Читать книгу A Contemporary Introduction to the Bible - Colleen M. Conway - Страница 54

READING

Stories of the Endangerment of the Matriarch: compare Gen 12:10–20, 20:1–18, and 26:6–11

Abraham and Lot Cycle of Stories: Genesis 13, 18–19

Stories of Hagar and Ishmael: compare Gen 16:1–14 and 21:8–19

Skim stories about Jacob, his family, and his Journey to Haran: Genesis 27–32.

We turn now to look at how stories in the first book of the Bible, Genesis, are built on oral traditions, including some trickster elements. Notably, the stories we will discuss here do not come from the first chapters of Genesis, narratives of primeval beginnings (creation, etc.) found in Genesis 1–11. We will discuss those chapters once we come to the development of writing in later Israel. Rather, the parts of Genesis that most reflect oral origins are narratives about Israel’s ancestors in Genesis 12–50 – Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and their families.

Of course the written biblical text contains no such oral tradition in pure form. The often-repeated idea that people in oral cultures perfectly remember and repeat their traditions was long ago shown to be untrue (see above pp. 40–41). That said, blurry forms of ancient Israelite traditions can be seen in biblical texts, especially in ways that those texts feature one or more accounts of how such figures survived by means of deception and trickery. Take, for example, the multiple accounts of how a patriarch worked to avoid being killed by a king because of his beautiful wife by telling the king that she actually was his sister. The Bible preserves two versions of this story about Abraham (Gen 12:10–20 and 20:1–18) and one version about Isaac (Gen 26:6–11). At least one biblical author seems to have found Abraham’s lying on this point problematic, since the second version of this story (in Genesis 20) has Abraham claiming that she was his half-sister (Gen 20:12). Nevertheless, the Bible’s own narrative says nothing of the sort about her (see Gen 11:29–30), and this additional part of Abraham’s speech is probably evidence of the discomfort that some later authors had with the trickster traditions that they adapted.

As we move to the section of Genesis focused on Jacob (Genesis 25–35), we see more places where the Bible’s written text preserves echoes of earlier trickster traditions. In Genesis 25 Jacob cleverly gets a hungry Esau to sell his birthright for a pot of lentil stew. Then, in Genesis 27, Rebekah, Jacob’s mother, develops a tricky ruse to get Jacob’s father, Isaac, to give Jacob the superior blessing that he meant to give to Esau. At Rebekah’s urging, Jacob flees to escape Esau’s plan to murder him, and he gets a taste of his own medicine in Haran, where his father-in-law, Laban, gets him to work seven years to marry Rachel, but then slips Leah into Jacob’s marriage bed instead (Genesis 29). Soon Jacob turns the tables on Laban, using magical means to outwit Laban’s plan to deprive Jacob of his wages in livestock (Genesis 30) and later escaping with Laban’s daughters without Laban’s knowledge (Genesis 31). In the process, Rachel shows her own capacity for trickery, stealing her father’s household gods and then preventing him from finding them by sitting on them and then telling her father that she cannot get up because she has her period (“the way of woman is on me”; Gen 31:35). In these ways and others, the story depicts Jacob and his closest family as crafty tricksters, able to survive and flourish in the face of difficult odds. Not only is he himself a trickster, but his mother helped get him started, and he worked 14 years to marry a woman, Rachel, who continues the tradition.

These traditions of trickery are not the sort of thing typically focused on in sermons and Sunday school lessons. Many within dominant cultures are not used to celebrations of such culture heroes – figures who trick and even lie to get their way. Nevertheless, such stories can be encouraging to people who feel that they will inevitably perish if they play by “the rules” of their social context. Whether Native American or ancient Israelite, vulnerable people often gain empowerment through celebrating ancestors who made their way in the world through using cleverness to overcome impossible odds. For people on the top, such trickster stories can appear to be embarrassing elements in an otherwise tidy Bible. For people on the bottom, such stories can be a major way of gaining hope and resisting domination.

That said, none of the texts in the Bible, including Genesis, are transcripts of early oral traditions. Rather these are later literary texts where earlier oral traditions have been radically reshaped to fit into a broader narrative. This means that we must distinguish between the present written level of the biblical text and faint outlines of oral traditions standing behind that text. The written text develops a new picture of Abraham as a recipient of God’s promises and even adds the idea of God making a covenant with him. This picture of Abraham and focus on God’s promise to him and his descendants developed as a response to Israel’s trauma under later empires. Meanwhile, another set of stories about Israel’s ancestors looms behind this picture: older oral stories of how some of Israel’s ancestors successfully fended for themselves.

(Echoes of) earlier oral traditions in Genesis	Elements specific to the present written text of Genesis 12–50
A focus on how both men (e.g. Abraham, Jacob) and women (e.g. Rebekah, Rachel) survived and flourished through their wits	A focus on how God promised the patriarchs of Israel (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob) to make them a great people, bless them, and give them the land of Canaan
Traditions about these figures circulate in one or more cycles of stories about each figure (e.g. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Hagar), with some of the same stories told about different figures (e.g. wife endangerment by Abraham in Gen 20:1–18 and 21:22–34; Isaac in Gen 26:6–33)	The reshaping and connection of originally separate traditions so that they are linked with new themes of blessing and promise that spoke to the despair of later Israelites
A celebration of deception if it ensures the success of the underdog trickster	Introduction of divine speeches to early ancestors (Abraham, Jacob, Isaac, and also Hagar) and focus on their need to trust in God’s covenant with them and provision for them