when the boundaries of human existence are drawn? An obvious way of dealing with woman’s absence in the closing scene would be to see her incorporated in hā’ādām, who can be considered a figure of humanity in general.192 However, the narrator has previously mentioned hā’ādām alongside woman (hā’ādām we’ištô, ‘the human and his wife’, Gen. 2.25, 3.8, 21; cf. 3.20), and so the omission of woman in Gen. 3.22-24 appears significant.193 Whether she is overlooked or written out of the text on purpose, woman is not included in the drawing of the boundaries, which allows her the spatial freedom hā’ādām is denied. In that sense, whether or not woman leaves the garden remains unclear. I would suggest that this ambiguity stems from her structural position vis-à-vis the tree of life. The final verses of the narrative show a frequent occurrence of the different forms of the root ḥyh, ‘to live’. Back in Gen. 3.20, as seen above, the narrator linked

190. The translations of 3.24 in Tg. Neof., Frg. Tg. P, Frg. Tg. V and Tg. Ps.-J. reflect a vocalization of the verb škn as wayyiškōn, ‘and he settled’, in difference to the Masoretic wayyaškēn, ‘and he placed, stationed’ (see Eichler, ‘When God Abandoned the Garden of Eden’, 2–8). 191. Except in Gen. 49.17, where the word nāḥāš is used as a metaphor to describe the destiny of Dan. 192. Van Wolde attaches that meaning to the character of hā’ādām in Gen. 3.17b-19 (A Semiotic Analysis of Genesis 2–3, 182). 193. According to Exum, ‘where women do not appear in the narrative is as important as where they do appear’ (Fragmented Women, 71).

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woman’s name ḥawwāh to the word ḥāy, ‘living’. In 3.22, 24 the root is used three more times in the context of hā’ādām’s expulsion: ḥayyîm, ‘life’, wāḥay, ‘he will live’ (v. 22), and ḥayyîm (v. 24). The accumulated references to life are grouped around two central images – Eve (ḥawwāh) and the tree of life (‘ēṣ haḥayyîm). The mother of all living and the tree of life do not appear alongside each other as if they were mutually exclusive, but their semantic link suggests a structural association. Woman in her procreative role carries the characteristics implicit in the tree of life, that is, through her childbearing humankind as a collective subject will ‘live forever’. Is it because of ḥawwāh’s association with life that she needs to ‘hide’ in Gen. 3.22, 24, when hā’ādām gets dissociated from it? The ambiguity of woman’s spatial position allows her to travel freely (at least, behind the scenes) across the guarded boundaries of the garden and of hā’ādām’s identity. It also displays the difficulties the narrator has in admitting that the tree of life, lost for humankind, is nevertheless implicitly present – beyond Eden – in woman as the mother of all life. At a different level, by leaving woman out of the picture, the narrator anticipates the suppression of the gendered other in the following narrative of Genesis 4–11. To an extent, woman as an acting, thinking subject is left behind, her significance confined to the garden narrative and its shadow plot. That the immediately following narrative celebrates Eve as a creative, life-giving force within humanity (Gen. 4.1) is an exception that confirms the rule, for it is also the last time Eve’s name is mentioned in Genesis and the Hebrew Bible. While hā’ādām is banished from the garden, ḥawwāh is banished from the subsequent history of humankind. Female reality in the cosmological myths of Genesis 4–11 exists only as a conjecture, an occasional generic reference to wives and daughters in the context of male genealogies (Gen. 4.17, 19-23; 6.1-4). To complete her banishment, woman is symbolically deprived of the life-giving role of ḥawwāh she has been assigned in the garden. Instead of the ‘mother of all living’, it is Adam and his male descendants that go on regenerating themselves through the lengthy tôledōt (Genesis 5; 10; 11.10-26). For Mary Daly, this ‘multiplication of males’ is part of the narrative strategy that denies female reality in the cosmic order.194 Yahweh ratifies this strategy in his new covenant after the flood when he transfers the blessing to ‘be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth’ from the unity of male and female (Gen. 1.27-28) to the males across their generations (Gen. 9.1; cf. 9.7). The cosmological myth of the spread of humankind has no place for female subjectivity and centres around the implicitly gendered relationship between humankind and the earth.

The Two Plots of Yahweh Elohim Emerging at the end of this examination of Genesis 2–3 is a picture of the narrative characterized by profound ambiguity and a complex structure. On the one hand,

194. Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 37–8.

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as a myth of creation, Genesis 2–3 lays out fundamental distinctions between God and human beings, male and female, good and bad, life and death. In this respect, the narrative resonates with the creation account in Genesis 1, in which the world comes into existence by being separated into binary pairs.195 On the other hand, unlike Genesis 1, which establishes fixed boundaries between the elements of the created world, Genesis 2–3 present a cosmic model, in which boundaries are permeable and identities unstable. At a closer look, each distinction or opposition in the garden narrative appears to be tempered, its contradiction mediated through the use of a middle or ‘third’ category, which resists a definite position within a binary structure.196 Thus, the binarity of man and woman, ’îš and ’iššāh, which appears with the institution of gender, is undermined by the continuous use of the ungendered term hā’ādām, which stands at different points for ‘man’ and for ‘human being’. The opposition between life and death, introduced with God’s prohibition in Gen. 2.16-17, is mediated by the idea of mortal life in Gen. 3.17-19, which incorporates the notions of both life and death. Alongside the clear opposition of good and bad – the object of the forbidden knowledge (Gen. 2.9, 17; 3.5, 22) – the narrator uses the term ‘not good’, lō’-ṭôb, to describe the singular state of the human creature. In a similar way, the distinction between the tree of life and the tree of knowledge is blurred when each one of them is in turn described as the tree ‘in the middle of the garden’ (Gen. 2.9; 3.3).197 At the most general level, the narrative as a whole subverts the fixed boundaries of divine and human identity through hā’ādām’s becoming ‘like gods who know good and bad’. The narrative resistance to fixed meaning is also demonstrated in the technique of double or split presentation. The text of Genesis 2–3 abounds in doubles, pairs and mirror images. Here one finds two names for man (hā’ādām and ’îš) and two names – and naming ceremonies – for woman (’iššāh, Gen. 2.23, and ḥawwāh, Gen. 3.20), two separate descriptions of hā’ādām being put in the garden (Gen. 2.8, 15) and two accounts of his expulsion (Gen. 3.23, 24). In Gen. 2.19-20, 21-22 Yahweh makes two attempts at creating a helper for hā’ādām and speaks to himself on two occasions, reflecting on the state of the human (Gen. 2.18; 3.22). Furthermore, Genesis 2–3 is the only text in Genesis where the narrator repeatedly presents

195. Clines argues that ‘in Genesis 2, as in Genesis 1, reality has binary structure’, but points out that creation here is achieved by forging bonds and not by separation, as in Genesis 1 (The Theme of the Pentateuch, 2nd edn [1978; JSOT SS 10; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1997], 81). 196. Edmund Leach describes the function of a ‘third category’ with respect to binary structures in Genesis as Myth and Other Essays (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), 11. For Leach, the gap between the binary poles of an opposition is bridged by an intermediate or third concept that resists codification; cf. anomalous beings in mythology. 197. David Jobling comments on the uncertainty of binary divisions in Genesis 2–3 in The Sense of Biblical Narrative, 19. For him, the interpretation of this narrative needs ‘not only to discover the underlying mythic oppositions, but also to give an account of how and why they have become unclear in the text’.

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God under the double name of Yahweh Elohim (the name occurring twenty times).198 On the other hand, the divine character who features as Yahweh Elohim is mirrored by the character described as Elohim in the dialogue of woman and the serpent (Gen. 3.2, 3, 5). Communications, transactions and identities in the story seem to break up, split into two, metamorphose under the readers gaze while, at the same time, forming part of a carefully woven plot. In an otherwise terse narration of Genesis 2–3, the technique of double presentation adds structural complexity and semantic depth to the characters and events in the story, signalling further departure from interpretative certainty. Scholars have long recognized the structural complexity of the garden narrative, presenting it as a combination of various plots or narrative programmes. George Coats has argued that the plot rests on two narrative pillars: ‘paradise gained’ (Gen. 2.8-17) and ‘paradise lost’ (Gen. 3.1-24).199 Robert Culley represents the traditional view, finding here action sequences of creation (Gen. 2.4b-25) and fall (Gen. 2.16-17; 3.1-19).200 This view reflects thematic differences between Genesis 2 and Genesis 3 but, by reading them as separate plots, undermines the complex network of cross-determination that exists between their elements. As Jobling has observed in his critique of Culley, by separating creation as a distinctive sequence, one ends up with an incomplete model of creation that is simultaneously subordinated to the fall in some respects and independent from it in others.201 Treating Gen. 2.4b25 as a separate creation sequence, one risks overlooking the overall argument of the garden narrative. Jobling and, more recently, Stordalen have followed a different approach, looking at the composite structure of Genesis 2–3 from the point of view of causality and motivation. Jobling presents the story as an interplay of two narrative models – ‘creation and fall’ and ‘a man to till the earth’ – that stand in tension with each other. The model ‘a man to till the earth’ resolves the main underlying concern of the narrative – to provide the gardener for the whole earth – yet on the surface it remains a minor theme. The ‘fall’ model with its clear transformation, on the other hand, is ‘much closer to the superficial narrative interest of the text’ and is presented as its major theme.202 In a similar vein, Stordalen has argued that

198. Earlier studies considered that the double designation ‘Yahweh Elohim’ resulted from a redactional merging of the J and P sources (cf. von Rad, Genesis, 77; Westermann, Genesis 1–11, 198). More recently, scholars have seen in it the author’s perception of God as ‘both Israel’s covenant partner (YHWH) and the God of all creation (Elohim)’ (Mettinger, The Eden Narrative, 14; see also John Day, From Creation to Babel: Studies in Genesis 1–11 [Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 592; London: Bloomsbury, 2013], 25; Mathews, Genesis 1–11:26, 192–3). 199. See George W. Coats, Genesis, with an Introduction to Narrative Literature (The Forms of the Old Testament Literature 1; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983), 51. 200. Robert C. Culley, ‘Action Sequences in Genesis 2–3’, Semeia 18 (1980): 28–32. 201. Jobling, The Sense of Biblical Narrative, 21. 202. Ibid., 20–7.

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the narrative of Genesis 2–3 connects several plots, with the basic plot centred on bringing vegetation to the entire land (Gen. 2.5; 3.19, 23).203 Both Jobling and Stordalen recognize the centrality of the narrative programme ‘a human to till the earth’ for the overall plot of Genesis 2–3, but see it as contradicting God’s interests as the private owner of the garden. Jobling, as mentioned above, maintains that Yahweh places hā’ādām in his private garden and prohibits knowledge in order to stop him from tilling the whole earth.204 In both cases, the scholars link the ambiguity of the narrative to the problem of Yahweh’s intentions – something that has also been attempted in the present study – but seem to overlook Yahweh’s own ambivalence, interpreting him as the story’s villain. Contrary to Jobling and Stordalen, I suggest that Yahweh’s primary intention is to provide a human to work the earth, and the garden with the tree of knowledge in the middle is designed to give hā’ādām the competence and complexity necessary to realize this intention. In line with the above suggestion, the narrative could be presented as an interplay of two conflicting plots, which stem from Yahweh’s double communication. Unlike the above models of Coats and Culley, either plot cannot be exclusively linked to particular sections of the text, as both unfold simultaneously. The prohibition in Gen. 2.16-17, which on the surface belongs to the leading plot with its legalistic framework, posits knowledge as a possibility, and the following creation of ‘helpers’ (the animals and woman) prepares all the conditions for the transgression. The central part of the narrative in Gen. 3.1-7, although clearly dominated by the shadow plot, still has the leading perspective represented in woman’s report of God’s words (Gen. 3.2-3). A similar interplay between the two strands happens after the human beings break the prohibition. At one level, the text of Gen. 3.9-24 presents the divine trial and punishment of the disobedient human couple. With Yahweh’s death warning fulfilled (vv. 18-19) and the human driven away from the tree of life (vv. 23-24), the leading plot asserts both God’s authority and human fall from grace. At the same time God’s supposed sentences of punishment lay out a new world order, centred on hā’ādām’s serving the earth and Eve’s life-giving – a world that was anticipated at the onset of the narrative in Gen. 2.5. Each of the two plots displays a different set of actors. In the leading plot, the main dramatis personae are Yahweh Elohim and hā’ādām. Both before and after the transgression, hā’ādām’s position vis-à-vis the knowledge of good and bad remains God’s central concern (Gen. 2.16-17; 3.11, 17, 22). When the couple hide among the trees, God only looks for hā’ādām, showing no interest either in woman’s whereabouts or in her having eaten of the tree.205 Similarly, woman is

203. Stordalen, ‘Man, Soil, Garden’, 3–25; Bob Becking argues along similar lines in ‘Once in a Garden: Some Remarks on the Construction of the Identity of Woman and Man in Genesis 2–3’, in Out of Paradise: Eve and Adam and their Interpreters, ed. Bob Becking and Susanne Hennecke (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2011), 1–13. 204. Jobling, The Sense of Biblical Narrative, 22. 205. Even when God directly interrogates woman in Gen. 3.13, his question ‘What is this that you have done?’ seems to refer more to man’s preceding statement (‘The woman

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not mentioned in the expulsion scene in Gen. 3.22-24. Having entered the garden as hā’ādām, a non-gendered human being, the narrative subject also leaves it as hā’ādām – a human, in whose identity gender and difference are concealed. Conversely, woman and the serpent play the main parts in the shadow plot. Here the serpent features as an inverted representation of Elohim, and its relationship with woman mirrors Elohim’s relationship with hā’ādām. At the centre of each relationship stands the prohibition, which Elohim addresses to hā’ādām in Gen. 2.16-17 and which the serpent interprets to woman in Gen. 3.1, 4-5. But unlike man, a passive recipient of God’s orders, woman in the shadow plot is a thinking, experiencing and acting subject. She discusses God’s law with the serpent, looks at the tree and recognizes the desirability of knowledge. She then makes a considered choice, upon which depends the success of Yahweh’s hidden agenda. hā’ādām, on his part, simply adheres or ‘clings’ to her, seeing her as ‘flesh of his flesh’ (Gen. 2.23). This adherence is necessary for the shadow plot to work, so that, once woman has acted, man would inadvertently follow her example (Gen. 3.6). In this logic, it becomes possible for man to break the prohibition ‘unconsciously’, and for woman, to carry the brunt of the blame at the trial (Gen. 3.12, 17). Extending his agency over both plots, Yahweh Elohim emerges as a complex character who occupies simultaneously the centre and the margins of the narrative world. As the central figure, he has absolute power and authority, and exercises them through the acts of creating (‘āśāh, yāṣar) and decreeing (ṣāwāh). He sets out boundaries and embodies the concepts of justice and judgement. In this sense, Yahweh Elohim in Genesis 2 is akin to the transcendent creator of Genesis 1 who, in Landy’s words, is ‘rational, determined, and uninvolved’.206 On the other hand, the same Yahweh Elohim introduces the seeds of subversion into the world by planting the tree of the knowledge of good and bad alongside the tree of life. The centre of the garden, occupied by the two trees, is split from the beginning. Seeing it as the symbolic centre that epitomizes God’s own identity, the concepts of Life and Knowledge convey the union of dualities that only Yahweh can possess. His knowledge of good and bad constitutes his other side, his Shadow, which is pushed out to the margins and which the subversive voice of the serpent represents. However, it is this suppressed knowledge that guides God’s further creation. When Yahweh recognizes human singularity as lō’-ṭôb, ‘not good’, he also acknowledges the deficiency of his own singular, totality-based discourse. By creating woman as hā’ādām’s other and, through her ‘help’, sharing the knowledge of good and bad with the humans, Yahweh expresses his own duality. By expelling hā’ādām from the garden, God finally provides the earth with a human to till it (Gen. 3.23), thus fulfilling the ultimate goal of creation, formulated in Gen. 2.5. The new world order that comes as a result of the interaction between Yahweh’s two plots accommodates the dualities of male and female, good and bad, life

whom you gave to be with me, she gave me from the tree’, Gen. 3.12), than to whether or not she ate of the tree herself. 206. Landy, Paradoxes of Paradise, 257.

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and knowledge. At the end of the narrative, the human couple assume both characteristics. hā’ādām becomes like God who knows good and bad, and woman becomes implicitly like God as ḥawwāh, the giver of life. The narrative also stresses their respective dissociation from each other’s semiotic domains: hā’ādām is structurally separated from the concept of life (his way to the tree of life is barred), while woman is never said to be in possession of knowledge. Each of the two plots tells its own story, complete in itself, with its own system of values, purpose and outcome. Each plot is a shadow of the other, and because of this, the two are inseparably linked. Despite the prominence of the leading plot, which surrounds and contains the ‘shadow’ theme of knowledge, its success depends entirely on the operation of the ‘other’ story. At a diachronic level, one might see here an example of what Brett defines as the ‘intentional hybridity’ of the Genesis narrative – a technique of juxtaposing alternative points of view, used by the final editors in order to undermine the dominant voices and ideologies.207 The application of ‘intentional hybridity’ simultaneously establishes and puts in question the decreed dominance of ’îš and problematizes the authoritative voice of Yahweh Elohim. However, the diachronic approach could not account for the extent of cross-determination that exists between the two alternative perspectives. In Sternberg’s definition, such interrelation of contradictory narrative perspectives leading to a fulfilment of the overall programme manifests the operation of ambiguity as a principle of literary discourse.208 In Genesis 2–3 ambiguity is not only a stylistic technique but also a key principle that guides every stage of the narrative. God’s fundamental ambivalence towards human beings unfolds here as two plots that simultaneously oppose and resonate with each other and in the end give rise to a world that integrates contradictory perspectives. In this sense, the structures of ‘double-plotting’ in the garden narrative manifest the creative and cohesive role ambiguity plays in the construction of meaning.

207. Brett, Genesis, 32. 208. Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, 227–8.

Chapter 2 THE SUBJECT AND THE LAND IN THE ABRAHAM CYCLE (GEN. 11.27–25.18)

The Patriarchal and Matriarchal Successions The cosmological myths of Genesis 1–11 tell the story of the spread of humankind over the earth – a process that leads to the emergence of multiple families, languages, lands and nations, named in Genesis 10. From the ethnic multitude of postdiluvial humanity, the focus in Genesis 11 narrows down through the chosen lineage of Shem to the family of Terah, the father of Abraham, thus setting the stage for the myth of ethnogenesis – a national myth of Israel that links its origins with a chosen line of forefathers. The narratives of Genesis 12–50, formally presented as tôl edôt, ‘generations’ (Gen. 11.27; 25.19; 36.1, 9; 37.2), tell about a succession of the patriarchs – Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – to whom God makes a promise of posterity, divine–human relationship and the land.1 The threefold promise, which initiates this succession, is renewed in each generation, being passed on from father to son and resting ultimately on Jacob, the eponymous ancestor of Israel and the forefather of its twelve tribes (Gen. 12.3; 15.5; 22.17; 26.3-5; 28.1314; 35.11-12). At the beginning of this line stands Abraham – the patriarch (or ‘first father’) par excellence, whose name ’abrā hā m in Gen. 17.5 God interprets as ‘the father of many nations’.2 Arguably, this name communicates a claim that lies at the centre of the patriarchal stories – a conflicted claim, based on a descent from a common ancestor, of both affinity with other nations and superiority over them.3 This claim

1. See Clines, The Theme of the Pentateuch, 30–47. 2. Throughout this study, I shall use the names ‘Abraham’ and ‘Sarah’ to designate the characters, who in the text are called ‘Abram’ and ‘Sarai’ until Genesis 17. 3. Seth D. Kunin develops this idea as a structural paradox underlying the Israelite ideology, that is, the coexistence in one myth of the ideology of similarity, implicit in the claim of one God who created the world and the provenance of all nations from one couple, and the ideology of difference, which stresses distinctions between ethnic groups and is expressed through the rules of endogamy. Kunin links the ideology of difference with the linear genealogies that detail the origins of Israel, and sees the ideology of similarity in the

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is magnified in the blessing of Abraham in Gen. 12.1-3, which founds the chosen identity on a separation from own family and land and simultaneously posits the patriarch as a source of blessing for all the families of the earth. From that point on, Abraham becomes the basis of the chosen identity, reproduced both genealogically (through endogamous succession) and ideologically (through the reiteration of the promise in each generation). In what follows I shall read the characters of the patriarchs and of Abraham in particular as personifications of Israel, used by the ethnocentric narrator to construct the boundaries of national identity, the ethnic self. Alongside the chosen identity, articulated by the patriarchal succession, the narrative repeatedly places the destabilizing presence of ‘other’ brothers – Lot,4 Ishmael and Esau – and resolves the ensuing tension by having them removed from the land. Just like the reiteration of the promise, the removal of the rival is a necessary feature of the patriarchal succession that takes place in each generation. Fewell describes this process as the pruning ‘of Abraham’s family tree to a singular trunk’ – an excision that she considers futile ‘since the scars remain’.5 But the narrative of Israel does not treat the stories of the ‘other’ brothers as redundant. Leaving more than mere ‘scars’, their genealogical presence is important and is often elaborated into lengthy tôl edôt (cf. Gen. 25.12-18; 36.1-43) to explain the origin of the neighbouring nations and to maintain a tension between them as the ethnic other and the chosen line of patriarchs as the self of Israel. As Exum has observed, throughout the stories of the patriarchs, ‘Israel is continually defining itself over against its neighbors, whose relation to Israel is described in terms of complex family relationships.’6 Although this central plot of promise and rivalry is centred on patriarchal succession, it includes large narrative sections featuring important female protagonists, who, as mothers to male heirs, make that succession possible. The very fact of women’s presence on stage indicates an important shift following the primeval myths of Genesis 4–11 with their exclusively male cast. As mentioned before, the genealogies of Adam (Gen. 5.1-32) and of Shem, Ham and Japheth (Gen. 10.1-32; 11.10-26) completely omit women’s names, and in those rare cases where women do receive a mention, they have a momentary presence with no

segmentary genealogies of other nations, whose descent is subordinated to that of Israel (The Logic of Incest: A Structuralist Analysis of Hebrew Mythology [JSOT SS 185; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995], 99). 4. The nuances of Lot’s relation to Abraham will be dealt with later in the chapter. 5. Fewell, ‘Imagination, Method, and Murder: Un/Framing the Face of Post-Exilic Israel’, in Reading Bibles, Writing Bodies: Identity and The Book, ed. Timothy K. Beal and David M. Gunn (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 137; see also R. Christopher Heard, Dynamics of Diselection: Ambiguity in Genesis 12–36 and the Ethnic Boundaries in Post-exilic Judah (The Society of Biblical Literature Semeia Series 39; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 2001), 3. 6. Exum, ‘Hagar en procè s’, 2.

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voice or action.7 Unlike the invisible mothers hidden behind these male tô lē dô t, the mothers of the patriarchal narratives – Sarah, Hagar, Lot’s daughters, Rebekah, Leah and Rachel – are distinct characters who are responsible for the continuation of the line and play central roles in ensuring the ‘right’ succession.8 Thus, Sarah both arranges the birth of Ishmael and secures the succession of her own son Isaac. Lot’s daughters safeguard their father’s descent by bearing his sons, ancestors of Moab and Ammon. Rebekah has twin sons but makes sure that ‘the elder serves the younger’ (Gen. 25.23), Leah produces multiple offspring and Rachel, arguably, establishes the privileged status of her son by stealing her father’s idols.9 Given the amount of narrative space dedicated to significant mothers in Genesis 12–36, Irmtraud Fischer argues that it is inaccurate to call these stories patriarchal narratives. To use such language, according to Fischer, is to impose on the text androcentric preconceptions and ‘a mode of reading that renders women invisible’. As an alternative solution, she refers to Genesis 12–36 as the (primordial) parent narratives.10 The drawback of Fischer’s approach is that, by foregrounding women’s presence, it masks the dominant ideology inherent in the text. In the biblical narrative, mothers play the role of perpetuating the identity of the father and are, therefore, secondary characters in the stories of the patriarchs. Their distinctiveness does not result from a validation of their maternal role but is, as Exum has noted, a sign of their ambiguous status and of the problem they present for the narrator. As real characters, the mothers in Genesis 12–36 ‘resist any simple narrative resolution that would confine them entirely to the mother’s place, which in the case of the genealogies means being absent, not being remembered’.11 If this is the case, how does one account for the presence of significant matriarchs in the narrative that is, in Jobling’s words, ‘everywhere patriarchal’?12 Why does

7. This applies to the mentions of Adah and Zillah, the wives of Lamech, and of Zillah’s daughter Naamah (Gen. 4.19-24). In the story of the flood, the unnamed wives of Noah and his sons are mentioned along with the animals, birds and creatures taken by pairs, male and female, into the ark (Gen. 7.7, 13; 8.16, 18). The daughters mentioned among the descendants of Shem are included in the category of ‘other sons and daughters’ (Gen. 11.11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, 25). 8. This does not apply to Bilhah and Zilpah – the two surrogate mothers, who bear sons on behalf of Rachel and Leah. 9. Rachel’s theft of her father’s idols does not lead to Joseph’s exclusive election (all the twelve sons of Jacob are included in the chosen identity of Israel) but is implicitly validated by the central role Joseph plays in the narratives of Genesis 37–50 as well as by Jacob’s final blessing (Gen. 49.26). 10. Irmtraud Fischer, ‘Genesis 12–50: The Story of Israel’s Origins as a Women’s Story’, in Feminist Biblical Interpretation: A Compendium of Critical Commentary on the Books of the Bible and Related Literature, ed. Luise Schottroff and Marie-Teres Wacker (Grand Rapids/Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2012), 15–16 (citation on p. 16). 11. Exum, Fragmented Women, 85. 12. Jobling, The Sense of Biblical Narrative, 43.

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the figure of the mother, who was redundant in the androcentric formulas of the tôl edôt, become necessary in the stories of patriarchal succession? What is these women’s unique contribution that makes them visible, included in Israel’s ethnocentric discourse? In short, paraphrasing Clines’s ‘readerly’ question on Eve, what do they do to help?13 Exum answers these questions from a structural perspective, highlighting the position of the mother as a source of difference, the other, whose role in Genesis is to differentiate Israel from neighbouring nations.14 While the patriarchal succession represents unity by providing a common ancestor to various groups, the issues of male conflict and dominance are resolved in these stories through mothers. Israel cannot be defined solely in terms of itself. It needs the other, the mother, to help it define its position in the world, as distinct from other peoples, and to clarify its identity, as an association of tribes distinct from one another. Difference thus has positive meaning, and the matriarchs, as the origin of difference, play an indispensable role.15

This role, as Exum points out, is problematic to the narrative psyche precisely because it is so important. Israel-the-subject is as dependent on the mother’s help for establishing its separateness as it is reluctant to admit this dependence. In the following discussion I shall draw on Exum’s insights, looking at how the characters of the matriarchs are used to establish the boundaries of Israel’s identity and considering the structural ambivalence of that task. As mentioned above, the symbolic world of the patriarchal stories is shaped by both ethno- and androcentric ideologies, which converge on the idea of dominance. Here, the subject’s male and ethnically unified identity is constructed as dominant with respect to the female and ethnically different other. With respect to these ideological concerns, the matriarch occupies an ambiguous position. On the one hand, as a woman in a story of men, the matriarch represents the gendered other and therefore connotes difference. On the other hand, in the case of the four Abrahamic mothers – Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel and Leah – the matriarch is included in the national self of Israel and therefore connotes sameness. The patriarchal narratives offer a twofold response to this structural ambivalence of the mother: here, the androcentric discourse undermines the mother’s difference, expressed in her procreative power, while the ethnocentric discourse reinforces her sameness through endogamy. To be counted within the same identity, the matriarch needs to come from the same kin. Patrilineal descent by itself cannot protect the identity and inheritance of the clan from outsiders and needs to be accompanied by endogamy – the kinship structure where men choose wives from their father’s lineage. At a structural level,

13. Clines, What Does Eve Do to Help? 14. Exum, Fragmented Women, 113. 15. Ibid., 114.

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endogamy controls the difference embodied in the wife, inscribing it within the unified identity of the husband.16 It is therefore crucial that the patriarchs choose their wives from the parentage of Abraham: Rebekah is the daughter of Abraham’s nephew Bethuel, the son of Nahor and the grandson of Terah (Gen. 24.15, 47); Leah and Rachel are the daughters of Bethuel’s son Laban (Gen. 28.5; 29.10, 16).17 However, the need to perpetuate the Abrahamic identity through endogamy poses a problem around the origin of the first matriarch, which makes Sarah’s position particularly significant. According to Abraham’s claim in Gen. 20.12, Sarah is his half-sister, the daughter of his father Terah, but not of his mother. This problematic statement takes endogamy to its extreme expression – an incestuous marriage between firstdegree relatives, both children of Terah. As a sign of unified identity, Terah is placed at the beginning of the lineage on both the paternal side via Abraham and the maternal side via Sarah. Structurally, the first matriarch is derived from the unified identity of the father and is therefore made equivalent to Abraham. Yet both Abraham and the narrator are visibly uncomfortable admitting the couple’s close kinship since it is only revealed under the pressure of a foreign ruler’s interrogation. Consequently, the narrative tones down the incestuous character of Abraham’s marriage by giving Sarah a different mother. We are not told whether she belongs to the clan. Having no narrative presence – she is assigned no name, origin, voice or action – Sarah’s mother hovers at the beginning of the succession as a pure sign of difference that stops the Abrahamic endogamy from collapsing onto itself in simple replication of the first father. In this, her position is consistent with the mother’s role as a bearer of difference. While the structures of endogamy resolve the issue of the mother’s origin, other strategies are used to control her inherent procreative ability – her difference. As Exum has noted, female procreation poses a problem to patriarchy because it threatens the father’s right to progeny: the mother’s claim to offspring is biologically evident, while fatherhood needs to be established.18 Feminist scholars have identified a range of patriarchal strategies used to undermine the rights and importance of the mother – from omitting women’s names in genealogies to using

16. The importance of endogamy for the construction of patriarchal identity in Genesis has been widely acknowledged by scholars. Nancy Jay has described endogamous marriage as a solution to the problem that descent from women poses to the patriarchal mindset. For her, ‘marriage between members of the same patrilineage ensures the offspring’s patrilineage membership even if it is figured through the mother’ (‘Sacrifice, Descent and the Patriarchs’, VT 38 [1988]: 56). See also Naomi A. Steinberg, ‘Alliance or Descent?’, JSOT 51 (1991): 52–3; Kinship and Marriage in Genesis: A Household Economics Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 10–14. Exum discusses the ideological function of endogamy in the patriarchal narratives in Fragmented Women, 81–91; ‘Hagar en procè s’, 4 n. 12. 17. Conversely, Hagar’s foreign origin is the reason her son is excluded from the lineage (Gen. 21.10). 18. Exum, Fragmented Women, 84, 91.

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blood sacrifice as a symbolic opposition to childbirth in order to establish descent through men.19 The reluctance of the narrative consciousness to acknowledge woman’s role in procreation finds its perhaps clearest expression in the image of the sterile mother. The motif of the miraculous birth of a hero from the initially sterile mother recurs throughout the Hebrew Bible.20 Outside Genesis, the mother of Samson (Judges 13), Hanna (1 Samuel 1) and the Shunammite (2 Kings 4) all have their sterility lifted by divine or prophetic agency and produce sons, marked by divine purpose. Similarly, in the narratives of Genesis 12–36, the mother’s initial sterility, followed by Yahweh’s intervention, is a prerequisite for the birth of the chosen heir in each generation of the patriarchs. The most important matriarchs – the mothers of the central protagonists who carry the identity of Israel (Isaac, Jacob) and ensure its survival (Joseph) – are therefore those who lack natural fertility. The sterile mother becomes an important feature of the patriarchal narrative from the start. Notably, the dynamic of the patriarchal succession starts off not with God’s promise, but with a contradiction associated with a woman.21 Even before Abraham receives any characterization and assumes a meaningful narrative presence, Sarah’s name is reiterated alongside his and the reader is informed about her sterility (Gen. 11.29, 30, 31; 12.5). The fact that the first woman to be mentioned by name in a genealogical setting is a sterile wife creates an obstacle that interrupts the smooth flow of male genealogies. Sarah is the first wife who is not able to fulfil the function, which so many other women, concealed behind the tô lē dô t, successfully fulfilled before her. The narrator who, since Eve, has been overlooking the issue of female fertility now brings the reader to a realization that a woman is required for the line (and life) to continue. Sarah’s deficiency makes her visible and by doing so, reveals the narrative in need of female subjectivity. Following Sarah, the next two matriarchs are marked by the same flaw. Jacob’s mother Rebekah is originally sterile (Gen. 25.26) and so is Rachel, the mother of Joseph and Benjamin (Gen. 29.31). For the three generations of matriarchs, sterility seems to be a precondition of their import: to become significant in the narrative, a woman has to lose, even if only temporarily, what patriarchy assigns to her as her raison d’ê tre.

19. Exum, Fragmented Women, 81–91; Esther Fuchs, Sexual Politics in the Biblical Narrative: Reading the Hebrew Bible as a Woman (JSOT SS 310; Sheffield: Academic Press, 2000), 44–90; Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion, and Paternity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 94–111. 20. Alter includes the motif of the birth of the hero to his barren mother among other biblical type-scenes (Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative [London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981], 51). Fuchs discusses the same motif under the title of annunciation type-scene (Sexual Politics, 49–65). 21. For Westermann, the call of Abraham is part of the extended unit of Gen. 11.27– 12.9, which from the start highlights the sterility of Sarah (Genesis 12–36 [trans. John J. Scullion; Minneapolis: Augsburg Press, 1985], 148).

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The issue of sterility is therefore deeply ambiguous. One may see in it an expression of narrative resistance that allows woman’s perspective to enter the story. From a narratological point of view, sterility is a marker of the chosen mother, which foregrounds her presence in the story. All three sterile matriarchs – Sarah, Rebekah and Rachel – have fuller characterization and are distinguished by the narrative long before they become mothers. They are depicted as beautiful women (Gen. 12.11; 24.16; 29.17); Rebekah and Rachel, moreover, are loved by their husbands (Gen. 24.67; 29.18; cf. 29.20, 30). All three at different times demonstrate their power over the patriarchs. They have a voice the patriarchs listen to, and their verbal exchanges with their husbands and sons consist mostly in giving orders or instructions (Gen. 16.2; 21.10; 27.8, 9, 13, 43-44; 30.1, 3, 16; 31.16). Institutional authority rests here with the patriarchs, but the matriarchs exercise considerable personal influence over the course of events.22 On the other hand, ideologically, sterility is used by the narrator to undermine the importance of the mother by denying woman’s natural ability to give birth.23 As Esther Fuchs has observed, the motif of the sterile mother serves patriarchal ideology ‘by repeatedly presenting women as barren, by emphasizing that birth is an extraordinary event, and by insisting that maternity is determined by an agency external to the mother-figure’.24 The other side of the same strategy, according to Fuchs, is the stigmatization of the naturally fertile mothers – Hagar, Lot’s daughters, Leah – as foreign, contemptuous, unattractive or morally dubious.25 Hagar – the Egyptian slave of Sarah used as a surrogate mother – is presented as both ideologically inferior due to her foreignness and morally deficient since she shows contempt for her sterile mistress (Gen. 16.4). Leah, the fertile wife of Jacob, appears in the story as an impostor bride, is unloved by her husband and remains a passive character outside her childbearing contest with Rachel in Gen. 29.31– 30.24. Finally, naturally fertile Lot’s daughters bear sons following incestuous sexual relations with their father, an act declared an abomination in Lev. 18.6-7. For Fuchs, the matriarchs are valorized by the narrative not because of their procreative power but because of ‘their initiative in obviating obstacles in patrilineal continuity’.26 In every generation, prospective mothers give birth to sons against the odds, restoring a temporarily disrupted patrilineage and thus contributing to the patriarchal system. Fuchs rightly exposes the androcentric

22. Feminist scholars have adopted the anthropological distinction between authority and power to the biblical studies of gender (see Meyers, Discovering Eve, 40–4, 181–7; Exum, Fragmented Women, 105–9; Gunn and Fewell, Narrative in the Hebrew Bible [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993], 73; for a bibliography of earlier studies see Exum, Fragmented Women, 12 n. 22). 23. Exum, Fragmented Women, 92. 24. Fuchs, Sexual Politics, 48. 25. Ibid., 63–4. Although Fuchs does not mention Lot’s daughters, their roles too seem to illustrate her argument. 26. Fuchs, Sexual Politics, 47.

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strategy of the narrator, who projects onto the matriarchs the needs of patrilineal descent by making them earnestly desire sons (cf. Gen. 16.2; 30.1). However, her evaluation seems to exaggerate the matriarchs’ role in overcoming their sterility. None of the sterile wives bears sons through their own initiative, as Sarah, Rebekah and Rachel all conceive as a result of God’s direct intervention (Gen. 21.1-2; 25.21; 30.22-23). While Sarah does show initiative in offering Hagar to Abraham, her action does not serve the continuity of the chosen line but leads to the birth of a foreign identity. On the other hand, the mothers who bear sons without Yahweh’s help – Hagar and Lot’s daughters – only prove the point by showing that foreign identity is not born through divine agency. I would suggest to view the sterility of the matriarch not so much as an obstacle that the protagonists need to overcome but as a structural prerequisite, a foundation upon which Israel builds its claim of divine descent. In the symbolic world of the patriarchal narrative, the prospective mother’s lack of fertility creates a void, which is then ‘filled’ by Yahweh’s action. In Gen. 21.1-2 Yahweh does to Sarah as he has promised, and she bears a son at the appointed time. Yahweh makes Rebekah conceive in answer to Isaac’s prayer (Gen. 25.21). Finally, Rachel conceives through God’s triple action of remembering her, heeding to her and opening her womb (Gen. 30.22).27 By positing the matriarch as a receptacle of divine fertility, a ‘holy vessel’, the narrator lays ground for the claim of Israel’s divine descent or ‘holiness’. As Seth Kunin has observed, at a higher level, the sterility of the matriarch ‘emphasizes the difference in origin between Israel and the other nations’.28 The sterile mother, the non-mother, starts off the dynamic of divine birth and thus, ideologically, serves to validate Israel’s election. An unexpected corollary to the ideology of divine descent is that it problematizes the role of the father. Ironically, Yahweh’s intervention on behalf of the sterile matriarch leaves out of the picture its ultimate beneficiary – the patriarch himself. Indeed, although Abraham repeatedly receives God’s promises of offspring through Sarah (Gen. 17.16, 19, 21; 18.9-15), he is not mentioned when she is visited by Yahweh (Gen. 21.1). Isaac’s role in Rebekah’s conception seems to be limited to entreating Yahweh on behalf of his sterile wife (Gen. 25.21). Furthermore, Jacob openly shirks the responsibility to make Rachel pregnant, laying it at Yahweh’s door (Gen. 30.2). In the scenes of the sterile matriarch’s miraculous conception, the narrator avoids using the sexual terms ‘to go into’ (bô ’), ‘to lie with’ (š ā kab) and ‘to know’ (yā da‘). The patriarch’s physical paternity is therefore never established and his claim to offspring is founded instead on divine promise. Bal has interpreted this gap as ‘a sign of an unsuccessful sexual relationship between husband and wife’, thus opening a discussion on the biblical narrator’s attitude to male impotence.29

27. Although Yahweh also opens Leah’s womb, he does it not to lift sterility, but to compensate for her being unloved (Gen. 29.31). 28. Kunin, The Logic of Incest, 74. 29. Bal, Lethal Love, 41.

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In general, the biblical narrator denies male infertility or impotence as the cause of childlessness.30 As Exum has noted, in the patriarchal narratives the sterile matriarch is contrasted to the fertile patriarch, ‘the father of a multitude of nations’.31 Abraham and Jacob demonstrate both their potency and fertility by having children by their other wives – Hagar, Keturah and Leah. However, as Bal has observed, in the specific instances when God ‘closes the womb’ of a woman, husbands appear powerless and acknowledge it (cf. Gen. 18.12, 30.2 and 1 Sam. 1.8). For Bal, interpreting the opposition between ‘the powerful deity and the powerless men’ in terms of sexual potency ‘turns powerless husbands into impotent men and the powerful deity into the potent father’.32 In the light of this opposition, the strategy of relegating to the deity the power to open and close wombs aims at concealing the impotence of the husbands.33 Nina Rulon-Miller develops Bal’s insight, interpreting the sterility of Sarah as a result of Abraham’s inability or unwillingness to respond to her sexually. For Rulon-Miller, Sarah’s laughter in 18.12 arises not from her disbelief in her ability to procreate in old age but from being surprised that now she is old, she could have the pleasure (‘ednā h) she has been denied before.34 A contradictory picture emerges, according to which the matriarch, despite her sterility, is the one who is actually involved in divine birth, being symbolically impregnated by Yahweh (cf. Eve’s speech in Gen. 4.1), whereas the patriarch, declared to be a super-fertile father of nations, is distanced from physical procreation, relegating it to God. To resolve the problem of paternity, the narrator needs to construct the patriarch as a source of divine fertility through a series of promises. By contrast, the maternity of the sterile mother – the tangible evidence of the promise – is a given that does not need to be established. It is with her, the chosen matriarch, that the process of Israel’s election starts, and through her it carries on. She is used as a marker and an attribute of Israel’s separate, ‘holy’ status, and continues to serve as an instrument of God’s election after she has given birth. Sarah in Gen. 21.9-10, Rebekah in Genesis 27 and, at a different level, Rachel in Gen. 31.19 influence the course of the succession, deciding on who is included in the self of Israel. Arguably, the narrator’s key concern in introducing the chosen matriarch is not to guarantee the continuity of the patriarchal lineage but to draw the boundaries of Israel’s identity by choosing which of the rival brothers succeeds

30. See Fuchs, Sexual Politics, 48. Bal questions the common assumption that ‘in the Bible barenness is always blamed on the woman and that men are presupposed to be both potent and fertile’ (Mieke Bal, Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988], 266 n. 10). 31. Exum, Fragmented Women, 95. 32. Bal, Death and Dissymmetry, 73. 33. Ibid., 73, 266 n. 10; Nina Rulon-Miller, ‘Hagar: A Woman with an Attitude’, in The World of Genesis, ed. Davies and Clines, 69–70. 34. Rulon-Miller, ‘Hagar’, 69–72. See also Sharon P. Jeansonne, The Women of Genesis: From Sarah to Potiphar’s Wife (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 23–4; Bal, Death and Dissymmetry, 73.

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to the promise and which does not. What the matriarch does to help is to ensure Israel’s election. Like hā ’ā dā m in Genesis 2–3, who receives divine knowledge with the help of woman, the patriarch appropriates the results. It has been demonstrated that the construction of Israel’s identity, represented by the patriarchal succession, requires the presence in each generation of a sterile matriarch, who functions as an agent of God’s election. In this sense one can speak of a matriarchal succession in Genesis. Unlike the patrilineal succession, it is not lineal and instead is constructed by a repeated narrative pattern. As the first matriarch, Sarah is established both narratologically, appearing on stage alongside Abraham (Gen. 11.29, 30, 31), and ideologically, through a series of divine promises (Gen. 17.15-21; 18.10, 14). The next two matriarchs are chosen by a complex betrothal procedure. In the case of Rebekah in Genesis 24, the patriarch is represented by Abraham’s servant Eliezer, while Rachel is wooed by Jacob himself (Gen. 29.1-14). Both women are recognized as chosen brides in a meeting by the well. In both cases, the narrator stresses that the bride belongs to the parentage of Abraham (Gen. 24.4; 28.2; 29.5-6, 10). As mentioned above, the sterile matriarchs who form this succession are singled out by their beauty and, in the case of Rebekah and Rachel, by their husband’s affection. Hagar and Leah, the other wives of the patriarchs, do not share these characteristics. As it will be shown below, the narrator uses them, each one in a different way, to introduce rivalry between women, and, consequently, between their sons, foregrounding the chosen lineage. With each sterile matriarch being ‘grafted’ onto a new generation of patriarchal family, their stories follow one another, testifying to their continuous presence. That presence is so crucial to the narrative of Israel that whenever one of them leaves the stage the ‘successor’ is appointed in the next move. As a result, the matriarchs never meet each other across generations. Such is the case with Rebekah, whose wooing and marriage to Isaac in Genesis 24 come immediately after the death of his mother Sarah in Genesis 23. Rebekah effectively replaces the mother for her husband: Isaac takes her ‘into his mother Sarah’s tent’ and his love for Rebekah comforts him ‘after his mother’s death’ (Gen. 24.67).35 Similarly, once Jacob meets his destined bride in Haran, his mother’s matriarchal role comes to an end. The narrator stresses the continuity between the two women with repeated references to Rebekah at the beginning of the scene (Gen. 29.10, 10, 10, 12, 13), but from the moment Jacob meets Rachel his mother disappears from the stage. It must be noted that for all the emphasis and characterization that the matriarchs receive, they serve the purpose of ensuring the chosen succession of the patriarchs and remain subordinate to it. In her analysis of the role of the matriarchs in Genesis 12–35, Exum has stressed the incomplete and fragmented

35. Fewell and Gunn maintain that Rebekah emotionally erases Isaac’s loss of Sarah (Gender, Power, and Promise, 73). It is noteworthy that it is only after the new matriarch, Rebekah, has been successfully installed in Sarah’s place that Abraham takes a new wife and has children by her (Gen. 25.1-6).

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nature of their stories, which are ‘no more than parts of the larger and more coherent stories of their husbands and sons’.36 Because of its subordinate character, the matriarchal succession ends together with that of the patriarchs. Jacob is the last patriarch to receive the promise (Gen. 35.10-12), and with the birth of his twelve sons the question of who is in and who is out of the chosen line is resolved. The following narratives of Joseph (Genesis 37–50) will deal not with the construction of identity (cf. the absence of the promise) but with the preservation of it. With the patriarchal succession ended, there is no longer any role powerful mothers could play. There will be, therefore, no matriarchs in the story of Joseph, whose Egyptian wife Asenath, ‘daughter of Potiphera, priest of On’, receives but a fleeting mention (Gen. 41.45, 50), necessary to explain the birth of Joseph’s sons and never becomes a character in her own right. At the end of the patriarchal narratives, like at the end of Genesis 2–3, female subjectivity, which has made the story possible, is absorbed back into the unified identity of the subject.

The Call of Abraham: Ambiguities of Election If the succession of the matriarchs starts with the announcement of Sarah’s sterility (Gen. 11.30), the patriarchal succession starts with the call of Abraham (Gen. 12.13). Both constitute an interruption in the genealogical progression of the tôl edôt and the beginning of a new discourse. Here, in his first communication since the covenant with Noah (Gen. 9.1-17), Yahweh announces the beginning of a new relationship with his creation, a relationship based on the promise of new identity. In Gen. 12.1 Yahweh orders Abraham to leave his land, his kindred and his father’s house and go to the land that Yahweh promises to show him. The divine command implies a break from the present identity of Abraham, conveyed through the markers ‘land’, ‘relatives’, ‘father’s house’, towards a new identity, signified by the land that is, for now, only a vision. Commentators have commonly noted the radical character of Abraham’s breaking away from his land and family as a key feature of Abraham’s narrative.37 But this break, like Sarah’s sterility, is not clearcut. The reader may infer from the context that the land Abraham has to leave is Haran, where he is found at the moment of the theophany (Gen. 12.4) and the destination is Canaan, where Abraham will go in response to his call (Gen. 12.5). However, neither of the two lands is named in Yahweh’s speech. What is, in any

36. Exum, Fragmented Women, 71. 37. Brueggemann, for example, sees it as ‘a dangerous departure from the presumed world of norms and security’ (Genesis, 118); see also Speiser, Genesis, 87; Joseph Blenkinsopp, Abraham: The Story of a Life (Grand Rapids/Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2015), 32–3. Westermann disputes this view as a misjudgement of Abraham’s nomadic context. According to him, ‘the patriarchs did not have the concept of “homeland” in our sense’ and could understand their God’s instruction ‘to depart for a land which he would show them only as the offer of a saving hand’ (Genesis 12–36, 148).

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case, Abraham’s land in Gen. 12.1? Haran could hardly be considered as such, since, according to Gen. 11.31, the family’s stay here was a temporary stopover on the way from Ur to Canaan – the journey started by the father of Abraham, Terah.38 Mentioned in conjunction with Abraham’s kindred and his father’s house, which could be understood as lineage,39 the phrase ‘your land’ in Gen. 12.1 could also denote Abraham’s native land, the land of his father, that is, Ur of the Chaldeans. In this case, as Gunn and Fewell have pointed out, it is ironic that Yahweh tells Abraham to leave his native land, which he has already done, and go to the land that had been his destination from the beginning.40 Brett notes along similar lines that Abraham’s journey to Canaan is his father’s initiative and by undertaking it, Abraham demonstrates more continuity with his father than a split from him.41 Along with the idea of Abraham’s land, the narrative destabilizes the concepts bê t hā ’ā b, ‘father’s house’ and mô ledet, ‘kindred, relatives’. It appears significant that Yahweh’s call comes immediately after the death of Abraham’s father Terah has been announced (Gen. 11.32). Although Terah’s lifespan of 205 years means that at the time of Abraham’s departure he should still be alive, aged 140 years (cf. Gen. 11.26; 12.4), the reader’s immediate perception is that Terah is no longer there. Narratologically, the house of Abraham’s father is already empty, which makes Abraham’s separation from it less radical than Yahweh seems to suggest. In addition, Abraham’s obedience to Yahweh’s command, which has traditionally been deemed unquestionable,42 appears less certain given the number of relatives and the amount of possessions that he takes with him when he leaves Haran. In fact, Abraham seems to directly disobey Yahweh’s command to leave his kindred behind by taking with him not only his wife Sarah but also his nephew Lot – the only two relatives who, along with Abraham, formed Terah’s party when he set off from Ur to go to Canaan (Gen 11.31). Along with all his relatives, Abraham takes with him all the possessions they have amassed and all the slaves they have acquired in Haran.43 Resisting a simplistic or literal interpretation, Yahweh’s command stands in tension with its narrative context, which undermines the idea

38. For a discussion of the issues that surround the topography of Terah’s journey see Blenkinsopp, Abraham, 30–1. 39. While the Hebrew word bā yit, ‘house’, could signify the family or household of a living paterfamilias, the expression bê t hā ’ā b may also be suggestive of lineage (cf. Harry A. Hoffner, ‘‫’ב ַּי ִת‬, TDOT II, 114–15). In either case, the meaning of Yahweh’s command is affected by the preceding reference to the death of Terah. 40. Gunn and Fewell, Narrative in the Hebrew Bible, 91. 41. Brett, Genesis, 47–8. 42. Cf. von Rad, Genesis, 161. 43. Eslinger sees the repeated use of pronominal suffixes (‘with him’, ‘his wife’, ‘his nephew’, ‘their possessions’, ‘their people’, Gen. 12.4-5) in the description of Abraham’s departure as an indication that Abraham is not cutting off his old identity but carries it with him: ‘Abram’s social bridges are portable, not burnt’ (‘Prehistory in the Call to Abraham’, BibInt 14 [2006]: 196–7; the citation on p. 197).

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of Abraham’s departure as a radically new beginning. The patriarchal succession starts on an ambiguous note with the patriarch’s both categorical and problematic response to the call of God. Another indication of the unstable position of the subject is the sterility of Sarah, announced in Gen. 11.30. It unveils the dysfunction at the basis of male genealogies by pointing directly at the absence of the mother. bê t hā ’ā b, the father’s house, is tainted with (Sarah’s) sterility. From a structural perspective, the metaphor of the father’s land carries a connotation of emptiness: deprived of the fertility of the mother, it holds no possibility of growth. This quality of emptiness and stagnation is highlighted by the deaths of two fathers, Haran and Terah, announced in Gen. 11.28, 32. In this context, it is ironic that Abraham comes on stage under the name Abram, meaning ‘exalted father’.44 At the beginning of his journey, at the start of the patriarchal succession, the Mother is sterile and the Father is dead. The structurally unstable and semantically empty concept of ‘father’s land’ is contrasted in Yahweh’s speech to the land, where Abraham has to go. The way Yahweh describes it is strikingly non-specific: Abraham’s destination is a future vision that Yahweh promises to show to the patriarch (hā ’ā reṣ ’aš er ’ar’ekā ) rather than a geographic location or a direction in space. This land is constructed around the subject as an experiential reality of divine blessing, which carries a potential for his self-realization (cf. lek-leka, lit. ‘go to/for yourself ’, Gen. 12.1). It functions as a metaphor of a new identity, set within a national framework: Abraham’s association with this land is prerequisite to his becoming a gô y gā dô l, a ‘great nation’ and an epitome of God’s blessing for ‘all the families of the earth’ (Gen. 12.2-3). The terminology of the promise clearly echoes that of the Table of Nations with its ‘lands, tongues, families and nations’ (Gen. 10.5, 20, 31). Yet the promise also breaks away from the plurality of Genesis 10, focusing on one ‘great nation’, the bearer of God’s election and blessing. The role of Abraham with respect to the nations in Gen. 12.3b has been the subject of continuous debate. Traditionally, scholars have followed the innerbiblical interpretation of the verse in Sir. 44.21, Acts 3.25 and Gal. 3.8, seeing here a proclamation of Abraham’s universal mission to mediate God’s blessing to the nations.45 This traditional reading has been influenced by the LXX translation of wenibrekû bekā in a passive sense as eneulogē thē sontai en soi ‘(all the families) will be blessed in you’. More recently scholars have come to understand the niphal form wenibr ekû in a reflexive sense (‘all the families will bless themselves in you’), which moves away from the universalistic idea of Abraham as a channel and mediator of God’s blessing for others and presents him instead as an epitome

44. DCH I, 115 derives the name ’abrā m from the words ’ā b, ‘father’, and rwm, ‘be high’. 45. Cassuto, for instance, has stressed the universalism of the promise that ‘the father of the Israelite nation will be privileged to become a source of benison to all peoples of the earth’ (A Commentary on the Book of Genesis II: From Noah to Abraham [trans. Israel Abrahams; Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1964], 315; see also von Rad, Genesis, 155–6).

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of blessedness before the nations.46 This last view is aligned with the prevailing biblical understanding of Israel’s blessing as a basis for its superior, dominant status. According to Moberly, Gen. 12.3 along with the blessings in Gen. 22.17-18, 27.29 and Num. 24.8-9 contains ‘an unblushing assumption that God’s blessing includes dominion over neighbours and enemies’.47 The concern here, states Moberly, ‘is not to “save” or “reconcile” other nations. It is to establish Israel in their midst, a people where the reality of God’s presence may be acknowledged by others.’48 By projecting an image of Israel as a great nation that epitomizes God’s blessing, the promise of Gen. 12.1-3 lays out an ideological programme for the rest of the patriarchal narratives. It constructs the emergent identity of the ethnocentric subject over against other families/nations. Structurally, this process is twofold. On the one hand, this new identity grows out of the preceding tôl edôt, which forms an uninterrupted line from Adam to Abraham and leads to the creation of ‘all the families of the earth’. In this sense, the entire primeval history in Genesis 1-11 serves to create a backdrop for the election of Israel – one chosen nation out of all the nations. On the other hand, following the divine command to leave the father’s house, this new identity breaks away from the genealogical past and starts a new succession of patriarchs, whose election is reinstated in each generation, accompanied by the separation of the ‘other’ brother/nation. The presence of other nations is therefore prerequisite to the story of Israel, both at the moment of Abraham’s call and after it. Quite literally, there is no Israel outside the notion of the ‘multitude of nations’, for the process of expelling the other is fundamental for the identity understood as chosen. This notion is emphasized in Gen. 17.5, where Yahweh names the patriarch ‘abrā hā m because he has been made the father of a multitude of nations. Here we may see the claim of Israel’s election reaching its pinnacle: being not only a ‘great nation’ (Gen. 12.2) but also ‘the father of a multitude of nations’ (Gen. 17.5), Abraham is also indirectly placed at the origin of ‘all the families of the earth’ (Gen. 12.3).49 Yahweh’s subsequent promises show Abraham’s offspring multiply to become like the dust of the earth, the sand on the seashore and the stars of the sky (Gen. 13.16; 15.5; 22.17). The expansion of the ethnocentric subject reaches cosmic proportions, ‘filling the earth’ and subsuming other identities along the way. The story of Israel’s origin becomes the story of

46. Moberly, The Bible, Theology and Faith: A Study of Abraham and Jesus (Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 120–7; see also Vawter, On Genesis, 177; Westermann, Genesis 12–36 (trans. Scullion; Minneapolis: Augsburg Press, 1985), 151–2. For a detailed presentation of the discussion on Gen. 12.3, see Keith N. Grü neberg, Abraham, Blessing and the Nations: A Philological and Exegetical Study of Genesis 12:3 in Its Narrative Context (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), 176–90. 47. Moberly, The Bible, Theology and Faith, 126. 48. Ibid. 49. According to Brett, the promises which speak about Abraham as the father of many nations resolve to a limited extent the conceptual puzzle of the relationship between Israel and the clans of the earth in Gen. 12.3 (Genesis, 51).

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Israel as the origin. By claiming to be the source of other identities that branch out of it, the subject is claiming precedence and control over the pre-existent other, the nations.50

The Land as Own and Foreign In the myth of ethnogenesis related in Genesis 12–36, the identity of the emergent subject of Israel, personalized in the collective figure of the patriarch, is shaped through his relationship with the land. Places and identities are mutually constitutive, and the identities of the Egyptians, the Canaanites, the Edomites, the Ammonites, the Moabites and other biblical nations are inseparably linked to the lands they occupy. The patriarchs’ connection to the land is fundamentally different, being shaped by a claim to the land that is not their own. The fact that the land, promised to the patriarchs, is already identified as the land of the Canaanites (cf. Gen. 12.6) creates the initial tension necessary to start off the ethnocentric discourse that shapes the foundational myth of Israel. In the Hexateuch, Israel’s national identity is gradually constructed over against other nations in relationship to the land, ultimately overcoming the ethnic other in the conquest of Canaan. Triangulating the relationship between the subject and the other, the promised land functions as a spatial metaphor of the emergent identity of Israel. In Gen. 12.4-5 Abraham follows Yahweh’s command to depart. In the description of his itinerary, the unspecified vision of a land in the divine call (hā ’ā reṣ ’aš er ’ar’ekā , ‘the land that I will show you’, v. 1) receives specific dimensions, and collapses into the land of Canaan. Compositionally, the narrator contrasts the patriarch’s movement to the land to his experience of being in the land: the expression areṣ ā h kena‘an, ‘to the land of Canaan’, used twice in v. 5, parallels the double occurrence of bā ’ā reṣ , ‘in the land’, in the following v. 6: Gen. 12.5 … they set forth to go to the land of Canaan. When they had come to the land of Canaan, Gen. 12.6 Abram travelled in the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land.

It is notable that though the word kena‘an twice indicates the direction of Abraham’s journey, it is not used after his arrival ‘in the land’. The general expression bā ’ā reṣ echoes ‘the land’ of Yahweh’s promise, constructing it from the inside as an experiential space centred on the patriarch as the subject. With his arrival,

50. One may recognize here the structural model, discussed above, that shapes the attitude of hā ’ā dā m to woman in Gen. 2.23. The phrase ‘she shall be called woman for from man she was taken’ suggests the precedence of the male subject over the female other, while, arguably, the concept of man appears only after woman has been created.

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Abraham can start the process of symbolic appropriation of the land, conferring on it a new identity that is a function of his experience. This identity as yet has no name. It is, however, from the start opposed to the ‘other’, pre-existent identity: in a parenthetic remark, the narrator notes that the land is already ‘filled’ with the indigenous people (‘the Canaanites were then in the land’, v. 6). The repetition of bā ’ā reṣ in each half of v. 6 juxtaposes Abraham and the Canaanites, assigning them equal positions within one space, which immediately becomes contested. Notably, at this point Yahweh for the first time appears to Abraham with the promise, ‘To your offspring I will give this land’ (Gen. 12.7). At first glance, it might seem that the divine promise ignores the issue of the indigenous population. Yahweh presents ‘this land’ as an externalized item of ownership, an empty space, devoid of inhabitants, that is yet to be shaped by Abraham’s wanderings (cf. the emphasis on the physical expanse of the land in Yahweh’s utterances in Gen. 13.14, 17).51 How should we interpret the contiguity of this promise to the narrator’s remark about the Canaanites? Brett finds it ironic that the promise of the land is announced ‘at a site that was probably sacred to the original owners of the land’ and, figuratively, in their presence (Gen. 12.6b).52 I would argue, however, that this awkward contiguity is structurally necessary for the ethnocentric argument: it establishes the ‘superior’ discourse of a new identity that grows out of the promise over against the other identity in a contested space. The Canaanites or the ethnic other have to be there to create the initial tension, on which the narrator can construct Abraham’s position as a subject and a representation of Israel. Having found himself ‘in the land’, the patriarch has to establish his identity vis-à -vis the people whose claim to the land precedes his own. This ambiguity will persist throughout the Abraham narrative, where the prior entitlement of indigenous groups to the land is never questioned. Yahweh reiterates his promise of the land to the patriarch amidst reminders that the land is already inhabited and thus belongs to someone else (cf. Gen. 12.6; 13.7; 15.18-21). This prior entitlement is demonstrated in the careful and precise negotiations that take place whenever the patriarchs purchase plots of land or property from the locals

51. Von Rad observes that God brings Abraham into an unexplained relationship with the Canaanites, which arises from an opaque status of ownership (Genesis, 166). 52. Brett argues that the terebinth of Moreh, mentioned alongside ‘the Canaanites’ in v. 6, might be referring to a pre-existing local cult of sacred trees and, if so, reinforces the ‘Canaanite’ presence. The fact that Abraham worships Yahweh by the terebinth (Gen. 12.7; cf. 13.18), a practice specifically forbidden by Deut. 16.21, suggests a hybridity of cultic practice, which contrasts the ideology of separation in the book of Deuteronomy. In Brett’s view, the absence of comments on any potential conflict of interests and the apparent compatibility of cultic practices points to the narrative’s underlying resistance to the dominant ethnocentric discourse (Brett, Genesis, 51). In contrast to Brett, Blenkinsopp suggests that the note about the Canaanites in Gen. 12.6 is made in order to explain and exculpate the problematic character of Abraham’s cultic practice (Abraham, 38–9).

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(Gen. 21.22-34; 23.1-20; cf. 33.19-20).53 As Brett points out, the Genesis narrative gives evidence for a peaceful coexistence of ethnic groups and cultic practices, countering the ‘ideology of dispossession’, which permeates the books of Deuteronomy and Joshua.54 The presence of the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hittites and the Philistines is less problematic for the narrator of Genesis than it is for the patriarch himself. Despite Abraham’s wariness of the locals in Gen. 12.12 and 20.11, the narrative often shows them doing their utmost to accommodate him and his descendants and to win their favour. They often function as symbolic donors, not only beneficial, but crucial for the survival of Abraham’s clan (Pharaoh in Gen. 12.10-20; Abimelech king of the Philistines in Genesis 20, cf. Gen. 26.6-11; Melchizedek king of Salem in Gen. 14.18-20; Ephron the Hittite in Gen. 23.3-18). To an extent, they belong with the land, so much so that the land is treated according to their conduct, as we find in the story of Sodom, where the land is obliterated for the sins of and together with its inhabitants (Gen. 19.24-25, 28). This idea stands in direct contrast to the Deuteronomic view that the wickedness of the indigenous peoples should be punished by their being ‘driven away’ from their land (Deut. 9.4-5). In contrast to the Deuteronomic ideology of national identity with its clear binaries of ‘own’ and ‘foreign’, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, the Genesis myth maps out the gradual emergence of Israel’s identity in relation to the nations that inhabit the land. At the early stages of its formation, the idea of Israel as the ethnic subject is built on permeable boundaries between ‘own’ and ‘foreign’. At a spatial level, this is reflected in the absence of clear territorial demarcation of the land. On the one hand, the narrator implies from the start that Canaan is the promised land (cf. Gen. 12.5), and Yahweh confirms that when he promises to give to Abraham and to his descendants ‘all the land of Canaan’ (Gen. 17.8). On the other hand, most of Yahweh’s communications avoid clear territorial definitions (cf. the varying delimitations of the land in Gen. 12.6-7; 13.14-17; 15.18-20; 17.8) and instead define the land with reference to the patriarch’s immediate experience (‘this land’, Gen. 12.7; 15.7, 18; cf. 26.3-4; ‘the land that I will show you’, Gen. 12.1; ‘all the land that you see’, Gen. 13.15; ‘the land where you sojourn’, 17.8; cf. ‘the land you are lying on’, 28.13). In contrast to the forceful claim to the land laid in the conquest narratives, the land in Genesis is appropriated by the patriarchs symbolically in their wanderings through its length and breadth and into and out of it. In this process, the identity of the land is constructed as a function of their own. One could observe this on the numerous occasions when the patriarchs name places after their experiences, inscribing their story onto the land – a process epitomized in the naming of Israel.55 Notably, on the one occasion that Yahweh names the land of Canaan, he also qualifies it by the description ’ereṣ megurê kā , ‘the land of your

53. Blenkinsopp observes this in The Pentateuch: An Introduction to the First Five Books of the Bible (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1992), 101–2. 54. Brett, Genesis, 51. 55. Cf. Gen. 16.14; 19.22; 21.31; 22.14; 26.20, 21, 22, 33; 28.19; 31.47-49; 32.3, 29, 31; 33.17; 35.7-8, 15.

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sojournings’ (Gen. 17.8). That detail destabilizes the juxtaposed territorial reference to Canaan, positing the land as a narrative space, shaped by the movements of the subject. What exactly is the land of Abraham’s sojourning? In the narrative, the area where the patriarch sojourns extends beyond Canaan into Gerar and Egypt (Gen. 12.10; 20.1; 21.23, 34; cf. 26.3; 32.5; 35.27; 47.4). Clines has observed that ‘the patriarchal narratives take place outside the promised land almost as much as inside it’.56 Remapping the promised land as the territory  of  the  patriarchs’ residence results in a much wider picture, outlined in Gen. 15.18-21. Here Yahweh promises to hand over to Abraham’s descendants the territory stretching ‘from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates’. Since, as Brett points out, this ‘inflated’ image of the promised land has no relation to the historic boundaries of Israel, it blurs the distinctions even further. For Brett, in contrast to the ideological concerns of Deuteronomistic redactors, the patriarchal narratives show little evidence to support seeing Egypt and Gerar as foreign lands.57 One finds a similar situation in Gen. 26.1-6, where Yahweh extends the Abrahamic promise to Isaac. The scene focuses on the concept of the land (the word hā ’ā reṣ is used six times in Gen. 26.1-4), presenting it from two angles. On the one hand, the territory where Isaac seeks refuge from famine is emphasized as the land that belongs to others (‘Isaac went to Abimelech, king of the Philistines, to Gerar’, v. 1). On the other hand, when Isaac arrives, Yahweh tells him to settle ‘in this land’ and promises to give ‘all these lands’ to him and to his descendants (vv. 3-4; cf. 15.18-21). The resulting suspense is centred on the question how Isaac will interpret the promise, in other words, where he is going to reside: ‘Do not go down to Egypt, settle in the land that I shall tell you (v. 2). Reside as an alien in this land… for to you and to your offspring I shall give all these lands… (v. 3). … and to your offspring I shall give all these lands, and in your offspring all the nations of the earth will be blessed’ (v. 4). … And Isaac stayed in Gerar. (v. 6)

While the limits of the land in Yahweh’s speech are not specified, they are unequivocally linked to the patriarch’s experience of sojourning in the land. The logic of vv. 2-6 seems to suggest that Gerar is (or at least is part of) the land of the promise. The Philistines who inhabit it play the same role as the Canaanites in Gen. 12.6: their background presence as part of the land does not interfere with the patriarch’s universal claim. The symbolic centre of the promise is thus placed not with the land but with the subject – the patriarch as a resident alien – and is,

56. Clines, What Does Eve Do to Help?, 49. 57. Brett, Genesis, 57.

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like the land of Abraham’s promise in Gen. 12.1-3, symbolically expanding: from ‘this land’ to ‘all these lands’ to ‘the earth’. While, on the one hand, the lands of Abraham’s wanderings all seem to be equally included in the promise, on the other hand, they all seem to be equally foreign to him. Barbara Mann points out that the land in Genesis is ‘almost always encountered from the outside: not only the object of desire and destiny, but a fundamentally strange and alien place as well’.58 The term nēkār, ‘foreigner’, mentioned twice in the account of the covenant of circumcision, indicates a person who is not ‘of the seed’ of the patriarch (Gen. 17.12, 27) and therefore suggests at that stage everybody except Ishmael. Strictly speaking, the only foreigner here is the patriarch himself, a figure of a ‘wandering Aramean’ (Deut. 26.5), whose claim to identity and to the land is based on his personal relationship with the deity, unfamiliar to the locals. Not only does Abraham reside in Egypt and Gerar as a gēr, ‘alien, stranger’ (Gen. 12.10; 20.1; 21.34) but he also remains an alien while living in Canaan, which he himself declares during the negotiations with the Hittites: ‘I am a stranger (gēr) and a sojourner (tôšāb) among you’ (Gen. 23.4). Likewise, the verb gûr, ‘to sojourn’, describes the residence of Abraham and Isaac as aliens in the Canaanite area of Hebron in Gen. 35.27. The patriarch’s emergent identity in Genesis is a function of his essential alienation, his otherness with respect to the indigenous peoples and their land. This fundamental alienation is projected onto Abraham’s promised descendants, who ‘shall be strangers (gēr) in a land that is not theirs’ (Gen. 15.13). To conclude, the presentation of the land in the Abraham cycle displays a number of dichotomies: the land is simultaneously own and foreign, spatially fluid as well as territorially determined, constitutes an immediate experience and mediates the universal expansion of the subject. It is defined by Abraham’s sojourning (‘ereṣ megurêkā, Gen. 17.8), but is not his possession. An important part of these dichotomies is the fact that Abraham’s experience of the land of Canaan is shaped by his exposure to the ethnic other, whose pre-existence is necessary to start off the dynamics of identity. This other is not, however, conceived of as categorically opposite, for there is yet no clear sense of ethnic self. At the origin of ethnocentric identity, otherness is not threatening. On the contrary, from a semiotic perspective, it can be seen as nourishing, for it provides both the space and the building blocks for the construction of identity. The abstract vision of the land, promised to Abraham in Gen. 12.1, can collapse into a place on the map for the reader and a space of experience for the protagonist only if it already has an identity, and so the presence of the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hittites, the Philistines is essential rather than incidental.

The Gendering of the Land From the moment of Abraham’s call, the divine promise of the land appears in the narrative alongside the themes of numerous descendants and of the lasting 58. Barbara E. Mann, Space and Place in Jewish Studies (Key Words in Jewish Studies; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 58.

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relationship between the patriarch and Yahweh. In Clines’s seminal study, The Theme of the Pentateuch, the fulfilment of this threefold promise to the ancestors has been seen as the overarching theme that unifies the narrative from Genesis to Deuteronomy, with one or another aspect of the promise receiving prominence in each book. According to Clines, in Genesis 12–50 the dominant thematic element is the promise of posterity and the land plays a subsidiary role, in contrast to the books of Numbers and Deuteronomy, which attach central importance to the concept of the land.59 It is worth noting, however, that the significance of the promised land in the patriarchal stories differs from what it signifies in the other books, where it might be regarded as a specific territorial entity and an object of possession or dispossession. In the Genesis narrative, as we have seen above, the land receives prominence not as a specific territory, but as a spatial metaphor of the emergent identity of the subject, a reality that is shaped by and in relation to the patriarch’s immediate experience. Yahweh’s initial call in Gen. 12.1-3 makes the patriarch’s relationship with the land a precondition of the other elements of the promise: ‘Go … to the land that I will show you and I shall make you a great nation’. This relationship can be posited as programmatic for the patriarchal stories. In parallel to the narrative programme of Genesis 2–3, described as ‘human being to serve the earth’, the narrative programme of Genesis 12–36 could be defined as ‘the patriarch to fill the land’. Throughout the Abraham cycle, the concept of the land develops in a close relationship with that of the ethnocentric subject. In Yahweh’s speeches, the promised land receives universal connotations and becomes limitless in parallel to the unlimited expansion of the subject. With Abraham (and later Jacob) positioned in the centre, the symbolic space of the land stretches out ‘to north and south and east and west’ (Gen. 13.14; cf. 28.14). A similar idea is expressed in more specific terms in Gen. 15.18-21, where Yahweh promises to give to Abraham’s descendants the land ‘from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates’ – the entire expanse of the Fertile Crescent, the inhabited universe of the ancient Near East – and completes the picture with a substantial list of the nations whose territories are to pass over to Abraham’s descendants. The expansion of the land is matched by an equally universal multiplication of Abraham’s offspring: his descendants are going to be countless ‘like the dust of the earth’ (Gen. 13.16) and like the stars in the sky (Gen. 15.5), he will be made ‘exceedingly fruitful’ and will become ‘nations’ (Gen. 17.6).60 Both concepts – the land and the progeny that is going to inhabit it – in the language of the promise acquire a cosmic significance. We have seen a similar example of such an expansion in Gen. 26.2-4, where the sequence ‘this land – all these lands – the earth’ parallels the transfer of the blessing to ‘all the nations of

59. Clines, The Theme of the Pentateuch, 30. 60. Rulon-Miller follows Gerda Lerner in attributing the feature of ‘sexual excess’ in the biblical image of the patriarch to the persistence of Canaanite fertility and goddess cults alongside the cult of Yahweh (Rulon-Miller, ‘Hagar’, 64–5).

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the earth’ through Isaac’s innumerable seed. Not only is the patriarch to channel God’s blessing for all humanity, but in a way he is seen as a figure of humanity and as such is called to populate the land or, figuratively, the whole earth (hā ’ā reṣ ). In this respect, Yahweh’s promise to the patriarchs echoes the original blessing of humankind to ‘be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth [hā ’ā reṣ ]’ (Gen. 1.28). From Yahweh’s point of view, the ultimate purpose of the subject in both cases is to expand to the limits of the earth. Described in cosmological terms, the relationships ‘humankind-earth’ and ‘patriarch-land’ arguably carry gender connotations. On the one hand, the active subject of the relationship is constructed as male (implicitly, as hā ’ā dā m; literally, as the patriarch). The male subject is ascribed the quality of excessive fertility, of self-propagation (‘I will make you exceedingly fruitful’, Gen. 17.6; cf. 1.28). This misattribution of fertility stems from the same narrative attitude that underlies the genealogies of Genesis, where the female role in procreation is taken over by men’s ‘begettings’. On the other hand, the land, signified by a grammatically feminine noun hā ’ā reṣ (cf. hā ’adā mā h), plays a role that structurally corresponds to the lexical construction neqē bā h, ‘female’. Brenner has drawn attention to the aetiology of the term neqē bā h, derived from a root denoting ‘hole’ or ‘orifice’. In this joint biological and social representation, a ‘female’ can be conceived of as an opening that requires to be filled.61 For Ilona Rashkow, this aetiological connotation expresses the biblical viewpoint on female sexuality, since ‘throughout the Hebrew Bible the biblical female is treated as a “hole” or “cavity”.’62 Imaging the earth as a receptacle to be filled by the multiplying humankind in Gen. 1.28 gives it feminine connotations over against the implicitly male hā ’ā dā m. Philip Davies describes this semiotic procedure as ‘the gendering of the earth (whether ’adā mȃ or ‘ereṣ ) as female’.63 The structural blueprint of Gen. 1.28 can be traced in the idea, recurrent in Genesis 12–36, of the land (hā ’ā reṣ ) being filled by the patriarch’s countless offspring. The narrator draws particular attention to the patriarch’s staying or moving about in the land (overall, the words bā ’ā reṣ and be’ā reṣ are used thirtythree times in relation to the patriarchs). The image of the land as a receptacle holding the subject within its borders is particularly graphic in Gen. 13.6, where the land literally cannot ‘carry’ the symbolic weight of Abraham and Lot staying together. Another example of symbolic gendering is found in Gen. 26.12, where, following his confrontation with Abimelech over Rebekah, Isaac sows ‘in that land’ and reaps a hundredfold. Elsewhere in the stories of the patriarchs, the root zr‘, ‘to sow’, is used figuratively in reference to the patriarch’s offspring or ‘seed’

61. Brenner, The Intercourse of Knowledge, 11–12. 62. Ilona N. Rashkow, Taboo or not Taboo: Sexuality and Family in the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 37. 63. Davies, ‘Genesis and the Gendered World’, in The World of Genesis, ed. Davies and Clines, 9.

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and plays a central role in the affirmation of male fertility.64 In that context, the only instance of literal sowing is charged with gender connotations: receiving the symbolic ‘seed’ of the patriarch, the land is cast as female. Another marker of gendering can be seen in the fact that the fertility of the land, implied in the dramatic harvest, is not clearly acknowledged. The feminine image of the land bearing fruit is concealed behind the patriarch’s action of ‘reaping a hundredfold’. From a structural perspective, hā ’ā reṣ provides symbolic space for the realization of the exceeding fertility of the male subject, who both sows and reaps ‘in the land’. The patriarch himself admits it when in Gen. 26.22 he names a well ‘Rehoboth’, saying, ‘Now Yahweh has made room (rḥ b, lit. ‘made wide’) for us and we shall be fruitful in the land’. With the patriarch, simultaneously virile and fruitful and the land, whose repressed fertility is seen as a vehicle for the multiplication of the male ‘seed’, the relationship between the subject and the land in Gen. 26.12, 22 takes on structural characteristics of the ‘male procreation’ model characteristic of the Genesis narrative. At this point in the analysis, it is possible to distinguish two levels of the narrative representation of the feminine in Genesis 12–36. On the one hand, the patriarchal narratives feature female characters – the wives and daughters of the patriarchs – whose narrative identity is invariably shaped by their ability or inability to produce male heirs and bring about the right succession. The matriarch is constructed in relation to that task and her relationship with the patriarch is subordinate to it. On the other hand, both Yahweh and the narrator foreground the relationship of the patriarch to the land in a way that is structurally reminiscent of the male– female relationship. The land is constantly referred to, repeatedly placed at the top of the subject’s agenda. It is a symbolic and creative space that he appropriates by filling it with his own meaning and identity.65 The land’s expanse, or ‘width’ (rḥ b), complements the patriarch’s ‘weight’ (kbd) and is a necessary condition of his fruitfulness (Gen. 26.22). While the matriarch is ‘completed’ by bearing the

64. In the Hebrew text of Genesis 12–36 the root zr‘ is used thirty-six times in the sense of ‘offspring’ (12.7; 13.15-16; 15.3, 5, 13, 18; 17.7-10, 12, 19; 19.32, 34, etc.). 65. The related ideas of the land’s being objectified and gendered as feminine have been widely discussed in postcolonial studies. Anne McClintock has argued that, in the colonial discourse, the ‘myth of the virgin land is also the myth of the empty land, involving both a gender and a racial dispossession’ (Imperial Leather [London: Taylor & Francis, 1995], 30; see also Paul Hjartarson, ‘“Virgin Land”, the Settler-invader Subject and Cultural Nationalism: Gendered Landscape in the Cultural Construction of Canadian National Identity’, in Gender and Landscape: Renegotiating Morality and Space, ed. Lorraine Dowler, Josephine Carubia and Bonj Szczygiel [London: Taylor & Francis, 2005], 203–20). Similarly, René e Dickinson speaks about feminization of the land in modernist novels, which make ‘the land (and, by association, women’s bodies) an empty, abject lack that must need filling, conquering and containing’ (Female Embodiment and Subjectivity in the Modernist Novel: The Corporeum of Virginia Woolf and Olive Moore [London: Taylor & Francis, 2009], 8).

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heir of the promise and ensuring his succession, the patriarch is ‘completed’ by filling the promised land with his ‘seed’. The two levels of the representation of gender in Genesis 12–36 seem to follow the same blueprint that underlies gender relationships in Genesis 2–3. As we have seen in the preceding chapter, the garden narrative presents two sets of gender relationships: a relationship between man and woman (’î š – ’iš š ā h) and that between humankind and the earth (hā ’ā dā m – hā ’ adā mā h). Here woman’s identity is constructed in relation to her childbearing and her husband’s rule (3.16) and the identity of hā ’ā dā m as (implicitly male) humankind, in relation to the earth as a metaphorical female. In a similar way, the dominant discourse in Genesis 12–36 confines the matriarch to motherhood while placing the patriarch in a relationship with the land as his symbolic counterpart. From a psychological perspective, the projection of female identity onto the land might be seen as a compensatory mechanism, through which the narrative psyche attempts to redress the balance lost through a denial of the role and presence of woman in the story of Israel’s origins.66

The Wife–Sister Ruse: The Subject in Search of Fertility Reinforcing the parallels between the literal and the metaphorical representations of femininity, at the beginning of the patriarchal narratives both the matriarch and the land are found sterile. Both facts receive double emphasis in the text. In Gen. 11.30 the narrator twice in one verse refers to Sarah’s sterility: ‘And Sarai was sterile; she had no child.’ Similarly, in Gen. 12.10 the narrator twice reiterates the expression rā ‘ā b bā ’ā reṣ , ‘a famine in the land’: There was a famine in the land. So Abraham went down to Egypt to sojourn there, for the famine was severe in the land (Gen. 12.10).

Structurally, the land of the patriarch is perceived as ‘empty’ or ‘lacking’. To counteract and ‘fill up’ the emptiness of the land of promise, the patriarch goes looking for resources to Egypt, which, by contrast, appears as a land of plenty. One could argue that the ‘emptiness’ of both the matriarch and the land indicates the structural deficiency of the subject, born of the impossibility to construct an

66. Other instances of the land being gendered as feminine in the Hebrew Bible are found in prophetic literature and the Song of Songs. The metaphorical figure of the wife in Hosea 2 has been interpreted as the land of Israel (see Brad E. Kelle, Hosea 2: Metaphor and Rhetoric in Historical Perspective [Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005], 83–6; Francis Landy, Hosea [Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995], 37). The garden landscape in the Song of Songs becomes a metaphor of the woman’s body (Exum, Song of Songs, 59; Kenneth I. Helphand, ‘“My Garden, My Sister, My Bride”: The Garden of “The Song of Songs”’, in Gender and Landscape, ed. Dowler, Carubia and Szczygiel, 254–68).

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identity within the homogenous and totalizing discourse of the tôl edôt. In both its representations as a female character (Sarah) and as a spatial feminine metaphor (the land), the gendered other with its symbolic fecundity is not accessible to the subject.67 This poses a double threat to the promised identity of the patriarch, since becoming a ‘great nation’ depends on fertility of both woman and the land. That the patriarch deals with this threat by leaving the promised land and moving to Egypt anticipates the latter’s significance for the construction of the self-identity of Israel in the story of its origins. On the whole, the patriarchal narratives present a series of three parallel accounts, which all describe a temporary sojourn of the patriarchs (Abraham and Isaac) in the lands of Egypt and Gerar and feature the so-called wife–sister motif (Gen. 12.10-20; 20; 26.1-33). Twice in those episodes the patriarchal family moves to another land because of famine (Gen. 12.10; 26.1). In the wife–sister type-scene, the patriarch presents his wife to the locals as his sister, fearing that his life would otherwise be in danger from rival men. The king of the land takes her in his house (or just contemplates that possibility, Gen. 26.1-33), but when the truth comes out, the wife is returned and the patriarch is offered a rich compensation. Until the late 1980s the three parallel accounts were examined in the scholarly literature from the diachronic point of view, as a result of final redactors’ combining materials from different sources or variant traditions.68 More recent synchronic studies look at the role this recurrent narrative pattern or type-scene plays in the overall story of the patriarchs, highlighting the ideological agenda and psychological tensions that underlie the construction of the characters.69 In the following analysis I shall adopt a similar approach, looking to establish the structural and psychological implications the wife–sister ruse has for the formation of patriarchal identity. In order to do so, I shall look at the structural model underlying all three episodes, the variations they show and the logic behind their repetition. At the centre of the type-scene lies a misrepresentation, a lie of the patriarch about his wife. Misrepresentation of a character is not uncommon in the patriarchal narratives: Jacob poses as Esau, Laban passes off Leah as Rachel, Tamar pretends to be a prostitute and Joseph hides his real identity from his brothers. In most cases, the masquerade serves to achieve a certain pragmatic objective that is linked to the

67. A similar dynamic can be observed in the book of Ruth, where the markers of fertility and sterility are shared by both the woman (Naomi, Ruth) and the land (Moab, Bethlehem) (Talia Sutskover, ‘The Themes of Land and Fertility in the Book of Ruth’, JSOT 34 [2010]: 283–94). 68. For a brief overview of diachronic studies of the motif see Exum, Fragmented Women, 115–16, 118–19. 69. Clines, What Does Eve Do to Help?, 67–84; Exum, Fragmented Women, 115–33; Fuchs, Sexual Politics, 118–50. See also Ann Marmesh, ‘Anti-Covenant’, in Anti-Covenant, ed. Bal, 48–54. Robert Alter examines the narrative function of type-scenes in The Art of Biblical Narrative, 55–78.

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desirable status of the one whose identity is being assumed and that in one way or another is going to benefit the person behind the ruse. Similarly, what is falsified in the wife–sister scene is not the identity of Sarah and Rebekah as such, but their status vis-à -vis their respective husbands. One might argue that the episode is not about the matriarch in question, but about the patriarch’s conception of her function and of its pragmatic value with respect to himself.70 Instead of a closed unit, ‘husband-wife’, the patriarch presents his relationship to the matriarch as an open unit, ‘brother-sister’. Considered from a perspective of kinship structure, the latter model presupposes the act of giving the woman away. A brother can be a dispenser of the bride alongside her father (cf. Gen. 24.55) and in the absence of the father, as it is in Sarah’s case, becomes solely responsible for arranging her marriage. This leads us to the question of the patriarch’s intention, which is essential for understanding the scene. Is he really concerned about his safety, or, is he actively arranging the removal of Sarah from his house? As a wife and possession of the patriarch, Sarah is disowned; as a sister, she becomes a thing for another, an object of exchange and is immediately recognized as such and taken away.71 There is no doubt in the patriarch’s mind as to the value of his wife as an object. He is certain that Sarah will be desired by the Egyptians (‘I know that you are a woman beautiful in appearance’, Gen. 12.11; cf. Isaac’s analogous ‘the men of the place might kill me for the sake of Rebekah, because she is attractive in appearance’, Gen. 26.7). While the beauty of the wife is regarded as a negative characteristic, presenting an existential threat to the patriarch, the beauty of the sister is a positive category, a currency to trade and a potential source of well-being. Though the narrator is reticent about the role of the husband in the actual removal of the wife from his house, it is implied that he consents to it. Ann Marmesh suggests that because Abraham and Isaac do not condemn the wife abduction, ‘they are complicit in breaking the taboo’.72 In my view, their complicity goes much further since they appear to have devised the whole scheme for personal gain. Along similar lines, Sharon Jeansonne considers Abraham’s ruse as a premeditated scheme to acquire wealth and slaves from Pharaoh.73 To make it worse, the patriarch cannot even be sure that his wife will ever be returned to him. Initiating the exchange, he does not intend for the truth to come out, neither can he expect that the foreign ruler would prove to be righteous and refuse to keep his wife, for the patriarch believes that ‘there is no fear of God in this place’

70. Clines and Exum have rightly criticized the old scholarly designation of the wifesister theme as ‘the Endangered Ancestress’, since it is the patriarch’s and not the matriarch’s interests that are central to the narrative (cf. Clines, ‘The Ancestor in Danger: But Not the Same Danger’, in What Does Eve Do to Help?, 67–84; Exum, ‘Who Is Afraid of “The Endangered Ancestress”’, in Fragmented Women, 115–33). 71. In Genesis 26 the wife, Rebekah, is not taken away, but the narrative revolves around that possibility. 72. Marmesh, ‘Anti-Covenant’, 50. 73. Jeansonne, The Women of Genesis, 7, 16–17.

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(Gen. 20.11). As far as the patriarch is concerned, he might be losing his wife forever. But maybe that is really what he wants. Looking at the patriarch’s behaviour from a psychoanalytic-literary perspective, Exum regards it as an expression of man’s ambiguous attitude to woman’s sexuality, which he both fears and desires and which he feels compelled to expose to another man as a means to work out his unconscious fantasies.74 The conflicting psychological drives of fear and desire could be applied to the patriarch’s dysfunctional relationship to the feminine at a more general level. By repeatedly disowning his wife he might be expressing his fear of the gendered other and his unconscious wish to dispose of her. Structurally, he does it by constructing the feared other as part of self, that is, as his sibling, a projection and an extension of his own subjectivity.75 The misrepresentation of the wife might be seen, at the level of the narrative psyche, as a symptom of a deep-seated dysfunction of the subject. His irrational fear of death by the hands of ‘the men of the place’ might therefore be a projection of an entirely different fear, the fear of alterity, manifested in a wife and suppressed in a sister. The danger may not be coming from murderous and godless rivals as the patriarch suggests; it may not even be coming from outside at all. As Clines observes, the danger is all in the patriarch’s mind.76 The patriarch’s perspective can be presented through the following structural correspondences: wife = Other = threat/death : sister = Self = life/well-being77

Exum speaks of the wife–sister ruse as a possible example of incest fantasy, arising from a desire of unity with the other, from a ‘narcissistic striving towards completeness or wholeness’.78 The unified identity is achieved through disavowing the other (wife) and constructing her as part of self (sister). A similar example of imaging wife as sibling is found in Gen. 2.23-24, where hā ’ā dā m calls the newly created woman ‘flesh of my flesh’. In both cases, the male subject constructs the image of a wife who is also, literally or metaphorically, an extension of his self. Echoing the words of hā ’ā dā m, Abraham’s claim, ‘she is my sister, the daughter of my father’ (Gen. 20.12), posits Sarah as an extension of himself, ‘flesh of his

74. Exum, Fragmented Women, 123–33. 75. In that sense, it is fitting that the matriarch does not speak or act in any of the three episodes. 76. Clines, What Does Eve Do to Help?, 68. Exum develops this point at length, adding psychoanalytic depth to the characters who serve as ‘vehicles for the narrative neurosis’ (Fragmented Women, 123–5). 77. Kunin develops these equations by adding to them the opposition ‘barren : fruitful’: when Sarah and Rebekah are ‘taken as wives by the local king, who represents “the nations”, they are barren, yet when they are wives of their “brother” Israel they are fruitful’ (The Logic of Incest, 263). 78. Exum, Fragmented Women, 131.

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flesh’, an endogamic ideal.79 Whether or not Abraham is telling the truth, the wife– sister motif functions as a potent symbol that reinforces the claim of ‘pure’ lineage and identity. This brings us to the dynamics of identity and assimilation that underlie the story of Israel’s origin. Adopting Exum’s method of treating the characters in the story as split-off parts of the narrative psyche,80 I would treat the wife’s figure as an aspect of Israel’s self that is engaged in and affected by the processes of assimilation. In this light, the patriarch’s fear for his life and well-being may be expressing the narrative concern about the identity of Israel vis-à -vis the people of the land. The other inherent in conjugality is perceived as an unstable element that threatens the andro- and ethnocentric identity and needs to be expelled. The ultimate horror for Israel’s self, represented by the patriarch, is that he, the male bearer of identity, might be killed, while the matriarch, the female bearer of difference, might live, presumably, assimilated, among the people of the land. (Abraham takes it for granted that Sarah should be equally horrified at that idea, cf. Gen. 12.12.) Time after time the subject plays out his ‘death by assimilation’ fantasy and each time, the ruler of the land is imagined to prevent the assimilation and restore the matriarch to her original position. By the end of each account, the threat has been neutralized, the other, reintegrated back into the self of Israel and the patriarch has reaffirmed his identity and gained in material wealth. At this point, one might ask why the wife–sister story with its manipulation of female subjectivity needs to be repeated three times. Exum considers the function of repetition in the text from the perspective of psychoanalysis, where the repetition compulsion is understood as a symptom of a deep-seated neurosis. Applying this idea to the wife–sister episodes, Exum argues that repeating the story offers a ‘semiotic cure for the neurosis by working over a particularly difficult problem until it is resolved’.81 In what sense, then, can we speak of the subject being cured by the patriarch’s transactions with the foreign ruler? What does the narrative psyche achieve by each enactment of the wife–sister motif? Noting the changes in the narrative pattern from one episode to the next may provide an insight into

79. Scholars have approached this statement with various degrees of suspicion. Clines considers it a lie (What Does Eve Do to Help?, 76). Blenkinsopp adopts the view of the ancient Jewish commentators (Gen. Rab. 38.14; Josephus, Ant. 1.151), who identify Sarah with Iscah, the sister of Lot and Milcah and the daughter of Haran (Abraham, 28–9). Accepting this suggestion would make Sarah a granddaughter of Terah rather than his daughter, but would still keep her Terahite descent. From a narratological perspective, Rulon-Miller considers the absence of Sarah’s genealogy in Gen. 11.29 a deliberate omission that highlights the ambiguity of Sarah’s position as a wife/sister in Genesis 12 and 20 (‘Hagar’, 68). For Exum, who offers a psychoanalytic-literary reading of the scene, the key issue is not the truthfulness of the patriarch, but the need, experienced within the narrative psyche, to imagine the brother–sister relationship (Fragmented Women, 131–2). 80. Exum, Fragmented Women, 121. 81. Ibid., 120–1.

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the nature of the semiotic cure they effect. If we look at each episode as part of a narrative progression, it becomes apparent that, while the male subject remains unaffected, the changes each time concern the representation of the feminine in its two forms, that is, the woman and the land. The sequence of the three episodes shows a progression in the woman’s changing family status. In the first episode, Sarah is a sterile wife, a state which, as Clines has observed, makes her expendable.82 This state will have changed by the time the family comes to stay in Gerar in Gen. 20.1. In the intervening chapters, Yahweh tells Abraham that Sarah will give birth to a son, an heir to the promise (Gen. 17.16, 21; 18.10, 14), and the combined chronological references in Gen. 17.21, 18.10 and 21.2 suggest that Sarah must be pregnant with Isaac at the time when she is taken into Abimelech’s house.83 In this context, Abraham’s actions not only are morally reprehensible, but also pose a direct threat to the birth of the promised heir. This might be the reason why the information about Sarah’s pregnancy is suppressed in Genesis 20. By doing so, the narrator avoids casting doubt over the purity of Abraham’s descent. For the same reason, the narrator stresses the righteousness of Abimelech, making it clear that the latter did not approach Sarah sexually. In the third episode, the matriarch (Rebekah) comes on stage having already fulfilled her role as a mother. The preceding narrative tells us of her giving birth to the twins Esau and Jacob (Gen. 25.21-26) and of their growing up (Gen. 25.27). The context of Genesis 27 implies that, at the time when Isaac and Rebekah stay in Gerar, both sons must still be living with their parents. Once again, the account of the patriarch’s ruse supresses the crucial information about the woman’s status, since the presence of the twins would have made it impossible for Isaac to claim that Rebekah was his sister. In her contextual reading of the three episodes, Exum exposes the disturbing character of the narrator’s suppressing the fertility of the matriarch.84 Since, following Exum’s argument, man’s unconscious fantasies revolve around woman’s sexuality, not her fertility, the idea of motherhood might be seen as impeding the realization of those fantasies. One might also argue that the mother represents the essential otherness of the feminine subject, a feature that the patriarch is trying to obfuscate in his wife by calling her his sister. Therefore motherhood needs to be taken out of the picture. And yet, as the wife’s implicit status as a mother grows from one episode to the next, the narrative seems to acknowledge it by gradually diminishing the degree of her sexual exposure to the patriarch’s rival. Thus, in Genesis 12, the sterile Sarah is taken into Pharaoh’s house ‘as a wife’, which implies her having a sexual relationship with the ruler. By contrast, in Genesis 20, Sarah, who has received the promise of a son and may already be pregnant, is taken into the house of Abimelech but is protected by Yahweh from sexual contact. Here the narrator stresses her

82. Clines, What Does Eve Do to Help?, 69. 83. Ibid., 75–6; Peter D. Miscall, The Workings of Old Testament Narrative (Semeia Studies 12; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), 32. 84. Exum, Fragmented Women, 122–3.

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complete vindication before her people that includes the price of a thousand shekels of silver paid by the ruler to acquit her of all guilt (Gen. 20.16). In Genesis 26, Rebekah the mother is not taken at all, and, instead, the patriarch himself openly enjoys sexual intimacy with her in the sight of Abimelech (Gen. 26.8). The last scene is particularly interesting because it employs a pun on the patriarch’s name yiṣ ḥ ā q: here Isaac is described as ‘caressing [meṣ aḥ ē q] his wife Rebekah’. The sexual connotation of the verb ṣ ḥ q, ‘to laugh’ (qal), ‘to mock, make fun of ’ (piel),85 in Gen. 26.8 is indicated by the reaction of the king, who interprets Isaac’s action as a sign of conjugality. However, given the uncertainty of the meaning of meṣ aḥ ē q in this context, its implicit play on Isaac’s name acquires more weight. From a semiotic perspective, in Gen. 26.8 Isaac acts out his own identity. And since the use of the particle ’et indicates a transitive meaning, Isaac appears to be acting out or projecting his identity ‘on’ Rebekah, or literally, making her ‘Isaac’. The gendered other becomes, literally, the ‘flesh of the flesh’ for the subject, her integration witnessed and, therefore, confirmed by a male outsider, Abimelech. By the end of the series, in which the patriarch repeatedly treats his wife as his sibling and his own flesh, a unified model of subjectivity is achieved, in which woman’s motherhood is both realized and hidden from view and her threatening difference is integrated into the subject’s identity.86 In parallel with the growing fertility and integration of the wife in the sequence, there is also a progressive increase in the fruitfulness of the land and in the extent of the patriarch’s association with it. At the beginning of the first episode, as we have seen above, the patriarch’s land, like his wife, is sterile. Egypt, by contrast, is presented as a land of plenty, where the family finds refuge from the famine. As a spatial and symbolic entity, Egypt has clear boundaries, which the narrator stresses when Abraham arrives in Egypt (Gen. 12.10, 11, 14) and departs from it (Gen. 13.1), making it clear that Egypt is not the promised land and the patriarch can associate with it only temporarily. In this ‘other’ land, Abraham receives from Pharaoh a payment in kind for his wife – the gift of sheep, oxen, male donkeys, male and female slaves, female donkeys and camels (Gen. 12.16) – which he takes back to the land of Canaan (Gen. 12.19). The previous ‘emptiness’ of the patriarch’s land

85. BDB, 850; DCH VII, 112. The term is unclear, used also in Gen. 19.14, 21.9 and 39.17. Teubal observes that all of these occurrences are found in passages related to sexual activity (Savina J. Teubal, Hagar the Egyptian: The Lost Tradition of the Matriarchs [San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990], 137–8). Teubal agrees with Rabbi Akiba, who states on the ground of a comparison with 39.17, that the only meaning of meṣ aḥ ē q is sexual (184 n. 26). 86. Analysing the progression from a different angle, Fuchs sees in it a gradual decline in the degree of threat that the idea of woman’s adultery poses to the institution of patriarchal marriage. With each episode, the threat becomes less and less real, which shows that the final goal of the narrative is ‘the reinstitution of the proper conjugal relationship, namely the wife’s re-enclosure within the control of her proper husband’. That this is the desired outcome for the narrator is evident from the increased wealth that accompanies the restoration of the wife to the patriarch (Fuchs, Sexual Politics, 122–3).

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is thus counteracted, being filled with the semiotic ‘weight’, provided by Egypt. At the lexical level, this correlation is apparent from the parallel between the former ‘heaviness’ of the famine (kā bē d hā rā ‘ā b, Gen. 12.10) and the ‘heaviness’ of the wealth that characterizes the patriarch on his return (we’abrā m kā bē d me’ō d, Gen. 13.2). As we shall see below, the theme of the semiotic ‘weight’ of Egypt will later re-emerge in the stories of Lot and Hagar, becoming a key factor in the narrative construction of the other. In the second episode, the patriarch sojourns in Gerar, in the land of the Philistines (Gen. 20.1). Situated halfway to Egypt, on the southern borders of Canaan, Gerar is simultaneously distanced from Egypt and reminiscent of it.87 Here the degree of the ‘wife-exposure’ is reduced, but the degree of compensation increases, so that it now includes not only sheep and cattle and male and female slaves (Gen. 20.14) but also a thousand shekels of silver (Gen. 20.16). But, most importantly, instead of being expelled, the patriarch is now allowed to settle freely in the land (‘My land is before you; settle wherever you like’, Gen. 20.15). Here, for the first time, the locals sanction Abraham’s sojourn in the land, which until now has only been based on Yahweh’s instructions. In the last episode, the relationship between the patriarch and the land reaches its highest point, becoming fruitful. Once again, there is a famine in Canaan and Isaac goes to Gerar, the land of the Philistines. Egypt also features in Gen. 26.2, but only as a reminder of Abraham’s previous journey and an occasion for a taboo. This time the wife, who is now the mother of Esau and Jacob, is not taken, so there is no reparation paid. However, the patriarch becomes ‘very wealthy’ (literally, ‘exceedingly great’) when he sows in the land of the Philistines and reaps a hundredfold (Gen. 26.12-14). This time, his wealth does not come from the ruler of the land – his male rival – but is a result of Yahweh’s blessing, described in characteristically masculine terms. Above we have looked at the male connotations of the patriarch’s sowing and reaping in the land, which conceal behind them the feminine aspect of the land bearing fruit. In addition, the patriarch is described as becoming ‘exceedingly great’, with the root gdl, ‘to be great, to increase’ – according to Clines, a distinctively male concept88 – used three times in one verse. This emphasis on the ‘great’ male identity downplays the real transformation that has been effected by the end of the series – that both the matriarch and the land have now been cured of their sterility. The life-giving aspects of the other that the patriarch was lacking at the beginning – the fertility of the wife and the productivity of the land – have now been symbolically appropriated by the subject. In the light of the above observations, one might see the whole wife–sister series as a gradual construction of the patriarchal subject in his relationship with

87. The association between Egypt and the Philistines is first introduced in the genealogy of Ham, where Egypt (miṣ rā yim) is said to be the father of Casluhim, the ancestor of the Philistines (Gen. 10.13–14). 88. See Clines, ‘The Scandal of a Male Bible’, 2015, available via www.academia. edu, https://www.academia.edu/10977758/The_Scandal_of_a_Male_Bible (accessed 10 December 2017).

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male rival

Subject

wife

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ruler of the land

land

Figure 2.1 Symbolic transfers in the wife–sister stories.

the land. The ruse brings no immediate change in the position of the wife, who is consistently restored to her husband. By contrast, every time the patriarch hands over his wife to the other man, his position vis-à -vis the land improves, as he either receives a concession to settle in the land or acquires more of its wealth. Central to this process is the figure of the local ruler (Pharaoh, Abimelech), who represents the people living in the land and with whom the patriarch has to negotiate his right to settle. The figures of the patriarch, who possesses the wife, and the ruler, who possesses the land, invite a structural parallel. Like the right to the wife, the right to the land is contested by the patriarch and the (equally male) ruler. Declining their ownership of the wife in the context of the rivalry over the land, Abraham and Isaac initiate a symbolic exchange, through which their rivals renounce, if only partially, their ownership of the land, making the land and its wealth available to the patriarchs. The desire for the woman that the patriarch ascribes to his rival may be seen as a projection of the subject’s own desire for the land. The triangular relationship between the patriarch, the wife and the male rival thus reflects the tensions implicit in the triangular relationship between the patriarch, the land and its inhabitants.89 The matriarch functions here as a symbolic object, whose transfer to the foreign ruler mirrors and brings about the symbolic transfer of the land to the patriarch (Figure 2.1). What is, in the end, the object of the patriarch’s desire? Is it directed at the woman, whom he subsumes as his sister–wife, or at the land, the symbolic space that belongs to others and where he looks to find ‘room’ for himself? I suggest that the symbolic transaction in which the wife is offered to the local ruler is related at another level to the dynamic of identity that is central to the collective psyche. What the patriarch imagines as a danger to his life might represent a different kind of danger, namely, the threat that settling among outsiders poses to the identity of the community through both antagonism and assimilation. Significantly, as the series ends, the land releases its abundant crops and water resources to the patriarch and not the Philistines (Gen. 26.12-14, 18-22, 32-33). Naming one of the wells ‘Rehoboth’, Isaac concludes that he can now rightfully settle in the land: ‘Now Yahweh has made room for us and we shall be fruitful in the land’ (Gen. 26.22). With this, the patriarch achieves his long sought-after entitlement to the land. There is one last, important observation to be made regarding a contextual reading of the series. It is notable that each wife–sister episode in Genesis is

89. Here I draw on Exum’s application of the Girardian model of triangular desire to the wife–sister narratives (Fragmented Women, 128–9).

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followed by an account of conflict or separation between the male rivals or brothers within the clan. The narratives of Abraham and Lot in Genesis 13, Isaac and Ishmael in Genesis 21, Jacob and Esau in Genesis 27 describe how one of the two brothers in each successful generation is removed from the chosen line and, eventually, from the land.90 The recurrent strategy of placing a ‘brother’ narrative immediately after a ‘sister’ episode seems to present the construction of the unified subject in two movements: first, by subsuming the female other and appropriating her fertility, and, second, by excluding the male other – the rival brother – from the possibility of shared identity. By the end of the sequence, the boundaries of the andro- and ethnocentric identity have been triply re-established.

The Separation of Abraham and Lot At the beginning of the Abraham cycle, Lot’s role is somewhat enigmatic. He comes on stage alongside Abraham in the first line of the tôl edôt of Terah as the son of Abraham’s deceased brother Haran (Gen. 11.27) and for a while shadows Abraham without playing any part in the unfolding events. Lot accompanies the patriarch, first as a member of Terah’s clan, on the journey from Ur to Haran (Gen. 11.31) and then, along with Sarah, from Haran to Canaan (Gen. 12.5). Although he is not mentioned during the patriarch’s sojourn in Egypt (Gen. 12.10-20), one can infer from Gen. 13.1 that Lot has stayed with Abraham throughout the entire episode. Remaining in the background until Genesis 13, Lot’s presence is nevertheless remarkably persistent. Despite his background role in the narrative, Lot seems particularly important to Abraham himself. In Gen. 12.1-5 Abraham takes his nephew with him to Canaan despite Yahweh’s order to leave his kindred behind. Laurence Turner has described Abraham’s response to Yahweh in Gen. 12.4-5 as ‘inherently contradictory’, showing both submission and disobedience to Yahweh’s will.91 What makes Lot so important that Abraham, who shows model obedience to Yahweh with respect to his land and his father’s house, goes against God’s order when it concerns his nephew?

90. This study places the relationship between Abraham and his nephew Lot under the category of sibling rivalry, an idea that will be closely discussed in the following section. 91. Turner, Announcements of Plot in Genesis (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1990), 62; cf. also Davies, Whose Bible Is It Anyway? (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 97; William John Lyons, Canon and Exegesis: Canonical Praxis and the Sodom Narrative (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002). For a detailed analysis see also Andrew G. Vaughn, ‘And Lot Went with Him: Abraham’s Disobedience in Genesis 12:1–4a’, in David and Zion: Biblical Studies in Honor of J. J. M. Roberts, ed. Bernard F. Batto and Kathryn L. Roberts (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2004), 111–24.

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Commentators largely agree on interpreting Lot’s role as that of Abraham’s potential heir.92 With Sarah declared sterile in Gen. 11.30 and Nahor and his descendants removed from the narrative until Genesis 24, Lot, the sole grandson of Terah, remains the only relative who can continue the lineage. If Abraham indeed sees Lot as his heir or even ‘surrogate son’ (Turner), then he must believe that Yahweh will make him a great nation through Lot. Clines has argued along similar lines in his reading of the first wife–sister story.93 In his view, the narrator of Gen. 12.10-20 projects onto Lot the role of possible successor of the childless Abraham, of one through whom the promise can still find its way, diverted though it might be, towards fulfilment. Accordingly, though Lot is not mentioned in the episode, his implied presence makes sterile Sarah expendable in Abraham’s eyes, allowing the patriarch to hand her over to Pharaoh. The same logic has been attributed to Abraham in Gen. 13.8-9, where he offers Lot the choice to occupy the land of Canaan to the left (the north) or to the right (the south) of Bethel. Joseph Blenkinsopp maintains that by offering to share the land with his nephew, Abraham treats him as his presumptive heir.94 Later in the cycle, Abraham shows remarkable commitment to his nephew’s welfare. In Genesis 14 Abraham starts a military campaign to rescue Lot who has been taken captive by foreign kings and in Gen. 18.20-33 he bargains with Yahweh, trying to spare Lot’s city Sodom from looming destruction. For John Lyons, this special association between Abraham and his nephew can be understood only in terms of Lot’s position as Abraham’s heir.95 Similarly, Lou Silberman describes Lot’s presence on stage as the ‘teasing motif of the presumed heir’, which serves to forward the plot by building up the tension around Yahweh’s promise.96 It is not possible, however, to interpret all of the Lot material in terms of his status as Abraham’s heir. For his part, the patriarch never names Lot in his conversations with Yahweh, thinking that first Eliezer of Damascus (‘one born in my house’, Gen. 15.2) and then his son Ishmael (Gen. 17.18) would inherit after him. Early in the cycle, Lot places himself outside the promised land: in Genesis

92. Turner, Announcements of Plot in Genesis, 62; ‘Lot as Jekyll and Hyde: A Reading of Genesis 18–19’, in The Bible in Three Dimensions: Essays in Celebration of Forty Years of Biblical Studies in the University of Sheffield, ed. David J. A. Clines, Stephen E. Fowl and Stanley E. Porter (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1990), 86; Brett, Genesis, 56; Clines, What Does Eve Do to Help?, 69–73; Steinberg, Kinship and Marriage in Genesis, 48–52; Larry R. Helyer, ‘The Separation of Abram and Lot: Its Significance in the Patriarchal Narratives’, JSOT 26 (1983): 82; Nachman Levine, ‘Sarah/Sodom: Birth, Destruction and Synchronic Transaction’, JSOT 31 (2006): 140. 93. Clines, What Does Eve Do to Help?, 69. 94. Blenkinsopp, The Pentateuch, 101. See also Lyons, Canon and Exegesis, 132; Turner, Announcements of Plot in Genesis, 67; Genesis, 63. 95. Lyons, Canon and Exegesis, 132. 96. See Lou H. Silberman, ‘Listening to the Text’, JBL 102 (1983): 19.

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13 he chooses to dwell to the east of Canaan, in Sodom.97 If Lot has ever had a claim to inherit the land of Canaan, now he must have relinquished it. Yahweh himself indicates this when he waits until Lot has left before showing the promised land to Abraham (Gen. 13.14-17). However, losing the claim to the land does not diminish the interest Lot presents to the narrator. A large portion of the narrative – Genesis 14 and 19 – is dedicated to the description of what happens to Lot after his separation from Abraham. Lot’s story becomes a lengthy sideline or, in the words of Silberman, a diversionary or retarding novella that appears to have no bearing on the main plot.98 If the idea of Lot as a possible descendant of Abraham does not justify the elaborate digression of Genesis 14 and 19, could there be another explanation? The aetiology that concludes the Lot story (Gen. 19.30-38) links it to the historic consciousness of Israel, tracing the ancestry of Moab and Ammon back to Abraham. Clines sees this episode as the first sign that the Abrahamic promise of becoming ‘a multitude of nations’ is beginning to be fulfilled (Gen. 17.4; cf. 12.2). For him, this fact in itself justifies the narrator’s attention to Lot.99 Brett expresses a similar opinion, reading the incest episode in Genesis 19 as ‘an extravagant fulfilment of the promise’.100 This being so, Abraham’s deep engagement with his nephew suggests that Lot’s function in the narrative might be more immediate, having a direct bearing on the identity of the patriarch himself. As a starting point for re-examining Lot’s place in the cycle, I suggest going back to the genealogical data in Gen. 11.27-32. In the account of the generations of Terah, the three sons of Terah – Abraham, Nahor and Haran – feature alongside his grandson Lot, the son of Haran. Although a similar genealogical formula presenting three or more successive generations at once could be found elsewhere (Gen. 4.18; 10.7, 24), the mention of Lot stands out in the strictly formulaic sequence of Genesis 11. What follows is even more specific: Lot’s father Haran dies in the presence of his father Terah in the land of his birth (Gen. 11.28). From a narratological point of view, Haran’s story is reverted to its beginning (cf. the markers of origin ‘father’, ‘birth’) and is thus cancelled out. He dies before the family starts its journey from Ur and it is logical to assume that his place should pass on to his son, while Terah should take the place of Lot’s father. By standing in Haran’s place, Lot acquires a parity of status with Abraham and Nahor. Nahor,

97. Scholars variously place Sodom inside or outside Canaan. Clines considers the valley of the Jordan to be ‘unquestionably a part of the land’, meaning the land of Yahweh’s promise (Clines, What Does Eve Do to Help?, 72). Blenkinsop argues the opposite, saying that ‘Lot disqualifies himself as Abraham’s heir by choosing to live in Sodom, therefore outside of Canaan’ (Abraham, 44). I would agree with the latter position on literary grounds, since the internal geography of Genesis 13 separates Canaan from the valley where Lot chooses to settle (cf. Gen. 13.12). 98. Silberman, ‘Listening to the Text’, 20. 99. Clines, What Does Eve Do to Help?, 73. 100. Brett, Genesis, 69.

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however, disappears from view in Gen. 11.31, when Terah and his family leave Ur to go to Canaan: ‘Terah took Abram his son and Lot the son of Haran, his grandson and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram’s wife.’101 With Sarah sterile and Nahor absent, Lot is, indeed, the most likely candidate to continue the lineage. However, the lineage Lot represents is that of Terah and not of Abraham. Arguably, this distinction holds for the rest of the Abraham cycle. Put from the start in the position of Abraham’s brother, Lot never comes to represent the line of Abraham, but features alongside him as his equal and potential rival. This becomes most apparent in the scene of their separation in Genesis 13. Here Lot matches Abraham in wealth and, arguably, in status. The two of them have brought abundant possessions from Egypt: Abraham is now ‘very rich in livestock, in silver and in gold’ (Gen. 13.2) and so is Lot, who has flocks and herds and tents (Gen. 13.5). Their parity of status leads them to separate, as the land cannot ‘carry’ both of them living together (Gen. 13.6), the detail that parallels the account of the separation of another pair of brothers, Jacob and Esau (Gen. 36.7). And so Abraham – describing Lot and himself as brothers (Gen. 13.8) – suggests that they go their opposite ways, a proposition that amounts to splitting the land in half: ‘If you take the left hand, I will go to the right; if you take the right hand, I will go to the left’ (Gen. 13.9). Contrary to the above-mentioned conclusion of Blenkinsopp and Turner, this offer makes better sense if Lot is seen not as an heir – an heir does not come into possession of the land until the death of the predecessor, in which case the land is left undivided – but as a brother, equal in status to Abraham. Such is the view of Steinmetz, who sees Lot as Abraham’s surrogate brother and competitor.102 That Lot does not take Abraham’s offer to take the land either to the right (south) or to the left (north) of Bethel and instead moves eastwards (miqqedem, Gen. 13.11) links him to the motif, recurrent in Genesis, of ‘the eastward movements of the dispossessed’.103 This motif features displaced brothers, who have to leave in order to free the space for a chosen heir. Fitting into this pattern are Cain, who moves to the east of Eden (Gen. 4.16), the sons of Abraham’s concubines sent by

101. It is notable that Nahor and his wife are not mentioned as part of Terah’s clan leaving Ur. They will also be absent at Terah’s arrival in Haran, at the time of his death and at the moment of Abraham’s call. Nahor will reappear later as the originator of the clan that will provide brides for Abraham’s descendants (Gen. 22.20-24; 29.5). By then he will have settled in Aram (cf. ‘Aram-naharaim, the city of Nahor’, Gen. 24.10) as will his son Bethuel (cf. ‘go to Paddan-aram, to the house of Bethuel’, Gen. 28.2; cf. 28.5). Strikingly, the place of the residence of Nahor’s clan will be further specified as Haran (cf. Gen. 27.43; 29.4-5), the town where Abraham’s journey started. This suggests that Nahor might have after all travelled along with Terah in Gen. 11.31, but was left unmentioned. By leaving Nahor out, the text emphasizes the connection between Abraham and Lot, the two male members of the family who would make it to Canaan. 102. Steinmetz, From Father to Son: Kinship, Conflict and Continuity in Genesis (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1991), 90. 103. Turner, Genesis, 62.

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their father to the east country (Gen. 25.6) and Esau, who settles to the southeast of Canaan, in Seir (Gen. 36.8). The spatial marker ‘east’ brings in the connotation of both otherness and rivalry, associated in the historic consciousness of Israel with the peoples dwelling east of Canaan (cf. the expression ‘sons of the east’ that designates the tribes hostile to Israel in Judg. 6.3, 33).104 Playing the role of Abraham’s surrogate brother, Lot is also constructed as the patriarch’s structural opposite or shadow. This is apparent in Genesis 18–19, where Lot’s story runs parallel to that of Abraham, forming an antithesis to it.105 One after the other, both men are visited by Yahweh’s messengers and both show hospitality to them. In Abraham’s case, the positive encounter leads to the announcement of the miraculous birth of the true heir to his aged and barren wife Sarah. Lot, in his turn, also welcomes the messengers, but his hospitality is compromised by the attack of the Sodomites and he himself has to be rescued and led by the hand out of the doomed city. Unlike Abraham’s strand with its positive promise of a descendant and an assertion of his wife’s fertility, Lot’s story ends on a low note. His wife turns into a pillar of salt when she looks back at the perishing Sodom, his house and possessions are lost and his land is destroyed. Although the episode concludes with an account of the births of Lot’s sons (cf. the announcement of a birth of a son to Sarah in Gen. 18.10, 14), it is overshadowed by incest. Living in isolation in a cave with his two daughters, Lot fathers their children, the eponymous ancestors of Moab and Ammon, the two neighbouring nations hostile to Israel (Gen. 19.30-38). Why does the narrative of the promise need Lot, a passive and weak shadow of Abraham, who is besieged by disasters and constantly needs rescue and assistance? One possible way to understand the relationship between Abraham and Lot would be to see it as a mediator for the deeper tensions surrounding the issues of identity and the land. In the following analysis I propose that the significance of Lot in the Abraham narrative arises in the context of Israel’s ambivalent attitude to Egypt. The figure of Lot – and of Hagar later in the cycle – will be seen as a narrative outlet for disposing of the symbolic ‘weight’ of wealth and fertility, carried by

104. Stordalen characterizes movement towards the east in Genesis 1–11 as generally unfavourable and contrasts it to the movement towards the promised land (Gen. 11.31– 12.9), directed from the south-east to the west. Referring to the negative connotation of the eastward movement, Stordalen argues against the eastern location of the garden of Eden in Gen. 2.8 and suggests to read the term miqqedem in a temporal and not geographical sense, as ‘primeval’ (Echoes of Eden, 267–70). In my view, the garden narrative associates eastern location not only with God’s planting the garden in Gen. 2.8, but also with his expelling disobedient hā ’ā dā m in Gen. 2.24, which fits with the overall negative connotations of the east in the symbolic landscape of Genesis. 105. In his extensive comparative analysis of Genesis 18 and 19, Robert Letellier shows them being linked together by a structure that combines both parallel movement and symmetrical inversion (see Robert Ignatius Letellier, Day in Mamre, Night in Sodom: Abraham and Lot in Genesis 18 and 19 [Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995], 64–8).

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Abraham out of Egypt, as well as for purging its symbolic contamination. To be able to proceed with this argument, it is necessary to consider briefly the unique place Egypt occupies in the narrative of Israel’s origin. Egypt plays a special role in the construction of Israel’s national identity on more than one level.106 In the patriarchal narratives, Egypt appears as a place of refuge, the country that provides vital resources and assures the survival of the chosen line. The narrative memory of Israel endows Egypt with a connotation of prosperity and fertility. The patriarchal narratives both begin and end with a flight to Egypt, which, each time, dramatically benefits the clan. As we have seen above, Abraham’s sojourn in Egypt makes the patriarch ‘exceedingly rich’ (Gen. 13.2).107 Similarly, at the end of Genesis we are told that, after Jacob’s family had settled in Egypt, ‘they gained possessions in it and were fruitful and multiplied exceedingly’ (Gen. 47.27). This theme continues into the book of Exodus, which states that during their four hundred years of sojourn in Egypt the Israelites were ‘fruitful and prolific; they multiplied and grew exceedingly strong, so that the land was filled with them’ (Exod. 1.7). The original blessing ‘be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth’ (Gen. 1.28) is realized in Egypt in the way it happens nowhere else. The process of ‘filling the land’ lays the ground for Israel’s nationhood, transforming the limited group of Jacob’s descendants who came to Egypt looking for economic refuge into ‘a great, powerful and numerous nation’ (Deut. 26.5). Notwithstanding the positive connotations Egypt holds as a place of refuge in Genesis, in the narrative of Abraham it is also associated with a perceived threat to the patriarch’s life and the removal of the matriarch from his household (Gen. 12:10-20). In the rest of the Hebrew Bible, Egypt’s relationship with Israel will be more unequivocally linked with captivity and oppression. The exodus from Egypt is seen as liberation and the single most powerful factor in the formation of Israel’s self-image (Deut. 26.6-8). The defining role the exodus plays in the perception of the Israelite identity is apparent in Num. 22.5, 11, where the Israelites are described as ‘a people who came out of Egypt’. In the historical narrative of Israel, this foundational separation gives way to a confrontation between Egypt and Israel as political powers. The prophetic writings associate Egypt not only with political opposition (Ezekiel 29–32) but also with moral and religious corruption and the origin of Israel’s religious ‘whoredom’ (Hos. 2.15; Ezek. 23.27). Ezekiel’s oracles demonize Egypt on a mythical scale, depicting Yahweh’s battle with Egypt as a

106. Pieter de Boer stresses the ambivalence of the biblical image of Egypt in ‘Egypt in the Old Testament: Some Aspects of an Ambivalent Assessment’, in Selected Studies in Old Testament Exegesis, ed. C. van Duin (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991), 152–67. For a thorough study of the topic F. V. Greifenhagen, Egypt on the Pentateuch’s Ideological Map: Constructing Biblical Israel’s Identity (JSOT SS 361; London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), 8–13; 28–33. 107. Similarly, in their exodus from Egypt the Israelites bring great riches out of the country (Exod. 3.21-22; 12.35-36).

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cosmic struggle with the Great Dragon of Chaos (Ezek. 29.1-16; 32.1-16), a mighty opponent who in the end is defeated and vanishes in Sheol (Ezek. 32.17-32). Why should the nation that once was a haven and a birthplace for the people of Israel become its most hated adversary? In an insightful interpretation of the portrayal of Egypt in Exodus, Diana Lipton suggests that Israel’s ambivalent attitude originates in its resistance to the powerful attraction exerted by Egypt and to the ensuing threat of assimilation.108 For her, the danger of Egypt lies not in its oppressive treatment of the Israelites, but in being ‘the apex of the seductive other’.109 The thriving civilization along the Nile with its developed irrigation and agriculture represents everything the promised land is not.110 In contrast to Canaan, ‘a land of mountains and valleys that drinks rain from heaven’, Egypt is likened to a ‘garden of vegetation’ (Deut. 11.10-11), an image that reverberates with the garden of Eden in the Hebrew creation myth. The desert experience following the exodus is marked by longing for Egypt and its abundance of grain, figs, vines, pomegranates and drinking water (Num. 20.5; 21.5), its pots of meat and its bread (Exod. 16.3). In their search for a land and identity of their own, the Israelites constantly need to confront the desire to go back (Num. 11.20; 14.2) and to reaffirm their distance from the lost paradise of Egypt. At the beginning of the patriarchal narratives, the image of Egypt exerts both a similar appeal and a similar threat. For Abraham, it has become the source of material abundance, profusion of wealth, which can now fill the symbolic ‘emptiness’ of his land (cf. Gen. 12.10). Later in the narrative, it will also give him his first son Ishmael through Hagar, Sarah’s Egyptian slave (Gen. 16.15). But the narrative seems uneasy about the idea of Israel’s being indebted to Egypt. Turner has observed multiple parallels between the narratives surrounding the episode of Gen. 12.10-20, which, according to him, serve to return the story back to its beginning in Canaan and show the stay in Egypt as a ‘dead end’.111 For example, on his return, the patriarch goes to Bethel and builds an altar at the same site where he has made an altar at the beginning (Gen. 13.3-4; cf. 12.8). On both occasions, the narrator mentions the Canaanites’ being in the land (Gen. 13.7; cf. 12.6). To take this point further, one may see the use of ‘full circle’ as part of narrative strategy. By making the story return to its beginning and to its original setting in Bethel the narrator seeks to cancel out the unfavourable association with Egypt and re-establish Canaan as the sole land of Abraham’s experience. It is at this point that Abraham’s ‘brother’ Lot comes into focus. Like Abraham, who is ‘very rich in livestock, in silver and in gold’ (Gen. 13.2), Lot possesses

108. Diana Lipton, Longing for Egypt and Other Unexpected Biblical Tales (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2008), 13–49. 109. Lipton, Longing for Egypt, 14. 110. Wenham comments on Egypt’s geography and climate making it a likely place of refuge for neighbouring ethnic groups (Genesis 1–15, 287). See also Blenkinsopp, Abraham, 43. 111. Turner, Genesis, 61–2.

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‘flocks and herds and tents’ that have arguably come from Egypt (Gen. 13.5). The abundance of wealth makes it impossible for the two to stay together (cf. the double negation of the phrase ‘dwelling together’, Gen. 13.6), since the land literally cannot ‘carry’ (nā ś ā ’) the ‘weight’ (cf. kbd, Gen. 13.2) of their flocks and herds. To resolve the ensuing territorial conflict between his and Lot’s herdsmen, Abraham suggests separating, allowing Lot to choose his part of the ‘whole land’ to the north or south of Bethel. Lot, however, looks beyond the hill country of Canaan to the east and chooses to settle in the Jordan Valley (Gen. 13.10). A few observations must be made with respect to the description of the valley, which appears to Lot to be ‘well-watered everywhere, like the garden of Yahweh, like the land of Egypt’. On the one hand, the narrator uses the allusions to Eden (‘the garden of Yahweh’) and Egypt to create an alluring image of a lush river valley. Like the garden, watered (š qh) by the river flowing out of Eden in Gen. 2.10, the valley of the Jordan is ‘well-watered (š qh) everywhere’. The reference to Eden is also supported by the eastern location of the valley (Gen. 13.11), which parallels the location of Eden ‘in the east’ (Gen. 2.8). The Jordan Valley is also reminiscent of the land of Egypt, where Lot and Abraham have just come back from and whose riches weigh so heavily on them that they need to separate. The juxtaposed reports about Abraham’s settling in Canaan and Lot’s settling ‘in the cities of the valley’ (Gen. 13.12) echo the opposition, described in Deut. 11.9-12, between the hill country of Canaan and the rich civilization of Egypt, developed in a fertile river valley. In Gen. 13.10 the images of Eden and Egypt merge together into one metaphor of plenty that contrasts the ideas of famine and sterility the narrative has so far associated with Canaan. Carrying an imprint of Egypt as the seductive other, the land that Lot sees represents a reality opposite to the perceived image of the promised land. On the other hand, along with their connotations of wealth and enticement, the references to Eden and Egypt bring in a context of suspicion. Eden and, through it, the east have negative associations with judgement and expulsion, with the image of the cherubim guarding the way to the tree of life at the east of the garden (Gen. 3.23-24). Similarly, along with its bountiful qualities, Egypt is also associated with perceived threat to the life and honour of the patriarch as well as his expulsion (Gen. 12.10-20).112 It is worth noting that the text of Gen. 13.10 shares a common thematic thread with both the Eden narrative and the story of Abraham’s stay in Egypt, each of them describing the characters being enticed by what they see. Like woman looking at the tree in the garden (Gen. 3.6) and like the Egyptians who see the beauty of Sarah (Gen. 12.12, 14-15), Lot looks at the land and is drawn to what he sees.113 The object of looking is seductive. It is also compromised, as the narrator

112. See Turner, Genesis, 62. 113. Steinmetz notes that being enticed is a characteristic that Lot shares with the Egyptians, who ‘follow what they see, but what they see leads them to misperceive what they should do’ (From Father to Son, 80). I would resist interpreting experiences of desire and enticement as a mark of moral failure on the part of the characters, since the narrator

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hurries to indicate in parenthesis, telling the reader about the looming destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and the iniquities of the Sodomites (Gen. 13.10, 13). The lush and alluring image of the valley in the east, so closely resembling both Eden and Egypt, is tainted by the wickedness of its inhabitants and an expectation of judgement. The paradise of Egypt is no sooner regained than it is renounced. The narrator upholds the context of suspicion by putting the reference to Egypt next to the place-name Zoar, one of the key words in the Lot story. On the whole the root ṣ ‘r, ‘be small, insignificant’, is reiterated here thirteen times, of which nine occurrences refer to the town Zoar to the south-east of Canaan. Zoar is the place where Lot initially seeks refuge from the destruction of Sodom, attaching particular value to its small size, or ‘insignificance’ (Gen. 19.20-23). The repeated allusions to Zoar towards the end of the Lot narrative seem to fit in with the general sense of decline that characterizes the story. In 13.10 the reference to Zoar might hint at the impending loss of significance, attached to the potent symbols of the ‘garden of Yahweh’ and the ‘land of Egypt’. In this light, one might see Lot’s story as a narrative mechanism that neutralizes or negates the significance of the seductive other. The semiotic ‘fullness’ of the foreign land (Egypt), which is at one level used to nourish the patriarchal subject, is at another level put under suspicion, problematized by its narrative association with Sodom. From a psychoanalytical perspective, the tension between the beneficial and threatening aspects of the other is resolved in terms of projection, whereby the narrator projects Abraham’s compromising association with Egypt onto the figure of his surrogate brother Lot and disavows this association through Lot’s demise. In studies of the Lot narrative, there has been a tendency to picture Lot in ethical–theological opposition to Abraham. The fact that Lot chooses to move out of the hill country of Canaan into the fertile valley of the Jordan has been interpreted as an error of judgement, an act of self-interest that makes him lose his place in the chosen lineage.114 In this traditional understanding, as Turner puts it, Genesis 13 communicates ‘the final rupture between godly Abraham and his hedonist nephew’.115 Fretheim and Steinmetz both speak about Lot’s flawed perception, a disjunction between the way he sees the land and the negative context in which the land is presented to the reader.116 Even Lot’s hospitality to Yahweh’s

uses enticement, in contrast to direct disobedience, to convey the ambivalence of a situation and to foreground the character’s point of view. 114. Helyer, ‘The Separation of Abram and Lot’, 86; G. W. Coats, ‘Lot: A Foil in the Abraham Saga’, in Understanding the Word: Essays in Honour of Bernhard Anderson, ed. J. T. Butler et al. (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1985), 127. 115. Turner, Announcements of Plot in Genesis, 69. While he too contrasts Lot and Abraham, Turner nevertheless disagrees with the scholarly consensus that, by moving eastwards, Lot loses his right to the promised land. For Turner, the plain of the Jordan is arguably included in the land promised to Abraham after the separation (67–8). 116. Terence E. Fretheim, Abraham: Trials of Family and Faith (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007), 67; Steinmetz, From Father to Son, 80.

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messengers in Gen. 19.1-3 has attracted opposing views. Speiser and Jeansonne in particular have emphasized that Lot’s welcome of the divine guests is inferior compared to that shown by Abraham in Gen. 18.1-5. In the context of Abraham’s failed intercession in Gen. 18.22-33, Lot’s failure to protect his guests can also be interpreted as a lack of righteousness.117 In a different vein, Jeansonne and John Skinner have questioned Lot’s righteous character with respect to his outrageous treatment of his daughters, whom he offers to the mob for rape in order to protect his guests.118 These readings share the assumption that Lot’s fate results from his own moral failure. In my opinion, however, Lot’s integrity is irrelevant for the narrator, who contrasts the righteousness of Abraham (Gen. 18.19) with the wickedness of the Sodomites (Gen. 13.13; 18.20-21; 19.4-11, 13). Linked to the sin of its inhabitants, the fate of Sodom is predetermined and does not depend on Lot’s actions. Remarkable in this respect is the scene of intercession in Gen. 18.22-33, where Abraham tries to persuade Yahweh to spare Sodom. It is surprising that Abraham, who in Genesis 14 sprang to the rescue of his nephew, now does not plead for Lot or even mention his name. Instead, he focuses on Sodom as a whole, hypothesizing on the number of righteous people sufficient to stop the destruction of the city. That his intercession stops at the minimum of ten makes it impossible to know whether or not Lot is found among the righteous. Since Lot and his relatives only total six people, Sodom would still be doomed even if all of them were upright. By not letting Abraham go below the number of ten righteous, the narrator avoids the need to judge Lot either way. Refraining from a moral judgement on Lot’s conduct, the narrator at the same time stresses his non-belonging with the Sodomites. Like Abraham in Egypt (Gen. 12.10), in Gerar (Gen. 20.1) and in Canaan (Gen. 21.34), Lot resides in Sodom as an alien, ger (Gen. 19.9) and remains an outsider at every stage of the narrative. This is reflected in the borderline positions he occupies in the narrative space. At the beginning of the story, Lot is placed at the gateway to the city (Gen. 19.1); later, his argument with the Sodomites happens at the entrance to his house, after which he takes refuge behind a closed door. At the end of the story, Lot is found in the hill country, having finally separated from Sodom – one of the ‘cities of the plain’, where he chose to dwell at the beginning (cf. Gen. 13.12). The strategy of placing Lot on the margin of the unfolding drama of Sodom could be explained by the symbolic ‘immunity’ Lot enjoys through his ties to the identity of Israel as Abraham’s nephew. His borderline position makes Lot simultaneously tainted by his association with Sodom and protected from its total destruction.

117. Speiser, Genesis, 138–9, 143; Jeansonne, ‘The Characterization of Lot in Genesis’, BTB 18 (1988): 126. At the opposite end of the debate stands T. Desmond Alexander, who sees Lot consistently pictured as righteous (T. Desmond Alexander, ‘Lot’s Hospitality: A Clue to His Righteousness’, JBL 104 [1985]: 290). 118. Jeansonne, ‘The Characterization of Lot in Genesis’, 31–2; Skinner, Genesis, 307.

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Gen. 19.28

Lot lifted up his eyes

Abraham looked down

and he saw

and he saw and behold,

all the valley of the Jordan

all the land of the valley

well -watered everywhere

the smoke of the land

before Yahweh destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah

toward Sodom and Gomorrah

like the garden of Yahweh

like the smoke of a furnace

like the land of Egypt

Figure 2.2 The lexical antithesis between Gen. 13.10 and 19.28.

The idea that the central focus of the narrator is on the fate of Sodom rather than Lot is supported by the apparent indifference Abraham shows to Lot’s fate once the city is destroyed. When Abraham looks towards ‘all the land of the valley’ and sees ‘the smoke of the land going up like the smoke of a furnace’ (Gen. 19.28), he, surprisingly, does not question the fate of his ‘brother’. Does this silence mean that he presumes Lot has perished together with Sodom? Alternatively, could it mean that Abraham sees only what is crucial for the narrative, that is, the obliteration of the land Lot chose in Gen. 13.10. This idea is supported by the implicit reference to Gen. 13.10 found in the description of the devastation of Sodom. The texts of Gen. 13.10 and 19.28 stand in clear antithesis, in which lexical elements of the former are reversed in the latter, as demonstrated in Figure 2.2. The antithetic parallelism between the two verses suggests that the movement that started with the separation of Lot is now completed. The very essence of the land’s former appeal is negated, as the irrigated valley turns into a burnt wasteland, an aftermath of destruction that reminds the reader of God’s undoing of creation in the story of the flood.119 Where Lot once saw the lush paradise of Egypt, Abraham now sees a smoking furnace and the similes ‘like the garden’, ‘like the land’, ‘like the smoke’ highlight the contrast between the two pictures. Egypt, which first appeared as a land of plenty that bestowed on the patriarch its ‘heavy’ riches (Gen. 13.2), is now disposed of, having been condemned and punished for its wickedness, as exceeding as its wealth (cf. me’ō d, Gen. 13.2, 13). From this angle, the story of Sodom appears to be a warning against turning back to Egypt (cf. ‘you must not go that way again’, Deut. 17.15-16), a symbolic antidote to the yearnings, embedded in the historic consciousness of the Israelites. Robert Letellier draws attention to the pronounced dark symbolism of the Sodom account.120 In contrast to the divine visitation of Abraham in Mamre, which takes place at midday (Gen. 18.1), the divine messengers enter Sodom at

119. On the parallels between the destruction of Sodom and the devastation of the flood see Alter, ‘Sodom as Nexus: The Web of Design in Biblical Narrative’, in Reclaiming Sodom, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (London: Routledge, 1994), 35. 120. Letellier, Day in Mamre, 223–4.

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nightfall (Gen. 19.1) and the confrontation between Lot and the Sodomites takes place during the night. In the story, the sun rises only after Lot and his family have been physically removed from Sodom and reached Zoar (Gen. 19.23). Letellier recognizes here some elements of the folk motif that Carl Jung has described as the ‘night journey’, in which the hero undergoes a transformation by descending into the underworld or inside a mythical beast. While Genesis 19 with its nocturnal and underworld symbolism lends itself to a Jungian reading, I would resist Letellier’s suggestion to read Lot as a Jungian archetype – ‘an heroic father of nations’. The heroic status of Lot is heavily undermined by his passive role and the absence of clear transformation in the story. Although the sunrise sees Lot come out of Sodom, he is almost immediately immersed in the darkness of the cave, where, instead of positive transformation, he experiences further regression and confusion of status. This is not surprising, given that the character of Lot functions narratologically as a foil to the central protagonist Abraham, and symbolically as a projection of the latter’s identity. Arguably, in the larger context of the cycle, the ultimate subject of the ‘night journey’ of Sodom is the patriarch himself. On the one hand, the story of Sodom highlights both the absolute righteousness of the patriarch and the unrivalled value of the promised land by contrasting them to the ‘other’ land with its demonized inhabitants. But more importantly, at the level of symbolic representation, the cosmic obliteration of Sodom does not serve to punish its wickedness, but to purge out of the narrative consciousness the land that has become ‘the apex of the seductive other’.121 From this perspective, Lot mediates restructuring of the self of Israel, representing the part of it that, having fallen for the seductive other, is then committed to destruction. It appears significant that, having survived the catastrophe, Lot is nevertheless decidedly ruined. As far as he is Abraham’s projection, he remains alive (a fact stressed in Gen. 19.29), yet he is reduced first to ‘insignificance’ (Zoar) and then to seclusion in a cave. The angels lead Lot out of Sodom stripped of all his possessions, the ‘flocks and herds and tents’, which once made Abraham seek separation from him (Gen. 13.5). The fruitful valley that once embodied for him the paradise of Egypt is now irretrievably lost, so cut off from the subject that even looking back at it imparts death. It seems logical therefore that Abraham should ‘forget’ about Lot towards the end of the story. With Lot, Israel cuts off the part of itself that is susceptible of turning back to Egypt. Having mediated the subject’s dissociation from the ‘other’ land, Lot fulfils his role and can be pushed out to the dark recesses of both the narrative world and the subject’s consciousness.

‘There Is No Man in the Land’ A distinctive feature of the Lot narrative is that it appears to subvert normative gender positions as part of a strategy of othering. In my view, the distortion of

121. Letellier, Day in Mamre, 107 n. 218.

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gender in Genesis 19 stems from the mechanism of projection mentioned in the above discussion. Having projected its hidden dependence on and yearnings for the other onto the figure of Abraham’s nephew, the narrative consciousness finds psychological release by constructing his land, Sodom, as the ‘other’ land – an antiworld, where boundaries are blurred and hierarchies reversed, the place of sterility, sexual violence, incest and destruction. Letellier has observed that practically every scene in Genesis 19 revolves around sexuality.122 To qualify this remark, I would add that sexuality and gender are not the narrator’s primary concern but are used to signify the inverted structure of subjectivity associated with Sodom. The first notable feature that distinguishes the presentation of gender in Genesis 19 is a lack of normative patriarchal characters. The weak and passive Lot hardly cuts a convincing patriarchal figure. He has daughters but no sons (Gen. 19.8, 12-15) and is, therefore, genealogically ‘sterile’, with no chance of preserving his lineage.123 He has no power to protect his guests or authority to persuade his prospective sons-in-law to join him. In v. 14, his words appear to them as laughable (meṣ aḥ ē q), as did the announcement of childbearing to Sarah in Gen. 18.12.124 He has to be led out of Sodom by hand and loses his wife along the way. He is fearful and uncertain about the route of escape (vv. 19-20, 30) and after the destruction of the valley finally settles in a cave, where, made drunk by his daughters, he has sex with them and eventually becomes the father of his own grandchildren. Male subjectivity is further destabilized in the narrative by the references, direct or implicit, to the forms of sexual intercourse, condemned elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, that is, homosexuality and incest (Lev. 18.6-7, 22; 20.13). It should be noted that, despite the long tradition of interpretation that associated the ‘exceeding wickedness’ of the Sodomites with practice of homosexuality, there are no clear allusions to it in the text. On the one hand, the Sodomites’ demand to ‘know’ Lot’s male guests in Gen. 19.5 implies a threat of homosexual violence. Among its other meanings, the verb yā da‘ denotes sexual intercourse performed by a male subject and it is this meaning that Lot seems to corroborate when he offers his two virgin daughters to the crowd, presumably, to be ‘known’ in the place of his guests. On the other hand, the verb yā da‘ may be used here in the sense of intellectual knowledge. As Lyn Bechtel points out, the men of Sodom may simply want to know what the two strangers are doing in the city (after all, the latter threaten the very existence of their community). Bechtel allows the possibility that the Sodomites may intend to ‘know’ Lot’s guests sexually, but believes that the issue would then

122. Letellier, Day in Mamre, 252. 123. The fact that Lot has no sons is implied in v. 14, which only mentions his sonsin-law and daughters in response to the messengers’ question about his sons and other relatives in vv. 12-13. This ellipsis suggests some unease on the part of the narrator with regard to Lot’s situation. 124. Nachman Levine sees the two instances of laughing as part of the complex opposition drawn in Genesis 18 and 19 between the themes of birth and destruction (‘Sarah/ Sodom’, 132). On the structural symmetry between the two chapters see also Letellier, Day in Mamre, 64–8.

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not be their homosexual orientation, but their desire to establish dominance through rape.125 Van Wolde maintains that while the Sodomites want to know whether the strangers represent a threat to the community, Lot interprets their demand in a sexual sense, which is then confirmed by the narrator.126 Although the wish of the Sodomites ‘to know’ remains ambiguous, Lot’s response gives it a particular angle. The reader will find a similarly ambiguous usage of the verb yā dā ‘ at the end of the narrative in Gen. 19.33, 35, where the phrase lō ’-yā da‘ has both cognitive and sexual connotations, referring to Lot’s loss of awareness and, at the same time, playing on his passive sexual role in the incest episode, which will be discussed later.127 It is because the sexual connotation of the attack is retained in Lot’s discourse that the implications of homosexual rape for the subject should be examined. In recent scholarship the Sodomites’ demand has been linked to their wish to dishonour Lot’s male visitors by treating them sexually as women.128 Directed at the male subject (the guests and Lot himself), the perceived threat carries the ideas of symbolic emasculation and sterility through homosexual rape and is therefore abhorrent to patriarchal consciousness, of which Lot is a spokesperson. The implied loss of masculinity is regarded as a far greater evil for the subject than a heterosexual rape of Lot’s virgin daughters.129 This is illustrated on a lexical level in the dialogue in Gen. 19.7-9. Here Lot asks the Sodomites not to act wickedly (rā ‘a‘) and offers his two daughters for them to do instead ‘what is good (ṭ ô b)’ in their eyes. In reply, the men of Sodom threaten to deal with Lot worse (rā ‘a‘) than they would have dealt with his guests. The verb rā ‘a‘, ‘to be (do) bad’ is used twice to characterize prospective homosexual violence – or, alternatively, the idea of establishing dominance over men through rape – while the word ṭ ô b, ‘good’ is associated with heterosexual rape. Lot’s offer could thus be seen semiotically as an attempt to counteract, to ‘put right’ the reversal of gender hierarchy intended by his fellow citizens. The underlying assumption that the loss of masculinity is a greater evil makes the narrator (and generations of later commentators) ignore the abhorrence of the father’s offering of his young daughters to the violent mob.130

125. Lyn M. Bechtel, ‘A Feminist Reading of Genesis 19:1–11’, in Genesis, ed. Brenner, 117–120. 126. Van Wolde, ‘Outcry, Knowledge and Judgment in Genesis 18–19’, in Universalism and Particularism at Sodom and Gomorrah: Essays in Memory of Ron Pirson, ed. Diana Lipton (Ancient Israel and Its Literature 11; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012), 96. 127. For a discussion and further bibliography on the subject of yā dā ‘ in the Sodom narrative, see Exum, ‘Lot and His Daughters’, in Plotted, Shot, and Painted, 140. 128. Nathan MacDonald, ‘Hospitality and Hostility: Reading Genesis 19 in Light of 2 Samuel 10 (and Vice Versa)’, in Universalism and Particularism, ed. Lipton, 184. 129. Letellier, Day in Mamre, 252. 130. For an overview of the commentators who either ignore Lot’s offering of his daughters or find it mitigated by the demands of hospitality, see Ilona N. Rashkow, ‘DaddyDearest and the “Invisible Spirit of Wine”’, in Genesis, ed. Brenner, 100–2. On a different note, Bechtel suggests that Lot makes his offer ‘in confidence that its incongruity and

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There is, however, an indication of narrative judgement on Lot’s disposal of his daughters’ sexuality in the incest scene, where the daughters assume control over the sexuality of their father (Gen. 19.30-38).131 From the point of view of the patriarchal subject, in Genesis 19 the male sexual drive as an expression of dominance is turned onto itself, introspected in both its homosexual and incestuous guises. Linked to a state of weak or compromised masculinity, this introspection might be seen as a symbolic castration of the subject resulting from Lot’s association with the ‘other’ land. The ‘wicked’ world of Sodom represents the realm of the other, which carries the ultimate danger for patriarchal consciousness and finds its expression in the images of threatened masculinity. Ironically, although Sodom is crowded with men, it represents the land where male subjectivity is rendered powerless or absent, an idea that Lot’s elder daughter captures in her belief that ‘there is no man in the land’. In this context, Lot’s demise is symbolic of the annihilation of the patriarchal subject in the ‘other’ land. The idea of compromised masculinity provides an interpretative clue for understanding the construction of the feminine subject. On the one hand, male introspection makes woman as sexual counterpart redundant. This redundancy is demonstrated in the fate of Lot’s wife – a fleeting character, whose only action in the story is to look back at the destruction of Sodom before turning into a pillar of salt (v. 26). The petrified figure of Lot’s wife is united with the dead land, literally becoming a part of it.132 In this, the wife and the land – manifestations of the gendered other – are both committed to death, freeing the space for the realization of the subject’s incestuous drive. Lot’s daughters, on the other hand, are construed by the narrative psyche as part of the self and thus allow introspection. Accordingly, they have a more lasting presence and role in the narrative. Their position is ambiguous: being daughters rather than sons, they represent the subject’s symbolic sterility – the absence of

inappropriateness will stop the action and prevent further aggression’ (Bechtel, ‘A Feminist Reading’, 124). 131. Brett considers the narrative in Gen. 19.30-35 an example of poetic justice, ‘a fitting fate for someone willing to bargain away his daughters’ sexuality’ (Genesis, 68). Similarly, Weston W. Fields holds that in the incest scene Lot is ‘punished measure for measure’ for his earlier treatment of his daughters (Weston W. Fields, Sodom and Gomorrah: History and Motif in Biblical Narrative [JSOT SS 231; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997], 124); see also Letellier, Day in Mamre, 187. In her psychoanalytic-literary reading of Genesis 19, Exum sees the episode of 19.1-29 as a first, unsuccessful attempt of the narrative unconscious to fantasize about the father’s sexual relations with his daughters, ‘a prelude to the version in vv. 30–38, in which the fantasy is narratively realized’ (Exum, ‘Lot and His Daughters’, 140). 132. Letellier points that out in Day in Mamre, 173. Calum Carmichael stresses the connotation of sterility – itself a major feature of the narrative – attached to the image of salt in Gen. 19.26 (‘Legal and Ethical Reflections on Genesis 18 and 19’, in Universalism and Particularism, ed. Lipton, 104).

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a male heir. They also carry a potential to cure that sterility. In the narrative that lacks normative male subjectivity, their role is to re-establish gender hierarchy and restore the status of the male protagonist by bearing his sons. This task of producing male heirs for Lot (‘that we may preserve offspring through our father’, v. 32) underlies his daughters’ desire for a heterosexual relationship, which they describe as ‘the way of the whole earth’ (v. 31). Yet, despite their ‘normative’ sexuality, from their first appearance onwards they are withdrawn from a sexual relationship with men. They first appear as virgins (they ‘have not known man [’î š ]’); next, they are rejected by the men (’anā š î m) of Sodom; later, their prospective husbands fail to follow them and in the final episode, Lot’s daughters are cut off from all society and live without a chance to find male partners (‘there is no man [’î š ] in the land’, v. 31). This dissociation allows feminine subjectivity to be imagined as part of the subject: the fact that they have not known and cannot know man means that they are still ‘flesh of the flesh’ of their father. In this context, the last scene of incest appears as a logical resolution of the tension that arises from the distortion of gender in the Lot narrative. In Gen. 19.30-38 the loss of masculinity associated with the anti-world of Sodom comes to its climax. Lot ends up living in a cave, which, as Rashkow points out, holds a sexual connotation both linguistically, through its association with nakedness, exposure and genitals (e.g. me‘ā rā h, ‘cave’; ‘erwā h, ‘genitals’; ‘eryā h ‘nakedness’; ‘ā rar, ‘to lay bare, to strip’) and psychoanalytically, in its reference to the subconscious with its suppressed desires.133 Symbolic of the womb, the cave becomes the space where the male subject is rendered unconscious.134 Here Lot is twice described as ‘not knowing’ (‘he did not know when she lay down or when she arose’, vv. 33, 35). The negative form of the verb yā da‘, ‘to know’, compromises Lot’s masculinity, symbolically distancing him from the male function of sexual ‘knowledge’. As Lot’s daughters get him drunk and then take turns to sleep with him in order to conceive, the man is placed in a lower hierarchical position, structurally becomes female. Accordingly, the scene reverses established sexual roles in favour of the female characters: the daughters ‘go into’ (bô ’) and ‘lie with’ (š ā kab ‘im) their father, performing the actions that in a sexual context are usually ascribed to men.135 Perhaps more than any other story in Genesis, the narrative of Genesis 19 lends itself to psychoanalytical interpretation that can account for its unresolved tensions, inversions and inconsistencies. Scholars have explored the psychoanalytic implications of the way the narrator ascribes male functions to Lot’s daughters.

133. Rashkow, ‘Daddy-Dearest’, 102; Taboo or not Taboo, 107. 134. See Letellier, Day in Mamre, 252. 135. Brenner points out that the case of Lot’s daughters in Gen. 19.30-38 is the only place in the Hebrew Bible where the expression š ā kab ‘im is used with a clear inversion of positions into female subject and male object (The Intercourse of Knowledge, 24). See also Esther Marie Menn, Judah and Tamar (Genesis 38) in Ancient Jewish Exegesis: Studies in Literary Form and Hermeneutics (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997), 98.

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Analysing the incest scene in Gen. 19.30-38, Robert Polhemus formulates the ‘Lot complex’ as complementary to the Oedipus complex in that it reveals male subconscious projections with respect to younger women, that is, the power to dispose of their sexuality within the legitimate father–daughter relationship as well as the subconscious desire to relate to them incestuously as sexual partners.136 According to Exum, the father’s repressed sexual desire, directed at his daughters, governs the events in the narrative, creating the conditions for the incestuous relationship while shifting the blame to the daughters.137 Along similar lines, Rashkow holds that Lot acts out his repressed fantasies under the influence of alcohol.138 The narrator abstains from judgement with respect to the morally problematic actions of Lot and his daughters in Gen. 19.30-38. Speiser develops the narrator’s perspective by exonerating both parties: the daughters for genuinely believing they were the last people on earth and Lot for not being conscious of his actions.139 Fuchs, on the contrary, notes the discrepancy between the ‘seemingly neutral voice’ of the narrator and the illicit actions it describes.140 But while the individual characters receive no evaluation, there is an implicit judgement in the overall sense of degradation that pervades the scene with its cave setting, inebriated father and reversed sexual and power roles.141 Most of all, however, the narrator’s condemnation is implied in the link between Lot’s incestuous relations with his daughters and the origin of Moab and Ammon. The reversal of sexual roles effects a symbolic cure to the sterile subject and sons are born as a result of it (vv. 37-38). But it also effects dishonour, tainting the ‘father’s seed’ with alterity. The names of the sons – mô ’ā b, ‘from the father’ and ben‘ammî , ‘son of my people’ – have a clear connotation of endogamy and therefore point back to their incestuous origin. But the names of Moab and Ammon also point forward to Israel’s political history: the narrator’s etiological note makes the boys the ancestors of two neighbouring nations hostile to Israel and excluded from its congregation (Deut. 23.3-4). The symbolic emasculation of Lot – the split-off part of Israel’s self, associated with the ‘other’ land – is thus translated into the birth of foreign identity. This completes the mechanism of projection that started in Genesis 13 with the separation of Lot and Abraham. The paradise of Egypt,

136. Robert M. Polhemus, Lot’s Daughters: Sex, Redemption and Women’s Quest for Authority (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 1–47. 137. Exum, ‘Lot and His Daughters’, 133–59. 138. Rashkow, ‘Daddy-Dearest’, 98–106. 139. Speiser, Genesis, 145. 140. Fuchs, Sexual Politics, 67. For a detailed presentation of the discussion see Johanna Stiebert, First-Degree Incest and the Hebrew Bible: Sex in the Family (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016), 157–65. 141. Along similar lines, Wenham holds that, ‘although the narrator seems to reserve judgment about the incident, it seems unlikely that he approves Lot’s daughters’ deed’ (Genesis 16–50 [Word Biblical Commentary; Dallas: Word Books, 1994], 61).

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which spread before Lot’s eyes in Gen. 13.10, has gone up in smoke and the part of Israel’s collective psyche that carried a fascination with Egypt has now been expelled, exteriorized in the image of other nations. It is notable that the Abraham narratives, while forcefully condemning Sodom, do not at any point demonstrate open enmity towards Egypt. The patriarch himself shows very different attitudes to the gifts from Pharaoh and the king of Sodom. In Gen. 14.21-23 Abraham vehemently refuses to take any share of the booty from the king of Sodom for fear of being indebted to him, while he has no qualms accepting Sarah’s ‘bride price’ from the Egyptians (Gen. 12.6; 13.1-2).142 Wondering at the motives of Abraham’s self-denial in Genesis 14, Brett suggests that Abraham shows fairness towards the Sodomites because of their association with Lot.143 However, Abraham’s forceful renunciation is hardly a fitting expression of generosity. Rather, his solemn oath (‘to Yahweh, God Most High, creator of heaven and earth’), his rejection of any recompense (‘not a single thread or sandal strap’) and his motive (‘so that you might not say, “I have made Abram rich”’) suggest a deliberate and absolute distance, almost a taboo, in the patriarch’s dealings with Sodom. Judging by the violence of the destruction that befalls Sodom and the extreme humiliation that surrounds Lot’s ‘begettings’, it seems that the bearer of projected otherness poses more danger for the narrative psyche than its original source. The ‘half-breed’ identity found at the border between self and other (Moab/Ammon) inspires more contempt than the other itself (Egypt). Sodom – the ‘garden of Yahweh’ turned desert – could be seen as such a borderline, contaminated space, which threatens the world order with its reversed hierarchies of gender and power. Fittingly, Moab and Ammon are denounced in Deuteronomy 23 alongside literal ‘half-bloods’ or children of illicit union: just like mamzē r, or ‘bastard’, no Moabite or Ammonite is admitted to the assembly of Yahweh up to the tenth generation (Deut. 23.2-3).144

Sarah, Hagar and the Project of Dominance (Genesis 16) Alongside the narrative of Lot, centred on the destruction of the ‘other’ land, another narrative of othering is related in Genesis 16 and 21 and it too has to do with Egypt. Here the reader finds an account of Hagar, Sarah’s Egyptian slave, who bears the first child of Abraham and who is expelled together with her son as soon as he is perceived to be a danger to the patriarch’s endogamous succession.

142. Fewell and Gunn, Gender, Power, and Promise, 44. 143. Brett, Genesis, 54–6. 144. It is striking that the same set of instructions presents a more favourable view on Egypt. Egypt here is placed alongside Edom, which is called Israel’s ‘brother’ and the descendants of Egypt and Edom are admitted to the assembly in the third generation (Deut. 23.7-8).

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The story of Hagar begins at a critical moment in the narrative. By the beginning of Genesis 16, the tension between Yahweh’s promise of descendants and Abraham’s childlessness has reached its highest point. In a dialogue with Yahweh in the preceding chapter, the patriarch for the first time voices his desperation at having no heir: ‘what will you give me, for I go on childless… ?’ (Gen. 15.2); ‘you have given me no offspring’ (Gen. 15.3). Yahweh replies with a first specific promise of heir (‘the one coming from your own body will be your heir’, Gen. 15.4) and of generations of offspring as countless as the stars (Gen. 15.5; cf. 13.16). This is enough to relieve Abraham’s doubts: he believes Yahweh and his unconditional acceptance has been seen in the Christian canon and in biblical interpretation as a model of faith, leading him into a proper relationship to God.145 From a narratological perspective, however, the protagonist’s absolute acceptance of the apparently unrealistic promise has a specific function. On the one hand, the acceptance of God’s plan is linked to the character’s own motivation, since, as Fewell and Gunn have observed, ‘the promise is something Abram desperately wants to believe’.146 On the other hand, by making Abraham unconditionally believe the promise, the narrator moves him ‘out of action’, which explains the patriarch’s passive attitude in the events of Genesis 16. Whichever way the promised heir is going to come about, it is not going to be through Abraham’s active intervention, since he already ‘knows’ the outcome. In this context Abraham’s wife Sarah takes centre stage. From the moment she first appeared in Gen. 11.29-30, she has been presented as sterile and the narrator reminds us about it in Gen. 16.1, blaming her explicitly for Abraham’s childlessness: ‘Sarai, Abram’s wife, bore him no children.’147 Above we discussed the use of the motif of the sterile mother as the narrator’s strategy of shifting the blame away from the patriarch. In line with that strategy, the patriarch himself speaks of his childlessness mostly in the ‘passive’, as a fact of having been ‘stripped’ of children (‘arî rî , Gen. 15.2) or given no seed (zā ra‘, Gen. 15.3). In his and the narrator’s view, he has been deprived of children by an outside agency (God and, implicitly, his wife) and never questions his own procreative power.148 By contrast, Sarah’s

145. See Heb. 6.13-15; 11.8-12; cf. von Rad, Genesis, 185. 146. Fewell and Gunn, Gender, Power, and Promise, 45. According to Trible, Abraham’s response could also be viewed as non-assertive or ‘wimpish’ (‘Ominous Beginnings’, in Hagar, Sarah and Their Children: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Perspectives, ed. Phyllis Trible and Letty M. Russell [Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006], 63 n. 11). 147. Trible has pointed out how the unusual syntax of the verse emphasizes Sarah as the subject by placing her name at the beginning of the sentence before the verb (‘Ominous Beginnings’, 38). 148. Bal sees the sterile mother motif as an attempt to repress the opposite possibility that it is the men who are impotent in Death and Dissymmetry; see also Jeansonne, The Women of Genesis, 23; Rulon-Miller, ‘Hagar’, 69–71. It is a convention of biblical narrative to blame the wife and not the husband for not being able to produce children, a blame that Rachel will try, albeit unsuccessfully, to shift back onto Jacob in Gen. 30.1.

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sterility is described as her own inherent quality (‘aqā rā h, Gen. 11.30). Since the problem is not the sterility of Abraham, but, emphatically, that of his wife, God’s promise now hinges on Sarah. The story begins in Gen. 16.1 by juxtaposing Sarah and Hagar.149 Their description introduces the main lines of tension in the story: Sarah is characterized by her status vis-à -vis Abraham (‘Abram’s wife’) and by her dysfunction (‘bore him no children’); Hagar, by her status vis-à -vis Sarah (Sarah’s slave-girl) and by her origin (‘Egyptian’). As Jeansonne has observed, the juxtaposition of these phrases poses an important question about Hagar’s role with respect to Sarah’s sterility.150 An implicit antithesis between Hagar’s being ‘Egyptian’ and Sarah’s ‘not bearing children’ develops the structural opposition sterility/fertility associated respectively with Israel and Egypt in Gen. 12.10-20. In addition, Hagar is introduced as š ipḥ ā h miṣ rî t, an ‘Egyptian slave-girl’, which reminds the reader about the female slaves, š epā ḥ ô t, whom Abraham brought back from Egypt as part of Sarah’s bride-price (Gen. 12.16). Offering a clue as to how Hagar could have ended up in Abraham’s household,151 this link is also reminiscent of the symbolic transaction between him and Pharaoh, whereby the sterile matriarch was exchanged for the wealth and fruitfulness of Egypt. That Hagar’s role indeed is constructed around fertility becomes clear when Sarah intervenes in v. 2. Here the wife of Abraham acquires a voice and, with it, unexpected authority, as she orders him to sleep with her slave. First, she reminds Abraham about her infertility and shifts onto God the responsibility that has until now been placed on her alone (‘Yahweh has kept me from bearing’, cf. Gen 16.1). Second, she suggests a solution, offering her slave to her husband as a surrogate in the hope to be ‘built up’ through her. In the Hebrew Bible the expression ’ibbā neh mimmennā h, ‘I shall be built up from/through her’, is twice attributed to childless wives – Sarah and Rachel – who use their servants as surrogate mothers in order to obtain children (Gen. 16.2; 30.3).152 The verb bā nā h, ‘to build’, is used here figuratively in the sense of establishing a family. An example of a similar usage is found in the description

149. Trible draws attention to this ‘artfully arranged sentence’, which begins with Sarah and ends with Hagar, placing Abraham between the two women (‘Ominous Beginnings’, 38). 150. Jeansonne, The Women of Genesis, 18. 151. See Fretheim, ‘The Book of Genesis’, 454. Rabbinic interpretation further develops this idea. In Gen. Rab. 45.1 R. Simeon b. Yohai suggests that Hagar was the daughter of Pharaoh, who gave her to Abraham as a slave, having seen God’s powerful protection of the patriarch. For a presentation of diverse rabbinical interpretations of Hagar see Adele Reinhartz and Miriam-Simma Walfish, ‘Conflict and Coexistence in Jewish Interpretation’, in Hagar, Sarah and Their Children, ed. Trible and Russell, 105–7. 152. For overviews of the legal background of the practice of surrogacy in the Ancient Near East see Westermann, Genesis 12–36, 238–9; Blenkinsopp, Abraham, 79–80; cf. Speiser, Genesis, 120–1; von Rad, Genesis, 186.

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of the levirate law in Deut. 25.9, whereby a widow can take up a case against her brother-in-law, who refuses to marry her, for not willing to ‘build up his brother’s house’. In Ruth 4.11 Lea and Rachel are mentioned as the fertile mothers, who ‘together built up the house of Israel’. In either case, the expression alludes to the production of children as a way to establish and perpetuate a dynasty. This meaning is supported by the wordplay between the Hebrew words bā nā h, ‘to build’, and bā nî m, ‘sons’, which suggests that the intended meaning of ’ibbā neh mimmennā h might be ‘I shall have a son from her’.153 Sarah’s wish to be built up through childbearing is consistent with the general image of women constructed by biblical patriarchy. As Exum has pointed out, ‘It is in the interest of patriarchal ideology not only that women bear children but also that they desire to do so.’154 By accepting this role as her own, Sarah as a character becomes complicit in the construction of the patriarchal subject.155 From this perspective, Sarah’s motives are aligned both with the general androcentric agenda of the text and the narrator’s specific concern about Abraham’s succession. The use of Hagar as a surrogate mother is Sarah’s roundabout way to provide Abraham with an heir. The reader might be asking at this point whether Sarah’s initiative might indeed be part of Yahweh’s plan to make Abraham ‘a great nation’. There are, however, some important gaps left in the text that indicate resistance to that primary agenda. First, Sarah does not actually say she wants to build a family (bayit, cf. Deut. 25.9; Ruth 4.11) but hopes to be built up herself. Although she does clearly refer to childbearing, as indicated by the sexual idiom bā ’, ‘go in to’, and by the wordplay bā nā h/ bā nî m, Sarah does not necessarily see it as a means to establish Abraham’s dynasty, or, at least, she does not say so. Instead, she posits herself as a sole beneficiary of the transaction. Second, it seems significant that Sarah does not show any knowledge of the promise. At this point of high suspense around the promised heir, is that omission intentional? The reader might wonder what exactly Sarah knows about God’s dealings with Abraham. Did she know about Yahweh’s promise of the land when he took her with him on his journeys from Haran to Canaan to Egypt and back to Canaan? Was she concerned about her husband’s becoming a great nation when he traded her to Pharaoh? Until now, the reader could not access Sarah’s point of view: she was only known by description as ‘sterile’ (Gen. 11.30) and ‘beautiful of appearance’ (Gen. 12.11), the two characteristics mentioned in the story only because they had

153. See Speiser, Genesis, 117 n. 2. 154. Exum, Fragmented Women, 92. 155. I borrow the term ‘complicity’ from Exum’s narratological argument regarding Sarah’s silence in the sister–wife episode in Gen. 12.10-20 (Fragmented Women, 130). According to Exum, Sarah, who is objectified by Abraham’s deception, is also silently complicit in it, ‘because her character is a creation of an androcentric narrator’ (Fragmented Women, 130 n. 33). Similarly, Sarah’s complicity in the narrator’s ethnocentric perspective is demonstrated in her dominance over Hagar. The very fact of her owning an Egyptian slave implies that Sarah too has benefited from Abraham’s ruse in Egypt.

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a direct impact on the patriarch. So it seems all the more significant that when we are finally let in on Sarah’s perspective, she does not say anything about God’s promise to Abraham and sees her husband as an instrument to establish a status of her own. Another narrative programme now emerges alongside that of promisefulfilment – the programme that aims at the building up of Sarah through the use of her Egyptian slave. In Genesis 16 the narrator takes pains to separate the two programmes. Sarah is foregrounded as the sole initiator and executer of the transfer of Hagar to Abraham (‘go in to my slave!’, v. 2; ‘Sarah … took Hagar … and gave her … ’, v. 3) and Abraham is clearly just following Sarah’s orders (‘and Abram listened to Sarai’s voice’, v. 2; ‘and he went in to Hagar’, v. 4). To make her fully responsible, both Sarah’s voice and action are necessary: although Abraham listens to her voice in v. 2, he will not obey her order until after Sarah has actually given him Hagar as a wife (vv. 3-4).156 The transaction in v. 3 involves two sets of hierarchical relations: Sarah/Abraham (‘Sarah, Abram’s wife’) and Hagar/Sarah (‘Hagar the Egyptian, her slave’). Sarah mediates between these hierarchies, restructuring them: as she suspends both her conjugal rights with respect to Abraham and her ownership of Hagar, she initiates a new conjugal relationship between the two. Notably, in her relationship with Abraham Hagar loses her name and ethnic identity and features solely as ’iš š ā h, ‘a wife/woman’ – a sexual object without a voice or subjectivity. Abraham, for his part, never speaks to Hagar and is only involved with her sexually, strictly following Sarah’s orders. By pinning the initiative of using the Egyptian slave on Sarah and by carefully distancing Abraham from it, the narrator from the onset of the story introduces a split within the subject which will deepen as the story goes on. Looking at the conflict between Sarah and Abraham over the later expulsion of Hagar, Exum describes it as ‘confusion within the self ’ of Israel, which the patriarchal couple represent.157 That confusion could be linked to the discomfort experienced within the narrative psyche at the possibility that Abraham’s heir might be born of an Egyptian mother. At a point of heightened suspense over the promised heir, the narrator of Gen. 16.1-3 creates an ambiguous situation by reintroducing the presence of Egypt with reference to female fertility. Sarah’s wish to use the fertility of Egypt in the hope to build herself up might be seen as the yearning, persistent within the subject, for the symbolic abundance of the other. If the story of Hagar presents, at least in part, an ethnocentric reflection on the danger of mixed marriages akin to that of Ezra 9.1-4, the patriarch’s inaction and distancing from Sarah’s scheme in Genesis 16 might represent his ideological ‘purity’, ‘clearing’ him of being susceptible to assimilation. That is supported by the fact that the narrator avoids using the word miṣ rî t, ‘Egyptian’ in the context of Hagar’s relationship with Abraham, reserving it to the instances that foreground Sarah’s point of view (Gen.

156. It is interesting that Sarah’s command in v. 2 emphasizes only the sexual relationship, whereas in v. 3 the narrator brings in the notion of marriage. 157. Exum, ‘Hagar en procè s’, 6.

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16.1, 3; 21.9). Israel’s ethnocentric discourse is overlaid here by the patriarchal concerns of the narrator, allowing the story to both acknowledge the threat of foreign identity and distance the male subject from that threat by channelling it through his wife. Like the destiny of Lot, attracted to the Egypt-like land of Sodom (Gen. 13.10), Sarah’s narrative programme appears in a negative light even before it can unfold. Indeed, the very next verse puts an end to Sarah’s problematic ambition. Based on the assumption of Hagar’s silent complicity, it is challenged when Hagar acquires, if not a voice yet, at least a point of view: ‘when she saw that she had conceived, her mistress became slight (wattē qal) in her eyes’ (Gen. 16.4; cf. 16.5).158 Trible has argued that Hagar’s stance in Gen. 16.4 reorders her relationship with Sarah, moving it away from old hierarchical structures towards mutuality and equality.159 However, there seems to be little evidence of equality between the two wives of Abraham. The verb qll, ‘to be light, despised’,160 plays on the connotations of lightness associated with Sarah’s sterility and therefore highlights the contrast between her and Hagar, who is now pregnant and therefore implicitly ‘heavy’. The previous hierarchies of status (mistress/slave; primary wife/secondary wife) are not cancelled out in v. 4; instead, they are replaced with a new status-related hierarchy based on fertility – fertile wife/sterile wife.161 As Amy-Jill Levine observes, ‘by “slighting” Sarah, Hagar, too, oppresses’.162 In the conflict between the two women, Hagar, who has been objectified by Sarah, turns the tables on her mistress simply by looking. It is the subjectivity implied in her ‘seeing that she has conceived’ that makes Hagar different from Bilhah and Zilpah, the other two surrogate mothers in Genesis, who bear children to Jacob on behalf of his two wives. In their case, everything goes according to plan: the slaves of Rachel and Leah, Bilhah and Zilpah, are used to build up status positions of their mistresses and their sons are accepted into the lineage (Gen. 30.6, 8, 11, 13).163 They silently perform their roles as surrogates and never become

158. Trible observes how words of sight that connote understanding (‘she saw’, ‘in her eyes’) begin and end the sentence, encircling the opposition between Hagar and her mistress (‘Ominous Beginnings’, 39). 159. Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 12. 160. DCH VII, 256–7. 161. For Exum, this new hierarchy underlying Hagar’s arrogant attitude expresses androcentric values of the narrator, who presupposes motherhood to be a status-conferring and therefore desirable state for women (Fragmented Women, 94). 162. Amy-Jill Levine, ‘Settling at Beer-Lahai-Roi’, in Daughters of Abraham: Feminist Thought in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, ed. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and John L. Esposito (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2001), 23. 163. According to Exum, the fact that Hagar’s son Ishmael, unlike the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, is not integrated into Israel may reflect ‘different valuations of Israel’s relationship with Mesopotamia and with Egypt in the tradition’ (Fragmented Women, 101 n. 65).

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subjects in their own right. For that, as a sign of approval from the narrator, they are allowed to remain in the family as a background presence (cf. Gen. 33.1-7; 35.23-26). Hagar, on the contrary, becomes aware of her motherhood, owns it and, by doing so, collapses the project of surrogacy. From a social perspective, her seeing liberates her from being subsumed, amalgamated into the exploitative structure that ignores her subjectivity and denies her parental rights.164 But from the perspective of Israel’s myth of origin, Hagar’s rise to subjectivity endangers the position of the ‘right’ wife and therefore puts at risk the purity of the patriarch’s lineage. That Sarah is belittled in the eyes of her Egyptian co-wife rather than ‘built up’ through her reflects the inherent vulnerability of Israel’s ethnocentric discourse to a reversal of its subject positions. It is notable that, in affirming her subjectivity against that of her mistress, Hagar never rebels against Abraham – the undeclared beneficiary of Sarah’s scheme. And in the end, it is Abraham who controls the story’s outcome. The scene of Ishmael’s birth at the end of the chapter is entirely overshadowed by references to the patriarch that stress his fatherhood and ownership of the child (Gen. 16.15, 15, 16, 16). Both andro- and ethnocentric ideologies merge in the construction of Abraham versus Hagar, positing him as the forefather, whose role is simultaneously to originate ‘a multitude of nations’ (Gen. 17.5) and to preserve the identity of Israel through ‘pure’ lineage. A part of the narrator’s strategy to achieve that goal is to remove the patriarch from the conflict and to assign it to the two wives, who, competing for the mother status, sort out issues of ethnic identity and difference in the interests of Israel.165 In a similar vein, Abraham refuses to deal with Hagar when Sarah tries to triangulate the conflict, blaming her husband for her slave’s arrogance. Sarah’s furious attack on Abraham following the change in Hagar’s attitude has puzzled some interpreters, who have seen it as unjust and misdirected.166 Looking from a historical viewpoint, Blenkinsopp holds that Sarah’s reaction might show her awareness of legal stipulations, like the one described in the Code of Hammurabi, which prescribes punishment for a privileged slave, who in a similar context behaves arrogantly towards her mistress.167 This suggestion would explain the judicial language Sarah uses in her speech, appealing to the authority of Abraham as the head of the household and to that of God as the ultimate upholder of justice: ‘May the wrong [lit. ‘violence’, ḥ ā mā s) done to me be on you!’; ‘May Yahweh judge between you and me!’ On a structural level, Sarah’s seemingly misdirected accusation reminds the reader that, despite her authority in the matters of

164. Joel Rosenberg, King and Kin: Political Allegory in the Hebrew Bible (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 94–5. 165. Fuchs, Sexual Politics, 154. 166. For an overview of various interpretations of Gen. 16.5 see Jo Ann Hackett, ‘Rehabilitating Hagar: Fragments of an Epic Pattern’, in Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel, ed. Peggy L. Day (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), 13. 167. Blenkinsopp, Abraham, 81.

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childbearing, the matters of identity are the patriarch’s domain. Sarah’s speech both reveals Abraham as the ultimate beneficiary of her scheme and implicates him in the ensuing project of dominance. What Sarah achieves here is a crucial sanction from her husband – ‘Your slave is in your power, do to her what is good in your eyes’ (Gen. 16.6) – which allows her to oppress Hagar on behalf of Abraham/Israel. Since Hagar/Egypt has refused to be ‘fed’ anonymously into the identity of Sarah/ Israel, Abraham restores the boundaries between the two, reinstating Hagar as a slave and placing her back ‘in Sarah’s hand’. In Abraham’s speech, Hagar is deprived of subjectivity as well as status: her point of view, which Sarah complained about (be‘ê nê hā , ‘in her eyes’, v. 5), is now superseded by the point of view of her mistress (be‘ê nā yik, ‘in your eyes’, v. 6). Once she has her power back, Sarah oppresses her slave. Her harsh treatment of Hagar is described by the verb ‘nh in Piel, which, along with the idea of causing suffering, signifies humbling or forcing submission on one’s opponent.168 Once again, the relative status positions of the two women are reversed: the mistress, who has been humiliated by her slave, now regains her standing by oppressing her rival. From Sarah’s perspective, this re-establishes justice: Sarah responds to ḥ ms, ‘violence’, done to her (v. 5), with ‘nh, ‘oppression’ (v. 6), seeing it as good or morally right (ṭ ô b, v. 5). This new position of dominance, established on behalf of Abraham/ Israel, could be seen as an indirect response to Sarah’s wish to be ‘built up’ through her slave. Unable to increase through Egypt, Sarah increases over against it. Scholars have observed that Sarah’s role in the opening scene of Genesis 16 parallels the role Abraham plays in the first wife–sister episode (Gen. 12.10-20). As Trible has noted, Sarah treats Hagar in Canaan in the same way as Abraham treated Sarah in Egypt: as ‘the object of use for the desires of others’.169 Fewell and Gunn hold that in both accounts the sexuality of a woman in one’s possession is traded for one’s security.170 A closer look at the two texts allows one to see structural similarities between Sarah and Abraham’s transactions and their respective actantial roles (Figure 2.3). In both cases, the giver of the wife-object exploits her qualities of beauty (Sarah) and fertility (Hagar) and intends to derive personal benefit from the exchange. In both cases, after a temporary possession by the receiver, the wife-object is returned to the giver. In both cases, as Amy-Jill Levine has observed, ‘the giver appears in an ambivalent if not negative light’.171

168. DCH VI, 497–8. 169. Trible, ‘Ominous Beginnings’, 38. Trible observes a number of literary parallels between the two accounts including the fact that Abraham and Sarah speak there respectively for the first time as characters (Gen. 12.11b–13; Gen. 16.2). 170. Fewell and Gunn, Gender, Power, and Promise, 45. Brett in Genesis, 58 speaks about the ‘blatant self-interest’ of the protagonists. Exum discusses the two accounts as an example of the double standard the narrator shows with respect to the woman’s honour (Fragmented Women, 150–1). 171. Levine, ‘Settling at Beer-Lahai-Roi’, 22.

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Structural elements

Gen. 12.10-20

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Gen. 16.1-6

giver of wife-object

Abraham

Sarah

wife-object

Sarah

Hagar

hierarchical relationship relinquished

husband/wife

mistress/slave

parallel relationship assumed

brother/sister

first wife/second wife

giver’s self-concern

‘it may go well with me

‘I shall be built up

because of you’

through her’

receiver of wife-object

Pharaoh

Abraham

receiver returns wife-object

‘here is your wife’

‘your slave is in your power’

Figure 2.3 Structural parallels between Gen. 12.10-20 and Gen. 16.1-6.

While the object of the trade in both accounts is sexual exploitation of woman, the narrator disposes of Hagar’s sexuality much more explicitly than that of Sarah. Abraham’s sexual intercourse with Hagar is related openly and unceremoniously as an expedient to her conception (‘and he went in to Hagar and she conceived’, Gen. 16.4). By contrast, the narrator withholds any comments on whether or not Sarah had sexual relations with Pharaoh.172 Because that question, if left open, could cast a shadow over the legitimacy of Abraham’s future heir, a side remark of the narrator in Gen. 16.3 places ten years between the couple’s stay in Egypt and the conception of Abraham’s first son, during which time Sarah has remained childless. In an extraordinary move, the narrative sanctions the use of the future ‘mother of nations’ (Gen. 17.16) as a sexual commodity and allows her to pass hands for the benefit of the patriarch but at the same time carefully protects his exclusive right to offspring. How should one interpret the striking similarities between the accounts of Gen. 12.10-20 and 16.1-6? What is the underlying logic that links these stories together in the context of the larger cycle? Sarah’s brief moment of authority over Abraham may be seen as a case of poetic justice – her retaliation for being mistreated by her husband back in Egypt. This idea, however, seems problematic, since Abraham ultimately benefits from Sarah’s trade, becoming a father. Trible observes the ‘disturbing parallels’ between the husband and the wife who each in their turn participate in oppression (‘like oppressor, like oppressed’), but, like other commentators, she stops short of examining the narrative or ideological function of this parallelism.173 In response to this apparent interpretative gap, I propose to consider the exchanges that take place in Genesis 12 and 16 in terms of the benefit they bring to the subject. From this perspective, each transfer of the

172. Exum holds that the story in Genesis 12 ‘does not satisfactorily resolve the issue’ and thus needs to be repeated in Genesis 20 and 26 (Fragmented Women, 125). 173. Trible, ‘Ominous Beginnings’, 38. In a similar way, Levine, Brett and Fewell and Gunn do not go beyond a comparison between the two accounts with varying degrees of detail.

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wife-object builds up the patriarch’s position, allowing him as a figure of Israel to appropriate an aspect of the semiotic ‘weight’ of Egypt. Seen together, the accounts of Genesis 12.10-20 and 16.1-6 present the two stages of the initial ‘building up’ of Israel through Egypt. The patriarch first acquires the wealth of Egypt, and with it, implicitly, Hagar, an Egyptian slave-girl (š ipḥ ā h miṣ rî t, Gen. 16.1; cf. 12.16), and then through Hagar attains Egypt’s symbolic fruitfulness, becoming the father of Ishmael. The second account continues and completes the first, conferring on the subject two material signs of Yahweh’s blessing: wealth and fertility. As the two stories hinge on Sarah, she is the one who, ultimately, mediates the ‘building up’ of the self of Israel and, as part of it, is ‘built up’ herself. This twostep transaction between Egypt and Israel is pointedly imbalanced, for in each case Israel pays Egypt back with a curse rather than a blessing. Thus, in exchange for the wealth and fertility it offers to the patriarch, Egypt is struck with ‘great plagues’ (Gen. 12.17) and oppression (Gen. 16.6). To posit its claim of dominance, the ethnocentric discourse in the same movement partakes of the symbolic fecundity of the other and undermines it through strategies of oppression. With Sarah/Israel regaining dominance, the story seems to have returned to the initial situation. But that situation is now untenable, since Hagar’s new selfidentity prevents her from submitting to the old hierarchy. She removes herself and her unborn child from the oppressive social structure and runs away into the desert. However, being part of the story of Israel, Hagar’s flight in Gen. 16.6 cannot be definitive. First, it is initiated by Hagar and not by Israel. Although Hagar runs away in response to Sarah’s oppression, it is unlikely that Sarah intended her to do so, since, like her subversive ‘looking’, Hagar’s fleeing from her mistress challenges the hierarchy. Second, by fleeing, Hagar removes the child she is carrying from Abraham’s house, reclaiming her motherhood and depriving the patriarch of his right over offspring. This latter aspect of her flight is especially problematic because of the uncertainty it creates around the status of Hagar’s future son and his potential claim to Abraham’s inheritance. This complication needs to be resolved and so the narrator grants Hagar a story, or rather, an interlude of her own. In the wilderness, a divine messenger finds Hagar ‘by the spring of water on the way of Shur’ (Gen. 16.7) – a geographic detail, which places her on a north-south route from Canaan to Egypt.174 The encounter happens in a borderland space both geographically (between Canaan and Egypt) and socially (wilderness as uninhabited, uncultivated space on the margins of society and culture).175 Likewise, the messenger’s question, ‘Hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?’ (Gen. 16.8), points to Hagar’s transitional, in-between state. Knowing her name and that of her mistress, the messenger could hardly

174. Intertextually, this is also the place where the Israelites of Exodus wander in search of water on their way from Egypt to Canaan (Exod. 15.22). 175. Judith McKinlay sees the wilderness as the space ‘between’, for while it is ‘markedly not the space of Sarai and Abraham, it is also not Egypt’ (Reframing Her: Biblical Women in Postcolonial Focus [Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2004], 131).

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be ignorant of Hagar’s journey and so the question is really a rhetorical means to provoke Hagar’s response. It is therefore fitting that her reply names neither her point of departure nor her destination and defines her spatiality solely in terms of her relationship with Sarah: ‘I am fleeing from my mistress Sarai.’ Here Hagar finally acquires a voice, but although her use of ’ā nō kî , ‘I’, seems to affirm her as a subject, she still speaks as Sarah’s slave. Even as she is breaking away from Israel, Hagar’s subjectivity is circumscribed by old hierarchies. The ambivalence of Hagar’s position is matched by the double-edged message she receives from Yahweh. On the one hand, addressed as ‘Hagar, Sarai’s slave’, she is in unequivocal terms ordered to go back to her mistress and submit to her, or, literally, ‘be oppressed under her hand’ (Gen. 16.9). By using the verb ‘nh (cf. v. 6), the messenger sanctions Sarah’s past and future mistreatment of her slave, turning it into a divine decree. Like Abraham, who placed Hagar in Sarah’s hand, Yahweh reaffirms the power of the matriarch, submitting Hagar under Sarah’s hand. The two providers of woman’s status – the patriarch and Yahweh – both uphold Sarah’s superiority. One might read this ‘building up’ of dominance as an answer to Sarah’s initial wish to be ‘built up’: unable to raise her standing through childbearing, she does achieve it through her oppression of the other. By doing so, the narrator accepts Sarah back into the dominant ethnocentric subject, thus ending Israel’s ‘confusion within the self ’. By the same motion, Hagar/Egypt is relegated to her ‘proper’ place at the bottom of the hierarchy. On the other hand, along with the message of submission, Yahweh’s messenger gives to Hagar a promise of multiple descendants, the like of which is only also given to Abraham. Yahweh’s emphatic declaration ‘I shall greatly multiply your seed’, with its typically male concept of seed as offspring, is only addressed to Hagar in Gen. 16.10 and to Abraham in Gen. 22.17. That a slave woman should receive a promise of uncountable seed and of a son who will become a nation undermines, according to Brett, the dominant ideology of Yahweh’s message in Gen. 16.9.176 But the biggest challenge to the dominant discourse is posed by Hagar’s own reaction to the theophany. In Gen. 16.13 she speaks directly to Yahweh, calling his name, ‘You are El, who sees me’,177 and claiming, ‘I have seen him who sees me’. With its play on the verb r’h, the naming speech suggests a depth of subjectivity, unprecedented in the biblical narrative. Here Hagar interprets the revelation of her new identity as a matriarch simultaneously as an experience of seeing God and of God seeing her. This idea of a returned, mirrored look resonates with the narrator’s play on the Hebrew term ‘ayin, a homonym that stands for either ‘spring’ or ‘eye’ and which has been used repeatedly in the previous verses to indicate Hagar and Sarah’s points of view (vv. 4, 5, 6). Here ‘ayin functions as a pun that plays on the role of sight in the construction of Hagar’s character. The spring of water by which the messenger of

176. Brett, Genesis, 59. 177. This translation is a result of repointing of ’ē l ro ’î , ‘El of seeing’, as ’ē l rō ’î , ‘El who sees me’ – the reading attested also in the LXX and the Vulgate (Wenham, Genesis 16–50, 3 n. 13b–b).

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Yahweh finds Hagar – a symbolic reference to life in an arid and sterile environment – is interpreted as an eye of God when it is named be’ē r-laḥ ay-rō ’î , ‘well of the living one who sees me’. Intertextually, Hagar’s seeing the God who sees her in Gen. 16.13 anticipates her seeing a well (be’ē r/‘ayin) in the wilderness in Gen 21.19.178 The scene of theophany in Genesis 16 raises Hagar’s narratological status above that of her mistress, for Sarah never receives a direct revelation and all divine messages regarding her are communicated to Abraham. But Hagar’s position is even more unique, as she is the only biblical character to ever name Yahweh. Though the Hebrew of her speech in Gen 16.13 is unclear (‘I have seen after (’aḥ arê ) him who sees me’), its structure anticipates another theophany, the one that Sarah overhears in Gen. 18.10: ‘and Sarah was listening at the tent door behind him (’aḥ arâ w)’. This reinforces the contrast between the two women. Sarah, who has been associated with voice and speaking (Gen. 16.2; 21.12), can only overhear God promising her a son, since, being behind the door, she cannot see him, whereas Hagar, who is capable of seeing (Gen. 16.4, 5), sees the God who promises her countless descendants and, moreover, names him as the one who sees her. The word ’aḥ arê in Gen. 16.13, though difficult to translate, qualifies Hagar’s experience so as to remove the possibility of her seeing God’s face (cf. the prohibition in Exod. 33.20). But, even in this qualified way, Hagar’s naming speech sounds triumphant, for in it she posits herself as a subject of seeing in parallel to El Roi, the God who sees.179 Yahweh’s ambivalent message, which makes Hagar subject to both oppression and promise, is reflected in the name she has to call her son. The Hebrew name yiš mā ‘ē ’l, ‘God hears’, connotes compassion, yet it is also set as a reminder to Hagar of the suffering she has received from the hand of her mistress (‘for Yahweh has heard your affliction [‘onî ]’, Gen. 16.11). Trible has noted the ambivalence in this seemingly comforting name that ‘attends affliction’.180 Seen in the context of v. 9, where Yahweh orders Hagar to ‘go back’ and ‘be oppressed’, his naming speech becomes even more ironic. It suggests that Yahweh pays heed to Hagar’s oppression while sending her back to her oppressor. What kind of heeding is it and whose interests does it serve? Does the name of Ishmael reveal Yahweh’s own complicity with the oppressors? The biblical text seems to present two opposing perspectives on Yahweh’s attitude to Hagar, which I shall delineate below. On the one hand, Yahweh’s message to Hagar is aligned with the discourse, centred on the emergent identity of Israel. From this ethnocentric perspective, the revelation concerning Ishmael is not motivated by Yahweh’s compassion for Hagar or her future child but serves Israel’s project of dominance by establishing its national other. The narrator uses the human drama of Hagar, exploited as a woman and oppressed as a slave, as a blueprint for Israel’s domination. And so, in

178. S. Nikaido argues that the original context of the naming in Gen. 16.13-14 might have been the scene in Gen. 21.19, where Hagar sees a well (‘Hagar and Ishmael as Literary Figures: An Intertextual Study’, VT 51 [2001]: 225–8). 179. Rulon-Miller, ‘Hagar’, 77. 180. Trible, ‘Ominous Beginnings’, 41.

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the end, Hagar will be expelled, but to make her expulsion worthwhile, she should first give birth to a nation that has its submission to Israel imprinted in its name and identity. In the end, both Sarah and Hagar are used as narrative expedients that serve the ‘larger’ discourse of Abraham/Israel. The reason Hagar has to go back to Sarah is that Ishmael could be born ‘to Abraham’ – an event important enough to be reported three times in the space of two verses (Gen. 16:15-16) – and become incorporated, albeit temporarily, into his family.181 On the other hand, the ethnocentric discourse with its clear dichotomy of Israel and Egypt as self and other is subverted, intertextually, through the reversal of the story of Hagar in the narrative of Exodus.182 The suffering (‘nh) of the Egyptian slave Hagar at the hand of Israel (Gen. 16. 6, 9, 11) is mirrored in the oppression (‘nh) the Hebrew slaves will receive from their Egyptian masters (Exod. 1.11, 12; 3.7; 4.31). The casting out (grš ) of Hagar and Ishmael from the house of Abraham in Gen 21.10 is reversed when the Israelites are expelled (grš ) from Egypt (Exod. 6.1; 11.1; 12.39). Like Hagar and Ishmael, the Israelites wonder in the wilderness before finally becoming a people.183 In both cases, Yahweh acknowledges the oppression by hearing it (š m‘, Gen. 16.11) and seeing it (r’h, Exod. 3.7; 4.31).184 Through this reversal of the positions of Israel and Egypt with respect to oppression, expulsion and desert wandering, the project of dominance in the Hagar story is resisted from inside the biblical narrative.

Hagar and Ishmael: Expelling the Other (Genesis 21) Following the theophany of Genesis 16.9-12, we are not given any information about Hagar’s return to her mistress: what matters for the narrator is the fact that

181. The symbolic appropriation of the child by the father happens in the same movement as the side-lining of the mother: although it was Hagar who received the name of Ishmael from Yahweh (‘you shall bear a son and you shall call his name Ishmael’, v. 11), in the end Abraham is the one who actually names his son in v. 15. 182. The multiple parallels between Hagar’s experience in the wilderness and the wanderings of the Israelites in Exodus were first observed by Trible in Texts of Terror, 22. 183. For a detailed analysis of the thematic parallels and their theological implications see Thomas B. Dozeman, ‘The Wilderness and Salvation History in the Hagar Story’, JBL 117 (1998): 28–43. See also Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 375–6; Jon D. Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 86, 100. 184. There is, however, an important difference between Yahweh’s response to Hagar, which reinstates the dominance of the master and his liberation of the Israelites in Exodus. Trible finds it ironic that, going through an experience similar to the oppression as Israel in Egypt, Hagar is not rescued by Yahweh, who in her case identifies with the oppressors (Texts of Terror, 22).

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Ishmael is born in Abraham’s house and is incorporated into his family. At this point the reader may finally believe, together with Abraham, that Ishmael is the heir, who was promised to ‘come out of Abraham’s body’ (Gen. 15.4). When in Genesis 17 Yahweh reiterates his promise to Abraham, giving him a new name (vv. 1-8) and establishing with him a covenant of circumcision (vv. 9-14), nothing in his speech suggests otherwise. Abraham’s identity as a father of many nations seems to hang on his only son, the son of Hagar the Egyptian. Thus, Abraham will plead to Yahweh for Ishmael’s well-being, believing him to be his heir (v. 18). And so, when at the end of his speech Yahweh for the first time mentions Sarah, proclaiming her as a mother of nations and kings (vv. 14-16), the surprise of Abraham is to a point shared by the reader. The way Abraham takes the news reveals his point of view. The patriarch’s worshipful reaction to the promise concerning himself (‘and Abram fell on his face’, v. 3) contrasts the way he takes Yahweh’s pronouncement on Sarah (‘Abraham fell on his face and laughed’, v. 17). Later in the narrative, this reaction will be echoed in Sarah’s incredulous laughter – a point of contention between her and Yahweh in Gen. 18.12-15. In both cases, it is the promise to Sarah and not the one to Abraham that both protagonists find laughable. An obvious reason for this difference may be that Abraham has already fathered a son, while Sarah has remained sterile. But laughter can also signify a release of tension and so Abraham’s laughter in Gen. 17.17, which follows the promise of an ethnically ‘pure’ heir, could be a release of the narrative tension surrounding the possibility that a son of Egypt might inherit the promise. Abraham’s laughter is particularly significant since, as Trible has observed, it also proleptically signals the forthcoming name of the child of promise.185 If the laughter indeed signifies a relief at the level of the narrative psyche, projecting the laughing (ṣ ḥ q) onto the name of the ‘right’ heir Isaac (yiṣ ḥ ā q, v. 19), it founds the latter’s identity on the removal of the threat of Ishmael. Even before his birth, Isaac is constructed over against Ishmael as one whose advent overcomes the other’s threat to the lineage. The identity of the other here precedes and, to a point, defines the identity of the ethnocentric subject. Following the announcement of Isaac’s birth in Genesis 17, it will take the narrative four more chapters to accomplish a full expulsion of Egypt from the house of Israel. Until then, the narrator continues to build up suspense around the issue of succession, positioning Ishmael as a possible contender before Isaac. This is apparent both in the dialogue in Gen 17.18-19, where Yahweh discloses the name of Isaac to controvert Abraham’s mention of Ishmael, and in Gen. 17.20-22, where the promise concerning Ishmael is announced before the future covenant with Isaac. The rest of Genesis 17 reinforces the focus on Ishmael, leaving no doubt that he too legitimately belongs to the covenant.186 Arguably, the whole point of placing the covenant of circumcision at this precise point in the narrative – after

185. Trible, ‘Ominous Beginnings’, 42. 186. Yahweh in Gen. 17.12-13 requires to circumcise all the male descendants of Abraham as well as those born in his household and foreign slaves bought with his money. This description seems to cover all the elements of Ishmael’s narrative identity, whether the

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the birth of Ishmael in Gen. 16.15-16 – is to include Ishmael in this identity-related ritual alongside Abraham. To stress the point, the narrator goes over the event three times: First, we are told that Abraham circumcised Ishmael together with all the males of the household (v. 23); next, we are given the ages of the father and the son at the time they were circumcised (Gen. 17.24-25) and finally, the narrator recapitulates the event, placing the two of them together (v. 26). Along with the threefold report of Ishmael’s birth in Gen. 16.15-16, the triple reference to his circumcision betrays the narrator’s concern to stress not only Ishmael’s presence, but also the legitimacy of his claim. This excessive foregrounding of Ishmael alongside Abraham highlights the seriousness of the threat Ishmael poses to Israel’s self-identity. Observing this dynamic, Exum has noted that, ‘as Abraham’s own flesh and blood, Ishmael radically threatens the fragile boundaries of Israel’s proper “self ”.’187 But before this threat is recognized within the narrative (cf. Sarah’s outburst in Gen. 21.10), the stories of Ishmael in Genesis 16 and 17 serve to emphasize his affinity with Israel. Only when Hagar’s son becomes a ‘proper’ (br)other to Abraham’s future heir, Ishmael can be expelled ‘properly’. Through this two-step process, the narrative consciousness will affirm endogamous descent over mixed marriages, Sarah over Hagar and Israel over Egypt. It is notable that the expulsion of Egypt takes place over two separate episodes (Genesis 16 and 21), which culminate in the separation of the rival heir Ishmael. Like other instances of the separation of rival brothers (Lot and Esau), Ishmael’s departure is definitive and allows no return. On the contrary, Hagar, the ‘other’ mother, has to be separated in two stages, both times ending up in a wilderness, both times given a message of reassurance by Yahweh. Exum, following Sternberg, treats this double expulsion of Hagar as a sign of the difficulties the narrator has with justifying her removal from Abraham’s household. Like other stories that exhibit patterns of repetition, the repeated theme of expulsion in the story of Hagar functions ‘as a textual working out of a particular problem or concern, repeated because the problem is not so easy to resolve’.188 It might be added that the two instances of separation in Genesis 16 and 21 communicate two different levels of dissociation. In Genesis 16, the threatening other (Hagar) is forced out, expelled with respect to the feminine part of Israel’s self (Sarah). Sarah as Israel cannot access her own fertility (birth of Isaac in Gen. 21.1-2) without first establishing her supremacy or ‘building herself up’. In the Hagar episodes, Sarah mirrors patriarchal structures of dominance: she has a voice (or authority to give orders, Gen. 16.2; 21.12) and a hand (as power over her rival, Gen. 16.6, 9), but little subjectivity. Elsewhere in the cycle, Sarah has little to show for being an independent character, being continuously aligned with Abraham as an extension of his identity or his ‘double’. She serves his interests as an object of

reader sees him as a son of Abraham, a male child born in his house or a son of his foreign slave. 187. Exum, ‘Hagar en procè s’, 5. 188. Ibid., 5–6 n. 16.

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trade in the wife–sister episodes and is paired with the patriarch in his encounters with Yahweh. Like Abraham, renamed as the father of a multitude of nations (Gen. 17.5), Sarah is given a new name as the one who will give rise to nations (Gen. 17.15-16); like Abraham, she is too old to have children (Gen. 18.11-12); like him, she laughs at the prospect of having a son in old age (Gen. 17.17; 18.12-15) and her internal monologue in Gen. 18.12, like his in 17.17, places her next to Abraham. The only occasion when Sarah acts on her own, without ‘doubling’ Abraham, is found in her oppressive treatment of Hagar and Ishmael. Yet even in this she implicitly represents his interests. In Genesis 16, the character of Sarah channels Israel’s project of dominance, playing the role of persecutor and thus clearing the male subject of the responsibility for Hagar’s plight. Unlike the separation in Genesis 16 with its emphasis on the ‘female’ issue of conception, the expulsion in Genesis 21 is centred on the ‘male’ issue of inheritance. As soon as her own son Isaac is born and weaned, Sarah sees the son of Hagar the Egyptian as meṣ aḥ ē q, ‘laughing’ (v. 9). As a pun on the name ‘Isaac’, meṣ aḥ ē q could signify Ishmael’s ‘playing Isaac’, making a claim on Isaac’s identity or status that Sarah interprets in economic terms as a threat to her son’s inheritance.189 It is this perceived threat that makes her require Abraham to ‘drive away (grš ) this slave with her son’ (v. 10). For Abraham, however, this demand appears exceedingly evil ‘because of his son’ (Gen. 21.11). In these contrasting attitudes, the gender positions of the husband and wife are transposed: Sarah is schematized as a bearer of the patriarchal concerns about status, power and inheritance, whereas Abraham is allowed to form attachments and feel compassion for ‘his son’ – character traits commonly associated with mothers. In contrast to Sarah’s harshness, Abraham grieves for his son and provides Hagar with water and bread for the journey (v. 14). Exum sees Sarah and Abraham’s contrasting attitudes as part of ‘an ideology that uses the matriarchs to carry out disagreeable but necessary deeds for Israel to fulfill its destiny, thereby allowing the patriarchs to appear in a better light’.190 In the end, since Sarah has no authority to expel Abraham’s son, the patriarch is the one who performs the expulsion, but even here the narrator chooses a softer word and avoids the mention of the child – Abraham ‘sends her away’ (š lḥ ) as opposed to the harsher gesture, demanded by Sarah, of driving away (grš ) ‘this slave and her child’. Significantly, in both episodes, neither Sarah nor Abraham regards Hagar as a subject. They never mention Hagar’s name, referring to her as either š ipḥ ā h (Gen. 16.1, 2, 3, 5, 6) or ’ā mā h (Gen. 21.10), both of which mean ‘servant’ or ‘slave’. In Abraham’s household, as Exum notes, Hagar is never spoken to, but ‘spoken about

189. Hackett, ‘Rehabilitating Hagar’, 20–1; Exum, ‘The Accusing Look: The Abjection of Hagar in Art’, RelArts 11 (2007): 149 nn. 17, 18; McKinlay, Reframing Her, 131. According to Brett, the purely economic terms used to justify the driving away of Hagar in Gen. 21.10 reflect the politics of dispossession that guides the divorces of foreign women in Ezra and Nehemiah (Genesis, 60–1). 190. Exum, ‘The Accusing Look’, 149 n. 19.

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and acted upon’.191 Yahweh is the only character who addresses her by name and on the two occasions that he does it, Hagar is found outside Abraham’s house, in the wilderness (Gen. 16.8; 21.17). In Genesis 16, when Hagar first breaks away from Sarah’s household, she places herself in a liminal space where she receives a promise of her own identity. Narratologically, this space becomes her ‘own’ and she returns to it when she is finally separated from the identity of Israel in Gen. 21.14. The desert is for her a place where she becomes, however briefly, a subject. The second time Hagar finds herself in the desert, she is there with Ishmael, having been driven out of Abraham’s household. Unable, this time, to find a water source, she leaves (lit. š lk, ‘throws’)192 Ishmael under a bush and sits down away from him, not wanting ‘to see the boy die’ (Gen. 21.16). Exum interprets this desperate gesture as Hagar’s second attempt, after her fleeing from Sarah in Gen. 16.6, to separate herself from Israel. In an application of Julia Kristeva’s terminology, Exum describes Hagar’s distancing from Ishmael as abjection, a process whereby the subject asserts its boundaries by expelling or abjecting a part of itself that is perceived as threatening. Just like Israel (Abraham) abjects or ‘throws out’ Hagar and Ishmael in Gen. 21.14, Hagar now abjects ‘what still connects her to Israel – the child – by casting the child away, throwing him under a bush’. As Exum observes, the narrator of Gen. 21.14-20 never describes Ishmael as Hagar’s son and consistently uses the impersonal terms ‘the child’ or ‘the boy’ to reinforce Hagar’s emotional distancing from him.193 In her abjection of Ishmael, Hagar rebels not only against Israel but also against Yahweh and his promise of descent (Gen. 16.1012), and, ultimately, against the ideology that confines her to the mother’s place. In that, she claims boundaries and, therefore, subjectivity entirely of her own. But Hagar’s rise to subjectivity is short-lived. Being part of the narrative of Israel, she cannot become the subject of her own story outside her role as Ishmael’s mother. As a result, Yahweh re-establishes her responsibility for the child (‘Arise, lift up the boy and hold him by your hand [yā dē k], Gen. 21.18) in the same way as his earlier command re-established her submission to Sarah (‘Go back to your mistress and submit under her hand [yā dê hā ]’, Gen. 16.9). Yahweh’s added reasoning, ‘for I shall make him a great nation’, on the one hand, resonates with the promise of multiple descendants that Hagar received in Gen. 16.10. On the other hand, however, the new promise erases Hagar from the picture, making her an invisible agent of Ishmael’s destiny. Underlying the text is the assumption that, as a mother, she should be appeased with the message of her son’s great destiny, despite the fact that it disposes of her as a subject in her own right.194

191. Exum, ‘Hagar en procè s’, 7. 192. Exum notes the forceful character of the verb š lk in ‘Hagar en procè s’, 12–13. Looking at the usage of the term in the Hebrew Bible, she observes that whenever ‘people who are still alive are the object of ‫ שלך‬they are thrown out or thrown down to their deaths’. 193. Exum, ‘Hagar en procè s’, 11–12. 194. The reader has come across a similar logic in Gen. 21.12-13. Here Yahweh comforts Abraham, who is upset about Sarah’s request to expel Ishmael, by promising him

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Construction of Gender and Identity in Genesis

Once again, Hagar has to suppress her abjection of Israel and, instead, serve its interests. In Genesis 16, she did it by going back to Israel to bear a son, who would first be named and circumcised as part of Israel’s self and then be expelled from it as a threat to Israel’s identity, its other. In Genesis 21, Hagar serves Israel’s interests by going back to the child to ensure the survival of Israel’s other, without whom the project of dominance is impossible. The subject needs his other to remain there, in the shadow (and as a shadow) of Israel’s superior identity. It is thus important to the narrator that Ishmael’s ambivalent presence endures even after the expulsion.195 On the one hand, as a son of Abraham, Ishmael earns the right to a place in the narrative memory of Israel. He merits a genealogy, becoming the father of twelve princes in parallel to Israel’s twelve tribes (Gen. 25.12-16) and is united with Isaac in the burial of Abraham (Gen. 25.9); in the next generation, Isaac’s son Esau marries the daughter of Ishmael to demonstrate affinity with the Abrahamic family (Gen. 28.6-9). On the other hand, as the son of Hagar the Egyptian, he lives on ‘over against all his brothers’ (Gen. 25.18) as a conflicted presence, ‘his hand against everyone and everyone’s hand against him’ (Gen. 16.12). His position of otherness is reinforced when his mother takes him a wife from Egypt. And this is the last thing she does. Having served the function to assure both the similarity and the difference of Israel’s other, Hagar disappears from stage and from Israel’s narrative. At the end of this examination, the subjectivity of Hagar appears both established and undermined, reflecting the ambivalence of Israel’s ethnocentric ideology. S. Nikaido has observed the dual status of Hagar, who is, on the one hand, a foreign slave and the antagonist of Sarah, and on the other hand, a heroine and a matriarchal figure, modelled on Abraham.196 Like Abraham, Hagar receives a promise of innumerable descendants (Gen. 16.10); like Abraham she is promised a son and told his name (Gen. 16.11; cf. 17.19) and like Abraham, she performs a naming ceremony following an encounter with a divine messenger (Gen. 16.13; cf. 22.14). Furthermore, Hagar’s expulsion in Genesis 21 bears striking lexical and thematic similarities to Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22. In both narratives Abraham rises early in the morning (š km, Gen. 21.14; 22.3), takes (lkḥ ) provisions (bread and water for Hagar’s journey or wood for Isaac’s burnt offering) and places them (ś î m) on Hagar (21.14) or on Isaac (22.6). Both Hagar’s wilderness experience and Abraham’s trial involve an exposure of the son (Gen. 21.15; 22.9), divine intervention and promise of nationhood (Gen. 21.17-18; 22.12, 16-18), the

that Ishmael will become a nation. According to Exum, the idea of Ishmael’s nationhood functions as a kind of compensation that ‘makes the reader feel better’ about the expulsion (‘Hagar en procè s’, 8–9). 195. I propose that the same reasoning underlies Yahweh’s sparing of Lot, which happens, admittedly, for the sake of Abraham (Gen. 19.29). It is in the interests of the subject to have Lot survive the fall of Sodom, since, following his rescue, Lot becomes the father of the ancestors of Moab and Ammon. The identity of the hostile nations is thus controlled by the narrative, being simultaneously traced back to the subject and definitively separated from him. 196. Nikaido, ‘Hagar and Ishmael as Literary Figures’, 221.

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motif of seeing in the naming of God and of the place (Gen. 16.13-14; 22.14) and reference to Beersheba (Gen. 21.14; 22.19).197 What is the purpose of these pointed parallels between the father of Israel and the Egyptian slave woman? On the one hand, the juxtaposing of Hagar and Abraham may be seen as a conscious strategy on the part of the narrator that casts the triply subordinate Hagar (a woman, a slave, a foreigner) as a worthy opponent of the patriarch, thus making her abjection even more significant for the emergent self-image of Israel. On the other hand, the structural ‘mirroring’ that goes on in the two adjacent chapters 21 and 22 seems to resist ethnocentric conceptualization, for here the patriarch goes through his own trial, which echoes his earlier mistreatment of the other mother, showing the traces of narrative judgement on her abjection. Exum finds here an example of inner-biblical critique that reflects the biblical writers’ awareness of the complex relationship between human actions and their consequences.198 Brett sees this awareness through the lens of identity politics of the Persian period. For him, by making the profound theological test of Abraham in chapter 22 supersede his expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael, the final editors of Genesis showed resistance to the exclusivist model of holiness, endorsed by the imperial governors, which insisted on endogamy and sending away of foreign wives (Ezra 9.1-2).199 While the multiple linguistic and thematic links between Genesis 22 and 21 lend themselves to various interpretations,200 their immediate effect is to place the ‘ghostly presence’ of the expelled other – Hagar and Ishmael – at the heart of Israel’s faith.201

Final Observations In the larger context of the Abraham cycle, the expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael, which serves to exclude Egypt from Israel’s self-identity, parallels the separation

197. The parallels between the expulsion of Ishmael in Genesis 21 and the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22 have been examined in Nikaido, ‘Hagar and Ishmael as Literary Figures’, 221–9; Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son, 104–10, 123–4; Trible, Texts of Terror, 34–5 n. 71; Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, 181. Curt Leviant presents a detailed analysis of the textual parallels in ‘Parallel Lives: The Trials and Traumas of Isaac and Ishmael’, BR 15 (1999): 20–5, 47. 198. Exum, ‘The Accusing Look’, 148 n. 15. 199. Brett, Genesis, 76–8. 200. See R. Christopher Heard, ‘Triangulating Responsibility: How and Why Abraham, Isaac, and Ishmael Offer and Refuse the Gift of Death, and to/from Whom’, in Derrida’s Bible (Reading a Page of Scripture with a Little Help from Derrida), ed. Yvonne Sherwood (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 151–66; Brett, ‘Abraham’s “Heretical Imperative”: A Response to Jacques Derrida’, in The Meanings We Choose: Hermeneutical Ethics, Indeterminacy and the Conflict of Interpretations, ed. Charles H. Cosgrove (London/New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2004), 166–78. 201. Brett, Genesis, 76.

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Construction of Gender and Identity in Genesis

of Lot. Above, I have argued that the ‘weight’ of Egypt, represented by the flocks, herds and slaves that Abraham brings with him to Canaan (cf. Gen. 12.16; 13.2), becomes a key semiotic factor that springboards the construction of the other at the level of both the female character and the land. At the level of the land, the wealth of Egypt leads to the separation of Lot, Abraham’s surrogate brother. At the level of the female subject, Egypt is represented by Sarah’s slave Hagar, who brings to the patriarch simultaneously a blessing of fertility and a threat of assimilation. Constructed from the viewpoint of Israel’s emergent identity, both Lot and Hagar are othered through their association with Egypt. It is notable that, unlike the separation between the two male protagonists in the Lot story, the expulsion of Hagar involves both Abraham and Sarah and happens at Sarah’s initiative. From a psychoanalytic point of view, Sarah, like Lot, carries, projected upon her, the aspects of the narrative psyche that the subject finds difficult to admit. While Lot is needed to channel the subject’s repressed desire for the ‘other’ land, Sarah serves as a projection of both the subject’s desire for the fertile ‘other’ woman and of his dominance towards Egypt as the ethnic ‘other’. Unlike Lot, who splits off from the Abrahamic line, Sarah is made responsible for its formation and for the abjection of Egypt. As illustrated in Figure 2.4, their stories present different levels of separation between the self of Israel and Egypt as its ethnic other. The two cases of projection have interesting implications for the understanding of gender in the narrative. Through the workings out of the Lot narrative, the subject renounces the unwanted aspect of the self – his underlying desire for the other – by first projecting it onto the ‘brother’ figure and then purging it through the latter’s ruin. As a result, in the narrative of Sodom the male protagonist loses power and masculinity, which leads to a reversal of the normative gender model in Gen. 19.30-38. In the case of Sarah, by contrast, the ideology of dominance is projected onto the female subject, which gives Sarah power both over Hagar and over Abraham. The fact that, like desire, dominance too has to be projected indicates that the subject finds it problematic. Thus Sarah as a character pays the price, becoming an uncomfortable or even ‘exceedingly evil’ (Gen. 21.11) presence Self (Israel)

Other (Egypt)

Levels of representation

projection of desire

Abraham projection of desire and dominance

Lot

other land

separation

Sarah

Hagar

other mother

Ishmael

other heir

expulsion

Isaac expulsion

Figure 2.4 Transactions between Self and Other in the Abraham cycle.

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for the patriarch himself. In the end, desire for Egypt is disavowed through Lot’s demise, whereas dominance over Egypt is authorized and incorporated into Israel’s consciousness: ‘Whatever Sarah says to you, listen to her’ (Gen. 21.12). Ironically, the time when God authorizes her voice is also the time when Sarah turns silent. Having achieved the abjection of Ishmael, she is now literally incorporated into the dominant discourse and disappears as a character. It is striking that, having fiercely protected the interests of her son in Genesis 21, Sarah is absent at the critical moment when he is nearly killed by his father in Genesis 22. She dies in the next chapter, and the collocation of the near sacrifice of Isaac and her death (Gen. 23.1-2) has been deemed significant throughout the history of biblical interpretation starting with Jewish midrashim.202 As was the case in Lot’s story, projection here is followed by repression and Sarah’s narrative presence, in the end, is repressed. Ideologically, however, her role in the formation of the subject receives approval, indicated by Abraham’s mourning and the amount of narrative space dedicated to the purchase of the land for her tomb (Gen. 23.3-20). Unlike Lot, Sarah is honoured, but only post-mortem, as part of the Abrahamic identity, as if to confirm the definite and absolute character of her removal as a character. Her death is utilized by the subject to lay claim to the land by setting Machpelah as an ancestral tomb, a place of memory and a marker of the Abrahamic identity. Removing the threatening aspects of alterity (other land, other mother, other heir), the narrator constructs a concept of identity that is not contaminated by the other. Israel, like Sarah, is emphatically not ‘built up’ through Egypt. The only safe ground for Israel’s emergent self is found in the paradox and transcendence of Yahweh’s promise. Signified by Abraham and Sarah’s laughter (Gen. 17.17; 18.12, 13, 15), this paradox becomes a constituent of Israel’s national identity through the name of their son, yiṣ hā q, ‘he laugh’ (Gen. 17.19). As a mark of discontinuity, Abraham’s laughter stresses that the birth of the right successor is not logically derived from any previously accumulated meanings, agencies or identities. Having come ‘out of nothing’, Israel’s descent is totally ‘uncontaminated’ and, therefore, totally separate or ‘holy’.203

202. Cf. Gen. Rab. 58.5, where Sarah’s death is caused by her anguish over the near death of Isaac; Lev. Rab. 20.2; Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer 72b. For insightful postmodern re-readings of the topic see Yvonne Sherwood, ‘And Sarah Died’, in Derrida’s Bible (Reading a Page of Scripture with a Little Help from Derrida), ed. Yvonne Sherwood (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 261–92; Chris Danta, ‘“The Absolutely Dark Moment of the Plot”: Blanchot’s Abraham’, in After Blanchot: Literature, Criticism, Philosophy, ed. Leslie Hill, Brian Nelson and Dimitris Vardoulakis (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 210–11. 203. As Brett points out, the expulsion of Hagar and her son can be read as a paradigm of holiness as seen by Ezra 9.1-2, which insists on endogamy and the need to send away foreign women. The ideology of holiness or exclusivism is, however, undercut by the text, which, despite the exclusion of Hagar and Ishmael from Israel, presents them as ‘effectively equal recipients of divine grace’ (Genesis, 76–7).

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The birth of Isaac, ‘the child of laughter’, and the expulsion of the other heir set the boundaries of the exclusivist national identity. But as soon as it is separated, the ‘uncontaminated’ self of Israel is brought to trial in the story of the near sacrifice of Isaac in Gen. 22.1-19. Brett stresses the ambivalence of God’s command in Gen. 22.2, describing it as ‘a chilling display of exclusivist ideology, tortuously trying to cover up the reality of the one excluded’.204 By saying ‘Take now your son, your only one, whom you love, Isaac’, God entirely dismisses the existence of Abraham’s elder son Ishmael, whom God himself has called ‘Abraham’s seed’ (Gen. 21.13) and for whom the patriarch has shown fatherly feelings (Gen. 21.11). Having suppressed all the other forms of alterity, the narrative threatens the unified identity, symbolized by the ‘only son’, to be absorbed back into its source – Yahweh or the ultimate other. Psychologically, Yahweh’s command to sacrifice Isaac reflects the perceived threat of annihilation associated with God as the other, as well as posits the other as the source of renewed identity. In Nancy Jay’s view, this process centres on reinstating the father’s role. The narrative restores Isaac, whose interests until now have been represented by his mother, to patrilineal descent. Through the symbolic transaction of sacrifice, Isaac ‘receives his life not by birth from his mother but from the hand of his father as directed by God’.205 The totalizing discourse is thus reaffirmed in the absence, literal and symbolic, of the mother, when God spares Isaac and renews the promise of countless descendants to Abraham (Gen. 22.12, 16-18). The exclusivity of this discourse is, however, problematized by the striking similarities, noted above, between Abraham’s trial and the preceding story of Hagar. In Brett’s view, by making the near sacrifice of Isaac follow the expulsion of Ishmael, the final editors subvert the exclusivism of the covenant in Gen. 17.1822.206 Accordingly, in the final scenes of the Abraham cycle, Hagar’s symbolic space is shared both by Isaac, who settles at Beer-lahai-roi (Gen. 25.11), and by Ishmael’s descendants, who dwell in the land ‘from Havilah to Shur’ (Gen. 25.18). In the end, the boundaries between self and other remain permeable, not only to remind the reader that the threat is ongoing (as Ishmael is to ‘live in the face of all his brothers’, Gen 16.12) but also, crucially, to allow the subject to continue as a signifying process that is nourished by the other’s presence.

204. Brett, Genesis, 73. 205. Jay, ‘Sacrifice, Descent and the Patriarchs’, 60. On constructing patrilineal descent through sacrifice see also Exum, Fragmented Women, 90–1. 206. Brett, Genesis, 75.

Chapter 3 THE MOTHERS AND THE MOTHER’S LAND IN THE JACOB NARRATIVE (GEN. 25.19–37.1)1

Binary Structures in the Jacob Narrative The Jacob narrative in Gen. 25.19–37.12 continues the myth of national origins that started with the story of Abraham. Jacob’s story as the eponymous ancestor of the nation carries a particular symbolic value – out of it is born the identity of Israel as the one who strives with God and with people (Gen. 32.29). The story presents one of the finest biblical examples of a developed and balanced plot, where the protagonist moves through various conflicts and their resolutions to the final possession of the land of his fathers. In the narrative, Rebekah, the wife of Isaac, helps her younger son Jacob steal the blessing, intended for his elder brother Esau. Fearing his brother’s vengeance, Jacob flees to Haran, his mother’s place. Yahweh appears to him on the way and promises him the land and Abrahamic succession. In Haran, Jacob serves his uncle Laban in return for marrying his daughters Rachel and Leah. During his twenty-year-long exile, twelve children are born to him and Jacob gains considerable wealth. On the way back, he fights a divine adversary who blesses him with the new name of Israel, after which Jacob finally makes peace with his brother and returns to his father’s house in Canaan. Even the most superficial examination of the Jacob narrative shows a clear presence here of structures of opposition. The story is shaped by a series of conflicts between the patriarch and his opponents – Esau, Laban, the divine being at Penuel – whom he has to overcome, by ruse or by force, in order to obtain a value object, be it birthright, blessing, wife, property or land. A more detailed analysis of the text

1. Parts of this chapter have been previously published as ‘Mother’s Land, the Land of the Shadow: Binary Structures and the Feminine in the Jacob Narrative (Gen. 25:19– 37:1)’, in The Survival of Myth: Innovation, Singularity and Alterity, ed. P. Hardwick and D. Kennedy (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 5–30. 2. I suggest that the Jacob cycle extends up to 37.1, since the genealogy of Esau in Genesis 36 and the crucial note about Jacob’s settling in the land of his father together provide a resolution to the central conflict of the narrative – the rivalry between the brothers over succession.

154 elder son

Construction of Gender and Identity in Genesis : younger son father

:

mother

promised : exile land elder : younger daughter daughter fertility : sterility plain : streaked sheep sheep uncle

: nephew deity

:

Jacob

other : brother

chosen brother Seir

: Canaan Edom : Israel

Figure 3.1 Progression of oppositions in the Jacob narrative.

uncovers a network of carefully balanced elements that stand in opposition to each other. The structural tensions that shape the myth on different levels stem from the initial opposition between Jacob – the chosen heir to the Abrahamic promise – and his elder brother Esau. In the definition of Claude Lé vi-Strauss, myth provides a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction.3 Lé vi-Strauss’s structuralist method breaks down elements of myth into pairs of opposites, which are resolved through mediators only to be further broken down into new pairs of opposites. This generates a spiral progression, which only ends when the signified, or the complex idea behind the myth, is exhausted. The Jacob story offers a striking example of such a progression, which starts with the initial tension between the twin sons of Isaac and Rebekah and ends with the separation of the two brothers and, through them, of the ethnic identities of Israel and Edom (Figure 3.1). The conflict between the elder and younger sons, announced at the beginning of the story (Gen. 25.23), is carried through all the divergences of the plot and is finally resolved with the removal of the ‘other brother’ Esau from the land and his

3. Claude Lé vy-Strauss, Structural Anthropology I (trans. C. Jacobson and B. G. Schoepf; New York: Basic Books, 1963), 229.

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settling in Seir (Gen. 33.16; 36.6-8) and Jacob’s settling in Canaan – the land of his father (Gen. 37.1). What unifies this prolonged sequence of related oppositions is its overall subversive character. From one level on to another, a tension is created between the existing system of reference and its opposite, that is, between the normal, accepted or superior, on the one hand and the irregular, impossible and subordinate, on the other. The mediation between them consistently inverts the expected order, for each time the narrator chooses to develop the element that represents a subordinate group or position. Accordingly, the coalition of the mother and her younger son wins over the father’s authority and the right of primogeniture, setting off a chain reaction of similar subversions: the blessed son goes into exile, the younger daughter is preferred to the elder, the unloved wife is fertile while the loved wife is sterile, the abnormally coloured animals produce most offspring and Jacob holds his own against God. The elements of most of these oppositions are grouped around two narrative strands, which could be seen as representing the institutional and the individual perspectives in the story. The institutional group includes the elements of father, older sibling, fertility and promised land, whereas the individual perspective operates with the concepts of mother, younger sibling, sterility and exile. These two groups embody two value systems: one that represents the interests of patriarchy, in which the primary values are patrilineal descent, father’s authority and the firstborn’s right and the other that is revealed whenever the characters subvert institutional norms and fixed identities, using deception through both language and disguise and displaying resourcefulness and determination in achieving their goals. Set within an institutional framework, the narrative, like the deity itself, favours the characters who defy the institution. It must be noted at this point that the subversiveness of the subject in the Jacob narrative appears to serve its own ideological function. The individual strand, which challenges the established norms within the narrative world, is consistently aligned with the divine election of Jacob as the younger brother and, through him, of the ‘younger’ nation of Israel. In the ethnocentric framework, introduced in the notion that ‘the elder shall serve the younger’ (Gen. 25.23), the reversal of primogeniture and the removal of the elder brother from the land back Israel’s claim as a newcomer over against other nations – previous inhabitants of Canaan.4 Through a chain of transformations that reverse gender and status hierarchies, a new hierarchical relationship is constructed – that between the ethnocentric subject of Israel and Edom as its ethnic other. On the diagram (Figure 3.1) this reversal of the status position happens at the point of Jacob’s encounter with the deity at Penuel – the moment when the conflicted and subversive identity of Jacob the deceiver becomes aetiologically linked to Israel as the one ‘who

4. This is the argument of Yvonne Sherwood in ‘The Perverse Commitment to Overcrowding and Doubling in Genesis: Implications for Ethics of Politics’, in Biblical Interpretation and Method Essays in Honour of John Barton, ed. Katharine J. Dell and Paul M. Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 311–28.

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Compositional

Jacob-Esau

Jacob-Laban

Jacob-Esau

Geographical

Canaan

Haran

Canaan

Kinship structures

patrilocal residence

matrilineal marriage

patrilocal residence

Spatial metaphors

father’s land

mother’s land

father’s land

Figure 3.2 Levels of structural binarity in the Jacob narrative.

has striven with God and with humans and has prevailed’5 (Gen. 32.29). After Jacob is invested with the new identity as Israel, the elder brother becomes the ‘other brother’ Edom, losing his institutional status, and is subsequently removed from the land. Ultimately, the individual strand is used to serve the narrator’s ethnocentric agenda. Jacob’s mother Rebekah and his wife Rachel represent the individual perspective in the narrative and so, for the most of the cycle, does Jacob. As we saw above, authority here rests with the patriarch, while the woman/younger sibling has the power to influence the course of events.6 Mary Douglas describes a similar model in the myth of Asdiwal as a paradox between male dominance and male dependence on female help.7 Lé vi-Strauss translates this dynamic into the language of kinship structures, defining it as a contradiction between patrilocal residence and matrilineal marriage.8 In the Jacob myth, which ultimately relates a story of male succession, female presence and agency permeate the structures of the plot, enabling the chosen heir to overcome his rival. This shapes the complex spatiality of the text and the narrative world, where the rivalry between the two brothers is translated into a tension between father and mother, and, metaphorically, into the opposition between the father and mother’s lands. Manifested on different levels, these tensions account for the concentric composition of the narrative (Figure 3.2). At the level of composition, the cycle consists of two extended narratives: the tale of Jacob’s conflict with his brother Esau that takes place in Canaan, the land of their father (Gen. 25.19–28.22; 32.2–35.22) and the story of the hero’s 5. Although the literal translation ‘with God and with men’ would be narratologically accurate, since Jacob is only ever engaged in conflicts with other men, the phrase clearly implies the generic difference between divine and human beings. 6. Fewell and Gunn stress the difference between Isaac’s authority and Rebekah’s power in Gender, Power, and Promise, 73. 7. Mary Douglas, Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (London: Routledge, 1975), 163. 8. Claude Lé vi-Strauss, ‘The story of Asdiwal’, trans. N. Mann, in The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism, ed. E. Leach (London: Tavistock, 1967), 1–47.

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dealings with his uncle Laban in Haran, the land of Jacob’s mother (Gen. 29.1– 32.1). Comparing the two storylines, Michael Fishbane points out the elaborate technique of symmetry that links them together, where the central narrative of the births of Jacob’s children in Gen. 29.31–30.24 counterpoints the surrounding tale of Esau.9 This happens through sequence of transformations, in each of them reversing the previous power position of the protagonist. The overall plot unfolds as a series of reversals, where the hero’s victory over his opponent alternates with defeat or relinquishing of power: Esau ® Jacob / Jacob ® Laban / Laban ® Jacob / Jacob ® Esau

In the first transformation in Genesis 27, Rebekah replaces her firstborn son Esau with his younger brother Jacob. As a result Jacob receives his father’s blessing, which was meant for the elder brother (subject gains).10 Next, in Genesis 29 Jacob is deceived by Laban, who replaces his younger daughter with the firstborn; this action symbolically inverts the episode of the stolen blessing (subject loses).11 Next, Laban’s deception by which he robs Jacob of his wages is reversed when Jacob takes all Laban’s flocks as his wage (subject gains). Finally, these flocks that now belong to Jacob are shared with Esau in what the narrative presents as a symbolic returning of the blessing. After his parting from Laban, Jacob selects from his herds a gift for Esau and later offers it to him saying, ‘Take now my blessing’ (Gen. 33.11). The giving back of the stolen blessing marks the end of the series of symbolic inversions and appears to resolve the main contradiction of the plot (subject renounces).12 In the above sequence of inversions, the Jacob-Laban episode appears as the central stage of the transformation. It puts Jacob in a position to resolve the conflict with his brother by offering him the ‘blessing’ in the form of the herds brought from Haran. At first sight, this seems to redress the disturbed balance within the narrative world, but the achieved balance is only superficial. The issue of succession – the point of the brothers’ rivalry – is still resolved in Jacob’s favour. Despite his symbolic giving back of the blessing, Jacob does not relinquish his inheritance claim and will be the one to settle in Canaan, the land of his father, while Esau will have to move to Seir (Gen. 36.6-8; 37.1). The ultimate purpose of the narrator is not the reconciliation of the brothers, but their eventual separation.

9. Fishbane, Text and Texture: Close Readings of Selected Biblical Texts (New York: Schocken Books, 1979), 55. 10. The preceding story of the ‘red pottage’ and the birthright (bekôrāh) in Gen. 25.29-34 does not constitute a separate transformation with respect to the power balance: it feeds into the episode of the stolen blessing (berā kā h), as Gen. 27.36 suggests. 11. Yair Zakovitch describes this instance of symmetrical inversion as an ‘expression of an “eye for an eye” punishment’ (‘Through the Looking Glass: Reflections/Inversions of Genesis Stories in the Bible’, BibInt 1 [1993]: 140). 12. According to Fishbane, the main contradiction of the cycle is reversed when Jacob ‘returns’ the blessing in Gen. 33.11 (Text and Texture, 42, 52).

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On the geographical plane, the compositional polarity between the narrative strands of Jacob-Esau and Jacob-Laban is reflected as a tension between Canaan, the promised land and Mesopotamia, the land of exile. This tension is mediated by the hero’s journey from Beersheba to Haran and back, which results in a treaty between Jacob and his uncle Laban (31.44-54), establishing a geographical boundary between Canaan and northwest Mesopotamia and an ethnic boundary between Israelites and Arameans. At the level of kinship structures, the Jacob narrative exhibits a tension between patrilocal residence and matrilineal marriage. Although the beginning and the end of the cycle see the hero reside in the land of his father, for most of the story he stays with his mother’s family in Haran. Exum discusses the tension between father-identified Canaan and mother-identified Haran in terms of the threat that uxorilocal residence poses to patrilineal descent.13 This threat is reflected in the territorial taboo concerning the return of the heir to the ancestral land (cf. Abraham’s prohibiting his son Isaac from entering Haran in Gen. 24.6, 9). In the case of Jacob this taboo is overruled by his mother’s authority. The mediation here takes place through the moving of the wives and children from their native land to the land of Jacob’s father that signifies a return to patrilocality. To summarize, the flight-return journey of the subject in the Jacob cycle takes place in the narrative space, divided into the spheres of father and mother. At the metaphorical level, all the correlated narrative, gendered and spatial tensions mentioned above contribute to a construction of one all-inclusive opposition between father and mother’s land.

Father’s Land vs. Mother’s Land In the symbolic landscape of the Jacob narrative, Canaan – the father’s land – is a positive reality, the land of promise, the paramount sign of God’s blessing. The connection with the land puts the protagonist in the context of Abrahamic succession and denotes the unity and permanence of the patriarchal subject. Since the promise of nationhood is contingent on the patriarch’s reaching the land (Gen. 12.1-2), walking through its length and breadth (Gen. 13.17) and residing in it (Gen. 26.3),14 the latter becomes a spatial metaphor of ethnic identity, inseparable from Israel’s idea of ‘self ’. The Jacob narrative repeatedly associates this land with the patriarch, first as the realm of his immediate experience (‘the land that you are lying on’, Gen. 28.13), then as the land of his fathers (Gen. 31.3), his native

13. See Exum, Fragmented Women, 86–90. Exum notes that, while the proper wife must come from Haran, the husband may not live uxorilocally – with the wife’s family – ‘because it would take the rightful heir out of the land promised to his lineage (loss of residence) but also because such an arrangement could result in Abraham’s lineage being swallowed up by the woman’s family (loss of descent)’ (86–7). The narrative therefore resolves the issue of descent and residence in favour of the husband. 14. See Blenkinsopp, The Pentateuch, 100–1.

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land (Gen. 31.13) and later simply as ‘his land’ (Gen. 32.10). In Jacob’s vision at Bethel this land and the house of his father are indicated as his final destination, the ultimate goal of his journey ‘there and back’ (Gen. 28.15). Therefore, although Jacob will remain in the narrative until Gen. 49.33, as a subject he is acquitted in Gen. 37.1 with the achievement of his goal, ‘And Jacob lived in the land of his father’s sojournings, the land of Canaan.’ Notably, Jacob only becomes aware of the land when he is about to depart from it. The land as a spatial concept has not been mentioned in the story of his early years or in the account of the stolen blessing.15 In the Bethel vision, the land therefore appears as the ‘lost’ land that needs to be regained. It comes in conjunction with the concept of the father, who is at this point similarly ‘lost’. Ironically, the protagonist who has just deceived his father and is fleeing from his house receives a promise of the land from Yahweh, the God of his fathers (Gen. 28.13), and sees his flight as part of the journey back to his father’s house (Gen. 28.21). At the opposite pole from the father’s land stands Haran in Paddan-Aram, the land of Jacob’s mother. Here, the association with Rebekah is not merely implicit; Jacob comes to be in Haran precisely on her account. It is Rebekah who arranges the removal of her favourite son from the father’s house and his sojourn with her relatives. Jacob’s exile in Haran is both an indirect consequence of her trick with the blessing and a direct implementation of her wish for him to take a wife from among her family. Both through narrative causality and by association, Haran for Jacob is the mother’s place. Haran’s significance as mother’s land is not limited to Jacob’s relationship with Rebekah. In the patriarchal narratives, this is the land of other mothers: Leah and Rachel also come from Haran and Sarah, the first matriarch, is brought to Haran and stays there before the family moves to Canaan (Gen. 11.31). This association with the mother does not, however, detract from Haran’s primary significance as the country of Abraham and his kin.16 It is the place where Terah’s clan resides at the time of Abraham’s call and which, later in the narrative, becomes associated with Abraham’s brother Nahor, from whose lineage come Rebekah, Leah and Rachel (cf. ‘the city of Nahor’, Gen. 24.10). In Gen. 24.4 Abraham sends his servant to procure a bride for Isaac from Abraham’s own land and parentage in Haran. Arranging for his son to marry within his kin, Abraham re-establishes the model of endogamy apparent in his own marriage with his half-sister. From that point on, Haran becomes a ‘pool’ of endogamous brides, carrying a double connotation of sameness and difference. Ethnically, it serves to secure ‘pure’ Abrahamic identity, allowing at the same time a degree of controlled difference in the gendered ‘other’, necessary for the narrative dynamic to unfold.

15. The reference to ‘eres. in the expression ‘the fatness of the earth’ (Gen. 27.28) has to do with fertility of the soil rather than spatiality. 16. Blenkinsopp quotes archaeological evidence that links the names of Terah, Haran and Nahor to the names of settlements in the region of Harran in Upper Mesopotamia or Aram-naharaim (Abraham, 28, 31). In a different strand of the narrative, the same area is referred to as Paddan-Aram (cf. Gen. 25.20; 28:2-7; 33.18).

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In contrast to the clear and positive symbolism of father’s land, the metaphor of mother’s land is fraught with ambiguity. On the one hand, the narrative shows it as a negative reality, a land of bondage and exile, the taboo land that Jacob’s father Isaac was never allowed to enter (Gen. 24.6-8). It brings Jacob a twenty-year-long servitude in the house of his uncle, the exact opposite to the future he had been promised as the one who would be served by the others (cf. Gen. 25.23; 27.29, 40).17 The exile in the land of his mother imposes on Jacob a symbolic punishment for his misdeeds, for here Jacob the deceiver is deceived ‘ten times’ by Laban (Gen. 31.7). At the level of the overall plot, the negative connotation of the mother’s land serves to express and balance out the tensions created back in the father’s land. In this its function is expiatory. On the other hand, during his exile Jacob is blessed in all other respects, as his family and his possessions grow in abundance. Fertility is a dominant feature of this land where women come from. Here the father’s promise of ‘the fatness of the earth and abundance of grain and wine’ (Gen. 27.28), received back in Canaan, comes to realization and Jacob himself will say on the way back from Haran: ‘God has been gracious to me and I have all I need’ (Gen. 33.11). At another level, Jacob’s wealth acquired in Haran mediates the resolution of the main conflict of the narrative: in Gen. 33.11 Jacob symbolically returns the stolen blessing by sharing his possessions with his brother Esau. The metaphor of mother’s land is therefore simultaneously experienced by the subject as two contrasting realities, as punishment and exile as well as fruitfulness and fulfilment. The ambiguous symbolism of mother’s land is further amplified when PaddanAram, the destination of Jacob’s flight, is described as ‘the land of the sons of the east’ (Gen. 29.1).18 This description is geographically problematic, but, as Robert Sacks comments, the specific geographical location of the land ‘may not be as important as its ambiguous character’, which arises from the ambivalence of the term qerem, ‘east’.19 As it was previously mentioned, the biblical concept of the east carries two sets of connotations. On the one hand, from the onset of the Genesis narrative, east is named as the location of the garden of Eden: ‘Yahweh God had planted a garden in Eden, in the east’ (Gen. 2.8). The obvious feminine symbolism of the garden with the tree of life in the middle and the four rivers flowing from it is consistent with the fertility aspect of the mother’s land. By placing Haran in the east, the narrator adds to it a connotation of life-giving. On the other hand, as Martin Hauge has observed, in the wider context of Genesis the movement towards the east is repeatedly associated with the losing party, the outcasts, the exiles, so that the land of the east comes to symbolize defeat and separation from the promise.20 Thus, the cherubim are placed ‘in the east of the garden of Eden’

17. See Turner, Genesis, 129. 18. Elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, the phrase ‘sons of the east’ refers to the tribes of the eastern regions hostile towards the Israelites (cf. Judg. 6.3, 33; 7.12; 8.10; Jer. 49.28). 19. Robert Sacks, ‘The Lion and the Ass: A Commentary on the Book of Genesis (Chapters 25–30)’, Int 10 (1982): 304. 20. Martin R. Hauge, ‘The Struggles of the Blessed in Estrangement’, StTh 29 (1975): 15.

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after hā ’ā dā m is driven out of it in Gen. 3.24. Later, the east becomes the ‘land of wandering’ of Cain and his descendants (Gen. 4.16), the location of the tower of Babel (Gen. 11.2), the direction in which Lot goes on the way to Sodom (Gen. 13.11) and the place to which Abraham sends away his sons by Keturah (Gen. 25.6). Stephen Sherwood points out the irony of Jacob’s situation, where he, the victor in the conflict with his brother, must travel to the east, the land of exile and defeat and the destination of the deselected brothers.21 It seems that the tension between the negative and positive connotations of mother’s land in the Jacob narrative reflects the ambivalent role the narrator ascribes to the feminine. Borrowing Exum’s wordplay, mother’s place stands for other’s place.22 Her land is constructed as a realm of alterity, of symbolic inversions, of the intuitive, the unconscious and the fertile – a tendency that can be illustrated by a number of concepts or narrative elements found almost exclusively in the Haran episode. These elements include fertility, meeting at the well, sexual relations, mandrakes, night-time, dreaming, household gods and divination. As mentioned above, fertility is the dominant theme of the Haran episode. Unparalleled in the Bible, the long account of a childbearing race, in which Jacob’s wives and concubines give birth to his twelve children, receives a particular emphasis, since it stands at the compositional centre of the episode and the entire cycle (Gen. 29.31–30.24). Fertility (or the lack of it) is emphasized here as the main aspect of characterization of Jacob’s wives. It is at stake in the rivalry between Rachel and Leah and in Rachel’s conflict with Jacob (Gen. 30.1-2) and a conferral of fertility is implied in Rachel’s purchase of mandrakes (Gen. 30.14-16). Significantly, most instances of childbearing in the cycle are found in the Haran episode, with the exception of the births of Jacob and Esau at the beginning of the cycle (Gen. 25.21-26) and the birth of Benjamin at the end (Gen. 35.16-18). The same theme of fertility is central to the story of Jacob’s sheep-breeding in Gen. 30.25-43. Here Jacob gets the upper hand over Laban by controlling animal reproduction. It is unclear how exactly, in the narrator’s view, Jacob’s herdsmanship brings about the desired result, for his techniques could be regarded as the practice of magic as much as traditional skills based on experience.23 However, in the context of his trickery back in Canaan, where the reader was fully aware of the

21. Stephen K. Sherwood, ‘Had God Not Been on My Side’: An Examination of the Narrative Technique of the Story of Jacob and Laban Genesis 29,1–32,2 (European University Studies 23, 400; Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1990), 34. 22. Exum, Fragmented Women, 69–114. 23. There is disagreement among scholars as to the character of Jacob’s operations with the sheep. Thomas Thompson, among others, defines them as ‘imitative magic’ (‘Conflict Themes in the Jacob Narratives’, Semeia 15 [1979]: 19). By contrast, Vawter suggests that Jacob’s methods were quite scientific for their time, considering a ‘notion of how prenatal influences can be transmitted to fetal life’ (On Genesis, 332). Westermann expresses a middle view, regarding Jacob’s artifice as a sign of an ‘earlier transition from magical to scientific thinking’ (Genesis 12–36, 483).

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rational mechanism of the deception, it would be appropriate to assume an equally rational procedure, engaging the natural forces of reproduction. Meeting at the well. This recurrent motif in the biblical narrative that has become known as the ‘betrothal type-scene’ describes a situation where the hero, or his envoy, meets his future bride at a well in a foreign land (24.10-61; 29.1-20; Exod. 2.15b-21).24 As Robert Alter points out, the well is a recognized symbol of fertility and generally a female symbol, reinforced by its association with the foreign land as a ‘geographical correlative for the sheer female otherness of the prospective wife’.25 Significantly, the first thing that Jacob does in the land of his mother is roll off a stone that was blocking the well to draw water, opening the stored life-giving forces of the land and, symbolically, of woman (Gen. 29.10). His action aims at watering the flocks, with the verb š ā qā h, ‘to water’, used five times in Gen. 29.2, 3, 7, 8, 10. The connotation of fertility is linked to another instance of š ā qā h in Gen. 30.38, where Jacob practises his sheep-breeding by the watering troughs (š iqatô t). Sexual relations. With such a strong emphasis on fertility it is not surprising that six out of the seven references to sexual relations in the Jacob cycle belong to the Haran episode (Gen. 29.23, 30; 30.4, 15, 16, 16). The only sexual reference outside Haran, found at the end of Jacob’s return journey to Canaan, concerns the illegitimate relationship of Reuben and his father’s concubine Bilhah (Gen. 35.22). Legitimate sexual expression between Jacob and his wives is therefore limited to the mother’s land. Mandrakes. In the middle of the childbearing race between Jacob’s wives, Rachel trades a night with Jacob to Leah in exchange for a mysterious plant dû dā ’î m (Gen. 30.14-16). While the text throws little light on the exact use of the plant, it is apparent that the characters believe it to be conferring fertility. The plant has been associated with the mandrake because of the latter’s well-known aphrodisiac properties. Night-time. Remarkably, there is no reference to night-time in the whole account of Jacob’s stay with his father in Canaan.26 By comparison, in the story of Jacob’s exile in Haran the term laylā h, ‘night’, appears seven times (Gen. 30.15, 16; 31.24, 29, 39, 40, 42, 54) and is also implied in Gen. 29.23-25. At night Laban deceives Jacob, swapping his daughters, at night Leah receives Jacob, having purchased him for mandrakes, at night God speaks to Laban in a dream. In addition, the theophanies of Bethel and Penuel that frame the Haran episode both take place by night (Gen. 28.11; 32.23). Notably, the previous time that events took place in Haran, in the episode of the wooing of Rebekah in Genesis 24, the narrator made it imperative for Abraham’s servant to spend the night in the house of Rebekah’s mother (the word ‘night’ is mentioned here three times, Gen. 24.23, 25, 54).

24. See Culley, Studies in the Structure of Hebrew Narrative (Philadelphia and Missoula: Fortress and Scholars, 1976), 41–3; Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, 47–62. 25. Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, 52. 26. The only exception is found in Gen. 26.24, where God appears to Isaac the night he returns from Gerar. Although the episode belongs to the Jacob cycle, this instance is not directly related to Jacob, who is not mentioned in the entire chapter.

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Dreams. As elsewhere in the patriarchal narratives, dreaming in the Jacob cycle is a numinous experience, a communication from the deity concerning the patriarch. In the first dream that Jacob has at Bethel, on the way to Haran, Yahweh renews the Abrahamic promise and declares the patriarch’s future return to his father’s house (Gen. 28.10-22). In the second dream, while he is still in Haran, God explicitly orders him to return (‘leave this land and return to the land of your fathers and to your kin’, Gen. 31.3; cf. 31.13). The text limits Jacob’s kin (mô ledet) to the immediate family back in Canaan and thus excludes the mother’s side of the family from Jacob’s kinship.27 It is interesting that in the language of Jacob’s visions Haran is qualified only in a negative way, as a state of separation from the father’s land, a finite and transitory stage of Jacob’s journey there and back. At Bethel, Haran is not mentioned at all, being concealed by the broad term ‘this journey’, Gen. 28.20. Communicating the perspective of the promise, Jacob’s dreams stress the hero’s dissociation from the mother’s land, a profane space, contrasting it to the sacred space of Canaan, the land of his fathers.28 Apart from Jacob, Laban is the only other person whose dream is recounted in the narrative (‘God came to Laban the Aramean in a dream by night and said to him, “Take care not to speak to Jacob either good or bad”,’ Gen. 31.24; cf. 31.29). Here the communication from God has an entirely different character: this dream conveys the idea of separation, setting a limit to further interaction between Laban, the bearer of the mother’s lineage and the future patriarch. The narrator highlights the idea of separation by using the term ’arammî , ‘Aramean’, to stress the foreignness of Laban (cf. also Gen. 31.20). By contrast, the preceding references to Laban in Gen. 27.43; 28.2, 5; 29.10, 10, 10 introduced him as a relative, the brother of Rebekah. At the end of Jacob’s stay in the mother’s land, the initial affinity with his mother’s brother gives way to the latter’s otherness as a foreigner. Jacob and Laban’s dreams, the only instances of God’s communication in Haran, serve the same purpose, facilitating the hero’s return to Canaan and severing his links with the mother’s lineage. Household gods. The foreignness of the mother’s land is further emphasized by its religious alterity, expressed in the reference to Laban’s household gods (terā pî m).29 In the narrative, the god figurines mediate a conflict between Laban’s authority

27. H. Haag, ‘‫’ מוׄלֶדֶת‬, TDOT VIII, 162–7. This issue may be resolved if, following Herbert Haag, one considers the primary meaning of mô ledet to be ‘place of birth, native land’ and not ‘kindred’ as such (‘mô ledet’, TDOT XIII, 165). In this case, God’s order in Gen. 31.3 should be understood as ‘return to the country of your fathers and of your birth’. Although DCH V, 174–5 translates mô ledet first as ‘birth’ or ‘birthplace’ and only then as ‘kindred’ or ‘offspring’, it renders the phrase in Gen. 31.3 as ‘go back to your kindred’. 28. Michael Fishbane has interpreted the opposition between Canaan and Haran as a dichotomy of sacred and profane (‘Composition and Structure in the Jacob Cycle [Gen. 25:19–35:22]’, JJS 26 [1975]: 36. 29. The meaning and usage of the terā pî m will be discussed in more detail in the section ‘The Father’s Gods and the Way of Women’.

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and his younger daughter Rachel’s quest for power. By stealing her father’s terā pî m, Rachel undermines his authority, an offence that is further aggravated when they are implicitly defiled by menstrual blood (Gen. 31.33-35). The narrator clearly shows the superiority of the God of Jacob’s fathers over the gods of Laban in the final dispute between the two men in Genesis 31. The play on the word ’elō hî m, ‘gods, God’, sets off the difference in the presentation of the two sides of the dispute. Here the short references to Laban’s gods as objects (‘why did you steal my gods’, v. 30; ‘anyone with whom you find your gods’, v. 32) contrast with the elaborate formulas describing the God of Jacob, all of which include a reference to the father (‘the God of your father’, v. 29; ‘the God of my father, the God of Abraham and the fear of Isaac’, v. 42; ‘the God of Abraham and the God of Nahor, the God of their father’, v. 53). In this dispute the God of Jacob’s fathers wins and Jacob removes his family from his mother’s land, but an element of alterity lingers with them: the terā pî m, which Rachel stole from Laban, stay in the possession of the group until the end of their journey, when at Yahweh’s command all the ‘foreign gods’ are put away at Shechem (Gen. 35.2-4). The removal of the idols, accompanied by a ritual purification, means that Jacob can affirm his fidelity to the God of his fathers and receive the Abrahamic promise at Bethel (Gen. 35.6-15). Divination. It is likely that household gods or terā pî m were used for the purpose of divination (cf. the references to terā pî m as an object of divination in 1 Sam. 15.23; Ezek. 21.26; Zech. 10.2). In Gen. 30.27 Laban learns by taking omens (nḥ š ) that God has blessed him because of Jacob.30 This detail implies that the gods that are supposedly used for divination are subordinate to the higher deity who alone can issue blessings. The above features of the mother’s land appear as signifiers of alterity, through which the andro- and ethnocentric narrator constructs a complex, if biased, metaphor of the feminine. The mother’s land is the symbolic space of the subject’s transformation, a shadow-land where Jacob, the male hero, a bearer of the patriarchal promise, or the conscious self, has to be enslaved, submitted, abjected, to allow the other side of reality to manifest itself. Jacob’s exile resembles a mythic journey to the ‘other side’, the Jungian ‘night journey’ or a symbolic death, which effects a transformation, endowing the hero with a new identity. In this way the main contradiction of the cycle is mediated: Jacob is abjected from the father’s land and the promise and can only come back as Israel having lived through the expiatory experience in his mother’s land. One might observe the gradual erasing of the mother’s presence towards the end of Jacob’s journey. With the disposal of the ‘other’ gods and Jacob’s building an alter to the God who ‘appeared to him when he fled from his brother’ (Gen

30. This is a traditional interpretation of the Hebrew. See Ann Jeffers, Magic and Divination in Ancient Palestine and Syria (Studies in the History and Culture of the Ancient Near East 8; Leiden/New York/Kö ln: E. J. Brill, 1996), 76. Wenham, Genesis 16–50, 255, opposes the idea thinking it would be ‘unlikely that Laban would have resorted to divination when he was prospering’.

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35.6-7), the narrative has turned full circle, placing the subject – who has been transformed and now bears the name of Israel – back in the father’s land. In this context the narrator reports the deaths of two women – Rebekah’s nurse Deborah and Jacob’s wife Rachel. The puzzling mention of Deborah in Gen. 35.8 is the only time the text names the nurse, who accompanied Rebekah on her journey from Haran to Canaan (Gen. 24.59). It is not clear at what point and why Rebekah’s nurse would have joined Jacob’s family – and Westermann considers it ‘beyond comprehension’ that she did31 – but her death report has a clear narratological role. It simultaneously brings in the context of Rebekah’s initial journey from Haran and indicates the end of her narrative programme. This seemingly superfluous detail serves to mark the final departure of Jacob’s mother, whose own death is never reported and who will never appear in the narrative again except in the passing mention of her being buried in the ancestral grave at Macpelah (Gen. 49.31). The furtive erasing of Rebekah’s presence (and of her death) in Gen. 35.8 is followed by an explicit departure of another mother figure. In Gen. 35.16-20 Rachel, the second wife of Jacob, dies giving birth to his younger son Benjamin. Unlike the rest of the matriarchs, Rachel dies and is buried in transition (‘on the way to Ephrath’) before the family reaches the home of Jacob’s father. The symbolic departure of the mother, communicated by the two death reports, accompanies and is, arguably, a condition of the subject’s re-emergence from the ‘other side’. After Jacob’s return, there will be no more powerful mothers in Genesis. Equally, there will be no more discourse of succession. The story of Israel’s forefathers culminates with Jacob’s becoming Israel and the subsequent Joseph narrative will focus on the preservation of the clan rather than on the construction of its identity – a process in which the otherness of the mother is an unacknowledged prerequisite. In this light, it is significant that Jacob receives the name of Israel and becomes the eponymous father of the nation on the way back from Haran. The new name reflects the struggles of the subject on both sides of the ‘looking glass’: Jacob is called yiś rā ’ē l as the one who ‘has striven (ś ā rā h) with God and with men and has prevailed’ (Gen. 32.29). The naming speech conceals the mother’s agency, positing the male identity of both God (’elō hî m) and men (’anā š î m) as Jacob’s opponents. Women in the patriarchal narratives do not rise to the status of opponent and function as unacknowledged mediators in the transformations of the male subject. Thus, the crucial mediation of Jacob’s mother, omitted in his name, is acknowledged only implicitly in the fact that his struggles against men, instigated by her and resolved in her land, become the foundation of his new identity as Israel. The above discussion may throw some light on the logic behind Jacob’s expulsion in the larger context of the patriarchal narratives. In the stories of Abraham and Isaac, the ‘other’ brother (Lot and Ishmael) is removed at the beginning of the story, while the chosen heir remains in the land and symbolically appropriates it, walking through its length and breadth, building altars, digging wells and harvesting rich crops. The temporary sojourns of Abraham and Isaac in Egypt and

31. Westermann, Genesis 12–36, 552.

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Gerar are voluntary and happen for economic reasons. By contrast, Jacob – the eponymous ancestor and a narrative representation of Israel – is abjected from the land of his fathers and for most of the narrative endures bondage in his mother’s land, while his rival brother Esau remains in Canaan. Only at the very end of the cycle the brothers will assume what in Genesis is seen as normative spatial positions, with the younger in the land and the elder outside the land. From a narratological perspective, the unprecedented abjection of the subject in the Jacob story could be linked to the very nature of his attempt to play or even become the other, claiming the identity of the firstborn. At a certain level, Jacob’s exile is not so much a result of poetic justice for his wronging his brother (the narrative, after all, is teleologically and not ethically oriented), as a retaliation by the narrative psyche for his ultimate fault – his declaration, ‘I am Esau, your firstborn’, in which the chosen and the non-chosen identities dangerously converge. In this logic, Jacob has to leave because, symbolically, he has become ‘firstborn’ and thus has to undergo the process of being othered. In the end, although the narrative valorizes Jacob’s conflicted path, it stresses that his election comes not from the usurped blessing and birthright but through God’s promise.

Rebekah’s Plot Among the figures of the matriarchs engaged in ‘building up the house of Israel’, Rebekah’s is a special place. She ensures the patrilineal succession through her younger son Jacob against the will of her husband and in the process appears discerning, resourceful, determined and altogether more powerful than Isaac, whom she outshines on more than one occasion. Most importantly, Rebekah’s actions are aligned with Yahweh’s implicit purpose, be it her betrothal to Isaac or the election of her younger son. With all these traits, Rebekah appears, as Fewell and Gunn have noted, ‘most clearly the daughter of Eve’ of all the women in Genesis.32 The narrator shows Rebekah’s significance as a character by the unique amount of narrative space dedicated to her introduction. She first appears outside the Jacob narrative in the detailed account of her betrothal in Genesis 24. In Gen. 24.4 the old and frail Abraham orders his servant to find a wife for his son in his land (’ereṣ ) and among his kin (mô ledet), a movement that reverses the patriarch’s own initial departure from his homeland (Gen. 12.1; cf. 24.7). The order is accompanied by two taboos – on Isaac marrying a Canaanite woman and on his entering the land of his father – which demonstrate the tension inherent in the subject’s ethnocentric agenda of maintaining pure descent with staying in the land, owned by others. In Turner’s words, this tension is solved ‘by remaining here but marrying from there’.33

32. Fewell and Gunn, Gender, Power, and Promise, 72. 33. Turner, Genesis, 100.

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Rebekah’s choice as a bride for Isaac is thus predetermined by the need to reproduce the homogenous Abrahamic identity in the next generation. But the narrator’s endogamic agenda in itself does not warrant the level of foregrounding received by Rebekah in the episode. Even before she comes on stage, the narrative forecasts her as a subject, for Abraham’s commission hangs on her willingness to leave her land and family (Gen. 24.8), an attitude that she will demonstrate in full. She passes the servant’s test, giving him to drink and watering his camels, offers him hospitality, runs to tell her family about the guest and, crucially, agrees to go with Abraham’s envoy to the unknown land to marry the man she has never met. Throughout the episode, the servant’s choice of Rebekah and her own actions are aligned with God’s design, with repeated references to Yahweh and his messenger as the real agents of the betrothal.34 Rebekah’s willingness to leave her land and kin in response to the divine call resonates with Abraham’s own obedience to the similar call in Gen 12.1-5, which the patriarch recalls to the servant (Gen. 24.7).35 Furthermore, Rebekah’s journey from Haran to Canaan physically retraces the steps of the patriarch. She seems to be modelled on Abraham even in the family blessing she receives upon her departure: echoing the Abrahamic promise of a multitude of descendants, she is to become ‘thousands of ten thousands’ and the wish ‘may your offspring possess the gate of those who hate them’ almost exactly repeats the promise made to Abraham in Gen. 22.17.36 Being loaded with Abrahamic context makes Rebekah’s position as a matriarch ambivalent. On the one hand, as a ‘right’ wife, she is needed to maintain the family structure and she readily fills the gap left by the death of Sarah in her tent and in Isaac’s mind (Gen. 24.67). On the other hand, her expansive introduction goes beyond the demands of endogamy, emphasizing her divine election and personal choice, modelled on that of Abraham. It would appear that ageing Abraham’s concern in Genesis 24 is not merely to find a wife for his son but to appoint, in her person, his own symbolic successor.37 Narratologically, this compensates for the weak and passive character of the next patriarch, Isaac, whose misguided affections will need to be counteracted by Rebekah in Genesis 27 in order to ensure the right succession. The role of Rebekah in the following scenes will demonstrate

34. For Westermann, the theme of God’s providence distinguishes Genesis 24 from the other instances of the ‘meeting at the well’ type-scene in Genesis 29 and Exodus 2 (Genesis 12–36, 383–4). 35. Cf. van Wolde, ‘Telling and Retelling: The Words of the Servant in Genesis 24’, in Synchronic or Diachronic? A Debate on Method in Old Testament Exegesis, ed. Johannes C. de Moor (Oudtestamentische Studien 34; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995), 235–6. On the parallels between Rebekah and Abraham see also Fewell and Gunn, Gender, Power, and Promise, 73. 36. See Wenham, Genesis 16–50, 151. Following Gunkel and Strus, Wenham sees here a play on the name ribqā h and the word rebā bā h, ‘ten thousand’, which links up with the Abrahamic promise of multiplying (cf. the root rbh in Gen. 17.2; 22.17). 37. Susanne Gillmayr-Bucher makes this point in ‘The Woman of Their Dreams: The Image of Rebekah in Genesis 24’, in The World of Genesis, ed. Davies and Clines, 94–5.

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her structural ambivalence as a matriarch endowed with some of the features of the first patriarch. Following the death of Abraham in Gen. 25.7-10, complications arise straightaway, threatening the birth of Isaac’s heir with the initial infertility of Rebekah (Gen. 25.21). From the outset, Rebekah is presented in close parallel to Isaac, but is accorded a much higher degree of subjectivity. Both Isaac and Rebekah address Yahweh regarding Rebekah’s womb: Isaac, when he entreats Yahweh to lift her sterility and Rebekah, when, in response to Isaac’s prayer, Yahweh grants her excessive fertility and the children jostle in her womb. But while the narrator goes quickly over Isaac’s matter-of-fact supplication (‘ā tar), Rebekah receives more attention as a subject who searches (dā raš ) for the meaning of her experience. She asks, ‘If this is so, why is this me (lā mmā h zeh ’ā nō kî )?’ (Gen. 25.22). This phrase deserves closer attention. The Hebrew text is uncertain,38 and most translations conceal its juxtaposition of the words zeh, ‘this’, and ’ā nō kî , ‘I’.39 In Rebekah’s question, the use of the personal pronoun ’ā nō kî in its full form, instead of the suffixed form lî , ‘to me’ (cf. Gen. 27.46), seems to put an additional stress on Rebekah herself. Could it be that her question ‘why?’ concerns primarily that ‘I’, in other words, herself and her role as a subject and not the things happening to her (zeh, the babies jostling)? Could it mean ‘why is it I and what am I to be in relation to this?’ If this were the case, the answer that she gets from God would have far more serious consequences. The translation ‘why is this happening to me?’ implies that Rebekah seeks a divine oracle to know why her babies are fighting inside her and so she learns about their different destinies, which do not seem to have much to do with her. But if we accept the emphasis on ’ā nō kî and translate the phrase as ‘why is this I’, Rebekah appears to be asking about her own role in the situation and the answer she receives tells her what she is to do. Since the oracle twice refers to Rebekah as the origin of the two nations (‘in your womb’ and ‘from within you’), could it imply her participation in their formation? If so, Rebekah is expected not only to give birth to her twins but also to ensure that ‘the older will serve the younger’. It seems that the text of Gen. 25.22-23 allows both readings, giving Rebekah an unparalleled role in the narrative: being endowed with the knowledge of forthcoming events, she now has the responsibility for bringing them about. The situation is even more unusual since, in the patriarchal narratives, it is normally the father who receives the revelation: God’s promise is reiterated on different occasions to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Hagar, Sarah’s Egyptian maid, is the only other woman in Genesis who, like Rebekah, receives a revelation from

38. Skinner maintains that it is ‘not quite intelligible’ (Commentary on Genesis, 359; see also Speiser, Genesis, 22). Alter describes Rebekah’s speech as ‘terse to the point of being elliptical’ and suggests that it might even be ‘construed as a broken-off sentence: Then why am I… ?’ (Alter, Genesis, 127). 39. Cf. ‘If it is to be this way, why do I live?’ (NRSV); ‘Why is this happening to me?’ (NIV); ‘If this is the way of it, why go on living?’ (JB).

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God concerning her child (Gen. 16.8-12; cf. 21.17-18).40 The narrative function of that particular revelation is to bring Hagar back to Abraham in order to ensure the future rivalry between his two sons and to emphasize through it the final election of Isaac. Unlike the insight Rebekah gets from the oracle, Hagar’s knowledge of her son’s destiny neither strengthens her position nor influences the following events. Each of the other matriarchal figures forms part of a rival pair – Sarah and Hagar, Rachel and Leah – and is engaged in a competition with a respective co-wife. Fuchs sees this arrangement as a narrative strategy that serves to increase the husband’s dominance over his wives.41 By contrast, Rebekah does not need to share her power with a co-wife, and, in a twist of plot, she takes on her husband, who becomes her rival over the choice of heir. Both her position of knowledge and her undivided power as an only wife contribute to the central role she plays in the scheme that upturns the institutional succession and ensures the inheritance of her younger son. The strife between Rebekah’s children, which started in her womb, is visually represented in their respective positions at birth (Gen. 25.25-26). Esau comes out first and marked out as different. His description as ’admô nî , ‘reddish’, and ś ē ‘ā r, ‘hairy’, plays on his other name Edom (’ edô m from the root ’dm, ‘to be red’) and on the word ‘Seir’ (ś ē ‘î r), the name of the territory, occupied by Edom (Gen. 32.4; 36.8). Both terms with their national connotations resonate with the oracle, which presented the children in Rebekah’s womb as two nations (Gen. 25.23). The wordplays make Esau’s visual difference iconic of his ethnic ‘otherness’ as an ancestor of Edom. Jacob is born second, grabbing the heel of his brother, a gesture to which Jacob owes his name ya‘aqō b (from ‘ā qē b, ‘heel’) and which epitomizes his future stance in the story as the one who ‘takes by the heel’ or ‘deceives’.42 Structurally, the manner of Jacob’s birth anticipates his active position as a subject, while Esau is objectified both through his visual difference (as the one being looked at) and by being the object of Jacob’s grabbing. The contrast between the boys deepens as they grow, suggesting Jacob’s cultural superiority: Esau becomes a hunter and ’î š ś ā deh, a ‘man of the wild’, and Jacob becomes ’î š tā m, a ‘perfect man’ who lives in tents (Gen. 25.27). What follows is a picture of growing discord within the family, as Isaac loves Esau for his tasty game and Rebekah loves Jacob. In Gen. 25.29-34 Jacob deliberately reverses the birth order, buying his brother’s birthright for a bowl of red pottage. Here the younger brother is motivated by the

40. A woman also receives the revelation in the birth account of Samson, Judges 13 and here, too, one might ask ‘why?’. On the positive role of Samson’s mother, see Exum, ‘Promise and Fulfilment: Narrative Art in Judges 13’, JBL 99 (1980): 43–59; and on the patriarchal interests served by this portrayal, see Exum, Fragmented Women, 42–7. 41. According to Fuchs, the biblical contest type-scene, associated with polygynous arrangement, serves to increase ‘the husband’s control over his wives because it permits him to play them off against each other’ (Sexual Politics, 157). 42. Cf. BDB, 784; DCH VI, 540–1.

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basic desire to take the place of the other, implicit in his initial gesture of clutching his brother’s heel. The narrator so far has been reticent about Isaac. Despite his pleading to Yahweh for a child in Gen. 25.21, there are no indications that the father of Esau and Jacob knows anything about the oracle. This reverses the pattern, familiar to the reader of Genesis, where a male character receives a revelation and acts on it, having neither consulted nor informed his female partner (cf. the stories of the call of Abraham in Genesis 12 and of his near sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22). By contrast, in Genesis 25–27 the mother Rebekah receives the revelation and loves her younger son Jacob, knowing all along that he is the child of the promise, while the father, Isaac, remains in the dark.43 Being ‘in the dark’ is a fitting metaphor to portray the position of ageing Isaac.44 He is old and frail and his eyes are now ‘too weak to see’ (Gen. 27.1). At another level, his physical blindness is paralleled by his intellectual and spiritual benightedness. In the narrative shaped by God’s promise, Isaac is placed on the margins. As a boy, he is a passive victim of a near sacrifice, a stake in the relationship between Yahweh and his father (Genesis 22). As a young man, he allows his father to arrange his marriage and stays by his mother’s tent, waiting for the bride to arrive from a distant land (Genesis 24). His version of the wife–sister ruse is a weaker replica of Abraham’s earlier stay in Gerar (Gen. 26.1-11; cf. Genesis 20). The only time when Isaac is acting independently is when he starts digging wells in Gerar, but even there the reader is told that the wells were originally dug by his father (Gen. 26.18-22). Having been overshadowed by his father to the point of becoming invisible,45 in Genesis 27 Isaac is deceived by his wife because of his own poor vision. He is lacking insight and his discernment is guided by sensory pleasures: he loves the hunter Esau because of the tasty game he brings (lit. ‘game in his mouth’) and trades his unique paternal blessing for a favourite dish.46 Yet, despite his physical frailty and apparent spiritual ineptitude, Isaac still possesses the institutional authority, which allows him to designate his favourite son as his successor. It is this authority that Rebekah will have to challenge in order that the

43. Jeansonne holds a similar view, looking at Rebekah’s feelings for Jacob in the context of the oracle in which his destiny has been revealed (The Women of Genesis, 63). Likewise, Fewell and Gunn find it hardly surprising that Rebekah should favour the son who has been chosen by God (Gender, Power, and Promise, 74). 44. Exum notes the two aspects of Isaac’s blindness, physical and metaphorical, in Fragmented Women, 108. 45. This observation, made by Fewell and Gunn with respect to Gen. 22.19 (Gender, Power, and Promise, 72), seems to apply to Isaac’s character throughout the narrative. 46. Jay suggests reading Isaac’s taste for game in sacrificial terms. Since the Bible presents game, as opposed to domestic animals, as non-sacrificial meat (Deut. 12.15), Isaac’s preference for game might be read as his refusal to sacrifice, ‘central to his loss of control of his line of descent’ (‘Sacrifice, Descent and the Patriarchs’, 62–3).

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oracle may be fulfilled. Ironically, in the narrative that is ‘everywhere patriarchal’,47 the Abrahamic promise can only be passed on to the chosen heir by subverting the patriarchal authority of the father. As is often the case with rivals, Rebekah has everything that Isaac lacks and vice versa. She is the one who sees and hears; she possesses both initiative and insight and is found in the centre of action. On the other hand, her social status is inferior and she cannot openly contradict the will of her husband. Inferior position, however, may hold some advantages. Being a woman, which means being largely unnoticed in the domestic world of the narrative, can make it easier for Rebekah to overhear the men talk (Gen. 27.5) and thus further strengthen her position of knowledge. Through Rebekah, the individual is contrasted to the institutional as a visionary to a visionless. Notably, the development of the conflict completely bypasses Isaac, who will eventually become aware of its outcome (Jacob getting the blessing) but not of its driving forces. This is reminiscent of the betrothal episode in Genesis 24, where Isaac was removed from the proceedings by the taboo on his entering Haran and remained ignorant until the outcome presented itself in the form of Rebekah arriving on a camel. In both stories, the reader is invited to see the story from Rebekah’s perspective, whereas Isaac’s perspective is virtually absent. In the larger context of Genesis, such positioning is reminiscent of the respective roles of the woman and hā ’ā dā m in Genesis 2–3, where the woman – the agent of the transformation – acts decisively on her knowledge and experience, whereas her husband remains a passive recipient of the final outcome, ignorant of its mechanism and logic. Christine Garside Allen argues that Rebekah is brought into relief by her contrast with wary and apathetic Isaac. Since the narrative presents Isaac as falling far short of an ideal patriarchal figure, Rebekah takes over what should be his functions, becoming ‘the necessary link between Abraham and Jacob’.48 The opposite, I would argue, is also true, as Isaac seems to be as predetermined for failure as Rebekah is for success. Starting with her betrothal, Rebekah’s compelling presence overshadows the story of Isaac and leaves him only a nominal role to play in establishing the succession. Having been modelled after Abraham, Rebekah de facto becomes head of the family, God’s confidant and a guardian of the promise and therefore, in Nelly Furman’s words, ‘ultimately disturbs the exclusively male genealogical lineage’.49 At another level, the contrast between Rebekah and Isaac extends to the structural division between the inside and the outside, presented through the

47. Jobling, The Sense of Biblical Narrative, 43. 48. Christine Garside Allen, ‘“On Me Be the Curse, My Son!”’, in Encounter with the Text. Form and History in the Hebrew Bible, ed. Martin J. Buss (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979), 168–9. 49. Nelly Furman, ‘His Story versus Her Story: Male Genealogy and Female Strategy in the Jacob Cycle’, in Feminist Perspectives on Biblical Scholarship, ed. Adela Yarbro Collins (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985), 114.

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different occupations of their sons. The two brothers belong to opposite realms: Esau, a hunter, is out in the fields, whereas Jacob, who stays in the tents, is in a position to cook meals (Gen. 25.29) and look after the cattle.50 On the whole, Jacob’s character does not seem to fit a dominant ‘male’ model. Is it because his affinities lie with his mother? Together, Rebekah and Jacob represent the subordinate, the interior and the non-institutional. The subordinate party uses the materials that belong to its sphere (pottage, goat meat, animal skins) to manipulate the immediate needs of the patriarchal pair (Esau’s hunger in Gen. 25.30, 32 and Isaac’s love of tasty game in Gen. 27.8-10) in order to subvert their dominance. In the story of the stolen blessing, Rebekah’s superior knowledge gives her the power to mastermind the events, give orders and fully control the situation. When she gives instructions to Jacob, she requires obedience: ‘Listen to my voice (š ema‘ beqō lî ) and do as I command you’ (v. 8) and again later, ‘Listen to my voice (š ema‘ beqō lî )’ (v. 13). Rebekah’s voice commands obedience because it mediates Yahweh’s will. One finds a similar example of mother’s voice being validated in the context of rivalry over succession in Gen. 21.12, where God orders Abraham, ‘Listen to Sarah’s voice (š ema‘ beqō lā h), because it is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned’. In both cases the mother plays a leading role in assuring the succession of the son whom God has already chosen. But the comparison with Sarah also helps one to notice the loneliness of Rebekah’s position. While Sarah – or, literally, her hand, which drives the oppression of Hagar, and her voice, which orders the expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael – has been publicly authorized by Yahweh (Gen. 16.9; 21.12), Rebekah’s mediation of God’s plan remains a private affair between her and God, who never interferes on her behalf. Unlike Sarah, Rebekah has just her own voice to go on and needs to demand her son’s obedience by her own authority. The distribution of roles between the mother and the son reflects Rebekah’s central position: in the preparations for the identity trick, Jacob is only his mother’s instrument. Their interests coincide in that they both want to win the blessing for Jacob, but they show different degrees of engagement in the action. Jacob is afraid to be found out and needs considerable encouragement. Rebekah, on the other hand, is determined and assumes full responsibility for deceiving her blind husband (‘On me be your curse, my son’, Gen. 27.13). Later in the narrative, Jacob too will gain insight into his destiny, but at this stage only Rebekah is aware of God’s plan for her son and so is solely responsible for carrying it out. To effect the transformation, Rebekah uses the objects of her realm, the household. She prepares the ‘tasty food’, maṭ ‘ammî m, that Isaac loves so much, not from wild game, but from young goats from the flock. She dresses Jacob in the

50. Here the text constructs an opposition between wild game, associated with the world ‘outside’, to which Esau belongs to and cattle or domesticated animals, which belong to the cultivated world ‘inside’, the shared domain of Jacob and Rebekah. For Jay’s comments on the sacrificial aspect of food in the narrative of Jacob and Esau see the note above. In Jay’s view, Rebekah’s replacing game with goat in Gen. 27.9-10; 13-14 connotes proper sacrificial practice (‘Sacrifice, Descent and the Patriarchs’, 62–3).

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clothes of Esau, which she had ‘in the house’ and covers his hands and his neck with goatskins to make Jacob resemble his hairy brother.51 In all these preparations Rebekah aims to deceive Isaac’s senses and in all of them she succeeds. The dish that Jacob brings to Isaac tastes like the food normally brought by Esau, and, as Isaac himself admits, Jacob smells and feels like his elder brother. In fact, the only part of the disguise that does not fool Isaac is the voice of Jacob, which Rebekah could not change but over which, in Isaac’s case, the taste takes priority. For Isaac, the taste is a decisive factor in allocating his love and blessing.52 Through this emphasis on the senses, the two opponents, Rebekah and Isaac, are contrasted even further. When the truth is discovered, the deceived father and son tremble and cry, but Rebekah never displays any emotions. In fact, had she been more ‘human’, had she shown any feeling for her frail husband or her cheated son, she would have failed Yahweh’s purpose. In contrast to Isaac’s sensory perception, Rebekah’s calculated knowledge comes from a theophany and is therefore posited as superior. Rebekah’s role is not exhausted by the deception alone and she reappears for one last time at the end of the episode in Gen. 27.41-46. Having won Isaac’s blessing for the son of promise, she now removes him from the father’s land, ordering him to flee from Esau’s revenge to her brother’s family in Haran (vv. 42-45). Her seemingly straightforward motives become less clear when, in the next verse, speaking to Isaac, she suggests that Jacob should get himself a wife from her parentage in Haran. Rebekah’s statement in v. 46 should be assessed against the report about the exogamous marriages of Esau and the ensuing displeasure of his parents in Gen. 26.34-35. Here the narrator stresses the Canaanite origin of Esau’s wives: ‘Judith, daughter of Beeri the Hittite and Basemath, daughter of Elon the Hittite’. This emphasis is taken further in v. 46, where Rebekah expresses in powerful terms her aversion to Hittite women: ‘If Jacob marries one of the Hittite women like these, one of the women of the land, what will life mean to me?’ Like the narrator in Gen. 26.34, Rebekah reiterates the word ḥ ē t, Heth, adding to it the apparently derogatory designation benô t hā ’ā reṣ , ‘women [daughters] of the land’. Rebekah’s words, which seem a deliberate overstatement, can also be read as a value judgement. The expression ‘what will life mean for me if … ’ implies an either-or situation, in which the two sides of the balance – Rebekah’s life and the right wife (or wives) for

51. Furman draws attention to the symbolism of women’s actions when they use men’s garments for their own personal ends. She groups together Rebekah, Potiphar’s wife and Tamar as the women who ‘use pieces of attire – which are the symbolic markers of the father-son relationship – to reinscribe themselves in the patriarchal system’. Furman points out that men in Genesis treat garments as a means of communication between men, while for women, ‘garments function as communicative devices between the sexes’ (‘His Story versus Her Story’, 114). Seen in this light, Rebekah’s ruse not only serves Yahweh’s purpose but also re-inscribes her as a subject into the exclusive father–son relationship. 52. Dennis Sylva speaks about Isaac’s being ‘led astray by the sensory focus of his life not only in how he treats his sons but also in his ability to discriminate them’ (‘The Blessing of a Wounded Patriarch: Genesis 27:1–40’, JSOT 32 [2008]: 271).

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Jacob – are symbolically equalized. Does this mean that she sees the purpose of her life in establishing the right succession based on endogamous marriage? The fact that, until now, she has been concerned with securing descent through the ‘right’ son supports her role as the one in charge of succession. However, since in the patriarchal household she has no authority to perform her role openly, she resorts to double communication. Rebekah shows remarkable mastery of communication. She did not say a word to Jacob about the daughters of Laban: as far as Jacob knows, his mother is providing him with a refuge from Esau. To Isaac, on the other hand, Rebekah says nothing about protecting Jacob from Esau’s revenge. It is understandable, since Isaac himself has enough reason to feel vengeful towards his younger son. Her speech, however, allows her to get a sanction from the patriarch for what she has already ordered to happen and she does it creating the illusion that he has all the agency. Brett calls Rebekah’s speech in Gen. 27.46 ‘an extraordinary successful case of indirect communication’.53 But what is her own point of view? Is she, as Brett suggests, exploiting Isaac’s dislike of Esau’s Hittite wives in order to get his permission for Jacob’s flight?54 Or is her primary motive obtaining the wife for Jacob from her own parentage? The whole of ch. 27, where Rebekah manipulates everyone including Jacob, does not offer any insight into what she really thinks or wants. She is the trickster, the puppeteer of the story, the one who plays on communication, upsetting and redressing the balance of power to suit her hidden motives. In a trickster story, any particular action, which in itself can be elusive and ambiguous, serves the story as a whole. Rebekah’s communication is deeply ambiguous because it serves the multiple causality of the narrative. Offering different versions of events to different people, Rebekah does not lie, but apportions information, deciding who needs to know what in order for the plot to go the way that it should. In this sense, she is a perfect instrument of the narrator whose double agenda includes reversing the right of primogeniture (Gen. 25.23) and assuring continued descent through the ‘right’ mother. Rebekah’s speech in Gen. 27.46 allows the reader to reconsider the logic of the entire episode, taking for a possible starting point not only Rebekah’s love of Jacob but also the taboo on exogamous marriage the narrative observes. One might argue that, even before his blessing was stolen, Esau had already excluded himself from the succession by marrying outside the parentage of Abraham. By orchestrating the events that lead to Jacob’s being blessed, Rebekah restores the endogamy of the chosen line. Her ambiguous actions are implicitly sanctioned in the narrative, because they serve the best interests of patriarchy. On her instigation, Isaac forbids Jacob to marry outside the family and sends him off to look for a bride among his mother’s kin: ‘You shall not take a wife from the daughters of Canaan. Go now to Paddan-Aram, to the house of Bethuel, your mother’s father;

53. See Brett, Genesis, 89. Turner describes Rebekah as a master of deception, able to ‘orchestrate events and yet remain undetected’ (Genesis, 122). 54. For Jeansonne, Rebekah in Gen. 27.46 not only avoids potential conflict but also ‘prompts Isaac to give Jacob an additional blessing’ (The Women of Genesis, 68).

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and take a wife for yourself from there, from among the daughters of Laban, your mother’s brother’ (Gen. 28.1-2). This statement echoes Abraham’s order issued earlier in Genesis concerning Isaac ‘You shall not take a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I live, but you will go to my country and to my kindred and get a wife for my son Isaac’ (Gen. 24.2-4). The change from ‘my country’ and ‘my kindred’ to ‘your mother’s father’ and ‘your mother’s brother’ signals an important shift of perspective between Abraham and Isaac. On the one hand, Haran is not Isaac’s land in the sense in which it is the land of Abraham and therefore he cannot call it ‘my country’; on the other hand, by referring twice to Jacob’s mother Isaac seems to admit Rebekah’s role in establishing succession while removing himself from all the agency. Thus Rebekah fulfils her purpose, ensuring the purity of the lineage continued through her younger son and simultaneously saving him from his brother’s vengeance. Her narrative function fulfilled, Rebekah disappears from the narrative and her name from now on will be mentioned mainly in connection with her brother, Laban. It seems unusual that the death of such an important character is not mentioned in the text, especially since the death and the burial place of her nurse Deborah are reported in Gen. 35.8 (cf. also the extended account of the death and burial of Sarah in Gen. 23.1-20 and the story of the death of Rachel in Gen. 35.16-20). Could it be an implicit reprisal of the androcentric world of the narrative on the powerful woman who succeeded in controlling its structures? If so, Rebekah’s disappearance may be interpreted in the light of the curse that she draws upon herself in the deception scene, deflecting it from Jacob (‘On me be the curse, my son’, Gen. 27.13).55 In this Rebekah is also a ‘daughter of Eve’. Like woman in the garden story, Rebekah is introduced in the narrative to fulfil an ambiguous purpose. The woman ensures the expulsion of hā ’ā dā m from the garden and Rebekah ensures the abjection of the chosen heir from the promised land – an unprecedented move the narrator introduces to resolve the question of the elder brother’s previous entitlement. Both outcomes are equally needed for the progression of the narrative and both are equally problematic, with the woman put simultaneously in the centre of action and at the centre of the blame. Like Eve before her, Rebekah is cursed, albeit implicitly – by silence. Like Eve, she gets her narrative punishment by being denied closure.56

Rachel, Leah and the Twists of God Placed at the centre of the Jacob cycle are the stories of the last generation of the matriarchs – Rachel and Leah. In comparison to Sarah and Rebekah before them,

55. Curses do not go unnoticed by the narrative psyche. Below I shall look at another example of a hypothetical curse finding its victim when Jacob unwittingly curses Rachel in Gen. 31.32. 56. On the lack of closure in the accounts of the matriarchs see Exum, Fragmented Women, 79–81.

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the wives of Jacob have a different function, since they are not responsible for choosing the ‘right’ successor. Being the last heir to the promise, Jacob completes the linear patriarchal succession based on a removal of the ‘other’ brother and from now on all the brothers will be included in the making of the nation. Accordingly, the two wives of Jacob are locked in a competition not over their sons but over their own status – Rachel as mother and Leah as wife. Their rivalry culminates in a childbearing race, in which they give birth to the twelve fathers of the Israelite tribes. From the outset, as Ilana Pardes has observed, Rachel has a narratological advantage over Leah.57 The narrative foregrounds Rachel as a chosen bride, introducing her in a type-scene ‘meeting by the well’ in close parallel to the betrothal of Rebekah (Gen. 29.1-12; cf. Genesis 24). The parallel is reinforced by the repeated references to Rebekah in the introductions of Laban (‘Laban, his mother’s brother’, v. 10), of Rachel (‘Rachel, the daughter of Laban, his mother’s brother’, v. 10) and of Jacob himself (‘the son of Rebekah’, v. 12). Sternberg sees here an ‘obvious example of how a redundant family attribution implies motive’.58 As argued above, Rebekah’s implicit presence in the scene serves to establish a continuity in the matriarchal succession, where each new bride comes to occupy the symbolic space of her predecessor once it becomes vacant: thus, Rebekah was taken into Sarah’s tent, and Rachel comes to Rebekah’s well, where she goes through the same ‘betrothal’ process. Jacob’s dramatic reaction to meeting Rachel – the superhuman strength he shows rolling the stone from the mouth of the well to water the flock of ‘his mother’s brother’ and his loud weeping as he kisses ‘the daughter of Laban, his mother’s brother’59 – is more likely to signify his recognition of reaching his mother’s symbolic space than express his immediate emotional attachment to Rachel, as has been suggested.60 In contrast to Rachel, Leah does not receive any introduction and appears alongside Rachel suddenly, halfway through the scene, as the elder daughter of Laban (Gen. 29.16). The opposition gedōlāh/qetannāh brings back the familiar tension between the elder and the younger siblings (cf. Gen. 27.15, 42) and is reinforced by the contrasting description of the sisters in Gen. 29.17. Here Leah’s unassuming features seem to set off the striking appearance of Rachel (‘Leah had weak eyes, but Rachel was beautiful in form and beautiful in appearance’, Gen. 29.17). With her exceeding

57. Ilana Pardes, Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 61. 58. Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, 538 n. 15. 59. Kissing in the Hebrew Bible is usually a sign of familial greeting or blessing involving two men. In the rare cases when a man kisses a woman, this expresses a greeting between father and daughter (Gen. 31.28; 32.1) or between son and mother (1 Kgs 19.20), with Song 1.2 the only example of erotic kissing (see Hamilton, The Book of Genesis: Chapters 18–50 [NICOT; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995], 256). 60. Hamilton sees Jacob’s reaction to seeing Rachel as ‘as instance of love at first sight’ (Genesis 18–50, 259).

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beauty, Rachel fits well into the model of the chosen bride, following Rebekah and Sarah before her, who were both described as beautiful (Gen. 12.11, 14; 24.16; 26.7). Rachel’s beauty explains Jacob’s feelings for her (‘and Jacob loved Rachel’, Gen. 29.18). In this respect, too, Rachel takes after Rebekah, who was loved by her husband (Gen. 24.67), but in Rachel’s case these features are intentionally exaggerated. Like Rachel’s exceeding beauty, the love Jacob feels for her is emphasized, being reiterated by the narrator throughout the scene (Gen. 29.18, 20, 30). Both of these elements are crucial to the plot, as they move Jacob to serve Laban for seven years to pay Rachel’s bride-price, launching the dynamic of his enslavement by his uncle. Both characterize Rachel as an object – of male gaze and male affection – used as a prize or a bait in a power conflict between men. Her own character and point of view for now remain hidden.61 In Genesis, parallel introductions of two rival characters are used as an important stylistic device. The introductions of Sarah and Hagar (Gen. 16.1) and Jacob and Esau (Gen. 25.25-26) not only contrast the respective rivals but also hold important clues to their roles in the unfolding story. Similarly, the reader might expect Leah’s ‘weak eyes’ to have some significance for the understanding of her character and function, just like the description of Rachel’s beauty explains Jacob’s feelings for her and sets off the dynamic of her story.62 Since sight and insight play a crucial role in the biblical construction of subjectivity, I would suggest that the description of Leah’s ‘weak eyes’ may hint both at her deficient insight and her weak position as a subject. One finds a similar example in the description of Isaac in Gen. 27.1: ‘Isaac was old and his eyes were too dim (khh) to see’. The root khh communicates the idea of growing faint, dull and therefore, like rak, has a connotation of weakness.63 In Isaac’s case, his poor physical sight, which allows Rebekah to carry out her plot, is symbolic of his declining mental and spiritual insight. Like his dimmed eyes, Isaac’s point of view in Genesis 27 is deficient and, therefore, inferior to that of Rebekah. Could the description of Leah’s weak eyes connote a similar deficiency?64 If so, Leah’s characterization might be expressive of the narrator’s strategy: undermining her as a seeing and thinking subject makes

61. Fuchs observes that the emphasis on Rachel’s appearance in Genesis 29 makes her characterization more schematic than that of Rebekah (cf. Gen. 24.16), as Rachel’s beauty ‘does not do much to illuminate her character, no more than do her silence and lack of distinctive action’ (Sexual Politics, 99). 62. Because another possible meaning of rak, ‘weak’, is ‘tender’, this detail of Leah’s appearance might also be mentioned to her advantage. Fewell and Gunn offer an attractive interpretation of v. 17a, reading ‘tender’ as ‘affective’ and deducing from that characteristic Leah’s ability to look rather that to be looked at and therefore her capability of affection and love (see Gender, Power, and Promise, 78). However, there is little semantic evidence for this interpretation, since the meaning of rak as ‘tender’ has the connotation of ‘delicate’ or ‘weak’ rather than ‘affective’ (BDB, 939–40; DCH VII, 486). 63. BDB, 462; DCH IV, 363. 64. For a discussion of the parallel between Leah and Isaac see Turner, Genesis, 128.

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it easier for the narrator to use her as a pawn in Laban’s deception. At a different level, in v. 17 the Hebrew word rakkô t, ‘weak’, is placed next to the name rā ḥ ē l, ‘Rachel’, and the phonetic link between the two words hints from the start of Leah’s story at her structural ‘encroaching’ on the identity of her younger sister. The construction of Rachel’s image as a chosen bride and her link to Rebekah is also supported by the context of Genesis 27. As indicated in Gen. 29.20, Jacob serves seven years for Rachel, but because of his love for her they seem to him keyā mî m ’aḥ ā dî m, ‘like a few days’. Strikingly, this is the expression that Rebecca uses when she sends Jacob to stay with her brother: ‘Stay with him for a few days (yā mî m ’aḥ ā dî m)’ (Gen. 27.44). In this way the narrative indirectly sanctions Jacob’s seven years of service – Rachel’s bride-price – as the length of time Rebekah wants him to stay in Haran to allow Esau’s anger to subside.65 In this version of events, at the end of the seven years, Jacob would have been free to marry Rachel and return home with his wife. His children would have then been born in Canaan, the land of his father. This scenario, however, does not take into account the weight of Jacob’s contentious past as a deceiver or offer him a possibility to be redeemed into Israel. For that to happen, another scenario has to come into play, featuring Laban and Leah. The story of Jacob’s flight to Haran, which links together the narrative strands Jacob-Esau and Jacob-Laban, is peppered by references to Laban, described as Rebekah’s brother (Gen. 27.43; 28.2, 5; 29.10, 10, 10; cf. 29.13). The persistent linking of Laban with Rebekah helps to establish Haran as Rebekah’s place. It also suggests structural parallels between the two characters. Laban shows himself a true brother of Rebekah when, on the night of the wedding, he substitutes his elder daughter Leah for his younger daughter Rachel. Like Rebekah, who played on Isaac’s blindness, Laban plays on Jacob’s lack of vision, using night-time darkness to conceal Leah’s identity. But while Rebekah as a mother aimed to win a blessing for her chosen son, Laban as a father does not act in the interests of either of his daughters and pursues only his own gain. As a result, in the weddingnight scene both sisters are deprived of subjectivity. On the one hand, Rachel is objectified through her absence. She is present nominally as a semiotic space for substitution but remains physically offstage – an unfulfilled narrative possibility, a ghost of a character without a voice or a point of view. We do not know whether Rachel returns Jacob’s feelings, whether she feels resentful towards her father and sister. Leah, though physically present, is also objectified, manipulated as a passive and anonymous body that serves men’s economic and sexual interests: ‘And he took his daughter Leah and gave her to Jacob and he went in with her’ (Gen. 29.23). There is a tension between Leah’s physical presence on the night, which for Jacob is only too real (‘and see, she was Leah’) and her absence as a real character, a subject, an intention. Used by Laban in his ploy to enslave Jacob, she is also ‘used’ by the narrator as an embodiment of birthright – an ironic reminder of Jacob’s conflict with his brother (cf. Gen. 29.26). In his identity trick, 65. Turner comments on the contextual implications of the expression yā mî m ’aḥ ā dî m in Gen. 29.20 in Genesis, 127–8.

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Laban inverts the plot of Genesis 27: the firstborn, bekî rā h, substituted here for the younger sister, becomes an instrument of poetic justice, a talionic punishment that Jacob receives for substituting his own bekô r, Esau.66 It is therefore hardly surprising that Leah is hated by her husband (Gen. 29.31, 33): for him she is a reminder of his own misdeeds and of the heavy retribution he received at the hands of her father. It is instructive to compare the symmetrical positions of Leah and Esau in the two instances of sibling substitution. They are the two firstborn in the Jacob story, institutionally privileged through their birthright. Ironically, on account of their privilege, both are, in the words of Turner, ‘in danger of being marginalized’,67 pushed out to the periphery of the narrative space with respect to their younger sibling. Both Leah and Esau are unloved by the central characters, who are aligned with God’s purpose: Leah is unloved by Jacob, who favours Rachel, while Esau is unloved by Rebekah, who prefers Jacob. Although Isaac is said to love Esau, the narrator qualifies this love as being conditional on Esau’s provision of game (lit. ‘Isaac loved Esau because of the game in his mouth’, Gen. 25.28). However, unlike Esau – the ‘other’ brother, who is cast as Edom and excluded from the promise – the ‘other’ wife Leah is included into the self of Israel. She is useful to Israel both narratologically and ideologically. Narratologically, she serves as an outlet for the bad conscience arising from Jacob’s deception: through her – an instrument of Jacob’s punishment – the narrative psyche frees itself from the necessity to make restitution to the deceived brother. Ideologically, Leah is useful to patriarchy as a mother who bears her husband’s offspring while having her own identity dissolved in his. By contrast, Esau, as a male bearer of identity (cf. his expansive genealogy in Genesis 36), represents a threat to Jacob’s lineage. Therefore the bekô r (Esau) has to leave the promised land and settle in the hill country of Seir (Gen. 36.6-8), whereas the bekî rā h (Leah) is incorporated into Israel as the mother of six of its twelve tribes and buried in the ancestral tomb with the patriarchs (Gen. 49.31). If Leah as bekî rā h parallels Esau, Rachel as qetannāh reflects the characterization of Jacob. Being a younger sister, her position with regard to institutions is inferior, but that same fact in the Jacob story carries a narratological advantage. Thus, like Jacob, the younger brother who becomes a chosen patriarch, the younger sister Rachel becomes a chosen bride, modelled on Rebekah, and is favoured by her husband (‘and Jacob loved Rachel more than Leah’, Gen. 29.30). Later in the narrative, Rachel’s importance for Jacob will be demonstrated in the scene of his meeting with Esau on the way back from Haran (Gen. 33.1-17). Here, Jacob, who fears a retaliation from his brother, protects Rachel and her son Joseph by placing 66. Jan Fokkelman sees the reversal of Jacob’s deception in Gen. 29.21-29 as an ‘absolutely fitting punishment’ (Jan P. Fokkelman, Narrative Art in Genesis: Specimens of Stylistic and Structural Analysis [Assen: Van Gorcum, 1975], 130). On the subject of poetic justice in Gen. 29.21-29 see also Alter, Genesis: Translation and Commentary, 155; Wenham, Genesis 16–50, 236–8; Brett, Genesis, 89, 92; Iain Provan, Discovering Genesis: Content, Interpretation, Reception (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 2015), 164. 67. Turner, Genesis, 128.

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them behind Leah and the maids with their children (v. 2). Consequently, Rachel and Joseph are the last to approach Esau, following the family groups of Bilhah, Zilpah and Leah (vv. 6-7). Elsewhere, when the wives of Jacob act together, Rachel’s name is mentioned before Leah’s (Gen. 31.4, 14). Rachel’s advantage over Leah triggers Yahweh’s response, which sets off the dynamic of rivalry between the sisters. In compensation for her being unloved (lit. ‘hated’, ś enû ’ā h),68 God ‘opens Leah’s womb’ and grants her fertility, while Rachel remains sterile (Gen. 29.31). The divine action demonstrates the biblical principle of ‘dual causality’, described by Yairah Amit.69 At the most immediate level, Yahweh reacts to Jacob’s bias, seeking to counterbalance it. With this, the sisters’ unequal status as wives is reversed in their hierarchy as mothers. Thus the neglected Leah obtains superabundant fertility and gives birth to six sons and a daughter as well as two more children by her maid and surrogate Zilpah (Gen. 29.32–30.21). Conversely, it is implied that Rachel’s sterility results from her being favoured by her husband. But there is another level to Yahweh’s motivation. As we have seen above, in the larger context of the patriarchal stories, the motif of sterile mother is linked with the concept of election. It ‘marks’ the future mother of the chosen heir and, by denying her natural fertility, posits the divine origin of the line. Thus, by depriving Rachel of fertility, Yahweh places her in the line of chosen matriarchs, which implicitly reinforces her structural privilege over Leah. From an institutional perspective, Leah’s status puts her above the ‘chosen’ Rachel. Leah takes her birthright as bekî rā h into her marriage when she becomes the first wife. Although unwanted by Jacob, she still has her rights protected by the establishment, since Jacob has to complete a bridal week with her before taking Rachel as his second wife (Gen. 29.27-28). Not only is Leah a firstborn daughter and a first wife, she also bears Jacob his first son, Reuben. Giving Jacob six sons, she more than fulfils her institutional duty and is, as she says in Gen. 30.20, honoured, if not by her husband, then at least by the patriarchal institution. It is notable that in the genealogical accounts of Jacob’s family, the names of Leah and her sons are mentioned before the names of Rachel, Joseph and Benjamin (Gen. 35.23-26; 46.8-25; cf. also 49.2-27).70 Finally, near the end of Genesis, in Gen. 49.31, the narrative will signal its approbation of Leah by mentioning that she, unlike Rachel, is buried together with Abraham, Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah in

68. Alter considers the term ś enû ’ā h in the light of Deut. 21.15-17 as a ‘technical, legal term for the unflavoured co-wife’ (Genesis, 155). The Deuteronomy text, which protects the birthright of the son born to an unflavoured wife, describes a situation closely resembling that of Jacob’s household. 69. Yairah Amit, ‘The Dual Causality Principle and Its Effects on Biblical Literature’, VT 37 (1987): 385–400. 70. In these genealogical accounts, according to Exum, ‘the status of the mothers is used to indicate the status of the tribes’ (Fragmented Women, 114 n. 90). The exact order in which the sons of Jacob are born is relevant here only to an extent, as each account displays a different sequence.

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the ancestral tomb near Mamre, which will eventually become the resting place of Jacob himself (50.13). Attaining motherhood not only raises Leah’s status but also gives her a degree of subjectivity and, finally, a voice, if only to name her sons.71 But her actions are formulaic (‘and she conceived … and bore a son … and she said/named him’ (Gen. 29.32, 33, 34, 35; 30.17-18, 19-20), and her point of view, accessible through the naming speeches, is limited.72 Whether or not Leah’s ‘weak’ eyes reflect her lack of discernment, her jubilant speeches seem out of place, contradicting her real situation (‘for my husband will love me now’, Gen. 29.32; ‘this time my husband will be attached to me’, Gen. 29.34; ‘what good fortune!’, Gen. 30.11; ‘happy am I!’, Gen. 30.13).73 Leah sees her childbearing as a way to win Jacob’s affection, which is structurally impossible, since, as the reader knows, her fertility was granted on account of her being ś enû ’ā h, ‘unloved’, by him (cf. Gen. 29.31). Consequently, in the succession of Leah’s naming speeches, the reader can see a gradual decline of her expectations: with her second son she admits that she is hated (Gen. 29.33), with the third she expects only her husband’s attachment rather than love (Gen. 29.34), with the fourth son the reference to her husband disappears (Gen. 29.35). Naming her sixth son near the end of her childbearing marathon, she will simply hope for her husband to honour her (Gen. 30.20) – a role that is finally commensurate with her institutional position.74 The following birth of a daughter does not bear on Leah’s status and therefore does not occasion any expression of feelings (Gen. 30.21). When Leah finally ceases to bear children, she disappears as an independent character and will subsequently appear only as part of the family group (Gen. 31.4, 14; 33.1-2, 7). The apparent failure of Leah’s narrative programme is linked to her contradictory position as an impostor. Identity tricks in the patriarchal narratives have an effect

71. The fact that it is Leah and not Jacob who names their sons highlights her status as a mother. This will also apply to Rachel’s naming Joseph, whose birth is a turning point in the narrative (Gen. 30.24). In the case of Benjamin, both Rachel and Jacob name the child, but the father’s naming (Benjamin) overrides that of the mother (Ben-oni) (Gen. 35.18). Maternal naming is a distinct feature of the Haran narrative, as in the previous naming scenes it was always the patriarch who named the child (cf. Abraham’s naming Ishmael Gen. 16.15 and Isaac in Gen. 21.3; in Gen. 25.25-26 the phrase ‘he called’ implies that it is Isaac who names both Jacob and Esau). The case of Lot’s daughters, who name their sons in Gen. 19.37-38, is exceptional, since here the father’s agency is compromised. 72. As Ilana Pardes has observed, biblical naming speeches tell ‘more about the character of the name-giver than the recipient’ (‘Beyond Genesis 3: The Politics of Maternal Naming’, in A Feminist Companion to Genesis, ed. Brenner, 176). 73. For Fokkelman, Leah’s naming speeches are ‘intensely “subjective” cries of pride and expectation’ (Narrative Art in Genesis, 133). 74. See Exum, Fragmented Women, 110. The verb zbl, translated here as ‘to honour’, is a hapax with an uncertain meaning. Its other possible translation would be ‘to dwell’ (BDB, 259).

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on the trickster beyond the expected gain, as Jacob’s exile in Haran demonstrates. In Leah’s case, one can assume that Jacob’s affection for her as ‘Rachel’ on the wedding night must have left her forever wanting after it was withdrawn (cf. Leah’s reproach: ‘you have taken my husband’, Gen. 30.15). Jacob, on his part, ‘hates’ Leah not only for having replaced his chosen bride but also for being a bekî rā h – a representation of his own rebounded trick with a bekô r. There can be no resolution to this deadlock, in which Leah is doubly exploited: as a wife, she is deprived of her husband’s love, and as a mother, she is made to relentlessly bear children in the hope to gain it. Yahweh mediates between the two exploitative modes: he intervenes in response to her plight as a hated wife, but instead of addressing her pain, keeps re-inscribing her back into the institutional role of mother. And when her son’s mandrakes put her in a position of advantage, it allows her not to win her husband’s love, but to hire him (š kr) from Rachel, reintroducing the very perspective of bondage that originally made her Jacob’s wife (Gen. 30.16; cf. 30.18, 32, 33). In contrast to Leah’s superior institutional position, Rachel’s married life is shaped by the loss of status. The narrator plays on the symbolic ‘emptiness’ of her situation: her physical absence on the wedding night, her loss of social status as a second wife and her ‘empty’ condition of sterility all connote lack and explain the neediness and envy she is ascribed as a character (‘when Rachel saw that she did not bear Jacob any children, she became envious of her sister’, Gen. 30.1). Rachel’s primary motive in striving for fertility seems to be a desire for the institutional status that Leah possesses as a mother (‘so that I, me too, can be built up’, Gen. 30.3). As observed above in the analysis of Gen. 16.2, the idea of ‘building’ a family, based on the pun bā nā h/bā nî m, entails a symbolic ‘building up’ of the female subject. It is this status-related advantage that Rachel appears to seek. Structurally, the struggle between Rachel and Leah inverts the rivalry between Sarah and Hagar, which associates the first, ‘institutional’ wife with sterility, while making the second wife fertile. The contrasting description of Hagar in Gen. 16.4 (‘when she saw that she had conceived, her mistress became slight in her eyes’) is shaped by the same concern over status in a hierarchical relationship. In both cases, the status position is directly related to fertility and in both cases, it is the sterile matriarch who complains to her husband. So Rachel blames Jacob for her sterility: ‘Give me children/sons, or I die!’ This angry and, in Jacob’s view, displaced outburst parallels Sarah’s displaced accusation of Abraham for Hagar’s contempt (lit. ‘the violence done to me is on you!’, Gen. 16.5). But if, in Sarah’s case, the husband responds to her need and restores her power over Hagar (‘Your maid is in your hand,’ Gen. 16.6), Rachel does not receive satisfaction from Jacob. On the contrary, Jacob, whose ‘anger burned against Rachel’ (Gen. 30.2), admits that he is powerless to help her and redirects her to God. Ignored by Jacob, Rachel’s death threat is suspended, casting a shadow over her entire narrative programme, since, ironically, she will die as soon as her wish to have sons (bā nî m, pl.) is fulfilled (35.16-20). Rachel’s wish to be ‘built up’ as a matriarch leads to her using a substitute mother, her maid Bilhah, in a move analogous to Sarah’s use of Hagar in Gen. 16.1-4. But, unlike Sarah who comes to resent Hagar’s fertility, Rachel celebrates

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the two sons she acquires by Bilhah’s surrogacy as her own victory (Gen. 30.8). Leah follows suit and gives her servant Zilpah to Jacob to bear two more children on her behalf (Gen. 30.9). Functioning as surrogate mothers for their mistresses, Bilhah and Zilpah are totally controlled by them and used as instruments in their rivalry. Significantly, they do not have their own voices, and their sons are named by their mistresses.75 That their sons become fathers of the tribes of Israel does not have an impact on their own status, for they are used to ‘build up’ Rachel and Leah instead. Unlike Hagar, they remain in the family along with their sons, but their status is problematic. Each of them is offered to Jacob ‘as a wife’ (Gen. 30.4, 9), which serves to establish the legitimate origin of their sons, but subsequently they are referred to as maids, not wives (Gen. 33.1, 2, 6).76 An interesting insight into Rachel’s point of view is given in Gen. 30.8 when she describes her attempt to outdo Leah by using Bilhah as naptû lê ’ elō hî m. This is an obscure expression, commonly understood as ‘great (or mighty) wrestlings’.77 The word naptû lî m is a hapax that derives from the verb ptl, ‘to twist, be twisted’, which elsewhere in niphal signifies being deceitful or crafty (Job 5.13; Ps. 18.27; Prov. 8.8).78 While the exact meaning of the phrase naptû lê ’ elō hî m niptaltî is not clear (lit. ‘I have twisted twists of God’),79 Rachel’s following comment, ‘and I overcame (yā kō ltî )’, suggests a context of struggle. A similar statement of victory is found in the naming of Jacob after his night struggle with a divine adversary (‘you have struggled with God and with men and have overcome [tû kā l]’, Gen. 32.29).80 However, given that deception is a key concept in the Jacob cycle, the connotation of trick or deceit in the use of ptl should not be ruled out.81 I would suggest that the term naptû lî m might have been used here intentionally because of its polyvalence, as it gives additional depth to Rachel’s statement. On the one hand, if taken as ‘twists’,82 it can imply a forceful exchange of places or identities that fits the context

75. The smooth absorption of Bilhah and Zilpah into Israel raises a question regarding the opposite treatment of Hagar, whom Sarah rejects as her surrogate in Genesis 16. Exum suggests that the reason for this may be found in different valuations of Mesopotamia and Egypt in Israel’s tradition (Fragmented Women, 101 n. 65). 76. This contradicts the fact that each is offered to Jacob ‘as a wife’ (Gen. 30.4, 9), necessary to establish the legitimate origin of their sons. 77. Cf. KJV, ESV, ASV, ERV, NRSV. 78. BDB, 836; DCH, 811. 79. Fokkelman offers a plausible explanation of the use of ’elō hî m in the phrase naptû lê ’elō hî m as an example of the objective genitive, in which case it should be understood not as a superlative – ‘mighty wrestlings’ – as commonly accepted, but as ‘wrestlings of God’ (Fokkelman, Narrative Art in Genesis, 135). 80. Wenham, Genesis 16–50, 245–6; see also Hamilton, Genesis 18–50, 272. 81. The REB is sensitive to this meaning in its translation, ‘I have devised a great trick against my sister, and it has succeeded.’ 82. Fokkelman, Narrative Art in Genesis, 135.

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of rivalry; on the other hand, if it is understood as deception(s), the term posits Rachel as a trickster and a true match for her husband. In their wrestlings, Rachel and Leah appear as true rivals: each possesses what the other lacks and desperately wants for herself what the other has. Fewell and Gunn stress the essential un-wholeness of the sisters, presented ‘only as parts, as though neither were complete in herself ’.83 Ultimately, it is the idea of incompleteness that drives their childbearing race. The narrative concern about who will become the mother of Jacob’s heir is projected onto each sister, but because the sterile Rachel has been singled out as the chosen matriarch from the start, none of the eleven births, which precede her giving birth to Joseph, can provide a final answer to that concern, and so the process has to go on. On the other hand, until God’s climactic ‘opening of her womb’ in Gen. 30.22, Rachel herself remains incomplete, driven to use surrogacy to achieve status. The narrator’s patriarchal strategy, according to Fuchs, sets the women up against each other, ‘incriminating the victims of the contest rather than the husband, who is in the final analysis the cause of their mutual rivalry’. Thus, Rachel is portrayed as envious and impulsive (Gen. 30.1), while Leah appears resentful and overbearing (Gen. 30.14-16). As Fuchs has observed, the women here are blamed for their own actions, being both victims and victimizers.84 In this way the institution exploits the women, making them engage in a fight that neither can win and in which their only reward is conformity to the patriarchal stereotype. Exum holds that the ultimate victory in this rivalry belongs to patriarchy, since, as a result of it, twelve sons are born to Jacob, which ensures the increase of Israel and lays a narrative foundation for its tribal structure.85 The patriarch benefits from the outcome of the procreative race because he is the one perpetuated through the ensuing lineage. However, his role in procreation is minimized to the point of passivity, which acquits him of any responsibility for the misery of his wives.

The dû dā ’î m of Reuben In the middle of Rachel’s wrestlings with Leah, an enigmatic exchange takes place between the two sisters. When Leah’s firstborn son Reuben brings to his mother a mysterious object dû dā ’î m from the harvested field, Rachel ‘buys’ it from Leah in exchange for a night with Jacob (Gen 30.14-16). The text sheds no light on the meaning of this rare term, assumed to be a derivative of the root dwd, which has a connotation of physical love.86 Since the LXX translation, the term has been

83. Fewell and Gunn, Gender, Power, and Promise, 78. 84. Fuchs, Sexual Politics, 154. 85. Exum, Fragmented Women, 101. Similarly, Fuchs sees the bitter competition between Leah and Rachel as ‘the necessary instrumental mechanism that presents Jacob with 12 sons who will constitute the foundation of the Israelite nation’ (Sexual Politics, 154). 86. BDB, 187 treats the root dwd as a primitive verb for ‘caressing’; cf. DCH II, 423–4.

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understood as the mandrake (mandragoras), a plant that was believed to arouse sexual desire and cure infertility.87 Westermann also calls them ‘love-apples’.88 Commentators generally agree that the plant called dû dā ’î m is an aphrodisiac as well as a remedy for sterility, which means that both sisters would be interested in having it: Leah to attract Jacob, Rachel to conceive.89 This attractive interpretation is nevertheless entirely conjectural and a closer look at the text reveals a number of interpretative problems. The first problem is the use of dû dā ’î m. This mysterious value object causes a verbal dispute between Jacob’s wives, in which Rachel asks Leah to share them with her and Leah wants to keep them for herself. For the mandrake hypothesis to work, the plant has to combine two properties: it has to both excite passion and bring about fertility. While these assumed properties explain why both sisters might want the plant, they do not make much sense in terms of the outcome of the exchange, since the possession of the dû dā ’î m will not cure Rachel’s sterility, whereas Leah will have three more successive pregnancies (seemingly, without the help of the plant). The second problem concerns the role of Reuben in this story. The figure of Leah’s firstborn son seems to have particular significance in the scene: the text refers to him – either as Reuben or as Leah’s son – five times in the space of three verses. Does the mention of Reuben, the firstborn of Jacob, reintroduce the institutional perspective into the dispute and thus reinforce Leah’s position of advantage? Does he symbolize for Rachel those sons, bā nî m, that she wishes for so badly? In the rivalry between the two sisters the arrival of another male figure breaks the exclusive focus on Jacob and draws the reader’s attention. The attribution of medicinal properties to dû dā ’î m is based on information that is not communicated by the text and has to be inferred by the reader. For that hypothesis to work, the plant and its qualities need to be well known to the intended audience, who would easily understand the attraction it holds for the characters. With the inferred meaning no longer accessible, the only insight we could have into the nature of the object that changes hands in Gen. 30.1416 can be obtained from its etymology and literary context, both of which point to its erotic connotation. The other most common forms of the verb dwd in the Hebrew Bible are dô d, ‘beloved’, and dô dî m, ‘love, caresses’. Fokkelman points

87. See BDB, 188; DCH II, 424. 88. Westermann, Genesis 12–36, 475. 89. Westermann, Genesis 12–36, 475. Wenham thinks that both Rachel and Leah viewed the plant as a fertility drug, ‘Rachel because she had never conceived, Leah because she had become infertile’, Genesis 16–50, 247. This traditional interpretation was supported by the studies of Mircea Eliade (see ‘La mandragore et les myths de la “naissance miraculeuse”,’ Zalmoxis 3 [1942]: 1–48; Patterns in Comparative Religion [trans. R. Sheed; London: Sheed and Ward, 1979], 314–18; see also Theodor H. Gaster, Myth, Legend and Custom in the Old Testament: A Comparative Study with Chapters from Sir James G. Frazer’s Folklore in the Old Testament [New York: Harper & Row, 1969], 200).

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out that the alliteration of dû dā ’î m with dô dî m enhances the parallelism of the sisters’ exchange as the plant is exchanged for ‘a right to Jacob’s ‘caresses’.90 The form dû dā ’î m, however, is extremely rare in the Hebrew Bible: apart from its five occurrences in Gen. 30.14-16, it is attested once more in Song 7.14. This only other occurrence of the rare term deserves a closer look. In Song 7.14 the term is characterized by fragrance with no mention of its other properties: ‘the dû dā ’î m give forth fragrance’. It is presumed to denote a fragrant flowering plant, identical to the mandrakes in Gen. 30.14-16. However, like other images of the garden in the Song of Songs, the dû dā ’î m have more than one level of meaning. Exum speaks of the double significance of the plant imagery in relation to the pleasure garden of Song 4.13, ‘which is both the woman’s body and the place for lovemaking’.91 In Song 7.1-10 the woman is admired by her lover, who uses the images of vineyard, palm tree and its fruit to describe metaphorically the beauty of her body. Here the images of the garden are the medium through which the text communicates the sensuousness and the intensity of the lover’s desire. In this respect, the response of the woman in Song 7.11-14 is different, for the metaphors she uses are less transparent, alluding rather than describing and pointing to the fulfilment of desire. In Song 7.12-13 she invites her lover to go out in the fields to see whether the vine and pomegranates are in blossom (cf. Song 6.11). Here, the blossoming garden presents a perfect setting and a precondition for the lovers’ imaginary encounter, for, at the peak of its splendour, it prefigures the consummation of their love. Semantically there is a correspondence between the buds opening on the vines (pittaḥ , Song 7.13), the woman opening her door to her lover in Song 5.2, 5, 6 (ptḥ ) and the doors (petā ḥ ê nû , ‘our openings’, Song 7.14) where she has stored ‘all the delicacies’ for him.92 This interplay of projected meanings that creates an association between the garden and the woman is also present in Song 7.13-14: the woman’s call reaches its climax when she promises to give her love (’ettē n ‘et-dō day lā k) and her words are immediately reflected in the image of the mandrakes giving off their fragrance (dû dā ’î m natenû -rê ah). As Exum notes, ‘the mandrakes, in giving their fragrance for the lovers’ pleasure, mirror and participate in the woman’s gift of love’.93 Along with the other sensory images of the garden, the mandrakes participate in the unfolding and fulfilment of the drama of desire. They receive an even stronger erotic connotation due to the extensive use of the root dwd in the woman’s speech (dô dî , ‘my lover’, Song 7.10, 11, 12, 14; dô dā y, ‘my love’, 7.13). The apparent chiasmus ‘I will give my love’:‘love-flowers give’ (vv.13b-14a) further supports the parallelism between the images of the garden and of the couple’s lovemaking. The ‘delicacies’ stored at the door, mentioned later in Song 7.14, hold the same

90. Fokkelman, Narrative Art in Genesis, 136. See also Alter, Genesis, 160. 91. Exum, Song of Songs: A Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 241. 92. Exum suggests a possible sexual allusion in 7.13 and 5.2-6 (Song of Songs, 242). 93. Exum, Song of Songs, 242.

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connotation; in fact, the entire v. 14 seems to unfold the meaning of v. 13b (‘there I will give you my love’), as it portrays the pleasures that are waiting to be released in the love-giving of the woman. On linguistic grounds, it has been argued that the word dû dā ’î m in the Song of Songs could simply be synonymous with dô dî m, ‘caresses’,94 though this literal reading takes away from the semantic possibilities offered by the wordplay on dû dā ’î m as flower. Both contextually and linguistically, the term dû dā ’î m plays on the two coexisting levels of meaning, denoting a fragrant flowering plant at the same time as pointing to an aspect of physical love. Given the highly metaphorical use of the term dû dā ’î m in Song 7.14, could it be used in a similar way in Gen. 30.14-16? Here the term dû dā ’î m is structurally associated with Reuben, the firstborn of Leah. It is used in conjunction with either the name of Reuben (v. 14) or a reference to him (‘the mandrakes of your son’ vv. 14, 15; ‘the mandrakes of my son’, vv. 15, 16), suggesting more than a link of ownership. If Reuben has given the plant to his mother, why is it still, persistently, referred to as his? When Leah retorts to Rachel’s demand, she places her husband (’î š î ) on the same level as her son’s mandrakes (dû dā ’ê benî ), which makes an exchange possible.95 Thus Rachel allows Leah to have Jacob, even if it is just for one night, and for Leah, literally and metaphorically, the consequences are significant, as she bears three more children one after another. Rachel, however, disappears from the stage, presumably in possession of the desired object. Her storyline is suppressed: the actual receiving of the dû dā ’î m is not reported, neither is the effect of using them. One could argue that the narrator uses Reuben’s mandrakes merely as a bait for Rachel, to make Leah benefit from the trade. But the narrator’s problematic attitude to the dû dā ’î m – an object reiterated five times and yet totally veiled from view – suggests they are more than a mere currency of Leah’s trade. One possible explanation for the vague description of the exchange has been put forward by Seth Kunin, who considers the episode to be an incest story, sharing the same motif with the other Reuben episode in Gen. 35.22. Seeing incest as an ultimate structural expression of endogamy, favoured by Hebrew mythology, Kunin suggests that the son’s offering mandrakes to his mother may represent an incestuous relationship between the two.96 Though it is mythologically acceptable, incest is culturally problematic (cf. Lev. 18.6-10), which may explain the vagueness that characterizes the entire episode.

94. According to the linguistic analysis of A. Fitzgerald, the Hebrew word yd, ‘hand’, that is often used as a euphemism for genitals could be possibly related to dû dā ’î m through the verb ydd/wdd, ‘to love’ (‘Hebrew yd = “Love” and “Beloved”,’ CBQ 29 [1967]: 368–74). 95. Roger Syré n thinks that the transfer of the mandrakes to Rachel ‘implies a kind of remission of the firstborn: he is exchanged for access to the father’ (The Forsaken First-Born: A Study of a Recurrent Motif in the Patriarchal Narratives [JSOT SS 133; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993], 131). 96. Kunin, The Logic of Incest, 123–5. Kunin’s argument stops short of including Rachel as part of the incest model.

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The word dû dā ’î m in this case, just as in Song 7.14, could be used as a metaphor of physical love. Stephen Sherwood mentions ‘love making’ among possible readings of dû dā ’î m.97 However, this suggestion raises a question with regard to Reuben’s age. Following the account of the pregnancies of Jacob’s wives and concubines that happen within the first seven years of his service (cf. 29.30; 30.25; 31.41), it seems that at the time of the mandrake episode Reuben can only be a child. Westermann, for instance, assumes that Reuben in 30.14-16 is about six years old,98 as does Fokkelman, referring to the boy as ‘a little chap’.99 The internal chronology of the episode is, however, problematic. Governed by the narrator’s concern to locate all the twelve pregnancies and births within the seven years that Jacob is serving his uncle for Rachel, it leads one to postulate that the process of childbearing that involved all four women was incessant. Hard to envisage as it is, even this conveyer-belt idea of how the ancestors of the Israelite tribes came into being does not make it possible to squeeze the twelve births into seven years. Leah, for her part, needs at least ten years to produce seven children of her own, have a period of infertility and allow her servant Zilpah to have two sons on her behalf. Wenham suggests an even longer period, spacing out the pregnancies at two-year intervals.100 Thus the time span of seven years for the births of Jacob’s children can only be considered emblematic, with no strict chronological accuracy. If one relaxes the tempo of childbearing in the story, the age of Reuben becomes less of a problem, as at the time of the wheat harvest in Gen. 30.14 he could easily be a teenager. The incest theory seems to fit the context of the episode, tying up some loose ends in its interpretation. Importantly, the bringing of the mandrakes to Leah does not necessarily point to the mother–son type of incest, as Kunin has suggested; it could also symbolize Leah’s authority over her son’s new sexual maturity. If this were the case, the exchange between the sisters should be reassessed. It is possible that Rachel, who has failed to obtain children by Jacob, may be trying to use Reuben as a surrogate father, for she is striving to have a child by any means (cf. Rachel’s initiative to use Bilhah as a surrogate mother in Gen. 30.3). Leah’s angry response also makes sense, for she might see in Rachel’s demand an expression of her greed for men; indeed, the whole trade now becomes more understandable, seen as a swapping of the two men’s sexual services. The episode highlights the powerful position of the matriarchs in the matters of family building: Jacob, who has already renounced his responsibility for Rachel’s fertility in Gen. 30.2, is now used as a pawn, letting his wives decide with whom he and his firstborn should sleep. Seen from this angle, the episode epitomizes the dynamic of the ‘wrestlings’ between the two sisters. In the dispute, Rachel’s position is one of need. On the other side of the dispute stands Leah with her firstborn son, bekî rā h and bekô r, in

97. See Sherwood, Had God Not Been on My Side, 165. 98. Westermann, Genesis 12–36, 475. 99. Fokkelman, Narrative Art in Genesis, 136. 100. Wenham, Genesis 16–50, 246.

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possession of all that Rachel lacks and strives for: a fertile mother whose power has increased even more, now that she can dispense her son’s newly acquired fertility. From that position of power comes a response that treats Rachel as a thief: ‘Was it not enough that you took away my husband?’ (v. 15). From Leah’s point of view, Jacob is her husband by right and the present situation is a result of Rachel’s having taken away what was not hers – her ‘theft’.101 Significantly, Rachel does not object to this accusation. Saying ‘he may lie with you’ Rachel does not mention Jacob’s name and neither does she call him ‘my husband’, like Leah. Implicitly, she dissociates herself from Jacob, as if to accept that he is Leah’s husband by right, whom she has stolen from her sister. The incest model provides the characters with motives that are consistent with their actions and characterization throughout the story. As elsewhere in the account of the sisters’ confrontation, Leah gets the upper hand no matter what Rachel tries. When Rachel uses a surrogate mother, Leah copies her to much the same effect (two sons born from each woman’s maid, Gen. 30.3-13), but still outdoes Rachel, having had four sons of her own to begin with. In the same way, now that Rachel ‘buys’ Reuben in the hope of getting pregnant, Leah ‘hires’ her husband and ends up having two more sons and a daughter. The birth of Joseph to Rachel, which occurs at the end of the childbearing race, may take away her disgrace, as she says in Gen. 30.22-24, but does not diminish Leah’s outright victory. Reading the episode of Gen. 30.14-16 as an incest story creates a problem with regard to the legitimacy of Rachel’s children. That is to say, according to the interpretation of the dûdā’îm, discussed above, Joseph or both Joseph and Benjamin could have been the sons of Reuben as substitute father. At first sight, this possibility seems implausible as it contradicts what the reader knows about the dynamic in Jacob’s family. Why should Jacob tolerate his son’s incestuous relationship with his favourite wife, the self-same action that in Bilhah’s case he will see as an abomination (35.22)? Even more problematic is the idea that Jacob should consider the children born from the incest as his own and even favour them above the others (37.3; 44.20)? Far-fetched as this suggestion may appear, the ambiguity that surrounds conjugal relationships in Jacob’s family seems to allow that possibility. The idea of using Reuben as a surrogate father gains more weight in the context of Jacob’s declining his responsibility for Rachel’s childlessness. In Gen. 30.1-2 Jacob replies to Rachel’s plea to give her sons, ‘Am I in the place of God, who has withheld from you the fruit of the womb?’ His statement reflects the biblical portrayal of God as the sole source of procreative power.102 As mentioned above, Sarah, Rebekah, Manoah’s wife (Judges 13) and Hannah (1 Samuel 1) are all initially sterile and owe their miraculous pregnancies to God. Likewise, Leah’s superabundant fertility results from God’s ‘opening her womb’ (Gen. 29.31) and

101. Rachel will be associated with actual theft when she steals her father’s household gods in Gen 31.19. 102. For a discussion of the transfer of the procreative power to the deity from women, see Exum, Fragmented Women, 94–5; from men, see Rulon-Miller, ‘Hagar’, 69–70.

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listening to her (Gen. 30.17). Later in the narrative, Rachel herself is able to have a child only thanks to God’s triple action of remembering her, listening to her and ‘opening her womb’ (Gen. 30.22), a role that she herself admits when, after the birth of Joseph, she says, ‘God has taken away my disgrace’ (Gen. 30.23). In the above discussion of the motif of sterility, we have seen how the idea of God’s ‘opening the womb’ of the matriarch undermines the husband’s role in procreation. The example of Isaac, who plays a more active role in alleviating his wife’s sterility by praying for her to Yahweh, only confirms the latter’s symbolic potency, since, in answer to Isaac’s prayer, Yahweh makes Rebekah conceive (Gen. 25.21). In this light, Rachel’s demand in Gen. 30.1 is misplaced and Jacob’s retort is entirely logical. Redirecting responsibility to God, Jacob also appears justified in his allocation of blame to Rachel. By this time he has already had four sons by Leah, so, as a potent father, he cannot be blamed for Rachel’s lack of children. Clearly, it is Rachel, the one from whom ‘the fruit of the womb’ is withdrawn, who is at fault. Elsewhere in the Bible, sterility is blamed on the woman, whose husband has already got children by other wives (cf. Gen. 17.17-18; 1 Sam. 1.1-2). According to Fuchs, this pattern reflects the way in which patriarchy redefines procreation, giving the father the ‘prerogative of owning his sons, without however bearing responsibility for their absence’.103 Accordingly, both Rachel and Jacob in their dialogue follow the conventional gender roles allocated to them by patriarchy: Rachel, in her desiring children, Jacob, in his clearing himself of responsibility for their absence. The conventional gender positions of the characters do not, however, account for the high emotional charge of the scene and its unique focus on Jacob. Both Rachel’s dramatic plea and Jacob’s angry retort revolve around his agency, if only to stress the lack of it. By saying, ’ā nō kî , ‘I’, to deny his involvement, Jacob involuntarily draws attention to himself. One might ask whether Jacob’s strong emotional reaction, described as burning anger, would arise if Jacob himself were entirely blameless. Behind his shifting the responsibility to God and the blame to Rachel, Jacob seems to hide his own frustration and self-diminishment (‘Am I in the place of God… ?’) due to his failure to impregnate his favourite wife. In the context of his love for Rachel, Jacob’s anger at her in Gen. 30.2 appears a displaced reaction to his own physical inability and his unwillingness to share her point of view. In short, his anger betrays a guilty conscience.104

103. Fuchs, Sexual Politics, 54. 104. Fuchs makes a similar observation concerning Jacob’s attitude, although she draws from it different conclusions. She notes that Jacob’s response in 30.2 ‘implies both that he has no control over and no responsibility for Rachel’s barrenness’ (see Fuchs, Sexual Politics, 154). Fuchs puts this attitude down not to the character’s own motives but to the narrator’s intention to undermine the husband’s role in order to free him from responsibility for his wives’ tragic experiences. Accordingly, the narrator presents Rachel’s demand as an ‘irrational and morally invalid complaint of the barren wife’, which contrasts Jacob’s reasonable and pious response (154–5).

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Arguably, the idea that Jacob is implicitly responsible for Rachel’s sterility has some structural grounds. The dysfunctional relationships between the conjugal partners in Jacob’s household stem from his preference for one of the wives at the expense of the other. As we have seen, it is Jacob’s preference for Rachel (Gen. 29.30) that leads to Yahweh’s counterbalancing allocation of fertility to Leah (Gen. 29.31). In this new balance, fertility and affection are separated, and thus Jacob cannot father Rachel’s children so long as he favours her over Leah. Similarly, Leah by definition cannot win her husband’s love by bearing him more children, for she is only fertile on account of being unloved. It is therefore logical that Jacob, who is, figuratively, the reason for Rachel’s misfortune, is not able to answer her plea. In the institutional framework that Yahweh represents, Jacob’s feelings for his wife render him symbolically sterile, dissociated from the power associated with fertility. In the context of Jacob’s renunciation, Rachel’s motherhood becomes a matter to be settled between her and God. However, given that it is the husband who normally discusses the matters of procreation with the deity,105 Rachel is left alone in her quest and has to rely on her own devices. In the first move, she uses her servant Bilhah as a surrogate mother (Gen. 30.3-8). When Bilhah bears two sons on her behalf, Rachel hastily interprets it as a sign of God’s favour and victory over her sister (Gen. 30.6, 8). Yet her triumph is premature: Bilhah bears sons ‘to Jacob’ (Gen. 30.5, 7), ‘building’ him up as a father, while Rachel remains sterile and without status (cf. Sarah’s failure to be ‘built up’ through Hagar in Gen. 16.1-6). In this context it is possible that Rachel might start looking for a surrogate not for herself, but for her husband. This motivation may answer the question of the legitimacy of Rachel’s children. If the dû dā ’î m really do symbolize Reuben’s procreative power, then the incestuous relationship between Reuben and Rachel would serve the institutional purpose of acquiring offspring of pure descent. Using Jacob’s firstborn son as a surrogate father, Rachel would be acting in the interests of patrilineal descent, for this would allow her to have children within her husband’s direct lineage. The Hebrew Bible has other instances of culturally problematic sexual encounters that serve the ends of patriarchy. Lot’s two daughters preserve their ‘father’s seed’ through incest in Gen. 19.30-38; likewise, Tamar in Genesis 38 seduces Judah, her father-in law, in order for the patrilineal descent to continue. In this context, observing cultural prohibitions could become a lesser priority and the sexual relationship between

105. This highlights Jacob’s unwillingness to intercede for Rachel, as pointed out in a midrashic elaboration of the scene. In Gen. Rab. 71.7 Rachel accuses Jacob of refusing to be involved or ‘gird up his loins’ to help her conceive and contrasts him to Abraham and Isaac who prayed to God on behalf of their sterile wives. The expression ‘to gird up one’s loins’ can also allude to procreation, which allows to interpret Rachel’s accusation both ways. Rebekah in Gen. 25.22-23 is an exception only to a point, for she enquires God about the meaning of her experience rather than imploring him to grant her wish, which is the prerogative of Isaac in 25.21.

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Rachel and her husband’s firstborn son could become an acceptable, if veiled, way for Rachel to be included in the ranks of the matriarchs. If Jacob’s angry reply in Gen. 30.2 has potential repercussions for the interpretation of the dû dā ’î m episode, so does Rachel’s demand that precedes it (Gen. 30.1). She commands Jacob, ‘Give me children, or I shall die!’, and the subsequent story shows that it is not an empty threat. The fact that Rachel will die prematurely creates a paradox in the light of Gen. 30.1, for she will die having become a mother of two sons. In a certain way this paradox can be resolved if one were to assume that Jacob did not in the end give Rachel children. In this case, Jacob’s failure would cast a shadow over Rachel’s married life, making forever futile her attempts to overcome her sister and leading, indirectly, to her death. One could read her unfulfilled yearning in the haunting name – ben-’ô nî , ‘the son of my sorrow’ – she gives to her last son before she dies (35.18). One might ask what is the part of Reuben, the original owner of the dû dā ’î m, in this interplay of power and desire? As the first son born to Leah, Reuben both symbolizes and secures his mother’s institutional privilege. But what is even more crucial is his symbolic value as Jacob’s firstborn – the one who epitomizes his father’s procreative power. Jacob himself will later associate Reuben with his own virility when he calls him ‘my might, the beginning of my vigour’ (Gen. 49.3). It seems that this connotation of virility, implicit in Gen. 30.14-16, singles Reuben out among his brothers, making his presence linger on stage. Reuben will thus reappear in Gen. 35.22 where, after the family’s move to Canaan, he has sexual relations with (or rapes) Bilhah, his father’s wife of secondary rank and Rachel’s chosen substitute.106 The narrative here is remarkably brief and seemingly disrupts the context. As Frederick Greenspahn points out, the narrator of Gen. 35.22 describes neither Reuben’s motivation nor any immediate consequences of his actions, unlike the parallel episode in 2 Sam. 16.21-22, where Absalom commits incest with David’s concubines in an explicit attempt to displace his father.107 Susanne Scholz holds an opposite view, suggesting that Reuben, in raping Bilhah, challenges his father’s property rights, attempting to mark his own territory over against Jacob.108 It seems that neither Greenspahn nor Scholz take into account the immediate literary context of the scene, which seems to shed some light on Reuben’s role. The second time that Reuben comes on stage, he is placed, once again, in narrative proximity to Rachel: the events of Gen. 35.22 come almost immediately after the report of Rachel’s death in Gen. 35.19-20. Arguably, this order of narration hints at Reuben’s association with Rachel, established back in Gen. 30.14-16. It is possible to see in the rape of Bilhah another instance of

106. Susanne Scholz argues that the verb š kb, which denotes sexual relations, in Gen. 35.22 connotes rape, because it is used there with a definite object marker instead of a preposition (Sacred Witness: Rape in the Hebrew Bible [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010], 72). 107. Frederick E. Greenspahn, When Brothers Dwell Together: The Preeminence of Younger Siblings in the Hebrew Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 122. 108. Scholz, Sacred Witness, 75; see also Stiebert, First-Degree Incest, 140–2.

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substitution. In other words, after the death of her mistress, Bilhah once again is used as a ‘substitute’ for Rachel, this time not by Jacob, but by his son Reuben. On this occasion, however, the narrative does not suppress the negative judgement on incest. What might have been implicitly legitimized for Rachel is openly condemned in the case of her servant, who has already borne children to Jacob. As a sexual encounter not intended for procreation, it is not sanctioned within the institutional framework, represented here by Jacob-Israel: ‘and Israel heard of it’ (Gen. 35.22). There is a striking contrast between the narrator’s attitudes towards the two instances of incest. In the first case, Rachel is the conscious instigator of the incest, which is subsequently hushed up; in the second case, the initiative belongs entirely to Reuben, whose transgression is brought to light and eventually brings upon him severe consequences. Thus, when the old Jacob confers his last blessing on his sons, he will accuse Reuben of defiling his father’s bed and will give him a curse instead of a blessing (‘you shall excel no more’, Gen. 49.3-4).109 The institutional reaction to Reuben’s transgression is further developed by the Chronicler who states that Reuben lost his birthright ‘because he polluted his father’s couch’ (1 Chron. 5.1). With Reuben’s birthright transferred to the two sons of Joseph, Ephraim and Manasseh,110 the familiar trend re-emerges – a trend of removing the firstborn son from inheritance, as in the earlier stories of Cain, Ishmael and Esau.111 The narrator of 1 Chron. 5.1 refers to the tradition expressed in Gen. 49.4, repeating almost word for word Jacob’s formulation of Reuben’s guilt. Since the only explicit account of Reuben’s misdeed in the Jacob cycle is found in Gen. 35.22, it has been assumed that Reuben’s relationship with Bilhah is what loses the firstborn his father’s favour (Genesis) and costs him the primacy over his brothers (Chronicles). Nevertheless, both Genesis and Chronicles allow the possibility that the unacknowledged incest with Rachel too might have been counted against Reuben. The clause about defiling his father’s bed in Gen. 49.4 uses the word miš kā b, ‘bed’,

109. Wenham considers this scene ‘one of the fiercest denunciations in Genesis’ (Genesis 16–50, 471). 110. This removal of Reuben’s birthright is not as clear-cut in Genesis as it is in the book of Chronicles. Greenspahn stresses that the text of Genesis is not aware of Reuben’s right of primogeniture being transferred to Joseph’s sons; rather it presents their elevated status as a result of their having been adopted by Jacob: ‘Ephraim and Manasseh shall be mine, as Reuben and Simon are’, Gen. 48.5 (When Brothers Dwell Together, 121). 111. Wenham notes the problematic aspect of the transfer in the light of Deut. 21.15-17, which explicitly forbids the father to transfer the rights of the eldest son by the first wife to the firstborn of the second wife (Genesis 16–50, 471). It would appear that Jacob in his punishment of Reuben follows the law with regard to incest (Lev. 18.6-10) but goes against the law on the economic rights of the firstborn.

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in the plural;112 similarly, in 1 Chron. 5.1-2 the word yā tsû ‘a, ‘bed, couch’, is used in the plural.113 One could argue that Jacob’s accusation (‘because you climbed up on the beds of your father’, Gen. 49.4) not only implies multiple occasions on which Reuben transgressed the incest law of Lev. 18.6-10, but also literally speaks of different beds, the bed of Rachel as well as the bed of Bilhah. If this were the case and the Chronicler’s reading of the Reuben story in Genesis took account of the double incest, then Reuben could be seen as the physical father of Joseph, which would justify the transfer of the birthright from Reuben to Joseph’s sons. A final piece of evidence in support of the incest hypothesis is found in the Joseph narrative, which hints at a special attachment Reuben has for his younger brother Joseph. In Gen. 37.21-22 Reuben stands up to his brothers when they conspire to kill Joseph and later in Gen. 42.22 he reproaches them, reminding how he had tried to stop them: ‘Did I not tell you not to sin against the boy?’ Reuben’s defence of Joseph cannot be understood within the familiar framework of the conflict between the younger and the older siblings (to an extent, this conflict is demonstrated in the rivalry between Reuben and Judah). Reuben’s compassion would be more understandable if he was acting not only as Joseph’s brother but also as his physical father. Later, speaking to Jacob, he offers the lives of his two sons to vouch for the safe return of Benjamin (Gen. 42.37), which would make more sense were he also the physical father of Benjamin. Reuben’s offer of his own two sons appears highly symbolic if seen as a replacement for Joseph and Benjamin. Scholars have expressed different views about the possible impact the use of the dû dā ’î m had on the birth of Joseph in Gen. 30.22-24. God’s intervention and Rachel’s ensuing childbirth are usually treated as unrelated to her efforts to conceive. Exum holds that Rachel’s attempt to use aphrodisiacs has no impact on her conception because of the time gap between Gen. 30.14-16 and 30.22 and, generally, since the narrator ‘regards female fecundity as due solely to divine intervention’.114 Hamilton notes the conspicuous absence of any mention of the mandrakes in Rachel’s words.115 On the contrary, Westermann has stated that despite the apparent time lapse ‘the narrative traces Joseph’s birth back to them [love-apples]’, with Rachel’s storyline suspended between vv. 17 and 22 so that Leah could have a son.116 In my view, the narrative allows both possibilities, showing another example of dual causality, since the ‘divine birth’ of Joseph effected by Yahweh’s triple action might be seen as a ratification of Rachel’s exchange. In a

112. In other instances where miš kā b is understood as a place for sexual intercourse the term is used in singular if it is related to the singular subject (cf. Isa. 57.7, 8; Prov. 7.17; Ezek. 23.17; Song 3.1), DCH V, 526. 113. DCH IV, 267. 114. Exum, Fragmented Women, 94–5. Similarly, Turner believes that the mandrakes have no effect on Rachel’s infertility. For him, ‘what the mandrakes failed to provide is achieved by Yahweh’s decisive act’ (Genesis, 132); see also Wenham, Genesis 16–50, 248. 115. Hamilton, Genesis 18–50, 278. 116. Westermann, Genesis 12–36, 476.

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narrative where the physical father is overshadowed by the divine progenitor, surrogate paternity can be imagined as easily as the normative one. What implications does our reading of Gen. 30.14-16 as an incest story have for the structures of Israel’s identity? While this interpretation seems to link together various elements of the Haran episode, it also conforms to the tendency, apparent in Genesis, to compromise the dignity and status of the firstborn son. In this trend, which includes Cain, Ishmael and Esau and from which Abraham is a notable exception, the firstborn are variably cast as murderous, mocking, wild and socially inferior. The story of Reuben’s possible involvement with Rachel fits well with his later problematic characterization in Gen. 35.22 and 49.3, which in 1 Chron. 5. 1 explains the transfer of Reuben’s birthright to the sons of Joseph (from the elder to the younger). But the narrator’s problematic attitude to Reuben as a firstborn does not lead to his expulsion and/or being othered as foreign, as it happens with Cain, Ishmael and Esau. Like his possible incestuous relationship with Rachel, sanctioned by the narrator because it serves the interests of Jacob’s lineage, Reuben’s presentation in Genesis is ambivalent.117 Though he is reproved for his attempt to occupy his father’s place in the narrative, ideologically Reuben is still considered part of the ethnocentric subject and will occupy the pride of place as the firstborn of Israel in the formal accounts of the twelve tribes (Exod. 6.14; Num. 1.20; 1 Chron. 5.1, 3; cf. Gen. 46.8). To conclude our examination of the ‘twists of God’ that Rachel and Leah wage in Gen. 29.31–30.24, let us look once again at the two narrative perspectives at work in the episode. At one level, here the issue of succession is resolved through the childbearing contest between Rachel and Leah, in which they together build up the house of Israel (Ruth 4.11). At another level, this is the time of Jacob’s servitude in Haran, which functions as retribution for his mistreatment of his brother back in Canaan. The two conflicting narrative strands that shape the Jacob narrative – the institutional and the individual – interact in the episode, presenting different levels of narrative causality. From the institutional perspective, the main point of the contest between Jacob’s wives is to give birth to the twelve fathers of the Israelite tribes, and the rivalry between Rachel and Leah is a perfect means to escalate the process of childbearing. Within this process the two women are presented as active agents, entitled to manipulate all available means, from surrogacy to ‘hiring’ one’s husband, in order to ensure the outcome required by patriarchy – patrilineal continuity and a profusion of offspring. Despite his position as a chosen heir and a patriarch, Jacob does not entirely fit into the institutional scheme. Though the overall ideology of the narrator makes him the ultimate beneficiary in the domestic conflict, his individual goals as a character belong elsewhere. It seems that to have a child by his favourite wife is all Jacob is waiting for in Haran. That the rest of his children are born on the way

117. As Syré n remarks, Reuben appears here as ‘the principled brother as well as the delinquent son’ (The Forsaken First-Born, 135).

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to achieving that goal results not from Jacob’s immediate choices, but from the dysfunctional character of his bigamous marriage. The individual motivation in the narrative conflicts with its institutional goals in such a way that Jacob is not able to father the desired descendant until the formation of the house of Israel is complete. Even then, as argued above, the elliptic character of the dû dā ’î m episode allows the possibility that Jacob fathers Joseph only through the mediation of his firstborn Reuben. As for Rachel, a sterile matriarch, who represents the individual perspective in the Haran narrative, she, like Sarah and Rebekah before her, acts to establish the chosen lineage through her son Joseph. And though all the sons of Jacob are incorporated into the house of Israel, Jacob’s individual preference for Joseph – the youngest son born to him in Haran and the firstborn of his favourite wife – will still be acknowledged, forming a complication in another extended narrative (‘Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his sons, because he was the child of his old age’, Gen. 37.3). In the subsequent story of Genesis 37–50, a considerable narrative space is devoted to Joseph, who will play the crucial role of preserving Jacob’s clan in Egypt. Finally, Jacob’s deathbed blessing will single Joseph out as one who is ‘consecrated among his brothers’ (Gen. 49.26). Despite that, Joseph does not give his name to any of the tribes, ceding this right to his two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh. The individual perspective, centred on the sterile matriarch, divine birth and the election of the younger brother, remains both validated and problematized till the end of Genesis.

The Father’s Gods and the Way of Women The seven years during which Rachel and Leah wrestle, building up Jacob’s house, is, from the point of view of the patriarch, the time of bondage – the extra time that Laban tricked him to serve in exchange for Rachel. This bondage ends with the birth of Rachel’s first son Joseph (Gen. 30.22-24), at which point Jacob gives notice to Laban (Gen. 30.25). The following six years he spends building up his own wealth, tricking Laban out of his flocks (Gen. 30.43; 31.1). Here, as elsewhere in the patriarchal narratives, the image of the flocks has a specific structural function. Like the flocks of Abraham and Lot, which communicated their respective semiotic ‘weight’ in Genesis 13, the flocks in the Jacob cycle are representative of their owner’s ‘weight’ or power in the narrative world. Thus Jacob starts preparing to leave the house of Laban as soon as he has acquired the latter’s wealth (lit. ‘weight’, kā bō d, Gen. 31.1), which Gen. 30.43 describes as ‘many flocks, female and male servants and camels’. The transfer of the flocks from Laban to Jacob in Gen. 30.25-43 parallels the father’s loss of power over his daughters. But while Jacob has already removed his flock from Laban’s possession, his wives are yet to be removed from their father’s authority. Laban remains the paterfamilias for Jacob’s wives and children, which explains why, when Jacob receives God’s command to return to the land of his fathers, he takes Rachel and Leah into the field where his flocks were grazing (Gen. 31.4). That is, in order to discuss their separation from their father, the daughters need to leave his house and enter their husband’s symbolic space, associated with

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his flock. And the following speech of Jacob contrasts the notions of ‘your father’ and ‘my father’ (v. 5; cf. vv. 2-3), which highlights the impending separation.118 It is significant that Jacob seeks his wives’ consent in making a transition. While they remain in Haran, Rachel and Leah represent Rebekah’s lineage that is yet to be absorbed into the patrilineal identity of Abraham’s clan. For Exum, the wives’ consent to leave Haran signifies the passing over of the women and their children from their father’s control to that of the husband and through it, a denial of the importance of matrilineal descent.119 In Gen. 31.15 Rachel and Leah already see themselves as separated from their father (‘Does he [Laban] not regard us as foreigners?’). The term nokrî , ‘foreign’, heralds the emerging ethnocentric dynamic: the same root will be used later in the cycle in relation to the family’s foreign gods, ’elō hê hannē kā r, disposed of at Jacob’s order at Shechem in Gen. 35.2, 4. According to Pardes, by referring to foreignness, the sisters are positioning themselves on the side of Jacob over against their father: Jacob is literally a foreigner during his stay in Haran, while the sisters are now figuratively estranged (nkr).120 This analysis is not, I believe, entirely accurate: although Jacob is a stranger in Haran, the text from the start stresses his close kinship status as ’ā ḥ , ‘brother’ or ‘relative’ to Laban (Gen. 29.12, 15, cf. 29.14). From the moment of Jacob’s arrival in the land of his mother, it is repeatedly stated that he is with his own kin (Gen. 29. 4, 5, 10, 12, 13). By contrast, the first indication of foreignness is linked with his wives. It is notable that in the unfolding conflict between the two men, it is the women, the symbolic bearers of difference, who first introduce and become associated with the ethnocentric discourse and its specific notion of nkr. After the joint decision to leave Haran, Jacob and his family set off for Canaan, the land of his father (Gen. 31.17-18). This leaves the conflict with Laban unresolved, for they are fleeing without a formal settlement. The text stresses the dubious character of their departure by putting it in the context of double theft (Gen. 31.19-20). Breaking free from her father’s house, Rachel steals (gnb) his household gods, terā pî m (v. 19), and Jacob ‘steals (gnb) the heart of Laban the Aramean’ by not telling him he is running away (v. 20). Importantly, the narrator notes that Laban is not in the house at the time. Here, as Fuchs remarks, the flow of the narrative, focused otherwise on Jacob’s flight, is interrupted by the two clauses that make up v. 19: ‘Laban had gone to shear his sheep and Rachel stole her father’s household gods.’ Fuchs sees in this syntactic juxtaposition a parallel between Laban and Rachel as deceivers – the daughter sharing her father’s fundamental characteristic.121 I tend to disagree with Fuchs’s reading Laban as a deceiver in

118. Cf. Paul D. Vrolijk, Jacob’s Wealth: An Examination into the Nature and Role of Material Possessions in the Jacob Cycle (Gen 25:19–35:29) (Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 146; Leiden/Boston, MA: Brill, 2011), 186. 119. Exum, Fragmented Women, 89. 120. Pardes, Countertraditions in the Bible, 68. 121. Fuchs, ‘“For I Have the Way of Women”: Deception, Gender and Ideology in Biblical Narrative’, Semeia 42 (1988): 71.

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parallel to Rachel. In this instance, Laban features as a paterfamilias, whose authority is challenged by the two parallel acts of theft described in vv. 19b and 20. Rachel’s theft anticipates the analogous action of Jacob and it is to him that she is paralleled as a deceiver.122 The clause about Laban’s absence in v. 19a relates to both acts of stealing and the way Laban is described in each case indicates the level of confrontation. Thus, the fact that Rachel steals from ‘her father’ suggests that her quest has to do with Laban’s paternal authority, whereas Jacob steals from ‘Laban the Aramean’, which stresses the ethnic dimension of their dispute.123 The wife and her husband each seems to have their own individual contests with Laban, and, in the order of their presentation, the wife’s quest takes precedence. So what is the nature of Rachel’s quest and what are her motives in stealing Laban’s terā pî m? Rachel’s characterization throughout the narrative provides some clues as to her position vis-à -vis her father. From the moment Rachel first appears on stage (Gen. 29.9-10), the narrative emphasized the link between her and Laban. As soon as Jacob arrives at the well and enquires after Laban, Rachel comes on stage tending her father’s flocks. In the scene of the meeting, Rachel is repeatedly presented as Laban’s daughter (Gen. 29.5, 6, 9, 10, 12). It is in her capacity as a daughter of Laban, his mother’s brother, that Jacob kisses Rachel in v. 11 and it is this role that she plays when she runs to inform her father of Jacob’s arrival. The repeated allusions to Laban downplay Rachel’s importance as an independent character. Rachel’s name rā ḥ ē l, ‘ewe’, and her association with Laban’s flocks posit her as part of her father’s possessions, and as such, of his semiotic ‘weight’, kā bō d, in the narrative. These initial clues to Rachel’s identity are fully exploited in the next scene, where Laban uses her as a bait to trick Jacob into servitude (Gen. 29.14-30). Here Laban uses Rachel as a means to increase his flocks or his kā bō d. For the purposes of the narrative, her role of shepherd is relinquished, for it is now taken over by Jacob. From being her father’s daughter she becomes her husband’s wife, but both she and her husband are trapped by Laban’s trickery: Rachel, in her rivalry with Leah, imposed by her father, and Jacob, in his prolonged servitude to Laban. Laban’s authority over Jacob’s family lasts for as long as they live in Haran. The double theft symbolizes the separation from that authority of those who have been bound by it the most. The meaning of the term terā pî m is uncertain.124 It is generally understood to refer to figures of the deities protecting a family and worshipped by it, though its

122. Pointing out the parallelism between the two acts of stealing, Fishbane comments on Rachel’s action: ‘In this theft of the objects of family blessing Jacob, the trickster … has married his match’ (‘Composition and Structure’, 31). 123. In Gen. 31.20 Laban is described as an Aramean for the first time in the Haran episode. 124. Suggested meanings range from ‘image as household god’, ‘idol’ and ‘object of reverence’ to ‘means of divination’ (BDB, 1076; DCH VIII, 679–80).

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usage in the Hebrew Bible suggests a variety of contexts.125 In Gen. 31.19, 30, 32, 34, 35 the terms terā pî m and ’elō hî m, ‘gods’, are used synonymously, which has led to the term being commonly translated as ‘household gods’.126 In recent scholarship, terā pî m have been seen as figurines of deceased ancestors used in divination. According to Benjamin Cox and Susan Ackerman, terā pî m were likely to perform a mantic function, ‘transmitting oracular messages from the realm of the dead to their families’ living descendants’.127 It is not clear, however, whether Rachel steals the figurines intending to consult them about the future; in fact, as regards Rachel’s motivation, the text is silent (31.19, 33-35). Yair Zakovitch maintains the implied mantic function of the terā pî m in Gen. 31.19 on the basis of their use in Ezek. 21.26 and Zech. 10.2. For him, the idea is also supported by the literary parallelism between Rachel’s theft and the staged theft of Joseph’s goblet – an object explicitly used for divination (Gen. 44.5, 15).128 Exum mentions divination as a possible explanation of Rachel’s motives, though admits that if, in taking the idols, Rachel intended to prevent Laban from divining the family’s route of escape, her plan fails, for Laban still manages to find them.129 The reader has already encountered a similar case of Rachel’s motives being suppressed in the dû dā ’î m narrative (Gen. 30.14-16). Fuchs sees here the narrator’s underlying strategy of representing negatively the women whose actions do not accord with the purposes of patriarchy. One part of this negative approach is the narrator’s discriminating treatment of male and female deception, which creates the impression that deceptiveness is a feature common to women. Comparing the literary presentations of Jacob, Laban and Rachel, all of whom deceive their opponents in the course of one narrative, Fuchs recognizes three major strategies unique to the story of Rachel’s theft: suppressed motivation of the character, suspended authorial judgement and the absence of closure.130 That all clues to Rachel’s motivation have been suppressed is, however, open to discussion. In removing the sacred objects from her father’s house, Rachel might be driven by the wish to retaliate against him who deprived her of her rightful status as Jacob’s only wife.131 It is even more likely that the figurines have a practical

125. See Wenham, Genesis 16–50, 273. These contexts would include divination (1 Sam. 15.23; 2 Kgs 23.24; Zech. 10.2) as well as use as cultic objects in a shrine (Judg. 17.5; Hos. 3.4). 126. Cf. ESV, NRSV, NIV. 127. Benjamin D. Cox and Susan Ackerman, ‘Micah’s Teraphim’, JHS 12 (2012): 4. For a detailed discussion of the meaning and function of the terā pî m see Karel van der Toorn, ‘The Nature of the Biblical Teraphim in the Light of the Cuneiform Evidence’, CBQ 52 (1990): 203–22; K. van der Toorn and T. J. Lewis, ‘‫’ ְּת ָר ִפ ים‬, TDOT XV, 777–89; Jeffers, Magic and Divination, 225–9. 128. Zakovitch, ‘Through the Looking Glass’, 141. 129. Exum, Fragmented Women, 104. 130. Fuchs, ‘“For I Have the Way of Women”’, 70. 131. See Jeansonne, The Women of Genesis, 136 n. 44.

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status-related significance for Rachel. Since Speiser, it has been common to interpret the episode in the light of the evidence from the Nuzi documents, which suggests that terā pî m belonged to paterfamilias and symbolized family status and the rights of inheritance.132 The fact that Leah does not participate in the theft makes it more specific to Rachel’s situation, against Steinberg’s suggestion that, by stealing the terā pî m, Rachel is ‘settling Laban’s debt for her and Leah’.133 Rachel’s action in Gen. 31.19 must be seen in the context of what the reader already knows about her motivation, which has been to achieve precedence over Leah through her son(s). In this light, Jay’s view that Rachel here seeks to establish the matrilineal descent through Joseph appears more plausible.134 The image of Rachel who wants to possess ‘her father’s gods’ to ensure the precedence of her son Joseph over his elder half-brothers fits in well with the theme of rivalry over succession that underlies the patriarchal narratives. In particular, it parallels Jacob’s stealing of the blessing from his brother Esau in Genesis 27. In the absence of the male head of the household, Rachel, the younger daughter and the second wife – one with the least entitlement to institutional succession – simultaneously challenges patriarchal authority and claims power and status for herself and her son. While Rachel herself will not benefit from her theft, dying on the way to Canaan, her action is nevertheless narratologically significant. Irmtraud Fischer has observed that, by removing the terā pî m from Haran, Rachel ‘takes away the legitimacy of the clan’, since no patriarch will go there again to find a wife. On the other hand, with the terā pî m she establishes the importance of her own genealogy reckoned through Joseph, who becomes the central figure in the story of the next generation of patriarchs.135 When Laban apprehends Jacob and his family in their flight and starts searching for the idols, Rachel sits on them and refuses to rise in front of her father, alluding to her menstrual cycle (‘for the way of women is upon me’, Gen. 31.35). The expression derek nā š î m, ‘the way of women’, is commonly understood as a euphemism for menstruation, which Rachel supposedly lies about in order to hide her theft. Whether or not Rachel is really menstruating is not, however, crucial, since in either case the ritual impurity she refers to is not the real reason why she does not rise in front of Laban. What is more important here, as Exum has observed, is that Rachel ‘uses male fear or respect for a uniquely female condition to gain power over a man’.136 From this perspective, Rachel’s words communicate a powerful statement of womanhood and a disregard for patriarchal authority.

132. See Speiser, Genesis, 250–1; Sarna, Understanding Genesis: The Heritage of Biblical Israel (New York: Schocken Books, 1966), 201; Fishbane, Text and Texture, 56; Pardes, Countertraditions in the Bible, 70. 133. Steinberg, Kinship and Marriage in Genesis, 107. 134. Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever, 106–7. 135. Fischer, ‘Genesis 12–50’, 25. 136. Exum, Fragmented Women, 107.

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As a reference to a female condition, derek nā š î m might be interpreted on different levels. For Fewell and Gunn, the expression refers to motherhood, which patriarchy constructs as an ultimate mark of alterity. By saying that she ‘can no longer show deference to her father’, Rachel might be suggesting that she now has other, more important loyalties – her new loyalties as mother, which she demonstrates by stealing the idols as a status symbol for her son.137 Along similar lines, Jacqueline Lapsley distinguishes various voices in Rachel’s speech. She reveals the hidden polemic of the statement, which on the surface refers to the codes of ritual purity but at a deeper level communicates Rachel’s resistance against the patriarchal structures. derek nā š î m – an unusual expression to denote a woman’s period in the Hebrew Bible – receives an additional meaning in the patriarchal context of Rachel’s utterance. In that context, as Lapsley points out, ‘the way of women’ is invariably perceived as ‘not the way of men’, or as the way of the other and, by associating herself with it, Rachel challenges the structures of (male) power, which deny her fulfilment of her ambitions.138 By saying that the way of women is upon her, Rachel indicates her ‘unofficial, unsanctioned means of getting justice’: having been excluded from inheritance, she steals it.139 Rachel’s deception, which Fuchs interprets as part of the androcentric strategy condemning women, is seen by Lapsley as a sign of female resistance and critique. There is yet another level of meaning that potentially undermines the subversive character of Rachel’s speech. Saying that she cannot rise (qû m) in front of her father, she might also be pointing to the fact that, in the male-dominated world of the patriarchal narrative, ‘the way of women’ cannot achieve the same status as, or rise up to, ‘the way of men’. The dichotomy of Rachel’s narrative position as one who strives for subjectivity and self-expression but is destined to failure and who can steal the inheritance but cannot use it for herself makes the irony underlying her speech even more poignant. Equally ironic is the curse that Jacob issues on the unknown thief in Gen. 31.32, when he says to Laban, ‘the one with whom you find your gods shall not live’. In the immediate context of Jacob’s separation with Laban, this oath benefits Jacob himself. As Turner notes, the fact that Laban does not find the stolen idols undermines his position in the dispute with his nephew and gives Jacob an upper hand.140 Jacob thus can speak from a higher moral position, and as a result Laban has to leave with nothing. For Rachel, however, Jacob’s oath becomes a delayed death penalty. It is not clear whether Rachel hears Jacob speak, but the reader’s understanding of the story is affected by the association between the terā pî m and death. The fact that they are not found with Rachel does not take away the allusion to death any more than Rachel’s giving birth to sons does with respect to

137. Fewell and Gunn, Gender, Power, and Promise, 79. 138. Jacqueline E. Lapsley, ‘The Voice of Rachel: Resistance and Polyphony in Genesis 31.14–35’, in Genesis, ed. Brenner, 238–42. 139. Lapsley, ‘The Voice of Rachel’, 243. 140. Turner, Genesis, 138.

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her statement in Gen. 30.1. Whether she weighs her life against fertility (‘give me children or I’ll die!’, Gen. 30.1), or has her life balanced against her father’s idols (Gen. 31.32), each time the narrative announces an implicit failure of Rachel’s quest, a failure that her death in childbirth ultimately manifests in Gen. 35.16-20. Converging on the idea of Rachel’s death, the curses in Gen. 30.1 and 31.32 bring to the fore the determinism of her situation. Rachel is condemned – by Jacob, herself and the narrator – whatever she tries, despite her initiative, resourcefulness and distinct subjectivity. Or, perhaps, it is because of her strong subjectivity that the beloved wife of Jacob does not make it to the end: a patriarchal story can only have one hero. Rachel’s destiny is shaped by the dynamic of poetic justice, of which Jacob is the main focus and she an instrument, and, although she can raise her voice before her husband (Gen. 30.1), she cannot emancipate herself from her secondary position. Too strong a character to linger behind the scenes like Leah, Rachel has to die so that the ‘heroic journey’ of Jacob may be completed. Crucially, the particular manner of Rachel’s death – in childbirth – is ultimately polluting. As such it echoes her polluting the terā pî m with menstrual blood, which is implied in Gen. 31.19.141 Rachel’s deception rebounds on her in an ironic twist, as the ‘way of women’ – the uniquely female impurity that she used as her power to trick her father – finally comes upon her and renders her powerless. At the end of Rachel’s story, derek nā š î m, ‘the way of women’, leads her to her roadside death – derek ’eprā tā h, ‘the way to Ephrath’. Rachel is abjected by the narrator in the way no other woman in Genesis has been. Marked with the double pollution of death and childbirth and refused a burial in the ancestral tomb at Machpehah alongside Leah, Rebekah and Sarah, Rachel is left in a liminal space in the narrative memory of Israel.142 One could see this as a retaliation of patriarchy on the woman who has deceived her father: although she flees from her father’s house, she dies in transition, never making it to the house of her husband.143 It is perhaps a mark of Rachel’s resilience as a character that, even in her being abjected, she still has a voice and a point of view. With her last breath, Rachel names her newborn child ben-’ô nî, ‘son of my sorrow’ (Gen. 35.18). This poignant name recapitulates, together with the final pain of childbirth, her entire story as one who desired to be built up through sons, bā nî m (cf. ’ibbā neh gam-’ā nō kî , Gen. 30.3), and

141. In Leviticus, the level of ritual impurity caused by menstrual blood is comparable to that caused by the birth of a male child: it lasts in both cases for seven days and is governed by the same rules of isolation (Lev. 12.1-8; 15.19-24). 142. Cox and Ackerman see the double pollution of death and childbirth as the reason why Rachel is buried in a roadside grave and not in the ancestral tomb like the other matriarchs (‘Rachel’s Tomb’, JBL 128 [2009]: 147). 143. Following Alter, Pardes links the location of Rachel’s tomb outside Ephrath or Bethlehem (Gen. 35.19) to the connotation of Bethlehem as a city of David. By not allowing Rachel to reach the royal city the narrator may be pointing out that ‘the future Davidic dynasty does not spring from her sons, but from Judah, Leah’s fourth son’ (Pardes, Countertraditions in the Bible, 72).

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failed. A striking parallel arises between this last utterance and her first words as a character in Gen. 30.1. There, Rachel wanted children to the point of death; here, she has her wish granted, but she dies nevertheless. Through the name of her son, Rachel protests against the injustice of her story. But her sorrow cannot be inscribed in the genealogy of Israel and so Jacob renames her son with a more suitable name, binyā mî n, ‘son of the right hand’, a name that overrides the expression of Rachel’s personal experience with a general, schematic phrase that alludes to masculinity and power. Thus Jacob stands in control of both Rachel’s own life (cf. his curse in Gen. 31.32) and of the new life that she brings. Unsurprisingly, the following narrative of Israel will uphold the name of Benjamin and with it, Jacob’s perspective.

Forms of Binary Relationships in the Jacob Narrative The structural tension between father and mother’s lands that permeates the Jacob narrative translates itself at the level of specific male and female characters. Here the patriarchs control all the initial and final situations and the function of the feminine is to mediate, to effect transformations without ever participating in the final balance of power. This principle is clearly demonstrated by looking at the patterns of relationships in the story and in particular, at the character of Rachel and her relationship with Jacob. As we have seen at the beginning of this chapter, the Jacob narrative abounds in binary relationships. Constructed through a play of similarity and difference, repetition and contrast, these pairs of oppositions create a tension that propels the story forward. In this process, the choices and motives of the subject are shaped by the presence of and through the interaction with the other. When one considers the patterns of relationships between paired or contrasted characters in the Jacob cycle, it is possible to distinguish among them two different forms of binarity – antagonistic and complementary. The Subject vs. the Twin: Antagonistic relationship In this relationship the initial equality is stressed, exemplified in the pair of the twin brothers, Jacob and Esau. The Hebrew term ’ā ḥ , ‘brother’, communicates the idea of sameness and affinity as well as difference. A brother is someone like me, but not myself. The equality of coming from the same womb, or even more, of sharing the same womb in the case of twins, purports their essential parity. This parity makes the opposition between them even more striking. Starting with their struggle in the mother’s womb in the opening scene of Gen. 25.22, Jacob and Esau undergo a gradual process of differentiation, which leads them through the experiences of deception, theft, anger, fear, exile, to reconciliation and the final establishment of boundaries. Constituting the main storyline of the Jacob cycle, this process gives the narrative its structure and thrust. The other pair of characters that exhibits the structural characteristics of the Subject-Twin type of relationship is Rachel and Leah, the two sisters who become

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Jacob’s co-wives. Being daughters of one father and wives of one husband, they are nevertheless made unequal by social structures (elder/younger daughter), characterization (fertility/sterility) and relationship with other characters (love/ hate of Jacob). As in the case of the twin brothers, Rachel and Leah’s initial equality (siblings, co-wives) reinforces their rivalry, which in Rachel’s view reaches the scale and intensity of the ‘twists of God’.144 The Subject in his/her relationship to the Twin typically lays claim to the other’s identity. The Subject (Jacob, Rachel) cannot accept the dichotomy of being with the other, which involves seeing the other as a subject possessing existential freedom. Instead, both Jacob and Rachel attempt to assume the identity of their opponents and to take up all the existential space in the story. This relational model is typified elsewhere in Genesis by Cain’s attitude towards Abel (Gen. 4.1-16), the attitude that leads the elder brother to the total elimination of his Twin. The Subject craves everything that belongs to the Twin: Jacob strives for the status and the blessing of the firstborn and Rachel yearns for her sister’s fertility. It is a peculiarity of the Jacob story that the character of the Twin is endowed with a superior institutional standing (bekô r, bekî rā h), whereas the narrative favours the Subject whose status is inferior and whose importance derives from his/her individual quest. Despite the strong structural parallels between the two antagonistic pairs, the conflict in each case ends in a different way. The opposition between Jacob and Esau is resolved and the two brothers achieve reconciliation in Genesis 33, where Jacob’s lengthy preparations to meet his brother and his ritual-like welcome lead to the symbolic return of the stolen blessing in Gen. 33.11. In this way, the main storyline is rounded off, with no less narrative space given to the account of the brothers’ reconciliation than was allotted to the story of their conflict. Nothing like this is found in the case of female Subject-Twin opposition. Lapsley observes that in the patriarchal narratives as well as generally in ancient Israelite culture ‘women do not participate in the form of negotiation that brings about reconciliation’.145 For the women involved, there are no boundaries established, no apologies issued, no relationship formed beyond that of rivalry. The story of the sisters’ ‘twists of God’ has no resolution. As characters, both of them disappear from the stage without comment: first, Leah, when she quietly merges with her role of mother, having failed to attract her husband; next, Rachel, when she dies prematurely, despite her final success in becoming a mother. The binary opposition between female characters is not developed fully because it is subordinate to the androcentric plot.

144. Fuchs observes that, compared to the hierarchical opposition between Sarah and Hagar, ‘the power relations between Rachel and Leah are more balanced, which exacerbates the rivalry between them. … What Leah wins through reproductive performance, Rachel nearly outweighs through sexual appeal’ (Fuchs, Sexual Politics, 162). 145. Lapsley, ‘The Voice of Rachel’, 236.

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The Subject vs. the Double: Complementary relationship The character of Rachel, among all the protagonists of the Jacob story, is structurally unique. Her narrative identity unfolds on two distinct planes, both of which present different degrees of opposition between the characters. The first opposition develops along the lines of Subject vs. Twin; the second, Subject vs. Double. In the first form of binary relationship Rachel is the Subject who defines herself through the conflict with the Twin, her sister Leah. In the second form of opposition Rachel is the Double, in other words the character who shadows the main Subject, her husband Jacob. The many similarities between Jacob and his favourite wife have been acknowledged in the scholarly literature. Fokkelman calls Rachel a ‘true Jacoba, related by nature to Jacob’.146 Pardes describes Rachel’s narrative programme as a counterplot that ‘mirrors’ the primary plot of Jacob.147 Like Jacob, Rachel is a younger sibling, deprived of status, and, like him, she strives to acquire it. Both of them are resourceful and determined, both are engaged in a confrontation with their rival (Twin). Both of them, as Fishbane observes, ‘deceive their fathers and flee from home’, having appropriated the patriarchal blessing and inheritance.148 Finally, at the end of their stay in Haran, they are put alongside each other, committing parallel thefts (Gen. 31.19-20). In the story of the terā pî m in Gen. 31.19, 33-35, Rachel’s actions parallel those of her husband in Genesis 27. Like Jacob, who ‘stole’ his father’s blessing, Rachel steals her father’s household idols. The thematic parallelism is maintained on a lexical level, with the verb mš š , ‘to feel’, used in both episodes: Laban ‘feels’ for the idols in Rachel’s tent (Gen. 31.34, 37), similar to Isaac ‘feeling’ Jacob’s hands in Gen. 27.22.149 In both cases, the action characterizes the father as a man who cannot see clearly. The lack of sight and perception undermines the authority of the father and creates the conditions that allow his son/daughter to appropriate a powerful symbol of patriarchal succession. By stealing the idols, Rachel claims something of the same nature as the blessing of Isaac. Only, in her case, the bid for status is more daring than that of Jacob, for she has been doubly deprived of it, first, as the younger sibling and second, as a woman. The misappropriation of status holds in itself the danger of death and both successful deceivers have to experience this threat. Thus, Jacob, despite his new position of power, has to flee from his elder brother who seeks to kill him, and Rachel’s death will come as a delayed outcome of her theft. What is the function of this marked parallelism? Indeed, what is the narrator’s purpose in introducing another subject, subordinate to the first and bearing a close resemblance to it? In this story, the Subject’s journey, like a play of mirrors, seems to generate multiple reflections revealing different aspects of narrative 146. 147. 148. 149.

Fokkelman, Narrative Art in Genesis, 163; see also Fishbane, Text and Texture, 56. Pardes, Countertraditions in the Bible, 73–5. Fishbane, Text and Texture, 56. Ibid., see also Wenham, Genesis 16–50, 268; Turner, Genesis, 138–9.

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identity. Zakovitch calls this type of narrative a ‘reflection story’. In such a story, the narrator shapes a ‘character, or his or her actions, as the antithesis of a character in another narrative and that character’s actions’.150 According to Zakovitch, this technique is used to guide the reader in evaluating characters. However, it appears to me that narrative parallelism also functions at a deeper level than that of ethical evaluation. Reflection stories seem to be redressing the structural balance in the narrative; they manifest its inner thematic connections and causal links, and, on the whole, together with other forms of intertextuality, reveal a narrative world where everything is a sign of everything else. While the Subject and his Double display many parallel features, they still stand in opposition to each other. Their binarity is based on the same hierarchical opposition between Male and Female that governs the metaphors of father and mother’s land. Rachel continues the mother strand in the story, epitomizing the features of a chosen matriarch. Her meeting Jacob at the well, her beauty, being loved by her husband, initial sterility and determination and shrewdness in obtaining a status for herself and her son – in all of these she is modelled on Jacob’s mother Rebekah (and, in most of them, on Sarah) and is thus posited as the one who continues the matriarchal succession. Like Rebekah who took the place of Isaac’s mother in her tent (Gen. 24.67), Rachel takes the place of Jacob’s mother in his mother’s land. It seems significant that Rachel’s role as a character is restricted to the area outside the promised land (she dies almost as soon as the family has reached Canaan in Genesis 35). Functioning as Jacob’s Shadow, she is confined to Haran, the realm of the mother, the shadow-land of the story. Her function in the story is determined by her belonging to what is for Jacob the other side of the looking glass and is to both reflect and invert the narrative identity of the Subject. This is seen clearly in Gen. 29.22-26, where Rachel, the younger daughter, symbolically representing Jacob, is passed over in favour of the elder daughter, Leah, who represents Esau. Rachel’s personal tragedy seems to be a direct reversal of Jacob’s success. While Jacob, an heir to the promise, grows in blessing and prosperity, his beloved wife stays unblessed (sterile) for a long time, and giving birth to the sons she has longed for becomes for her a curse instead of a blessing (Gen. 35.16-20). Pardes argues that Rachel’s narrative programme has to fail because, as a subordinate female counterplot, its function is to serve the primary plot centred on the male subject. As a female character, Rachel serves Jacob’s symbolic transformation and therefore cannot shape her own programme and fulfil her own ambitions.151 On the occasions when she ‘goes too far in striving to become a subject, like her counterpart, … her voice must be repressed’.152

150. Zakovitch, ‘Through the Looking Glass’, 139. 151. Pardes, Countertraditions in the Bible, 75–7. 152. Ibid., 74.

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This ambiguous role of Rachel determines the pattern of her relationship with Jacob. Whereas Jacob’s changing attitude to Esau brings him to see God in the face of his brother (Gen. 33.10), Rachel’s face for Jacob remains a reflection of his own. Therefore, if the Subject-Twin relationship moves from confrontation towards association, the Subject-Double relationship follows the opposite pattern, changing from unity to dissociation. At the beginning the narrator stresses first Jacob’s affinity with Rachel as his kin (Gen. 29.10-12) and then his love for Rachel, using the verb ’ā hab, ‘to love’, three times in the same episode (Gen. 29.18, 20, 30). And yet, his love is allocated a specific, limited place; that is, the sphere of affection is restricted by the primary institutional values of status and fertility. The association between the Subject and his Double soon begins to crumble, as Jacob’s love turns into anger after Rachel’s desperate demand for children (‘and Jacob’s anger flamed at Rachel’, Gen. 30.2). Later, having left Haran, Jacob unwittingly but effectively sentences her to death, saying to Laban, ‘whoever you find your gods with shall not live’ (Gen. 31.32). The beloved wife of Jacob is not allowed to live in the land ‘where Abraham and Isaac dwelt’ (Gen. 35.27): she dies in childbirth and the pillar that Jacob erects over her tomb conveys the finality of his dissociation from his Double. But this dissociation also signals the end of Jacob’s story. With the feminine presence in the myth gone, the Subject’s heroic journey is over. The story of Jacob and Rachel demonstrates the general pattern of dissociation that characterizes the Male-Female opposition in the Hebrew narrative, where love stories do not have happy endings. From a psychoanalytic point of view, one may see Rachel’s symbolic role as that of a repressed part of the subject, associated with his misdeeds. In this light, Jacob’s gradual dissociation from his Double could be seen as a process of semiotic ‘cure’ that the patriarchal psyche undergoes in the mother’s land. By burying his Double – his gendered other – the patriarch symbolically disposes of (or sacrifices) the part of his identity that is problematic to the narrative consciousness (thief and deceiver) and thus ‘clears’ himself of all charges. Rachel’s death is a necessary part in the process whereby the subject casts off his identity of ya‘aqō b and becomes Israel. In this new capacity, he can return to his father (Gen. 35.27) and settle ‘in the land of his father’s sojournings, the land of Canaan’ (Gen. 37.1). Yet a seed of the narrative resistance to the institution, associated with Rachel as well as Jacob’s former self, will be distinguishable in the patriarch’s preference for his younger sons Joseph and Benjamin, both sons of Rachel (Gen. 37.3; 42.4). The individual strand in the narrative will persist, for Jacob’s love for Joseph will trigger a new conflict in the next generation of the patriarchs, leading to the family’s move to Egypt and the setting of stage for the exodus and the birth of Israel as a nation. It could be said by way of conclusion that the Jacob cycle shows a problematic attitude to the feminine at the level of specific characters as well as that of a general metaphor. The story owes its depth and complexity to the structural tension between the role of the gendered other as a fundamental constituent of identity and her narrative representation as a subordinate reality that never quite rises to the status of the subject. Excluded from the dominant discourse, the gendered other remains imbedded into the deeper layers of the narrative psyche as a symbolic

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inversion of the Subject, his Double, who effects a ‘semiotic cure’, allowing Jacob to be transformed into Israel and resolving the issue of ethnocentric boundaries with Esau/Edom. As no other text in Genesis, the Jacob cycle shows that the subject’s identity needs to be ‘wrestled’ from the other – by taking the other’s place, going to the other’s land, fighting for the other’s blessing and being left both blessed and wounded.

CONCLUSION In his study of Genesis 2–3 Jobling has observed that structural methods of exegesis have a potential, almost fully unexploited, for furthering the programme of feminist biblical exegesis.1 In the three decades that have ensued since this remark, major advances have been made in this regard with the work of Mieke Bal and Ellen van Wolde in the fields of narratology and semiotic analysis. With the general shift in humanities from the analysis of symbols to that of social processes, the importance of structuralist approaches to interpretation has declined. The present study seeks to contribute to the discussion by showing that the potential these approaches holds for biblical studies has not been exhausted. Engaging with structuralist methodologies has allowed me to highlight the contradictions inherent in the structures of dominance, through which the unified subject seeks to suppress the very difference it relies on for its signification. Conversely, uncovering these structures demonstrates the narrative resistance to dominance and an attempt at compensation that the narrative makes in response to the created imbalance. In Genesis 2–3 the unified discourse is epitomized by the central character of hā ’ā dā m, who simultaneously occupies two structural planes: one, as a general representation of humankind and the other, gendered as male. In the double logic of the plot, hā ’ā dā m can only emerge as a complex subject in possession of knowledge and in a relationship with the earth with the help of woman, the transforming and therefore threatening other to whom the narrator attributes both the agency and the blame. In Genesis 12–36 the unified identity inherent in hā ’ā dā m is represented in a sequence of patrilineal genealogies that convey the idea of totality and continuity of the male subject. Narrative identity, however, cannot be built through genealogical accounts. To become a subject, Israel needs a story, an instance of symbolic communication, through which it can draw its significance in relation to the world. At the level of female subjectivity, this story starts with the image of the sterile mother (Sarah), which interrupts genealogical continuity and demonstrates the need of the gendered other. At the level of national representation, the narrative self of Israel begins by establishing itself over against the other nations, which it has to ‘abject’ in order to become a separate, or holy, that is, ‘set apart’ people (Exod. 19.6). To become a chosen nation, Israel needs the other, the non-chosen. The other, therefore, has to be born, and, because the subject is total, it can be born only out of the subject. In the garden narrative, the other is taken out of the subject’s body, separated from it and at once becomes subordinated to its 1. Jobling, The Sense of Biblical Narrative, 19.

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needs (woman as ‘helper’). In a similar way, the narrative of the ethnogenesis of Israel time after time derives foreign identity from the members of the patriarch’s family.2 To be able to define itself over against the other, the subject first needs to construct the other as a split-off, separated part of the self, as ‘flesh of its flesh’ and only then move on to its exclusion. Accordingly, Lot is paralleled to Abraham as a brother and ‘double’ and the patriarch shows particular attachment to his nephew (Genesis 14) before the definitive separation is effected. Ishmael has to be named and circumcised by Abraham, carrying the patriarch’s mark on his flesh and identity, to foreground the significance of his expulsion (16.15; 17.23-26). In the Jacob narrative, out of the patriarch’s two opponents, from whom he will be formally separated, Esau is his twin brother and Laban is his uncle, who also calls Jacob his brother and his own flesh (29.14-15). While the dominant patriarchal discourse aims at the construction of the unified subject – hā ’ā dā m in Genesis 2–3 and Israel in Genesis 12–36 – the other in all its guises is also constructed, serving the subject’s need of self-definition and yet always threatening, by the very fact of its existence, to slip across the boundaries of identity and subvert them. The subversive discourse arises from the structural impossibility to construct identity without difference. Without difference, without the other, the story would revert to genealogy. Incorporated into the overall patriarchal and ethnocentric discourse of Genesis, the voices of subversion and difference serve a function within the project of unified identity, and are subordinated to it. In Genesis 2–3, woman, the gendered other, communicates the knowledge of distinctions to hā ’ā dā m, destabilizing his totality-based identity. The effects of her agency are incorporated into the subject’s new identity. She is, however, subsumed by the subject once she has served her task and her place is taken over by the earth, hā ’adā mā h, the metaphorical counterpart of hā ’ā dā m. The Abraham cycle introduces new, national parameters to the subject. Here, the patriarch’s emergent identity as personification of Israel is constructed over against Egypt, the powerful other that cannot be subsumed and therefore has to be rejected. Lipton’s idea that the book of Exodus is guided by Israel’s resistance to assimilation could be successfully applied to Genesis 12–24.3 Being a ‘people who came out of Egypt’ (Num. 22.5, 11), Israel has to relinquish its memory of the land and the desire to ‘turn back’ to it on the one hand and to deal with the threat of assimilation through intermarriages with the Egyptians on the other. The narratives of Lot and Hagar provide a semiotic solution to these problems. In these

2. The eponymous ancestors of the Moabites, the Ammonites, the Ishmaelites and the Midianites are all close relatives of Abraham; Edom is associated with Jacob’s brother Esau and Aram is a descendant of Abraham’s brother Nahor. Although Egypt, Canaan and the Philistines are not immediately related to Abraham’s parentage, their lineage is traced, incorporated into the account of Israel as a Hamite branch of Noah’s posterity and is, therefore, not entirely unconnected (Gen. 10.6, 13–14). 3. Lipton, Longing for Egypt, 13–49.

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texts, it has been argued above, the identity of Egypt is purged from Israel’s selfimage through the mechanism of projection. The patriarchal subject symbolically disposes of the desire for the lush and fertile land of Egypt by attributing this desire to the character Lot. Since, in the collective consciousness of Israel, longing for Egypt is seen as a threat to identity, the subject’s projection leads to the ‘abjection’ of Lot and the obliteration of the land of Sodom as the other land and an image of Egypt. At a different level, the threat to the patriarch’s descent posed by Egypt is removed through the expulsion of the other mother, Hagar the Egyptian, and of the other heir, her son Ishmael. Sarah here occupies a central role as a mediator of dominance, through whom the primacy of Israel is asserted. By projecting its desire and its dominance onto Lot and Sarah, the patriarchal consciousness achieves the desired effect (destruction of the other land, expulsion of the rival heir) without assuming responsibility for it. However, the very need to project reveals the uneasiness that marks the unifying discourse, shown also in Abraham’s apparent displeasure about the destruction of Sodom and the expulsion of Ishmael (Gen. 18.23-32; 21.11). Moreover, the validity of exclusion is thrown into question when the subject, having ‘removed’ the other, is forced symbolically to expel, and eliminate the ‘only son’, the symbol of the unified self. The final trial of the subject in Gen. 22.1-19 makes Abraham re-enact in relation to himself what he has done to the others and thus subverts the idea of identity based on dominance and exclusion. Although, in the end, the self is restored, the trauma of the ‘binding of Isaac’ remains imbedded in the narrative consciousness as a price Israel has to pay for its being ‘set apart’. The Jacob narrative presents a different stage in the construction of the subject that culminates in the patriarch acquiring the name and identity of Israel. Here concerns over assimilation are translated into the focus on endogamy and the subject establishes himself not with respect to other nations, but within the extended patriarchal family. In the analysis of the Jacob cycle, I used Lé vy-Strauss’s structural approach to demonstrate how the initial contradiction between Father and Mother unfolds through a series of oppositions into a general conflict between the institutional and the individual structural perspectives. The difference between the two perspectives does not run along the gender divide, as Leah comes to represent institutional values, while Jacob, the future patriarch, first appears as a deceiver who destabilizes the institution. In his individual quest, Jacob is associated with the mother and with the mother’s land, the transformative space where he becomes Israel; it is, however, also a place of bondage and exile. In this space, Jacob is paralleled to Rachel, upon whom his subversive qualities are projected and through whom he is punished for his misdeeds. Through Rachel, the narrative disposes of Jacob the deceiver and then invests him with the new, heroic identity of Israel, the one who ‘strived with God and with men and prevailed’. The name, however, comes with a wound (Gen. 32.26, 32) and though the unified, institutional subject is re-established, his new identity as Israel is marked by conflict and alterity. In the dynamic opposition between the subject and the other, the dominant programme is subverted every time the other emancipates to subjectivity. Woman

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in Gen. 3.6 becomes the garden narrative’s only independent subject who seeks experience and understanding. Hagar becomes self-aware and rejects the oppressive structures, running away to the desert. Lot’s wife, in the minimal narrative space she has, subverts Yahweh’s judgement of Sodom simply by ‘looking back’. Rebekah searches for the meaning of her painful pregnancy and uses her knowledge to reverse the patriarchal status quo. More than others, Rachel is subversive in both what she says and what she conceals. Her reticence in the mandrake episode allows for the possibility that she uses Reuben as a surrogate father (Gen. 30.1416). In the episode with the stolen idols, she communicates her point of view as ‘the way of women’, thus indicating her power to confront patriarchy on her own terms. In this way she manages, if only briefly, to turn the tables and treats patriarchy as her other. It is noteworthy that Hagar, Rebekah and Rachel all use emphatically the personal pronoun ’ā nō kî , ‘I’, in their speeches, drawing attention to their subjectivity (Gen. 16.8; 25.22; 30.1, 3). Typically, their resistance to the patriarchal structures stems from uniquely female conditions. Hagar’s conception triggers her flight from her mistress; Rebekah’s pregnancy, interpreted in Yahweh’s oracle, leads to her deception of Isaac and Rachel’s alleged menstruation allows her to subvert the authority of her father. The female other finds her strength in that which cannot be taken away from her and which patriarchy both needs and fears, her alterity. This book has highlighted the essential similarity between the narrative structures mapping out the construction of the subject in Genesis 2–3 and in Genesis 12–36. On the one hand, the basic opposition between the subject and the other that underlies the narrative imposes a hierarchy of value and significance, where the transformation is teleologically subordinated to the patriarchal ethnocentric discourse. In the end, the apparent concern guiding the overall composition is that each narrative cycle establishes a male genealogical entry in the tô l edô t of Israel. Yet, on the other hand, the subject in these narratives is both challenged and changed by what the hierarchies cannot contain – the transforming power, the symbolic fecundity of the other. This posits a different kind of teleology that is never explicit, yet, like Yahweh’s shadow agenda in Genesis 2–3, is what pushes the narrative forward, for both hā ’ā dā m and the patriarchs become who they are through their ambiguous relationship with the gendered and political representations of the other. Whether it is woman as the mother of all living or the fruitful paradise of Egypt, the repressed, expelled, destroyed or punished other remains foundational to Israel’s consciousness.

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Niskanen, Paul. ‘The Poetics of Adam: The Creation of ‫ א ד ם‬in the Image of ‫’ ל ה י ם א‬. JBL 128 (2009): 417–36. Okoye, James C. ‘Sarah and Hagar: Genesis 16 and 21’. JSOT 32 (2007): 163–75. Pardes, Ilana. ‘Beyond Genesis 3: The Politics of Maternal Naming’. In A Feminist Companion to Genesis, edited by Athalya Brenner, 173–93. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993. Pardes, Ilana. Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Pirson, Ron. ‘Does Lot Know about Yada‘’. In Universalism and Particularism at Sodom and Gomorrah: Essays in Memory of Ron Pirson, edited by Diana Lipton, 203–13. Ancient Israel and Its Literature 11. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012. Polhemus, Robert M. Lot’s Daughters: Sex, Redemption and Women’s Quest for Authority. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Provan, Iain. Discovering Genesis: Content, Interpretation, Reception. Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 2015. von Rad, Gerhard. Genesis. Translated by John H. Marks. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1961. Rashkow, Ilona N. ‘Daddy-Dearest and the “Invisible Spirit of Wine”’. In Genesis, edited by Athalya Brenner, 82–107. A Feminist Companion to the Bible (2nd Series) 1. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998. Rashkow, Ilona N. ‘Intertextuality, Transference and the Reader in/of Genesis 12 and 20’. In Reading between Texts: Intertextuality and the Hebrew Bible, edited by Danna Nolan Fewell, 57–73. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992. Rashkow, Ilona N. Taboo or not Taboo: Sexuality and Family in the Hebrew Bible. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000. Reinhartz, Adele. Why Ask My Name?: Anonymity and Identity in Biblical Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Ricoeur, Paul. The Symbolism of Evil. Translated by Emerson Buchanan. New York: Harper & Row, 1967. Rosenberg, Joel. King and Kin: Political Allegory in the Hebrew Bible. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Roth, W. M. W. ‘The Text Is the Medium: An Interpretation of the Jacob Stories in Genesis’. In Encounter with the Text: Form and History in the Hebrew Bible, edited by M. J. Buss, 103–15. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979. Rulon-Miller, Nina. ‘Hagar: A Woman with an Attitude’. In The World of Genesis: Persons, Places, Perspectives, edited by Philip R. Davies and David J. A. Clines, 60–89. JSOT SS 257. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998. Sacks, Robert. ‘The Lion and the Ass: A Commentary on the Book of Genesis (Chapters 25–30)’. Int 10 (1982): 273–318. Sarna, Nahum M. The JPS Torah Commentary: Genesis. The Traditional Hebrew Text with the New JPS Translation. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1989. Sarna, Nahum M. Understanding Genesis. New York: Schocken Books, 1966. Sawyer, John F. A. ‘The Image of God, the Wisdom of Serpents and the Knowledge of Good and Evil’. In A Walk in the Garden: Biblical, Iconographical and Literary Images of Eden, edited by Paul Morris and Deborah Sawyer, 64–73. JSOT SS 136. Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1992. Scholz, Susanne. Sacred Witness: Rape in the Hebrew Bible. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010. Schü ssler Fiorenza, Elizabeth. Rhetoric and Ethic: The Politics of Biblical Studies. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999.

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INDEX OF AUTHORS Ackerman, Susan 199, 202 Alexander, T. Desmond 123 Allen, Christine Garside 171 Alter, Robert 9, 59, 88, 106, 124, 149, 162, 168, 179, 180, 202 Amit, Yairah 180 Andrews, Stephen 59, 64 Arnold, Bill T. 52 Bal, Mieke 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 14, 15, 17, 21, 23, 24, 30, 31, 33, 39, 42, 52, 53, 62, 63, 71, 72, 90, 91, 132, 209 Barr, James 7, 8, 9, 10, 28, 29, 40 Barth, Karl 40 De Beauvoir, Simone 1, 5 Bechtel, Lyn M. 6, 126, 127, 128 Becking, Bob 22 Bird, Phyllis A. 6, 18, 23, 40, 61 Blenkinsopp, Joseph 93, 94, 98, 99, 109, 115, 116, 117, 120, 133, 137, 158, 159 Boer, Roland 3 De Boer, Pieter A. H. 119 Bratsiotis, N. P. 23 Brenner, Athalya 62, 63, 103, 129 Brett, Mark G. 4, 6, 9, 23, 65, 81, 94, 96, 98, 99, 100, 115, 116, 128, 131, 139, 141, 146, 149, 151, 152, 174, 179 Brueggemann, Walter 8, 24, 69, 93 Bueler, Lois E. 25 Burnett, Joel S. 46 Carmichael, Calum M. 52, 128 Cassuto, Umberto 16, 22, 26, 29, 34, 53, 56, 72, 95 Charlesworth, James H. 26, 27, 55, 72 Clines, David J. A. 9, 10, 14, 15, 61, 77, 83, 86, 100, 102, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112, 115, 116 Coats, George W. 78, 122 Collins, Adela Yarbro 40 Cox, Benjamin D. 199, 202

Crossan, John Dominic 36 Culler, Jonathan 2 Culley, Robert C. 78, 162 Daly, Mary 76 Danta, Chris 151 Davies, Philip R. 103, 114 Dickinson, Renée 104 Douglas, Mary 156 Dozeman, Thomas B. 143 Eichler, Raanan 74, 75 Eliade, Mircea 185 Eslinger, Lyle 41, 94 Exum, J. Cheryl 3, 4, 7, 75, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 113, 127, 128, 130, 134, 135, 136, 139, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 152, 158, 161, 169, 170, 175, 180, 181, 183, 184, 186, 189, 194, 197, 199, 200 Fabry, H.-J. 18 Fewell, Danna Nolan 7, 42, 52, 54, 62, 74, 84, 89, 92, 94, 131, 132, 139, 156, 166, 167, 170, 177, 184, 201 Fields, Weston W. 128 Fischer, Irmtraud 85, 200 Fishbane, Michael 143, 156, 157, 163, 198, 200, 205 Fitzgerald, A. 187 Fokkelman, Jan P. 179, 181, 183, 188, 205 Fox, Everett 62, 63 Fretheim, Terence E. 63, 122, 133 Fuchs, Esther 88, 89, 90, 91, 106, 111, 130, 137, 169, 177, 184, 190, 197, 199, 201, 204 Furman, Nelly 171, 173 Gaster, Theodor H. 185 Gillmayr-Bucher, Susanne

167

228

Index of Authors

Good, Edwin M. 35 Greenspahn, Frederick E. 192, 193 Greenstein, Edward L. 8, 13 Greifenhagen, F. V. 119 Grüneberg, Keith N. 96 Gunkel, Hermann 6 Gunn, David M. 7, 42, 52, 54, 62, 74, 89, 92, 94, 131, 132, 139, 156, 166, 167, 170, 177, 184, 201 Haag, Herbert 163 Hackett, Jo Ann 137, 146 Hamilton, Victor P. 14, 18, 26, 27, 56, 64, 176, 183, 194 Hauge, Martin R. 160 Hayward, C. T. Robert 26, 56, 57 Heard, R. Christopher 84, 149 Helphand, Kenneth I. 105 Helyer, Larry R. 115, 122 Hjartarson, Paul 104 Hoffner, H. A. 94 Howell, Brian C. 37 Jacob, Benno 62 Jay, Nancy 87, 88, 152, 170, 172, 200 Jeansonne, Sharon Pace 91, 107, 123, 132, 133, 170, 174, 199 Jeffers, Ann 164, 199 Jobling, David 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 38, 67, 77, 78, 79, 85, 171, 209 Keiser, Thomas A. 41 Kelle, Brad E. 105 Kimelman, Reuven 6, 18, 33 Korpel, M. C. A. 22 Kraus, H. 6 Kristeva, Julia 2, 147 Kunin, Seth Daniel 83, 90, 108, 187, 188 Landy, Francis 4, 26, 29, 30, 43, 55, 59, 68, 72, 80, 105 Lanser, Susan S. 9, 10 Lapsley, Jacqueline E. 201, 204 Leach, Edmund R. 36, 77 Lerner, Anne Lapidus 6, 13, 18, 21, 23, 34, 35, 43, 46, 59, 62, 63 Letellier, Robert Ignatius 118, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129

Levenson, Jon D. 143, 149 Leviant, Curt 149 Levine, Amy-Jill 136, 139 Levine, Nachman 115, 126 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 154, 156, 211 Lewis, T. J. 199 Lim, Johnson 29 Lipton, Diana 120 Lohr, Joel H. 64 Lyons, William John 114, 15 MacDonald, Nathan 127 Mann, Barbara E. 101 Marmesh, Ann 106, 107 Mathews, Kenneth A. 56, 78 McClintock, Anne 104 McKinlay, Judith E. 140, 146 Menn, Esther Marie 129 Mettinger, Tryggve N. D. 8, 12, 45, 52, 53, 68, 73, 74, 78 Meyers, Carol L. 6, 9, 23, 52, 56, 59, 61, 63, 89 Millett, Kate 5 Miscall, Peter D. 110 Moberly, R. W. L. 26, 27, 28, 29, 37, 96 De Moor, J. C. 9 Niehr, H. 26 Nikaido, S. 142, 148, 149 Niskanen, Paul 40, 41 Pardes, Ilana 176, 181, 197, 200, 202, 205, 206 Polhemus, Robert M. 130 Provan, Iain 179 Von Rad, Gerhard 6, 22, 56, 78, 94, 95, 98, 132, 133 Rashkow, Ilona N. 103, 127, 129, 130 Reinhartz, Adele 133 Rezetko, R. 22 Ricoeur, Paul 67, 68 Rosenberg, Joel 137 Rulon-Miller, Nina 91, 102, 109, 132, 142, 189 Sacks, Robert 160 Sarna, Nahum M. 22, 71, 200

Index of Authors Sawyer, John F. A. 39 Scholz, Susanne 192 Sherwood, Stephen K. 161, 188 Sherwood, Yvonne 151, 155 Silberman, Lou H. 115, 116 Simkins, Ronald 9, 10 Ska, Jean-Louis 14 Skinner, John 27, 29, 123, 168 Speiser, E. A. 27, 59, 93, 123, 130, 133, 134, 168, 200 Steinberg, Naomi A. 87, 115, 200 Steinmetz, Debora 66, 117, 121, 122 Sternberg, Meir 13, 81, 145, 176 Stiebert, Johanna 192 Stordalen, Terje 7, 8, 12, 78, 79, 118 Stratton, Beverly 14, 15 Sutskover, Talia 34, 106 Sylva, Dennis 173 Syrén, Roger 187, 195 Teubal, Savina J. 111 Thompson, Thomas L. 161 Van der Toorn, Karel 199 Trible, Phyllis 5, 6, 9, 14, 15, 17, 20, 23, 24, 27, 34, 35, 40, 47, 48, 49, 52, 58, 61,

229

63, 132, 133, 136, 138, 139, 142, 143, 144, 149 Turner, Laurence A. 55, 114, 115, 117, 120, 121, 122, 160, 166, 177, 178, 179, 194, 201, 205 Vaughn, Andrew G. 114 Vawter, Bruce 72, 96, 161 Vermeulen, Karolien 30, 56, 57 Vrolijk, Paul D. 197 Walfish, Miriam-Simma 133 Walsh, Jerome T. 12, 34 Wenham, Gordon J. 6, 12, 16, 17, 22, 26, 27, 56, 59, 62, 72, 73, 74, 120, 130, 141, 164, 167, 179, 183, 185, 188, 193, 194, 199, 205 Westermann, Claus 6, 17, 22, 23, 29, 36, 51, 52, 56, 59, 66, 78, 88, 93, 96, 133, 161, 165, 167, 185, 188, 194 Whybray, R. Norman 8 Van Wolde, Ellen J. 4, 6, 11, 14, 22, 25, 36, 40, 43, 65, 66, 68, 69, 75, 127, 167, 209 Zakovitch, Yair

157, 199, 206

INDEX OF BIBLICAL REFERENCES

Hebrew Bible/ Old Testament Genesis 1–11 83, 96 1 21, 22, 36, 39, 41, 42, 77, 80 1.24-25 55 1.26-28 39 1.26-27 39, 40, 41 1.26 41 1.27-28 40, 76 1.27 13, 18, 39, 40, 41 1.28 15, 39, 40, 55, 60, 76, 103, 119 1.30 55 2–3 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 15, 34, 35, 38, 39, 41, 43, 44, 47, 57, 61, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 76, 77, 78, 79, 92, 93, 102, 105, 209, 210, 212 2 5, 6, 7, 14, 16, 22, 39, 42, 46, 52, 69, 77, 78, 80 2.4–3.24 4 2.4-25 78 2.5-17 73 2.5-7 65, 66 2.5 9, 13, 10, 12, 65, 66, 73, 79, 80 2.7-21 9 2.7-8 13 2.7 9, 55, 65, 66, 68, 72 2.8-17 78 2.8 10, 13, 77, 118, 121, 160 2.9 10, 11, 13, 31, 32, 66, 73, 77

2.10-14 13 2.10 10, 121 2.15 10, 13, 14, 65, 77 2.16-17 10, 11, 12, 28, 31, 32, 44, 47, 77, 78, 79, 80 2.16 60 2.17 7, 12, 13, 15, 16, 27, 28, 29, 30, 35, 47, 60, 67, 73, 77 2.18-25 12 2.18-22 12 2.18 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 41, 60, 77 2.19 16, 20, 21, 27, 66 2.19-20 14, 77 2.20 16 2.21 17, 18, 19, 24 2.21-22 14, 18, 23, 24, 25, 64, 77 2.22 9, 19, 21 2.23-24 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 37, 48, 62, 63, 108 2.23 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 46, 61, 64, 71, 77, 80, 97 2.24 19, 26, 59, 61, 118 2.25–3.7 25 2.25–3.1 54 2.25 9, 25, 26, 35, 36, 37, 41, 43, 46, 54, 75 3 6, 38, 52, 70, 78 3.1-24 78 3.1-19 78 3.1-7 16, 41, 79 3.1-4 53, 54 3.1 26, 27, 28, 31, 43, 54, 55, 80

3.2-3 31, 78, 79 3.2 78 3.3 12, 31, 35, 77, 78 3.4 28, 60 3.4-5 28, 30, 49, 80 3.5-7 33 3.5 28, 33, 35, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 50, 73, 77, 78 3.6 12, 15, 25, 31, 32, 33, 34, 37, 46, 49, 50, 61, 63, 65, 80, 121, 212 3.7 26, 28, 30, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 59 3.8 9, 21, 44, 45, 46, 75 3.8-13 44, 45 3.9 45, 46 3.9-24 79 3.9-19 53 3.9-13 45 3.9-12 46, 53 3.10 35, 37, 44, 46, 47, 50, 122 3.11 31, 32, 45, 47, 48, 50, 79 3.12 32, 45, 48, 54, 62, 64, 80 3.13 45, 46, 48, 53, 54, 58, 79, 122 3.14-24 51 3.14-19 51, 52, 68, 71 3.14-15 53, 75 3.14 51, 53, 54, 55, 65 3.15 17, 55, 56, 57, 58, 63, 70 3.16-19 69, 70

Index of Biblical References 3.16 15, 34, 53, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 68, 69, 70, 71, 105 3.17 31, 32, 51, 55, 58, 66, 67, 69, 79, 80 3.17-19 9, 14, 53, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 74, 75, 77 3.18-19 28, 67, 79 3.18 68 3.19 30, 55, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 79 3.20 17, 59, 61, 71, 72, 75, 76, 77 3.21 9, 43, 44, 75 3.22-24 73, 75, 79, 80 3.22 7, 28, 30, 35, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 50, 73, 74, 76, 77, 79 3.23-24 38, 77, 79, 121 3.23 12, 65, 66, 73, 77, 79, 80 3.24 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 161 4–11 76, 84 4.1-16 45, 204 4.1 59, 61, 68, 74, 76, 91 4.2 61 4.7 64 4.9 45, 46, 50 4.10 45 4.14 74 4.16 74, 117, 161 4.17 76 4.19–24 85 4.19-23 76 4.18 116 4.25 61 5 76 5.1-32 84 5.3-32 59, 76 5.5 30 6.1-4 76 6.3 19 7.7 85 7.13 85 8.12 91 8.16 85

8.18 85 9.1-17 93 9.1 76 9.7 76 9.23 45 10 59, 76, 83, 84, 95 10.1-32 84 10.5 95 10.6 210 10.7 116 10.13-14 112, 210 10.20 95 10.24 116 10.31 95 11 83, 116 11.2 161 11.10-26 59, 76, 84 11.11 85 11.13 85 11.15 85 11.17 85 11.19 85 11.21 85 11.23 85 11.25 85 11.26 94 11.27–37.1 4 11.27-32 116 11.27–25.18 83 11.27–12.9 88 11.27 83, 114 11.28 95, 116 11.29-30 132 11.29 45, 88, 92 11.30 88, 92, 93, 95, 105, 115, 133, 134 11.31– 12.9 118 11.31 88, 92, 94, 114, 116, 117, 159 11.32 94, 95 12–50 83, 102 12–36 85, 88, 97, 102, 103, 105, 209, 210, 212 12–35 92 12 109, 110, 170 12.1-5 114, 167 12.1-3 84, 93, 96, 101, 102 12.1-2 158

231 12.1 93, 94, 95, 97, 99, 101, 166 12.2-3 95 12.2 96, 116 12.3 83, 95, 96 12.4-5 94, 97, 114 12.4 93, 94, 97 12.5 88, 93, 97, 99, 114 12.6 97, 98, 99, 100, 120, 131 12.7 98, 99, 104, 140 12.8 120 12.10-20 99, 106, 114, 115, 119, 120, 121, 133, 134, 138, 139–140 12.10 100, 101, 105, 106, 111, 112, 120, 123 12.11 89, 107, 111, 134, 177 12.12 99, 109, 121 12.14-15 121 12.14 177 12.16 111, 133, 140, 150 12.19 111 13 114, 116, 117, 122, 130, 196 13.1-2 130 13.1 111, 114 13.2 112, 117, 119, 120, 121, 124, 150 13.3-4 120 13.5 117, 121, 125 13.6 103, 117, 121 13.7 98, 120 13.8 115, 117 13.9 115, 117 13.10 121, 122, 124, 136 13.11 117, 121, 161 13.12 116, 121, 123 13.13 121, 124 13.14-17 99, 116 13.14 98, 99, 102, 111 13.15-16 104 13.15 99 13.16 96, 102, 132 13.17 98, 99, 158 13.18 98 14 115, 116, 123, 131, 210

232

Index of Biblical References

14.18-20 99 14.21-23 131 15.2 115, 132 15.3 104, 132 15.4 132, 144 15.5 83, 96, 102, 104, 132 15.7 99 15.13 101, 104 15.18-21 98, 99, 100, 102 15.18-20 99 15.18 99, 104 16 131, 132, 135, 142, 145, 146, 147, 148, 183 16.1-6 139–140, 191 16.1-4 182 16.1-3 135 16.1 132, 133, 136, 140, 146, 177 16.2 89, 90, 100, 133, 135, 142, 145, 146, 182 16.3 100, 135, 135, 136, 139, 146 16.4 89, 100, 135, 136, 139, 141, 142, 182 16.5 136, 138, 141, 142, 146, 182 16.6 100, 138, 140, 141, 143, 145, 146, 147, 182 16.7 140 16.8-12 169 16.8 140, 147, 212 16.9-12 143 16.9 141, 142, 143, 145, 147, 172 16.10-12 147 16.10 141, 147, 148 16.11 142, 143, 148 16.12 148, 152 16.13-14 142, 149 16.13 141, 142, 148 16.14 99 16.15-16 143, 145 16.15 120, 137, 143, 181, 210 16.16 137 17 83, 144, 145 17.1-8 144 17.3 144

17.4 116 17.5 2, 83, 96, 137, 146 17.6 102, 103 17.7-10 104 17.8 99, 100, 101 17.9-14 144 17.12-13 144 17.12 101, 104 17.14-16 144 17.15-21 92 17.15-16 146 17.16 90, 92, 110, 139 17.17-18 190 17.17 144, 146, 151 17.18-22 152 17.18-19 144 17.18 115, 144 17.19 90, 92, 104, 148, 151 17.20-22 144 17.21 90, 92, 110 17.23-26 210 17.23 145 17.24-25 145 17.26 145 17.27 101 18 118, 126 18.1-5 123 18.1 124 18.9-15 90 18.10 92, 110, 117, 142 18.11-12 146 18.12-15 144, 146 18.12 91, 126, 146, 151 18.13 151 18.14 92, 110, 117 18.15 151 18.19 50, 123 18.20-33 115 18.20-21 123 18.22-33 8, 123 18.23-32 211 19 116, 118, 125, 126, 128, 129 19.1-29 128 19.1-3 123 19.1 125 19.4-11 123 19.5 126

19.7-9 127 19.8 50, 126 19.9 123 19.12-15 126 19.12 126 19.13 123, 126 19.14 111, 126 19.19-20, 30 126 19.20-23 122 19.22 99 19.23 125 19.24-25 99 19.26 128 19.28 99, 124 19.29 125, 148 19.30-38 116, 118, 128, 129, 130, 150, 191 19.30-35 128 19.30 126 19.31 129 19.32 104, 129 19.33 50, 127, 129 19.34 104 19.35 50, 127, 129 19.37-38 130, 181 20 99, 106, 109, 110, 139, 170 20.1 100, 101, 110, 112, 123 20.11 99, 108 20.12 87, 108 20.14 112 20.15 112 20.16 111, 112 21 114, 131, 143, 145, 146, 148, 149, 151 21.1-2 90, 145 21.1 90 21.2 110 21.3 181 21.9-10 91 21.9 111, 136, 146 21.10 89, 143, 145, 146 21.11 146, 150, 152, 211 21.12-13 147 21.12 142, 145, 151, 172 21.13 152 21.14-20 147 21.14 146, 147, 148, 149

Index of Biblical References 21.15 148 21.16 147 21.17-18 148, 169 21.17 147 21.18 147 21.19 37, 142 21.22-34 99 21.23 100, 101 21.31 99 21.34 100, 101, 123 22 148, 149, 151, 170 22.1-19 8, 152, 211 22.2 152 22.3 148 22.6 148 22.9 148 22.12 148, 152 22.14 99, 148, 149 22.16-18 148, 152 22.17-18 96 22.17 83, 96, 141, 167 22.19 149, 170 22.20-24 117 23 92 23.1-20 99, 175 23.1-2 151 23.3-18 99 23.3-20 151 23.4 101 24 92, 115, 162, 166, 167, 170, 171, 176 24.2-4 175 24.4 92, 159, 166 24.6-8 160 24.6 158 24.7 166, 167 24.8 167 24.9 158 24.10-61 162 24.10 117, 159 24.15 87 24.16 51, 89, 177 24.23 162 24.25 162 24.47 87 24.54 162 24.55 107 24.59 165 24.61 45

24.67 89, 92, 167, 177, 206 25.1-6 92 25.6 118, 161 25.7-10 168 25.9 148 25.11 152 25.12-18 84 25.12-16 148 25.18 148, 152 25.19–37.1 153 25.19–28.22 156 25.19 83 25.20 159 25.21-26 110, 161 25.21 90, 170, 190, 191 25.22-23 168, 191 25.22 168, 203, 212 25.23 85, 154, 155, 160, 169, 174 25.25-26 58, 169, 177, 181 25.26 57, 88 25.27 110, 169 25.29-34 157, 169 25.29 172, 179 25.30 172 25.32 172 26 139 26.1-33 106 26.1-11 170 26.1-6 100 26.1-4 100 26.1 100, 106 26.2-4 102 26.2 112 26.3-4 100 26.3-5 83, 99 26.3 100, 158 26.6-11 99 26.6-8 119 26.7 107, 177 26.8 111 26.12-14 112, 113 26.18-22 113, 170 26.12 103, 104 26.20 99 26.21 99 26.22 99, 104

233 26.24 162 26.32-33 113 26.33 99 26.34-35 173 26.34 173 27 91, 110, 114, 157, 167, 170, 174, 177, 178, 179, 200, 205 27.1 170, 177 27.5 171 27.8-10 172 27.8 89, 172 27.9 89 27.13 89, 172, 175 27.15 176 27.22 205 27.28 159, 160 27.29 96, 160 27.36 57, 157 27.40 160 27.41-46 173 27.42-45 173 27.42 176 27.43-44 89 27.43 117, 163, 178 27.44 178 27.46 168, 173, 174 28.1-2 174-75 28.2–7 159 28.2 92, 117, 163, 178 28.5 87, 117, 163, 178 28.6-9 148 28.10-22 163 28.11 162 28.13-14 83 28.13 99, 158, 159 28.14 102 28.15 159 28.16 50 28.19 99 28.20 163 28.21 159 29.1– 32.1 156 29 157, 167, 177 29.1-20 162 29.1-14 92 29.1-12 176 29.1 160 29.2 162

234

Index of Biblical References

29.3 162 29.4-5 117, 197 29.5-6 92 29.5 117, 197, 198 29.6 198 29.7 162 29.8 162 29.9-10 198 29.9 198 29.10-12 207 29.10 87, 92, 162, 163, 176, 178, 197, 198 29.11 198 29.12 92, 176, 197, 198 29.13 92, 178, 197 29.14-30 198 29.14-15 210 29.14 23, 24, 197 29.15 197 29.16 87, 176 29.17 89, 176, 177, 178 29.18 89, 177, 207 29.20 89, 177, 178, 207 29.21-29 179 29.22-26 206 29.23-25 162 29.23 162, 178 29.26 179 29.27-28 180 29.30 89, 162, 177, 179, 188, 191, 207 29.31–30.24 89, 156, 161, 195 29.31 88, 90, 179, 180, 181, 189, 191 29.32–30.21 180 29.32 181 29.33 179, 181 29.34 181 29.35 181 30.1-2 161, 189 30.1 89, 90, 132, 182, 184, 190, 192, 202, 203, 212 30.2 90, 91, 182, 188, 190, 192, 207 30.3-13 189 30.3-8 191

30.3 89, 133, 182, 188, 202, 212 30.4 162, 183 30.5 191 30.6 136, 191 30.7 191 30.8 136, 183, 191 30.9 183 30.11 136, 181 30.13 136, 181 30.14-16 161, 162, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 192, 194, 195, 199, 212 30.14 187, 188 30.15 162, 182, 187, 189 30.16 89, 162, 182, 187 30.17-18 181 30.17 190, 194 30.18 182 30.19-20 181 30.20 180, 181 30.21 181 30.22-24 189, 194, 196 30.22-23 90 30.22 90, 184, 190, 194 30.23 190 30.24 181 30.25-43 161, 196 30.25 188, 196 30.27 164 30.32 182 30.33 182 30.38 162 30.43 196 31 164 31.1 196 31.2-3 197 31.3 158, 163 31.4 180, 181, 196 31.5 197 31.6 50 31.7 160 31.13 159, 163 31.14 45, 180, 181 31.15 197 31.16 89 31.17-18 197 31.19-20 197, 205

31.19 91, 189, 197, 198, 199, 200, 202, 205 31.20 163, 197, 198 31.24 162, 163 31.28 176 31.29 162, 163, 164 31.30 164, 199 31.32 164, 175, 199, 201, 202, 203, 207 31.33-35 164, 199, 205 31.34 199, 205 31.35 199, 200 31.37 205 31.39 162 31.40 162 31.41 188 31.42 162, 164 31.43 24 31.44-54 158 31.47–49 99 31.53 164 31.54 162 32.1 176 32.2–35.22 156 32.3 99 32.4 169 32.5 100 32.10 159 32.23 162 32.26 211 32.29 99, 153, 156, 165, 183 32.31 99 32.32 211 33 204 33.1-17 179 33.1-7 137 33.1-2 181 33.1 183 33.2 180, 183 33.6-7 180 33.6 183 33.7 45, 181 33.10 207 33.11 157, 160, 204 33.16 154 33.17 99 33.18 159

Index of Biblical References 33.19-20 99 35 206 35.2-4 164, 197 35.6-15 164 35.6-7 165 35.7–8 99 35.8 165, 175 35.10-12 93 35.11-12 83 35.15 99 35.16-20 165, 175, 181, 202, 206 35.16-18 161 35.18 181, 192, 202 35.19-20 192 35.22 162, 187, 192, 193, 195 35.23-26 137, 180 35.27 100, 101, 207 36 153, 179 36.1-43 84 36.1 83 36.6-8 154, 157, 179 36.7 117 36.8 118, 169 36.9 83 37–50 85, 93, 196 37.1 153, 154, 157, 159, 207 37.2 83 37.3 189, 196, 207 37.21-22 194 37.26 24 37.27 23, 24 38 191 38.16 50 39.17 111 41.33 26 41.39 26 41.45 93 41.50 93 42.4 207 42.22 194 42.37 194 44.5 199 44.15 199 44.20 189

46.8-25 180 46.8 195 47.4 100 47.27 119 48.5 193 49.2-27 180 49.3-4 193 49.3 192, 195 49.4 193, 194 49.17 75 49.26 85, 196 49.31 165, 179, 180 49.33 159 50.13 181 Exodus 1.7 119 1.11 143 1.12 143 2 167 2.15b-21 162 3.7 143 3.21-22 119 4.31 143 6.1 143 6.14 195 11.1 143 12.35-36 119 12.39 143 15.22 140 16.3 120 18.4 14 18.17-18 13 18.21 13 19.6 209 21.14 26 25.12 18 25.14 18 26.20 18 26.26-27 19 26.26 18 26.27 18 26.35 18 32.7-14 8 33.20 142 37.3 18, 19 37.5 18

235 Leviticus 11.42 55 12.1-8 202 15.19-24 202 18.6-10 187, 193, 194 18.6-7 89, 126 18.6 23 18.22 126 20.13 126 25.49 23 Numbers 1.20 195 11 8 11.20 120 11.14 13 12.1 45 14.2 120 14.11-25 8 20.5 120 21.5 120 22.5 210 22.11 210 22.31 37 24.8-9 96 22.5 119 22.11 119 31.17-18 51 31.35 51 Deuteronomy 1.9 13 1.12 13 9.4-5 99 11.9-12 121 11.10-11 120 16.21 98 17.15-16 124 21.15-17 180, 193 23.2-3 131 23.3-4 130 23.7-8 131 25.9 134 26.5 101, 119 33.7 14 33.26 14

236 33.29 34.10

Index of Biblical References 14 50

Joshua 9.3ff 26 Judges 6.3 118, 160 6.33 118, 160 7.12 160 8.10 160 9.2 23 11.39 51 13 88, 169, 189 17.5 199 21.11-12 51 Ruth 2.11 50 4.11 134, 195 1 Samuel 1 88, 189 1.1-2 190 1.8 91 15.23 164, 199 23.22 26 25.17 50 26.12 17 26.16 46 2 Samuel 5.1 23 12.2 45 16.21-22 192 19.12 23 19.13 23 1 Kings 2.15 50 6.5 18 6.8 18 6.15 18 6.16 18 6.34 18 8.39 50 19.20 176 2 Kings 4 88

4.35 37 6.17 37 6.20 37 23.24 199

15.5 26 19.25 26 22.3 26 27.12 26

1 Chronicles 5.1-2 194 5.1 193, 195 5.3 195 11.1 23

Song of Songs 1.2 176 3.1 194 4.13 186 5.2 186 5.5 186 5.6 186 6.11 186 7.1-10 186 7.10 186 7.11-14 186 7.11 64, 186 7.12-13 186 7.12 186 7.13 186, 187 7.14 186, 187, 188

Ezra 9.1-4 9.1-2 Job 1–2 5.12 5.13 9.17 11.11 15.5

135 149, 151 8 26 26, 183 56 50 26

Psalms 1.6 50 18.27 183 33.20 14 35.21 37 37.18 50 72.9 55 115.9-11 14 121.2 14 124.8 14 139.4 50 139.11 56 146.5 14 Proverbs 1.4 26 7.17 194 8.5 26 8.8 183 8.12 26 9.13 51 12.16 26 12.23 26 13.16 26 14.8 26 14.15 26 14.18 26

Isaiah 13.8 58 21.3 58 26.17 58 26.18 58 35.5 37 45.10 58 45.18 66 49.23 55 54.1 58 57.7 194 57.8 194 66.7, 8 58 Jeremiah 1.5 50 4.31 58 6.24 58 14.6 56 49.28 160 Ezekiel 21.26 23.17 23.27 23.49

164, 199 194 119 50

Index of Biblical References

237

29–32 119 29.1-16 120 32.1-16 120 32.17-32 120 41.5-9 18 41.11 18 41.26 18

New Testament

Dead Sea Scrolls

Acts of the Apostles 3.25 95

1QS 11.21-22

Galatians 3.8 95

Midrash

Hosea 2 105 2.10 51 2.15 119 3.4 199 5.3 50

1 Timothy 2.11-14 5

Amos 2.7 56 8.13 45

Deuterocanonical Books

Hebrews 6.13-15 132 11.8-12 132

Sirach 44.21 95

Micah 4.10 58 7.17 55

Old Testament Pseudepigrapha

Zechariah 10.2 164, 199

Jubilees 3.24 64

64

Genesis Rabbah 8.1 18 20.11 72 22.2 72 45.1 133 58.5 151 71.7 191 Leviticus Rabbah 20.2 151 Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer 72b 151