13.07.05 - A Biblical Backgrounder 1

Since May this year (2005), the first reading each Sunday (from the ?´Old?? or ?´First?? Testament, or Hebrew Scriptures) is from the book of Genesis. Apart from one version of the creation story (there are two ?± Genesis 1: 1 ?± 2: 4a, and 2: 4b ?± 25) and the story of Noah and the great flood, the readings from May through June, July and to 14^th August come from the sagas of Israel??s ancestors.

These ancestors are Abraham and his wife Sarah; their son Isaac and his wife Rebekah; their twin sons Esau and Jacob; and Jacob??s two wives Leah (whose sons became the ancestors of Israel??s twelve tribes) and Rachel (who bore Joseph); and Joseph and his dreaming and adventures which led him to power in Egypt.

When did all this happen? If Abraham was a real person in history, he lived in at least the 1700s BCE (1) and possibly as early as the 1900s BCE, in other words about 3,900 years ago. These were preliterate times for the nomadic Hebrew people, and it wasn??t until the reign of King Solomon (960-920 BCE) that these sagas were first written down. For around 700-900 years, stories about the ancestors were told, generation to generation, before being permanently recorded.

The theme of Promise and Fulfilment, Marcus Borg claims, provides the overarching structure and narrative of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. In the Gospels these are often called the Law, which translates the Hebrew Torah ?± the heart of the Hebrew Scriptures.)

The promise is found in the dramatic beginning to the Abraham and Sarah story 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 yet 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 two-fold ?± the land of Canaan (today geographically, this is the state of Israel and the Palestinian state), and a multitude of descendants.

The rest of the Pentateuch is the story of the fulfilment of this promise. It concludes, at the end of Deuteronomy, with the descendants of Abraham and Sarah at the Jordan River following the exodus from Egypt and forty years living in the wilderness, ready to cross over to Canaan, the Promised Land.

Many of the individual stories dramatise and intensify the theme of promise and fulfilment by adding a third element ?± a threat to the promise, an obstacle to its fulfilment. It is like a sacred melodrama ?± the ancestors find themselves in one predicament after another. Will God be able to fulfil the promise despite apparently hopeless circumstances?

Of the many stories of threat that are told, a repeated theme is the barrenness of the matriarchs of Israel. Although promised a multitude of descendants, Abraham and Sarah are aged, and Sarah is ?´barren??. They try surrogate parenthood through Abraham having a son, Ishmael, by Sarah??s Egyptian slave-girl Hagar. But this is not what the promise meant. Then when Sarah is ninety and Abraham is ninety-nine, the humanly impossible thing happens ?± Sarah conceives and gives birth to Isaac. The father and mother of Israel finally have a descendant ?± and only, the narrator need hardly say, because of God.

Ishmael and his mother are banished by a jealous Sarah. In biblical and in Muslim understanding, Ishmael became the ancestor of the Arab peoples ?± and so the seed is sown for later (and contemporary) conflict.

The theme of barrenness is repeated in the next two generations. Isaac marries a distant relative, Rebekah, and she like Sarah proves to be ?´barren??. After twenty years of childless marriage, God hears Isaac and Rebekah??s prayer, Rebekah conceives, and gives birth to twins, Esau and Jacob. Sibling rivalry begins in the womb, and after they are grown Jacob, the younger twin, cheats Esau first out of his birthright and then out of the patriarchal blessing, and he becomes the child of promise.

Jacob, having fled Canaan to get away from Esau??s anger, finds himself with members of the wider clan, falls in love with Rachel, also a distant relative, but is tricked first into marrying her older sister Leah. Leah (whom we are told he does not love) is wonderfully fertile and produces sons galore, but Rachel, who he does love, is barren. After many years, we are told, God open??s Rachel??s womb and she gives birth to Joseph, who later as the top official in Egypt saves his half-brothers ?± the ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel ?± in a time of famine. By this time, Jacob has been renamed Israel, the ancestor, through his twelve sons, of the Israelite people.

Marcus Borg asks why the Hebrew people told the story this way, with all this emphasis on the barrenness of the matriarchs. He suggests that by narrating these stories of threats to the promise, they intensify the theme of promise and fulfilment. "?ñeven when it looks as if birth is impossible, when it seems there is no hope, when we fear we have no future ?ñ even then God finds a way to fulfil the promise made to our ancestors."

John Shelby Spong (3) approaches the sagas of the patriarchs and matriarchs of Israel from a different angle in his book which attacks the literal interpretation of the Bible.

For a start, he points out that if Homo sapiens emerged at the latest around 500,000 years ago, then Abraham appears 496,000 years later. Or, in other words, the starting point of our Christian (and Jewish and Muslim) faith story is 496,000 years after our first human ancestors emerged on earth. He wonders why God is considered to have been interested in and involved with human beings for only 0.8% of human history. This could open up a fascinating exploration of the origins and development of religion and spirituality amongst the human race, in the Middle East and elsewhere ?± but Spong doesn??t go down that track here and neither shall we, for this leaflet anyway.

He also raises questions that have been asked by scholars about this hazy period of Israel??s prewritten history. If stories were passed down generation to generation over 700-900 years before taking written form, how much is based on original memory, how much on accumulated legend, and how many influences changed the stories during the course of human transmission?

For instance, he raises the possibility that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, far from being the founding ancestors of Israel, were in fact Canaanite holy men, connected with the religious shrines at Hebron, Beersheba and Bethel ?± each linked in the biblical narrative respectively with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Did, some scholars and Spong ask, the marauding Hebrews simply take over these shrines and their stories, and adapt them to Israel??s history, linking these patriarchal figures to Israel??s story, and then use them to legitimise their invasion and conquest of Canaan? It was in the children of Israel??s political interest then (from around 1300 BCE) to claim that a divine promise was made to their ancestors some 500 years previously that this land would be their land, and to associate these ancestors with three Canaanite holy places.

It is helpful when reading the sagas of the patriarchs and matriarchs of Israel to remember that they come from different and varied sources. Many of the stories are very old, perhaps as old as story-telling itself. Each of the stories were no doubt popular tales in ancient Israel, told by various tellers with their own nuances and variations long before they were set down in writing. The biblical tale was then transmitted, elaborated and edited by subsequent writers until it reached the form in which we now read it.

Over the last century biblical scholarship has spoken about separable "sources" out of which Genesis as we read it emerged. The sources are called J (the Yahwist, or Jahwist source), E (the Elohist source), and P (the Priestly source). There is a fourth source in the Pentateuch, but it does not impact on Genesis.

E uses the more generic Elohim ("God" in English Bibles), supposedly reserving the special name "Yahweh" until it is revealed to Moses in Exodus 3. In E, God communicates more indirectly through mediating dreams and angels.

P employs the divine epithet El Shaddai (often translated as "God Almighty") in Genesis. God in this source is an even more transcendent being. P??s interests are genealogy, ritual matters, and matters of purity.

J, the oldest written source, is dated by scholars to the 900s BCE in Jerusalem, reflecting the worldview of a court writer in the time of the glory of Solomon??s reign, where Jerusalem and its temple is the ritual heart of Israel. E is dated to the 800s BCE, from the by now separated northern kingdom, and downplays the centrality of Jerusalem by emphasising other holy places such as the shrine at Bethel. P is dated to the 500s BCE, the time when the Hebrew people were exiled in Babylonia. The priests reasserted the religious tradition of the exiled Jewish people, giving them a sense of being different and chosen by rewriting massive parts of the sacred story recorded thus far from the J and E sources.

 1. BCE=Before the Common Era; CE=in the Common Era (i.e. this year is 2005 CE); recent replacements of BC and AD adopted in academic circles as a more neutral way to divide the years.

2. Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, p89ff

3. Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, p38-42