It is equally clear what happened in the wrestling match the night before. It was Jacob’s battle with existential truth. Who was he? The man who longed to be Esau? Or the man called to a different destiny, the road less travelled? ‘I will not let you go until you bless me,’ he says to his adversary. The unnamed stranger responds in a way that defies expectation. He does not give Jacob a conventional blessing (you will be rich, or strong, or safe). Nor does he promise Jacob a life free of conflict. The name Jacob signified struggle. The name Israel also signifies struggle, but in a different way.
In effect, the stranger said to him, ‘In the past you struggled to be Esau. In the future you will struggle not to be Esau but to be yourself. In the past you held on to Esau’s heel. In the future you will hold on to God. You will not let go of him; he will not let go of you. Now let go of Esau so that you can be free to hold on to God.’ The next day, Jacob did so. He let go of Esau by giving him back his blessing. And though Jacob had now renounced wealth and power, and though he still limped from the encounter of the previous night, the passage ends with the words, ‘And Jacob emerged complete’ (Gen. 33:18). He no longer wanted Esau’s blessings. In the past, when he had mimetic desire, he was divided within himself and thus prey to anxiety and fear. The truth at which Jacob finally arrived, to which the name Israel is testimony, is that to be complete we need no one else’s blessings, only our own. The face that is truly ours is the one we see reflected back at us by God. That is the meaning of the priestly blessing ‘May God turn his face towards you and grant you peace’ (Num. 6:26). Peace comes when we see our reflection in the face of God and let go of the desire to be someone else.
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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.
8
Role Reversal
Do not judge your fellow until you have been in his place.
Mishnah1
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.
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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, tw
ice 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.
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