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Midrash and Mashal: Difficulty in the Blessing of Esau

Author(s): David H. RichterSource: Narrative, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Oct., 1996), pp. 254-264Published by: Ohio State University PressStable 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 specificallyas James Phelan uses it in his essay "Toward a Rhetorical Reader-Response

Criticism: The Difficult, the Stubborn, and the Ending of Beloved? There Phelandefines 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.2This theoretical suggestion of Phelan's is wonderfully productive not only

for Toni Morrison but for biblical narrative, and I plan to use it in amonograph

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, Iwas 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 theMidrash and our own midrashim. The second term, mashal,

is literally a similitude, a simile or ametaphor, with the derived sense of a parableor a fable, a story with moral or emotive significance; I am going to use itwithin

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 Jdocument,

theblessing

of Esau in Genesis 27. The blindpatriarch

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 hisbrother 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 morphemesrun "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 interpretive 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 thedays

of

mourning

for my father are come I shall kill Jacobmybrother." 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 itwas 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 "Isnot 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.

This reading 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 tomollify his brother's




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, Ephraimand 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 blessingof 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 complementarymotifs: 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 reconquerthat 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 problemsto 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 inwith him" (Bereshit Rabbah 72; II: 606). The doubling of words in

Isaac's question, "Who is this that has hunted game?" (Hu hatzad tzayid) provokes 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




tide "mi" in Esau's blessing, got the opposite answer. Within theMidrash, 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, mightseem

peculiar, given

the Canaanite location of the fraternalstruggle,

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 withthe 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 iswrong 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 Edomitesthe 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 goods

. . . stood at the 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




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, itwas clear why the pathos and irony inherent inmy 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 imposea

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, iswhat 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 he said, 'Here I am, my son.'" As themoment of the sacrifice

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




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 RoshHa-Shanah,

the Jewish NewYear,

when the Akedah is theprescribedTorah 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 upon 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. Ifenough

of us do so, what

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.




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 iswhat we might call the trivial

case of recalcitrance, where a mistake on the part of the author (Toni Morrison's inconsistencyabout the time frame of Beloved is Phelan's example) creates problems 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. Forexample,

at Numbers4:1, 14:26-28,

and elsewhere in thePentateuch,

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 reads the blessing of Esau as inferior to Jacob's but of the same kind: "Isaac 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 method of biblical 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"




in Dante's sense. Rashi's sense of the context that can be applied to a given text is usually widerthan 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 thatno

reconstruction of ahistorical 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

precise exilic experience is inappropriate; the expression of hostility to Edom . . .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

writing of G-d, graven upon the tables. ... Do not read charut (graven) but cherut (liberty).'"

Where Newton sees midrash as the scene of unbounded textual play, a deeply personal response

controlled only by the answerability of the reader to his relation to tradition and to God, I tend

to view the 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 wasexplained.

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




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 holdsAbraham 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 lips. . .Did I tell thee,

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

Ackroyd, Peter. Exile and Restoration: A Study in Hebrew Thought of the Sixth Century B.C.

Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1968.




Freedman, H., and Maurice Simon, trans. Bereshit Rabbah. Vols. 1 and 2 of theMidrash Rabbah.

3rd ed. London: Soncino Press, 1983.

Charles, R. H., ed. Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1913.

Dante. "Letter to Can Grande della Scala." In The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contem

porary Trends, edited by David Richter, 118-22. Boston: Bedford Books, 1989.

Herr, Moshe David. "Edom." In Vol. 6 of Encyclopaedia Judaica, 370-79. New York: Macmillan,

1972.

Hertz, J. H., ed. Pentateuch and Haftorahs. 2 vols. New York: Soncino, 1941.

Kasher, Menachem Mendel, ed. Encyclopedia of Biblical Interpretation: A Millenial Anthology.

Translated and abridged from the Humash Torah Shelemah under the editorship of HarryFreedman. 20 vols. New York: American Biblical Encyclopedia Society, 1953?.

Momigliano, Arnold. "Some Preliminary Remarks on the 'Religious Opposition' to the Roman Em

pire." In On Pagans, Jews, and Christians. Middletown, PA: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1987.

Nachmanides (Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman). Commentary on the Torah. 5 vols. New York: Shilo,

1971.

Newton, Adam Zachary. "At Play in the Piels (and Hiphals) of the Lord, or, The Home of the Free

and the Grave(n)" Narrative 4 (1996): 265-77.

Online Bible. CD-ROM version 6.12. Winterbourne, Ontario: Larry Pierce, 1994.

Phelan, James. "Toward a Rhetorical Reader-Response Criticism: The Difficult, the Stubborn, andthe Ending of Beloved:9 Modern Fiction Studies 39 (1993): 709-32.

Rad, Gerhard von. Genesis: A Commentary. Translated by John H. Marks. Philadelphia: West

minster Press, 1961.

Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzkhaki). Pentateuch with Targum Onkelos, Haphtaroth and Rashi's Com

mentary. Translated by M. Rosenbaum et al. Jerusalem: Silbermann Family, 5733 (= Gregorian

year 1973).

Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. "Contingencies of Value." In The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and

Contemporary Trends, edited by David Richter, 1320-43. Boston: Bedford Books, 1989.

Spiegel, Shalom. The Last Trial: On the Legends and Lore of the Command to Abraham to Offer

Isaac as a Sacrifice: The Akedah. Translated by Judah Goldin. New York: Schocken, 1969.

Steiner, George. On Difficulty and Other Essays. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

midrash and mashal

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