Hebrew Myths (35 page)

***

1
. Two Greek mythic heroes, Autolycus the master-thief and his rival in deceit, Sisyphus the Corinthian, appear here in the persons of Jacob and Laban. Hermes, god of thieves, shepherds and orators, had granted Autolycus power to metamorphose stolen beasts from horned to unhorned, white to black, and contrariwise. Sisyphus noticed that his herds grew steadily smaller, while those of his neighbour Autolycus increased. One day he engraved his own initials on the cattle’s hooves. When, that night, Autolycus stole again, Sisyphus and a group of kinsmen tracked the cattle to Autolycus’s farm-yard. Leaving them to confront the thief, he hurried around to the front door, entered secretly, and fathered the famous rascal Odysseus on Autolycus’s daughter. Autolycus also stole horses from King Iphitus of Euboea, changed their appearance, and sold them to Heracles as if bred by himself. Iphitus followed their tracks to Tiryns, where he accused Heracles of the theft; and when he was unable to identify the stolen beasts, Heracles hurled him over the city walls. This involved Heracles in a fight against Apollo, but Zeus made them clasp hands again.

Sisyphus and Autolycus, like Jacob and Laban, matched deceit against deceit. Moreover, Jacob was aided by God, as Autolycus was by Hermes, and died like him in prosperous old age. Both myths seem to be drawn from the same ancient source; their resemblances are more numerous than their differences, and Sisyphus can be equated with Abraham in another myth (see 39.
1
). Nevertheless,
Genesis
justifies Jacob’s trickery as forced on him by Laban’s miserliness. Nor does he steal grown beasts, but merely arranges that lambs and kids are born in colours favourable to him; whereas Rachel, who does steal, earns the death unwittingly decreed by her loving husband.

2
. ‘Teraphim’ here refers to a single household god, somewhat smaller than the one which Saul’s daughter Michal placed in her bed to form the lower half of a dummy—the upper being supplied by a goat’s-hair quilt (1
Samuel
XIX. 13 ff). Since Laban’s teraphim fitted into the U-shaped bolster placed around a dromedary’s hump to make a platform for baggage, or a litter, it cannot have been much longer than two feet.

Neither Rachel nor Michal are reproached because they consult teraphim (see 44.
6
); any more than are the Danites who stole an oracular breastplate and a teraphim from the house of Micah the Ephraimite in order to set up a new sanctuary at Laish, and at the same time abducted the young Levite priest in charge of them (
Judges
XVII. 1; XVIII. 31). On the contrary, Micah’s mother had piously cast this image from silver dedicated to the God of Israel (
Judges
XVII. 3–5); and Micah, after persuading the Levite
to officiate in his private chapel, had exclaimed with satisfaction: ‘God will certainly favour me, now that I have a Levite as my priest!’ (
Judges
V. 13).

Since Rachel’s theft is treated in
Genesis
merely as a proof that she shared her husband’s resentment against Laban, it must date from the days of the Judges. She will have intended to found a shrine in Aramaean style. Laban was obliged to respect her excuse: the horror of contact with a menstruous woman, or with anything that she has touched, still prevails in the Middle East; and a man who passes between two such women is thought liable to fall dead. The avoidance of this danger helps to maintain the strict separation between men and women in synagogues and mosques; although it was originally designed to keep festive gatherings from becoming orgiastic (M. Sukka V. 2 and parallel sources).

3
. An assembly of kinsmen is the common judicial forum among nomad Arabs: their numbers, and the publicity given to a dispute, assure that both parties will accept the verdict.

4
. Laban represents the Aramaeans of Mesopotamia, and the boundary stone and cairn prove that Mesopotamian power once extended as far south as Gilead. In the early days of the Hebrew monarchy, however, the nation threatening Israel from that quarter was not Mesopotamia but Syria—also known as
Aram
, though sometimes distinguished from Mesopotamia,
Aram-Naharayim
, by being called
Aram-Dameseq
, ‘Aram of Damascus’. Laban thus came to represent Aram-Dameseq, and the quarrel between him and Israel was interpreted in this sense. When, after the death of David’s son Solomon, Syria freed itself from Hebrew sovereignty, the two countries lived at peace—a situation reflected in the Gilead feast—under treaties of friendship (1
Kings
XV. 18–20) until Ben-Hadad, King of Damascus, defeated Ahab, King of Israel, in 855
B.C.

5
. Boundary cairns, consisting of five or six largish stones placed on top of each other, are still used in Israel and Jordan to divide fields, and the respect shown them is founded on the Mosaic curse against removal (
Deuteronomy
XXVII. 17).

The derivation of
Gilead
from
Gal-‘ed
is popular etymology;
Gilead
represents the Arabic
jal‘ad
, meaning ‘strong or hard’, which occurs in several Gileadite place names, such as Jebel Jal’ad, Khirbet Jal’ad and Khirbet Jal‘ud.

(
a
) Jacob crossed the Jordan and, next evening, so numerous a company of angels met him beside the River Jabbok, that he exclaimed: ‘Here are
two camps:
God’s and mine!’ Hence the city afterwards built there was called Mahanaim.

He sent a message to Esau on Mount Seir: ‘Greeting to my lord Esau from his slave Jacob, who has lived at Padan-Aram these past twenty years and is now rich in camels, oxen, asses, flocks, and servants. He mentions this prosperity because he desires to enjoy my lord’s favour.’ The messengers, hurrying back, reported that Esau had already set out for the Jabbok at the head of four hundred men. Jacob, greatly alarmed, divided his retinue into
two camps
, each containing half of the flocks, herds, and women. ‘If Esau plunders the first,’ he thought, ‘the second may yet escape.’ Then he prayed to God for deliverance.

Jacob prepared gifts to send Esau: a flock of two hundred she-goats and twenty he-goats; another of two hundred ewes and twenty rams; a drove of thirty milch-camels with their colts; a herd of forty cows and ten bulls; another of twenty she-asses with ten foals. He told his herdsmen to ford the Jabbok in turns, leaving intervals of a bowshot between flocks, herds, and droves; and to answer Esau, when questioned: ‘These beasts are a gift to my lord Esau from his slave Jacob, who follows humbly behind, desiring your favour.’

The herdsmen obeyed, and Esau treated them well; but Jacob delayed on the farther bank, while sending his whole household ahead, over the ford.
³⁵³

(
b
) Left alone that evening, Jacob was attacked by an unseen presence, who wrestled with him all night and shrank the sinew of his thigh, so that he limped ever afterwards. At last the adversary cried: ‘Let go, for dawn is near!’ Jacob answered: ‘I will not let go unless you bless me!’ ‘What is your name?’ his adversary inquired and, when Jacob gave it, said: ‘Henceforth you shall be called “Israel”, because you have
wrestled with God
and with men, and remain undefeated.’ Jacob then asked: ‘And what is your name?’, but was
answered: ‘Why inquire? Is it not enough that I give you my blessing?’ Jacob cried: ‘I have seen
God’s countenance
, and am still alive!’ So the place was called ‘Peniel’; and because of the injury done to Jacob’s thigh, no Israelite since eats the thigh sinew of any beast.
³⁵⁴

(
c
) Some say that God assumed the shape of a shepherd, or a brigand chief, who led Jacob’s herds across the ford in return for help with his own; and that, when they went back to see whether any beast had been overlooked, He began to wrestle. Others say that Jacob’s adversary was not God but Samael, the celestial guardian of Edom, trying to destroy Jacob; and that the heavenly hosts made ready to fly down if summoned. Yet God said: ‘My servant Jacob needs no aid; his virtue protects him!’
³⁵⁵

(
d
) Others, again, say that Jacob’s adversary was Michael and that, when he cried, ‘Let go, for dawn is near!’, Jacob exclaimed: ‘Are you then a thief, or a gambler, that you fear dawn?’ To which Michael replied: ‘No, but at dawn we angels must sing God’s praises.’ Observing Jacob’s lameness, God questioned Michael: ‘What have you done to My first-born son?’ Michael answered: ‘I shrank a sinew in Your honour.’ God said: ‘It is good. Henceforth, until the end of time, you shall have charge of Israel and his posterity! For the prince of angels should guard the prince of men; fire should guard fire, and head guard head!’
³⁵⁶

(
e
) Still others say that Michael fought Jacob because he failed to pay the tithes vowed at Bethel twenty years earlier; and that, next morning, Jacob repentantly sacrificed victims by the hundred, also dedicating his son Levi as God’s priest and collector of tithes.
³⁵⁷

***

1
. Mahanaim (‘Two Camps’), the name of which is here given two alternative explanations, stood on the banks of the Jabbok River, some six miles eastward from Jordan, and became one of Solomon’s twelve capital cities.

2
. Each stage in Jacob’s wanderings is charged with mythic significance. He founds settlements at Bethel, Mizpeh, Mahanaim, Peniel, Succoth—all of which derive their names from one of his acts or sayings—though the chronicler has omitted to mention that the Jabbok was so called because there Jacob ‘strove’ (
yeabheq
) with God. Later commentators made him
foresee the far-reaching effect of what he said or did. Thus, his order to the herdsmen ‘Put a space betwixt drove and drove!’ (
Genesis
XXII. 17), was read as advising his descendants always to keep a reserve for use in emergencies; and he is said to have prayed: ‘Lord, when disasters fall upon Your children, pray leave a space between them, as I have done!’

3
. Jacob speaks in the first person singular when referring to his kinship group (
Genesis
XXXII. 12; XXXIV. 30–31), and after the new name is accepted (XLIII. 6, 11; XLV. 28), his identification with the Israelite people becomes more and more pronounced (XLVI. 1–4). God tells him: ‘Fear not to go down to Egypt, for there I shall make of thee a great nation… and I shall also surely bring thee up again!’ And in
Genesis
XLVIII. 20, Jacob himself uses ‘Israel’ instead of ‘Children of Israel’.

4
. The widely differing midrashic views of this wrestling match between Jacob and the ‘man’ whom he afterwards identifies with God, are all prompted by pious embarrassment. God, the transcendental God of later Judaism, could never have demeaned himself by wrestling with a mortal and then begging him to release his hold. In any case, if He loved Jacob so well, and was so perfectly loved in return, why should they have struggled? And if the adversary was only an angel, should he be identified with Gabriel or Michael, or rather with the fallen angel Samael? Nevertheless, the notion that a pious man can struggle against God in prayer, and force Him to grant a blessing, was theologically admissible; Rachel had used the wrestling metaphor when she won her adoptive son ‘Naphtali’ from Him.

5
. To make historic sense of this myth, one must ask such questions as these: on what occasion does a tribal hero wrestle? On what occasion does he change his name? What was the nature of Jacob’s thigh injury? What was its magical effect? How is it related to the taboo on eating the flesh around thigh sinews? Why is this anecdote interpolated in the myth of Jacob’s reunion with Esau? And since it seems historically agreed that ‘Israel’ at first contained only the Rachel tribes, what part does Rachel play here?

6
. The answers are perhaps as follows. A tribal hero changes his name either when he commits manslaughter, flees from his country and is adopted by another tribe—but this does not apply to Jacob—or when he ascends a throne, or occupies a new country. The latter seems to have been the reason for Abraham’s change of name (see 31. 3). Jacob’s crossing of the Jabbok signified an important change in his position: hitherto he had been a hired servant of Laban, his father-in-law; now he was an independent chieftain, ready to enter and occupy his own tribal lands, secure in a parental blessing and a divine promise.

7
. Arabic lexicographers explain that the nature of the lameness produced by injury to the sinew of the thigh-socket causes a person so afflicted to walk on the tips of his toes. Such a dislocation of the hip is common among wrestlers and was first described by Harpocrates. Displacement
of the femur-head lengthens the leg, tightens the thigh tendons, and puts the muscles into spasm—which makes for a rolling, swaggering walk, with the heel permanently raised, like that attributed by Homer to the God Hephaestus. A belief that contact with the jinn results in a loose-mannered gait as though disjointed, is found among the Arabs: perhaps a memory of the limping dance performed by devotees who believed themselves divinely possessed, like the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel (1
Kings
XVIII. 26). Beth Hoglah, near Jericho may have been so called for this reason, because
hajala
in Arabic means to hobble or hop, and both Jerome and Eusebius call Beth Hoglah ‘the place of the ring-dance’. The Tyrians performed such limping dances in honour of Hercules Melkarth. It is possible therefore that the Peniel myth originally accounts for a limping ceremony which commemorated Jacob’s triumphal entry into Canaan after wrestling with a rival.

8
. The explanation of the name Israel in
Genesis
XXXII. 29 is popular etymology. In theophorous titles, the element containing the deity’s name is the subject, not the object. Israel therefore means ‘El strives’, rather than ‘He strove with El’; just as the original form of Jacob,
Ya‘qobel
, means ‘El protects’ (see 38. 6), and just as the original meaning of Jerubbaal was not ‘He fights against Baal’ (
Judges
VI. 32), but ‘Baal fights’. The intention of names such as these was to enlist divine help for those who bore them.
Israel
thus meant ‘El strives against my enemies’.