Midrash and Mashal: Difficulty in the Blessing of Esau

Author(s): David H. Richter

Source: Narrative, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Oct., 1996), pp. 254-264
Published by: Ohio State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20107089
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 David H. Richter

Midrash and Mashai:

Difficulty in the Blessing of Esau

The notion of "difficulty" is something I am sure we all intuitively under

stand well enough, but it is often tempting to define and categorize it anyhow.
Two decades ago, for example, George Steiner defined "difficulty" in terms of an
implicit contract between author and reader that is challenged by various sorts of
resistence encountered in a text.1 Here I am going to be using the term specifically
as James Phelan uses it in his essay "Toward a Rhetorical Reader-Response
Criticism: The Difficult, the Stubborn, and the Ending of Beloved? There Phelan
defines the "difficult" text as one that resists readerly interpretation until we find
just the right "code that allows us to claim cognitive understanding of the text, to
hear the 'click' of the numerous signals of the text rearranging themselves into
our new system of intelligibility" (713). Phelan contrasts the difficult text with
what he calls the stubborn or recalcitrant text that will not ultimately yield,
where the text has no single coherent and consistent explanation, where every
attempt at explication leaves something out. The recalcitrant text is not merely
ambiguous, possessing several explanations; it is rather that the disparate explana
tions that might explicate the text as a whole do not cohere with one another
phenomenologically, cannot be part of the same experience of reading.2
This theoretical suggestion of Phelan's is wonderfully productive not only
for Toni Morrison but for biblical narrative, and planI to use it in a monograph
at which I am currently working. But in the process of reflecting on my own ex
plications of biblical texts and on those of others, I was struck by some compli
cations that arise from the peculiar interaction of midrash with mashal.
These terms may need definition. Midrash is a noun formed from the He
brew verb "lidrosh," meaning to inquire. The Midrash with a capital M is an
anthology of commentaries explicating various books of the Bible that began
theoretically with Ezra the scribe in postexilic Judea and ended almost two mil
lenia later in the high middle ages. But in the lower case, it can denote any tex

David Richter, Professor of English at Queens College, is the author of Fable's End, The
Critical Tradition, Narrative/ Theory, and The Progress of Romance: Literary Historiography and
the Gothic Novel.

NARRATIVE, Vol. 4, No. 3 (October 1996)

Copyright 1996 by the Ohio State University Press
 Difficulty in the Blessing of Esau 255

tual inquiry or interpretation, and is often used for those stories we add or supply
or invent to supplement and explicate the ones in the Bible. Midrash in this
sense is something we all help to make: every rabbi's sermons, every secular
teacher's textual explanations, are midrashim. This essay is going to skim the in
terface between the Midrash and our own midrashim. The second term, mashal,
is literally a similitude, a simile or a metaphor, with the derived sense of a parable
or a fable, a story with moral or emotive significance; I am going to use it within
stories that are not structurally ordered as meshalim to indicate the rhetorical or
ideological dimension of any narrative.
For my key example I am going to take one of the great narrative passages
of the J document, the blessing of Esau in Genesis 27. The blind patriarch Isaac
has sent his firstborn and favorite son Esau to hunt for venison and to make his
favorite savory stew before he gives his ancestral blessing; hearing this, Rebecca
incites her own favorite twin, Jacob, to masquerade as his brother, dressing him
in Esau's best clothing, using animal skin to mimic Esau's hairy hands and neck,
and making her own version of the delicacy out of kid. Isaac is a bit suspicious
("the voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau"), but he is
also hungry, and despite his doubts he gives Jacob the blessing. No sooner has he
done so when Esau comes back with the real venison stew. As soon as Isaac
hears the voice of Esau, he trembles violently, realizing what has happened. And
then the passage focuses on the other recognition?Esau's realization that his
brother has purloined the blessing meant for him?after swindling him out of his
birthright. The pathos swells as Esau asks Isaac if his father has only one bless
ing to bestow, whether there cannot still be a blessing for him too. But Isaac has
already given Jacob everything: he has made Jacob lord over his brethren and
given him all the material things of life besides: what is left to give Esau? Esau
persists: Bless me too, my father, and bitterly bursts into tears. And Isaac relents
and blesses Esau too.
What ismost obviously "difficult" about the passage in Phelan's sense is the
language of Esau's blessing. In Hebrew the first part of it goes "mishmanei ha
aretz yihiyeh moshavekha umital ha-shamayim me'al" Literally the morphemes
run "from the fat of the land shall be your encampments and from the dew of
the heavens thereon." What exactly does this mean? Comparing a King James
and a Revised Standard Version of the Bible, you can see that this is an interpre
tive crux: the two translations give the blessing opposite meanings. KJV trans
lates it as follows: "Behold, thy dwelling shall be the fatness of the earth, and of
the dew of heaven from above." RSV has quite a different blessing: "Behold,
away from the fatness of the earth shall your dwelling be, and away from the
dew of heaven on high." The source of the discrepancy is grammatical ambiguity,
Empson's sixth type. It is caused by the particle "mi" which is used twice, the
first syllable of "mishmanei" and the second of "umital." It is the connective form
of "min" which means "from." Like the French "de" and the Latin "ex," "min"
can operate as a partitive ("some of the fat places of the land") or it can express
a direction ("away from the fat places of the land"). Which it is depends on the
context.

Well, for what Phelan calls "standard academic interpretation" (712), the
256 David H. Richter

context is set primarily by the adjacent narrative and the surrounding structure
of plot and values in which it plays out. The first consideration is that Isaac has
told Esau that he has already given Jacob the jackpot and there is nothing left
for him. In that case, the blessing cannot be a duplicate of Jacob's. And Esau's
blessing goes on: "And by thy sword shalt thou live and shalt serve thy brother,
and it shall come to pass when thou shalt have the dominion, that thou shalt
break his yoke from thy neck." If Esau is to live by the sword then he is to be a
raider, not a farmer, who has no use for the dew of the heavens. Furthermore,
after the blessing the narrator continues, "And Esau hated Jacob his brother on
account of the blessing with which his father had blessed him and he said in his
heart, when the days of mourning for my father are come I shall kill Jacob my
brother." Why would Esau want to kill Jacob if he had just been given some of
the fat places of the land?
What clarified the situation and intensified the pathos was going back to the
blessing Isaac had given the disguised Jacob. In the Hebrew that blessing begins
V'yiten Tkha ha-Elohim mital ha-shamayim umishmanei ha-aretz. Here the mor
phemes go: "The Lord shall give you from the dew of the heavens and from the
fat places of the land." With the verb "to give" the "mi" is unambiguously parti
tive, as the French "de" is with "donner" or the Latin "ex" with "dare." By con
trast, the "mi" then seems unambiguously privative in Esau's blessing. This 'click'
of intelligibility came when I realized that Isaac, looking for a way to bless Esau,
had chosen language that almost precisely duplicated the language with which he
had meant to bless him, even though with the change of the verbs (yihiyeh in
stead of yiten; the verb "to be" instead of "to give") it actually meant the oppo
site. What was the motive for this play on words? Was Isaac trying to pull the
wool over the eyes of that notoriously poor grammarian Adonai?3 Was he trying
to reassure Esau? Conceivably a little of both ... I rather thought, though,
that it was primarily a gesture meant for his own ears, trying to pretend a little
that everything was still all right and that the blessing had been given as planned.
Isaac is not the only member of his family given to rueful wordplay and
ironic punning at times of high emotion. Esau himself asks within this passage "Is
not he rightly named Jacob (ya*akov) for has he not now tricked me (ya'akveni)
twice??had not Jacob taken his birthright (bikhorati) and now his blessing
(birkhati)! Those two words look almost exactly the same, with just two con
sonants reversed, particularly in a torah scroll without the vowels.
Thisreading of the episode was strengthened by the way its themes echo
down the rest of the book of Genesis. You will recall that Jacob, escaping from
Esau's anger, goes to his uncle Laban in Haran, where he falls in love with his
cousin Rachel, works seven years for her, and then is fooled in the dark?when
he cannot see any more than his blind father Isaac could?into taking the older
daughter Leah instead of the younger: the trickster tricked. The Hebrew under
lines the relation between the two events. When Laban explains that it is not
their custom to marry the younger daughter before the older, he doesn't use the
usual word for "older": instead the word is "bekhirah" meaning "the woman with
the birthright"?like the birthright Jacob had taken from Esau (Gen. 29:26).
And when, after leaving Laban with four wives and a dozen children and flocks
and herds, Jacob once again encounters Esau, he attempts to mollify his brother's
 Difficulty in the Blessing of Esau 257

anger by sending in advance a tremendous present of livestock. Jacob tells his

servants to bring what he calls his "minkhah" (or gift) to Esau, but Esau refuses
it till they have met face to face, when Jacob urges his brother "kakh-na et
birkhati" ("take, please, my blessing") as though metaphorically he could thus
return the blessing he stole from Esau?and Esau then accepts (Gen. 33:11).
The consequences of the swindle continue on into Jacob's later life, when
the sons of Leah the "bekhirah" sell into slavery Joseph the son of Rachel,
Jacob's own favorite child, clouding his old age with sorrow and suspicion. Even
into Jacob's final moments, when giving his own patriarchal blessing to his chil
dren, the eternal trickster inverts the order of Joseph's two children, Ephraim
and Manassah, crossing his hands so as to put his right hand on the head of the
younger brother Ephraim instead of the one with the birthright. So the blessing
of Esau is a little like the primal crime in the house of Atreus, the act of trans
gression that sets into motion several generations of consequences, except that in
Genesis the consequences are serious but not tragic: no one dies at once and
horribly, brothers forgive brothers eventually. Esau forgives Jacob, Joseph for
gives the sons of Leah and provides them with corn and pasture land in Goshen.
Yet ultimately the result is to move the children of Jacob down from Canaan
into Egypt from which another patriarch is going to have to liberate them.
In a still broader perspective, looking at the book of Genesis as a whole, one
can view the wanderings of the forefathers as establishing two complementary
motifs: the first is the sojournings of the forefathers within Canaan, from where
Abraham dwelt in the south, near Beersheba, to where Jacob tended Laban's
flocks in the north near Dan, establishing the right of original habitation in an
area equivalent to the kingdom of the Davidic monarchy; the second is the de
parture from Canaan, requiring an Exodus from Egypt to reclaim and reconquer
that kingdom. Within this double-motived narrative of the land, the blessing of
Esau acts as the hinge.
It might seem as though my problems are over. But when I examined the
Midrash with a capital M on this passage, I discovered that my own difficulty
didn't trouble the rabbis at all; they had located a very different set of problems
to solve. Rabbi Johanan, for example, wonders about Isaac's trembling: "When
a man has two sons and one goes out while the other comes in, does he then
tremble? Surely not! The reason, however, was that when Esau went in, Gehenna
[Hell] went in with him" (Bereshit Rabbah 72; II: 606). The doubling of words in
Isaac's question, "Who is this that has hunted game?" (Hu hatzad tzayid) pro
vokes a fierce reaction from Rabbi Leazar ben Simeon: "Thou snarer, how hast
thou been ensnared! Thou breaker of gates, how are thy gates broken and de
stroyed!" (607). An anonymous commentary in Bereshit Rabbah on the phrase
"The days of mourning for my father are at hand" turns Esau from a filicide into
a parricide: "Esau reasoned thus: Cain slew his brother yet it availed him
naught,
for Adam begot other children who inherited the world together with him. So I
will first slay my father and then my brother and inherit the world alone" (695).
Apparently none of the rabbis saw Esau as the sympathetic victim I did. One
even suggested that Esau, unsuccessful at his hunt, made his stew out of dog
(Kasher V: 228, citing Torah Shelemah 27: 140, 143).
Predictably, perhaps, my own question, about the interpretation of the oar
 258 David H. Richter

tide "mi" in Esau's blessing, got the opposite answer. Within the Midrash, Jacob
gets the blessing that counts, but Esau gets his blessing too, including the fatness
of the land.4 The Encyclopedia of Biblical Interpretation quotes an old source to
the effect that "In recompense for the two tears that fell from his eyes, Esau was
given Mount Seir, a place which is never without the kind of rain that falls as a
blessing" (Kasher, V: 60, citing Tor ah Shelemah 27, 175). But the Rashi anno
tates verse thirty-nine to give Esau a somewhat different inheritance: "Zo Italia
shel Yavan" he says, meaning that "Esau's dwelling place was in the south of
Italy, inMagna Graecia [or Sicily]"?surely one of the lushest places on earth.5
The Rashi's suggestion that Esau's heritage was Sicily, of all places, might
seem peculiar, given the Canaanite location of the fraternal struggle, until one
recalls that, like Aquinas and Augustine, the medieval rabbis read biblical narra
tives not merely for literal meaning but as historical allegory, moral parable and
apocalyptic revelation.6 And in the prophetic dimension, Esau, known also as
Edom, the Red, the Man of Blood, had become identified over the centuries with
Rome.

The process of that allegorical connection of Edom with Rome was histori
cally complex. The most direct link between Edom and Rome was through the
Herod family, Edomite converts to Judaism who had become, under the Roman
hegemony, the tributary rulers of Judea. Herod the Great had supported the
Temple cult and had enlarged the Second Temple, but was no more popular with
the Pharisee sect?out of which traditional Judaism later emerged?than with
the messianic sects that eventually united into Christianity and which made the
name "Herod" a byword for a tyrant. Unfortunately, the dating is wrong for that
link: midrashim explicitly connecting Edom with Rome do not appear until the
second century a.D., several generations after Herod (Herr, 626). Instead, the
connection between Esau and Rome has to do with the participation of the
Edomites in the destruction of the First Temple by Nebuchadnezzar in 587 B.c.,
about six centuries earlier. Exactly how the Edomites participated is not clear.
Psalm 137 ("By the waters of Babylon") suggests merely that Edom had encour
aged the Babylonians when Adonai is asked to "remember it against the Edomites
the day of Jerusalem, how they said 'raze it, raze it to its foundations'" (Ps.
137:7). But Obadiah's prophecy of destruction insists on the literal "violence done"
by Esau "unto your brother Jacob" when Edom "entered the gate of my people
. . . looted his . . . stood at the
goods parting of the ways to cut off the fugi
tive, . . . delivered up his survivors on his day of distress" (Obad. 10, 13-14).
By the Apocryphal period, Edom had replaced Babylon as the nation that actu
ally burned the Temple ("Thou hast also vowed to build thy temple, which the
Edomites burned when Judah was laid waste by the Chaldees" [1 Esd. 45]).7
When the Romans under Titus destroyed the Second Temple in 70 a.D., the
metaphorical/historical link between Edom and Rome was forged that would
last for more than a millenium.8
At this point one can see how upsetting this whole episode had to have been
to the rabbis moralizing the book of Genesis. It was not merely that Jacob, the
great ancestor of the Jews, the progenitor of the twelve tribes, gets Adonai's
blessing through a lying masquerade. Given the fact that Esau was read as the
 Difficulty in the Blessing of Esau 259

ancestor of the Romans, he was responsible (as Leasar ben Simeon had sug
gested) for the breaking of the gates of Jerusalem and for the destruction of the
Holy Temple. Given the fact that Rome was itself a metonymy for the Roman
Catholic church, Esau was responsible for the persecutions of the Jews through
out the middle ages, which may explain the appeal of Rabbi Johanan's observa
tion that when Esau came into his father's tent, Gehenna arrived with him.
Given all this, it was clear why the pathos and irony inherent in my literal read
ing of Genesis 27 were largely unreadable by the creators of the Midrash: the
mashal, the ideological dimension, of the story I read was entirely unacceptable.9
On a theoretical level, I am suggesting this historical dimension of readerly
interpretation might impose a qualification on James Phelan's notion of textual
difficulty as an ambiguity that can be clarified or a complexity that can be sim
plified by means of a special code. If the mashal of a given passage is unaccept
able as a social text to the historical reader, the passage will have to be reinscribed
until it becomes readable.10 The difficulties that appear on the literal level will be
ignored. Indeed, the simpler the text, the more desperate may be the need to re
complicate it, or to create ambiguities by means of special codes so that it can be
read with a difference.
The story of the Akedah, of the binding of Isaac as a sacrifice in Genesis
22:1-19, is what almost anyone would call a transparently simple text, narrato
logically. God has decided to test Abraham by commanding him to sacrifice
Isaac, that son miraculously given to Abraham's previously barren wife. After
the command is given, Abraham's setting out with Isaac and servants is pre
sented in rapid summary. Once the destination, Mount Moriah, is sighted, the
narrative slows down its pace. As the servants are left behind at the foot of the
mountain, the narrative becomes highly dramatic, with trenchant dialogue be
tween Abraham and his son emphasizing the extraordinary pathos of a father
whose faith leads him to the very edge of sacrificing his own son: "Look, here is
the fire and the wood," says Isaac, "but where is the lamb for the burnt-offering?"
"My son, God will provide himself a lamb for the burnt-offering." Meanwhile
even the tags to the dialogue emphasize over and over again the filial relationship
between Abraham and Isaac: "And Isaac spoke to Abraham his father, and
said, 'My father,' and son.'" As the moment of the sacrifice
he said, 'Here I am, my
approaches, every action Abraham takes ismentioned in detail, gesture by gesture,
slowing the action down nearly to "real time," right up to the moment that
Abraham "stretched forth his hand and took the slaughtering-knife to slay his
son"?at which point the Angel of the Lord intervenes.11 The narrative choices
are clearly designed to heighten, in a text nearly devoid of psychonarration or
other inside views, the reader's sense of the tremendous torment and suspense
inherent in the testing of Abraham.
But of course no narrative in Genesis has come in for more elaborate r?in
scription than the Akedah, because its transparent mashal has seldom been in
tune with our ideas of God and the limits of sacrifice.12 As Shalom Spiegel elabo
rately demonstrated in The Last Trial, many of the medieval midrashim on the
Akedah renarrated the story so that Abraham actually perpetrates the sacrifice
of Isaac.13 Under their historical circumstances, one can understand the tempta
260 David H. Richter

tion: the chroniclers of the massacres in Mainz and Cologne at the end of the
eleventh century tell of parents who killed their own children swiftly and hu
manely to prevent them from falling into the hands of those who would have
tortured them to death. Relative to such parents, an Abraham who suffers only
the anticipation of having to sacrifice his favorite son would seem to have gotten
off very cheaply indeed.
Today the opposite reaction seems to have occurred: it is too uncomfortable
to pray to an Adonai who would be so unfeeling as to test his faithful servant by
sending him off to an unknown mountain to cut his son's throat and burn him to
ashes, even if he intends at the last instant to countermand the order. Last year
at Rosh Ha-Shanah, the Jewish New Year, when the Akedah is the prescribed
Torah reading, I heard two sermons on the text in my synagogue. Our rabbi
emeritus presented an elaborate midrash about Abraham being the one who was
testing God's goodness and justice, which the patriarch had questioned at the
destruction of Sodom, going through the motions of the sacrifice waiting for
what he knew had to be the proper outcome for a just and merciful God. No
suspense can be implicit in that narrative revision. And our new rabbi at the
junior service told my children that the Akedah was a story about whether
Abraham was listening carefully. His point was that when Abraham hears God
say "v'ha-aleihu sham Volah al achad he-harim asher omar eilekha," he does not
understand it as God had intended: "and you shall bring him up there to go up
on one of the mountains that I shall show you." Instead he mistakenly hears God
saying "and you shall sacrifice him there as a burnt offering." So by this ingenious
midrash, the Akedah is changed into a comforting amiable comedy of misunder
standing: God never wanted Abraham even to think of sacrificing Isaac.14
So contemporary rabbis too, like their medieval counterparts, rewrite the
biblical text, interpreting it to achieve the mashal they think we need to hear. So
great has been the ingenuity with which we have created midrashim that it is rare
for any commentator to admit to experiencing anything like the recalcitrance of
the sort James Phelan describes at the heart of Toni Morrison's Beloved. In the
long narrative between Genesis and 2 Kings, it would be hard to find a passage
whose interpreters have thrown up their hands?although, as I hope to show
some day, there are in fact many such disturbingly unreadable passages, whose
intentionality can be seen as part of a strange and complex rhetorical effect so
long as one restricts one's method to standard narratological interpretation, a
strict reading of reading.15
But if I ultimately plan to decline the complicating ingenuity of midrashic
exegesis?with its homiletic, allegorical and mystical interpretations?I think I
can understand its sanctifying motives. Literary scholars like ourselves can al
ways just avoid teaching a text of the secular canon should we find it offensive.
Those who are unhappy with the mashal of Tom Jones or Huckleberry Finn can
always teach Pamela or Uncle Tom's Cabin instead. If of us do so, what
enough
ever is politically incorrect or morally offensive may fade into obscurity.16 But the
exegete cannot hope to adjust the biblical canon, which was set for all time
two thousand years ago. Barring a few variants from the manuscripts found at
Qumran, the texts we were given are the only texts we are ever going to have.
 Difficulty in the Blessing of Esau 261

And for the inheritors of the Western tradition, these texts contain the deepest
truths of life. So if, reading the texts one way, we cannot live with the mashal,
we must learn to read them differently, we must have a new midrash. Interpreta
tion thus becomes an industry that, given the evolving needs that each progressive
generation finds for the stories the Bible tells, can have no end.17

ENDNOTES
1. Steiner found four categories of "difficulty": [1] contingent difficulties like difficult or foreign
words, or unusual names, which "aim to be looked up" and are solved with homework (40); [2]
modal difficulties that involve "a stance towards human conditions that we find essentially inac
cessible or alien" (28); [3] tactical difficulties, reefs on which authors intentionally run readers in
order "to deepen our apprehension by dislocating or goading to new life the supine energies of
word or grammar" (40). All these are meant to be solved. In a different class are [4] ontological
difficulties that actually break the writer-reader contract by confronting us with "blank questions"
about the nature of language, meaning and literary communication (41). Steiner's "ontological
difficulty" is a bit like Phelan's notion of "recalcitrance," though his authorial notions of difficulty
do not map exactly onto Phelan's readerly ones.

2. Phelan also includes a category called "the erroneous" (715). This is what we might call the trivial
case of recalcitrance, where a mistake on the part of the author (Toni Morrison's
inconsistency
about the time frame of Beloved creates problems
is Phelan's
example) of interpretation that
cannot be resolved (at least by any interpretive schemes that make sense), but whose contradic
tions do not lead to any significant interpretive movement. Trivial contradictions abound in bib
lical narratives as well (was it the Ishmaelites or the Midianites who sold Joseph in Egypt?), and
there are also many mini-narratives that are not inconsistent but which instead seem to have
been truncated to the point where their significance is hard to read. The casual mention of
Reuben's lying with his father's concubine Bilhah in Genesis 35:22 seems a part of an important
story that has been lost. Even more puzzling is the "bridegroom of blood" episode at Exodus
4:24-26 where Adonai tries to kill Moses on the way back to Egypt but is appeased by Zipporah's
circumcising their son and touching the foreskin to Moses' "feet."

3. For example, at Numbers 4:1, 14:26-28, and elsewhere in the Pentateuch, the Lord addresses
"Moses and Aaron" with an imperative verb form used for singular subjects. The Lord's warning
to Adam and Eve and his promises to Noah also contain misleading grammatical ambiguities.
Even the name Yahweh itself (the tetragrammaton pronounced "Adonai" ["my Lord"] by pious
Jews) is an grammatically peculiar futurative form of the copula.

4. Nachmanides the blessing of Esau as inferior to Jacob's but of the same kind: "Isaac
reads did
not give him 'plenty of corn and wine' as he gave to his brother, since he wanted to honor the
one who had been blessed first above him" (1:344).

5. Pentateuch with Targum Onkelos, Haphtaroth and Rashi's Commentary, Volume I, 128. The
name "Rashi" is an acronym for Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki, the greatest of the medieval com
mentators on Torah and Talmud, who lived in eleventh-century Provence. Nachmanides agrees
that "Esau would have the dew and fat places of another land" than Canaan (1:344).

6. The fourfold of biblical

method interpretation is known as PARDES
after the initial letters of
the four modes of
interpretation of scripture current in the thirteenth century: peshat, remez,
derash, and sod. These correspond roughly to the four modes of interpretation in Dante's "Letter
to Can Grande della Scala," the literal, the allegorical, the moral and the mystical.
The Rashi is usually characterized as belonging to the peshat or literal/contextual school of

interpretation, but I characterize his equation of Esau with Rome as "prophetic" or "allegorical"
262 David H. Richter

in Dante's sense. Rashi's sense of the context that can be applied to a given text is usually wider
than most "standard academic" interpreters would think proper. For example, in Gen. 37:15 a
"man found Joseph straying in the field" and lets him know where his brothers have taken their
flocks. For Rashi this "man" (?ha~ish") is actually "the angel Gabriel" because in Dan. 10:21 the

angel is referred to as "the man Gabriel" ("ha-ish GavrieV) {Pentateuch with Rashi I: 182).
Daniel, a text written nearly seven centuries after Genesis, so late that it is partly in Aramaic,
seems a long way to stretch in the wrong direction for an allusion. Indeed, for a present-day
academic, a phrase like "the man" does not seem sufficiently idiosyncratic to be any sort of
allusion.

7. This crescendo of reinscription of Edom as the prime destroyer of the Temple follows the sugges
tions of Herr in Encyclopaedia Judaica, "Edom," who assumes that there is something historical
lurking behind the prophecy. Peter Ackroyd, to the contrary, suggests that no reconstruction of a
historical relation of Israel with Edom is possible, that Edom, Israel's bad neighbor to the south,
was merely "the 'type' of enemy nation. To argue from . . . oracles"
by postexilic prophets "to
the expression of hostility to Edom . . .
precise exilic experience is inappropriate; belongs to the
development of Israel's experience of the hostile world, that which is opposed to God and his

purpose" (224). Postexilic Israel may have found it easier to blame Edom, always on the southern
border, than Babylon, whose empire collapsed two generations after the sack of Jerusalem. What
ever the historical basis, by the late second century b.c., the pseudoepigraphal book of Jubilees
reinscribed the conflict between Israel and Edom back into the lives of the patriarchs. In that re
construction of Genesis, Isaac ends his "blessing" of Esau with: "Thou shalt sin a complete sin
unto death, and thy seed shall be rooted out from under heaven" (Jubilees 26: 54; Charles II: 54).
In Chapter 37 war between Jacob and Esau breaks out immediately after Isaac's death, con
cluded by the death of Esau in Chapter 38 (Charles II: 68-69).

8. Araaldo Momigliano suggests that it was rather the unsuccessful Bar Kochba rebellion of 135
a.D. that froze the Edom-Rome metaphor into place.

9. My own initial reaction to the midrashim on the blessing of Esau was an instance of what
Steiner would call modal difficulty, and it dissolved for me as I began to understand how Esau
Edom fit into the thought of the commentators.
While
rampant hostility to Esau dominates the classical and medieval midrashim of this epi
sode, many modern orthodox Jewish exegetes read the episode with an ear for the pathos of
Esau's situation. For example, J. H. Hertz, the deeply orthodox Chief Rabbi of the British Em
pire and the commentator to the Soncino Torah, says: "Those tears of Esau, the sensuous wild
impulsive man, almost like the cry of some trapped creature, are among the most pathetic in the
bible" (1:100).

10. My argument is in a sense the obverse of Adam Newton's in "The Home of the Free and the
Grave(n)." Newton approvingly quotes a midrash on the text from Exodus "'the writing was the
of G-d, graven upon the tables. ... Do not read charut (graven) but cherut (liberty).'"
writing
Where Newton sees midrash as the scene of unbounded textual play, a deeply personal response
controlledonly by the answerability of the reader to his relation to tradition and to God, I tend
to viewthe inventiveness and productivity of biblical interpretation as reined in relatively tightly
by the forces of history, which require us to read the biblical text in tune with the ideology of our
own times. If I am right, the lay reader should have found my "Bible as literature" explanation of
the blessing of Esau easily understandable, if not compelling, and found the rabbinical midrashim
on Esau nearly incomprehensible till their historical grounding was explained.

11. Commentators back to von Rad have noticed the agonizing quality of the pacing here.

12. My assumption is that the original mashal of the Akedah was twofold: that any righteous son of
Abraham should be prepared to sacrifice for his Lord the dearest thing in his possession, but that
Yahweh desires no human sacrifice, unlike the gods of the other nations who required the sacrifice
of the firstborn. The date of the "original" is difficult to determine, however: the J and E texts,
which flow together at this point in Genesis, are usually dated in the tenth and ninth centuries
 Difficulty in the Blessing of Esau 263

b.c., respectively, while the postexilic redactor of Genesis was at work in the sixth century B.c.
Cultic practices, needless to say, must have undergone tremendous change over that stretch of
time.

13. Not irrevocably, of course. But it is interesting that Isaac is not mentioned at the time of the
death of his mother and does not appear in person for two further chapters. Isaac of course re
turns, as he must do, miraculously resurrected by the Lord, at some later point. One ingenious
midrash is that when Rebecca falls off her camel at the appearance of her destined husband
Isaac, in Genesis 24:64, it is because she has seen him descend from the heavens. See Spiegel 37.
Though the medieval midrashim on the completed sacrifice of Isaac are the most striking,
Spiegel traces the theme back to the classical tradition, the tannaim and amoraim of the first
through the fifth centuries a.D. There is even the possibility that the tradition goes much further
back than that. When Abraham descends the mountain, Isaac is not mentioned as being with
him. Grammatical awkwardnesses and textual inconsistencies at the point where the angel holds
Abraham back from the sacrifice suggest an uneasy redaction of the E-text with the J-text here,
and some textual scholars have suggested that the tradition of the E-text contained a human
sacrifice carried out, while the J-text had the sacrifice prevented. Spiegel, skeptical of the Graf
Wellhausen documentary hypothesis, indeed mildly contemptuous of the interpretive freedom it
ratifies, mentions the issue only tongue in cheek (122-24).

14. Because sacrifices were traditionally held on high places, the verb "to go up" is cognate to the
noun for "burnt offering": both words are spelled ayin-lamedh-heh. "Bring him up there" and
"sacrifice him there" are both acceptable translations of "ha'aleihu sham.n But "to go up" would
be "/fl'fl/oi," not "/b/a/i" so this reading is grammatically impossible. The real ambiguity is (as
with Esau's blessing) over the sense of a preposition: the "/'" preceding the word "o/a/i" (sacrifice).
This can mean either "as a sacrifice" or "to a sacrifice." Reading the full implications of the am

biguity, we see Abraham incorrectly assuming the former reading, judging perhaps from his up

bringing in Ur that Yahweh requires human sacrifice. In fact the order is to bring Isaac to a
sacrifice?which is what ultimately happens: the word of God is precisely fulfilled. That, I sup
pose, is the implication of one early midrash:
Rabbi Akha tells a story of Abraham on Mount
Moriah wondering to God whether in countermanding the sacrifice "Thou indulgest in prevarica
tion." God replies that He does not "alter what has gone out of My . . .Did I tell thee,
lips
Slaughter him? No! But Take him up.' Thou hast taken him up. Now take him down!" {Bereshit
Rabba 56; 1:498).

15. Passages I have found recalcitrant under close reading include, for example, the rape of Dinah
(Gen. 34), the episode of the concubine at Gibeah (Judg. 19) and the rejection of Saul (1 Sam.
15).

16. This is the acknowledged motivation behind much canonical

theorizing today. For example,
Barbara Herrnstein Smith's epochmaking theoretical essay, "Contingencies of Value," was de
signed to support a feminist revision of the secular canon of literature.

17. Here I would like to express my warmest thanks to Rabbi Lawrence Pinsker of Toronto, to
whose love of scholarship and e-mail communication I owe my understanding of the complex
historical links between Edom and Rome. I would also like to thank my fellow students in the
Adult Hebrew class at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue?Rita, Ellen, Elliot, Michael, Nahum and
Maron, with whom my love of biblical text and scholarship was reborn.

WORKS CITED

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264 David H. Richter

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