1/10/10

Genesis 27-29

In Genesis 27, Isaac, aging and blind, wants to bless his elder son (and favorite) Esau.  He sends Esau out to hunt, telling him to return and prepare a meal for him, and receive his blessing.  Esau goes out hunting, but Rebekah, having overheard, encourages Jacob (her favorite) to kill a goat, prepare a meal, and receive Esau's blessing.  He protests that Isaac won't be fooled, as Esau is hairy and Jacob isn't, but Rebekah prepares the goatskins and hangs them on Jacob's neck and arms.  Jacob feeds Isaac and receives the blessing intended for Esau, including "be lord over your brothers, and may the sons of your mother bow down to you."  Esau returns, prepares a meal for Isaac and prepares to receive his father's blessing, only to find that his younger twin has already received it.  Isaac blesses him, but not with the same blessing.  Esau determined that he would kill has brother as soon as the days of mourning for their father had passed.  Rebekah hears this and encourages Jacob to leave for Haran, to escape his brother's wrath, and also to look for a non-Canaanite, non-Hittite wife.

Genesis 28 features the story of Jacob's journey to Haran.  He actually goes at the behest of his father, as Isaac wants him to find a wife from his own people.  He stops and sleeps in Bethel, and has a dream.  In his dream, he sees a ladder (or staircase) reaching to heaven, with Angels traveling up and down upon it.  At the top, God stands and tells him

Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring. 15 I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land.

In Genesis 29 Jacob arrives in Haran where he meets his mother's brother Laban, and Laban's daughters (Jacob's cousins) Leah and Rachel.  He stays and works for Laban, who agrees to give him Rachel as a wife after 7 years.  When the 7 years ends, there's a wedding feast and Laban brings his daughter in to Jacob, but he discovers the following morning that it was Leah rather than Rachel.  Laban explains that they don't give the younger daughter in marriage until the older is wed.  The upshot is that Jacob remains for seven more years, and then marries Rachel.  He loves her, but Leah, who is unloved, begins having children, while Rachel remains barren.  At least, that's the case through the end of chapter 29.

Thoughts, questions, issues
• "The Wilkes' always marry their cousins." 
  

  - Gone With The Wind

  
  There's a lot of that going on here, but I guess it lasted a lot longer than I was really thinking earlier in the week.
• One of the striking things about the patriarchal stories is how dishonest they are.  From the repeat denials of the identity of wives to Jacob's lie to get Isaac's blessing, we actually see very little in the way of admirable behavior.
• The issue of the "stolen" blessing is another one that doesn't sit well with our modern sensibilities.  Why is it that Isaac cannot just bless Esau the same way?  If there is some kind of essential or mystical quality to the blessing, why can't he withdraw it from Jacob?  It's an odd passage, and it reads very oddly now.
• "We are ... climbing ... Jacob's Ladder ... Children of the cross..."
• I've lost track, already, of how many times the LORD has promised the "promised land" to Abraham and his sons.
• And the dishonesty shows itself again, with Laban sending Leah rather than Rachel in to Jacob.
• How old is Rachel?  If she's of a marriageable age when promised to Jacob, well, she's 14 years older before the wedding.  That seems...unfair.  Unrealistic.  Yet another example of a time scale that seems questionable.
• Obviously, bigamy wasn't a concern.  Polygamy was a realistic and acceptable practice.

Proverbs 10:1-6

Whereas the first several chapter of Proverbs, most of which focused on the benefits of wisdom, read best in paragraph form, with themes and "thought units" that are more than a line or two, chapter 10 begins a new style or form of text.  Here are what we generally think of as proverbs, aphorisms of advice or information or wisdom.

The verses in this section express ideas using a poetic technique of parallelism,

proverbial sayings in poetry of two lines each (distichs).  The parallelism [in this section] is almost always antithetical¹.

That is, a positive quality is described as a producing a positive result, but ("but" being the key word to an antithetical parallelism) the absence or opposite of that good quality brings about a negative result.

e.g., Proverbs 10:12
Hatred stirs up dissension,

but love covers over all wrongs.

¹ - Arnold, Bill T., Beyer, Bryan E. - Encountering the Old Testament, 1999, Baker Books, Grand Rapids, MI, p. 318

01/09/10

Genesis 24-26

Chapter 24 features the familiar story of Isaac and Rebekah.  Abraham wants to find a wife for his son Isaac from among his own people.  He sends a servant to "Aram Naharaim," to the town of Nahor, where the servant finds Rebekah drawing water from the well.  After some discussion with Rebekah, in which she responds in the way that the servant had prayed to the Lord that she would, she agrees to go back and become Isaac's bride.

In chapter 25, Abraham, having taken a new wife, fathers more children (including Midian), but still "left everything he owned to Isaac" when he died.  He was buried (by his sons Isaac and Ishmael) in the cave in Hebron with Sarah.  The rest of the chapter gives genealogies, at least for one generation, for Ishmael and Isaac.  As for Ishmael, "His descendants settled in the area from Havilah to Shur, near the border of Egypt, as you go toward Asshur. And they lived in hostility toward all their brothers."  Isaac and Rebekah have twins, Esau and Jacob.  Esau is the older, but sells his birthright to his brother Jacob in exchange for a meal, for "some bread and some lentil stew."

Chapter 26 features the third iteration of the "she's my sister, not my wife" story.  First it was Abram and Sarai in Egypt with Pharoah (GEN 12).  Then it was Abraham and Sarah in Gerar with Abimelech (GEN 20).  Now it's Isaac and Rebekah in Gerar with Abimelech.  And there's more echoing in the second half of the chapter, as Isaac and Abimelech (and Phicol the commander of his forces) negotiate a pact over a well, much as Abraham and Abimelech (and Phicol the commander of his forces) did at Beersheba (GEN 21).

Thoughts, questions, issues
• Isaac and Rebekah are cousins, as her grandfather Nahor was Abraham's brother.
• We've seen a lot of tribal intermarriage in this book.
• It's not clear to me what Rebekah's motivation would be.  If the Lord has told her to go, we don't hear about it.
• The end of the last verse in chapter 24 is, to our modern sensibilities, odd.  Isaac marries Rebekah and "was comforted after his mother's death."  That isn't what we would normally consider to be an important outcome of a marriage.
• Abraham took another wife and had more children, but was buried with Sarah after his death.
• I commented earlier that I'm not sure I understand exactly what "despise" means in the Old Testament.  We see it again in chapter 25, as Esau "despised" his birthright.  There seems to be a "turned away from" or "rejected" kind of connotation.
• It's not clear how cheaply he sold it.  If he was actually dying of hunger, well, it was the price of life.  The passage doesn't seem as if his situation were desperate, but again, it's not clear.  At least not to me.
• I'm starting to feel very stupid about this "sister not wife" story.  How is that I've read Genesis at least a couple of times and never realized that it came over and over again?¹  And if it appears over and over again, there must be a point, right?  Why don't I see it?
• The story of the treaty between Isaac and Abimelech in chapter 26 is so similar to the story of the treaty between Abraham and Abimelech in chapter 21 that I wonder (again) if this isn't one story, corrupted and told twice.  To emphasize two of the points of similarity, in both stories, Abimelech is accompanied by Phicol, and in both stories are we given a variant of "to this day the name of the town has been Beersheba."

Proverbs 9

Thoughts, questions, issues
• "The fear of the LORD" in verse 10 is an echo of chapter 1.  Indeed, it's really the central point of the book.  If one came out of Proverbs with nothing else, it seems to me that it's been of value.
• There is some practical wisdom in this chapter.  "Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult" is not debatable.  Anyone who has spent any time on the internet has seen this section in action many times.

¹ - I suppose that if you aren't reading it, start to finish, in a fairly short time period, it's actually not hard to miss.  And most Bible reading, at least in my experience, tends to be in small chunks from different books.  Certainly, the act of commenting as I go is forcing me to notice things that I've never really noticed before.

² - Chapter 9 in paragraph form:

Wisdom has built her house; she has hewn out its seven pillars. She has prepared her meat and mixed her wine; she has also set her table.  She has sent out her maids, and she calls from the highest point of the city.  "Let all who are simple come in here!" she says to those who lack judgment.  "Come, eat my food and drink the wine I have mixed.  Leave your simple ways and you will live; walk in the way of understanding. 

"Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult; whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.  Do not rebuke a mocker or he will hate you; rebuke a wise man and he will love you. Instruct a wise man and he will be wiser still; teach a righteous man and he will add to his learning. 

"The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.  For through me your days will be many, and years will be added to your life.  If you are wise, your wisdom will reward you; if you are a mocker, you alone will suffer." 

The woman Folly is loud; she is undisciplined and without knowledge.  She sits at the door of her house, on a seat at the highest point of the city, calling out to those who pass by, who go straight on their way.  "Let all who are simple come in here!" she says to those who lack judgment.  "Stolen water is sweet; food eaten in secret is delicious!"  But little do they know that the dead are there, that her guests are in the depths of the grave.