A fine example of a family man
Jan. 26th, 2018 02:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cincinnatus_c
Today I'm up to Genesis 40, in which Joseph interprets the dreams of Pharaoh's jailed butler and baker, on the Bible Gateway program. This is the second time recently I've read through the Joseph parts of Genesis, because Howard was on about them last month. Joseph is a funny character--it occurs to me that Joseph is the Forrest Gump, or maybe the Chauncey Gardiner, of the bible; momentous things just happen to him and he naively spits out nonsense that gets taken for wisdom and happens to turn out to be true. Howard is hard on Joseph for denying anyone's responsibility for anything, his supposing that everything is for the best, despite anyone's malign intent, because everything is in God's hands. In consecutive posts Howard commends Joseph for his open-hearted generosity to the brothers who had sold him to the Ishmaelite traders who in turn sold him to Potiphar in Egypt, and then condemns Joseph for refusing the possibility of real forgiveness to his brothers by denying that any wrong-doing had been done or that they were even responsible for their actions. Howard points out that Joseph pretends to speak on behalf of God, but unlike Jacob, does so without listening to God. But, the text says, God was with Joseph, as God was with Jacob, and made Joseph prosperous in all his endeavours as Jacob was. Howard says that Joseph is a diviner where Jacob was a prophet, because Joseph puzzles out the hidden meanings of things whereas Jacob is the conduit for God's plain speaking. And where God makes a puzzle for Jacob it is left a puzzle. People still argue over the meaning of "Jacob's ladder", but not so much over whether Joseph could have been wrong in his interpretations of the dreams of the butler and the baker, and of Pharaoh. (Then again, no interpretation is needed on Joseph's part of the two dreams of his that are reported, the eleven sheaves of wheat bowing down to the one, and the sun and moon and eleven stars bowing down to him.) Well, of course he wasn't wrong; his prophecies were borne out. Lucky him! The constant twists of fate in Joseph's life, in which everything always turns out for the best in the end, blind him to the possibility of human responsibility for anything, but the really distasteful people in his position are those who manage to regard themselves as the masters of their own good fortune. But the reunion scene between Joseph and his brothers, which Howard focusses on, is still five chapters away, so I guess I'll hold off on talking about it in any more detail until then.
After all, so much has happened with Jacob! Trying to remember now what all has happened to him before Joseph takes centre stage, I recall that while Jacob is said to have prospered because God was with him, the text also shows Jacob taking some of the responsibility for his prosperity into his own hands, as he tries to outmaneuver Laban, the brother of Rebekah and the father of Rachel, the pretty girl whom Jacob wishes to marry and also of Leah, the girl with "weak eyes" whom Laban tricks Jacob into marrying first, because she is the older of the two (and, Laban says, it is the custom in those parts for the older to marry first), by sending Leah instead of Rachel to sleep with Jacob. (Another implausible Shakespearian comedy trick of mistaken identity.) This after Jacob had agreed that he would work for Laban for seven years in exchange for Rachel, and he "had served seven years for Rachel and they seemed to him but a few days because of his love for her." Laban gets Jacob to agree to "complete the week" with Leah and then he can have Rachel as well. Jacob "completes the week" (as, you have to suppose, a stud horse), and then he "went in to Rachel also, and indeed he loved Rachel more than Leah, and he served with Laban for another seven years." Oddly there is no agreement mentioned for Jacob to serve Laban another seven years; he just does it. Meanwhile, Jacob doesn't just love Rachel more than Leah; God does not just see that Leah is "unloved", as the NASB puts it, but actually that she is hated, as the KJV puts it and as the NASB notes in a footnote.[1] Because he sees that she is hated, he "opens her womb," and out pop, in turn, Reuben, Simeon, and Levi. After each is born she says that surely now Jacob will love her. But he does not. So when she bears a fourth son, Judah, she says only, "This time I will praise the Lord." And then she stops bearing. But the chidlbearing competition between Leah and Rachel is underway. Rachel is jealous of Leah and demands that Jacob give her children or she will die. "Then Jacob's anger burned against Rachel"--Jacob is not so soft-hearted and understanding as we might have expected, it turns out. Isaac, we might imagine, would not have reacted in anger (and neither for that matter would we imagine Joseph reacting in anger). Jacob says to Rachel, "Am I in the place of God, who has withheld from you the fruit of the womb?" A funny thing about this is that it's always the women who are barren (until they magically aren't) in the bible, never the men who are shooting blanks. (This reminds me of another "unrealistic" fertility-related oddity in the bible: no one, right through Genesis, is said to die at any time between conception and adulthood. Joseph's brothers' making out to Jacob that Joseph has been killed by a wild animal seems to be the only time that the possibility of dying young even comes up. Evidently people who die before adulthood are as inconsequential as most women.) Of course we know now that it is far more usually the other way around, but you can see why, before microscopes, people didn't get that--the man's seed is coming out, there it is, so obviously it's the woman's ground that's the problem. But in the case of Jacob and Rachel, just like in the case of Abraham and Sarah, the proof of the woman's infertility is the man's fertility with another woman.
Rachel, like Sarah, decides to have children by surrogate, through a maid given to her by Laban. "So she gave him her maid Bilhah as a wife"--it turns out that Genesis is actually complete indiscriminate in its use of the word "wife". This turns out completely differently than the case of Sarah and Hagar; there is no mention of Bilhah's feelings about any part of it and Rachel, saying that God has vindicated her and given her a son, names the child Dan. Bihlhah has a second child; Rachel says, "With mighty wrestlings I have wrestled with my sister, and I have indeed prevailed," and names the child Naphtali. Now Leah, who has stopped bearing, uses her own maid, also given to her by Laban, as a surrogate to keep up the competition. Leah's maid Zilpah (who is also a non-person as far as the story goes) has two children, whom Leah names Gad and Asher.[2]
I didn't intend to go through all that (and for that matter I wasn't sure I was up to any bible-writin' at all tonight)--it is kind of funny how once I start into it I get carried away with it--it seems to be some kind of compulsion to get the story straight, I dunno! But the next thing that happens is actually interesting and I had meant to maybe say something about. Reuben finds "mandrakes" and brings them to Leah. Rachel asks for some of them. Leah says, what, you take my husband and you want my son's mandrakes, too? Rachel says Leah can sleep with Jacob in exchange for some mandrakes. So that's what happens; Leah goes to Jacob and informs him that she has hired his services with her son's mandrakes. She has two more sons and a daughter, who you know is going to be of some importance, because daughters are never named unless they turn out to be of some importance. And then Leah has a son, and that son is Joseph. So there are two interesting things here. One is that Leah is the first person in the bible to pay for sex, although she doesn't pay the person she gets sex from. The other is the mandrakes, which I don't know if I would've gotten around to looking into (though on the face of it their importance to Rachel is curious) if I hadn't happened to notice Howard saying in an old post that the mandrakes had allowed Rachel to have Joseph. That sent me off to learn that "mandrake" translates a Hebrew word that literally means "love plant", and that there are some different conjectures about what the love plant in question might have been, but it could have been mandrake (which, I see in the wikipedia, Josephus says, if you want to harvest it without it killing you, you should tie your dog to it and then run away, so that the dog will run after you and pull it out, and it will kill your dog instead of you), and anyway was evidently supposed to work as a fertility drug, and evidently is supposed to have worked for Rachel. (And maybe also for Leah, but you have to wonder, since she had to buy some time with Jacob from Rachel, whether the reason she "stopped bearing" was that she and Jacob just weren't sleeping together anymore.) Although what the text actually says is: "Then God remembered Rachel, and God gave heed to her and opened her womb." Well, God helps those who help themselves, maybe, which is the point I was after when I started all this, except in relation to Jacob and Laban.
After Joseph comes along, Jacob tells Laban it's time for him to go. Laban wants him to stay; "I have divined that the Lord has blessed me on your account," he says, and tells Joseph to name his wages to stay. But Jacob says he has to build up his own household after working so long for Laban's benefit and making Laban a wealthy man. Laban asks what he can give Jacob, and Jacob says (kind of confusingly) nothing, except that if Laban will do one thing for him, Jacob "will again pasture and keep [his] flock"; the one thing is to let Jacob go through his flock and take all the speckled and spotted goats and sheep and black lambs, I guess on the assumption that these are less desireable. Laban agrees--and then takes all the animals he'd agreed Jacob could take (but notice that the letter of their agreement was that Jacob could go through the flock and take all the speckled etc. animals he found; Laban is just ensuring that he won't find any!), gives them to his sons, and "puts a distance of three days' journey between himself and Jacob." If Jacob has any kind of emotional reaction to this, the text doesn't say; his response, as the text has it, is to get to work. He tends to what's left of Laban's flock and performs some kind of obscure trick with wooden rods that makes the animals have speckled and spotted offspring, but he only does it for the stronger animals, so that there will be stronger speckled and spotted offspring, which will be his (one thing you have to say for Jacob, he is a man of great patience, which Laban presses as far as he can), and weaker monochromatic offspring, which will be Laban's. (Obviously there is something to be made here of the less attractive (like Leah?), maybe the less pure, being the stronger.)
But! and to be honest I had forgotten what comes next: Jacob makes out to Rachel and Leah that it was God's doing that so many of the goats and sheep have turned out speckled. He tells them that Laban keeps cheating him and changing the bargain between them, but God has seen to it that if Laban says that all the spotted or striped animals will be Jacob's, then all the animals will turn out spotted or striped. So the problem of responsibility strikes again.
One more thing, that happens right after that: Jacob gathers up his family and his things to leave, and he "deceived Laban the Aramean"--again the text specifies a kind of ethnic difference between Jacob and his mother's brother--"by not telling him that he was fleeing." Rachel, for some reason, steals her father's household idols to take with her. This is the first mention of idols or of any real or imagined supernatural presence in the world other than God and his angels (and his "sons" who fathered the Nephilim, who precipitated the flood). Who knows why Rachel wanted them. But it looks like the seed has been planted for an idea that (I expect, based on what I hazily think I know) will sprout again and again in the Hebrew bible: the Hebrew people's tenuous fidelity to their god is under constant threat from even the slightest incursion by foreign elements. (And here I'm reminded of Leonard Cohen's appropriation of Christian imagery! (Not to mention his Buddhism, of course.) And, now, Howard's, as his most recent blog post is about the pearly gates. (Thinking about this kind of thing it strikes me that, as a Jew, you can look on the "New Testament" as writings of heretic Jews, as a kind of Jewish apocrypha, which are mistaken in one fundamental premise--that Jesus of Nazareth is the messiah promised by the prophets--but may nonetheless possess some kind of Jewish wisdom. (And then it strikes me, well, that's what Nietzsche thought.)))
Speaking of the Hebrew people's tenuous fidelity to their god, one more (I promise this time!) thing I had been meaning to note: after Isaac sends Jacob to Haran to find a wife from among his own people, Jacob has his dream of the ladder with angels ascending and descending, in which God tells Jacob that he willl have innumerable descendants, and that he will be with Jacob and always bring him back to this land. When Jacob wakes up, he "makes a vow, saying, 'If God will be with me and will keep me on this journey that I take, and will give me food to eat and garments to wear, and I return to my father’s house in safety, then the Lord will be my God.'" As far as Jacob is concerned, God will have to earn Jacob's fidelity.
[1] The NASB, it turns out, is continually maddening in this way: it is constantly giving glosses and euphemisms to which it gives notes with the literal translations. Sometimes it makes totally gratuitous substitutions for smoothness of style, e.g. frequently substituting a pronoun for a proper name, with a note that the Hebrew gives the proper name! The result is that my trust continues to build in the honesty and transparency of the NASB (and also incidentally of the KJV, and thereby of Strong's, since the NASB often confirms that the KJV aims at literal translation, because the KJV has in its text what the NASB has in its notes), but I wonder more and more how long I'm going to tolerate slogging through the back-and-forth between the text and footnotes required by using the NASB as a study text.
[2] Gad and Asher are the names of two brothers--I would've sworn they were twins, but some bibliographical records I just looked at to confirm or disconfirm that indicate that they were born about fourteen years apart!--of my former acquaintance. One, the one who is said to have coined the phrase "Red Tory", is of my very slight acquaintance, but enough to have told me I was in danger of being taken for a Straussian (to which I replied that I was not unaware of that); the other's house I've been to, for a class potluck, where he informed us that his standard poodle had one failing, which was that she enjoyed rolling in shit. I have also owed him a set of sonnets for nearly eighteen years.
Currently at Havelock: -7.3, slowly climbing from around -9 around 8:30. High today: -6.
After all, so much has happened with Jacob! Trying to remember now what all has happened to him before Joseph takes centre stage, I recall that while Jacob is said to have prospered because God was with him, the text also shows Jacob taking some of the responsibility for his prosperity into his own hands, as he tries to outmaneuver Laban, the brother of Rebekah and the father of Rachel, the pretty girl whom Jacob wishes to marry and also of Leah, the girl with "weak eyes" whom Laban tricks Jacob into marrying first, because she is the older of the two (and, Laban says, it is the custom in those parts for the older to marry first), by sending Leah instead of Rachel to sleep with Jacob. (Another implausible Shakespearian comedy trick of mistaken identity.) This after Jacob had agreed that he would work for Laban for seven years in exchange for Rachel, and he "had served seven years for Rachel and they seemed to him but a few days because of his love for her." Laban gets Jacob to agree to "complete the week" with Leah and then he can have Rachel as well. Jacob "completes the week" (as, you have to suppose, a stud horse), and then he "went in to Rachel also, and indeed he loved Rachel more than Leah, and he served with Laban for another seven years." Oddly there is no agreement mentioned for Jacob to serve Laban another seven years; he just does it. Meanwhile, Jacob doesn't just love Rachel more than Leah; God does not just see that Leah is "unloved", as the NASB puts it, but actually that she is hated, as the KJV puts it and as the NASB notes in a footnote.[1] Because he sees that she is hated, he "opens her womb," and out pop, in turn, Reuben, Simeon, and Levi. After each is born she says that surely now Jacob will love her. But he does not. So when she bears a fourth son, Judah, she says only, "This time I will praise the Lord." And then she stops bearing. But the chidlbearing competition between Leah and Rachel is underway. Rachel is jealous of Leah and demands that Jacob give her children or she will die. "Then Jacob's anger burned against Rachel"--Jacob is not so soft-hearted and understanding as we might have expected, it turns out. Isaac, we might imagine, would not have reacted in anger (and neither for that matter would we imagine Joseph reacting in anger). Jacob says to Rachel, "Am I in the place of God, who has withheld from you the fruit of the womb?" A funny thing about this is that it's always the women who are barren (until they magically aren't) in the bible, never the men who are shooting blanks. (This reminds me of another "unrealistic" fertility-related oddity in the bible: no one, right through Genesis, is said to die at any time between conception and adulthood. Joseph's brothers' making out to Jacob that Joseph has been killed by a wild animal seems to be the only time that the possibility of dying young even comes up. Evidently people who die before adulthood are as inconsequential as most women.) Of course we know now that it is far more usually the other way around, but you can see why, before microscopes, people didn't get that--the man's seed is coming out, there it is, so obviously it's the woman's ground that's the problem. But in the case of Jacob and Rachel, just like in the case of Abraham and Sarah, the proof of the woman's infertility is the man's fertility with another woman.
Rachel, like Sarah, decides to have children by surrogate, through a maid given to her by Laban. "So she gave him her maid Bilhah as a wife"--it turns out that Genesis is actually complete indiscriminate in its use of the word "wife". This turns out completely differently than the case of Sarah and Hagar; there is no mention of Bilhah's feelings about any part of it and Rachel, saying that God has vindicated her and given her a son, names the child Dan. Bihlhah has a second child; Rachel says, "With mighty wrestlings I have wrestled with my sister, and I have indeed prevailed," and names the child Naphtali. Now Leah, who has stopped bearing, uses her own maid, also given to her by Laban, as a surrogate to keep up the competition. Leah's maid Zilpah (who is also a non-person as far as the story goes) has two children, whom Leah names Gad and Asher.[2]
I didn't intend to go through all that (and for that matter I wasn't sure I was up to any bible-writin' at all tonight)--it is kind of funny how once I start into it I get carried away with it--it seems to be some kind of compulsion to get the story straight, I dunno! But the next thing that happens is actually interesting and I had meant to maybe say something about. Reuben finds "mandrakes" and brings them to Leah. Rachel asks for some of them. Leah says, what, you take my husband and you want my son's mandrakes, too? Rachel says Leah can sleep with Jacob in exchange for some mandrakes. So that's what happens; Leah goes to Jacob and informs him that she has hired his services with her son's mandrakes. She has two more sons and a daughter, who you know is going to be of some importance, because daughters are never named unless they turn out to be of some importance. And then Leah has a son, and that son is Joseph. So there are two interesting things here. One is that Leah is the first person in the bible to pay for sex, although she doesn't pay the person she gets sex from. The other is the mandrakes, which I don't know if I would've gotten around to looking into (though on the face of it their importance to Rachel is curious) if I hadn't happened to notice Howard saying in an old post that the mandrakes had allowed Rachel to have Joseph. That sent me off to learn that "mandrake" translates a Hebrew word that literally means "love plant", and that there are some different conjectures about what the love plant in question might have been, but it could have been mandrake (which, I see in the wikipedia, Josephus says, if you want to harvest it without it killing you, you should tie your dog to it and then run away, so that the dog will run after you and pull it out, and it will kill your dog instead of you), and anyway was evidently supposed to work as a fertility drug, and evidently is supposed to have worked for Rachel. (And maybe also for Leah, but you have to wonder, since she had to buy some time with Jacob from Rachel, whether the reason she "stopped bearing" was that she and Jacob just weren't sleeping together anymore.) Although what the text actually says is: "Then God remembered Rachel, and God gave heed to her and opened her womb." Well, God helps those who help themselves, maybe, which is the point I was after when I started all this, except in relation to Jacob and Laban.
After Joseph comes along, Jacob tells Laban it's time for him to go. Laban wants him to stay; "I have divined that the Lord has blessed me on your account," he says, and tells Joseph to name his wages to stay. But Jacob says he has to build up his own household after working so long for Laban's benefit and making Laban a wealthy man. Laban asks what he can give Jacob, and Jacob says (kind of confusingly) nothing, except that if Laban will do one thing for him, Jacob "will again pasture and keep [his] flock"; the one thing is to let Jacob go through his flock and take all the speckled and spotted goats and sheep and black lambs, I guess on the assumption that these are less desireable. Laban agrees--and then takes all the animals he'd agreed Jacob could take (but notice that the letter of their agreement was that Jacob could go through the flock and take all the speckled etc. animals he found; Laban is just ensuring that he won't find any!), gives them to his sons, and "puts a distance of three days' journey between himself and Jacob." If Jacob has any kind of emotional reaction to this, the text doesn't say; his response, as the text has it, is to get to work. He tends to what's left of Laban's flock and performs some kind of obscure trick with wooden rods that makes the animals have speckled and spotted offspring, but he only does it for the stronger animals, so that there will be stronger speckled and spotted offspring, which will be his (one thing you have to say for Jacob, he is a man of great patience, which Laban presses as far as he can), and weaker monochromatic offspring, which will be Laban's. (Obviously there is something to be made here of the less attractive (like Leah?), maybe the less pure, being the stronger.)
But! and to be honest I had forgotten what comes next: Jacob makes out to Rachel and Leah that it was God's doing that so many of the goats and sheep have turned out speckled. He tells them that Laban keeps cheating him and changing the bargain between them, but God has seen to it that if Laban says that all the spotted or striped animals will be Jacob's, then all the animals will turn out spotted or striped. So the problem of responsibility strikes again.
One more thing, that happens right after that: Jacob gathers up his family and his things to leave, and he "deceived Laban the Aramean"--again the text specifies a kind of ethnic difference between Jacob and his mother's brother--"by not telling him that he was fleeing." Rachel, for some reason, steals her father's household idols to take with her. This is the first mention of idols or of any real or imagined supernatural presence in the world other than God and his angels (and his "sons" who fathered the Nephilim, who precipitated the flood). Who knows why Rachel wanted them. But it looks like the seed has been planted for an idea that (I expect, based on what I hazily think I know) will sprout again and again in the Hebrew bible: the Hebrew people's tenuous fidelity to their god is under constant threat from even the slightest incursion by foreign elements. (And here I'm reminded of Leonard Cohen's appropriation of Christian imagery! (Not to mention his Buddhism, of course.) And, now, Howard's, as his most recent blog post is about the pearly gates. (Thinking about this kind of thing it strikes me that, as a Jew, you can look on the "New Testament" as writings of heretic Jews, as a kind of Jewish apocrypha, which are mistaken in one fundamental premise--that Jesus of Nazareth is the messiah promised by the prophets--but may nonetheless possess some kind of Jewish wisdom. (And then it strikes me, well, that's what Nietzsche thought.)))
Speaking of the Hebrew people's tenuous fidelity to their god, one more (I promise this time!) thing I had been meaning to note: after Isaac sends Jacob to Haran to find a wife from among his own people, Jacob has his dream of the ladder with angels ascending and descending, in which God tells Jacob that he willl have innumerable descendants, and that he will be with Jacob and always bring him back to this land. When Jacob wakes up, he "makes a vow, saying, 'If God will be with me and will keep me on this journey that I take, and will give me food to eat and garments to wear, and I return to my father’s house in safety, then the Lord will be my God.'" As far as Jacob is concerned, God will have to earn Jacob's fidelity.
[1] The NASB, it turns out, is continually maddening in this way: it is constantly giving glosses and euphemisms to which it gives notes with the literal translations. Sometimes it makes totally gratuitous substitutions for smoothness of style, e.g. frequently substituting a pronoun for a proper name, with a note that the Hebrew gives the proper name! The result is that my trust continues to build in the honesty and transparency of the NASB (and also incidentally of the KJV, and thereby of Strong's, since the NASB often confirms that the KJV aims at literal translation, because the KJV has in its text what the NASB has in its notes), but I wonder more and more how long I'm going to tolerate slogging through the back-and-forth between the text and footnotes required by using the NASB as a study text.
[2] Gad and Asher are the names of two brothers--I would've sworn they were twins, but some bibliographical records I just looked at to confirm or disconfirm that indicate that they were born about fourteen years apart!--of my former acquaintance. One, the one who is said to have coined the phrase "Red Tory", is of my very slight acquaintance, but enough to have told me I was in danger of being taken for a Straussian (to which I replied that I was not unaware of that); the other's house I've been to, for a class potluck, where he informed us that his standard poodle had one failing, which was that she enjoyed rolling in shit. I have also owed him a set of sonnets for nearly eighteen years.
Currently at Havelock: -7.3, slowly climbing from around -9 around 8:30. High today: -6.
