Humanities C1001-014: Masterpieces of Western Literature and Philosophy
Prof. Eileen Gillooly
PROTOCOLS
#20: The Bible: "Genesis"
Written by Elizabeth Segran and edited by Monica Pasternak
Initial Problems
In order to appreciate the bible as a literary text, we should not bring our preconceptions about God and our religious biases to it. This having been said, several questions arise.
First of all, is God knowable at all? And if so, how does one go about trying to understand him? In one sense, as we are made in his image, the first place to look for him is in the human nature, that is, in the characters in the Bible and in ourselves: as with human beings, we can study His words and His actions to understand his ethos or character. At times He is very direct about His character. For example, there is a point in Exodus where He says He is a jealous God.
The second problem that arises is not that God is necessarily an enigma, but that He is inconsistent. What He says sometimes directly contradicts what He says at other times, and perhaps more compellingly, in His relationships with man, his actions reveal inconsistency. The difficulty arises because we desperately want God to be consistent. It is part of our nature to want to see cause-and-effect relations between actions to establish a predictable God. And God in Genesis is often unpredictable; we are dealing with an infinite character, using finite reasoning. Our reason limits us and traps God in what we perceive as an inconsistent confusion.
This of course leads to the natural question – if God is so elusive and incomprehensible, is there any point in attempting to understand His character and reasoning at all? We can learn about God from his interactions with His chosen people, setting them apart and giving them progeny and land.
Genesis states that God sets out to test Abraham by asking him to sacrifice his son. We speculate that it was a test of faith, of loyalty. When we come down to it, the bible simply does not provide any answers as to God’s motives. Again, our desire to find a causal relationship is frustrated.
Interestingly, the text calls us to sympathize with Abraham’s conflict. The text repeats phrases like “your only son Isaac, whom you love” to call attention to what will be the severity of Abraham’s loss. And yet there is also room to sympathize with his son. Abraham does not seem to question God, as we think he should: he questioned God in respect to Sodom and Gomorrah, why doesn’t he question God now? Isaac on the other hand is helpless and oblivious. In any case, Abraham chooses not to disobey God, and he is “blessed” in consequence. (See 22:18-18)
Occasionally God reveals his motives directly, but generally, all that we can do is interpret his actions or decide that they cannot be understood – that they are beyond our realm of understanding. The need to interpret has resulted in myriad religious disagreements that have divided religions into denominations and sects throughout the ages.
After the fall of Adam and Eve in the garden of evil, humanity tasted of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and of Evil, that is, moral knowledge. Knowing what is evil doesn’t seem to have kept man from committing it, as is seen in the days before the flood, and in Sodom and Gomorrah. While these are examples of God punishing evil, we see the general tendency in Genesis for God to remove himself from the lives of a’dam (humans), choosing instead to let them govern and punish themselves. When He does intervene, it is usually when entire communities are sinning.
There seems are a number of instances where God seems to ignore morally ambiguous actions. When Jacob steals Esau’s blessing, when Lot’s daughters sleep with him, these seem to go unpunished. Why is this? As we have previously stated, God seems to be refraining from direct intervention on an individual basis. There is also the view that God’s justice gets played out over a span of time beyond our comprehension. What may seem unjust from our myopic point of view may be just when seen in the big picture.
Sometimes the stories themselves contain contradictions and add discrepancies. For example, there are two contradicting pieces of information about how long the flood lasted. After the flood we are told that the “sons of God married the daughters of earth”. Who are these daughters of earth? It sounds like Greek mythology.
God speaks and things are called into being (debar). He speaks and things are. This calls attention to the power of language itself. God gives Adam the power to name the animals, which reflected his authority over them. Language, indeed, is so powerful that when God sees that mankind tries to build a tower to heaven and make a name for itself he says that they must be stopped from speaking one language otherwise “nothing they propose to do will now be impossible”. (11:6-8)
There is also a huge emphasis on names in the bible. Characters are named and renamed because of the symbolic meanings in their names. There is a constant play on words in the text. Puns are everywhere.
There are two points of interest in our reading of the tale of Jacob. First of all, we see Esau selling his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of lentil stew. Although Jacob’s cunning here ethically seems questionable, perhaps it shows us that if Esau was willing to give up his birthright for one meal, then perhaps he wasn’t worthy of the birthright to begin with. Not only Isaac but also God Himself eventually blesses Jacob. It is through him that the offspring of Israel emerges.
Secondly, Jacob is by nature deceptive. He deceives his father in order to receive the blessing instead of his brother. He deceives Lot in relation to his sheep. This is reminiscent of Odysseus. Even Rachel, his wife is rather cunning, and she, like Penelope, is a good match for Jacob. (See 31:19-20; 34-35)
This bible is not a philosophical argument. It is not hypotactic; that is, it does not link phrases or clauses together to show them logical, generally causal or relational. Thus we are thrown back on literary strategy as a means of deciphering the text. One technique we have seen so far is repetition with variation. It is in the variations of repeated stories that meaning is gleaned. Here are a few examples of repetition:
a) There are several instances where men have lied that their wives were their sisters. They do so to protect themselves and their wives. This “type scene” occurs twice with Abraham and Sarah and once with Isaac and Rebecca. But the particulars of the scene vary slightly but significantly. In the Abraham situation, God tells the people that Sarah is Abraham’s wife. In the case of Isaac, it was Abimelech who discovered for himself that Rebecca was Isaac’s wife, having seen Isaac “fondling” her, having previously found himself in the same predicament before with Sarah, Isaac’s mother. Knowledge is progressive and in the latter story obliterates the need for divine intervention.
b) Marriages are arranged at wells. This is seen in both Isaac and Rebecca’s marriage and in Jacob and Rachel’s. In the case of Isaac’s marriage, he wasn’t himself there to arrange it. This is consonant with his rather passive nature. Is this a result of his previous trauma? In the case of Jacob, we see that he seems to be more concerned with the sheep than he is with Rachel. This allows us to glimpse some of Jacob’s pragmatic, attitude and craftiness.
c) Famines. The famine in the land forces Isaac to go to the land of the philistines. The famine in Egypt forces Joseph’s family to go to Egypt for food and where they encounter Joseph who “remembers them.” These are examples of how even natural disasters are used by the Almighty to work His will.
Throughout all of this we see that despite the different particulars the themes of history are the same. There is a consistency in human actions.
Joseph was an interpreter of dreams. As a child he was rather obnoxious and annoying, and yet even then, his dreams were to prove reliable as prophesies. This indicates another important fact: that sometimes we only truly understand the world or events when we see them in retrospect, when we are able to perceive the big picture. Joseph made sure to acknowledge that his prophesies were not merely his own interpretations, but that they came from God. As such, he acts in a manner similar to the priests of the Oracles in the Greek times. He seems to translate Gods word into human form.
When Potiphar’s wife, in anger, frames him for rape, she uses his robe as evidence against him. The theme of the robe is a reoccurring one in his life. As a child, his brothers bloodied his multicolored coat as evidence to prove his death. In both cases, the evidence was unreliable, and misinterpretation took place. As such the story of Joseph acts as an analogy for our own struggles with interpretation. We cannot always rudimentarily assume that our interpretations are correct when we see compelling evidence. Also, when relating to stories of God, we cannot always assume that he is wrong based on what we see as evidence against Him. As an aside, the use of the robes in the Joseph story is reminiscent of the use of the robe as evidence of the murder of Agamemnon in the Oresteia.