A Sinaite's Notebook: Genesis/Bereshith: 2 Introductions

[This was first posted October 25, 2014.  These are introductions to the first book comprising the TORAH.  They are from two of our MUST READ/MUST HAVE resources:  

• one is from our translation of choice — Everett Fox (EF), The Five Books of Moses
• while the second is from Robert Alter (RA) who has also done his own translation of the same, with exactly the same title as Fox.

 We provide these supplementary readings to aid our web-visitors in understanding the Torah books.  As much as our featured favorite commentators have helped us in our study and discussions, we offer to share our Sinaites resources to those who might not have access to the original books.  Reformatted for this post.—Admin1]

Everett Fox [EF]:

Part I: THE PRIMEVAL HISTORY (I-II)

THE COLLECTION OF STORIES WHICH FORMS PART I OF GENESIS HAS BEEN ASSEMBLED for a number of purposes:

1.  History is traced from the creation of the world, in a direct line, down to Avraham, father of the People of Israel.  Through use of the leading-word toledot, “begettings,”  we are meant to view him as the logical end point in God’s preliminary plan in history

2.  The nature of God, as he will appear throughout the Hebrew Bible, is firmly established.  He is seen—

• as a Creator who is beyond fate, nature, and sexuality;
• as an all-powerful orderer and giver of meaning to history;
• as a bestower of blessing to living creatures;
• as a giver of choice to human beings;
• as a just punisher of evil
• and, simultaneously, a merciful ruler;
• and as a maker of covenants.

The one quality of God which does not unfold until the Patriarchal stories (Parts II-IV) is his shaping of human destiny through focusing on the people of Israel.  It is portrayed as the logical outcome of the characteristics just mentioned.

3.  It appears that the Mesopotamian origins of Israel are reflected in such narratives as the Creation, the Flood, and the Tower of Babel, and are transformed or repudiated in the biblical versions.  What in the older culture appears arbitrary and chaotic has been changed in the Bible into stories that stress morality and order.  Further, human beings in Genesis Chapters I-II, despite their failure to live up to God’s expectations, are nevertheless considered capable of doing so, in contrast to the Mesopotamian view that humankind was created merely to be slaves to the gods.

4.  Like virtually all other creation stories, Part I is concerned with the origin of the world and its institutions.

• Chapter I expounds on the origins of earth, sky, vegetation, animals, and human beings (as well as the Sabbath);
• Chapter 2, of sexuality, death, pain in childbirth and work;
• Chapter 4, of sin, hatred, and murder, as well as of cities and crafts;
• Chapter 6, of giants; and
• Chapter 10, of nations (including the low status of the Canaanites) and languages.

In sum, Part I serves as a fitting Prologue, not only to Genesis but to the entire Bible.  The reader’s chief task in interpreting it is to be able to determine the reason for the inclusion of any one section into the whole.

God as Creator (I:I-2-2:4a):  Three principal themes emerge from the great creation account with which Genesis opens.

• The first is the total and uncompromised power of God as creator;
• the second, the intrinsic order and balance of the created world; and
• the third, humankind’s key position in the scheme of creation.

These themes are brought home as much by the form in which they are presented as by their actual mention.

God (Heb. elohim, a generic term) is introduced into the narrative without any description of origins, sex, or limitations of power.  As the only functioning character of the chapter, he occupies center stage.  There is no opposition, no resistance to his acts of creation, which occur in perfect harmony with his express word.

As a sign of both God’s total control and his intent, the world unfolds in symmetrical order.  The division of God’s labor into six days, plus a seventh for rest, itself indicates a powerful meaningfulness at work, as well as providing the external structure for the narrative.

Interpreters have tended to divide these into either three groups of two days or two groups of three, with always the same results:  a balanced and harmonious whole.

In addition, the number seven is significant (as it will be elsewhere in the Bible) as a symbol of perfection, not only in Israel but in the ancient world in general.

The narrative uses several repeating words and phrases to both unify the story and underscore the theme of order.  These include,

• “God said,”
• “Let there be . . .,”
• “God saw that it was good,”
• “It was so,” and
• “There was setting, there was dawning . . . .”

Robert Alter [RA] :  

Excerpts from the  INTRODUCTION

A FEW brief remarks about the structure of Genesis as a book are in order.  Genesis comprises two large literary units–

• -the Primeval History (chapters 1-11) and
• the Patriarchal Tales (chapters 12-50).

The two differ—

• not only in subject
• but to some extent in style
• and perspective.

The approach to the history of Israel and Israel’s relationship with God that will be the material of the rest of the Hebrew Bible is undertaken through gradually narrowing concentric circles:  

• first an account of the origins
  • of the world,
  • of the vegetable
  • and animal kingdom
  • and of humankind,
• then a narrative explanation of the origin
  • of all the known peoples from Greece to Africa to Mesopotamia and Asia Minor,
  • and of the primary institutions of civilization,
  • including the memorable fable about the source of linguistic division.

 The Mesopotamian family of Terah is introduced at the end of this universal history in chapter 11,

• and then when God calls Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldees
• at the beginning of chapter 12 we move on to the story of the beginnings of the Israelite nation,
• though the national focus of the narrative is given moral depth because the universal perspective of the first part of Genesis is never really forgotten.  

Some critics have plausibly imagined this whole large process of biblical literature as a divine experiment with the quirky and unpredictable stuff of human freedom an experiment plagued by repeated failure and dedicated to renewed attempts:

•  first Adam and Eve,
• then the generation of Noah,
• then the builders of the Tower of Babel,
• and finally Abraham and his seed.

Although the Creation story with which the Primeval History begins does look forward to the proliferation of humanity and the human conquest of the natural world, by and large the first eleven chapters of Genesis are concerned with origins, not eventualities—with the past, not the future:  “he was the first of all who play on the lyre and pipe” (4:21), the narrator says of Jubal, one of the antediluvians.  The literal phrasing of the Hebrew here, as in a series of analogous verses, is “he was the father of ….”   That idiom is emblematic of the Primeval History, which is really a record of the archetypal fathers, a genealogy of human institutions and of ethnic and linguistic identity.

 Although the Patriarchal Tales are in one obvious way also the story of a chain of fathers—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—the horizon these tales constantly invoke is the future, not the past.  God repeatedly tells Abraham what He intends to do with and for the offspring of Abraham in time to come, both in the impending near future of Egyptian enslavement and in the long-term future of national greatness.  It is perfectly apt that the Patriarchal Tales should conclude with Jacob’s deathbed poem envisaging the destiny of the future tribes of Israel, which he prefaces with the words, “Gather round, that I may tell you what shall befall you in the days to come” (49:1).

The Primeval History, in contrast to what follows in Genesis, cultivates a kind of narrative that is

• fablelike or legendary, and sometimes residually mythic.
• The human actors in these stories are kept at a certain distance, and seem more generalized types than individual characters with distinctive personal histories.
• The style tends much more than that of the Patriarchal Tales to formal symmetries, refrainlike repetitions, parallelisms, and other rhetorical devices of a prose that often aspires to the dignity of poetry, or that invites us to hear the echo of epic poetry in its cadences.
• As everywhere in biblical narrative, dialogue is an important vehicle, but in the Primeval History it does not have the central roles it will play later, and one finds few of the touches of vivid mimesis that make dialogue in the Patriarchal Tales so brilliant an instrument for the representation of human—and human and divine—interactions.

 In sum, this rapid report of the distant early stages of the human story adopts something of a distancing procedure in the style and the narrative modes with which it tells the story.

God’s very first words to Abraham at the beginning of chapter 12 enjoin him to abandon land, birthplace, and father’s house.  These very terms, or at east this very sphere, will become the arena of the narrative to the end of Genesis.  The human creature is now to be represented not against the background of the heavens and the earth and civilization as such but rather

• within the tense and constricted theater of the paternal domain, in tent and wheatfield and sheepfold,
• in the minute rhythms of quotidian existence,
• working out all hopes of grand destiny in the coil of familial relationships, the internecine, sometimes deadly, warring of brothers and fathers and sons and wives.

In keeping with this major shift in focus from the Primeval History to the Patriarchal Tales, style and narrative mode shift as well.  

The studied formality of the first eleven chapters—epitomized in the symmetries and the intricate repetition of word and sound in the story of the Tower of Babel—gives way to a more flexible and varied prose.  Dialogue is accorded more prominence and embodies a more lively realism.  When, for example, Sarai gives Abram her slavegirl Hagar as a concubine, and proudly pregnant Hagar then treats her with disdain, the matriarch berates her husband in the following fashion:  “This outrage against me is because of you!  I myself put my slavegirl in your embrace and when she saw she had conceived I became slight in her eyes” (16:5).  Sarai’s first sentence here has an explosive compactness in the Hebrew, being only two words, ^hamasi ‘alekha, that resists translation.  In any case these lines smoldering with the fires of female resentment convey a sense of living speech and complexity of feeling and relationship one does not encounter before the Patriarchal Tales:  the frustrated long-barren wife at cross-purposes with herself and with her husband, first aspiring to maternity through the surrogate of her slavegirl, then after the fact of her new co-wife’s pregnancy, tasting a new humiliation, indignant at the slave’s presumption, ready to blame her husband, who has been only the instrument of her will.  Such vivid immediacy in the representation of the densely problematic nature of individual lives in everyday settings is an innovation not only in comparison with the Primeval History but also in comparison with virtually all of ancient literature.

What nevertheless binds the two large units of the Book of Genesis is both outlook and theme.

• The unfolding history of the family that is to become the people of Israel is seen, as I have suggested, as the crucial focus of a larger, universal history.
• The very peregrinations of the family back and forth between Mesopotamia and Canaan and down to Egypt intimate that its scope involves not just the land Israel has been promised but the wider reach of known cultures.
• National existence, moreover, is emphatically imagined as a strenuous effort to renew the act of creation.
• The Creation story repeatedly highlights the injunction to be fruitful and multiply, while the Patriarchal Tales, in the very process of frequently echoing this language of fertility from the opening chapters, make clear that procreation, far from being an automatic biological process, is fraught with dangers is constantly under threat of being deflected or cut off.
• Abraham must live long years with the seeming mockery of a divine promise of numberless offspring as he and his wife advance childless into hoary old age.
• Near the end of the book, Jacob’s whole family fears it may perish in the great famine, and Joseph must assure his brothers that God has sent him ahead of them to Egypt in order to sustain life.
•  Genesis begins with the making of heaven and earth and all life, and ends with the image of a mummy—Joseph’s—in a coffin.

But implicit in the end is a promise of more life to come, of irrepressible procreation, and that renewal of creation will be manifested, even under the weight of oppression, at the beginning of Exodus.  Genesis, then, works with disparate materials, puts together its story with two large and very different building blocks but nevertheless achieves the cohesiveness, the continuity of theme and motif, and the sense of completion of an architectonically conceived book.  Although it looks forward to its sequel, it stands as a book, inviting our attention as an audience that follows the tale from beginning to end.