Ancient Israel - What to do with Genesis

so today we're looking at well I think I called the lecture something like what to do about Genesis what to do about Genesis and of course when I put this off out there I'm buying into the Bible organization of the study of ancient Israel and I told you on one hand as the class began that this is a question like we could run a class in ancient Israel that tried to be completely organized by archaeology for one I'm not an archaeologist so I wouldn't be working from my own strengths if I tried to do that but also I just think that a lot of the reason that people find ancient Israel still important is connected to at least these kind of cultural communities that have the religious component to them Jewish and Christian and the Bible is so much part of that and also the Bible gives us words it gives us names that gives us identities and stories and a sort of scheme of things that to try to do a history of ancient Israel or a study of the culture of ancient Israel without any attention to the Bible would be a kind of a weird exercise as well so I've gone ahead and embraced it even as I've approached each part of this Bible story carefully so today we're gonna come back to this Genesis component and we did this a little bit before when I said I was going to talk to you about shepherds and nomads and we talked about just kind of the basic structure of society and the notion in Genesis that the ancestors were these Shepherds on the move and I said that I thought there really is something to that in terms of a memory about Israel's origins being connected to people of this sort but today I want to come back and look at another angle another aspect of Genesis what I think is the most important part of Genesis and so the way we're gonna lay out the rest of the class is in a second but not quite yet I have a goal for the class I I didn't purposely start doing this but it seemed to work you know to begin a class with a statement of what I want you to know this is about so I'm gonna try to keep doing that and then I wanted to go over Pitt's hard the art the rest of the article right that I I wanted you to read for this class it's it's the second half of the first chapter of the history I want you to see what he's doing on one hand it's just really useful if anybody talks about the background to Israel what is known about the ancient world before Israel that relates to Israel you know he's just giving you real basics if somebody mentions the name Mauri or Amarna or Garrett in some if I say it in class or if one of your section instructors brings it up or it comes up in a reading for a paper then go to petard right he tells you what the things are and what's been found there that's important but I do want you to step back and get a sense of how he's approaching the world before Israel shows up on the scene and I have a couple of points and then I'll come to the main event in terms of primary evidence I've tried to build our class sessions around looking together at some piece of actual evidence and today that's gonna be from the book of Genesis and it's going to be I told you to read chapters 28 to 31 I don't know if you all got to it but I hope so in the midst of that I'm actually gonna take what it the surface might seem the least interesting part of it which is what I'll call the birth narrative there's a story embedded in the middle it's like a big pause in the action almost where you have to explain how all of Jacob's sons were born and when daughter Dinah Deena so this is actually really really important as in fact in some ways that birth story is the most important part of Genesis the entire book of Genesis and I want you to look at it with me and then we'll kind of come back around to my own sort of list of takeaways what I want you to get out of this reflection on Genesis but before I even give you my goal for today's class I wanted to ask you a question now again and this is a little bit I know that you're coming a lot of different places so if you have never even read any of this stuff in the Bible and I didn't demand that you do a kind of project you know read all of Genesis and come with questions so well I mean some of you may find it easier to answer this question than others but my start off was just sad I wanted to get you to help me a little bit with the entire concept of talking about Genesis and history and I just wanted to get a feel from you for what you think you want to know and so if I say alright there's a question out there in case you didn't know there are many scholars who doubt that you can get history from Genesis at least a couple of people I've talked to about the chapter in the Oxford history said oh you know petard says there's no history in Genesis you just got to look at all this other stuff and I thought well that's interesting because the tides among the much more accepting of the interest of Genesis for history then a lot of people either you you want to see skepticism I could get you some skepticism but I didn't assign that reading so that said I quoted what's the issue here anybody like what so here's this book it's got a story I won't repeat the whole thing for you right but and in a way like let's not even worry it like don't tell me okay what's the archaeological evidence for the flood because that's the whole problem of itself in the story it's about creation and the flood and the Tower of Babel I'm going to just shells but the larger part of Genesis is this story of ancestors Abraham Isaac and Jacob you know this whole note because that's where we started talking about Israel really and so what do you need to know like if but if I say there's an issue like what how would you even begin to ask about Janish the the relationship between Genesis and history go ahead okay so that's an interesting way to put it I'll repeat what he said how could a whole nation grow out of 12 sons right so this various ways you could sort of rephrase this question and this question in a way is absolutely going to be central to this whole session that we do today you know one key part of the picture the part that the birth story is about is the notion that Jacob has this family and then those so there are 12 sons that are described and then those twelve sons are identified with what are known elsewhere in the Bible even in Genesis itself as twelve tribes so that you have Israel made up of these different groups that are related as family and so Genesis you know kind of presents each one of these tribes as having what I'll call an autonomous ancestor you like that word I remember to bring my Dre up dry erase marker I shelled the other one I'll bring it some day when I'm feeling like a prankster you know sort of like a graffiti artist I'll write stuff on the board here and someone else allowed to go to enormous work to erase it which just means that the tribe is named for an individual person so these are the eponymous ancestors of the tribes the idea is that each tribes actually named for a person with the notion being that they represent an actual family and this is the picture at least and that you know that the tribe of Joseph had an actual original forefather named Joseph and that they were all related so for sure this is important as a concept like how do you think about that it's history it's not just how it worked like it's one couple of a couple of maid servants thrown in and the next thing you know you've had a whole nation but of course then the question is how do you approach that to try to check it out historically like we don't have birth records you know go check all the birth certificates or something and all the villages are you know so for one there's a question about how you'd even investigate that good question though what else is out there history Genesis think of something yeah go ahead obvious is good right so now it's kind of the part that I shelved but the way that's alright but but the thing the reason it is good to put it on the table I suppose in part would be I mean when you read it and you say okay it says seven days and then it's not really I mean you think how does that work and there are various theological kind of solutions you know God forgot as seven days are not the same as for us and of course the Sun isn't even created till the fourth day and there's all sorts of interesting ways to talk about that but right off it doesn't just look like science and so it does help a bit even to go all the way back to his to the creation and they don't separate it like for them as they're telling the history of Israel they start their history of his knoweth creation of the world and they see that as part of the same history that brings you down to you know to Jacob and his sons and talk about checking out a family that's their explanation for the whole universe right they they give you this genealogy that goes back to Adam is the first person and that's how they see all of humanity as a family which is you know kind of a cool concept anyway but also kind of hard to track but so I'll allow this on the table slightly in that it gives you a sense of what the way they're reviewing history go ahead in the other archives are in Genesis involved yeah so there's a good question just generally I like the observation how how do you know when you're reading this writing whether it's from the Bible in Genesis or whether it's from Garrett or the letters from el-amarna or you know some story they have stories like a depe that we read from Babylon that was founded in Amarna also how do you know what to take it face value and what does face value mean and and part of the answer is that it depends on the genre which means what kind of writing is this in what setting for what purpose so if you're writing a letter that has a very practical sort of this you could say well it's not gonna be the same as a story like a myth or story or something like that which has a different kind of purpose might have a different purpose from a royal inscription that was propaganda more or less and yet both the royal inscription and the letter would be very close to the time right they're coming right out of the time but it's like reading either the newspaper or a leaflet a pamphlet or you know online ad what would you say right how do you know that you you have to believe their point of view even if it's current and then of course with the Bible the issue is that you're reading stuff that's part of a compilation that's been passed on and on and on and so there it's much more removed from the time they're describing so in a way I just leave your question out there which is that I am not advocating that the Bible be doubted and everything else be trusted I'm actually saying that we should approach all of our written evidence and in a way our non written evidence as well as something to be interrogated so where were you asked you know what can we know what can't we know another question idea yeah yeah so that's reintroducing the part that I was trying to shelve but but let me use it again that's okay I'm just asking you so the thing is that okay so say there are these two stories so it's the one of seven days and then there's a focus on Adam and Eve or at first Adam and Eve and and we read that right and and the thing that's interesting is that the second story the one that's about the Garden of Eden doesn't seem to really be based on the first story you know it doesn't talk about humanity being made in the image of God which is what how the first chapter went and it seems to start almost from scratch as if you didn't really have anything yet and I suppose if you learned something from that one thing you learn is it to expect a kind of complicated Genesis story that you're dealing possibly with stories from more than one place not just one mind you know one person organizing everything and that's gonna affect the stories about the characters so let me move on but but I mean a little bit you can start to see what some of the questions are but you know I mean so you have this story about a family and you have these ancient characters that are supposed to be ancestors and they're said to have started it actually says he that Abraham comes from or which is this city that really did exist and really did exist way way back in time from Babel it's near Babylon it's actually closer to the Persian Gulf downstream from Babylon and it says he started it or and then it says and this is all very quickly done it says he goes to a place called har on not Abraham actually but his his family before him they move out of or to a place called Haran and you think oh I don't know I don't know this geography we're very well and we'll get there you know to put it on on the screen yet we'll have a map in a second or a few minutes and so Iran is actually it's in modern Turkey even near the border of Syria closer to the Mediterranean Sea then then way down Iraq and so his whole family moves up into northern Syria effectively and that's where Abraham is told to you know move and get down to the land it's gonna be long his his descendants so then you get you know Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and they have these various adventures and you talk about them going to these various places but the big picture I suppose might be can you really believe the picture you know that you have all this whole people that would be descended from this one guy and his family and we'll come back to this because this is a big question and at the end of petard he actually says well you know the problem with history and genesis is so then of course we can't believe that I mean that Israel's actual origin is can't be viewed so simply so let's ask other questions instead but in fact I I think this issue of Israel being viewed as a family deserves another look and and that's gonna be my goal for today so here here is my class goal in one sentence to suggest that Genesis has enormous importance for reconstructing the history of Israel if we think more deeply than the existence of its characters because I mean one of the first questions people would ask was would be well I mean the family question was a nice way to put it but was there a Jacob was there an Isaac was their neighbor him was there a Joseph and a Dan and an Asher and a GAD and enough Tully and rape these other names that you may or may not know those are the tribes the sons yeah go ahead yes so here's the class goal to suggest that Genesis has enormous importance for reconstructing the history of Israel basic statement so and I'll finish it in a second right so that's the first half of the sentence but that's the most important part to suggest that Genesis has enormous importance for reconstructing the history of Israel and I mean that as an historian I'm not just saying that to be nice you might say or to be gullible I really think Genesis has enormous importance for reconstructing the history of Israel it is historically important information that we don't have anywhere else it's only because we have the Bible and have Genesis that we can know something really important about the character and origin of of Israel so the rest of the statement was if we think more deeply than the existence of its characters to suggest that Genesis has enormous importance for reconstructing the history of Israel if we think more deeply than the existence of its characters I mean there's no way for one that you're gonna get any information about these people you know whether they existed or didn't and even if you didn't let say you found some letter from Abraham or something like that it still would improve the the picture that you'd asked about how can you imagine everybody really being descended from this one person okay so we might have existed it doesn't make it any easier to have the whole you know people of Israel as one literal family so whatever or and you could say no but I mean I don't see why you couldn't and I want to I want to see it that way I'm gonna believe it that way and you can still do well in this class don't worry so I'm not gonna necessarily try to force you off that but historically there are other ways to think about this family organization and we'll talk about them but it's really important for understanding the nature of early Israel and this is what today is all about now let me start with batard and at this point I'm just gonna talk a little bit and then we'll get to we'll get to Genesis 29 and 30 the story of the births of all of Jacob's sons and gives you a chance to pitch in partly I with this I want to give you a sense to reflect on petard I'm trying you can imagine as I'm putting together class sessions on one hand I want something interactive I want a chance to talk to you I think it's more interesting that way and the best way to do that is to put some evidence up there and get your reactions but at the same time as I asked you to read certain thing I want you to feel like I've been reading that stuff too and then wanting to bring certain things to your attention so this is the the reading acknowledgement section of class now petard talks about what he calls the ancestral narratives in the Bible so in a way I'm starting with the very end of his chapter the very end of his essay and he says that there's little data there are little data there is more theology than history and that the picture of descent from a single couple is simply untrue right so this is just in just a paragraph petard gives you this kind of reflection on Genesis and again I I know him he's a wonderful guy very good scholar fantastic teacher I hear too but at some simple level I'm gonna I'm gonna disagree with him and and in a way I think if I talked to him he'd actually agree with me but it wasn't what his project was in writing this chapter and all he was trying to do was say well you know you can't just say here's the picture it's just this family so I get his point but the the danger here is thinking that when you pose the question that way you know are you to explain the whole people of Israel as literal descendents from this couple is that it for the historical question if it's true great its historical if it's not true oh it's not historical and what I'm saying is that whether or not it's true and absolutely if it's not true literally it is still extremely important historically now I'll tell you what I mean meanwhile hold that thought what does petard tell us about what I'm gonna call the Levant right so this is the sort of bend of land that runs through Lebanon and what's now Israel along the Mediterranean what does petard tell us about the Levant le VA NT Levant in the Late Bronze Age with me on the on the dates right petard explained all this stuff and he talks about the middle bronze and the late bronze the late bronze is from like what are the dates say roughly 1550 to 1200 or at least those are the traditional dates so the later part of the second millennium and this is what I want you to see what his categories are this is not literally what he said but what are the categories he uses to talk to you about the Late Bronze Age so if you'll remember he starts with Empires I don't know if you caught this alright so there are five and I might as well write them up since I have a dry erase marker Egypt hotkey and if you want to be really cool say it like with a rough age Cauchy Mitanni actually got distracted it's a separate one so one two three and then the other ones are the eventual bad guys of Israel's life Babylon and Assyria which already existed in in Iraq so pretty much of these Egypt's in Egypt hottie is in Turkey sort of occupies most of Turkey Babylon and Assyria are in Iraq with Assyria being more North Babylon being near Baghdad and Mitani nobody knows exactly where its capital was but it's kind of in between it's in northern Syria D near there Syria Iraq border it would be a region I mean part of it would be kind of Kurdish region if you ever think are aware of that it was a Terran you hear about on bar province in the history of our recent conflict in Iraq that would be partly Mitani so this would be the five big kingdoms and he calls call some empires right and it is interesting that it this is a time when these five powers really kind of dominated the region and they divided the land up between them as best they could they didn't totally succeed and then he talks about smaller states and he uses the category of state so which would be a formal academic category for you know kingdoms of a certain size and a certain level of complexity you know that they'd pass on that they have real institutions that that outlive a given generation you know that they're they're organized with administration's even though they might be smaller and then he talks about coastal cities he's kind of zeroing in on the Land of Israel as well which would include places like I mean in fact Garen that he mentions is it one of these coastal cities there's Beirut which is filled a rude it was already a really important place and then I don't know if you've ever heard of these places tyre and sidon which are part of what later was called Phoenicia he's worth famous merchants and Greek traders symp seamen so he talks about these and then in a way that I thought was kind of funny he talked about small weak city-states and you think well who gets to be a small weak city-state well if you're in what became Israel you get to be a small weak city-state all the good states are somewhere else so those include you know so God's or which at least once upon a time was a little bigger I mean almost a small state not a small weak city-state and then you know Jerusalem say would've made it to Qatar its list of small weak city-states which I won't dispute I mean in the grand scheme he's probably right it's down the pecking order pretty far but here's the interesting thing right I mean ah so so everything that he has set for you is defined in terms of kingdoms and cities right everything defined by kingdoms and cities so we'll come back to that so as categories are kingdoms and cities his chronology is built around what I call the rise and fall of Empires so if you just read the chapter and you think what's the story here the story is how Egypt began to get an empire that included what would be the Land of Israel remember that part and then how eventually they kind of lost that and then meanwhile there's this hot seat Kingdom which they're also called the Hittite that's just the adjective and you know it talks about how they got to be more powerful and they took over some of Egypt's land and he talks about Mitanni how they started off powerful and they lost ground everybody else and right it's the whole thing it's like who's getting stronger who's getting weaker that's his chronology which is fine I mean that's actually again this is not a criticism at all but I want you to realize what's not there when he's painting this picture for you so just wait we'll get there and then and then finally he talks about major evidence for the land that would become Israel from two archives both of which are in city centers when is Amarna which we talked about that's the old capital of Egypt for a while and the other is this place called Igorot I'm not going to write it up there it's in the book all over the place and you know the reason that these are so important is that Amarna because it has all these letters from all of the little centers that Egypt controlled it gives you kind of a map of what the world looked like in this area before Israel which is a great kind of control and then the reason you got it is so important is that if you look at the the world of this Late Bronze Age the writing is either an Egyptian and it's that's mostly in Egypt or it's in an Akkadian which is the language of Babylon and like I said this is the international language that's why we had this odd up a story you know the scribes had to be trained to use this language but still I mean it's a it's not their own culture so for a complicated set of reasons that Aaron will explain because he was writing a dissertation on it right who got it and it out was a kind of writing system that was separate from the normal cuneiform with which they used to write their own language in and that they had kind of a preference when they were talking about their own culture to use this different script in their own language and it's the only place in the entire ancient world where we have this for anything near the world of Israel so you have people writing in their own language talking about their own culture and their own religion and their own politics yes right so this stuff becomes really interesting because it's the only thing that gives us that but again it's a city it's a big center and that's the way people tell the history of the world before Israel in this picture there's very little connection for Genesis with any of that stuff if you read Genesis there's no sense of empire I mean you meet Egypt briefly if you go read the book of Genesis but you'd never know that the people of Egypt actually control this area and you could say well maybe the story is from before when Egypt controlled it but for whatever reason these Egypt is just another outside Kingdom there's no other powers there's just the locals there's the local Canaanite towns and there's Abraham Isaac and Jakub you can check out the towns and an archaeologists have you know some of them seem to have been occupied and and can be located in some old time that would fit before Israel and some of them can't and you can argue about why but I know so what do you have no reference to the empires you can check out the towns but there's really nothing that you can know that much about them in terms of connection to Genesis so what does that mean there's nothing you can tell to check out the history historical value of Genesis so my proposal is to listen to the text and ask what are they saying about history and with this I want to do just that so Mari so we we brought along Genesis 29 to 30 and I asked you to read it in advance but let's talk about it so for a quick review while Mary's getting this warmed up I'd see her introduced to Abraham as this guy who's told to leave where he lives up in Siri and he's supposed to go down to the area to someplace that he doesn't even know so he ends up down there in what sometimes called Canaan and he moves around the various places he has a lot of trouble having a son and so it's a big deal if he can't have a son because God said your descendants are gonna be like the stars of the sky and the sand on the seashore if it's a little hard to do that if you haven't even had one kid so the whole idea is well don't worry God will provide that one kid it'll all happen the one kid that counts that leaf ends up being this guy Isaac so then you have just a little bit of attention to Isaac and then quickly that moves on to the fact that Isaac has two twin sons Esau ESA you being the older by however many minutes and Jacob being the one that's going to get the credit in the end now the problem is that Jacob turns out to be both the kind of a guy who likes to hang around tense if you thought of that mari letter then you know esau could write to jacob and say some of the same things but whatever his name was Tommy ich Tamar wrote to yamaha do but in fact jacob seems to be pretty aggressive when it comes to getting hold of his brothers possessions and so he gets a hold of his the big thing is he steals he tricks his father their father into giving him the paternal blessing that will somehow really count to make him be the one who is the true heir and so his father only does it because he thinks he's talking to esau but that it works once he says the blessing then it can't be taken back so at that point he saw he saw his natural reaction is to kill him i think what else would you do so Jacob figures I am out of here right so off he goes up to his mother's family which is way up in Syria and and then there's this whole thing he meets his lovely distant cousin and wants to marry her and then he gets tricked himself into getting married to the older sister but eventually gets the the one he wants these are Leah and Rachel and then eventually you know after years and years of living up there he goes back and and you get it reintroduce to Esau and they kind of make up but in the midst of all this not only then does he get his two wives back up in Syria but they started to have kids and so when you get to this point right here yeah this would be where we would start mari kindly included this note at least above laid Laban gave has made Bilhah to his daughter Rachel to be her maid well we're going to come back to these these maids these servants but really this story begins with verse 31 when the Lord so this is gonna be Yahweh rendered is this is the way they handle that tradition of not speaking the name saw that leah was unloved he opened her womb but Rachel was barren Leah conceived and bore a son she named him Reuben for she said because the Lord has looks on my affliction surely now my husband will love me and on it goes I mean she has another son Simeon she has another son Levi wherever we are and then she has another son Judah she has four sons and with each one they give you a little saying to go with the naming so then he gets to the beginning of chapter 13 it says when Rachel saw that she bore Jacob no children so now it's I you know keeping score via for Rachel zero it's not going very well for the Rachel crowd so so then she has this kind of discussion with her husband it's the obvious thing to do again they're always just doing the obvious thing Rachel saw that she had warned Jacob their children she envied her sister and she said to Jacob give me children or I shall die like what what do you want the poor guy says like I know I'm doing my part it's just not happening so you know they didn't really have doctors that kind you could handle this sort of thing so not that it works nowadays either necessarily so Jacob became very angry with Rachel and said am I in the place of God it was withheld from you the fruit of the womb so she said okay alright here's my maid bill huh go in to her you get sort of get what that means that she lay there upon my knees which is an interesting kind of cultural sort of image of this and that I too may have children through her so she gave him her may bill has life and Jacob went into her and dill how is fine she bore Jacob a son so whose problem is it here anyway so Rachel said God has judged me and has heard my voice she feels like okay at least it's like four to a half they have here full score but at least she feels like she got something out of this deal so she has two kids she has this Dan and Naphtali and then Leah says hey wait a minute and isn't it my turn but the funny thing is the way the story goes instead of thinking alright I'm gonna have more kids she took her maid so she has one two and she thinks okay if this works for my sister it'll work for me and she gets two more sons so now we're gonna be up to eight if you're counting and you should be because the number 12 is always really important in the story so you get what is this it's now gonna be gad and ashur and then you get down to verse 14 and it says in the days of wheat harvest reuben went and found Mandrake's in the field it's a sexy plant for some reason and brought them to his mother Leah and Rachel said to Leah please give me some of your son's Mandrake's but she said to her is it a small matter that you've taken away my husband would you take away my son's Mandrake's also and Rachel said well then he may lie with you tonight for your son's Mandrake's think okay this is how it works huh so Jacob came in from the from the field and the evening and Leah said okay you know my turn now so and she actually manages to have two more kids two more sons in particular and it mentions a daughter and then finally you have to get all the way down to the end and it says then God remembered Rachel and God heated her and opened her womb if you follow the tracking and it is now all the way up okay she can say and she conceived in borås son and said God has taken away my reproach and she named him Joseph saying may the Lord add to me another son and then interestingly yeah so and if in a way in that there's two sayings right so she conceived and bore a son and said God has taken away my approach and then she named him Joseph saying may the Lord add to me another so counting how many do we have eleven where's the twelfth well you're gonna say it's later where is it in this passage the second Joseph's saying you see it may the Lord add to me another son right so it's anticipated you could say but it's very important that it's so you can read through this whole story and you only have eleven you have eleven sons with Joseph being the long-waited and the the one that's missing is Benjamin and we'll come back and talk a little bit about Benjamin but okay so here's the basic story well I called it a story so here is my first question is it a story right so everything else around it was a story argument between Jacob and Esau negotiations over getting the two wives Leah being unloved Jacob tries to get rich it's a whole separate story and then you get down to here and in a way you could say well it looks almost like a list you know just trying to get this one and then that one and then that one so what is your sense of what this is is is it a story and if it's a story what connects it because this is actually going to be important to know whether you should make sure that you're reading it as a unity is it a unity and what makes it a unity what do you see what holds it together I know you can't look at it all take all at once quite yeah why don't you back it up a little bit how it's characters so do you get the feeling in the story that the first time you meet these characters would be in this story like so in this story who might be introduced for the first time yeah what so you could you could wonder that and I didn't have you you know I didn't put the whole thing up there in fact it's not true I mean they have been introduced already go all the way back to the like one more line up right see see how it's what how does the story begin when the Lord saw that leah was unloved he opened her womb but Rachel was barren so like even if you hadn't read anything above that that opening line alone assumes something that came before you follow right that Jacob loves Rachel and not Leah there's some kind of backstory that you don't know yet as you start but that already that's like the very first thing you you find out as you begin reading this story is that Lea gets to have four kids and the narrator explains it by God kind of being nice to her because because she's not getting a very good deal from from her husband yeah go ahead so there you go I wasn't even thinking along that line but that's that's great that's like the number one category they're all named for the first time absolutely I like that idea that you with the sons you figure this is the first time you've met these characters and and they're set up that way they're born they're named there's no way you would have thought they existed before so so but this is important right to kind of pick that out and realize that's different from Rachel and Leah whom you have met before did you have an idea yeah go ahead yeah so that was I was wondering about them in fact there are notes in in the text that are provided there's the one that Mari included in parentheses Laban gave has made Bill hot to his daughter Rachel to be your maid and there is another note for for what's in a name the other one um Bilhah and Zilpah or something so anyway so but but in fact again you have to decide if you go with me on this but given that the thing has this kind of archival combined nature to it and one of the things that biblical scholars often ask is whether the kind of editors of this who put it together sometimes provided notes so that you get how things connected and so when you see these little notes by the way you know Laban gave you know his daughter's servants it feels like an explanation in advance for this story right that in the story they're introduced like oh we need somebody to provide another son and so they they feel much more like they didn't have a role except in this story so from that point of view then sort of Rachel Leah and Jacob who are the main characters seem already to have been introduced and there's a kind of a storyline that follows them right so what's the storyline of Jacob Rachel and Leah that ties this together is there one yeah go ahead again yeah go ahead no in the story like so if you look at it actually inside this story is there a story and I mean I'll say there is a story there act you can there's a thread that connects the whole thing I kind of played it up as I gave you the resume go ahead they're competitive yeah so there's a competition which is tied to what you want to follow up it's like a game show but that having children yeah but go ahead so that's a sort of a spin off at least I mean there's a good well so hold that what make me come right back to you after this in a second because I want it that's important I want to first deal with the story aspect and then I want to come right back so do you so what are they what's the issue in the competition go ahead they both want Jacobs love right so in a purely narrative sense then they're competitive and the thing they're after is their husband's love and which is so interesting right and touching in a way right as as you read this and they read what a horrible situation right for a woman right they read both I don't know the condition of their relationship to their husband and they're kind of larger existential situation in relation to God according to whether they've been able to have children or not although then the one who can't who you might say has suffered the most is the one who's struck it rich in terms of her husband's attitude toward her and of course the earlier story told you that she's the one that was most wanted in the beginning and that leah was just an add-on which is a great job right you know oh yeah you know their dad decided I don't want to marry the younger one before the older one so Leah you go in and she's going like I don't want to like I don't want to be the second choice wife you know get to hear that part of the story but in a way you can feel it when you get to this part when she's thinking what kind of deal have I got well at least God says I'll give you sons which in that day really defined a woman's place in the world that if you had children your that was your future that was your status that was your life you know they they they represented you in the world and if you failed to then no matter how much you might be cared for your position in the world was tenuous so there's this weird mix yeah yeah that's a good question she said having children are having boys and and absolutely it would be especially boys but there and there's a whole side conversation that at some point we'll touch on this at a couple points in the class in terms of what's going on with women one of the very interesting things about non biblical ancient stuff is that we have a lot of legal documents the in King in cuneiform Akkadian especially and a certain number of these legal documents involved women women who are passing on their wealth women who are inheriting the full wealth and so one of the things you could ask is well if everything's about boys what happens when it's like Pride and Prejudice and you know you have only five girls if you got to make some good marriages I mean that's what Pride and Prejudice is about not so crazy as a comparison and yet that's not always the route they would go they wouldn't just marry them off there are cases where you would get the girls inheriting and or the wife inheriting and then it going on to the girls and it's fascinating that that you might think well if it's a male only world and the only feel is having sons then there's just no place for the women unless they get married and it's not totally true so yeah sons but but not totally okay so here's the family part and all of that's kind of tying the whole together staying together but to go back to your question about the tribes and the question of whether there's competition between tribes what would be like how would you start to think about that you want to answer your own question when you say competition how would that look you could say they could be competing for land just based on this story what would you learn about that competition and it could you learn anything about such competition from this story okay fueled by their ancestry give me more detail what kind of ancestry what do you know about their ancestry you know who their mothers are I was fishing and I caught something right so all right but that is leading the witness but you got it that's what I mean right so you do in a way I think that's what you were assuming when you said that there's competition between the sons so in fact this story gives you or proposes to you a very interesting set of details about these characters as tribes in that it sets them up with different sorts of status so somebody else I mean what do you do with that status like what who do you think that's the most status in this story okay somebody said the first son so that would be Reuben which is kind of funny because Reubens not that major a character so I'm gonna go to the left one of you go ahead in the white shirt yeah so I yeah so I go with that too but totally taking into account what you said about the firstborn because in terms of tradition you'd expect the firstborn to have the most standing but of course there is this weird thing is in that he's the firstborn of the wrong wife so in another way Joseph is also a firstborn of Rachel and certainly the way the story sets it up although interestingly you feel a lot of sympathy for Leah because Rachel is both loved and happy in that way and also kind of nasty right I mean this whole thing about give me children or I'll die you know or sons or I'll die and yet there's this sense it it almost isn't about Rachel it's about Jacob that Jacob himself you know that that from the beginning the wife that he wanted was Rachel you know she he saw her from the very beginning of chapter 28 I guess it well 29 and he falls in love with her and he just goes straight to her father and says I want to marry your daughter and he says oh yeah eventually seven years later so and then when they arranged the marriage it gives her the other daughter on the sly like you know grateful they're really drunk after the reception or whatever and thinks that he won't notice somehow which apparently is true until later and so you know then he has to make a deal for Rachel I didn't so from Jacobs point of view it's been a rough ride whether or not Rachel was really worth it so yeah in the end I do think that the story is set up to present Joseph as the long-awaited son that Jacob wanted like for ketches Rachel that Jacob wanted and so that's interesting so if you order if you if you ask yourself in the framework of this story who is the favorite son it would be Joseph and if you look at the structure of genesis as a whole it kind of plays out that way because who's the who's the son who gets special attention in the storyline it ends up being that there's a long story to end of the book of Genesis about how this relates ended up in Egypt that's gonna also explain how they need to come out of it Egypt later and it's about Joseph who you know gets kind of beat up on by his brothers and thrown in the pit and then sold off you know to some traveling merchants who take him to Egypt where it turns out that God looks out for him and he comes out okay pretty very much okay ends up being working high up in the Pharaoh administration and and ends up bringing his family there and takes care of that man everything's great so that's interesting right both the Joseph's the long-awaited and then Joseph's the one that's the center of attention in the storyline when you move to the next phase so yeah in this sort of scrapheap or whatever a Joseph is the the long-awaited he's the first status who would you say is next if yeah go ahead that's interesting they said Judah Judah is the fourth of the first four and it's a good question what to do with that does that make him also kind of long-awaited the in a way it's surprising that Judah wasn't number one that you know Reubens number one Jew does not number one I have opinions about why that might be the case but the reason why you might expect you to is that Judah is gonna be the eponymous ancestor of the whole kingdom of Judah which is the last Kingdom left standing and is the eponymous ancestor of the Jews you could say right even by that name and so yeah Judah should be really important yeah and so what makes you say Dan so that's an interesting question I mean I wouldn't have gone there but it's logical I see what you're saying right I mean so he's the first one that Rachel kind of gets so then the question is how do you play this go ahead well so Benjamin is a funny case because Benjamin isn't even in the chapter he's the missing one but he is also going to be Rachel's he's going to be Rachel's other son and he hasn't choked till chapter 35 when after Jacob has returned from Syria to back in the land and then she gets pregnant one more time it says and has the son and dies having him you know great but at least from Jacobs point of view again he's got this other you know son from Rachel and in the Joseph story Benjamin has this special role so it's a good answer although got to be careful because he's not in the story so in a funny sort of way there's a sense that Benjamin's kind of been added into the story because the person back there had said that you know Joseph really looks like the long waited he's the hero you almost don't need Benjamin but then the funny thing is if you don't need Benjamin in the story itself there's only 11 tribes so one thing that leads me to suspect is that the original story here might not have had a leavin 11 sons it might have had fewer than eleven sons and somebody's topped off the number to get twelve and they topped it off by adding the Benjamin story later making sure you have the twelfth one they topped it off by adding that little comment about you know the double blessing or naming little saying that goes with Joseph where the second one says oh yeah oh yeah I need another one and then the question is whether they topped it off with any of the other names and we won't go there we just won't get into it but it's quite possible so meanwhile leaving that aside you have to play with issues of status like after Judah is a son of Leah but there are five other sons of Leah so like are those six tribes relatively higher status because at least they're the sons of Jacob's first wife or do you go over to the sort of Bilhah those two which are what Dan and Naphtali are something like that because at least they're associated with with Rachel and so the bottom of the pecking order our Zilpah sons because they're not Rachel and they're not even Lea interestingly if you if you look at old texts from the Bible texts that are arguably that go back a long way on some of these kind of those for you know maidservant tribes turn out to be really central to Israel and who Israel was they just didn't get much credit you know and and there's a whole story behind that go ahead well so the motivate for for one it would be that there are acts that that in some cases it's that there are other people that need to be explained and they end it by putting them all the way back to Jacob you can say look they go back to the very beginning of Israel one example would be Levi right so from a tribal point of view Levi is not a tribe I mean it's not a it's a it's an identification of a group of people of priestly kind of priestly caste you could almost say and so they don't hold territory they don't that they aren't a tribe politically in the same sense at all they don't act as a unit politically there's no tradition that they did even though there is a tradition that there was such a group and it's quite quite old so I mean then one could say that the Levites were included from the very beginning I'm not saying automatically that I'm that the Levites must have been added but just as a cait an example of why one could look to Levi as a possible addition would be that Levi is a different kind of tribe it's the only one that's kind of not a regular tribe and so somebody would have said wait a minute you know they can't be on the list and and and stick them in it's that's the kind of question you'd ask but again the way I'm framing the argument the the starting point for imagining the possibility that the membership and this group might have shifted is the fact that there are only eleven in this story when in all the biblical tradition more broadly it's they're very serious about making sure there are twelve and they'll make they'll make adjustments to the lists always to make sure there are twelve and even this one has adjusted in a sense with the final blessing to say oh and don't forget there's gonna be one more and and that's gonna be Benjamin even though he's not in the story so yeah keep that in mind now we've got like five minutes left let me give you my own list and again I'm I mean on purpose I let this discussion of the actual text take a good part of the class because I want to do this with you right I want our class sessions to be this kind of conversation about actual material and I really like your observations your line of thought I like things you said about the story and I like the direction with asking the question about the tribes and the kind of there's a unity in a sense at both levels right there's a unity as a story with the competition of Jacobin or rather Rachel and Leah as wives of Jacob and then there's also unity in terms of giving you this picture of a batch of tribes with different status and and how that might relate to later political situations all very interesting now I've got I've got two main points that I'm gonna want you to take out of this and it's gonna end up I'm gonna probably miss the map and the Maurya stuff but it's how it goes but thank you so the first thing to say this is still not my two points right before I get to say my two points anthropologists study what they call tribal societies and when they talk about tribal societies what they're talking about in particular are groups of people on a fairly large scale that understand themselves to be related by kinship kinship which means family ties and these I mean anthropologists have gone and lived with all sorts of people they sometimes live in you know backcountry sorts of places and in little groups but they also can be very large groups of people that live in cities and towns they can be you know spread across parts in the Middle East or Africa or places like that and live in in different places but they know they're related because they understand theirs themselves to have a family connection and so tribal societies are understood according to these family ties one of the strange things about anthropological study of tribal societies is everybody talks about ancestry and kinship and yet there are very very few actual stories or pictures of kind of tribal organizations that are arranged as a family and where you have the actual family set up here's this starting point here are the groups within they're all related as brothers so from this point if you you know as a reader of the Bible if any of you ever read the Bible then you you think oh it's just how it works right this is the story of Genesis that's how you would do kinship and yet this is an amazing resource for studying tribal people the tribal idea because it gives you an actual scenario where it literally takes all the different groups the tribes a that they imagined to be to make up this early Israel and it relates them through a specific story as sons of one father even by four different mothers it makes this elaborate scenario this is amazing and this is the important history in Genesis I mean above everything else what is so important about Genesis is what I'll call an interpretive claim by the writers of Genesis that ancient Israel was tribal that it was a family that it it could be that all its parts could be connect could be understood by their family relationship so when I point you back to petard right it's how I've never said a thing about this but everything he had to say about how you understood the Late Bronze Age was about empires and kingdoms and cities and small weak city-states right where were the tribes were there none I mean surely there were and and in fact even when you go back to some of that same evidence like the Amarna stuff we I have a student who's finishing a dissertation right now doing just that sort of re-evaluation that is not focused on tribes per se but builds a kind of different picture that shows you where they would be in this stuff so you know it's whatever the people who wrote these texts to Egypt and whatnot they didn't need to know who the tribes were by name and stuff like that they weren't interested they were little kings in their cities and their centers and they just didn't talk about those details and yet you know this site called Mari actually does for some strange unique reason they they really want you to know about tribal identities and how they're related to each other well Genesis belongs with that you know Genesis is like Mari and it's text that the writers of this book want you to know that these people that we're talking about our tribal and they're related in this way so now I'm really out of time here are my two points number one Israel is a family of related tribes Israel is a family of related tribes this is this is what Genesis is telling you we would not know this from outside the Bible we would not know it from archaeology and yet I would argue that it's historically important and you know if some level historically true it's probably very very old and it's in its character characterization of Israel right like Israel as a tribal people probably seated the existence of kings surely that's true historically and Genesis tells us that it's not the only place in the Bible that tells us that but it does and it gives an explanation for it also the book of Judges presents Israel as having various tribes but it doesn't give you the family connection Genesis gives you the kit the kinship it actually gives you what the anthropologists say should be there it's great history and my second point which is sort of by the by and I don't know if I'll come back to it but is that it that Genesis says that the people of Israel did not just come from the local land but that they have a kind of tribal connection to the land side of the north that's where all these people were born right that all of the sons of jacob up to joseph are said to be to be born in syria his wife's from sirius where he's living all that time and and there's this deep claim of a connection with Syria and that's what I don't have time to get to all right so but the the my one point is so important and so when somebody says well what do you think or where's professor Fleming think about history and Genesis you can tell them he likes it and that's why all right see you next time

Channel: New York University

Views: 12,481

Rating: 4.3939395 out of 5

Keywords: Daniel Fleming, Ancient Israel, New York University, NYU, Open Ed, Open Education, Roots, Bible

Id: RLfRf3luaI8

Length: 66min 47sec (4007 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 19 2011