Not in God's Name (16 page)

What then of the words with which the story of the brothers began, namely that ‘the elder shall serve the younger’ (in Hebrew,
ve-rav ya’avod tsa’ir
)? Here the Bible delivers a masterstroke. At first sight, the words mean what they say. Only in retrospect – and only in the original Hebrew – do we discover that they contain multiple ambiguities.

The first, noted by several medieval Jewish commentators,
¹³
is that the word
et
, which signals the object of the verb, is conspicuously missing. Normally in biblical Hebrew the subject precedes, and the object follows, the verb, but not always. Especially in Hebrew poetry (and the prophecy about Rebekah’s children is constructed as a four-line poem), the order may be reversed: object-verb-subject. There are only two ways of resolving the ambiguity, either by context (in Job 14:19, for example, the sequence
stone-wear-water
must mean ‘water wears away stones’, not ‘stones wear away water’) or by the syntactic marker
et
. In the case of Rebekah’s prophecy, both are missing. Thus the phrase may mean ‘the elder shall serve the younger’,
but it may equally mean the opposite
: ‘the younger shall serve the elder’.

The second is that the Hebrew terms
rav
and
tsa’ir
are not opposites.
Tsa’ir
means ‘younger’, but its opposite is
bechir
(‘older’ or ‘firstborn’).
¹⁴
Rav
does
not
mean ‘older’. It means ‘great’ or ‘numerous’ or possibly ‘chief’. This linking together of two terms as if they were polar opposites, which they are not, further destabilises the meaning. Who was the
rav
? The elder? The leader? The more numerous? The word might mean any of these things.

The third ambiguity is not in the biblical text itself but was added by later tradition. The Pentateuch is not
read
in the synagogue, but
sung
, and there is a precise musical notation which also serves as a form of punctuation (biblical Hebrew has neither
vowels nor punctuation marks). We would have expected the three words to be notated as a single sequential phrase. In fact, however, they are sung in such a way as to place the musical equivalent of a comma after the first word: ‘the older, shall the younger serve’ – again, precisely the opposite of the conventional reading.

Re-reading the text, we now discover that the words with which the Jacob-Esau story begins are deliberately ambiguous. They may mean
either
‘the elder shall serve the younger’
or
‘the younger shall serve the elder’. This is remarkable in its own right, but its real significance can only be grasped if we reflect on what this implies about the form of the message itself.
An ambiguous supernatural message is not a prophecy but an oracle
. This is the meaning of God’s statement about Moses (Num. 12:8): ‘With him I speak mouth to mouth, plainly and not in
dark speeches
’ – that is to say, not in oracles, whose message is ambiguous and obscure (‘oracular’).

The medieval commentators were puzzled about the remark that Rebekah ‘went to seek the Lord’.
¹⁵
To whom was Rebekah going? A prophet? Were there prophets in those days, other than Abraham and Isaac? Besides which, the phrase ‘to seek the Lord’ means, in the Bible, to pray, not to enquire.
¹⁶
God communicates in Genesis either in simple, unambiguous speech or through visions or dreams, but never – except in this one instance – in oracles. Oracles do not belong in Israelite religion. They belong to the world of myth, the world the Hebrew Bible rejects.

This is not a small point but a fundamental one. Oracles and prophecies belong to two different types of civilisation. Oracles belong to the cluster of ideas – fate, hubris, nemesis – that yield tragedy in the classic, Greek sense. In tragedy the outcome is signalled in advance, and the more the characters fight against their fate, the more enmeshed in it they become. Prophecy, by contrast, belongs to open, non-predetermined, historical time, the time that makes its first appearance in the Hebrew Bible, and constitutes one of its most original contributions to human thought. The prophet
warns
; he does not
predict
. Tomorrow is made by our choices today. Time, for the prophets, is not the
inexorable unfolding of destiny but the arena of human freedom in response to the call of God.

We are now in a position to understand the full scope and ingenuity of the literary unit that is the Jacob-Esau story.
¹⁷
It is two narratives in one. The surface narrative tells the story as if it were a Greek tragedy – a story of sibling rivalry (Romulus-Remus) of a kind found in all mythological cultures. The cunning younger brother outwits and displaces his stronger, elder sibling, only to find himself threatened by revenge. This is a basic form of myth. A father, usually the king, dies, and his sons contend for the succession. One wins, only to be defeated in turn. This is mimesis, Girard’s source of human violence.
¹⁸
The entire Jacob-Esau story, from oracle to victory to fear of revenge, is written to be heard, at first reading, like myth.

The counter-narrative, suddenly revealed at the end, is a totally unexpected subversion and rejection of myth. Mimesis, rivalry, displacement, anger, violence, revenge – these are what the Bible challenges at their very roots. Jacob was wrong to seek Esau’s blessing. In the wrestling match at night, Jacob fights, not Esau, but himself-in-the-presence-of-God.
¹⁹
That is what he means when he says he has seen God face to face. He now knows who he is, not the man holding on to his brother’s heel, but the man unafraid to wrestle with God and with man because he has successfully wrestled with himself. The next morning he gives back to Esau what he had taken from him twenty-two years before. He now knows that his true blessing was quite different and to obtain it he had no need of disguise.

Sibling rivalry is defeated the moment we discover that we are loved by God for what we are, not for what someone else is. We each have our own blessing. Brothers need not conflict. Sibling rivalry is not fate but tragic error. As a young man, Jacob had lived ‘desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope’, wanting to be what he was not. Alone at night, wrestling with the angel, he discovered the rivalry-dissolving truth that it is
for what we uniquely are that we are loved
.

Not by accident was this episode the point at which the covenantal people acquired its name. For Israel is summoned to a different destiny than the pursuit of wealth and power. It would never know the wealth of ancient Greece or Rome, Renaissance Italy or aristocratic France. It would never be an imperial power. When it longed for these things, as in the days of Solomon, it lost its way. Israel’s strength lay not in its own power but in the power that transcends all earthly powers, and the wealth that is not physical but spiritual, a matter of mind and heart.

No less interesting is the Bible’s attitude to Esau and his descendants. Moses commands, ‘Do not hate an Edomite [a descendant of Esau], for he is your brother’ (Deut. 23:7). God instructs the Israelites:

You are passing by the borders of your brothers, the descendants of Esau, who live in Seir. Although they fear you, be very careful not to provoke them. I will not give you even one foot of their land, since I have given Mount Seir as Esau’s inheritance. (Deut. 2:4–5)

Something of deep consequence is being intimated here.
The choice of Jacob does not mean the rejection of Esau.
²⁰
Esau is not chosen, but neither is he rejected. He too will have his blessing, his heritage, his land. He too will have children who become kings, who will rule and not be ruled. Not accidentally are our sympathies drawn to him, as if to say: not all are chosen for the rigours, spiritual and existential, of the Abrahamic covenant, but each has his or her place in the scheme of things, each has his or her virtues, talents, gifts. Each is precious in the eyes of God.

To be secure in my relationship with God does not depend on negating the possibility that others too may have a relationship with him. Jacob was loved by his mother, Esau by his father; but what of God, who is neither father nor mother but both and more than both? We can only know our own relationships; we can never know another’s. Am I loved more than my brothers or sisters?
Less? Once asked, the question must lead to sibling rivalry, but
it is the wrong question and should not be asked
. Love is not quantifiable: not a matter of more or less. Jacob is Jacob, heir to the covenant. Esau is Esau, with his own heritage and blessing. The people of the covenant must wrestle, as did Jacob, in the depths of the soul to discover the face, the name and the blessing that is theirs. Before Jacob could be at peace with Esau and with himself, he had to overcome mimetic desire, abandon sibling rivalry and learn that he was not Esau but Israel – one who wrestles with God and never lets go.

Do not judge your fellow until you have been in his place.

Mishnah
¹

With the story of Joseph and his brothers, sibling rivalry becomes high drama. No other narrative in the Pentateuch is as long – it occupies almost a third of Genesis – and none is as tightly constructed. Like the last movement of a great symphony, it focuses all the tensions that have gone before and wrestles with them until it reaches resolution.
²

The final scene in which Joseph assures his brothers that he has forgiven them – ‘Am I in place of God? You intended evil against me but God has turned it to good’ (Gen. 50:19–20) – is Genesis’ serene and unexpected closure. In retrospect it is as if the entire book, from Cain’s murder of Abel, has been leading to this denouement, where brothers learn what it is to resolve conflict, be reconciled, make space for one another and forgive. Only now can the story move forward to the book of Exodus. Genesis was about the birth of the covenantal
family
. Exodus is about the birth of the covenantal
nation
. The unstated but implicit message of Genesis is this: not until families can live in peace can a nation be born.

The Joseph narrative is not merely longer than the others. It is also significantly different. In the case of Isaac and Ishmael, it was God and Sarah who chose; with Jacob and Esau, it was Rebekah. Both times, the father is attached to the elder: Abraham to Ishmael, Isaac to Esau. In the Joseph story, however, the roles are reversed. This time it is Jacob who loves the younger. Indeed Jacob favours the younger three times, preferring Rachel to her elder sister Leah, Joseph to his older sons, and the younger
Ephraim over Manasseh, Joseph’s children. The entire life of Jacob is a set of variations on the danger of favouritism, and the grief to which it gives rise.

The Joseph story is the most searching of all Genesis’ studies of sibling rivalry and its consequences. It is so because of its narrative technique. God, who has been in the forefront of the action until now, steps back, allowing us to focus on the human drama as it unfolds. It is a tense and enthralling tale – doting father, spoiled child, envious brothers, jealousy and its unforeseen outcomes. No other passage in the Pentateuch is so literarily constructed; none reads so much like a novel. That is no coincidence. In the Bible, form follows function. Having given us several dramas of sibling rivalry, it now invites us to deepen our understanding of the theme by identifying with the characters, empathising with their emotions, understanding for ourselves what goes wrong when one child is favoured over others. God is not absent. To the contrary, nowhere else does he control the action so tightly, but always obliquely – through a dream here, a conveniently placed stranger there, by making Joseph successful in all he does, and giving him the power to interpret the dreams of others. The outcomes are divine, the emotions all too human.

And it happens because of love. Nowhere in Genesis do we read that Abraham loved Sarah. Once we hear that Isaac loved Rebekah.
³
Three times
we read that Jacob loved Rachel,
⁴
and three times that he loved Joseph.
⁵
The Hebrew Bible is a book of love: love God with all your heart, soul and might (Deut. 6:5); love your neighbour as yourself (Lev. 19:18); love the stranger (Lev. 19:34). But love is not unproblematic. Given to one but not another, to one
more
than another, it creates tensions that can turn to violence. More than any other character in Genesis, Jacob loves, but the result is conflict between Leah and Rachel, and between Joseph and his brothers. The message of Genesis is that love is necessary but not sufficient. You also need sensitivity to those who feel unloved.

The Joseph story begins on an ominous note which tends to be lost in translation: ‘Jacob dwelt [
vayeshev
] in the land in which his fathers sojourned [
megurei aviv
]’ (Gen. 37:1). The contrast between the two verbs, ‘to dwell’ and ‘to sojourn’, to live securely and insecurely, suggests that Jacob wanted what Abraham and Isaac did not have: tranquillity. Having fled twice, once from his brother Esau, a second time from his father-in-law Laban, he longs for a quiet life. He will not achieve it. The sages said: ‘Jacob sought to dwell in peace; immediately there broke upon him the storm of Joseph.’
⁶

In a few deft strokes, the Bible sketches a picture of tension within the family. Jacob loves Joseph, the youngest-but-one of his twelve sons. The reason stated in the text is that Joseph ‘was a son of his old age’ (37:3). The more significant, unstated reason is that he was the son of his beloved Rachel. The first glimpse we have of him is when he is tending the flocks with the sons of the handmaids Bilhah and Zilpah. Already there is tension between him and the sons of Leah. They keep a distance from one another.

Three incidents orchestrate the conflict. The first is that he brings his father a ‘bad report’ about his brothers (37:2). He tells tales. The second is the visible sign of his father’s favouritism, the ‘coat of many colours’ or richly ornamented robe (37:3). This acts as a constant provocation to his brothers. The third is that he dreams dreams: first that his brothers’ sheaves will bow down to his, then that the sun, moon and stars will bow down to him. Worse: he tells his brothers about them. At this stage we have no idea whether the dreams are auguries of the future, or merely the vaulting ambition of a child. At this point, the Bible withholds from us the one piece of information that would resolve the ambiguity. Not until much later (41:32) do we discover that a repeated dream is a divinely sent prophecy. Had we known this at the outset, the Joseph story would have lost its tension, its capacity to make us identify with both sides of the conflict. At this
stage we have no idea how to evaluate Joseph. All we know is how others see him.

His father loves him; his brothers hate him. We are told this repeatedly with cumulative force. First, ‘they hated him and could not speak peaceably to him’ (37:4). Communication had broken down, and in the Bible where words fail, violence follows. A second time, after the first dream, ‘they hated him all the more’ (37:5). Then after the second dream, ‘his brothers were jealous of him’ (37:11). The hostility is palpable and about to explode.

The text sets up a contrast between love and hate. Twice we read that Jacob loved Joseph, twice that his brothers hated him. They hated him
because
their father loved him. As we will see in the next chapter, the same pair of verbs, ‘to love’ and ‘to hate’, have already appeared in the story of Jacob’s wives, the sisters Rachel and Leah (Gen. 29:30–31). This is a crucial point, the core of the problem Genesis is intent on exploring. To create a universe, Genesis implies, is easy. It takes up no more than a single chapter (Gen. 1:1–2:3). To create a human relationship is difficult. Jacob’s love for Joseph – innocent, human, benign – generates envy and hate. It is this honest confrontation with complexity that makes Genesis so profound a religious text. It refuses to simplify the human condition.

The climax comes when Jacob sends Joseph off to see his brothers who are tending sheep near Shechem. For the first time they are about to be together, alone and far from home. The brothers see Joseph approaching, recognising him by his robe. The text at this point is powerfully ironic. ‘They
saw him in the distance
and before he reached them they plotted to kill him’ (37:18). This sentence, like so many others in the Joseph narrative, has two meanings. On the surface, it means what it says: they saw him approach, and they planned murder. At another level, however, it is a philosophical statement about love and hate. They were able to contemplate fratricide because ‘they saw him at a distance’.
⁷
They refused to allow him to come close. He was a threat rather than a person. They could see his cloak, but in Emmanuel
Levinas’s terminology, they could not yet see his ‘face’, his alterity, his reality as a person.
⁸
Distant physically, they would not let him come close emotionally.

In case we doubt whether this double meaning is really there in the text, the next verse but one resolves the doubt. The brothers say, ‘Come, let’s kill him and throw him into one of these wells…
then we’ll see what comes of his dreams
’ (37:20). Here, the irony could not be more explicit. The words mean one thing to the brothers, the opposite to us, the listeners.
⁹
Once we have reached the end of the story and go back to read it a second time, we realise that the very act intended to frustrate the dreams by killing the dreamer is the beginning of a sequence of events that will make the dreams come true. We have here a Hebraic counterpart of the story of Oedipus. Laius, Oedipus’ father, is told by the Delphic oracle that he will be murdered by his son. To prevent this, he leaves him as a baby, nailed to a rock to die. This too is the first of a sequence of events that leads to the oracle being fulfilled. The irony is the same in both cases. The difference is that the Greek story is tragic, the biblical one non-tragic.

From this point on the story moves rapidly forward through a series of reversals and unexpected shifts of fortune. Persuaded by Reuben, the brothers refrain from killing Joseph. Instead, throwing him into one of the cisterns, they leave him to die (Reuben had intended to rescue him, but does not, in the end, have the opportunity). Then Judah proposes selling him into slavery. He is taken to Egypt. There he becomes head of the household of Potiphar, one of Pharaoh’s officials. Potiphar’s wife conceives a fancy for him, but he refuses to betray his master. Instead he himself is betrayed. Potiphar’s wife accuses him of attempted rape. He is thrown into prison, where once again he shows talent as an administrator.

He is also an interpreter of dreams, and successfully deciphers the dreams of two of his fellow prisoners, Pharaoh’s erstwhile butler and baker. Two years later Pharaoh himself has a pair of dreams. Troubled by them, he asks the court magi to explain their significance, but is satisfied with none of their explanations. At this point
the butler, restored to office, remembers Joseph, who is brought out from the prison and gives Pharaoh an interpretation that makes sense: there will be seven years of plenty, followed by seven of famine. Without pausing, Joseph then proceeds to solve the problem he has diagnosed: take a fifth of the harvest during the years of plenty, store it, and there will then be food during the years of drought.

Impressed, Pharaoh appoints Joseph as his second-in-command and dresses him in royal robes. He gives him a new name, Zaphenath-Paneah. Joseph marries an Egyptian wife, Asenath, daughter of an Egyptian priest. The years pass, the plenty comes and the drought begins. Jacob, facing famine in Canaan, sends the ten sons to Egypt to buy food. There they enter the presence of the man in charge of Egypt’s economy and prostrate themselves before him. He tells them he is their long-lost brother Joseph and asks them to bring the rest of the family to Egypt. They arrive. Jacob and Joseph, his beloved son, are reunited. The family settle in Egypt under Joseph’s aegis.

End of story. The dreams have come true. Joseph has risen to great heights. As he foresaw, his family has bowed down to him. Not merely in his father’s affections but also in terms of worldly estate, the younger has succeeded; the older brothers have not. We have yet another typical displacement narrative – except that
this isn’t the story at all
. It should have been, had the Bible followed narrative convention. But the Bible does not. Instead it subverts it, for profoundly moral reasons. Rarely is this done more subtly than in the Joseph story, the last and most explicit of Genesis’ treatments of sibling rivalry.

What actually happens when the brothers arrive in Egypt is wholly counter-intuitive:

Now Joseph was the governor of the land, the one who sold grain to all its people. So when Joseph’s brothers arrived, they
bowed down to him with their faces to the ground. As soon as Joseph saw his brothers, he recognised them [
vayakirem
], but he pretended to be a stranger [
vayitnaker
] and spoke harshly to them. ‘Where do you come from?’ he asked.

‘From the land of Canaan,’ they replied, ‘to buy food.’

Although Joseph recognised [
hikir
] his brothers, they did not recognise him [
hikiruhu
]. (Gen. 42:6–8)

This is unexpected. The story is nearing closure. Joseph has become a ruler. His brothers have bowed down to him. All that remains is for Jacob and Joseph’s young brother Benjamin to be brought to Egypt. There they will make their obeisance and the end foretold at the beginning will be complete. We cannot but expect this to happen, given the story thus far.

It does not. Instead Joseph accuses the brothers of being spies. He places them in custody for three days. He then tells them that to verify their story – that they have come to buy food – they must bring him their youngest brother. This is illogical. The existence of another brother has nothing to do with whether or not they are spies. Indeed, were they to bring a child, there would be no way an Egyptian ruler would be able to tell whether he was their brother or not. The strangeness of the request does not, however, raise doubts in the minds of the brothers. They know they are in trouble; that is all. One of their number, Simeon, is put in prison as a hostage against their return. On the journey back, they discover that the silver they have paid for the grain has been returned to them in their sacks. They tremble: ‘What is this that God has done to us?’ (42:28).

They go back and tell Jacob what has happened. There is a sense of foreboding. Jacob has now lost two of his sons, and no longer trusts the brothers. The demand that Benjamin go with them to Egypt touches Jacob’s most sensitive nerve. Benjamin was the other son of Jacob’s beloved wife Rachel. She had died giving birth to him. How can he let him go and risk losing him? But how can he not let him go when they are facing starvation? Reuben
offers to leave his own two sons with Jacob as hostages. It is a pointless offer, and Jacob rejects it. Eventually Judah says that he will personally accept responsibility for Benjamin’s safe return. Jacob agrees.