Reading the Bible this fall, from Genesis forward, I finally appreciate its meaning as a chronicle of a people living in relation to God, a people living in history.
Genesis is a kind of prologue. There isn’t a people yet. It is all about projecting back to account for Israel and the other nations. Cain kills his brother and his descendants will bear the mark of Cain through the ages. What this mark is is not clearly stated, so the notion has lent itself to abuse through the ages: an excuse to persecute the Other. Esau sells his birthright, Ham “sees his father’s nakedness,” Lot is guilty by association with the depravity of Sodom, Ishmael is born of Sarah’s (Serai’s) maidservant, Hagar. All these and their descendants are more or less cast out. They no longer belong to the people of Israel. They become Egyptians, Canaanites, what-have-you. The rest of the innumerable peoples of the world are accounted for in the very brief story of Babel and the many tongues whose origin it explains.
Genesis is a book with some of the most memorable and retold stories in the Bible: Eden and the Fall, Noah’s flood, Abraham and Isaac, and, of course, Joseph. God is very active, if not quite ever-present. He speaks to Adam and Eve, makes a covenant with Abraham, wrestles with Jacob, and so on. (The story of Jacob wrestling “a Man” who turns out to be God and who sets his hip socket out of joint, is nigh on inscrutable. The skinny: God gives Jacob a new name, Israel, “Wrestles-with-God,” and the rest is history.)
But the god of Genesis is not so sympathetic to anyone with a modern disposition. He is too righteous, proud, unbending. A little fatherly advice less cryptically given might have avoided all that trouble in Eden. Already in chapter 6, God is so disgusted with his creation he determines to destroy it all, “both man and beast,” save for Noah, his family, and a pair, male and female, of each of said beasts. (Genesis 6:7) Though He vows never again to “curse the ground for man’s sake,” he can’t restrain himself from destroying Sodom and Gomorrah for their iniquity eleven books later. (Genesis 8:21)
God shows a sadistic streak, too, when he asks Abraham to sacrifice his only son on a stone tablet. The last-minute reprieve hardly makes up for the psychological abuse:
And He said, “Do not lay your hand on the lad, or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me.” [Genesis 22:12]
Abraham’s relationship with God is to be built on fear? If Abraham didn’t fear before, he certainly does now–and the rest of us do, too.
Even submissive Abraham chides his Lord for vengefulness–and gives him a lesson on accounting, too: “Suppose there were fifty righteous within the city; would You also destroy the place and not spare it for the fifty righteous that were in it?” (Genesis 18:24) What about five less than fifty? Or five less than that? Continuing his mathematical rhetoric, Abraham convinces God, who agrees not to “destroy it for the sake of ten.” (Genesis 18:32)
God is not always the main focus in Genesis. Much of the text regards earthly matters. What are we to make of Abraham twice denying his wife to save his own skin? “You are a woman of beautiful countenance,” he tells Serai as they enter Egypt: “Please say you are my sister, that it may be well with me for your sake, and that I may live because of you.” (Genesis 12:11-12) The story repeats itself eight chapters later when husband and wife travel into Abimelech’s kingdom (Genesis 20:1-12) The repetition suggests significance, but what it is, I cannot discern. Later, famine strikes the land. Isaac digs wells and fights over wells until there is but one that stands uncontested at Rehoboth. In another sequence, Jacob marries Rachel, but also her sister Leah, and his father-in-law Laban tricks him into impregnating Leah, but Rachel is barren anyway, so he also lies with two maidservants until Rachel finally succeeds in giving Jacob two sons, Joseph and Benjamin, bringing his total to a numerically significant twelve, plus one daughter, Dinah. Throughout, Laban treats Jacob less than fairly, and Jacob retaliates in kind: a family feud. Fertility and lineage are hardly the only issues plaguing this Biblical family. Theological elements are merely intimated in these stories; they are primarily anthropological.
Joseph takes up the most space of any of the Genesis stories, and his is a good one. In its denouement we get the strongest statement yet of the mysteries of the workings of God. Joseph tells his brothers, “It was not you who sent me here, but God; and He has made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house, and a ruler throughout all the land of Egypt.” (Genesis 45:7) In essence: Don’t feel guilty about putting my in the pit and selling me into slavery. If you hadn’t been such shits, we would all be back in Canaan, starving, and I wouldn’t be such a big shot. Later, he makes the point more broadly, “You meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, in order to bring it about as it is this day, to save many people alive.” (Genesis 50:19) Who can call the brothers’ actions evil when they led to a higher good, the creation of a people chosen by God?
Joseph’s words are of a piece with Shirley Temple Wong’s epiphany in Bette Bao Lord’s In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson. After getting two black eyes while making a best friend in the bargain, Shirley understands the moral of her grandfather’s tale of Wispy Whiskers: “Things are not what they seem. Good can be bad. Bad can be good. Sadness can be happiness. Joy, sorrow.” ( Lord 1984) Personally, I prefer the Chinese philosophical narrative to the theistic Biblical one. It avoids the teleological emphasis of the latter. Where Genesis 37-50 applies to a single people; Wispy Wiskers speaks to all of us.
For readers of the Bible, Joseph’s initial adversity is understood as leading to ultimate triumph, not just for him but for an entire people. The stage is set for the watershed event that will bind Israel and God throughout history. Joseph has brought Israel–and the descendants of Jacob/Israel–to Egypt, and he has made them favored by Pharaoh. But what of Pharaoh’s descendants? Will they hold Israel in the same esteem?
End of prologue.
Exodus is the story of the birth of a people, born of trauma–first, living under Pharaoh’s yoke, but also of a narrow escape and survival, with God’s help, for years in “the wilderness.”
The story picks up long after Joseph, when the current Pharaoh has forgotten contributions of the Hebrew Dream-Teller. We can see the seeds of antisemitism already sown more than three thousand years ago:
And [Pharaoh] said to his people, “Look, the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we; come, let us deal shrewdly with them, lest they multiply, and it happen, in the event of war, that they also join our enemies and fight against us, and so go up out of the land.” [Exodus 1:9-10]
Exodus tells of Moses in the bullrushes, the Hebrews suffering under the slave drivers, and the Ten Plagues. The tenth is set up to be the most dastardly of all: the death of all first-born sons. But, if you were the first born and still alive after watching the rest of your family fall to bloody waters, frogs, plagues, locusts, etc., wouldn’t you rather be dead in any case? For the rest, wouldn’t you already be numb to tragedy. Literarily, the ten repetitions of plague try patience and stretch credulity beyond the breaking point. Still, the Angel of Death passing over the homes of the children of Israel makes for dramatic reading, and has been enshrined in the Passover ritual ever since.
God helps Moses help Israel every step in their flight: parting the waters (Moses separates his arms), bitter waters made sweet (Moses throws a log in the pool), manna from heaven (God shows the grousing Israelites who is boss), drawing water from a rock (Moses strikes it with his staff), defeating the Amelikites (Moses holds a rock in the air above his head).
The struggle for survival notwithstanding, the trial-worn Israelites somehow meet God’s specifications for building the sanctuary, tabernacle, and ark after Moses has descended Sinai (twice) with the tablets. “Then Moses called…every gifted artisan in whose heart the Lord had put wisdom, everyone whose heart was stirred, to come and do the work.” (Exodus 36:2) Work they do, crafting each devotional object of gold and acacia wood…and yet more gold. Silver, bronze, and woven linens of blue, purple, and scarlet supplement the ornamentation. Unmentioned behind all this industry is the artisanal infrastructure that would have been required. Whence the mining? Whence the plundering from other peoples? Whence the furnaces and the crafting tools? Whence, for that matter, the craftsmanship, the artisanal skills? Weren’t they mere laborers under Pharaoh? If Genesis is history, it leaves wide gaps and large questions in the account.
Leviticus enumerates the laws. Most famously–or infamously– are the “Foods Permitted and Forbidden”: “Among the animals, whatever divides the hoof, having cloven hooves and chewing the cud—that you may eat. Nevertheless these you shall not eat among those that chew the cud or those that have cloven hooves: the camel, because it chews the cud but does not have cloven hooves, is unclean to you. …” (Leviticus 11:3-4) Compare this with Ian Frazier’s “Lamentations of the Father” from 1997: “Of the juices and other beverages, yes, even of those in sippy-cups, you may drink, but not in the living room, neither may you carry such therein.” Think of all the humor we would be denied without these hyper-specific proscriptions of Leviticus.
In the sexual realm, incest, homosexuality, and bestiality are all clearly “an abomination.” Then, in chapter 19, the “laws” become more appealingly modern, less didactically arcane:
“‘Do not defraud or rob your neighbor.
“‘Do not hold back the wages of a hired worker overnight.
“‘Do not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block in front of the blind, but fear your God. I am the Lord.
“‘Do not pervert justice; do not show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the great, but judge your neighbor fairly.
“‘Do not go about spreading slander among your people.
“‘Do not do anything that endangers your neighbor’s life. I am the Lord.
“‘Do not hate a fellow Israelite in your heart. Rebuke your neighbor frankly so you will not share in their guilt.
“‘Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.'” [Leviticus 19:13-18]
Much of the rest–the offerings, the rituals–is fodder only for today’s Orthodox Jews. Except that tidbit about the year of Jubilee in chapter 25:
That fiftieth year shall be a Jubilee to you; in it you shall neither sow nor reap what grows of its own accord, nor gather the grapes of your untended vine. For it is the Jubilee; it shall be holy to you; you shall eat its produce from the field. [Leviticus 25:11-12]
This, by contrast, is fodder for today’s left-leaning economists and activists who would see in these verses a way through our current debt crisis (as well as the one that will emerge fifty yearshence). David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years is the most comprehensive argument for reconsidering the issue more along the lines of this Biblical passage.
Numbers begins appropriately enough with a census, tribe by tribe. The Reubenites come in at a respectably specific 46,500. There are eleven more tribes to go. These Israelites are significantly more populous than today’s city of Cincinnati. Do they live together? In a city? Obviously not. In what sense do they live as a people worshiping in God’s sanctuary? In what sense do they live “in the wilderness” with such a population?
Such questions are elided. The narrative is more concerned with a larger theme: the ingratitude and unfaithfulness of the children of Israel. It is almost comical how often and repeatedly the children of Israel backslide, deny their own God:
And all the children of Israel complained against Moses and Aaron, and the whole congregation said to them, “If only we had died in the land of Egypt! Or if only we had died in this wilderness! Why has the Lord brought us to this land to fall by the sword, that our wives and children should become victims? Would it not be better for us to return to Egypt?” [Numbers 14:2-3]
How does God react to all this grousing? He is both vengeful and forgiving; hard-ass and softie. He sends the people quail meat to sate their hunger…followed by a plague to teach them a lesson. Either way, he makes his power manifest, while demanding their devotion. Israel is an anti-hero in this book, hardly worthy of God’s attention, and yet he can’t help but give it to them. For all his bluster, God is a pushover.
But not with Moses at the end of the book. He will not retract His punishment for Moses’ transgression at Meribah, his alleged lack of faith. God told him to speak to the rock, and it would provide the water the people needed. Moses struck it with his staff, instead. We don’t really know why. The text doesn’t tell us his thought process. We do know this: In Exodus, faced with a similar threat of dehydration, a rock, and God’s guidance, Moses struck the rock to release its liquid. God didn’t object then. Why the difference? Ostensibly, it was Moses’ lack of faith, his disobedience. But God’s justice seems uncomfortably arbitrary.
On the other hand, the authors of Numbers knew how to squeeze all the drama they could out of their narrative. Moses has delivered his people out of Egypt, led them through forty years of trials in the wilderness, reassured naysayers, put down potential rebellions, defeated enemies, seen the Promised Land from atop Mount Pisgah, only to be denied entrance himself. What could be more dramatic? It also allows Moses to make a grand sermon in the last book of his five books.
Deuteronomy is also review of the previous books. It is a good synopsis–a kind of Cliff’s Notes–for slow learners like me, those who had trouble keeping all those names and places straight.
What do we take away from the first five books of the Bible, the Books of Moses, the Torah. First, and most obviously, that God–the idea of a people’s God–is a powerful force in history. Without God these people would be unnamed, unknown, unaffiliated pastorals, eking out a living. History would not care a fig-leaf for them, if they had not their relationship to God as recorded in this book. Even before the book, the stories gave these people a narrative, the narrative gave them meaning, meaning would give them power.
Does Israel deserve their God? The Torah avoids taking a stance. The people have God. And God has a people. They are in this thing called history together. For the long haul.
“New King James Version.” Bible, https://www.biblegateway.com/, Accessed November 2022.
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