The Joseph story brings Genesis to closure by showing that sibling rivalry is not written indelibly into the human script. We can change, repent and grow. The brothers show that they have changed when they demonstrate that they are no longer willing to let Benjamin – the Joseph-substitute – be enslaved. Joseph, by his act of reconciliation, shows that he is not captive to the past and its resentments. His statement, ‘You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good’, shows the power of a religious vision to reframe history, liberating ourselves from the otherwise violent dynamic of revenge and retaliation. In a real sense, then, freedom extends to more than our ability to choose between alternative futures. It includes the freedom to reshape our understanding of the past, healing some of its legacy of pain. The point could not be more significant in the context of the sibling rivalry between Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The past does not dictate the future. To the contrary, a future of reconciliation can, in some measure at least, retroactively redeem the past.
The length and weight of the Joseph story testifies that, within the highly structured book of Genesis, it is resolving the tension not of that generation alone, but of all that went before. Genesis is about failure and learning from failure, discovering that we can change. Jacob discovers this after a long night of wrestling with the angel. His sons discover it after a long period of suspense and fear. In learning, they enact the greatest of biblical themes: the defeat of tragedy in the name of hope.
It happens through role reversal. The most fundamental fact about consciousness is that I cannot feel someone else’s pain. I can only feel my own. This is the source of the human tendency to divide the world into brothers and others, kin and non-kin, friends and strangers, the ‘Us’ to whom I belong, and the ‘Them’, the Other, to whom I do not belong. That is why the covenantal family, the children of Israel, begin their collective life as a nation in Egypt, as slaves, so that they will know from the inside what it feels like to be on the other side.
That is what Joseph is forcing his brothers to do. He is educating them in otherness through role reversal. They must undergo what he went through when he was sold as a slave to a strange land far from home. This is not revenge, for which Joseph has neither desire nor need. It is, rather, the only way they will understand what evil feels like from the other side, not as perpetrator but as victim. That is the necessary prelude to repentance, itself the most compelling proof that we are free. Cain is able to commit murder because, he says, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ He does not feel Abel’s pain. He feels only his own at having his offering rejected. The way we learn not to commit evil is to experience an event from the perspective of the victim. Judah’s repentance – showing that he is his brother Benjamin’s keeper – redeems not only his own earlier sin, but also Cain’s.
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There is a masterstroke in the Joseph narrative, completely missed in translation. It occurs in the crucial scene, quoted above, where the brothers come before Joseph for the first time, not knowing who he is, thinking him to be an Egyptian. There is a rare linguistic phenomenon known as a contronym, one word with two contradictory meanings. In English, the word ‘sanction’ can mean both a permission and a prohibition. ‘Fast’ can mean immovably stuck or moving quickly. ‘Cleave’ can mean to cut in two or to join together.16 In Hebrew the root n-k-r is a contronym. It can mean ‘to recognise’ or the opposite, ‘to be a stranger’, someone who is not recognised.
If we now re-read the text cited above, we see that it uses the root n-k-r four times in two verses, three in the sense of recognition, one in the sense of estrangement. ‘Joseph recognised his brothers but they did not recognise him’, and Joseph ‘recognised them but acted as a stranger’.
The power of this contronym is intense. The central question of Genesis is: are human beings friends or strangers, brothers or others? That has been hammering at our consciousness since Cain and Abel, the first human children. Judah, in proposing the sale of Joseph, utters the devastatingly ironic words, ‘Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites and not lay our hands on him; after all, he is our brother, our own flesh and blood’ (37:27). This is close to Cain’s ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ Genesis is about recognition and non-recognition in the deepest sense, about the willingness to accord dignity to the other rather than see the other as a threat.
The irony of Joseph is that his siblings did not recognise him, in Egypt, as their brother. They recognised him only as a stranger, an Egyptian ruler called Zaphenath-Paneah, who wore Egyptian robes of office and whom they assumed could not even speak their language. Eventually Joseph forced them to recognise that just as a brother can be a stranger (when kept ‘at a distance’), so a stranger can turn out to be a brother.
The dual meaning of the verb n-k-r gathers into itself the whole force and dramatic conflict of Genesis as a sustained exploration of recognition and estrangement, closeness and distance. It tells us that if only we were to listen closely to the voice of the other, we would find that beneath the skin we are brothers and sisters, members of the human family under the parenthood of God. When others become brothers and conflict is transformed into conciliation, we have begun the journey to society-as-a-family, and the redemptive drama can begin.
9
The Rejection of Rejection
The Lord is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth.
Psalm 145:18
The Hebrew Bible was a document meant to be heard rather than read. It came into being at the critical juncture between orality and literacy. When it was first written, the alphabet had only recently been invented. The world’s first alphabets were semitic.1 The word ‘alphabet’ itself comes, via Greek, from the first two letters of Hebrew script, aleph-bet. The biblical verb likro, which later came to mean ‘to read’, primarily means ‘to call’. The Hebrew name for the Bible, Mikra, means a summons, a proclamation.2 To this day, every Sabbath, and in a shorter form three times during the week, a section of the Pentateuch is read aloud from the handwritten Torah scroll in the synagogue. To understand the Bible you sometimes have to listen to it rather than read it.
There is a fundamental difference between reading and hearing in the way we process information. Reading, we can see the entire text – the sentence, the paragraph – at one time. Hearing, we cannot. We hear only one word at a time, and we do not know in advance how a sentence or paragraph will end. Some of the most powerful literary effects in the Bible occur when the opening words of a sentence lead us to expect one ending and instead we encounter another.
There is a stunning example in Genesis, and it sheds powerful light on the entire subject we have been studying: sibling rivalry. In this case, however, the conflict is not between brothers but between sisters: the two daughters of Laban, Rachel and Leah.
Jacob, in flight from Esau’s anger, has travelled to the house of Laban. Arriving, he meets Laban’s younger daughter Rachel and falls in love with her. Laban proposes a deal: work for me for seven years and I will give her to you in marriage (Gen. 29:18–19). Jacob does so, but on the wedding night Laban substitutes Leah for Rachel. The next morning, Jacob discovers the deception and protests, ‘Why did you deceive me?’ Laban replies with massive irony, ‘It is not done in our place to give the younger before the elder’ (29:26). This is a reference back to Jacob’s deception of Isaac, when the younger took the blessing of the elder, Esau. Measure for measure, the deceiver has been deceived.
Laban then agrees that in return for a further seven years’ labour, Jacob may marry Rachel. He does not have to wait seven years, but he must at least wait seven days until Leah’s wedding celebrations have ended. The days pass. Jacob marries Rachel. We then read:
He also [gam] married Rachel, and he also [gam] loved Rachel…(Gen. 29:30)
Freezing the text at that point, we are led to believe that the two sisters are equal in Jacob’s eyes. That is what the repeated word gam, ‘also’, signifies. The deception has – so we must suppose at this point �
� a happy ending after all. Jacob has married both sisters. He loves them both. It seems that for the first time there will be no sibling rivalry. It is possible to love two women equally. The next word sends this expectation crashing to the ground:
…more than Leah.
This is the negative counterpart of a joke. It is meant to make us cry, not laugh. The surprise, though, is unmistakable. Jacob, fleeing from one sibling rivalry, has just unintentionally created another. The sentence is deliberately ungrammatical. The words ‘also’ and ‘more than’ cannot co-exist side by side in the same sentence. Either one loves X and also Y, or one loves X more than Y. The emphasis cannot be on both. The discord is strident and arresting. Jacob does not love the two sisters equally. He may love them both, but his real passion is for Rachel. The next verse contains an even sharper discord:
God saw that Leah was hated [senuah]…(Gen. 29:31)
This is a phrase that cannot be understood literally. The previous verse has just said that Leah was not hated but loved. The commentators wrestled with this difficulty: they read senuah not as ‘hated’ but as ‘less loved’.3 Yet, though the text is semantically impossible, it makes psychological sense. Leah, less loved, felt rejected. The words ‘God saw’ mean that God identified with her sense of humiliation. Laban’s deception had tragic human consequences. Leah weeps inwardly for the husband she acquired by her father’s wiles, whose love is for someone else.
Only now, in retrospect, do we understand the significance of the Torah’s first description of Leah:
Now Laban had two daughters; the name of the older was Leah, and the name of the younger was Rachel. The eyes of Leah were weak [rakot], but Rachel was lovely in form, and beautiful. (Gen. 29:16–17)
The word rakot could mean many things: beautiful,4 weak,5 or sensitive.6 But the word is more significant than that. It means – as Rashi, Kimche and midrashic tradition7 explain – ‘Leah was easily moved to tears.’ She was emotionally vulnerable, with none of the resilience that might have carried her through her husband’s attachment to her younger sister. Thin-skinned, sensitive, easily hurt, she knew she was Jacob’s lesser love, and it caused her pain. The subtlety with which this is conveyed is remarkable. The text has sketched Leah’s situation and character in a few deft strokes, each of which we only notice if we are listening carefully.
The story does not end there. Over the next few verses, the Bible makes us hear Leah’s pain in the names she gives her children. Her first she calls Reuben, saying, ‘It is because the Lord has seen my troubles. Surely my husband will love me now.’ The second she calls Shimon, ‘Because the Lord heard that I am unloved.’ The third she calls Levi, saying, ‘Now at last my husband will become attached to me’ (Gen. 29:32–34). There is sustained anguish in these words.
We hear the same tone later when Reuben, Leah’s firstborn, finds mandrakes in the field. Mandrakes were thought to have aphrodisiac properties, so he gives them to his mother hoping that this will draw his father to her. Rachel, who has been experiencing a different kind of pain, childlessness, sees the mandrakes and asks Leah for them. Leah then says, ‘Wasn’t it enough that you took away my husband? Will you take my son’s mandrakes too?’ (Gen. 30:15). The misery is palpable.
The final denouement occurs centuries later, in the days of Moses, in the book of Deuteronomy, and in a legal context:
If a man has two wives, one loved, the other unloved [senuah], and both bear him sons but the firstborn is the son of the unloved one, when he wills his property to his sons, he must not give the rights of the firstborn to the son of the loved one in preference to his actual firstborn, the son of the unloved one. He must acknowledge the son of his unloved wife as the firstborn by giving him a double share of all he has. That son is the first sign of his father’s strength. The right of the firstborn belongs to him. (Deut. 21:15–17)
In the Hebrew, this passage is saturated with linguistic evocations of Genesis and the rivalry between Leah and Rachel and their respective sons. The same key word, senuah, ‘unloved’, appears in both, and these are the only occurrences of the word in the Pentateuch. The phrase ‘first sign of his father’s strength’ is the same as that used by Jacob on his deathbed, referring to Reuben, Leah’s (and his) firstborn (Gen. 49:3–4). The reference to ‘double share’ recalls Jacob’s words to Joseph, firstborn of his beloved Rachel, ‘To you I gave one portion more than to your brothers’ (48:22). He does this by giving Joseph’s two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim, the status of tribes in their own right (48:5). The intertextuality of the two passages is unmistakable.
So is the implication: Jacob’s behaviour is not to become normative for his descendants. What he did then, is now forbidden.8 There are to be no more dramas of chosen and rejected sons, preferential treatment, favouritism, and the psycho-dynamics of sibling rivalry. Deuteronomy brings belated closure to the narratives of Genesis. No more will the younger usurp the older.
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This drama between Leah and Rachel encapsulates the entire extended drama of which Genesis has been a set of variations. It all begins with love. As we noted earlier, the religion of Abraham is supremely based on love – three loves. ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might’ (Deut. 6:5). ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’ (Lev. 19:18). And ‘You shall love the stranger, for you were once strangers in a strange land’ (see Lev. 19:34).
But love is not enough, and the story of Leah tells us why. Jacob loved Rachel. He loved her at first sight. There is no other love story quite like it in the Torah. Abraham and Sarah are already married by the time we first meet them. Isaac had his wife chosen for him by his father’s servant. But Jacob loves. He is more emotional than the other patriarchs. That is the problem. Love unites but it also divides. It leaves the unloved, even the less loved, feeling rejected, abandoned, forsaken, alone. That is why you cannot build a society, a community or even a family on love alone.
If we look at the eleven times the word ‘love’, ahavah, is mentioned in the book of Genesis, we make an extraordinary discovery. Every time love is mentioned, it generates conflict. Isaac loved Esau but Rebekah loved Jacob. Jacob loved Joseph, Rachel’s firstborn, more than his other sons. From this came two of the most fateful sibling rivalries in Jewish history.
Even these pale into insignificance when we reflect on the first time the word ‘love’ appears in the Bible, in the opening words of the trial of the binding of Isaac: ‘Take now your son, your only one, the one you love…’ (Gen. 22:2). Rashi, following Midrash, itself inspired by the obvious comparison between the binding of Isaac and the book of Job, says that Satan, the accusing angel, said to God when Abraham made a feast to celebrate the weaning of his son, ‘You see, he loves his child more than you.’9 That, according to the Midrash, was the reason for the trial: to show that Satan’s accusation was untrue.
Abrahamic monotheism is predicated on love for profound theological reasons. In the world of myth the gods were at worst hostile, at best indifferent to humankind. In contemporary atheism the universe and life exist for no reason whatsoever. We are accidents of matter, the result of blind chance and natural selection. The Hebrew Bible by contrast tells us that we are here because God created us in love. God’s love is implicit in our very being.
But love is not enough. You cannot build a family, let alone a society, on love alone. For that you need justice also. Love is partial, justice is impartial. Love is particular, justice is universal. Love is for this person not that, but justice is for all. Much of the moral life is generated by this tension between love and justice. Justice without love is harsh. Love without justice is unfair, or so it will seem to the less loved. That is what the Bible is forcing us to understand when we read the words, ‘And God saw that Leah was hated.’
‘And God saw’: recognising her humiliation, he gave her children instead – one of whom, Levi, would eventually beget Israel’s three great leaders, Moses, Aaron and Miriam, as well as its
future priests; another of whom, Judah, would be the ancestor of Israel’s kings.
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We now understand why the book of Genesis ends as it does, with the reconciliation between Joseph and his brothers. The story of Joseph brings to a climax the drama that began when Jacob married two sisters, Leah and Rachel, the second of whom he loved more than the first. What happened between the sisters then occurred between their children. The love which involves choice, favouring one over the other, is experienced as rejection by the unloved:
Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his other sons…When his brothers saw that their father loved him more than any of them, they hated him and could not speak to him in peace. (Gen. 37:3–4)
The less loved feel hated, and therefore hate. The story of Joseph and his brothers almost takes us back to the world of Cain and Abel as the brothers plot to kill Joseph and eventually sell him as a slave. This is the end of the road that begins with sibling rivalry. From here on there will be no more choice, no more dramas of elder and younger sons. By the time the book of Exodus begins, the children of Israel are collectively called ‘God’s firstborn’ (Exod. 4:22). The closing scene of Genesis in which the brothers are reconciled and live peaceably together marks the rejection of rejection. Henceforth, all the children of the covenantal family will be chosen. Later, at the time of the Golden Calf, when God says to Moses, ‘Now leave me alone…that I may destroy them; and I will make you into a great nation’ (Exod. 32:10), Moses reminds him of his covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. From now on, none of the people of the covenant may be unchosen.
This precisely mirrors the end of the earlier cycle of stories that began with Adam and Eve and culminated in God’s covenant with Noah. God had twice chosen: Abel rather than Cain, and Noah rather than humanity as a whole. After the Flood, however, there is a decisive change:
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