Reading the Bible again for the First Time
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5
Reading the Pentateuch Again
Israel’s story of the beginning of the world in Genesis 1–11 is followed immediately by her story of her own beginning. The story fills all five books of the Pentateuch. As in the creation story, God is the central reality and actor. The one who created heaven and earth now creates Israel.
Israel’s story of her origins begins in Genesis 12 with God’s call of her nomadic ancestors Abraham and Sarah and continues through three generations to their great-grandsons, the “fathers” of the twelve tribes of Israel, who are living in Egypt as Genesis ends. The subsequent four books of the Pentateuch narrate the story of Israel’s birth as a people and a nation: the exodus from Egypt under the leadership of Moses, the covenant and giving of the law at Mt. Sinai, and the journey through the wilderness to the border of the promised land.
Embedded within the narrative of the Pentateuch are the 613 laws revealed by God to Moses on Mt. Sinai. The most famous of these are, of course, the Ten Commandments. But the laws of the Pentateuch address far more than those ten issues. They cover not only what we think of as ethical and ritual matters, but also matters of civil and criminal law. In a comprehensive sense, they functioned as both constitutional and statutory law for ancient Israel. By grounding them in her story of sacred origins, Israel gave them the status of sacred law.
The combination of sacred narrative and sacred law made the Pentateuch the foundation of ancient Israel’s life. It not only told the story of Israel’s creation but shaped the world in which she lived.
The Story Crystallized
A very compact version of Israel’s story of origins is included in scripture as part of the ritual of offering the firstfruits of the harvest to God:
A wandering Aramean was my ancestor.
He went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous.
When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us by imposing hard labor upon us, we cried to the LORD, the God of our ancestors.
The LORD heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders;
And the LORD brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.1
A generation ago, many Hebrew Bible scholars saw this text as a unit of very early oral tradition much older than the first written account of Israel’s story. The present generation of scholars is less certain about this; in fact, many now see it as a late summary. But whether early tradition or late summary, it crystallizes Israel’s story as found in the Pentateuch as a whole.2 Indeed, the Pentateuch is an expanded version of this basic narrative, which includes the following:
We began as nomads, wanderers upon the earth without a home.
We fell into slavery to the lord of Egypt.
God heard our groaning and liberated us from bondage.
And God gave us a bountiful land in which to live.
Historical Illumination
The exodus from Egypt under the leadership of Moses probably happened in the thirteenth century BCE. The stories of Israel’s nomadic ancestors Abraham and Sarah are set a few hundred years earlier. For many centuries, both Jews and Christians routinely spoke of the Pentateuch as “the five books of Moses” and took it for granted that Moses (aided by God) was the author. Thus the Pentateuch was seen as roughly contemporary with the events it describes.
But modern historical scholarship, beginning in the seventeenth century, has rejected the notion of Mosaic authorship for good reasons. Instead, it sees the earliest accounts of Israel’s beginnings as having been written much later. As mentioned in the previous chapter, some scholars think that the earliest extended narrative in the Pentateuch may have been written as early as the 900s BCE (the J source). Other scholars think that the narratives were written significantly later. In any case, the completed narrative in its present form, with its combination of stories and laws, is quite late, written during or after the Jewish exile in Babylon in the 500s BCE and perhaps finalized as late as the time of Ezra in the 400s BCE.3
My primary concern in this chapter is with Israel’s story of origins in its present form, and not with a reconstruction of the history that lies behind it. Nevertheless, when it seems illuminating to make some observations about the possible history behind the stories, I will do so. Paradoxically, the primary effect of such observations is to turn attention from historical reconstruction to a metaphorical reading of these narratives.
The Fathers and Mothers of Israel
The stories of Abraham and Sarah; Isaac and Rebekah; Jacob, Leah, and Rachel, and their twelve sons (the fathers of Israel’s twelve tribes) are found in Genesis 12–50.
The Question of Historicity
I begin with a memory from my first seminary course on the Hebrew Bible some thirty-five years ago. I recall sitting at my desk in my dorm room in New York City listening to an FM radio station (a new experience for a young man from the remote northern Midwest) and doing the reading assignment for the next day’s class.
By then, I had learned that the first part of Genesis was a mythical prologue to the Pentateuch and that Israel’s history began with the stories of “the fathers of Israel”—“the patriarchs,” as they were called in those days: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and his twelve sons. The time of Abraham was commonly said to be about the 1700s BCE.
The assignment consisted of conflicting essays about whether the patriarchs were historical or legendary figures. Did Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and his twelve sons really exist, or were they legendary personifications of tribal groups? It also included a short essay on when camels were domesticated. Its conclusion: whereas asses had been domesticated by the alleged time of Abraham, camels had not been.
The effect of the assignment was a strong feeling of vertigo. So, I thought, let me see if I’ve got this right. Our tradition began with Abraham—but he might never have existed. And if he did, he was an ass nomad, not a camel nomad. Somewhat irreverently (but not without fear and trembling), I wondered why, even if he did exist, I should take seriously what happened to him—an ass nomad from the 1700s BCE? What did he know about anything? The foundation of the tradition seemed to be crumbling.
I recovered from the vertigo of that evening, but I still do not have an opinion about the historicity of the stories of Abraham and Sarah and their immediate descendants. I have realized, though, that their historicity does not matter. What does matter is the two questions raised in the previous chapter: Why did Israel tell these stories? And why did she tell them this way?
Promise and Fulfillment
The theme of promise and fulfillment provides the overarching structure and narrative flow of the Pentateuch. The promise is found in the dramatic beginning of the story of Abraham and Sarah in Genesis 12.1–2. God calls the two of them to leave home and family and embark on a journey to a land they do not know: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation.” The promise is twofold: the land of Canaan and a multitude of descendants.4
The rest of the Pentateuch is the story of the fulfillment of this promise. The Pentateuch ends several hundred years later with the descendants of Abraham at the Jordan River, ready to cross over to Canaan, the promised land.
The theme of promise and fulfillment is central not only to the Pentateuch as a whole, but to many of its individual stories. These stories often dramatize and intensify the theme of promise and fulfillment by adding a third element: a threat to the promise, a formidable obstacle to its fulfillment. As in a sacred melodrama, the ancestors find themselves in one predicament after another. Will God be able to fulfill the promise despite what look like hopeless circumstances?
The Barrenness of the Matriarchs
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p; Of the many stories of threats to the promise that could be cited, I focus on a repeating theme about the mothers of Israel: the matriarchs are barren. Abraham and Sarah’s role in the theme is well known. Though promised a multitude of descendants, Sarah is both barren and old. So the couple tries surrogate parenthood: Sarah gives her maidservant Hagar to Abraham, and Hagar bears his son Ishmael. But for the narrator of Genesis, this is not the fulfillment. It will not be brought about by human ingenuity.
Then, when Sarah is ninety and Abraham is ninety-nine—when humanly speaking it is impossible—Sarah conceives and gives birth to Isaac. The father and mother of Israel finally have a descendant. And, the narrator hardly needs to say, only because of God.5
Less well known is the repetition of this theme in the next two generations. Isaac, Abraham and Sarah’s son, marries Rebekah, who like Sarah is barren. Through twenty years of marriage, they have no children. Then God answers Isaac’s prayer, and Rebekah gives birth to Esau and Jacob.6
Jacob is now the child of promise. He falls in love with Rachel but is tricked into marrying her sister Leah as well. Leah (whom we are told he does not love) is marvelously fertile. But Rachel, whom he does love, is barren. After many years, we are told, God opens Rachel’s womb and she gives birth to Joseph, who later saves his brothers—the ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel—in a time of famine.7
What are we to make of this theme of the barrenness of the matriarchs? Why did the storytellers of Israel tell the story this way? By narrating these stories of threats to the promise, they intensified the theme of promise and fulfillment. The story as Israel tells it: even when it looks as if birth is impossible, when it seems that there is no hope, when we fear that we have no future, when the promises of God seem like pipe dreams—even then God finds a way to fulfill the promises made to our ancestors.
Joseph and His Brothers
The theme of promise and fulfillment (with the added drama of threat) is also central to the rich collection of stories that conclude the book of Genesis. Like a novella, Genesis 37–47 tells us about Joseph and his brothers, the sons of Jacob and the fathers of the twelve tribes of Israel. To condense these wonderfully written and often adventurous stories into a summary is a bit of a shame, but I do so now in order to show their connection to the theme of promise/threat/fulfillment.
Joseph, the favored son of Jacob and Rachel, is a dreamer and interpreter of dreams. His brothers become homicidally jealous of him. Having first planned to kill him, the brothers sell him into slavery instead, and then they tell their father that Joseph is dead.
Joseph ends up in Egypt as a servant. Through a series of adventures, he rises to the position of chief overseer, second in authority and power only to the pharaoh. He is placed in charge of organizing the storage of food in anticipation of a seven-year famine disclosed to him through the interpretation of dreams.
The famine strikes. Back home in the land of Canaan, hunger drives the family of Joseph to go to Egypt in search of food. They do not even suspect that Joseph might still be alive, much less imagine him as a person of power in Egypt. But they meet. Though Joseph recognizes them, they do not recognize him.
Finally Joseph tells them who he is: “I am your brother Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt.” And then he says these extraordinary words:
Do not be distressed [they might well have been afraid!], or angry with yourselves because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life. . . . God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here but God.8
This is an extraordinary claim: Joseph affirms, seeing things in retrospect, that even the event that ripped him from his homeland and family and sent him into slavery has been turned by God to a providential purpose.
In the Joseph stories, the threat to the promise was twofold. First, Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery; the one who was to be the savior of Israel in his time was betrayed by his brothers. Second, the famine left the ancestors of Israel desperate. But the narrator of Genesis turns the story into one of fulfillment in spite of these threats to the promise, and he does so in a strikingly provocative and evocative way. It is never the will of God that one sell one’s brother into slavery; betrayal of that sort is always horrendous and wrong. Yet God can take even so great an atrocity and make it serve the providential purposes of God. God can be counted on to fulfill the promises made to Israel, the people of God.
The theme of promise and fulfillment connects closely to the theme of creation with which Genesis begins. Just as the world came into existence through God and is sustained by God, so the people of God come into existence through the call and promise of God and continue to exist only because of God’s faithfulness. In the stories of the ancestors, God saves Israel from the abyss of nothingness again and again.
But the worst threat to the promise is yet to come. Genesis ends with Joseph’s family—his father (Jacob), his brothers, and their households—settling in Egypt. There they prosper and live out their lives. Jacob dies, then Joseph and his brothers. Their descendants remain. Israel is now in Egypt.
The Exodus: Israel’s Primal Narrative
We turn now to Israel’s story of the exodus, shorthand for the rest of the core story that shapes the Pentateuch as a whole. The exodus story includes Israel’s time of slavery in Egypt, the exodus itself, the covenant and laws given at Sinai, and the forty-year journey through the wilderness to the promised land.
In this story we encounter Israel’s “primal narrative.”9 The exodus story is primal in three meanings of the word. First, “primal” means “of greatest importance.” Throughout Israel’s history, the exodus story was the most important story she knew. Second, “primal” means “originary” or “originating”: the events narrated in this story gave birth to Israel; it is her story of origins par excellence. Third, “primal” means “archetypal”: this story narrates the perennial struggle between the world of empire and the liberating will of God, between the lordship of Pharaoh and the lordship of God.10
Like biblical narratives generally, Israel’s primal narrative combines historical memory with metaphorical narrative. Though the exodus story contains some history remembered, it is not what we think of as historical reporting; rather, it is history metaphorized.
As the storytellers of Israel narrate the exodus, they make use of remarkable literary artistry, dramatic hyperbole, and extraordinary numbers. Many of the scenes are exceptionally memorable, filled with both theological and psychological insights. The stories of the ten plagues and the crossing of the sea tell of stu-pendous miraculous interventions. According to the book of Exodus, the number of Israelites who left Egypt was six hundred thousand men plus women and children—presumably a total of two to three million.11
A couple generations of Americans have had their impressions of the exodus shaped by Cecil B. DeMille’s 1950s epic movie The Ten Commandments, still shown each year near Easter on network television. Though the movie allows itself some Hollywood license, it basically takes the biblical story literally: God speaking to Moses through the burning bush, sending the ten plagues against Egypt, dividing the sea into two towering walls of water with a canyon of dry land between, writing the Ten Commandments on two tablets of stone with a flaming finger, and so forth. Like all literalizations of metaphorical narratives, it makes the story frankly incredible.
Nevertheless, the exodus is rooted in the historical experience of ancient Israel. The memory of having been Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt is indelibly printed on the pages of the Hebrew Bible and etched in the life of ancient Israel. It is delineated not only in the Pentateuch itself, but in the psalms and the writings of the prophets as well as in Israel’s rituals and liturgies. But the exodus probably involved a few thousand people rather than a few million. And whatever historical events lie behind the stories of the plagues and the crossing of the sea, the texts are not simply reporting “what happened.”
Egypt and Bondage
The most severe threat to the promise made to the ancestors begins when a new pharaoh comes to power in Egypt. The first chapter of Exodus solemnly announces the change: “Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph.”12
The result: Israel is enslaved by imperial power. Now in bondage to the lordship of Pharaoh, she is condemned to unremitting hard labor:
The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites, and made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and brick and in every kind of field labor. They were ruthless in all the tasks they imposed upon them.13
And even worse: the imperial power in charge of the Israelites’ world orders the killing of all male babies born to the Hebrews. Imperial oppression is now combined with genocide. Under the power of empire, Israel has no future.
Moses
Into this world, Moses is born. It is no accident that the Pentateuch has long been associated with Moses. His birth is narrated at the beginning of Exodus and his death in the final chapter of Deuteronomy, the last book of the Pentateuch. In between is the story of his life as the liberator, law-giver, and leader of Israel. Moses towers over the Pentateuch. Other than God, he is the central figure in Israel’s primal narrative.