In this newsletter, I am reading the approx. 850 authors and works of Harold Bloom's Western canon, from cover to cover, from the Epic of Gilgamesh of ca. 1200 B.C. to Tony Kushner's 1991 play Angels in America. For today I’ve continued the third item on Bloom’s list, the Holy Bible.
The first ten chapters of Genesis are concerned with human history in a general sense: Adam and Noah can both claim to be patriarchs of the entire race, with the caveat that Noah’s sons are married to women whose parents died in the flood; the stories in the beginning of Genesis treat the origins of generic human activities and experiences, so that we read about the first murder in the story of Cain and Abel, the origins of music, metallurgy, and animal husbandry in the descendants of Cain, and the origin of eating animal flesh in the story of Noah’s ark. Chapter 10 lays out the descendants of Noah and traces them to the founding of the different nations that inhabited the ancient Near East, and chapter 11 begins with the story of the Tower of Babel, in which God, fearing what humanity will do if the whole world stays united, “confounds” human language so that everyone can’t understand one another, which explains how one family came to be a clump of cultures that each treated foreigners as aliens rather than as distant relatives. With the story of Abraham, né Abram, the narrative of Genesis becomes much tighter in focus and follows four generations of a family with special favor from God as it deals with foreign, often hostile, peoples and unnamed individuals, as seen in Chapter 19 where Lot and his guests, two angels sent by God, are assailed by anonymous men of Sodom who wish to rape the visitors staying at Lot’s house.
Other than God’s blessing, which several characters, even the Egyptian Pharaoh, are forced to acknowledge on account of the extraordinary material prosperity they enjoy, the main thing that seems to distinguish Abraham, his son Isaac, and his grandson Jacob who will later be renamed Israel after he holds his own in a wrestling match with God, are their aptitude for playing tricks on others. Twice Abraham deceives a king, first Pharaoh1 and later Abimelech2 of the Philistines, into thinking that his beautiful wife Sarah is really his sister, causing the king to marry Sarah and get cursed by God. When confronted by the king for his deceit, Abraham explains that he feared that he would be killed if the king believed that he was Sarah’s husband; but I don’t see how this excuse explains his actions. Pretending to be Sarah’s brother might have saved his life, but the foreseeable outcome of that ruse was that his wife would be married off to another man, and that doesn’t seem like much better of an outcome. In both cases Abraham was visiting the king’s country due to famine in his home of Canaan, but in other parts of Genesis, as in the incident in which Jacob’s daughter is defiled or raped by Schechem and Jacob’s sons kill every male in Schechem’s city in retaliation, great value is placed in the honor of the women in Abraham’s family, so I would think any risk of giving up his wife to another man would be too great for Abraham to tolerate. Really, I think Abraham pretended to be Sarah’s brother so he could receive lavish bride-prices from these kings, get rich, and recollect Sarah after the king was cursed and he was expelled from the country. Abraham’s son Isaac pulls the exact same scam on Abimelech (not necessarily the same Abimelech whom Abraham fooled: see note 2 above) with his wife Rebekah, but the text doesn’t say that Isaac profited from it in any way.
But some of the more amusing ruses are performed by Isaac’s son Jacob. He famously extorts his elder twin brother Esau’s birthright, that is, his right to inherit their father’s wealth, when Esau is exhausted from hunting all day and begs to eat some of Jacob’s pottage; and later disguises himself, with his mother Rebekah’s help, as his brother so that his dying father, no longer able to see well, will bestow on him the blessing meant for Esau:
Therefore Good give thee of the dew of heaven, and the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine: Let people serve thee, and nations bow down to thee: be lord over thy brethren, and let thy mother’s sons bow down to thee: cursed be every one that curseth thee, and blessed be he that blesseth thee.
The real Esau later returns with the venison Isaac had asked for (Jacob had slaughtered a goat and passed it off as venison), and rather pathetically begs for a blessing too:
And Esau said unto his father, Hast thou but one blessing, my father? bless me even me also, O my father. And Esau lifted up his voice, and wept.
Isaac does muster up this consolatory blessing for his cheated firstborn son:
Behold, thy dwelling shall be the fatness of the earth, and of the dew of heaven from above; And by thy sword shalt thou live, and shalt serve thy brother; and it shall come to pass when thou shalt have the dominion, that thou shalt break his yoke from off thy neck.
I offer an alternative translation, from the New Revised Standard Version, of Isaac’s blessing of Esau:
"See, away from the fatness of the earth shall your home be, and away from the dew of heaven on high. By your sword you shall live, and you shall serve your brother; but when you break loose, you shall break his yoke from your neck."
I think the New Revised Standard Version’s rendering of the first verse is more likely: since Isaac has bestowed on Jacob the fatness of the earth and the dew of heaven, it makes more sense to say that Esau’s home will be away from them than that his dwelling will be the fatness of the earth and the dew of heaven. I don’t speak a word of Hebrew, but I suspect that these alternative translations with very different meanings arise from a difference of opinion of how a noun in the genitive case should be read. In some Indo-European languages such as Greek and Latin, nouns transform (“decline”) according to their grammatical function, and nouns that take the genitive case can usually be translated into English as if they had “of” in front of them; as in English “of” can indicate distance from the following noun or that the following noun is the material out of which something is made, so nouns in the genitive case can be interpreted in those ways depending on context. (I checked, and in Classical Hebrew nouns do decline in respect to case, and one of the possible cases is the genitive.) In the Hebrew, there is probably a word for “home” in the genitive, and the editors of the King James Version and the New Revised Standard Version have interpreted this use of the genitive case differently.
A less well known but even more amusing trick played by Jacob occurs when he wants to move out of his father-in-law Laban’s home back west to Canaan, and has requested that Laban split his herd of sheep and goats with him:
I will pass through all thy flock to day, removing from thence all the speckled and spotted cattle, and all the brown cattle among the sheep, and the spotted and speckled among the goats: and of such shall be my hire.
But Laban, something of a trickster himself, having previously promised to let Jacob marry his daughter Rachel if Jacob worked for him for seven years and then given Jacob his other daughter Leah on Jacob’s wedding night, immediately removes all “the he goats that were ringstraked and spotted, and all the she goats that were speckled and spotted, and every one that had some white in it, and all the brown among the sheep, and gave them into the hand of his sons,” leaving Jacob with no animals to claim according to their agreement. But Jacob comes out ahead in the end with the help of a little shepherd’s folk wisdom:
And Jacob took him rods of green poplar, and of the hazel and chesnut tree; and pilled white strakes in them, and made the white appears which was in the roads. And he set the rods which he had pilled before the flocks in the gutters in the watering troughs when the flocks came to drink, that they should conceive when they came to drink. And the flocks conceived before the rods, and brought forth cattle ringstraked, speckled, and spotted. And Jacob did separate the lambs, and set the faces of the flocks toward the ringstraked, and all the brown in the flock of Laban; and he put his own flocks by themselves, and put them not unto Laban’s cattle. And it came to pass, whensoever the stronger cattle did conceive, that Jacob laid the rods before the eyes of the cattle in the gutters, that they might conceive among the rods.
Jacob has acted on the principle that livestock are influenced by what they see while they are breeding, and has placed sticks partly shaved off in front of the eyes of the mating sheep and goats; since the ewes and she-goats were looking at these speckled-white sticks while mating they gave birth to speckled young. Jacob performed further selective breeding by making sure only the strongest animals conceived spotted young, leaving only the weaker animals for Laban.
Jacob’s sons also inherit the trickster gene to some extent, but the story of Joseph in which their deceptions play out is different in tone from the rest of Genesis. I would characterize the stories of Adam, Noah, Abraham, and Jacob as not having much of a moral dimension: later religious traditions would emphasize the moral wrongness of Adam and Eve’s disobedience of God by eating the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, but I don’t think the story as given in Genesis gives us enough of a basis for reading it as a moral fable. It was clearly a mistake for Adam and Eve to disobey God’s command not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, but his warning that they would die if they did so was misleading: from the fact that God fears that they would next eat from the tree of life, we can gather that Adam and Eve were not yet immortal, and thus were going to die whether they ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil or not. And of course they weren’t immediately killed either: we don’t know how old Adam was when he was expelled from Eden, but he was no older than 130 years, the age when he begat Seth, his third son and the replacement for Abel after Cain murdered him, and Adam would live 800 years after Seth’s birth, dying at 930. So the serpent’s assurance of Eve that she would not die if she ate the fruit of knowledge of good and evil was correct, and the fact that God seems to fear Adam and Eve makes it look like God had an ulterior motive for forbidding them from attaining knowledge of good and evil. Abraham’s obedience of God in being prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac has also been moralized by later religious traditions, but Abraham also challenges God at times, as when God tells Abraham he is going to destroy the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and Abraham, rather impetuously, denounces his resolve to smite the righteous with the wicked:
That be far from thee to do after this manner, to slay the righteous with the wicked: and that the righteous should be as the wicked, that be far from thee: Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?
Abraham further tries God’s patience by asking him if he will spare Sodom for the sake of fifty righteous citizens, then for the sake of only forty-five, then for the sake of only forty, then for the sake of only thirty, then for the sake of only twenty, then for the sake of only ten. Abraham asks these repetitious questions of the same god whose authority is later so great that even a command to sacrifice one’s own child is obeyed without challenge; the relationship of Abraham with his god is a complex one, but doesn’t easily admit of an ethical interpretation.
Not so with the story of Joseph, whose hero always seems to have the moral high ground and which consistently expounds the lesson that one should trust God to make good results out of bad circumstances. Jacob, sometimes called “Israel” in this part of Genesis, favors Joseph over his eleven older brothers3 because he is the first borne by Rachel, his favorite of the four wives, for whose hand in marriage he had to work for Laban for fourteen years. As a show of his favor, Jacob gifts Joseph a “coat of many colours”4, causing his brothers to hate Joseph. Joseph rubs it in by telling them and his father about a couple of dreams he has:
And he said unto them, Hear, I pray you, this dream which I have dreamed: For, behold, we were binding sheaves in the field, and, lo, my sheaf arose, and also stood upright; and, behold, your shaves stood round about, and made obeisance to my sheaf.
It doesn’t take an expert interpreter of dreams to figure out what this one means, but Joseph tells them of another, even more outrageous dream:
And he dreamed yet another dream, and told it to his brethren, and said, Behold, I have dreamed a dream more; and, behold, the sun and the moon and the eleven stars made obeisance to me.
Even Jacob rebukes Joseph for this second dream of his: “Shall I and thy mother and thy brethren indeed come to bow down ourselves to thee on the earth?” Joseph’s brothers decide to set upon him and kill him, but at the last minute the eldest brother Reuben5 sees the error of his ways and proposes that they instead trap him in a pit and sell him to some Ishmeelites. While the brothers are away from the pit, negotiating with the Ishmeelites I assume, some Midianites come across it, find Joseph, and become the ones to sell him to the Ishmeelites! The brothers take the coat of many colors that they had stripped from Joseph before, dip it in goats’ blood, and present it to their father, who concludes that his favorite son has been eaten by wild animals. Meanwhile Joseph is sold to the Egyptians6 and becomes the slave of Potiphar, captain of Pharaoh’s guard. After Joseph rejects the advances of Potiphar’s wife, the wife accuses Joseph of insulting her, and he is thrown into prison. In prison, Joseph meets Pharaoh’s butler and baker, who have also been imprisoned, for unspecified offenses. The butler and the baker have dreams, the butler of filling Pharaoh’s cup with gapes from a vine with three branches and the baker of three baskets of “bakemeats” on his head from which birds are eating; Joseph correctly predicts that the butler will be released and returned to Pharaoh’s court after three days and that in three days the baker will be hanged. Pharaoh, hearing about Joseph’s prophetic interpretations of his butler’s and baker’s dreams two years later, summons Joseph to interpret two dreams he himself has had:
And Pharaoh said unto Joseph: In my dream, behold, I stood upon the bank of the river: And, behold, there came up out of the river seven kine7, fatfleshed and well favoured; and they fed in a meadow: And, behold, seven other kine came up after them, poor and very ill favoured and leanfleshed, such as I never saw in all in the land of Egypt for badness: And the lean and ill favoured kine did eat up the first seven fat kine: And when they had eaten them up, it could not be known that they had eaten them; but they were still ill favored, as at the beginning. So I awoke. And I saw in my dream, and, behold, seven ears8 came up in one stalk, full and good: And, behold, seven ears, withered, thin, and blasted with the east wind, sprung up after them: And the thin ears devoured the seven good ears: and I told this unto the magicians; but there was none that could declare it to me.
Joseph tells Pharaoh that these dreams portend seven years of good harvest followed by seven years of famine, God having sent two dreams meaning the same thing for emphasis. Pharaoh, greatly pleased, not only releases Joseph from prison, but makes him a sort of governor in charge of Pharaoh’s house and all of Egypt, so that “only in the throne” will Pharaoh be greater than Joseph. Over the next seven years Joseph manages Egypt’s food supply sensibly, with the blessing of God passed down from Abraham, and when the famine comes Joseph opens up the storehouses to feed the people, winning honor and riches for himself. One day Joseph’s eleven older brothers come from Canaan looking to buy grain (Benjamin stayed home because he was thought too young for the journey). Joseph recognizes his brothers but his brothers don’t recognize him; remembering what they did to him, Joseph tests his brothers first by accusing them of being spies and demanding they present him their youngest brother Benjamin who they claim they left behind in Canaan, and then, when they come back to Egypt, with Benjamin in tow, to buy more grain, by hiding his silver cup in the sack of Benjamin, with instructions to his steward to overtake the brothers as they’re leaving Egypt and act like the cup has been stolen. When the cup is found in Benjamin’s sack and the brothers are bought back to Joseph, Joseph demands that Benjamin become his slave, but Judah, the fourth son borne to Leah, volunteers to take Benjamin’s place as slave. Joseph’s older brothers have refused to sell out Benjamin as they once did him, a fit basis for reconciliation, so Joseph finally reveals himself to his brothers, who apologize for selling him into slavery. Joseph replies:
Now therefore be not grieved, nor angry with yourselves, that ye sold me hither: for God did send me before you to preserve life. For these two years hath the famine been in the land: and yet there are five years, in the which there shall neither be earing nor harvest. And God sent me before you to preserve you a posterity in the earth, and to save your lives by a great deliverance. So now it was not you that sent me hither, but God: and he hath made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house, and a ruler throughout all the land of Egypt.
This attribution of Joseph’s blessings to God is seen throughout the story. Jacob, on meeting Joseph’s sons Ephraim and Manasseh, says to Joseph, “I had not thought to see thy face; and, lo, God hath shewed me also thy seed.” Even the Egyptians, who have no particular reason to acknowledge the god of Abraham, credit the LORD with blessing Joseph. Thus it’s written of Potiphar, Joseph’s master when he is first brought to Egypt, that he “saw that the LORD was with him, and that the LORD made all that he did to prosper in his hand.” Pharaoh too attributes Joseph’s talent for interpreting dreams to God, saying, “Forasmuch as God hath shewed thee all this, there is none so discreet and wise as thou art.” In Joseph we have an example of a man met with extraordinary misfortune who, with God’s blessing, overcomes these obstacles and becomes greater and more prosperous than before. The reader is urged to trust with Joseph that God only visits us with misfortune so that better things might be got than those good things which were lost. The fact that God it not actually a character in the Joseph narrative, making him bear the same relation to Joseph, his brothers, and his father Jacob as he does to the readers of Genesis, certainly makes it easier to see Joseph’s conduct as exemplary: what are we to do with Abraham’s example of challenging God on his plan to destroy Sodom or his readiness to make his own son a sacrificial victim when God is not in the habit of coming down to seek our counsel or give us direct commands? So Joseph’s story, even if it hinges on his astute interpretation of prophetic dreams, or his knack for macroeconomic policy, rare talents to say the least, offers a more practical model for emulation than anything else in Genesis.
The editors of my New Oxford Annotated Bible note that at times in Joseph’s story, as when he volunteers to take Benjamin’s place as Joseph’s slave, Judah comes out looking like the hero. Judah’s descendants will include King David of Israel and will be one of the few tribes of Israel that would survive the Assyrian conquest; and he will give the Kingdom of Judah its name, as well as one of those by which the descendants of Israel are known: Jew. With the twelve tribes of Israel existing in microcosm in Jacob’s sons, it’s certainly peculiar that Joseph, the father of the two unimportant half-tribes Ephraim and Manasseh, plays the central role in the familial relations. The editors suggest that this awkwardness was smoothed over by the redactors of Genesis by giving Judah more of a role to play in the story of Joseph than he did in traditional versions. Also justifying Judah’s place as an important tribe in Israel’s later history is this blessing given by Jacob on his deathbed to his sons:
Gather yourselves together, and hear, ye sons of Jacob; and hearken unto Israel your father.
Reuben, thou art my firstborn, my might, and the beginning of my strength, the excellency of dignity, and the excellency of power: Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel; because thou wentest up to thy father’s bed; then defiledst thou it: he went up to my couch.9
Simeon and Levi are brethren; instruments of cruelty are in their habitations. O my soul, come not thou into their secret; unto their assembly, mine honour, be not thou united; for in their anger they slew a man, and in their self-will they digged down a wall.10 Cursed be their anger, for it was fierce; and their wrath, for it was cruel: I will divide them in Jacob, and scatter them in Israel.
Judah, thou art he whom thy brethren shall praise: thy hand shall be in the neck of thine enemies; thy father’s children shall bow down before thee. Judah is a lion’s whelp: from the prey, my son, thou art gone up: he stooped down, he couched as a lion, and as an old lion; who shall rouse him up? The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come, and unto him shall be the gathering of the people be. Binding his foal unto the vine, and his ass’s colt unto the choice vine; he washed his garments in wine, and his clothes in the blood of grapes: His eyes shall be red with wine, and his teeth white with milk.
Zebulun shall dwell at the haven of the sea; and he shall be for an haven of ships; and his border shall be unto Zidon.
Issachar is a strong ass couching down between two burdens: And he saw that rest was good, and the land that it was pleasant; and bowed his shoulder to bear, and became a servant unto tribute.
Dan shall judge his people, as one of the tribes of Israel. Dan shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path, that biteth the horse heels, so that his rider shall fall backward. I have waited for thy salvation, O LORD.
Gad, a troop shall overcome him: but he shall overcome at the last.
Out of Asher his bread shall be fat, and he shall yield royal dainties.
Naphtali is a hind let loose: he giveth goodly words.
Joseph is a fruitful bough, even a fruitful bough by a well; whose branches run over the wall: The archers have sorely grieved him, and shot at him, and hated him: But his bow abode in strength, and the arms of his hands were made strong by the hands of the mighty God of Jacob; (from thence is the shepherd, the stone of Israel:) Even by the God of thy father, who shall help thee; and by the Almighty, who shall bless thee with blessings of heaven above, blessings of the deep that lieth under, blessings of the breasts, blessings of the womb: The blessings of why father have prevailed above the blessings of my progenitors unto the utmost bound of everlasting hills: they shall be on the head of Joseph, and on the crown of the head of him that was separate from his brethren.
Benjamin shall ravin as a wolf: in the morning he shall devour the prey, and at night he shall divide the spoil.
Judah is nominated as the ruler of the twelve tribes of Israel because his elder brothers, Reuben, Simeon, and Levi, are disqualified due to indiscretions recorded earlier in Genesis.
Genesis leaves the Israelites in Egypt, raising livestock on land given to them by Joseph, who dies at 110 and is mummified in the Egyptian fashion. Next week I’ll begin reading the next book of the Bible, Exodus.
For some reason the Pentateuch invariably uses “Pharaoh” is if it were itself a personal name and not just the title of an Egyptian king, whereas I think really pharaohs were distinguished by given names, for example Ramesses and Tutankhamon
It’s come to my attention that “Abimelech” is also a generic name for a king, in this case referring to any Philistine king, used in many books of the Bible, much like “Pharaoh” is a generic name for any king of Egypt.
Joseph also has a younger brother borne by Rachel, Benjamin, but he doesn’t seem to be included in the group of brothers jealous of Joseph, maybe because he would already have to be give regard to Joseph as his older full brother.
The New Revised Standard Version has “robe with long sleeves.”
Reuben was borne to Leah, Laban’s elder daughter who was substituted for Rachel on Jacob’s first wedding night.
In Genesis 37:36 it says that the Midianites sold Joseph to the Egyptians, but 39:1 says the Ishmeelites brought Joseph to Egypt. In 45:5 Joseph actually accuses his brothers of selling him into slavery.
the plural of “cow”
that is, of grain
Jacob refers to an incident recorded in Genesis 35:22, where Reuben has sex with Jacob’s concubine Bilhah.
Jacob refers to the slaughter of the males of Shechem, when Dinah was defiled.
Abimelech = avi + melech, father + king.
Cool to read a sharp mind diving into this material without preconceptions or prejudice - looking forward to more