Jewish Theology Unbound

Biblical Questioning Jewish Theology Unbound James A. Diamond Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198805694 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: June 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198805694.001.0001 Biblical Questioning Philosophy Begins in Anguish James A. Diamond DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198805694.003.0003 Abstract and Keywords Questions posed by God and biblical characters in the Hebrew Bible are often philosophically empowering moments. They transpire from the very inception of human history, according to the Bible’s own reconstructed version of it. Rather than divinely imposed law, biblical questioning is a vital tool initiating the decisive biblical way toward truth through independent investigation. Questions then recur throughout various biblical narratives, revealing the Bible’s philosophical dimension. As such, they may indicate the Bible’s conception of the essential expression of humanity, or where the Bible locates the beginning of serious thought, and how it suggests proceeding in the search for truth and the highest good. This chapter explores specific episodes where questions are posed, beginning with the Garden of Eden and ending with the book of Job. Keywords: philosophical quest, suffering, creation, Job, shame, deceit, identity Quests and Questions in the Bible In this second chapter, I begin where all thought begins: with the question. This is the case in the Hebrew Bible and subsequently in the rabbinic tradition as well, where I will argue questions provoke philosophical and theological thought. This position also mounts a challenge to the clichéd notion of Judaism as a religion of laws observed by rote, as noted in the Introduction. The widely held perception of the Hebrew Bible as simply a record of divine revelation imposing law and demanding the unflinching and unreflective loyalty of its recipients is simply false. The Hebrew Bible is far more complex than a Page 1 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning revelatory text that imposes divinely sanctioned law on one particular people. Leo Strauss poses the apparent incompatibility between the two best: “To the philosophic view that man’s happiness consists in free investigation or insight, the Bible opposes the view that man’s happiness consists in obedience to God.”1 Baruch Spinoza, one of the earliest and most formidable subversives of biblical authority, reinforced this cliché by asserting that any philosophical reading of the Bible subjects it to an alien form of discourse. This followed from his characterization of revelation as an instrument of obedience, which is “completely distinct from natural knowledge in its purpose, its basis, and its method.”2 In other words, for Spinoza, obedience and law are at the heart of the biblical agenda, not philosophical reflection. (p.23) However, a critical dimension of the Hebrew Bible also promotes independent investigation in the search for meaning, depicting characters who are headed down the road of philosophical inquiry with divine approval. This view is consistent with both the Greek Platonic and Jewish Maimonidean positions, which anchor the religious obligation of a duty to philosophize in divine oracular or scriptural pronouncements.3 Biblical characters are prodded to follow the route mapped out best by Aristotle, who famously asserted, “It is through wonder that men now begin and originally began to philosophize, wondering in the first place at obvious perplexities, and then by gradual progression raising question about the greater matters too, for example, about the origin of the universe.”4 As such, there are numerous biblical moments whose fulcrum is a question, the essential catalyst of any quest and of all philosophical discourse. Questioning is a further dimension to what Yoram Hazony argues is the decisive biblical way toward truth through a self-initiated quest. In Hazony’s version of the prophet Jeremiah’s popular remonstrations, “The truth will become known to those who stand and look, who inquire and compare. The difficulty lies not in the impossibility of the task, but in the resistance of the people to the very activity of independent inquiry, which alone can save them.”5 There is no better place to begin an exploration of the philosophical dimensions of the Bible than with the question. Quests are always inspired by a problem, an astonishment at what presents itself to us in the world, and the deeply human instinctual, existential, and intellectual urge to examine the “wonders” of the world. Although I do not claim a unified theory that pertains to every instance of biblical questioning, there often are what I would term philosophically empowering moments implicit in many questions posed by God and biblical characters. They transpire from the very inception of human history, according to the Bible’s own reconstructed version of it.6 Questions then recur throughout various biblical narratives, revealing the Bible’s philosophical dimension.7 As such, they may indicate the Bible’s conception of the (p.24) essential expression of humanity, or where the Bible locates the beginning of serious Page 2 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning thought, and how it suggests proceeding in the search for truth and the highest good, or the summum bonum. As far as treating the Bible this way, I am in complete agreement with Shalom Carmy and David Shatz, who conclude, “The Bible is the primary source for Jewish philosophical reflection. It indeed warrants philosophical attention, as it supplies rich resources for philosophical analysis and exegesis.” The theme I develop in this chapter, of biblical question, is another of those “resources.”8 As I develop the notion of biblical questions as philosophically empowering moments, I also inveigh against what I consider the trivialization of the Bible by approaching it as history or science. It is clear to me that the Bible is not interested in history per se, but rather in what past events can contribute to a philosophical and theological understanding of the present and one’s life. As Yosef Haim Yerushalmi presciently states, “The biblical appeal to remember thus has little to do with curiosity about the past. Israel is told that it must be a kingdom of priests and a holy people; nowhere is it suggested that it become a nation of historians.”9 Creation as God’s Pristine Philosophical Moment These philosophical moments captured by questions that transform Israel into a “holy” nation rather than one of historians actually trace their way back to prehistoric time, to an instant preceding the advent of humanity, indeed prior to the complex divine organizing activity usually described as creation. At the beginning of the creation process, there was nothing but a scattering of stray ingredients that lacked cohesion and order, listed in the first two verses of Genesis. Characteristic of that state was the earth’s enigmatic “tohu and bohu,” whose two other paired biblical appearances attest to the phrase’s connotation. The phrase has been taken to mean various bleak things: “unformed and void” (JPS; King James), “waste and void” (American Standard Version), “formless void” (New Revised Standard Version), “formless and empty” (New International (p.25) Version), “formless and desolate” (Good News Translation). Whatever its exact meaning, it communicates anything but creation ex nihilo.10 In fact, there is little or no evidence to show that creatio ex nihilo was an accepted belief in the ancient rabbinic sources.11 The common, yet clichéd, belief of creation out of nothing is a sad reflection on those who speak in the name of the Bible and are committed to its teachings, but have not read at all, nor read carefully, nor read in its original Hebrew, the very book they claim to be central to their lives. If one reads the Bible closely, one is confronted by the primordial morass facing God at creation’s beginning that is untranslatable precisely because, preceding the first spark of human inquiry, it is closed to human experience and cognition.12 However, there is a second “tohu wabohu” that humankind experienced that affords us a trace of what originally confronted God. The complete disorder described in Jeremiah 4:23 is the only other occurrence of the hendiadys in its Page 3 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning original combination of “tohu wabohu,” and reflects total societal mayhem.13 That chaos is particularly characterized by intellectual impoverishment, as evidenced by the repeated lament of the absence of wisdom in the preceding verse: “they don’t know (yad’u) Me; they are foolish (sekholim) children; they are not intelligent (nevonim); they are wise (chakhamim) at doing bad; and they don’t know (yada’u) good” (Jer. 4:22). The “tohu wabohu” that follows in the next verse is associated with the inhabitants of this vacuous society. Thus, the proximity of the phrase to this knowledgeless state, as a symbol or consequence of it, conveys a sense of what originally provoked the divine creative impulse. The universe in its pristine state betrayed a disorganization and utter lack of thought which God found intolerable. It was a “dark inert chaos upon which (p. 26) form and order are about to be imposed.”14 God needed to live up to the reputation He was later credited with, “who makes everything with wisdom (chokhma)” (Ps. 104:24). God was thus prompted to shape creation into something orderly, defined, planned, and imbued with wisdom so that it would qualify it as an object of scientific and philosophical reflection.15 The operative principle underlying the creation account of Genesis1 as “separation and distinction” was brilliantly formulated by Leo Strauss.16 The “tohu and bohu” of formlessness precedes the divine acts that lend the world shape and definition. Abraham ibn Ezra, the classic medieval biblical exegete, already adumbrated Strauss’ analysis by understanding the term bara’ in the first verse of Genesis, not in the sense of “create,” as it is traditionally translated, but rather as “to set clearly defined borders.”17 As such, God’s original shock in the face of primeval chaos set the agenda for human encounters with the world thereafter.18 As there was with the chaotic state of the world before God began His creative ordering activity, so there must always be some disturbance to prod the need to make sense of anything. Rashi may very well have captured this sense of “tohu wabohu” as descriptive of some stupefaction and bleakness that overcame God in the face of ontological mayhem in his first comment on Genesis 1:1, as noted in Chapter 1.This accords with Rashi’s interest not in the theoretical questions concerning how the world was created, but, instead, in the implication of creation for law and ethics, as evidenced by his very first question on Genesis 1:1, which asks why the Torah began with Creation rather than Law.19 (p.27) Thus, thought begins in shock, in this case divine shock at the chaotic state of existence prior to His involvement with it. The ordering, classifying, and distinguishing that inform the week of creation are responses to that disorder which indicates an original discomfort with it. The catalyst for creation must have been some questioning of what presented itself to God, which, in turn, led to making sense of it all. It is no surprise then that God’s “philosophical” discomfort prompts speech and a daily evaluation of what that speech produced. For the great Jewish medieval philosopher Moses Maimonides, exercising the intellect is the highest form of imitatio dei, since it is the only thing human beings share in common with God. Page 4 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning Serious thinking is also the only measure of one’s humanity since, as Maimonides states, it is “because of the divine intellect conjoined with man that it is said of the latter that he is in the image of God and in his likeness.”20 Questioning, reflection, and the desire to set things right, evoked by circumstances that puzzle thoughtful observers of existence which surrounds them, should therefore be added to the standard list of purely ethical obligations as an act of imitatio dei. Failure to Philosophize as Primal Sin Though the first divine communication to human beings is the command to refrain from eating from one tree in the Garden, the second is the curious oneword question in response to the violation of that command: “Where are you (a’yekah)?” (Gen. 3:9). If history involves flux, then its incipient moment lies in this question that stimulates other questions and responses to and from Adam and Eve, seeking to situate the human in the world ethically, spiritually, and teleologically.21 In a reversal of the existential loneliness of the homo religiosus who seeks God’s presence in the world, it is God who searches for human presence, since Adam here flees the divine Presence. Abraham Joshua Heschel actually sees this moment as definitive of biblical theology that accentuates the divine initiative of God in search of man, rather than the (p.28) usual man in search of God. In fact, he boldly states, “All of human history as described in the Bible may be summarized [as] God in search of man.”22 Rabbinic midrash enters here, imaginatively, yet poignantly and constructively, instructing a new vocalization of the one-word question “a’yekah?” to read “eichah?”23The midrash transforms the word that indicates God’s search for humanity’s whereabouts (“a’yekah”) into the Hebrew title and first word of the Book of Lamentations, eichah, translated by the Jewish Publication Society as “alas.”24 Adam’s primeval sin portends the destruction of the Temple, or the alienation of heaven from earth, since the nexus that bound them was destroyed. The book of Jubilees reinforces the link between Adam and the Temple by depicting the Garden as a symbolic Temple with Adam as its first priest. Repointing the word a’yekah to eichah, thus relocating the Garden to a period associated with the later Temple, is consistent with Jubilees’ reconstituting of Adam as a pioneer of the sacrificial cult.25 God can no longer find humanity, the only creation that bears God’s divine imprint. God is thrust into mourning over the moral destruction of His own construction, over the marring of His “image.”26 In other words, the very first question (“a’yekah”) evokes a lament, sorrowfulness, and a disappointment with Adam’s attempt to hide from God’s presence. The question in its original context of “where” is meant to provoke the very first serious human consideration regarding the existential consequences of choices made. Its midrashic layering of lament expresses the damage that has been inflicted on the relationship between Adam and God intended to further Page 5 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning motivate a serious response that might reconcile them. The very enterprise of responding, of Adam contemplating his position in the world, would have, at the same time, been a source of comfort for God. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s analysis of the hermeneutic priority of the question is (p.29) apropos, as he states, “The art of questioning is the art of questioning further—i.e. the art of thinking. It is called dialectic because it is the art of conducting a real dialogue.” Thus, a question in earnest response to God’s question would have also expressed relationship. God’s question of “Where are you?” also complies with Gadamer’s primary requisite for a dialogue structured as question and answer, since “the first condition of the art of conversation is ensuring that the other person is with us.”27 Adam fails on both counts. First, he hides and avoids encounter, shirking his ethical responsibility of meeting the Other—in this instance, literally the face of God. Secondly, he circumvents the question philosophically. By hiding, but then responding from a place of hiddenness, the Bible intimates that one can avoid the divine Presence, but cannot ignore the question, cannot escape reflection and still maintain one’s humanity. To be human is to be a homo quaerens.28 Given the opportunity to reflect on his situation within the world, Adam’s response amounts to a far more grievous failure than mere disobedience. It is the oral equivalent of his hiding, and compounds the transgression with the failure to take responsibility for it. It consists of two excuses. First, Adam justifies his hiding because of “nakedness.” The rationale of a fear that nakedness arouses (“And I was afraid for I was naked,” Gen. 3:10) is striking as an unanticipated defense for secreting himself away from the divine gaze. Considering the correlation between nakedness and the feeling of shame drawn at the very beginning of the narrative (“And the man and his wife were both naked and yet they were not ashamed,” Gen. 2:25), one would have expected shame rather than fear to be the stated motivation for Adam’s hiding. However, shame would have reflected a deep sense of introspection about a developed sense of an ideal self that conforms to certain conceptions of what a perfect self might be. As Martha Nussbaum puts it: Shame, as is generally agreed…pertains to the whole self, rather than to a specific act of the self…In shame, one feels inadequate, lacking some desired type of completeness or perfection. But of course one must then have already judged that this is a type of completeness or perfection that one rightly ought to have.29 For Adam, then, to have been overcome by shame would have implied that he first had some philosophical conception of what constitutes human perfection. (p.30) Shame would have been the response to the realization of his inadequacy, not having measured up to that ideal state. If that were the cause of Page 6 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning his hiding, then it may have led to some further reaction by Adam aimed at rehabilitating that ideal self he failed to live up to. Adam’s fear, on the other hand, as opposed to shame, is simply a feeling of vulnerability to negative consequences against which he is unprotected, and thus involves no complex moral or teleological self-awareness. The fact that shame is conspicuously missing from Adam’s experience after the sin also indicates how oblivious he is to his relationship with the divine, since one of the causes of shame in the Bible is divine abandonment.30 It is, as Aristotle defined it, “a kind of pain or disturbance deriving from an impression (phantasia) of a future evil that is destructive or painful.”31 It certainly did not address the “whole self” as shame would have. If relationship with God is a primary dimension of Adam’s existence in the Garden, then his lack of shame betrays a total lack of self-awareness. According to the Psalter, faithfulness and trust in God protect from shame, while treachery and breach of that trust attract shame (Ps. 25:2–3). Adam’s fear, rather than shame, reflects a deep insensitivity to who he really is as a human being. Adam’s second excuse involves transferring blame and responsibility to another: “for the woman You gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree and I ate” (Gen. 3:12). It is critical to note that Adam does not only shift blame to another human being, but ultimately onto the source of all being Itself, “for the woman You gave to be with me.” The twice repeated “gave”—God’s giving of Eve to Adam and Eve’s giving of the fruit to Adam—parallels God’s magnanimous creative act and woman’s destructive one. The repeated language accentuates the offensiveness of Adam’s accusatory defense of his own malfeasance: Adam equates the divine “giving” that engenders the relational in human existence with the human “giving” that attempts to overcome relational humanity by “becoming like God” (3:5). God fixed boundaries between heaven and earth; humanity seeks to blur those boundaries, threatening a relapse into chaos. The question, “Where are you?” is not answered but evaded. Thus, the primal sin was not simply disobedience, but evading the philosophical discourse demanded of Adam to address a lament about the human condition expressed midrashically in God’s “Alas!”. The consequence of Adam’s evasion is a profound alienation from the divine questioner, marked by a doubly emphasized eviction from the Garden that both “sends out” (vayishalchehu) and “expels” (vayigaresh) Adam (Gen. 3:23–4). (p.31) Failure to reflect and think things through does not merely result in philosophical immaturity. It also impacts negatively on the formation of relationships. When God asked the question that was intended to elicit thoughtfulness, the question also anticipated some kind of dialogue that would establish a rapport between the questioner and the questioned. A midrashic word-play on Adam’s expulsion from the garden closes the circle that began with a lament, eichah (“Alas!”). It uproots it from its later historical context of destruction in Lamentations and positions Adam vis-à-vis the Garden parallel to Page 7 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning Israel’s post destruction exilic state vis-à-vis Jerusalem.32 The question/lament, “Where are you?/Alas,” cannot safely be shirked but, unanswered or dodged, also risks catastrophe and historical rupture. The first eichah (“Alas!”) of Lamentations, which specifically mourns the loneliness of Jerusalem in its devastation—“Alas, lonely sits the city”—is an ironic reflection of the midrashically read eichah of God’s first question, or, at least, of Adam’s response to it. Adam’s response blames God for saddling him with a partner and amounts to a preference for the very “not good” state of loneliness that God’s creation of woman was so compassionately meant to remedy. The eichah of Lamentations mournfully echoes the loneliness born of destruction to which Adam was oblivious in his response.33 Cain’s Unreflective Moment A subsequent divine–human encounter, with the second generation of humankind, is also initiated by a divine question posed to Cain, “Why are you distressed and why is your face fallen?” (Gen. 4:6). Once again, God’s question evokes the human condition of despair, frustration, and anger in response to failure and God’s rejection. However, here, there is no philosophical engagement whatsoever with God’s question; Cain’s only response is the brute violence of murder. In other words, not only does Cain avoid any introspection in his response, as did Adam, but Cain newly responds with the instinctual aggression that has often reduced humankind to the level of (p.32) animals. The complete absence of context that precedes Cain’s words to Abel—“And Cain said to his brother Abel” (Gen. 4:8)—itself indicates the lack of any relationship between Cain and Abel. As Ellen van Wolde, who attributes meaning to what many scholars consider a textual omission, states, “This ‘empty’ speaking would then suggest, or testify to, the negation of the existence of the other as an equal, as a brother, and it can be seen pointing ahead to the actual elimination of the other.”34 An alternative reading, which understands the verse as “And Cain spoke against his brother,” further highlights this lack.35 In contrast to the absence of reflection, the only speech conducted with another human being in this narrative is acrimonious and therefore destructive. Murderous act logically follows acrimonious speech in this rendering. The ethical gravity of avoiding reflection and authentic dialogue escalates from leaving another human being despondent and distraught, bereft of comfort, to the murder of the other. On the heels of the primal murder, which is also a fratricide, the next question extends the query of the very first addressed to Adam from “Where are you?” to “Where is your brother?” Having initially failed to elicit any reflection concerning the self, the question now moves to the other essential component of human existence: the other. Again, as with His question “Where are you?” addressed to Adam, God demands that Cain reflect on what it is to be human. Yet, here, in the rhetorical rebuff, pleading both a cognitive ignorance and an ethical solipsism of “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” (Gen. 4:9), there is no evasion of the question. There is only a rejection of its premise. It is “both Page 8 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning false and insolent. Only a murderer renounces the obligations of brotherhood.”36 Cain’s first response—“I do not know”—constitutes a lie, whose offense is aggravated by its further claim of ignorance. Cain’s denial resonates with the overtones of the “knowledge of good and evil” human beings were said to acquire in the preceding narrative. His feigning ignorance as to his brother’s whereabouts amounts to a denial of any ethical awareness and therefore absolves him of criminality. In his defense, Cain might even be alluding to the fact that he has avoided the very offense his parents committed of wanting to become like God. The term “keeper” (shomer) connotes power and control as well.37 (p.33) His reply then arrogantly amounts to, “Why do You expect me to know where my brother is when only You have the authority to control others and have already punished human beings for attempting to encroach on your domain?” But Cain deepens the philosophical insult and issues a resounding “no” to the responsibility and care for the other that constitutes the very essence of the human, that “help” (ezer) which originally motivated the creation of another human being in addition to the “lonely” first. Underlying the separation of one human being into two is the acknowledgment by God that loneliness is not good and its remedy is to create a “fitting helper for him” (Gen. 2:18). The essential element of all relationship, then, is “help” (ezer) or assistance. Cain’s disavowal of this notion of ezer then corresponds philosophically to his material act of obliterating the other. Despite no admission by Cain, nor any forensic evidence of it, God knows of the murder from Cain’s response. Care for the other is the only barrier to harming or exploiting the other, and so when Cain disavows his responsibility, God immediately knows the inevitable outcome of such a stance and asks the next question rhetorically “What have you done?” (Gen. 4:10). Cain’s response simply persists in his ethical morass that is only concerned with his own welfare, for “anyone that meets me will kill me” (Gen. 4:14). God’s response to Cain’s anxiety directs itself precisely to the ethics of indifference espoused by Cain’s own rejection of being his “brother’s keeper.” God agrees to be Cain’s keeper, to care for him and to protect him, ensuring his survival by “marking” him (Gen. 4:15). Rashi captures the thrust of this gesture, if not its literal meaning, by identifying the mark with a letter of God’s name engraved on Cain’s forehead.38 God responds to the image of God within himself that Cain abandoned, and which he eradicated in another, by enhancing it. God externalized what should constitute the internal make-up of the human, but which Cain failed to assimilate. In its protective role, the mark also acts as a constant reminder of Cain’s shame in leading a life wholly incongruous with the mark. But the mark bears a further signification of a “sevenfold vengeance” (Gen. 4:15) on those who breach its protection. Cain is the first to somehow embody the number seven, which resonates with the divine order of creation. Cain’s dismal philosophical failure destines him to not only externalize the divine element within him that constitutes his humanity which he betrayed. Page 9 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning He is also stamped with the number that represents the systematic ordering of the creation that he so violently disturbed. The cumulative failures of Adam and Cain just proposed lead to a global state of philosophical impoverishment as signified by the report that, “It was then that men began (huchal) to invoke the Lord by name” (Gen. 4:26). (p.34) Though there is a debate among traditional commentators over whether to read the term “began” as “profane” (i.e. they profaned by invoking God’s name liberally), Rashbam reads it as “began,” and his identification of the activity begun is particularly apropos our analysis. He claims that they began to pray to God because of all the new suffering that emerged at that time.39 Just as previously some pain, anguish, or despair posed an unexploited opportunity to pursue philosophical investigation, suffering now results not in independent inquiry toward the truth, but in religiosity, dependence, and abdication of personal responsibility in favor of submission to heteronomous authority. Rebekah’s Philosophical Shriek Biblical narrative moves further in a philosophically oriented direction when human beings, rather than God, initiate questioning. Evoking Edvard Munch’s painting, The Scream of Nature,40 Rebekah shrieks out of the agonizing pain of her pregnancy, “If so, why do I exist?” (Gen. 25:22). As a result, for the first time in biblically recorded history, a human being is prompted to “inquire (lidrosh) of the Lord” (Gen. 25:22) to direct her speculation upward and to engage in some form of metaphysics to investigate the ultimate question of meaning.41 Though the first divine question expressed a divine need for comfort, in this case, the question seeks comfort from God. Human inquiry elicits a response from on high but, rather than its traditional reading as some kind of blessing adumbrating Jacob’s future overcoming of Esau, it responds to the ultimate existential question emerging from the depths of despair, with a prospect of further despair that defines the human condition:42 “Two nations are in your womb. Two peoples out of your insides shall separate. One people shall be mightier than the other and the older shall be subservient to the younger” (Gen. 25:23). (p.35) The emphasis is on common origins of human beings in the same “womb,” out of the same organic “insides” of gestation. Yet, despite this nascent bond accentuated by the image of twins conceived and incubating at the very same time, they are destined to “separate” and form distinct national identities. Divisiveness engenders conflict and the inevitable resolution of the victor and the vanquished. This dismal future does not conform to any natural expectations associated with seniority or traditional familial hierarchy privileging the first born, since the younger can overcome the older. There is hardly a semblance of order in this disorder. The victor’s primacy is not even justified by any particular merit, achieved solely by power or by the determinative factors of natural selection.43 Instead of consolation, Rebekah’s primal search for meaning is met with the prospect of a Hobbesian world defined by conflict, discord, and Page 10 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning randomness. Rebekah’s philosophical cri de coeur invites resignation to the prospect of history as an endless repetition of the Cain and Abel story, pitting sibling against sibling as the natural law of human affairs in the world. An intriguing scholarly emendation of the word for ‘I” (anokhi), vowelizing it differently to read, “am I stricken” (enokheh), captures precisely the way I conceive of the question, viewing suffering at its core.44 I would only supplement that interpretation of Rebekah’s brokenness over her painful pregnancy with her distress over the dismal prospects of human history as predicted by the “blessing.” Though the general human condition as presented by the prophecy might seem inevitable, it can be overcome to some extent on an individual scale. That is, the choice still remains in each discrete instance whether to play by its dismal rules of power and exploitation or by a different moral standard. Rebekah had that choice, and although the particular relationship between the two children may have been divinely predetermined, it remained subject to alternative means of realization. Instead of subterfuge, lies, and betrayal, Rebekah could have chosen another route—that of disclosure, forthrightness, and respect. One would have expected her to have the courtesy to openly confront Isaac with the predetermined fate of their children. This would have left his rightful prerogative to bless each son undisturbed and preserved the integrity of both her son’s characters and her spousal relationship. Rebekah, (p.36) instead, resigns herself to a life informed by the amoral logic of the prediction and resorts to choices steeped in betrayal and deception. There is a telling discrepancy, noted by all the major medieval commentators, in Rebekah’s plan as outlined to Jacob. Rebekah adds the phrase “before God” (lifnei YHVH) in her report of Isaac’s intentions to bless Esau, which does not appear when Isaac originally states his intentions to Esau.45 While Isaac instructs Esau to bring him food “so that I may give you my innermost blessing before I die” (Gen. 27:4), Rebekah quotes him saying “I will bless you before God before I die” (Gen. 27:7). The difference in meaning is noted in translation, for example by JPS as “with the Lord’s approval.” However, as she concocts her conspiracy to disguise Jacob and usurp Esau’s blessing, she conspicuously drops the phrase and describes the goal as “so that he may bless you before he dies” (Gen. 27:10). What this indicates is the conscious, or perhaps subconscious, reservations Rebekah might have had about the dubiousness of her conduct. Isaac innocently expresses the wish to exercise his paternal prerogative of passing on his preferential blessings to his children. Rebekah’s insertion of “before God” in her first recitation of Isaac’s wishes expresses her own belief that what she is about to do is divinely sanctioned. However, omitting God in her second reflects her subconscious awareness of the plan’s deviousness as a rogue victory, marked by divine absence. Page 11 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning Questions of Deceit The first serious question posed to Jacob, “Who are you?” follows along the existential connotations of the ones we have examined previously. We have explored the evolution from the first “Where are you?” inquiry by God of Adam, to the “Why do I exist?” cry of Rebekah, now, to a third question: “Who are you, my son?” This question expresses Isaac’s perplexity at encountering Jacob disguised as Esau (Gen. 27:18). Having just sent Esau on an assignment and expecting his return, what could the meaning of this question be? The address of the question to “my son” deepens the enigmatic sense of the question. Jacob has just assumed his brother’s identity in order to usurp his father’s assignment of the primogeniture. When Jacob asserts “I am Esau, your first born” (Gen. 27:19), fratricide is again committed, not of physical annihilation, but of annihilating his brother’s identity and the rights that go along with it. The moment Jacob stands before his father in the guise of Esau, he consigns Esau to oblivion of both person and possession. (p.37) The struggle traditional commentators have with the patent deceit practiced by Jacob on his father serves to highlight the egregious problem Jacob’s conduct raises. They all resort to various rationales to justify Jacob’s lie. Isaac Abarbanel, for example, reads Jacob’s lie as really the truth, for he had previously purchased Esau’s birthright and now stands legally in Esau’s shoes, as Esau, Isaac’s first born. Rashi, on the other hand, splits the statement into two separate assertions: “I am” and “Esau is your first born,” thus transforming what appears to be a lie into a grammatically distorted truth. However, if Isaac did not perceive the bifurcation of Jacob’s claim, and believed Jacob’s masquerade, I fail to see how the deception does not continue to be so, even according to Rashi’s interpretation.46 The weakness of the rationalizations merely highlights the egregiousness of Jacob’s behavior. Unlike God’s question of Cain, Isaac’s question of Jacob presents the opportunity for Jacob to retrieve what he has annihilated and restore his brother’s existence by admitting his own identity. Though his actual crime is clearly not as severe, Jacob’s response is actually more ethically offensive than Cain’s renunciation of responsibility for his brother. Jacob is about to live a lie at the expense of the other, but he does so feigning to care for the other. Not only does Jacob deny who he is, claiming “I am Esau your first born” (Gen. 27:19), but he does so within the context of feeding the hungry, the quintessential gesture of benevolence— “Pray, sit up and eat of my game.” Emmanuel Levinas offers a modern version of this prime ethical directive, when he states, “To give, to-befor-another, despite oneself, but in interrupting the for-oneself is to take the bread out of one’s own mouth, to nourish the hunger of another with one’s own fasting.”47 Destroying the other and his future is accomplished by Jacob’s subterfuge of caring for the other and his nourishment.48 Page 12 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning Scholars have subjected Jacob’s deceptive acquisition of the blessings to a thorough examination of its legal and moral implications. Some distinguish biblical legality and morality from modern jurisprudence on issues such as unconscionable bargains, mistake, and fraudulent transactions. Their conclusion is that, with the respect to deception carried out through disguise, the Bible shows no “moral condemnation of the stratagem of disguise…the perpetrator is not only exempt from punishment…but also gains the full (p.38) benefit aimed for.”49 However, my own analysis sharply differs in noting the subtle moral and legal condemnation of Jacob’s fraud that is embedded within the narrative and, in particular, the line of questioning he is manipulated into when he himself is ironically the victim of fraud. I maintain that it is no surprise that the next questions, aside from identity and directions, asked by Jacob, relate to deception and fraud.50 Upon realizing the switch of identities in his connubial bed, he confronts his father-in-law with a three-part question: “What have you done to me? Have I not worked for you in exchange for Rachel? And why did you deceive me?” (Gen. 29:25). The first phase of the questioning echoes two previous biblical questions. Those were posed respectively to Abraham and Isaac, who found themselves in a common situation where their wives were exposed to the sexual desires of a foreign king. Both of them misrepresent their wives’ identities as sisters rather than wives. The king then becomes aware of the deceit. In the case of Abraham, the king confronts him with the questions “What have you done to me? Why didn’t you tell me she was your wife?” (Gen 12:18). In the case of Isaac, the king angrily questions, “What have you done to us? One of the people might have lain with your wife!” (Gen 26:10). Both of these occasions involve accusations against another for orchestrating a situation where sexual relations would have been conducted with an unintended partner. However, in these prior narratives there was no substitution of one woman for another. Rather, what was hidden from the king was the marital status of the woman with whom relations were had. Was she (Sarah or Rebekah) single and permitted or another man’s spouse and prohibited? The contrast transforms the question into a kind of self-realization as well. Nothing technically prohibited Jacob’s sexual relations with an unmarried wrong woman. However, the question, “What did you do to me?” voices the same harm effected and resonates with his own choices in life. Though Jacob’s acquisition of the birthright may have been technically permissible since he had bought it from Esau pursuant to a legal transaction, there is still a very palpable harm caused to others, whether legally entitled or not.51 (p.39) The second of Jacob’s three questions (“Have I not worked for you in exchange for Rachel?”) introduces legality into the encounter, which problematizes the issue of ethics with law. Jacob’s question raises a contractual claim of an exchange of Jacob’s labor for his marriage to Rachel. The question Page 13 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning calls for enforcement of a mutually agreed verbal contract. Once again, Jacob’s own question invokes his own attempt to enforce a contractual right, but colored by the facts of the situation at hand. Jacob’s agreement with Laban involves the rights of third parties, in this case Rachel and Leah, and particularly Leah’s primogeniture preferential rights to marriage. Jacob is compelled to reassess his own ethics in a parallel situation. Though he may have had a contractual right to the primogeniture vis-à-vis Esau, there was no such right vis-à-vis his father’s right to assign it to the child of his choice.52 The morally dubious nature of his agreement, in its lack of concern for his brother, carries over into the same lack for Leah, Rachel’s sister. Her interests and rights, just like Esau, can be swept aside by legalities regardless of how it may affect their lives. The third question (“Why did you deceive me?”) assumes a different tone if it is not read in its usual accusatory sense, but, instead, as a sincere attempt to understand the reason for Laban’s deceit. Once the previous two questions prompted reflection on his own conduct, Jacob became aware that there was some deeper significance to his predicament than a mere swindling. This reading transforms the “why” into a genuine inquiry into the meaning of the deceit. There are two other instances in the Hebrew Bible where the interrogatory “Why have you deceived me?” appears, both associated with King Saul, and both involving a deceit conducted by the use of clothing that conceals identity.53 One occurs in the context of enmity and rivalry between Saul and David, who is Saul’s son-in-law. After Saul’s daughter Michal helps her husband David elude Saul’s guards, Saul asks her, “Why have you deceived me?” (1 Sam. 19:17). In the second, Saul is conducting a campaign to eradicate all witches from his kingdom. At the same time, he approaches a witch in disguise, which allows him to offer the witch asylum from his own deathly crusade against her profession. Upon discovery of his true identity, she asks the same question, “Why have you deceived me?” (1 Sam. 28:12). In both these (p.40) cases, the deceit involves rescuing another from certain death. Perhaps this tenor of the inquiry, of a deceit that salvages rather than destroys, layers Laban’s response. Jacob’s question echoes this sense of the possibility of something positive through deceit, of preserving someone else’s life that the other two of its biblical instances conveys. In Jacob’s case, the answer is that Leah’s rights and honor need to be preserved. Thus Jacob’s question elicits the same sense of a positive deceit which rehabilitates and rescues another’s dignity and self-worth. The successive line of questioning pursued by Jacob just examined prompts a reexamination of his own deceit with a new ethical consciousness. That questioning begins with a suddenly startling awareness signaled by the words “when morning came, it was Leah” (Gen. 29:25). Rashi adapts a midrash, which, though imaginative in its derivation, captures a certain truth that informs this whole analysis of Jacob’s questioning: in anticipation of what he recognizes as Page 14 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning Laban’s wiliness, Jacob prearranged signs for Rachel by which to ascertain her identity on the first conjugal night. Rachel, in turn, gave these to her sister to prevent the horrible shame her sister would endure as a result of being discovered as the wrong bride. Thus, Rachel sacrifices her identity, her future, and the love of her life, for the sake of another (in this case, she is a younger sibling sacrificing herself for an older), the exact opposite of Jacob’s own conduct vis-à-vis his older brother Esau. Questioning the Boundaries between the Human and the Divine Jacob’s newly acquired self-awareness does not steadily progress. Rachel provokes a question out of Jacob when she implores him to resolve her barrenness. In great anguish she pleads, “Give me children and if not I shall die!” (Gen. 30:1). Rachel’s existential pain of infertility mirrors Rebekah’s physical pain of pregnancy, in that its agony is so intense as to be tantamount to a negation of life and being. Jacob’s question in response reveals a certain detached philosophical maturity. Jacob’s philosophical discovery here—“Am I in place of God who has denied you fruit of the womb?” (Gen. 30:2)—provides a corrective to the misconception in the Garden regarding the human being’s place in the world. Originally the attempt to “be like God” by eating from the tree was a transgression of boundaries, a distortion of the definitional lines demarcated by the organizing activity of creation. The transgression threatened a regression back to the primordial disorder that existed before the creative organization exercised by God. Jacob, in a stark reversal of humanity’s desire to trespass into God’s domain, articulates his acknowledgment of the clear (p.41) boundaries between God and human beings. In addition he asserts that principle with respect to reproduction, or that ability a human being has that most approximates, the role of creator, and therefore most prone to the blurring of boundaries between the Creator and His creations. However, regardless of its cognitive maturity, its tone reflects an ethical constitution that is still somewhat stunted. First, Jacob poses his question angrily—“And Jacob was incensed with Rachel” (Gen. 30:2)—in response to Rachel’s suicidal desperation. Second, the question is a flippant shirking of his responsibility toward Rachel, as if to say, “Don’t ask me, ask someone else; I have nothing to do with this.” The wholly insensitive nature of Jacob’s questioning response comes to the fore when it is contrasted with the other time this question (“Am I in the place of God?”) is asked, posed by Joseph to his brothers (Gen. 50:19). The context there is that, fearful of retribution from Joseph, the brothers apprise Joseph of their father’s last testament calling for forgiveness. Like Rachel’s anticipation of death in the event of continuing barrenness, the brothers’ (perhaps false) report of their father’s wishes that Joseph should forgive them intimates impending doom. They offer to permanently indenture themselves to Joseph: “We are prepared to be your slaves” (Gen. 50:18). In response, Joseph reiterates Jacob’s question, “Am I in the place of God?” Page 15 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning On the philosophical plane, while Jacob’s question addressed the ontology of the human, Joseph’s directs itself to human relationship to history and human autonomy. The brothers believe that they exercise control over their past actions and their destiny. They are convinced they can somehow redeem the past and steer their future in the right direction by a precise measure for measure calculation—they sold Joseph into slavery; ergo, the proper recompense is to indenture themselves to Joseph. Here, unlike in Jacob’s case, Joseph elaborates on the meaning of his question, which extends further than simply the idea that only God has the right to seek retribution. He attacks their misconceived expansive view of human action, radically curtailing its scope: “For you intended me harm (ra‘) while God intended it for good (tov), so as to bring about what is on this day—the survival of so many people” (Gen. 50:20). By severing intent from the realization of the act of his sale into slavery, Joseph denies the brothers, and human beings in general, control over their actions once taken. Joseph strategically decouples tov from ra‘, placing the former on a divine plane, and the latter on the human.54 By desynchronizing tov and ra‘, Joseph alludes to the dual causality of the outcome of the Garden.55 (p.42) Although human beings gained the knowledge of tov and ra‘ in the Garden, and are responsible for their immediate actions, the ultimate effects of those actions are beyond their control.56 In a sense, Joseph offers a philosophical argument against the misconception in the Garden that knowledge of good and evil would render human beings godlike. Although that knowledge might be something held in common with God’s knowledge, it does not afford the control over the consequences of actions taken in accordance with it. Joseph’s argument is that while the brothers may know the distinction between good and bad they have no control over their destinies. They acted reprehensibly but God wielded ultimate power by directing the consequences of that act toward the good (tov).57 The ethical contrast between Jacob and Joseph as questioners could not be accentuated more, highlighting Jacob’s lack of moral sensibility. Joseph’s first reaction to the brothers’ fear of retribution just prior to posing his question is an emotional breakdown of weeping (Gen. 50:17). Joseph weeps more than any other biblical character, and this episode of weeping stands out from the previous six occasions on which he wept.58 In each of them, his tears are evoked by a familial reunion either with his brothers or his father, indicating an emotional overwhelm at the possibility of a recovered past from which he has been long estranged. However, since this encounter reflects the brothers’ ongoing fear of Joseph, this time, Joseph’s weeping laments the frustrated restoration of the relationship that those original reunions anticipated. Joseph’s weeping signals a longing for what is yet to be, while Jacob’s anger is a dismissal of Rachel’s yearning for a restoration of relationship. Page 16 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning In this context, it is of note that Rachel becomes the quintessential “weeper” over Israel’s loss and exile, as proclaimed in Jeremiah 31:14, “Rachel weeps for her children.” What is even more ironic, in terms of the midrashic view of Rachel, (p.43) is that her argument to God in defense of her “children” is that she overcame her jealousy and sacrificed her marriage to Jacob for her sister’s sake, when she refused to reveal Leah’s identity and shame her on Jacob’s wedding night.59 In my interpretation, the midrashic Rachel’s overwhelming and compelling compassion contrasts starkly with Jacob’s insensitive dismissiveness. After asking this question, Joseph guarantees that he will support and provide for his brothers and their children, whereas Jacob offers no support to Rachel, who is distressed because she cannot bear children. Joseph comforts (“vayenahem”) his brothers, while Jacob aggravates Rachel’s pain with his own anger. Joseph offers consolation to his brothers—“Don’t worry, I will support you and your children and he comforted (vayenahem) them and spoke kindly to them” (Gen. 50:21). The comfort he offers his brothers ironically recalls the comfort they offered their own father for the disappearance of Joseph from their father’s life that they themselves caused (Gen. 37:35). From a literary point of view, the comfort Joseph offers his brothers compensates for the vacuity of the rejected comfort the brothers offered to their father, both by Joseph’s very survival and his compassionate gesture. Finally, all of Joseph’s sympathetic responses to his brothers’ anxiety are informed by an attitude that seems to indicate a surfeit of kindness, “and he spoke kindly to them,” or, more literally, “to their hearts (al libam)” (Gen. 50:21). This was the opposite of their own behavior toward Joseph at the very beginning of the Joseph narrative, when they could not even speak civilly with him (Gen. 37:4). When Jacob questioned Rachel, “Am I in the place of God?,” he did not soothingly address her heart, but berated her about the uselessness of her womb. Jacob, faced with the deeply felt death-like existence his wife expresses in her own question “Why am I?,” refuses to offer her comfort. Thus, the same question that intersects Jacob’s and Joseph’s lives at decisive junctures stimulates critical reflection relating to ethics and ontology. One final question to probe more deeply in Genesis concerns the place of humanity and God in the world. It, like the previous question, relates to a potential confusion between the human and divine realms. Here we return to an earlier passage in the narrative, when the brothers first arrive in Egypt and are still ignorant of Joseph’s true identity. Joseph, who now is the second-incommand of all of Egypt, ironically casts the brothers’ own identities into question, accusing them of entering Egypt as subversive spies. Joseph issues an ultimatum to them that would refute that accusation—“Bring your youngest brother to me” (Gen. 42:20). Joseph compounds the excruciating choice he has forced them to make of separating Benjamin from their father by secretly returning the funds they used to purchase provisions from the Egyptian regime Page 17 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning back into their saddlebags. During their journey back home, the (p.44) ruse is discovered. Terrified by the prospect of being accused of thievery, they begin to question the cause of their present predicament: “Their hearts sank and, trembling, they turned to one another saying ‘What is this that God has done to us?’” (Gen. 42:28). On a superficial level, their question reveals a simple acknowledgment of some providential design and a feeling of impending doom.60 However, the first part of this passage demands a deeper reading because of what it suggests about the state of the relationship between the brothers at that point. Before we read their question, the text tells us of “hearts [that] sank” (vayetze libam, literally “hearts went out”), “trembling” (vayehredu), and the turning of “each to his brother” (ish el ahiv), demanding some reflection about their meaning as the subject of what has been “done to” them (asah lanu). There are two previous occasions where there was a turn to each other, or “a man to his brother.” The first involved the brothers’ criminal conspiracy against their brother Joseph which led to selling him into slavery—“And they said, each man to his brother, Behold the dreamer is coming” (Gen. 37:19). The second occurs once Joseph has risen from slavery to the highest echelons of power in the Egyptian royal court and the brothers acknowledge their guilt. In Joseph’s disguised presence they confess: “And they said, each man to his brother, we are surely guilty…” (Gen. 42:21). Both are prefaced by the term that signifies a simple quote, “and they said,” indicating nothing more than a detached observation. However, in contrast, a phrase that runs much deeper emotionally, baring their internal being to each other, prefaces this final “man to his brother.” “Their hearts sank,” literally translated as “hearts went out,” expresses a horrifying dread and vulnerability to what they perceive as Joseph’s opportunity for vengeance. R. David Qimhi conveys the depth of their existential exposure by analogizing the expression “hearts went out” to the lover’s “soul” that “went out” in the Song of Songs, upon the disappearance of her beloved (S. of S. 5:6).61 Rather than a mere objective remark, like the cause of the lover’s devastation, it conveys an absence of relationship that leaves all of the brothers vulnerable and exposed, emotionally united by the absence of their brother. Once her “soul went out,” the Song’s lover wanders the streets searching aimlessly for her beloved, becoming the object of ridicule and assault by the very authorities designated to protect the public (“The watchmen who patrol the town struck me, bruised me; The guards of the walls stripped me of my mantle,” S. of S. 5:7). Like the Song’s lover, there is a link between the absence of a loved one and becoming vulnerable to derision and attack. In this case, it is exposure to the Egyptian regime and the one charged with governance and authority over (p.45) the brothers. Joseph’s penultimate act with respect to his brothers of speaking “to their hearts” (Gen. 50:21) also resolves the redemptive process that began with this moment. The hearts that were dislocated by Joseph’s secret return of their Page 18 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning funds in Genesis 42:28 (“and their hearts went out [sank] and they trembled with each other”) were restored by Joseph in Genesis 50:21 (“and He spoke kindly to them [to their hearts]).” The only prior biblical incident of “trembling” highlights the intensity of Joseph’s brothers’ experience here: Isaac was “seized by a violent trembling” (Gen. 27:33) on first realizing that Jacob had deceitfully appropriated the blessing for which Esau now comes to claim. That trembling reverberates with betrayal and a dissolution of familial bonds between parents and children and between siblings. Shattering hatred and murderous intent replace those bonds—“And Esau hated Jacob for the blessing his father had blessed him, and he said to himself [his heart] ‘I will kill my brother Jacob when the days of mourning for my father approach” (Gen. 27:41). The brothers’ trembling echoes those same irreparable familial fractures that Isaac’s trembling signified between father and son and between brother and brother. They also irreparably fragmented the family, tearing a son away from his father, estranging themselves from their father, and severing, what they thought would be permanently, their relationship with their brother. The rare repetition of the term “trembling” at the end of Isaac’s life and at a critical juncture in the brothers’ journey of self-discovery, link up in this deep sense of familial breakdown. For the first time, the brothers actually experience to the very core of their being, the pain, loss, and fragmentation they themselves have incurred. The question the brothers immediately ask on experiencing this trembling dread (“What has God done to us?”) spurs them to explore further the existential implications of their relational state of being. What ensues in the narrative then is a re-enactment of their original crime, but this time in full view of their father. The necessity of returning to Egypt with their youngest brother Benjamin forces the brothers to openly inflict the pain they inflicted surreptitiously previously of depriving their father of a beloved child. They must now replicate that very same act, but this time directly confront their father’s anguish and be held accountable for what they wish to do. They now stand openly accused by their father of potentially sending him “to hell with grief (beyagon she’olah)” (Gen. 42:38), for “committing evil against” him (Gen. 43:6), and for causing him to resign himself to permanent bereavement (Gen. 43:14). Given that the question “What has God done to us?” compelled an experiential transformation and an existential reexamination previously, there is now also concrete evidence of profound character transformations in some of the brothers. Reuben and Judah now voice a willingness to do everything in their power to preserve the family, safeguard the beloved child’s relationship (p.46) with their father, and prevent their father from experiencing further pain. Reuben is prepared to sacrifice his own family and children should he fail to return Benjamin safely to his father (“may my two children die if I don’t bring him back to you,” Gen. 42:37), while Judah guarantees at the cost of suffering Page 19 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning for the remainder of his life should he fail (“If I don’t bring him back to you and present him to you then I will remain a sinner against you all the days,” Gen. 43:9). R. David Qimhi conveys the full thrust of the risk Judah takes by explicating that the nature of a life of “sinning against” Jacob involves permanent excommunication from his father’s presence.62 Judah realizes that is precisely what he should have suffered for tearing Joseph away from his father’s life. The Case of Moses: Questioning His Way from Royalty to a Stranger in a Foreign Land When we are introduced to Moses, the next major biblical hero, the very first words he utters are in the form of a question. His very first recorded act entailed murder with no questions asked, the most violent reaction possible to injustice. Since the only details offered in the Bible’s description of the first conflict Moses witnessed are the ethnic backgrounds of the slave and the taskmaster involved, it seems that this conflict was rooted in ethnic or tribal difference; Moses “saw an Egyptian man beating a Hebrew man (ish mitzri makeh ish ‘ivri)” (Exod. 2:11). Moses’ first attempt to engage the conflict is to search for a person who is not identified by his ethnic background, but only by his humanity. The search is futile, for “he looked here and there and saw that there was no man (vayyar’ ki’eyn ’ish).” Another search that ends with finding “no man” corroborates the fact that Moses’ search is similarly for someone willing to intercede to stop injustice, rather than simply making sure there are no witnesses to what he is about to do. That other appearance is in the context of God also searching for someone to intercede in a situation where there is “no justice”: “And the Lord saw it and it displeased Him for there was no judgment (mishpat), and He saw that there was no ish. He gazed long but no one intervened” (Isa. 59:15–16). The simple description of “man” without any further characterization stands out in direct contradistinction to the scene described of two men defined by their respective ethnicities. In other words, Moses fails to find anyone simply identified as a “man.” What confronts him are only those defined by their nationality, a trait that divides, rather than unites, the humanity and gender (p. 47) that they share.63 Once he failed to discover an alternative to the divisive reality that faced him, Moses resorted to violence. Moses saw violence as the only means to immediately halt the particular injustice he witnessed, but not as a solution to a long-term problem that was endemic to society as a whole. The second time Moses encounters injustice, he intervenes with a question: “Why do you strike your fellow?” (Exod. 2:13). The next scene, in contrast to the first, involves oppression among those of a common nationality—“two Hebrew men quarreling (shenei anashim ‘ivrim)” (Exod. 2:13)—and is a refutation of the thesis that ethnic and tribal differences are the sole causes of social injustice. Rather than an empirical study, this scene evokes an inquiry into the roots of oppression and exploitation between those who do share a common ancestry and Page 20 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning social bond: “Why do you strike your fellow (re‘echa)?” The question reflects an acknowledgment that his prior perception of the sole cause of injustice was misconceived. These problems of injustice and exploitation are pervasive across racial borders and defy resolution through violence and murder. There is a “why” that demands thought and ultimately some kind of philosophical rationale to sustain any campaign against injustice. Whatever action taken to eradicate injustice would remain only temporary and unsuccessful without theoretical ideas to underpin it. Moses’ question is met by two further questions posed by the fighting men. Once again, as we saw with the original question posed to Adam, their responses fail to seriously engage the issue raised by Moses’ original question. They merely accentuate the very problem whose underlying rationale Moses seeks to discover. The first question the offender responds with is: “Who appointed you ruler and chief man over us?” (Exod. 2:14), which reflects the oppressors’ worldview colored by the offender’s own ethical constitution. He simply cannot conceive of human actions driven by anything other than power, exploitation, and the advantageous exercise of control in order to enhance one’s own position, prestige, and power. The second question then logically follows the first in its attribution of sinister motives to Moses’ actions: “Are you planning on killing me as you killed the Egyptian?” The first question’s accusation of a power-driven Moses aspiring to leadership then transforms Moses’ murderous act from a harsh revolt against injustice to a political conspiracy to seize the reins of authority from Pharaoh. Moses’ reaction (vayira’), normally taken as fear, instead conveys a sense of “startled and shaken.”64 He then declares, “Surely the thing is known!” which now means that he realizes the futility of asking questions meant to evoke serious reflection from those he has confronted. “What is known” is what appears to (p.48) Moses as an immutable Darwinist law of human nature to which he feels he must resign himself. Defeatism in the face of such a pessimistic and philosophically vapid view of humanity leads Moses to retreat and abandon any hope that his activism might alter that law. However, even by running away to Midian, Moses cannot escape his own nature: his penchant for justice and his revulsion at oppression. When confronted with persecution and unfairness, now in the form of gender discrimination, he is once again compelled to intervene and set things right. Moses “rises to the defense” of women who have been deprived of their rights by men (Exod. 2:17), but the perception among observers remains the same as before. When asked to account for their prompt return after watering their flocks (for male harassment was a common cause of delay in their water-drawing routine prior to Moses’ intervention), the women describe how “an Egyptian man” (ish mitzri) had rescued them from the “hand of the shepherds” (Exod. 2:19). Since the common perception of human actions is in terms of conflict, power, and opposition, the women frame their view accordingly by precisely choosing a familiar adversarial binary between Egyptians and shepherds. Moses is not described as simply a Page 21 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning man, but “an Egyptian man,” defined by his national loyalties. The reader of the biblical narrative has already been advised in a previous episode, involving Joseph and his advice to his brothers regarding their declared occupation, of some longstanding hostility between shepherds and Egyptians, “for all shepherds are abhorrent to Egyptians” (Gen. 46:34). Thus, rather than ascribe Moses’ actions to an acute ethical posture that was offended by injustice, they adopt the language of aggression, and frame his actions within the context of belligerence and competing interests between Egyptians and shepherds. Though arguing a different perspective, Yoram Hazony’s view of the biblical shepherd trope is wholly consistent with my approach to this narrative. Moses acts in accord with Hazony’s notion of the shepherd who refuses “to accept the order of the universe as it has been decreed, and the demand to know why it cannot be made to conform to the demands of his own outsider ethics.”65 In my account, Moses’ outsider ethics, signified by his assumed occupation as a shepherd, also challenges the commonly accepted ethics, rather than divine decree. Moses was self-interested rather than selfless, in the view of Jethro’s daughters. Yet, Moses finds a kindred spirit in Jethro, who questions his daughters about why they “abandoned the man (ha’ish)” Moses, rather than invite him to share a meal (Exod. 2:20). In its indignation at ingratitude and its ethical corrective, it is, by its ethical reciprocity, an implicit recognition of Moses’ true motivation in driving off the harassing male shepherds. The medieval commentator Seforno corroborates this by considering Jethro’s question a (p.49) reprimand to his daughters for failing to reciprocate Moses’ kindness: “since he is a guest and a compassionate man, you should have reciprocated with the kindness of hospitality.”66 In contrast to the daughters’ description, Jethro refers to Moses not as “the Egyptian man,” but simply as “the man.” That Moses has finally found a home of shared universal moral sentiment is evidenced by the words used to describe whom Moses consents “to live with”—not “Jethro,” or “the Midianite,” as he is called elsewhere, but simply “the man (ha’ish).” We are introduced to Moses by a narrative progression that begins in his futile search for a “man” and finds its denouement in his discovery of a fellow “man” who shares his universal ethic. The cost of this iconoclastic ethic, however, is his complete alienation from his past, his people both inherited and adopted, and his family—an existential loneliness memorialized in his son’s name, “Gershom,” whose etymology is the root for foreign, alien, distant, and uprooted: “I have been a stranger in a foreign land” (Exod. 2:22). The Questioning of Becoming Unlike Adam’s first encounter with God, which elicits evasion, Moses’ first Godly encounter at the burning bush elicits a self-reflective question: “Who am I? (mi anokhi)” (Exod. 3:11). Many of the traditional commentators understand this question as a general expression of humility. Moses therefore raises a possible reason for disqualification as a potential liberator of Israel. His claim is that he Page 22 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning is too insignificant to gain notice by Pharaoh, let alone convince him to release his slave population.67 The specific context, though, reveals a further dimension to the question that complements Moses’ humility. God’s commission of Moses is anchored in Israel’s suffering: God hears Israel’s “groaning” (Exod. 2:23), “mourning” (2:24), and “cries” (3:7, 9); sees their “plight” (3:7) and their “oppression” (3:9); and knows their “suffering” (3:7). God’s mind and senses are barraged by pain, compelling a call for human leadership to address its source and halt it. A divine voice shot through with the pain of these victims logically addresses a man who, himself, witnessed the oppressive labor they experience and was moved to act autonomously, absent divine fiat. Moses’ questioning of his own self-worth, of his own “I” (mi anokhi in Exod. 3:11), contrasts itself to the divine “I” (anokhi in Exod. 3:6) that (p.50) addresses him now. While it is true that Moses witnessed Israel’s suffering and reacted decisively, he ultimately turned his back on it and fled, assuming the identity of a shepherd. The introduction to the incident of the burning bush specifically depicts Moses as a shepherd: “and Moses tended his father-in-law Jethro’s flock” (Exod. 3:1). He tends to flocks and travels the desert in an abandonment of any social attachments or commitments. A trend in the midrashic tradition accounts for God’s appearance in a thorn bush by His empathy with His people. God is said to inform Moses that, “from the place that I speak with you, from among the thorns, it is as if I share in their suffering.”68 As they suffer He suffers with them. The Voice therefore, that is suffused with the suffering of others, mirrors the Moses that once was but is no longer, the Moses that could no longer tolerate witnessing pain because he himself was no longer tolerated by those who suffered it. Confronted with this startling phenomenon, Moses’ question resonates with the angst of a confused identity. He once was a radical activist who struck a blow against injustice, but he now spends most of his time in the desert isolated from those most in need of his leadership. The question “Who am I?” translates into the question of whether Moses can go back and retrieve a former self that he has in effect renounced. Although Chapter 3 in this book is dedicated to probing the meaning and implications of God’s “name” YHWH extensively, I must at least cursorily address God’s name here, too. God’s name is an intimate response to Moses’ vulnerable question about the nature of his self. God’s assurance, “I will be (ehyeh) with you (imakh)” (Exod. 3:12) in response to Moses’ self-doubt must be read in conjunction with the divine name “ehyeh asher ehyeh” revealed to Moses two verses later (3:14), in response to his request. Whatever else it might mean, it connotes becoming and being (whatever God chooses to be), rooted as it is in the Hebrew for “to be.” God does not have a proper name, and so God cannot be captured or called upon or controlled, as was the case for other divine beings in the Ancient Near East. Although I will deal extensively with the meaning of this “name” of ehyeh asher ehyeh in Chapter 3, for the purposes of this chapter God’s revealed name responds directly to Moses’ question of identity. God’s name does Page 23 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning not divulge the comfort of divine support, but rather amounts to a philosophical response to Moses’ quest for what constitutes the self. As such, it defines the self as becoming. God’s reassurance of “I will be with you” bears dual connotations that relate the process of becoming to both God and Moses. God advises Moses that He will accompany Moses in the capacity of one who becomes. Correspondingly it also resonates with the notion that the “I will be,” the characteristic of becoming, is “with you,” that is, is part of Moses’ nature as well. Moses, (p.51) like God, is not fixed or static, but also “becomes” or is ever-evolving and changing. The narrative recounting Moses’ birth and life up until the revelation at the burning bush moves along this theme of becoming, evolving, escaping the grip of others, and gaining independent control of one’s life. Moses’ own name, in its biblically assigned etymology, depicts both his origins in water where his mother placed him as an infant adrift in the river (Exod. 2:3), and subsequently on his extraction from it by Pharoah’s daughter’s handmaiden (2:5). Thus, from a literary point of view, Moses’ life commences in fluidity that portends change and the ability to make transitions between various identities. Yet that fluidity is disrupted when Pharaoh’s daughter names him “Moses.” What indicates the disruption is that this naming occurs not at the point one would expect of discovering Moses as an infant, the stage of Moses’ birth vis-à-vis Pharoah’s daughter. Rather, she names Moses when he “grew up (vayigdal ha’yeled)” (Exod. 2:10). Years after his infancy, she attributes his very existence to her own “drawing him out of the water.” Her naming of Moses after he had assumed responsibility for his life signifies her attempt to capture him in her own image of him and freeze his identity then. The verse indicates that, at this point, his maturation does not involve any self-development as an independent entity, since it describes the “child” growing until now with no name. Thus, at this stage, the disruptive naming indicates that his “growth” is completely within the control of others. The very next verse (Exod. 2:11) curiously introduces us to the next phase of Moses’ life with the exact same phrase “growing up (vayigdal moshe).”69 Moses grows up a second time, but this time the phrase is immediately followed by Moses’ “going out (vayetze).” This “growing up” marks a sudden shift from a controlled life to an independent one. It signals Moses’ departure from the cloistered palace or the environment that raised him, to what will soon become a total withdrawal from it. Moses now begins the journey of autonomously shaping his own identity. Moses’ destination when “going out” is to “his brothers” (Exod. 2:11). There is a subtle ambivalence in the use of the term “his brothers (achiv),” which Exodus 2:11 repeats twice: “And Moses grew up and went out to his brothers and he saw their suffering, and he sees an Egyptian man beating a Hebrew man from his brothers.” The first appearance of “brothers” describes those to whom Moses Page 24 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning initially ventures, and then, when he observes an Egyptian beating a Hebrew. Abraham ibn Ezra strikingly interprets the first reference to brothers to apply to Egyptians, “for he had been in the king’s palace.” As far as Moses was aware, his blood relations (p.52) were Egyptians.70 His initial foray out of his sheltered, aristocratic life and into the world of the street was thus intended to observe the common lives of his fellow Egyptians. The end of the verse describing the oppressive treatment of a Hebrew by an Egyptian with the phrase “from among his brothers” is consistent in its ambiguity with its appearance at the beginning. That second reference to brothers resonates with the duality of Moses’ origins—both men are his brothers, one by virtue of nature and the other by nurture. The verse now captures the tightrope which Moses traverses, slung between his Egyptian and Hebrew identities, and reads—Moses ventured out to witness the suffering that pervaded both his Egyptian brothers and Hebrew brothers and views the scene where an Egyptian brother is beating a Hebrew brother. His radical choice at that instant, to kill the Egyptian, decisively severs his ties to his Egyptian roots, breaking out of the community that until this point definitively molded his personality and destiny. In the next instant of the narrative he severs his ties to his Hebrew roots when he intervenes in a struggle between two Hebrews and his involvement is rejected—“Who ever appointed you as a chief and leader over us?” (Exod. 2:14). Moses breaks free of both communities and flees on the road to safety, but at the same time heads toward achieving complete autonomy. Moses’ very first act after turning his back on both his pasts is a kind of reversal of both his births, literally with the Hebrews and figuratively in his subsequent naming by the Egyptians. In the first instance, Moses was placed in the water, and in the second, he was taken out of the water as memorialized by his name, anchoring his life in destinies instantiated by others. On escaping his roots (Exod. 2:15), he camps at a well, protects the rights of water-drawers, and waters another’s flock. His growing autonomy is literarily captured by the transition from an image of being drawn from water to images of control over drawn water and watering. The becoming signified by God’s term “I will be (ehyeh)” jars Moses into retrieving that sense of self he had gained upon leaving Egypt but that his question “Who am I?” now indicates he has since lost. God instructs him that imitatio dei consists in living a life that mimics “I will be who I will be (ehyeh asher ehyeh)”—a life of choosing and becoming. Job Reverses Adam’s Failure I conclude this examination of biblical questions with another one that links up with the question that began this chapter. It is an all-embracing question of (p. 53) God’s in the book of Job that looks back at the very first primordial question God poses to Adam, “Where are you?” (Gen. 3:9). There are thirty seven chapters of agonizing dialogue, reflection, and existential torment trying to come to grips with the theological problem raised by Job’s devastating, and Page 25 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning undeserved, losses of everything he possessed and loved. The destruction of all his property, the deaths of all his children, and affliction with excruciatingly painful disease, despite his irreproachably righteous character (Job 1:1), plunge Job into a seemingly irresolvable theological crisis. Finally God Himself enters the scene with His own question that silences Job’s persistent and anguished questioning until this point. God formulates the question as an inquisitorial admonishment of Job, asking, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” (Job 38:4). That question/accusation attenuates the philosophical resonance of the primordial “Where are you?” Right after asking the question, God constrains Job’s response by demanding that he preconditions it on knowledge and understanding: “Speak if you know [are familiar with] understanding (binah)” (Job 38:4). This is consistent with Proverbs, which also anchors the “foundation” of the world in wisdom and understanding—“the Lord founded the earth by wisdom, established the heavens by understanding” (Prov. 3:19) As noted at the start of this chapter, creation involves designing, organizing, and arranging, rather than creating sui generis. God places that creative ordering beyond the limits of Job’s, or anyone else’s, human intellect. Humanity’s task is to discern the traces of the originating wisdom that undergirds the world it experiences. But God’s question here is a response to the very first question Job poses thirtyfive chapters previously. Tormented by physical pain, material impoverishment, and familial loss, Job asks, “Why did I not die at birth, expire as I came forth from the womb?” (Job 3:11). Repeated imaginings of death as a release from suffering follow this initial yearning for non-existence. Yet Job resists this “easy way out” and struggles to find meaning in the pain of existence. As Philippe Nemo describes this refusal to succumb to suicide, “While death would probably bring everything to a quiet end and a perfect peace, suffering continually awakens Job and obliges him to stay alive despite himself.”71 But Job’s primal question that instigated his suffering-suffused awakening is met with a long litany of natural phenomena whose understanding is beyond the reach of human intellect, signified by the tempest, the chaotic source of the voice that advises Job of his ignorance. The implication is that human beings cannot even fully gauge the meaning of their very own existence within the schema of God’s design, let alone plumb the ends of the natural universe. (p.54) However, God never criticizes Job for his questions, only for his expectation of comprehensive answers. In fact, God pointedly reprimands the friends “who have not spoken the truth about Me as did my servant Job” (Job 42:7). They simply accept, justify, placate, and engage in that age-old enterprise of theodicy, but they do not seriously question. By subscribing to platitudes and refusing to surrender an old theology that flies in the face of empirical truths, they would rather distort the observable facts to fit their ideology. They resort to compelling Job to admit to a life lived that is not his, in order to make sense of Page 26 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning their belief and justify the kind of God to whom they sorely cling. But Job will not succumb to their “invention of lies” (Job 13:4), nor will he accept their “empty platitudes” (13:12). He chooses, instead, to confront God with the authentic life he has lived even at the risk of death: “He may well slay me; I may have no hope; yet I will argue my case before Him” (Job 13:15). Importantly, there is a serious epistemological disagreement between Job’s friends and Job. The friends rely on traditional wisdom, even if it flies in the face of empirical evidence, while Job considers existential experience, as well. As Ed Greenstein insightfully argues, “Job lays stress on a person’s ability to assume a critical stance and examine the truth value of every saying.” As such, Job is a far better philosopher than his friends.72 Job may have expected a full answer when he acknowledged his own state of ignorance, while the friends believe they already possess the answer. The friends’ posture can never develop into anything resembling the philosophical questions that God encourages. Those questions, at the same time, must be soberly grounded in the kind of humility to which Job resigns himself: “Therefore I recant and relent, being but dust and ashes” (Job 42:6). While Adam responded to God’s first question of “Where are you?” with hiding and evasion, Job’s incessant querying of God offers a resounding “Here I am!” to the oppressive divine gaze to which he is subjected. God’s question to Job (“Where were you?”), and all its philosophical implications about human beings’ place in the world and the limits of human knowledge, provides the corrective to the “Where are you?” addressed to Adam which failed to elicit thoughtful reflection. Job finally understands through relentlessly sincere questions—though you can never ultimately know the workings of divine governance, you must still persist in questioning. God’s address to Job confirms the imitatio dei of philosophizing claimed at the beginning of this chapter.73 Job’s resignation to what amounts to an abrupt (p. 55) and utter silence provokes a firm divine reaction intended to jolt Job into a renewed kind of speech.74 God commences his discourse with Job with an exhortation to Job to assume the warrior posture of “girding loins” (Job 38:3, 40:7), but for the purpose of responding to inquiry rather than armed struggle: “I will ask and you will inform Me.” At the conclusion of the discourse, Job adopts this precise pedagogical stance, with an identical formula: “I will ask and you will inform Me” (Job 42:4). Job’s philosophical “battle” resolves itself in the acknowledgment that he is an inquiring being who must pursue all the questions laid out by God. However, he must always be cognizant of the limits of the human intellect, beyond which the logic of reason and the grasp of the laws of physics do not extend. Page 27 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning Though God demands that Job “gird” himself at the start of His emergence from the tempest (Job 38:3, 40:7), Job does not gird himself when he begins to respond. He simply opens with “listen and I will speak,” and then, in a reciprocal request to God’s, he demands “I will ask and you will inform me” (Job 42:4). Girding is normally a gesture of protection and shielding in preparation for battle. Being ungirded here leaves Job exposed and vulnerable, as he states: “Therefore, I recant and relent, being but dust and ashes” (Job 42:6). While dust and ashes are easily swept away, Job has also gained something that is not so easily disturbed or shunted aside. He assumes relationship with God in the very give and take of the dialogue where both God and he speak and inquire of each other. Job’s decision to leaving himself exposed rather than arm himself echoes Martin Buber’s life of authentic dialogue. Authenticity entails casting off the armor we usually envelop ourselves with in order to open ourselves to the “address” that inheres in the ordinary: Each of us is encased in an armour whose task is to ward off signs. Signs happen to us without respite, living means being addressed, we would need only to present ourselves and to perceive…Each of us is encased in an armour which we soon, out of familiarity, no longer notice. There are only moments which penetrate it and stir the soul to sensibility.75 Job attains just such a moment. Adam attempted to transgress a domain that belonged only to God, to “become like God.” The suggestion that “know” can also mean “having power over” and “possessing” (sexually), combined with (p. 56) the phrase “good and evil” as a merism for a totality, strengthens the notion of man attempting to acquire what is not his but is strictly a divine prerogative.76 Job, on the other hand, reverses that arrogant pretension with an acknowledgment of his earthly constitution, the only vantage point from which philosophical inquiry can proceed. My reading of Job is consistent with Maimonides’ insight that the “most marvelous and extraordinary thing about this story is the fact that knowledge is not attributed in it to Job.”77 The book of Job, then, begins with boorishly ignorant righteousness and ends with enlightened ignorance. Moshe Greenberg also understands Job’s self-acknowledged lowliness in light of a new awareness that, despite his insignificance, he “has yet been granted understanding of the inscrutability of God; this has liberated him from the false expectations raised by the old covenant concept so misleading to him and his interlocutors.”78 Job’s friends, like Adam, also hide and evade serious thought, but in their case it is hiding behind an unfalsifiable theology that they refuse to surrender no matter what evidence refutes it. As a result, they can never pursue philosophical inquiry, since they remain blindly convinced they have all the “answers.” Job, on Page 28 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning the other hand, can now move forward at least with inquiry, because he has “liberated” himself of that now falsified theology. Conclusion: Biblical Interpretation as Philosophical Pursuit The prophetic narratives are dotted by other divine, philosophically nuanced encounters prompted by existential need, such as Moses’ metaphysical inquiry that seeks God’s “glory,” or “ways” (Exod. 33:13, 18). Samson questions the meaning of death at one instant (Judg. 15:18) and desires it in another (Judg. 16:28). Likewise, Jonah considers death and echoes the existential question of “Why not commit suicide?” in the face of what is experienced by him as absurd (Jonah 4:3). Such biblical questions, dialogues, and challenges may constitute a kind of philosophical discourse akin to other ancient philosophical genres such as dialogues, letters, and meditations. These questions, like the way I have treated all the others in this chapter, demand of the biblical (p.57) characters to whom they were addressed much the same reaction that Martin Buber urgently called for in the modern reader’s encounter with the Bible: Man of today resists the Scriptures because he cannot endure revelation. To endure revelation is to endure this moment full of possible decisions, to respond to and to be responsible for every moment. Man of today resists the Scriptures because he does not want any longer to accept responsibility. He thinks he is venturing a great deal, yet he industriously evades the one real venture, that of responsibility.79 A number of the biblical personalities I have examined, starting with Adam, already themselves set the precedent for the danger Buber saw facing modern man in their inability to “endure” revelation and their “evasion” of the responsibility called for by it. As I look back at the narratives that were the foci in this chapter I discern a connective thread of suffering throughout all the biblical questioning I have examined. Disappointment, fracture, disobedience, and alienation provoke the very first articulated biblical question, the primal divine query of Adam, “Where are you?” Fratricide and jealousy prompted the second, asked of Cain: “Where is your brother?” Rebekah, the third character we examined, screams out her question “Why am I?” out of unbearable physical pain. In the fourth case Isaac asks his son Jacob “Who are you?” facing deceit out of blindness, leading to further familial disintegration and conflict. That question sets in motion a series of events leading to the fifth example of Jacob himself becoming a victim of deceit and asking his own question of Laban, “What have you done to me?” That question emerges from the frustration of relationship with a beloved following a lengthy period of servitude and leading in turn to another such period. The sixth case introduces a new scenario where guilt, fear, and trembling at having committed a reprehensibly immoral act against their brother and father induces Joseph’s brothers to ask their self-reflective question, “What is this that God has Page 29 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning done to us?” The seventh is when Joseph subsequently asks his brothers “Am I in the place of God?” That also arises out of an experience of sibling jealousy, hatred, and absolute familial brokenness that has severed him from his past and his origins. As we moved to the eighth illustration the suffering that evokes questioning surpasses the individual and family to a widespread human condition. The suffering and oppression of an entire people precipitates a series of questions posed by Moses: “And Moses grew up and went out to his brothers and he saw their suffering” (Exod. 2:11). Finally, an entire book in the Bible dedicates itself (p.58) to the question regarding divine governance and innocent suffering. Job’s excruciating physical pain and familial devastation returned us to a variation on Rebekah’s questioning of the value of her very existence with his, “Why did I not die at birth, expire as I came forth from the womb?” (Job 3:11). Biblical questioning is conceived in agony and suffering so extreme, embodied in the figure of Job, as to bring into question the purpose of being altogether. The Bible thus presents the Hebraic challenge to what stimulates philosophical investigation. Rather than in “wonder,” it begins in the pain, despair, anxiety, and frustration that is so at odds with the ethical ideal of humanity on the one hand and the metaphysical ideal of a benevolent, beneficent God on the other. Notes: (1) See Leo Strauss’s “Reason and Revelation (1948),” in Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, ed. Heinrich Meier (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 140–80, at 149. (2) See the preface to his Tractatus Theologico Politicus, trans. S. Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001), 6; and Heidi Ravven’s discussion in “Spinoza’s Rupture With Tradition—His Hints of a Jewish Modernity,” in Jewish Themes in Spinoza’s Philosophy, ed. Heidi Ravven and Lenn Goodman (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002), 187–223, esp. 209 ff. (3) See Daniel Frank, “The Duty to Philosophize: Socrates and Maimonides,” Judaism 42/3 (1993), 289–97. (4) Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Tredennick, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1933), Book I, 982b,12. Though I end up reformulating it somewhat, Aristotle, as usual, formulated it best. (5) See Yoram Hazony’s The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 166. (6) For a good overview of all the various approaches to understanding biblical history as recounted in the Bible, see Jeremy Zwelling’s review of The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel, by Thomas L. Thompson, in “The Fictions of Biblical History,” History and Theory, 39/1 (Feb. 2000), 117–41. Page 30 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning I take the criticism offered of the literary approach, “In emphasizing what the text means, these scholars endow the text with a certain timeless quality” (p. 126), as a positive assessment. I find it odd that the attempt to extract “meaning” from a text is considered illegitimate. (7) Whether I am correct about the particular goal, it is clear to me that the authors of these narratives were not interested in recording history. What Baruch Halpern asserts regarding Genesis is apropos the narratives I examine here: “It makes claims of truth and validity, primarily at a thematic level, about YHWH and cosmic order; the themes, not evidence of events, father the particulars of the reconstruction.” In The First Historians: The Hebrew Bible and History (University Park, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 268. (8) See their “The Bible as a Source for Philosophical Reflection,” in History of Jewish Philosophy, ed. Daniel Frank and Oliver Leaman (New York: Routledge, 1997), 10–29, at 24. (9) Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), 10. (10) See Shalom Paul, “Creation and Cosmogony in the Bible,” in Encyclopedia Judaica (Jerusalem: Keter, 1972), v. 1059, who states categorically, “the verb brʾ used in the very first sentence of the creation story does not imply, as most traditional commentators believed, creatio ex nihilo…” (11) David Winston goes as far as to assert that, “In sum, there is no evidence that the normative rabbinic view was that creation was ex nihilo.” See “The Book Of Wisdom’s Theory of Cosmogony,” History of Religions 11/2 (1971), 185–202, at 191. (12) See David Toshio Tsumura’s thorough analysis of the phrase in “The Doctrine of Creation ex nihilo and the Translation of tōhû wābōhû,” who concludes that “the phrase reminds the audience, who lives on an earth already inhabited with plants and animals, of the situation of the earth as ‘not yet’ the normal one they know by experience.” In Pentateuchal Traditions in the Late Second Temple Period, ed. Akio Moriya and Gohei Hata (Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2012), 3–22, at 19. (13) On one other occasion the two terms appear separately, though in the same verse, as part of a divine forecast of devastation on the enemies of Israel (Isa. 34:11). Scholars have noted Jeremiah’s allusion in Jer. 4:23 to Gen. 1:2. See e.g. J. T. A.G.M. van Rooiten, “Back to Chaos: The Relationship Between Jeremiah 4:23–6 and Genesis 1,” in G. H. van Kooten, ed., The Creation of Heaven and Earth: Re-interpretations of Genesis 1 in the Context of Judaism, Ancient Philosophy, Christianity, and Modern Physics (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 21–30. For an Page 31 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning extensive bibliography of the scholarship on Jer. 4:23–6, see note 1, p. 21 of Rooiten’s article. (14) See Jon Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 122–3. According to Levenson though, chaos is never entirely eliminated and God constantly struggles to limit it and keep it at bay. In a sense, rather than Creator, God is the supreme Philosopher whose project of defining and ordering the world never ceases. (15) This idea accords with Hellenistic Jewish writings during the Second temple period that, as Menahem Kister states, “things are not considered existent before they are formed.” See his “Tohu wa-Bohu, Primordial Elements and Creatio ex Nihilo,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 14 (2007), 229–56, esp. at 245, where he asserts this in regard to the verse in 2 Maccabees that God “made heaven and earth out of things non-existent” (2 Macc. 7:28). (16) See Leo Strauss, “On the Interpretation of Genesis,” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, ed. Kenneth Green (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997), 359–76. (17) See his commentary on Gen. 1:1. (18) On the idea that divine creation is an ongoing process that God leaves to human beings to continue, see W. Randall Garr’s interesting analysis of P’s use of the term bara as “an expression of God’s sovereign power which he intensely invests in the human race. To this extent, God empowers the human race to continue the work that he had begun,” in “Bara in the Priestly Source,” Harvard Theological Review 97/1 (2004), 83–90, at 87. (19) Rashi’s perspective is strikingly at odds with Maimonides’. Menachem Kellner summarizes this contrast: “for Rashi, creation vs. eternity is not a Jewish question. For Maimonides, on the other hand, it is a question of cardinal importance.” “Rashi and Maimonides on the Relationship between Torah and the Cosmos,” in Between Rashi and Maimonides: Themes in Medieval Jewish Thought, Literature and Exegesis, ed. Ephraim Kanarfogel and Moshe Sokolow (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 2010), 23–58, at 31. (20) GP 23. (21) I cannot enter the thorny debate on the nature of history here, but will refer to one work that is an excellent review and critique of various theories about the nature of history throughout history: Joseph Margolis, The Flux of History and the Flux of Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Margolis expresses the enigma of defining history succinctly as (pp. 9–10): “The labyrinth is the flux. We can only acknowledge it as the house of the argument that Page 32 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning follows. But the thread is a question: how (we may ask), if thinking is inherently historicized, can we recover the objective history of historied things?” (22) See God In Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Harper & Row, 1955), 136–7. (23) Eichah Rabbah 1. (24) Its plain sense is “generally thought to be an emphatic form of eich,” as observed by R. B. Salters, Lamentations (London: T. & T. Clark, 2010), 35. (25) As Esther Chazon states, Jubilees portrays “Adam as a venerable forefather who establishes historical precedents for laws of ritual purity, nudity, and Temple sacrifice.” See “The Creation and Fall of Adam in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in The Book of Genesis in Jewish and Oriental Christian Interpretation, ed. Judith Frishman and Lucas van Rompay (Leuven: Peeters, 1997), 13–24, at 21, and the recent discussion of Michaela Bauks, “Knowledge, Nakedness, and Shame in the Primeval History of the Hebrew Bible and in Several Texts from the Judean Desert,” in The Hebrew Bible in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. Nora David et al. (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 172–85. (26) Marc Hirshman cites this midrashic reading as “a fine example of free, even fanciful exegesis, which might, in a broad stroke, reveal hidden but ‘intended’ meanings in the Bible,” in A Rivalry of Genius: Jewish and Christian Biblical Interpretation in Late Antiquity (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996), 3–5. Although he understands it as a rabbinic response to the Gnostic dangers inherent in the narrative, I would agree with this general assessment. (27) See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, 2006), 356–71, at 360. (28) See Nicholas Rescher, Philosophical Inquiries: An Introduction to Problems of Philosophy (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 5, who states, “Our questions form a big part of our life’s agenda, providing the impetus that gives rise to our knowledge—or putative knowledge of the world. Our species is Homo quaerens. We have questions and want (nay, need) answers.” (29) Martha Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 184. (30) Also see Lyn Bechtel, “Shame as a Sanction of Social Control in Biblical Israel: Judicial, Political, and Social Shaming,” JSOT 49 (1991), 47–76. (31) See Rhetoric 2.5, 1382a21–5, and David Konstan’s discussion in the chapter on fear in The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Page 33 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), where he asserts that “fear does not involve complex moral judgment” (p. 131). (32) See Bereshit Rabbah 21. According to Bereshit Rabbah 19:9, God’s laments eichah translates into “How well it was with you previously?” As Gary Anderson points out, since this midrash has the question eichah refer to a previous ideal state in the Garden, it remarkably changes the biblical chronology and “the interrogation and punishments occur after the expulsion of Adam and Eve.” See his discussion in The Genesis of Perfection: Adam and Eve in the Jewish and Christian Imagination (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 139. (33) My reading does not necessarily exclude another goal of placing Adam’s sin and the Temple’s destruction in apposition to each other, which is, as Christian Brady points out, locating them “within a history of God’s punishing those He loves…it is an act of love rather than of hatred.” In The Rabbinic Targum of Lamentations: Vindicating God (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 18–21. (34) See “The Story of Cain and Abel: A Narrative Study,” JSOT 52 (1991), 25–41, at 35. (35) See Pamela Tamarkin Reis’s summary of solutions to the lacuna here, “What Cain Said: A Note on Genesis 4:8,” JSOT 27/1 (2002) 107–14. This would accentuate the gravity of Cain’s offense in terms of my argument. (36) See J. H. Hertz, in his classic commentary, The Pentateuch and Haftorahs (London: Soncino Press, 1981), 14 n. 9. (37) Paul Riemann suggests an interesting alternative to the term shomer, normally translated as “keeper” with ethical connotations in “Am I My Brother’s Keeper?” Interpretation 24 (1970), 482–91. For him, it implies control and power over another, transforming Cain’s reply to an argument that only God can exercise power or control over human beings. (38) Rashi on Gen. 4:15. This is just one of a variety of rabbinic identifications offered for this “sign.” For a review of many of them, see Avigdor Shinan, “‘VaYasem YHWH L’Qayin Ot’: On Targum Pseudo-Jonathan to Gen. iv:15” (Heb.), Tarbiz 45/1–2 (1975), 148–50. (39) Rashbam on Gen. 4:26. (40) For Munch’s tortured life, see Stanley Steinberg, Joseph Weiss, “The Art of Edvard Munch and its Function in his Mental Life,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 23 (1954), 409–23. The Scream captures Munch’s “fear of dissolving into his surroundings…[of becoming] a gas and floating away” (p. 415). Page 34 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning (41) As Claus Westermann describes this question, “It is the primeval cry of ‘Why?’ about the meaning of life, an expression of anguish across the whole of human history.” See his Genesis 12–36: A Continental Commentary, trans. John Scullion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 413. (42) This is consistent with Frederick Greenspahn’s argument that this oracle “has nothing to do with the twins at all…Instead it deals with a much larger context,” dealing, as the prediction makes clear, with a dimension that goes far beyond the individuals known as Esau and Jacob. See When Brothers Dwell Together: The Preeminence of Younger Siblings in the Hebrew Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 118. (43) This conspicuously absent link between success and merit is highlighted by the typical midrashic strategy of filling in what are perceived as “gaps.” See Bereshit Rabbah 63. Walter Brueggemann characterizes this “blessing” as a “scandal,” for “God does not explain it or justify it. God simply announces it… Jacob is announced as a visible expression in the face of conventional definitions of reality and prosperity. Jacob is a scandal from the beginning. The powerful grace of God is a scandal. It upsets the way we would organize life.” See Genesis: Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Louisville, Ky.: John Knox Press, 2010), 217. (44) See N. Tur-Sinai, Peshuto shel Miqra (Jerusalem: Kiryat Sepher, 1962), 50. (45) Most read Rebekah’s “before God” inclusion of as indicative of divine approval. See e.g. Rashi on Gen. 27:7 “With His permission.” (46) See Abarbanel’s and Rashi’s commentary on Gen. 27:19. (47) Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 56. (48) For a good overview of the various attempts in the Jewish tradition to come to terms with Jacob’s deception, see David Marcus, “Traditional Jewish Responses to the Question of Deceit in Genesis 27,” in Jews, Christians, and the Theology of the Hebrew Scriptures, ed. Alice Bellis and Joel Kaminsky (Atlanta, Ga.: Society of Biblical Literature, 2000), 293–305. The majority attempt to rationalize it by either shifting the blame from Jacob to Rebekah or even to Isaac, or “by means of legal niceties or by theological explanations” (p. 295). (49) See Daniel Friedmann’s chapter “Stories of Disguise,” in To Kill and Take Possession: Law, Morality, and Society in Biblical Stories (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2002), 42–61, at 59. (50) For an extensive list of biblical scholars who have noted the echoes of Jacob’s earlier deception in this narrative, see John E. Anderson, Jacob and the Divine Trickster: A Theology of Deception and YHWH’s Fidelity to the Ancestral Page 35 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning Promise in the Jacob Cycle (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2011), 98–9. However, he argues that rather than this deception serving a punishment of Jacob, God is actually complicit in deception in order to realize the blessings. (51) Other scholars, such as Yair Zakovitch, “Through the Looking Glass: Reflections/Inversions of Genesis Stories in the Bible,” Biblical Interpretation 1/2 (1993), 139–52 have noted this narrative’s “symmetrical inversion” of Jacob’s own deception of his father, but the allusions to the previous deceptions I note are entirely different. (52) This is another example of what Michael Fishbane argued regarding the “Jacob Cycle” of Genesis 25–35, all of whose themes appear “in proleptic form” in the original passage of the birth and sale of the birthright in Gen. 25:19–34. It resonates with all the central motifs of “‘fraternal strife and deception’; of barrenness and fertility; of hunter and herdsman; of parental and guardian preferences; and of promise and fulfillment.” See “Composition and Structure in the Jacob Cycle (Gen 25:19–35:22),” JJS 26 (1975), 15–38, at 23. (53) Clothing is a central theme that runs through the Saul and David narratives, beginning with the detail of Samuel’s cloak in 1 Sam. 2:19. See e.g. Ora Horn Prouser, “Suited To the Throne: The Symbolic Use of Clothing in the David and Saul Narratives,” JSOT 71 (1996), 27–37. (54) According to Yair Amit, Joseph’s declaration of Gen. 50:19–20 is a narrative strategy that reminds the reader of this dual causality and “guide[s] him towards retrospective observation of the narrative and realization of the determining role of God.” Yair Amit, “The Dual Causality Principle and Its Effects on Biblical Literature,” Vetus Testamentum 37/4 (Oct. 1987), 385–400, at 397. (55) The dual causality principle provokes a commentator like Rashi to provide providential causality when it is glaringly absent from the biblical text. See Sarah Kamin-Rozik, “Dual Causality in Rashi’s Commentary to Esther: Investigation of Rashi’s Motivations for Choosing Rabbinic Explanations” (Heb.), in Sefer Yitshak Aryeh Zeligman, ed. Y. Zakovitch and A. Rofe (Jerusalem: Elhanan Rubenstein), ii. 547–58. (56) For this dual perspective in the Bible that views actions operating on a human plane as a function of human choices and actions, and on a divine plane as a function of divine providence, see I. L. Seligman, “The Might of Man and the Deliverance of God—Dual Causality on Biblical Historical Thought” (Heb.), Studies in Biblical Literature (1992), 62–81. See also Yehezkel Kaufman’s analysis of Joshua 7, which he describes as typical of biblical narratives that reflect events that transpire both naturally and providentially, in Yehezkel Kaufman, The Book of Joshua (Jerusalem: Kiryat Sepher, 1970), 128. Page 36 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning (57) Most recently, Shulamit Elizur examines the Joseph story’s midrashic and piyutic traditions in which “the dual reading of events, on an individual plane and on a national one, are very evident in the line of midrashim related to the narrative of the selling of Joseph,” in “The Guiding Hand of God in the Biblical Narrative of Joseph and his Brothers According to Midrash and Piyut” (Heb.), in Teshurah Le-Amos: Collected Studies in Biblical Exegesis Presented to Amos Hakham, ed. Moshe Bar-Asher, Noah Hacham, and Yosef Ofer (Alon Shevut: Tevunot Press, 2007), 405–20, at 405. (58) Gen. 42:24; 43:30; 45:14, 15; 46:29; 50:1. (59) See Rashi on Jer. 31:14. (60) Note that the brothers previously expressed providential design in their admission of guilt over their disregard for Joseph’s suffering in Gen. 42:21. (61) David Qimhi’s commentary on Gen. 42:28. (62) Radak on Gen. 43:9. (63) For another reading of this narrative focusing on the term ish as central to the narrative, see Ari Zivotofsky, “The Leadership Qualities of Moses,” Judaism 43/3 (1994), 258–69. (64) See e.g. Gen. 28:17, where JPS translates Jacob’s same reaction on waking from a vivid dream as “shaken.” (65) See his chapter on “The Ethics of a Shepherd,” in The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, 103–39, at 138. (66) Seforno on Exod. 2:20. (67) See Rashi, Rashbam, and Abraham ibn Ezra on Exod. 3:11. In the two other appearances of the question mi anokhi (1 Sam. 18:18; 2 Sam. 7:18), David voices a feeling of insignificance and of being unworthy of honors offered to him. (68) Shemot Rabbah 2:5. (69) Medieval commentators find the duplication of “he grew up (vayigdal)” to be somewhat problematic. They resolve the redundancy by saying that the terms relate to two facets of Moses’ character or two stages of his life. See Rashi and Rashbam on Exod. 2:11. (70) See Abraham ibn Ezra on Exod. 2:11. (71) See Philippe Nemo’s Job and the Excess of Evil, trans. Michael Kigel (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 98–9. Page 37 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019 Biblical Questioning (72) See Edward Greenstein, “On My Skin and in My Flesh: Personal Experience as a Source of Knowledge in the Book of Job,” in Bringing the Hidden to Light: The Process of Interpretation—Studies in Honor of Stephen A. Geller, ed. Kathryn Kravitz and Diane Sharon (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2007), 63– 77, at 69. (73) Others, such as Francis Landy, see the Song of Songs as an inversion and recapture of the Garden of Eden through love and culture. However, I have represented Job as remedying Adam’s failure and re-entering Paradise through questioning and the philosophical enterprise. See Francis Landy, “The Song of Songs and the Garden of Eden,” JBL 98/4 (1979), 513–28. (74) Matityahu Tsevat understands Job’s response of 40:4–5 as an admission that “his position has crumbled,” in “The Meaning of the Book of Job,” in The Meaning of the Book of Job and Other Biblical Studies (New York: Ktav Publishing, 1980), 1–23, at 21. (75) Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. Ronald Gregor-Smith (Florence, Ky.: Routledge, 1947), 12. (76) See J. A. Soggin, who considers its meaning as “to attain power through omnipotence and omniscience.” In “And You Will be Like God and Know What is Good and What is Bad: Gen 2–3,” in Sefer Moshe: The Moshe Weinfeld Jubilee Volume, ed. Chaim Cohen, Avi Hurvitz, and Shalom Paul (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2004), 191–3. (77) GP III:22, p. 487. (78) See Greenberg’s “Job,” in The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1990), 283–304, at 299. (79) “The Man of Today and the Jewish Bible,” in The Writings of Martin Buber, ed. Will Herberg (Cleveland, Ohio: Meridian Books, 1963), 239–50 at 244. See also Shemaryahu Talmon, “Martin Buber’s Ways of Interpreting the Bible,” JJS 27/2 (1976), 195–209, who shows how the study of the Bible for Buber “is not a self-contained pursuit, but an aid to the existential understanding of Scripture” (p. 197). Access brought to you by: Page 38 of 38 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Toronto Libraries; date: 15 November 2019