by Leland Ryken
27The boys grew up, and Esau became a skillful hunter, a man of the open country, while Jacob was a quiet man, staying among the tents.
28Isaac, who had a taste for wild game, loved Esau, but Rebekah loved Jacob.
29Once when Jacob was cooking some stew, Esau came in from the open country, famished. 30He said to Jacob, “Quick, let me have some of that red stew! I’m famished!” (That is why he was also called Edom.)
31Jacob replied, “First sell me your birthright.”
32“Look, I am about to die,” Esau said. “What good is the birthright to me?”
33But Jacob said, “Swear to me first.” So he swore an oath to him, selling his birthright to Jacob.
34Then Jacob gave Esau some bread and some lentil stew. He ate and drank, and then got up and left. So Esau despised his birthright.
The Experiential Realism of the Story
The experiential realism of biblical narrative is fully evident in this brief story. Here is a story that turns upon a pot of stew. As is so often the case in the Bible, a thoroughly mundane event becomes invested with a sense of ultimate spiritual destiny. The story revolves, moreover, around sibling rivalry and as such awakens our own experience of that archetypal phenomenon. It is the type of story that is thoroughly rooted in familiar everyday reality.
Foils in the Story
The first two verses give us the background information that is essential to understand the story that follows. These verses introduce the grand foil or contrast around which the story is built. It is the spectacle of twin brothers with opposite temperaments and lifestyles. The outdoor hunter favored by his father is contrasted to his quiet and domestic brother, who of course is the mother’s favorite. The opening contrast is so pronounced that we could predict conflict between the two brothers even before the plot of the story unfolds. This seething pot of sibling rivalry produces the central action of the story.
The Setting of the Story
The setting for the action at once gives Jacob the advantage. The tent is his natural environment. Esau, by contrast, is out of his depth in this setting. A pot of stew becomes a weapon in the hands of the family cook. A person as governed by his physical appetites as Esau proves to be is no match for a schemer like Jacob. The situation is one that we have seen dozens of times on television and in life: the gullible dupe waiting to be taken by the clever trickster. Our narrative curiosity about outcome is assured by the very situation.
Plot Conflict and Reversal of Situation
The conflict that underlies this story of sibling rivalry is the struggle to secure the benefits represented by the birthright. The situation—bartering between hostile persons—has conflict written all over it. In this conflict Jacob is the protagonist, the aggressive manipulator who initiates the action and dominates his brother. His chief strategy for getting the upper hand in the struggle is to put Esau in a position that tests him. With the smell of pottage in his nostrils, Esau is easy game. In six short verses, the opening situation is exactly reversed. The plot conflict is resolved as we watch the birthright change ownership and the brothers’ respective fortunes reversed in that very exchange. As so often in biblical narrative, the significance of what happens is all out of proportion to the actual brevity of the story. By this single act of bartering, both Jacob and Esau have made a life-changing choice.
Unity and Coherence
Every detail in the story contributes to the unifying action of the exchanged birthright. At the end of the story Esau leaves the scene with a full stomach and without the birthright. He does so because Jacob made him swear to give him the birthright. This sale, in turn, occurred because Esau had asked for food. He had asked for food when he had come home hungry just as Jacob was cooking dinner. This is obviously a cause-effect sequence of events having a beginning, middle, and end.
Techniques of Characterization
What about the characters in the story? They are known to us through their words and actions. Jacob is above all the clever schemer. His cleverness is seen mainly in his ability to seize the opportune moment and to turn it to his advantage, and in his making Esau swear an oath to make the bargain binding, lest Esau later change his mind. Other traits also emerge from Jacob’s actions: he is aggressive, devious, unfair (even though he does not literally steal the birthright), unloving, unscrupulous in exploiting another person for his own advantage, and materialistic (the birthright assured him of a double portion of the inheritance).
Esau comes off even worse in the story. He lives only for the moment. He cannot endure a little discomfort for the sake of future benefit. He has no capacity for grasping the covenant promises and spiritual blessings that would accompany this particular birthright.
What Is the Story About?
What does the story communicate at the level of theme or meaning? Patterns of repetition and the presence of a central character foil draw attention to two main themes. Esau’s experiment in living focuses our attention on the question of values. The story is a memorable example of someone who chooses the lesser over the greater—immediate physical gratification over future blessing. Our proverb about “selling one’s birthright for a mess of pottage” means exactly what the story does. The Anchor Bible renders the last sentence of the story, “Thus did Esau misprize his birthright,” suggesting the inverted values by which Esau operates in the episode. Hebrews 12:16 provides a good interpretive framework for the story when it calls Esau “godless” or “profane” (kJ), having no adequate feeling for what is sacred.
The Moral Aspect of the Story
When we shift the spotlight from Esau to Jacob, the thing that keeps getting repeated in the story is his unbrotherly behavior. Here the story becomes a comment about morality rather than values. The portrait of Jacob in this story is a memorable and frightening picture of what selfishness can do to human relationships.
Point of View in the Story
How does the storyteller get us to share his negative assessment of both brothers’ behavior? Like other biblical storytellers, he pays us the compliment of assuming that our own morality and sense of values are healthy. He depends partly on our negative responses to bad behavior in getting his point across.
The Outcome as an Implied Comment
He also uses the outcome of the story to convey his meaning. In the case of Jacob, we have to wait for subsequent episodes to see how destructive of self and family his experiment in self-serving proved to be. The verdict on Esau, by contrast, occurs within the story itself, and it takes two forms. One is the storyteller’s final interpretive comment: “So Esau despised his birthright.” In case we were in any doubt, this parting shot tells us what the action shows about Esau’s inverted values.
Esau’s Uncouth Speech Patterns
Along with this direct evaluation, the storyteller secures a negative response to Esau by stressing his uncouth lack of manners and vulgar personality. According to one commentator, in verse 30 “Esau is depicted as an uncouth glutton; he speaks of ‘swallowing, gulping down,’ instead of eating.”23 A good translation of what Esau says to Jacob in verse 30 would be, “Let me gulp some of that red stuff.” To accentuate the importance of what is happening, the author tells us in the same verse that Esau’s uncomplimentary nickname “Red” could be traced right back to this decisive event in his life. All of this is reinforced by the second half of verse 34, which “presents a staccato succession of five verbal forms . . . calculated to point up Esau’s lack of manners and judgment.”
The Total Impact of the Story
In a well-told story like this, everything works together to produce a unified impact. Form and meaning are inseparable. The sheer mastery of storytelling technique elicits our interest and delight, and at the same time we sense the significance of what happens in the story. We resonate with the story partly because it is simply good story material, memorable for its strong characters, its vivid situation, and its conflict whose resolution was so momentous in the lives of the actors. But we kn
ow that the storyteller also chose to tell the story for what it reveals about life. The story is a crucial chapter in salvation history and is simultaneously true to the way things are in the world. People still behave this way, and with the same dire results. We even have a proverb based on the story to prove it.
Further Reading
Literary Interpretations of Biblical Narratives, vols. 1, 2, ed. Kenneth R. R. Gros Louis (Nashville: Abingdon, 1974, 1982), contain numerous literary explications of biblical stories. In the first volume, D. F. Rauber’s essay on the Book of Ruth (pp. 163–76) is a particularly outstanding model of what a literary analysis of a biblical story should be.
Robert C. Tannehill’s article “The Disciples in Mark: The Function of a Narrative Role,” Journal of Religion 57(1977): 386–405, contains an abundance of good narrative theory that can be applied to biblical stories in general. Of a similar nature is Amos N. Wilder’s essay “Story and Story-World,” Interpretation 37(l983):353-64, which provides a brief overview of some of the leading “rituals of storytelling.”
Jacob Licht, Storytelling in the Bible (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1978), is particularly helpful in anatomizing biblical stories into four narrative ingredients: straight narrative that merely tells what happened; scenic narrative, in which the action is broken up into dramatic scenes; description of scenes and characters; and explanatory commentary by the storyteller. Robert Alter does similar things in The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981).
1Early Christian Rhetoric: The Language of the Gospel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 56.
2The New Testament: An Introduction (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 165.
3This formulation comes from Samuel Sandmel, The Enjoyment of Scripture (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 26.
4Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), ch. 1. A truly great essay.
5The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 126, 184.
6Aristotle’s Poetics, especially chs. 7–11, 17, and 23, has been rather definitive on the nature of plot through the centuries, and it continues to be the best starting point on the subject.
7Aspects of the Novel (1927; reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), 35. This book contains an abundance of good narrative theory.
8Mystery and Manners, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1957), 167.
9Aspects of the Novel, 93.
10Gerald Prince, A Grammar of Stories (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), 28.
11A Preface to Paradise Lost (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942), 133. Lewis makes the claim for Milton’s treatment of the biblical story in Paradise Lost.
12A particularly excellent treatment of irony in the Bible is Edwin M. Gooďs book Irony in the Old Testament (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1965).
13Stories of God (Chicago: Thomas More, 1978), 9.
14Quoted by J. Middleton Murry, The Problem of Style (London: Oxford University Press, 1922), 30.
15Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 115.
16Mystery and Manners, 76.
17Talks with Tolstoy, as excerpted in Novelists on the Novel, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959), 235.
18John Dominic Crossan, The Dark Interval: Towards a Theology of Story (Niles, III.: Argus Communications, 1975), 107–8.
19The Theology of the Book of Ruth (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1969), 19.
20Sheldon Sacks, Fiction and the Shape of Belief (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), 249.
21David Lodge, Language of Fiction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 65.
22Art and Reality (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958), 158, 114.
23E. A. Speiser, The Anchor Bible: Genesis (Garden City: Doubleday, 1964), 195. I have used the same source for other material in this paragraph.
Chapter Three
Types of Biblical Stories
IN ADDITION TO THE GENERAL FEATURES of stories noted in the preceding chapter, there are a number of traits that are characteristic of more specialized narrative genres. These subtypes within the general category of narrative have their own procedures and rules of interpretation. Two of these subtypes, parable and gospel, will receive separate treatment in later chapters.
HEROIC NARRATIVE
A Definition of Heroic Narrative
The largest branch of narrative is heroic narrative. Hero stories are built around the life and exploits of a protagonist. Such stories spring from one of the most universal impulses of literature—the desire to embody accepted norms of behavior or representative struggles in the story of a character whose experience is typical of people in general.
Literary Heroes
The following definition of a literary hero is a good starting point for discussing heroic narrative:
A traditional. . .hero must be more than merely the leading figure or protagonist of a literary work. The true hero expresses an accepted social and moral norm; his experience reenacts the important conflicts of the community which produces him; he is endowed with qualities that capture the popular imagination. It must also be remarked that the hero is able to act, and to act for good. Most important of all, the narrative of his experience suggests that life has both a significant pattern and an end.1
The practical import of this definition is simple: both the dynamics of the action and the meanings the storyteller is trying to get across will be concentrated in the central hero. In interpreting a hero story, therefore, we cannot go wrong if we focus on the protagonist. The hero’s conflicts and encounters comprise the plot of the story, and we can organize our understanding and discussion of the story around them.
Ways of Portraying a Hero
Determining the precise identity of a literary hero is a prime task whenever we read a heroic narrative. The hero’s identity is revealed chiefly through six means: the hero’s (1) personal traits and abilities, (2) actions, (3) motivations, (4) responses to events or people, (5) relationships, and (6) roles.
The Hero Is Representative of Humanity
A literary hero or heroine is representative. The purpose behind the storyteller’s selection of specific heroes and events is that they in some sense capture the universal human situation. It is a commonplace that whereas the historian tells us what happened, the writer of literary narrative tells us what happens. The hero stories of the Bible do more than set the historical record straight. They are also models or paradigms of the religious experience of the human race. They capture what is true for us and for people around us. Characters like Joseph and Ruth and David do not stay within their stories in the Bible; they merge with our own experiences as we begin to “build bridges” between their stories and our own.
The Hero as an Ideal
Usually such representative heroes are exemplary of some ideal, though they need not be wholly good (in the Bible they rarely are completely idealized). Stories tend to get written about people whose character and exploits we can look up to. The stories of the Bible are no exception. They give us a memorable gallery of moral and spiritual models to emulate.
Conveying an Ideal by Negative Example
On the other hand, stories can also inculcate a positive ideal by negative example. They can indirectly encourage good behavior by telling the story of a hero who failed to measure up to such a standard. Some of the most foolish misreadings of biblical stories I have encountered have come from a misguided assumption that we are intended to approve of the behavior of biblical heroes in virtually every episode in which they figure. One of the distinctive features of the Bible is how deeply flawed its heroes and heroines are. The Bible portrays most of its protagonists as Cromwell wished to be painted—warts and all.
Hero Stories Are More Than Moral Fables
Of course, in describing hero stories as moral or spiritual examples, I run the risk of making them appear to b
e simplistic moral fables. This is emphatically not true of heroic narrative in the Bible. All we need to do is dip into biblical scholarship and literary criticism to sense that these stories are subtle, frequently complex to interpret, and usually characterized by a kind of cryptic understatement or mystery that requires the reader to supply an abundance of interpretation. The moment we reduce the moral or spiritual meaning of the hero’s experience to an idea, we have turned the story into a platitude and robbed it of its power.
How Stories Picture Reality
The antidote lies in respecting how stories work. The values or virtues that are inculcated by a hero story like that of Joseph or Ruth are embodied in the protagonist’s character and life. The strategy of literature is to give form and shape to human experience by projecting it onto a character. A story can communicate truth or reality or knowledge simply by picturing some aspect of human experience. A story conveys truth whenever we can say, “This is the way life is.”
In other words, “the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction.”2 To say that the story of Abraham embodies an ideal of faith is not to offer that interpretation as a substitute for the story but as a pair of eyes by which to see what the story itself means. As readers we must preserve the integrity of the story as a story, while at the same time realizing that “all narrative. . .possesses. . .some quality of parable.”3