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 Accessed: 24/01/2010 14:31
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David H. Richter

Midrash Difficulty

and Mashai: 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 text that will not ultimately yield, what he calls the stubborn or recalcitrant where the text has no single coherent and consistent explanation, where every leaves something out. The recalcitrant text is not merely attempt at explication it is rather that the disparate explana ambiguous, possessing several explanations; tions that might explicate the text as a whole do not cohere with one another cannot be part of the same experience of reading.2 phenomenologically, is wonderfully This theoretical suggestion of Phelan's productive not only I plan to use it in a monograph for Toni Morrison but for biblical narrative, and 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 to inquire. The Midrash with a capital M is an brew verb "lidrosh," meaning 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 Critical the Gothic Richter, Novel. Vol. 4, No. 3 (October 1996) 1996 by the Ohio State University Press Professor at Queens of English is the author of Fable's End, College, and The Progress Literary Historiography of Romance: The and

Tradition,

Narrative/

Theory,

NARRATIVE, Copyright

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in the Blessing

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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 are midrashim. This essay is going to skim the in teacher's textual explanations, 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 to indicate the rhetorical or stories that are not structurally ordered as meshalim 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 as his brother, dressing him incites her own favorite twin, Jacob, to masquerade 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 The pathos swells as Esau asks Isaac if his father has only one bless birthright. 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 of Esau's blessing. In Hebrew the first part of it goes "mishmanei ha language 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 a King James the heavens thereon." What exactly does this mean? Comparing 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
context.

("away from the fat places for what Phelan

of the land"). Which academic

it is depends

on the the

Well,

calls "standard

interpretation"

(712),

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 of the blessing with which his father had blessed him and he said in his for my father are come I shall kill Jacob my when the days of mourning heart, 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 umishmanei ha-aretz. Here the mor V'yiten Tkha ha-Elohim mital ha-shamayim 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 a little of both ... to reassure Esau? Conceivably 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) not Jacob taken his birthright and now his blessing twice??had (bikhorati) Those two words look almost exactly the same, with just two con (birkhati)! sonants reversed, particularly in a torah scroll without the vowels. reading of the episode was strengthened by the way its themes echo 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 Leah instead of the younger: the trickster tricked. The Hebrew under daughter 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 This down 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 account

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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 are serious but not tragic: no one dies at once and the consequences Genesis 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 to where Jacob tended Laban's dwelt in the south, near Beersheba, 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 in Bereshit Rabbah on the phrase stroyed!" (607). An anonymous commentary "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). none of the rabbis saw Esau as the sympathetic victim I did. One Apparently even suggested that Esau, unsuccessful at his hunt, made his stew out of dog V: 228, citing Torah Shelemah 27: 140, 143). (Kasher Predictably, perhaps, my own question, about the interpretation of the oar

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the Midrash, tide "mi" in Esau's blessing, got the opposite answer. Within Jacob the blessing that counts, but Esau gets his blessing too, including the fatness gets of the land.4 The Encyclopedia quotes an old source to of Biblical Interpretation 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 one of the lushest places on earth.5 inMagna Graecia [or Sicily]"?surely Italy, 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 revelation.6 And in the prophetic dimension, Esau, known also as apocalyptic the Red, the Man of Blood, had become identified over the centuries with Edom,
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 the tributary rulers of Judea. Herod the Great had supported the hegemony, cult and had enlarged the Second Temple, but was no more popular with Temple sect?out the Pharisee of which traditional Judaism later emerged?than with sects that eventually united into Christianity the messianic and which made the name "Herod" a byword for a tyrant. Unfortunately, the dating is wrong for that link: midrashim Edom with Rome do not appear until the explicitly connecting 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 in the destruction of the First Temple by Nebuchadnezzar Edomites 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 burned the Temple ("Thou hast also vowed to build thy temple, which the ally 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 link between Edom and Rome was forged that would metaphorical/historical 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 It was not merely that Jacob, the the book of Genesis. ancestor of the Jews, the progenitor of the twelve tribes, gets Adonai's great Given the fact that Esau was read as the blessing through a lying masquerade.

Difficulty

in the Blessing

of Esau

259

he was responsible (as Leasar ben Simeon had sug of the Romans, for the breaking of the gates of Jerusalem and for the destruction of the gested) for the Roman Holy Temple. Given the fact that Rome was itself a metonymy 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 arrived with him. tion that when Esau came into his father's tent, Gehenna ancestor Given all this, it was clear why the pathos and irony inherent in my literal read the ing of Genesis 27 were largely unreadable by the creators of the Midrash: the ideological dimension, of the story I read was entirely unacceptable.9 mashal, 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. of the binding of Isaac as a sacrifice in Genesis The story of the Akedah, is what almost anyone would call a transparently simple text, narrato 22:1-19, him to sacrifice by commanding logically. God has decided to test Abraham Isaac, that son miraculously given to Abraham's previously barren wife. After out with Isaac and servants is pre is given, Abraham's the command setting is sighted, the sented in rapid summary. Once the destination, Mount Moriah, its pace. As the servants are left behind at the foot of the narrative slows down the narrative becomes highly dramatic, with trenchant dialogue be mountain, tween Abraham the extraordinary pathos of a father and his son emphasizing to the very edge of sacrificing his own son: "Look, here is whose faith leads him is the lamb for the burnt-offering?" for the burnt-offering." Meanwhile and over again the filial relationship his father, and spoke to Abraham son.'" As the moment of the sacrifice in detail, gesture by gesture, approaches, every action Abraham takes ismentioned that the action down nearly to "real time," right up to the moment slowing to slay his Abraham "stretched forth his hand and took the slaughtering-knife the fire and the wood," says Isaac, "but where "My son, God will provide himself a lamb even the tags to the dialogue emphasize over between Abraham and Isaac: "And Isaac and he said, 'Here I am, my said, 'My father,' son"?at which point the Angel of the Lord intervenes.11 The narrative choices or are clearly designed to heighten, in a text nearly devoid of psychonarration 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 because its transparent mashal has seldom been in scription than the Akedah, tune with our ideas of God and the limits of sacrifice.12 As Shalom Spiegel elabo on the in The Last Trial, many of the medieval midrashim rately demonstrated the sacrifice the story so that Abraham Akedah renarrated actually perpetrates one can understand the tempta of Isaac.13 Under their historical circumstances,

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David H. Richter

in Mainz and Cologne at the end of the tion: the chroniclers of the massacres eleventh century tell of parents who killed their own children swiftly and hu to prevent them from falling into the hands of those who would have manely 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 to cut his son's throat and burn him to sending him off to an unknown mountain even if he intends at the last instant to countermand the order. Last year ashes, 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 at the testing God's goodness and justice, which the patriarch had questioned of the sacrifice waiting for of Sodom, going through the motions destruction 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 it as God had intended: "and you shall bring him up there to go up understand on one of the mountains that I shall show you." Instead he mistakenly hears God "and you shall sacrifice him there as a burnt offering." So by this ingenious saying is changed into a comforting amiable comedy of misunder the Akedah midrash, standing: God never wanted Abraham even to think of sacrificing Isaac.14 So contemporary rabbis too, like their medieval rewrite the counterparts, biblical text, interpreting it to achieve the mashal they think we need to hear. So that it is rare great has been the ingenuity with which we have created midrashim to admit to experiencing anything like the recalcitrance of for any commentator In the the sort James Phelan describes at the heart of Toni Morrison's Beloved. narrative between Genesis and 2 Kings, it would be hard to find a passage long as I hope to show whose interpreters have thrown up their hands?although, some day, there are in fact many such disturbingly unreadable passages, whose can be seen as part of a strange and complex rhetorical effect so to standard narratological restricts one's method interpretation, a strict reading of reading.15 But if I ultimately plan to decline the complicating ingenuity of midrashic its homiletic, allegorical and mystical think I interpretations?I exegesis?with can understand its sanctifying motives. scholars like ourselves can al Literary ways just avoid teaching a text of the secular canon should we find it offensive. intentionality long as one are unhappy with the mashal of Tom Jones or Huckleberry Finn can of us do so, what teach Pamela or Uncle Tom's Cabin instead. If always 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 texts we were given are the only texts we are ever going to have. the Qumran, Those who

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261

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

the deepest the mashal, Interpreta progressive

ENDNOTES
1. Steiner words, modal cessible order word about found difficulties four or unusual of "difficulty": difficulties like difficult or foreign [1] contingent categories names, which "aim to be looked up" and are solved with homework (40); [2] that we find essentially that involve "a stance towards human conditions inac

run readers in or alien" (28); [3] tactical difficulties, reefs on which authors intentionally or goading to new life the supine energies of "to deepen our apprehension by dislocating or grammar" to be solved. In a different class are [4] ontological (40). All these are meant

difficulties

us with "blank questions" contract by confronting that actually break the writer-reader the nature of language, meaning and literary communication (41). Steiner's "ontological is a bit like Phelan's notion of "recalcitrance," difficulty" though his authorial notions of difficulty do not map exactly includes onto Phelan's readerly ones. is what we might (Toni Morrison's call the trivial

2. Phelan

also

case of recalcitrance, about the time frame

inconsistency creates problems of interpretation that example) cannot be resolved (at least by any interpretive schemes that make sense), but whose contradic tions do not lead to any significant abound in bib Trivial contradictions interpretive movement. of Beloved is Phelan's

a category called "the erroneous" (715). This on the part of the author where a mistake

or the Midianites as well (was it the Ishmaelites lical narratives who sold Joseph in Egypt?), and there are also many mini-narratives but which instead seem to have that are not inconsistent to the point where is hard to read. The casual mention of been truncated their significance Reuben's Bilhah in Genesis 35:22 seems a part of an important lying with his father's concubine is the "bridegroom story that has been lost. Even more puzzling on the way back to Egypt 4:24-26 where Adonai tries to kill Moses "feet." their son and touching the foreskin to Moses' circumcising 3. For of blood" episode at Exodus but is appeased by Zipporah's

at Numbers in the Pentateuch, and elsewhere the Lord addresses 4:1, 14:26-28, example, "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. "Adonai" Even the name Yahweh itself (the tetragrammaton pronounced ["my Lord"] by pious Jews) is an grammatically reads peculiar futurative form of the copula. did the

4. Nachmanides

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

5. Pentateuch name mentators

"Rashi"

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

that "Esau would 6. The fourfold

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

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David H. Richter

in Dante's than most "man flocks. angel Daniel, seems found

sense. Rashi's "standard

sense of the context

academic"

straying Joseph For Rashi this "man"

that can be applied to a given text is usually wider in Gen. 37:15 a think proper. For example, interpreters would in the field" and lets him know where his brothers have taken their

is referred

in Dan. 10:21 the (?ha~ish") is actually "the angel Gabriel" because to as "the man Gabriel" with Rashi I: 182). {Pentateuch ("ha-ish GavrieV) a text written nearly seven centuries after Genesis, so late that it is partly in Aramaic, for an allusion. sufficiently Indeed, idiosyncratic for a present-day to be any sort of

academic, allusion. 7. This

a long way to stretch in the wrong direction a phrase like "the man" does not seem

crescendo

tions of Herr

of reinscription in Encyclopaedia

of Edom Judaica,

as the prime destroyer "Edom," who assumes

to the contrary, lurking behind the prophecy. Peter Ackroyd, to the south, relation of Israel with Edom is possible, that Edom, Israel's bad neighbor historical . . . oracles" was merely "the 'type' of enemy nation. To argue from by postexilic prophets "to . . . the expression of hostility to Edom is inappropriate; precise exilic experience belongs to the to God and his of Israel's experience of the hostile world, that which is opposed development Israel may have found it easier to blame Edom, always on the southern purpose" (224). Postexilic two generations after the sack of Jerusalem. What border, than Babylon, whose empire collapsed ever the historical book of Jubilees basis, by the late second century b.c., the pseudoepigraphal In that re the conflict between Israel and Edom back into the lives of the patriarchs. reinscribed construction unto death,

of the Temple follows the sugges that there is something historical of a suggests that no reconstruction

In Chapter cluded by the death 8. Araaldo a.D.

of Genesis, Isaac ends his "blessing" of Esau with: "Thou shalt sin a complete sin and thy seed shall be rooted out from under heaven" (Jubilees 26: 54; Charles II: 54). after Isaac's death, con 37 war between Jacob and Esau breaks out immediately of Esau in Chapter that 38 (Charles rather II: 68-69). the unsuccessful Bar Kochba rebellion of 135

suggests Momigliano that froze the Edom-Rome

it was

metaphor

into place. on the blessing of Esau was an instance of what for me as I began to understand how Esau

9. My own initial reaction Steiner would call modal Edom fit into the thought While

to the midrashim

difficulty, and it dissolved of the commentators.

to Esau dominates the classical and medieval midrashim of this epi rampant hostility Jewish orthodox read the episode with an ear for the pathos of sode, many modern exegetes Esau's situation. For example, J. H. Hertz, the deeply orthodox Chief Rabbi of the British Em to the Soncino Torah, says: "Those tears of Esau, the sensuous wild pire and the commentator in the impulsive man, almost like the cry of some trapped creature, are among the most pathetic bible" 10. My (1:100).

is in a sense the obverse of Adam Newton's in "The Home of the Free and the argument on the text from Exodus "'the writing was the Grave(n)." Newton quotes a midrash approvingly ... of G-d, graven upon the tables. Do not read charut (graven) but cherut (liberty).'" writing sees midrash as the scene of unbounded Where Newton textual play, a deeply personal response of the reader to his relation to tradition and to God, I tend only by the answerability the inventiveness and productivity of biblical as reined in relatively interpretation 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 controlled to view the blessing of Esau easily understandable, if not compelling, and found the rabbinical on Esau nearly incomprehensible till their historical grounding was explained. midrashim

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: Abraham should be prepared to sacrifice for his Lord the dearest thing Yahweh which desires flow no human The of the firstborn. date

together

sacrifice, unlike the gods of the other nations of the "original" is difficult to determine, however: the J and E texts, are usually dated in the tenth and ninth centuries at this point in Genesis,

son of that any righteous in his possession, but that who required the sacrifice

Difficulty

in the Blessing

of Esau

263

b.c., respectively, Cultic practices, time. 13. Not death

while needless

the postexilic redactor of Genesis was at work in the sixth century B.c. to say, must have undergone tremendous change over that stretch of

of course. But it is interesting that Isaac is not mentioned irrevocably, of his mother and does not appear in person for two further chapters.

at the time of the Isaac of course re

resurrected by the Lord, at some later point. One ingenious turns, as he must do, miraculously 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. Spiegel the medieval Though traces the theme midrashim back on the completed to the classical sacrifice of Isaac are the most striking, the tannaim and amoraim of the first tradition, the possibility that the tradition goes much further as being with the angel holds of the E-text with the J-text here, a human of the E-text contained Spiegel, skeptical of the Graf of the interpretive freedom it

through the fifth centuries a.D. There is even back than that. When the mountain, Isaac is not mentioned Abraham descends at the point where him. Grammatical awkwardnesses and textual inconsistencies Abraham and some sacrifice Wellhausen back carried from the sacrifice have textual scholars out, while suggest an uneasy redaction that the tradition suggested the J-text had the sacrifice prevented.

indeed mildly documentary contemptuous hypothesis, the issue only tongue in cheek (122-24). ratifies, mentions sacrifices for "burnt him were

14. Because noun "sacrifice

to the the verb "to go up" is cognate held on high places, traditionally are spelled ayin-lamedh-heh. both words him up there" and "Bring offering": of "ha'aleihu sham.n But "to go up" would translations there" are both acceptable

The real ambiguity be "/fl'fl/oi," not "/b/a/i" so this reading is grammatically is (as impossible. the "/'" preceding the word "o/a/i" (sacrifice). with Esau's blessing) over the sense of a preposition: This can mean either "as a sacrifice" or "to a sacrifice." Reading the full implications of the am the former reading, judging perhaps from his up incorrectly assuming biguity, we see Abraham in Ur bringing sacrifice?which that Yahweh is what requires human sacrifice. the word In fact of God ultimately happens: of one early midrash: the order is to bring Isaac to a I sup is precisely fulfilled. That, on Mount tells a story of Abraham

Rabbi Akha pose, is the implication to God whether in countermanding the sacrifice "Thou indulgest in prevarica Moriah wondering . . .Did tion." God replies that He does not "alter what has gone out of My I tell thee, lips Slaughter him? No! But Take him up.' Thou hast taken him up. Now take him down!" {Bereshit Rabba 15. Passages (Gen. 15). 16. This is the acknowledged motivation behind much Smith's epochmaking Herrnstein theoretical to support I would a feminist revision of the secular theorizing essay, "Contingencies canon of literature. canonical today. For example, of Value," was de 34), 56; 1:498). I have found recalcitrant under close reading include, for example, the rape of Dinah at Gibeah (Judg. 19) and the rejection of Saul (1 Sam.

the episode

of the concubine

Barbara signed 17. Here

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

Maron,

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