Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis
Page 24
‘Why do you not water your flocks?’ he asked.
‘We are awaiting the other shepherds. They will help us to roll back yonder huge stone from the well-head.’
When Rachel arrived, leading Laban’s flock, Jacob rolled away the stone single-handed and watered the sheep for her—some say that the waters thereupon rose miraculously and maintained the same level throughout his stay.328 He then revealed himself to Rachel as her cousin, kissed her, and wept. Some say he wept because, many years before, Eliezer had brought rich gifts from Abraham to this very spot, when proposing Rebekah’s marriage with Isaac; but he, their son, now stood here destitute. Others say it was because the shepherds whispered jealously among themselves when he gave Rachel his cousinly kiss.329
(b) Rachel went home to announce Jacob’s arrival, and soon Laban hurried to the well, embraced him, and invited him to the house. Laban hoped for even more valuable gifts than those brought by Eliezer and, though Jacob had come on foot without even a bundle, suspected that he kept gold in a belt beneath his garment. While they embraced, Laban searched but found no belt; then kissed him on his mouth to see whether it contained pearls. Jacob said plainly: ‘Uncle, you will find no wealth hidden on me: I bring only greetings, having been robbed on the way by Eliphaz, son of my twin-brother Esau.’330
(c) Laban thought: ‘He comes empty-handed, expecting to eat and drink at our table for a full month, or perhaps even a year!’ Angrily he went to consult his teraphim.
Now, when making an oracular idol of this sort, the Aramaeans of Harran would murder a first-born male and preserve his head in brine, oil, and spices. Then they would chant spells, place underneath the tongue a golden disk engraved with a demonic name, mortar the head into a wall, light lamps, prostrate themselves, and ask questions to which it whispered replies. They had another sort of teraphim, also: idols of gold and silver, fashioned piece by piece at certain calculated hours, and empowered by the stars to foretell the future—Laban, a famous astrologer, had such in his possession. He now bowed down before them and inquired: ‘This guest who lodges in my house, eating bread without payment—how shall I treat him?’ They whispered back: ‘Beware of antagonizing a man whose stars are in so marvellous a conjunction! For his sake, God will bless whatever you do in house or field.’ Laban pondered: ‘What if I should ask Jacob to enter my service, and he demands high wages?’ The teraphim, reading his thoughts, whispered again: ‘Let his pay be a woman. He will demand only women. Whenever Jacob threatens to return home, offer him one more, and he will stay.’331
(d) After a month had passed, Laban asked Jacob: ‘What shall your wages be?’ Jacob replied: ‘Let me serve seven years for your daughter Rachel.’ Laban cried: ‘I should rather have you as her husband than any other man in the world!’ So the bargain was struck.332
(e) Some say that, at first, Rachel and her elder twin, Leah, were equally beautiful; but that, when Leah heard people say ‘Rebekah’s twin sons are bound to marry Laban’s twin daughters; the elder taking the elder, and the younger, the younger,’ she asked: ‘What is known of Rebekah’s son Esau?’ They answered: ‘His ways are evil, and his trade banditry.’ ‘And what is known of Jacob?’ They answered: ‘He is a righteous one, who dutifully minds his father’s flocks.’ Leah began to weep, sobbing: ‘Alas! May God keep me from marriage with that wretch Esau!’ Constant weeping deformed her eyes; whereas Rachel, who heard nothing but good of Jacob, grew more lovely still.333
(f) Jacob, though aware that elder daughters should be married before their sisters, thought: ‘Esau already hates me because I tricked him out of birthright and blessing; now, if I take her, he may come and murder me. I dare sue only for Rachel.’334
(g) Rachel warned Jacob: ‘Do not trust my scheming father!’ Jacob boasted: ‘I will match my wits against his.’ She asked: ‘Are the righteous then free to deceive?’ He answered: ‘They may counter fraud with fraud. Tell me, what does your father plan?’ ‘I fear,’ said Rachel, ‘that he will order Leah to take my place in the darkness of the nuptial chamber; which can easily be done here in the East, where no man enjoys his wife by either sunlight or lamplight. I have heard that it is otherwise in the sinful West.’
‘Then let us agree upon a sign,’ Jacob said. ‘I shall accept the woman who first touches the great toe of my right foot; next, my right thumb; and finally, my right ear lobe.’
‘I will remember those signs,’ Rachel answered.335
(h) Jacob told Laban: ‘I know that you Easterners are masters of evasion. Understand then, that I will serve seven years for Rachel, your younger daughter; and not for Leah, your elder daughter with the deformed eyes; nor for any other woman named Rachel, whom you may fetch in from the market-place!’
‘We understand each other well, Nephew,’ replied Laban.336
(i) Jacob served Laban seven years, and they seemed no longer than a week, so deeply did he love Rachel. On the very day they ended, he went to Laban saying: ‘Come, Uncle, prepare the wedding feast!’ Laban invited all Padan-Aram to his house, but sent Leah veiled into the nuptial chamber that night, and Jacob did not discover the fraud until morning! For Rachel, though she loved Jacob dearly, also loved Leah, and said to herself: ‘I fear that from ignorance of our secret signs, my sister will be put to shame. I must therefore disclose them.’ Thus, when Jacob called Leah ‘Rachel’, she replied ‘Here I am,’ in Rachel’s voice; and touched, in turn, the great toe of his right foot, his right thumb and right ear lobe.337
(j) At the first light of dawn, Jacob reproached Leah angrily with: ‘Deceiver, daughter of a deceiver!’ Leah smiled and said: ‘No teacher without his pupil: having heard from your own lips how my blind uncle Isaac called you “Esau”, and how you replied in Esau’s voice, I bore your lesson in mind.’ Later, God granted Rachel, as a reward for this sisterly kindness, that Samson, Joshua and King Saul should be her descendants.
Jacob also reproached Laban: ‘I served seven years for Rachel, why have you defrauded me? Take back your daughter Leah, and let me go. That was a wicked act!’
Laban answered mildly: ‘It is not our custom, and forbidden in the Heavenly Tablets, to give away a younger daughter before the elder. Do not be vexed, but make your posterity observe the law; and thank me for teaching you by example. Rachel, too, shall be yours as soon as this wedding feast has ended; you must buy her by serving seven years more.’338
(k) Jacob agreed, and Laban, remembering the teraphim’s advice, gave him two women besides Leah and Rachel: namely Zilpah, Leah’s bondmaid, and Bilhah, Rachel’s bondmaid. They were Laban’s own daughters by concubines; and later Jacob took both to his bed.339
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1. Only Isaac’s sympathy for his first-born son Esau could have decided him not to give Jacob a suitable bride-price; but, lest this harshness might read like a repudiation of the stolen blessing, we are told of Eliphaz’s brigandage—with which Jacob, somewhat implausibly, excuses his empty-handed arrival. Laban will have realized that Isaac who, as Abraham’s heir, could buy Jacob the most expensive bride in Harran, had driven him from home, unattended and in disgrace. But impecunious young Arab villagers still often serve a future father-in-law, instead of paying a bride-price; and Jacob furnishes them with an honourable precedent.
2. Laban’s answer to Jacob’s complaint: ‘It is not our custom to give away the younger daughter before the elder’ (Genesis XXIX. 26) implies that force of local custom annuls any individual undertaking which may contradict it. Jacob’s acceptance of this view is proved by his subsequent silence; and the myth thus validates an ‘excellent rule’ which the Book of Jubilees wished to make binding on all Israel.
3. Polygamy remains legal in the Middle East for both Moslems and Jews, but is rarely practised. Marriage to two sisters, though prohibited by Leviticus XVIII. 18, must have been tolerated as late as the sixth century B.C., since Jeremiah (III. 6 ff) and Ezekiel (XXIII. 1 ff) symbolically speak of God’s marriage to the sisters Israel and Judah, or Aholah and Aholibah.
5. The secret signs agreed upon between Jacob and Rachel are, according to Abraham Azulai, a sixteenth-century commentator, the ritual proper for bride and bridegroom to observe on their wedding night. She must handle in turn the great toe of his right foot, his right thumb, and his right ear lobe: which will not only arouse his desire for honest procreation but expel the three demons, lodging there, that incite carnal lust. If fortunate, she may thus achieve the rare distinction of giving birth to a son already circumcised (see 19. c and 38. e). The priest who smears blood from a sacrificial victim upon those three places, rids himself of defilement (Leviticus XIV. 14, etc.). In the kapparah ritual on the eve of the Day of Atonement, blood from a cock similarly banishes the demons of carnal lust.
6. Teraphim like those owned by Laban, David (1 Samuel XIX. 13–16) and Micah (Judges XVII. 5 ff), although ‘graven images’ of the sort condemned by the Second Commandment, were in common use. Hosea (III. 4) writes in the eighth century B.C. that religion would die out but for teraphim, sacrifices and sacred pillars. They were divinatory household or village gods, perhaps ancestral images of metal, wood or terracotta (2 Kings XXIII. 24; Ezekiel XXI. 1 and Zechariah X. 2); and consulted at least until the time of Judas the Maccabee (2 Maccabees XII. 40), whose men wore Jamnian teraphim underneath their tunics. Judas, like Samuel (1 Samuel XV. 33), considered divination abominable to God, and this discovery shocked him. The midrashic account of mummified human heads being put to oracular use at Harran is supported by Jacob of Edessa and by Chwolson’s collection of tales from that area. ‘Teraphim’, though it has a plural ending, can mean a single image as well as two or more.
7. Leah’s eye complaint was probably trachoma, a common fly-borne infection, for which a vaccine has only now been developed.
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BIRTH OF THE TWELVE PATRIARCHS
(a) Because Jacob had hated Leah ever since she was foisted upon him by Laban, God in His compassion let her bear a son. She named him ‘Reuben’, saying: ‘God has seen my misery; now Jacob will love me’; and her second son ‘Simeon’, saying: ‘God listened to my prayer, and gave me another child’; and her third son ‘Levi’, saying: ‘My husband will be joined to me in love: I have borne him three sons’; and her fourth son ‘Judah’, saying: ‘Now indeed do I praise God!’ Then, for a while, at Rachel’s request, Jacob no longer slept with Leah.
Rachel, still barren, told Jacob: ‘I shall die unless you give me children!’
He asked angrily: ‘Is it my fault that God closed your womb?’
Rachel pleaded: ‘At least pray over me, as Abraham prayed over Sarah.’
He asked again: ‘But would you do as Sarah did, and lay a rival in my bed?’
‘If it be jealousy that keeps me barren,’ Rachel answered, ‘take my bondmaid Bilhah, and reckon any child she bears as mine.’
Jacob accordingly took Bilhah to his bed, and when she bore a son, Rachel cried: ‘God has been my judge and granted my plea!’ She therefore named the child ‘Dan’. Bilhah also bore a second son; and Rachel, saying: ‘I have been a wrestler and won my bout against God!’, named him ‘Naphtali’.
Leah, not to be outdone in kindness, let Jacob use Zilpah, her own bondmaid, as his concubine. When Zilpah bore a son, Leah said: ‘What fortune!’, and named him ‘Gad’. Zilpah likewise bore a second son, and Leah, saying: ‘Now all women will call me happy!’, named him ‘Asher’. After this, Jacob slept only with Rachel; and Leah learned to hate her bitterly. But Rachel had constant fears of being sent back to Padan-Aram as a barren stock, and there claimed by her cousin Esau.340
(b) One day, however, during the wheat harvest, Leah’s son Reuben was tending Jacob’s ass, when he found mandrakes in a gully. These magical roots resemble a man’s lower members; the flower is flame-coloured and, at dusk, sends out strange rays like lightning. They grow in the valley of Baaras, which lies to the north of Machaerus in Judah, and can not only increase a woman’s attraction for her husband, but cure her of barrenness. Mandrakes struggle fiercely against the hand that plucks them, unless menstruous blood, or a woman’s water, be poured over them; even so they are certain death to touch, unless held legs downward. Mandrake-diggers trench the plant about until only its root tips remain fast in the ground; then they tie a dog to it by a cord, and walk away. The dog follows, pulls up the plant, and dies at once; which satisfies the mandrake’s vengeful spirit.341
(c) Reuben, not recognizing the mandrakes by heir fetid, lance-like leaves, innocently tethered his ass to them and walked off. The ass soon pulled out the mandrakes, which gave a blood-curdling shriek; and it fell dead. Reuben thereupon brought them home for his mother Leah, to show what had killed the beast; but Rachel met him on the way and snatched the mandrakes from his hands. Reuben wept aloud, and Leah ran up, asking what ailed him. ‘She has stolen my little men,’ he sobbed. ‘Give them back at once!’ Leah commanded Rachel. ‘No, no,’ she answered wildly, weeping too; ‘these little men shall be my sons, since God has given me no others.’ Leah screamed: ‘Is it not enough that you have stolen my husband? Do you now also wish to rob his eldest son?’
Rachel pleaded: ‘Give me those mandrakes, and Jacob shall lie with you tonight.’
Leah dared not scorn this offer and, when she heard the braying of Jacob’s ass as he rode home from the fields at dusk, hurried to meet him. ‘You must share my bed tonight,’ she cried. ‘I have hired you with your son’s mandrakes.’
Jacob grudgingly complied and Leah, conceiving again, bore him a fifth son, whom she named ‘Issachar’, saying: ‘God has rewarded my hire!’ Indeed, God honoured Leah’s disregard of woman’s modesty in thus hiring Jacob—not for lust but from a desire to enlarge the tribes of Israel. He decreed that Issachar’s sons should always possess a peculiar understanding of the weather and of astronomy.
Then Rachel, having grated and eaten the mandrakes, conceived at last and bore a son. She named him ‘Joseph’, saying: ‘God has taken away my reproach! O may He add to me a second son also!’342
(d) Leah afterwards bore a sixth son, whom she named ‘Zebulun’, saying: ‘God has given me a good dowry; now Jacob will surely dwell in my tent, since I have borne him six sons!’343
(e) Benjamin was born many years later, during Jacob’s return from Padan-Aram. He had brought his flocks, herds, and wives through Bethel and, just before they reached Ephrath, the pangs of labour overtook Rachel. When, after a day or more, her child finally appeared, the midwife cried: ‘Courage: once more you have a son!’, Rachel, worn out by travail, died whispering: ‘Yes, in truth, he is the son of my sorrow!’ She thus named him ‘Benoni’; but Jacob called him ‘Benjamin’, which means ‘Son of my right hand’. Grieving that he could not lay Rachel to rest in the Cave of Machpelah, Jacob set a pillar over her grave, still to be seen at Ephrath, near Ramah.344
(f) All the twelve patriarchs, except Joseph, had twin sisters whom they later married—Benjamin had two. Leah also bore a daughter, Dinah, without a male twin. Jacob would have divorced Leah, but she gave him so many sons that he felt bound at last to style her the head of his harem.345
(g) Some say that to commemorate Reuben’s finding of the mandrakes, his tribe always carried a mannikin on their standard. Others, that Rachel never ate these roots—which would have been sorcery—but entrusted them to a priest; and that God rewarded her with two sons for having conquered so strong a temptation.346
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1. Genesis supplies popular etymologies for the names of the twelve patriarchs, few of them plausible. R’ubhen (Reuben), taken to mean ‘See, a son!’ cannot be construed as ra’ah b’onyi, ‘He saw my misery’ (see 50. 3). And although ‘Dan’ has been correctly derived from the root dan, ‘to judge’, in both Gen
esis XXX. 6 and XLIX. 16, and although Rachel’s words ‘God has judged me!’ (dananni elohim) correspond with the Akkadian shamash idinanni, ‘may Shamash judge me!’ and are paralleled in Amorite and Katabanian names, yet Dan will originally have been an epithet of the tribal patron. ‘Dinah’ is the feminine form of ‘Dan’.
2. The Ephraimites won their tribal name ‘fertile tract’ from the well-watered range of hills which they occupied about 1230 B.C. in the conquest of Palestine; and ‘Benjamin’, (‘son of my right hand’ or ‘son of the South’) meant that this tribe held Southern Ephraim. ‘Ben-oni’, however, the original name, suggests ‘son of On’—an Egyptian city mentioned in Genesis XLI. 45 as the home of Joseph’s father-in-law, from which Benjamin may have migrated with the two Rachel tribes and the priestly clan of Levi. Zilpah’s two sons, Gad and Asher, bear the name of Aramaeo-Canaanite deities. Gad was the god of good luck, which is the meaning of his name in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syrian and Arabic, and his worship spread to Palmyra, Phoenicia and all Arabia. ‘Ba Gad!’, Leah’s alleged exclamation at the birth of Gad, would be understood simply as ‘Good luck!’ ‘Asher’ is the Amorite Ashir (see 35. 3), the masculine form of ‘Asherah’, a name of the wide-reigning fertility-goddess otherwise known as Atherat, Ashirat, Ashirtu, or Ashratu. ‘Issachar’ probably means ‘Sakar’s man’; Sakar or Sokar being the Egyptian god of Memphis.
3. A midrashic passage shrewdly points out that the Mosaic Law governing the inheritance of sons borne to a man by two co-wives, one beloved and one hated (Deuteronomy XXI. 15–17) is based on this myth and rejects the precedent set by Jacob.
If a man have two wives, the one beloved and the other hated, and they bear him children, both the beloved and the hated; and if the first-born son be hers that is hated, then it shall be that in the day that he gives his inheritance he may not make the son of the beloved the first-born; but he shall acknowledge the first-born, the son of the hated, by giving him a double portion.