Not in God's Name (14 page)

The story beneath the story, hinted at by these three discrepant details, is that neither Abraham nor Isaac made their peace with the banishment of handmaid and child. As long as Sarah was alive, they could do nothing about it, respecting her feelings as God had commanded Abraham to do. But once Sarah was no longer alive, they could engage in an act of reconciliation. That is how Isaac and Ishmael came to be together when Abraham died.

Only against this background can we understand a rabbinic tradition remarkable both for its psychological insight and for its astonishing interfaith implications:

He [Ishmael] lived in the desert of Paran
(Genesis 21:21). Ishmael sent for and married a woman named Ayesha from the plains of Moab. Three years later Abraham went to see his son Ishmael. He arrived at midday and found his wife at home. ‘Where is Ishmael?’ he asked. ‘He has gone to fetch dates from the desert’, she replied. ‘Give me a little bread and water’, he asked. ‘I have none’, she replied. He said to her, ‘When Ishmael comes, tell him that an old man from the land of Canaan came to see him and said, “The threshold of the house is not good.” ’ When Ishmael returned his wife told him this, and he divorced her.

His mother then sent to her father’s house and took for him a wife named Fatimah. Three years later, Abraham again went
to see his son. He arrived at midday and found Ishmael’s wife at home. ‘Give me a little bread and a little water, for my soul is weary from the road’, he asked. She took out [bread and water] and gave them to him. Abraham stood and prayed before the Holy One, blessed be He, and Ishmael’s house became filled with all good things.

When Ishmael came, his wife told him about it, and Ishmael then knew that his father still loved him.
¹⁴

What an extraordinary rewriting of the story! Now it transpires that Abraham, despite the fact that he had sent Ishmael away, did not cease to love or care for him. He made a visit to see him. Discovering that he had married an ungracious wife, he left a coded message. ‘Tell him that an old man from Canaan came to see him’ was his way of announcing his identity. ‘The threshold of the house is not good’ was a way of hinting, ‘This is not the woman you should have married.’ He pays a further visit three years later and finds that Ishmael has remarried, this time to a woman who gives hospitality to strangers. He blesses their home.

The passage ends on a marvellous note: ‘Ishmael then knew that his father still loved him.’ When he had been sent away, Ishmael was too young to understand what had happened. He must have thought that his father had disowned him. Now he knew this was not so. Whatever the reason for his exile, he had forfeited neither his father’s love nor his blessing that his home be ‘filled with all good things’.

What gives the Midrash its unique significance is the names it ascribes to Ishmael’s wives.
Both are references to the Qur’an and Islam
. Ishmael’s first wife, Ayesha, bears the name of the prophet Mohammed’s child-bride. Fatimah is the name of the prophet’s daughter. Neither are Hebrew names. This dates the passage to an early period in the history of Islam, probably the era of the Umayyads. It is astonishing in what it implies. Yes, Ishmael
is
the central figure in Islam. He
is
a beloved and blessed child of Abraham. Fatimah is a figure of grace and kindness. Nor is this
mere apologetics. The proof is that long before the birth of Islam, many rabbis in the Mishnaic and Talmudic periods, from the first century
CE
onwards, were called Ishmael, hardly likely – indeed impossible – if Ishmael were a rejected figure in Judaism. The force of the Midrash is greater still in light of one striking fact: that in the Bible, Abraham
does not bless Isaac
. God does, after Abraham’s death, but he himself does not. One ancient Jewish tradition states explicitly: ‘Abraham did not bless Isaac because he did not want Ishmael to feel resentment against him [Isaac].’
¹⁵

Less important to the story of Ishmael but central to the theme of this book is the
test
by which Abraham judges the worthiness of Ishmael’s wives, namely,
did they show kindness to strangers? –
the criterion by which, in the Bible, Abraham’s servant chooses a wife for Isaac. At the core of the Bible’s value system is that cultures, like individuals, are judged by their willingness to extend care
beyond
the boundary of family, tribe, ethnicity and nation.

On the surface, the story of Isaac and Ishmael is about sibling rivalry and the displacement of the elder by the younger. Beneath the surface, however, the sages heard a counter-narrative telling the opposite story:
the birth of Isaac does not displace Ishmael
. To be sure, he will have a different destiny. But he too is a beloved son of Abraham, blessed by his father and by God. He becomes a great nation. God is ‘with him’ as he grows up. God stays with him to ensure that his children flourish and become ‘twelve rulers’. Abraham and Isaac both make a journey of reconciliation. The two half-brothers stand together at their father’s grave. There is no hostility between them. Their futures diverge, but there is no conflict between them, nor do they compete for God’s affection, which encompasses them both. This reading becomes all the more powerful when, in the Midrash, it is extended to the relationship between Judaism and Islam.

This is the first indication of what will, in the next few chapters,
emerge as a systemic feature of the biblical text. In each narrative of apparent choice-and-rejection, there is a counter-narrative that subverts the surface story and presents a more nuanced, generous picture of divine (and, by implication, human) sympathy. It is never blatant. It never unequivocally announces itself. But it is unmistakably there in the text. The counter-narrative is not an interpretation imposed by a modern or postmodern sensibility. The proof is that early rabbinic Midrash heard the nuances and drew attention to them,
despite
the fact that they preclude any clear, black-and-white, good-versus-bad reading of the text.

The surface narrative is itself revolutionary. It asserts that the hierarchy of the ancient world – where the elder is destined to rule, the younger to serve – was about to be overthrown. The counter-narrative is more radical still, because it hints at the most radical of monotheism’s truths: that God may choose, but
God does not reject
. The logic of scarcity – of alpha males and chosen sons – has no place in a world made by a God whose ‘tender mercies are on
all
his works’ (Ps. 145:9). Perhaps it needed the twenty-first century, with its ethnic and religious conflicts, to sensitise our ear to the texts’ inflections and innuendoes.

Brothers
can
live together in peace, so the counter-narrative implies. But if this is true of Isaac and Ishmael, can it really be true of the supreme instance of displacement: the story of Jacob and Esau?

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featur’d like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy, contented least…

Shakespeare
, Sonnet 29

Nowhere are narrative and counter-narrative more subtly interwoven than in the story of Jacob and Esau. It is a work of awesome brilliance, so surprising in its effect that we cannot doubt, once we have understood its hidden message, that it is intended as
the
refutation of sibling rivalry in the Bible. Its significance, set at the very centre of Genesis, is unmistakable. Once we have decoded the mystery of Jacob, our understanding of covenant and identity will be changed for ever.

The surface narrative is a paradigm – almost a caricature – of displacement. The first time we see the twins, at their birth, the younger Jacob is already clinging to the heels of the firstborn Esau. They are different types, Esau a hunter, Jacob ‘a plain man staying with the tents’ (Gen. 25:27). The tension is heightened by parental attachment. Isaac loves Esau, Rebekah favours Jacob. In the first dramatic scene between the two brothers, Esau comes in exhausted from the hunt, smells the stew Jacob is making and asks for some. Jacob drives a hard bargain: my stew for your birthright. Esau agrees and in a staccato succession of five consecutive verbs – ‘he ate, drank, rose, left, and despised his birthright’ – reveals his character: mercurial, impetuous, no match for the subtle Jacob.

The story rises to a crescendo in the great scene of the deception.
Isaac, by now old and blind, asks Esau to hunt him some venison and prepare a meal so that ‘my soul may bless you before I die’ (27:2–4). Rebekah, overhearing, decides that Jacob must take the blessing. Jacob has his doubts. What if Isaac feels him to check his identity? Esau is hairy, Jacob smooth-skinned. Rebekah, ever resourceful, has an answer. She takes Esau’s goatskin clothes and puts them on Jacob, covering his hands and neck. The disguise works, despite Isaac’s repeatedly expressed doubts and misgivings. The blessing is bestowed. Isaac says to Jacob:

May God give you

Of the dew of the heavens,

And the richness of the earth,

And abundant grain and wine.

May nations serve you

And peoples bow down to you.

Rule over your brothers,

And may your mother’s sons bow down to you. (Gen. 27:28–29)

Jacob leaves. Soon after, Esau arrives with the food he has prepared. Father and son slowly realise what has happened. Isaac trembles. Esau lets out ‘a long and bitter cry’, adding, ‘Is he not rightly called Jacob seeing that
he has supplanted me
these two times’ (27:36). Here, displacement is explicit. The younger has usurped the place of the elder. Conflict has yielded tragedy – a blind man misled, a son robbed of his blessing, a trust betrayed, a family divided, and violence waiting in the wings: ‘Esau said in his heart: The days of mourning for my father are approaching. Then I will kill my brother Jacob’ (27:41).

Nor is this unexpected. In a unique scene, the theme of sibling rivalry is announced even before the children are born. Rebekah, hitherto infertile, becomes pregnant but suffers agonising pain. She goes ‘to enquire of the Lord’, who tells her that she is carrying twins already contending for dominance:

Two nations are in your womb,

And two peoples will separate from within you;

One people will be mightier than the other,

And the elder will serve the younger. (Gen. 25:23)

The brothers’ fate is to clash, their destiny to conflict. Nowhere else does the Bible come so close to Greek tragedy. The scene reminds us of the Delphic oracle in
Oedipus Rex
who tells Laius that he will be killed by his son. The story begins with the end, and the tension lies in waiting to see how it comes to pass. Fate and tragedy belong together, which is what makes this passage so unexpected, so
unbiblical
. The Hebrew Bible rejects the idea of inescapable fate, a pre-ordained future. Yet the verse sets up an expectation, shaping the way we interpret all that follows. The story begins with the words, ‘The elder will serve the younger’, and ends with Isaac’s blessing to Jacob, ‘Rule over your brothers, and may your mother’s sons bow down to you.’ The prediction has come true. Jacob has been granted dominance, his apparently predestined fate. A simple tale.

Yet something is amiss. Reading the passage in which Jacob takes the blessing, it is impossible not to notice how often Isaac doubts that the son in front of him is really Esau:

He went to his father and said, ‘My father.’

‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘Who are you, my son?’

Jacob said to his father, ‘I am Esau, your firstborn. I have done as you asked. Please sit up and eat some of my venison so that you may give me your blessing.’

…Then Isaac said to Jacob, ‘Come near so that I can touch you, my son. Are you really my son Esau or not?’

Jacob went close to his father Isaac, who touched him and said, ‘The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau.’ He did not recognise him, for his hands were hairy like those of his brother Esau; so he blessed him.

‘Are you really my son Esau?’ he asked.

‘I am,’ he replied. (Gen. 27:18–24)

Three times, Isaac expresses doubts – giving Jacob three opportunities to admit the truth. He does not. Far from glossing over the morally ambiguous nature of Jacob’s conduct, the text goes out of its way to emphasise it.

Jacob leaves. Esau enters. The power in this scene is not just what happens, but how the Bible describes it:

After Isaac finished blessing him, and Jacob had just left his father’s presence, his brother Esau came in from his hunt. He too had prepared some tasty food and brought it to his father. Then he said to him, ‘My father, sit up and eat some of my game, so that you may give me your blessing.’

His father Isaac asked him, ‘Who are you?’

‘I am your son,’ he answered, ‘your firstborn, Esau.’

Isaac
trembled violently
and said, ‘Who was it, then, that hunted game and brought it to me? I ate it just before you came and I blessed him – and indeed he will be blessed!’

When Esau heard his father’s words, he
burst out with a loud and bitter cry
and said to his father, ‘Bless me – me too, my father!’

But he said, ‘Your brother came deceitfully and took your blessing.’

Esau said, ‘Is he not rightly named Jacob, for he has supplanted me these two times: he took my birthright, and now he’s taken my blessing.’ Then he asked, ‘Haven’t you reserved any blessing for me?’

Isaac answered Esau, saying, ‘But I have made him lord over you and have made all his brothers his servants, and I have supported him with corn and new wine. What is left for me to do for you, my son?’

Esau said to his father, ‘Do you have only one blessing, my father? Bless me too, my father.’ Then Esau
wept aloud
. (Gen. 27:30–38)

Reading this passage, we cannot but identify with Isaac and Esau, not Jacob
. We feel the father’s shock – ‘Isaac trembled violently’ – as he realises that his younger son has deceived him. We empathise with Esau, whose first thought is not anger against his brother but simple love for Isaac: ‘Bless me – me too, my father.’ Then comes Isaac’s helplessness – ‘So what can I possibly do for you, my son?’ – and Esau’s weeping, all the more poignant given what we know of him, that he is strong, a hunter, a man not given to tears. The scene of the two together, robbed of what should have been a moment of tenderness and intimacy – son feeding father, father blessing son – is deeply affecting. There is only one other scene like it in the Pentateuch: Hagar and Ishmael, alone in the heat of the desert, without water, about to die. The comparison is deliberate. Just as there, so here, our sympathies are being enlisted on behalf of the elder son.

There is another discrepant note. Unexpectedly, Isaac
does
manage to give Esau a blessing:

The fat places of earth can still be your dwelling.

[You can still have] the dew of heaven.

But you shall live by your sword.

You may have to serve your brother,

But when your complaints mount up,

You will throw his yoke off your neck. (Gen. 27:39–40)

The ‘fat places of earth’ and the ‘dew of heaven’ are plentiful enough, Isaac implies, for there to be enough for both sons. More significant is his qualification of Jacob’s supremacy. It will last, he says, only as long as he does not misuse it. If he acts harshly, Esau will ‘throw his yoke off’ his neck. For the first time, a doubt enters our understanding of the brothers’ respective fates. Until now we had been led to believe that the narrative had reached closure. The elder (Esau) will serve the younger (Jacob). So Rebekah was told; so Isaac said in his first blessing. Now, it is suddenly less clear. Perhaps Esau will not serve Jacob after all. Perhaps Jacob will
misuse his power and Esau will rebel – a small incongruity, but a significant one.

The real doubt, however, lies in the way the text describes Jacob’s conduct. Whatever else the covenant is, we feel, it cannot be
this
: a blessing taken by deceit, a destiny acquired by disguise. Did God not say of Abraham, ‘I have known him so that he may instruct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord, doing what is right and just’ (Gen. 18:19)? Righteousness, justice, integrity, truth – these are key words of covenantal ethics, and we strain to see how they could be applied to Jacob’s conduct towards his blind father. Besides which, Isaac may have been deceived, but was God? The idea is absurd. Had God wanted the blessing to go to Jacob, not Esau, he would have told Isaac, as he told Abraham about Isaac and Ishmael. There is just enough discord to make us wonder if we have read the story correctly. In the end we will discover that our unease was justified and that nothing in the story is as it seems – but only at the end. The suspense is maintained until the final scene. Even then, only the most careful listening reveals the unexpected truth, because of yet another brilliant literary device. The final scene almost passes without notice because of the drama that precedes it. It is to this we must now turn.

The story of Jacob’s wrestling match with an unnamed adversary alone at night is the supreme enigma of the Bible.
¹
Told by Rebekah that Esau is planning to kill him, Jacob flees to his uncle Laban and stays there for some twenty years. Returning home, he hears that Esau is preparing to meet him with a force of four hundred men. He is terrified: ‘Jacob became exceedingly afraid and distressed’ (Gen. 32:7).
²
He makes every possible preparation. He sends emissaries to Esau with large gifts of cattle and sheep. He prays. He divides his camp into two so that if one is killed, the other may survive. There then takes place the defining
scene of Genesis, the episode in which Israel, the covenantal people, gets its name.

Alone at night Jacob wrestles with a stranger (32:22–32). As dawn is about to break, the man asks to be released. Jacob refuses to do so until the stranger has blessed him. He does so by giving Jacob a new name: ‘No longer will it be said that your name is Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and men and have prevailed’ (32:28). The episode is cryptic almost to the point of unintelligibility.

Who was Jacob’s unnamed adversary? The text calls him ‘a man’ (32:24). According to the prophet Hosea, it was an angel (Hos. 12:5). For Judaism’s sages, it was Esau’s guardian angel.
³
Jacob had no doubt that it was God himself. He calls the place of the encounter Peniel, ‘because I
saw God face to face
, yet my life was spared’ (Gen. 32:30). The stranger implies as much when he gives Jacob the name Israel, ‘because you have striven
with God
and men and have prevailed’ (32:28). The clues seem to point in all directions at once, yet we cannot doubt that the episode holds the key to the identity of the people known to eternity as ‘the children of Israel’. Names in the Bible, especially when given by God, are not labels but signals of character or calling. Israel, later known as the Jews, are
the people who struggle with God and men and yet prevail
. What does this mean? The clue must lie in what happened next. But it is here that we encounter a succession of surprises.

Everything we have read thus far – Jacob’s fear, his frantic preparations, his nocturnal struggle – prepares us for a tense meeting. The last time we saw the brothers together, twenty-two years earlier, Esau had vowed to kill Jacob. We know that Esau is hasty, hot tempered, physical, violent. Yet when he finally appears, all the fears turn out to be unfounded. Esau runs to meet Jacob, throws his arms around his neck, kisses him and weeps. He shows no anger, animosity or threat of revenge. Suddenly we understand Esau’s character. He is, we now realise, an impulsive man who lives in the mood of the moment, quick to anger, quick to forget.
He has none of Cassius’s ‘lean and hungry look’ or Iago’s cold calculation. The scene is pure anti-climax.

So overpowering is the sense of tension aroused, then released, that at first reading we miss two extraordinary details in
Jacob’s
behaviour when the brothers meet. The first is that he ‘bowed down to the ground seven times’ (33:3), prostrating himself before Esau. Each of his family members does likewise: ‘Then the maidservants and their children approached and bowed down. Leah and her children also came and bowed down. Finally, Joseph and Rachel came, and they too bowed down’ (33:6–7). The threefold repetition is emphatic. No less strange is Jacob’s use of language. Five times he calls Esau ‘my lord’,
adoni
. Twice he calls himself Esau’s ‘servant’,
eved
. As with the physical gesture of sevenfold prostration, so with his sevenfold use of the words ‘my lord’ and ‘your servant’ – this is the choreography of self-abasement.