26:6-11 - Yet another instance of lying and saying a wife is a sister! Isaac tells the people of Gerar that Rebecca is his sister because "he feared to say: 'My wife'; 'lest the men of the place should kill me for Rebekah, because she is fair to look upon.'" So here we have an instance of God telling Isaac what to do and promising that Isaac will be looked after and taken care of, but, apparently, Isaac doesn't buy it and lies to the Philistines so that they don't kill him and take his wife?!?
26:34-35 - Here's an interesting throwaway line: "And when Esau was forty years old, he took to wife Judith the daughter of Beeri the Hittite, and Basemath the daughter of Elon the Hittite. And they were a bitterness of spirit unto Isaac and to Rebekah." Why? Up to that point, we know of nothing Esau has done to deserve this bad reputation -- he traded his birthright, true, but his parents didn't know about it. What's more, we already know (25:28) that Isaac preferred Esau. So which was it, a source of bitterness or the perferred son?
27:5-15 - The entire episode of Rebecca conspiring with Jacob to trick Isaac into blessing him instead of Esau is really an odd story. First, this is a lot of scheming and lying among the patriarchs/matriarchs! Second, why doesn't Rebecca just tell Isaac what to do? If God really wanted things to turn out as they did, why not get involved? Why in this case let Rebecca lie about it? And while I understand that Jacob would go along, because he wanted the birthright he traded for the porridge, then why be so secretive about it? Why not just tell Isaac the deal was done? This just seems like a lot of unsavory behavior...
27:46 - Hillarious! From the JPS translation, "Rebekah said to Isaac, 'I am disgusted with my life because of the Hittite women. If Jacob marries a Hittite woman like these, from among the native women, what good will life be to me?'" She sounds like the first Jewish Mother: "Oy vey, anyone but the Hittite women!" : )
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
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"26:6-11 - Yet another instance of lying and saying a wife is a sister!" The repetition makes it seem like a comic shtick, doesn't it? At least that is how I remember it striking me when I last read through Genesis. The only even mildly illuminating comment that I have been able to find is this report on the scholarship of others by James Kugel: "Another scholar pointed to the Bible's odd narration of how Abraham twice ran into trouble (in Genesis 12 and 20, as similarly did his son Isaac in Genesis 26 [emphasis added]) after a king thought that the beautiful Sarah was merely Abraham's sister and not his wife--and thus available for the king's own attentions. The confusion, it was claimed, derived from another sort of fictitious adoption documented in the Nuzi texts: according to an ancient Hurrian marriage custom, a wife could be 'adopted' by her husband as his sister and thereby gain a status superior to that of an ordinary wife." (How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now (Free Press, 2007), p. 100.)
ReplyDeleteBy the way, have you seen the plug for your blog at Off the Derech? Congratulations! However, the writer describes yours as "a frum blog." You may want to set him straight on that point!
Thanks for the reference!
ReplyDeleteIt's strange, in a way, to come at the Torah as if for the first time in light of its status as probably the most read -- and commented upon -- book in history. It's overwhelming, actually, to know that any question I could possibly come up with has likely been asked, debated ad nauseum, and answered a million times. So when things look strange to me, I'm sure there are plenty of reasons for them looking as they do, reasons I'm interested in knowing. But I'm not willing to let go of my own faculties in coming to grips with the text -- I'm not willing to say, "well, things look strange to me, but as long as Rabbi X says what it should be, then I don't have to ask any questions." The Torah, to me, is a text that cannot ever be decisively interpreted or its meaning affixed for all time. Texts don't work that way, at least not for me.
And yes, now I do see the kind plug by OTD for my blog! It took me a while to figure it out, actually; I saw a big uptick in visitors before tracking it back to his post. And even then, it didn't quite sink in...I don't, em, think of myself as frum! :) But in a way, I think there's a lot of similarity between myself and OTDers, just from different directions. We don't believe in TMS, have real doubts about a lot of things Judaism tells us are right, seek to be consistent and honest, and have a lot of problems with certain Jewish institutions. The difference, of course, is that OTDers (it seems) start from a place of knowing a lot more than I do.
The big shock since starting this blog is that I expected to learn from other Reform Jews about how to learn to live a more honest and authentic Jewish life, when in fact I'm learning much more from OTDers. Go figure.
Well, we're all off the derech; the difference is just that some of us were never on it in the first place.
ReplyDeleteThat's an interesting way of putting it, but being either "on" or "off" does kind of imply that there is a single derech out there for us to be on or off of, when, actually, there is no one "way."
ReplyDeleteOne of my favorite poems, by Antonio Machado, says it best:
You walker, there are no roads,
Only wind trails on the sea.
I think it fits for Jews too.