Walking the Bible (15 page)

“Absolutely,” he said. “They go back to Mesopotamia. First sons were considered sacred, the key to the family line. They received double inheritance and were given a seat of honor over their brothers. Also, in this case, they received the special covenant with God.”

“So could these rights be transferred?”

“Yes. We have a Nuzi document in which a son actually buys the right from his brother.”

In a second story of manipulation, Rebekah helps Jacob finagle a greater birthright from his father. One day when Isaac is old and “too dim to see,” he summons Esau and says, “I do not know how soon I may die. Take your gear, your quiver and bow, and go out into the open and hunt me some game. Then prepare a dish for me such as I like, and bring it to me to eat, so that I may give you my innermost blessing before I die.” Rebekah overhears her husband and instructs Jacob, her favored son, to fetch two choice kids so she can prepare Isaac’s favorite dish and he can receive his father’s blessing. “But my brother Esau is a hairy man,” Jacob protests, “and I am smooth-skinned. If my father touches me, I shall appear to him as a trickster and bring upon myself a curse, not a blessing.”“Just do as I say,” Rebekah insists, and he does.

Rebekah dresses Jacob in Esau’s clothes, covers his hands and neck with the skins of the kids, and gives him the dish. Jacob goes to visit
Isaac, who asks, “Which of my sons are you?” “I am Esau,” Jacob says, “your first-born; I have done as you told me.” Skeptical, Isaac asks, “How did you succeed so quickly?” Jacob responds, “Because the Lord your God granted me good fortune.” Isaac bids Jacob to come closer so he may feel the boy’s arms. “The voice is the voice of Jacob, yet the hands are the hands of Esau.” He smells the boy and announces, “Ah, the smell of my son is like the smell of the fields that the Lord has blessed.” Finally Isaac relents and gives his innermost blessing to his second son.

May God give you/Of the dew of heaven and the fat of the earth,
Abundance of new grain and wine./Let peoples serve you,/And nations bow to you;
Be master over your brothers,/And let your mother’s sons bow to you.
Cursed be they who curse you,/Blessed be they who bless you.

No sooner does Jacob leave than Esau returns and does as he has been instructed. When he and Isaac uncover the ruse, Isaac is seized with “very violent trembling” and Esau bursts into “wild and bitter sobbing.”“First he took away my birthright,” Esau wails, “and now he has taken away my blessing.” Finally he threatens, “I will kill my brother Jacob.” When Rebekah hears this, she instructs Jacob to flee at once for Harran, to visit her brother Laban. Before Jacob leaves, Rebekah tells Isaac that if Jacob takes a bride “from among the native women,” she will be distraught, so Isaac instructs Jacob, “You shall not take a wife from among the Canaanite women.” Jacob promptly sets off for Mesopotamia. Would someone in the ancient Near East undertake such a grueling trip just to meet a wife?

“Of course,” Professor Malamat said. “Jacob goes back to his clan. He doesn’t go to a foreign people. The Bible says that God hurt people if they married foreigners. There is a bias against Canaanites. We try to make it nicer these days, but it’s not nice. The biblical storytellers
hated
the Canaanites, because the Canaanites didn’t believe in God.”

Jacob arrives in Harran and promptly meets Rachel, the daughter of his uncle Laban. Jacob tries to impress her by rolling the stone covering off the mouth of the well, and, in an episode repeated nowhere else in
the Bible, he kisses Rachel and breaks into tears. Jacob then explains that he is Rachel’s kinsman and they go to meet her father, who offers Jacob a job. Jacob responds, “I will serve you seven years for your younger daughter Rachel.” Besides being the younger of Laban’s two daughters (and thus parallel to Jacob), Rachel is described as being “shapely and beautiful,” while Leah is described only as having “weak eyes.” Laban agrees, and the seven years pass, though they seem like just days to Jacob, “because of his love” for Rachel.

At the end of his service, Jacob demands his reward and is given a bride, with whom he has marital relations. The following morning he discovers that Laban, in what appears to be an unwitting but poetic retribution for Jacob’s deception of Isaac, has substituted Leah for Rachel. “Why did you deceive me?” Jacob asks, to which Laban responds, “It is not the practice in our place to marry off the younger before the older.” Laban offers to let Jacob marry Rachel if he works another seven years, which Jacob agrees to do. Another seven years pass, and Jacob marries Rachel. But God, seeing how Jacob prefers Rachel, makes her barren. Leah, by contrast, gives Jacob four sons. Rachel’s servant gives him another two sons. Leah’s servant adds two more. Leah then contributes two more sons and a daughter, Dinah. Finally God remembers Rachel, and she bears him a son, Joseph.

My question to Professor Malamat was, would such switching of brides truly have happened?

“It was common to marry the firstborn daughter first,” he said. “If Jacob wants the more beautiful daughter, he has to work another seven years. You have to understand, the most important thing in a marriage was not love. It was not romance. It was children.”

“So all in all,” I said, “how would you evaluate the story in terms of its historical accuracy?”

“I believe in the historical background of the story,” he said. “There might have been a man like Jacob. It’s quite possible. Of course, there are many anachronisms in the story. Edom did not exist at the time of the patriarchs; that detail was probably added later. But I say, ‘Good show!’ I like anachronisms. I always quote Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar
. There’s a
part where someone says, ‘And the clock strikes three.’ That’s a good line, but in Rome there were no churches during that period—Christianity wasn’t even invented—and no clocks. So that’s an anachronism.”

“So who introduced the anachronisms?”

“The writers. Those who, at the end, edited the Bible we have now.” Which is where the real controversy begins.

In 1800 the Bible was regarded by much of the world to be true, the unchallenged word of God. The Pentateuch, in particular, was written by Moses; the stories were historically accurate, the contents divine. In the course of the nineteenth century, this view came under relentless scrutiny. In one of the momentous intellectual revolutions of the last two centuries, a series of European and American scholars, working in the novice fields of literary criticism and archaeology, removed the Bible from its untouchable heights and planted it firmly in history.

The first area for exploration was authorship. Studious readers had long observed contradictions in the text. Events are reported in one order, then repeated in a different order. The Moabites are said to have done something; then the Midianites are said to have done the same thing. Moses gets the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai, then at Mount Horeb. Also, events are described that Moses couldn’t possibly have known, like his own death. Over time, the rabbis had tried to explain these seeming contradictions, but some commentators refused to go along. Their views were hurriedly squelched. One eleventh-century critic was dubbed “Isaac the Blunderer.” A sixteenth-century scholar had his book banned; a seventeenth-century scholar was imprisoned. By the nineteenth century, an enlightened consensus emerged that certain tensions in the text could no longer be avoided: foremost among them, that God has different names. Genesis, for example, tells two different versions of Creation; in one the protagonist is Elohim, in the other it’s Yahweh.

By century’s end, German scholar Julius Wellhausen compiled a number of these budding ideas into a unified theory, the Documentary Hypothesis, easily the most destabilizing doctrine in the history of the Bible. Using linguistic analysis, word frequency, even syllable count,
Wellhausen concluded that the Bible has four separate sources. The oldest he termed “J,” for the German word for Yahweh, which was responsible for many of the narrative sections. The second source was “E,” for sections mentioning Elohim. The largest source comprised the legal sectionsandwastermed “P,” forthepriests. Alatersource, foundonlyin Deuteronomy, was called “D.”

This thesis has dominated scholarship ever since, with critics scrambling to unmask the ghostwriters. The “J” source must have lived in the kingdom of Judah, the reasoning goes, since Abraham buys land in Hebron, which is in Judah. The “E” source must have lived in the kingdom of Israel, since Abraham stops first in Shechem. Later scholars grew even bolder. Harold Bloom, the Yale literary critic, wrote a bestselling book in which he proposes that “J,” because of its style and sensitivity, was written by a woman. Richard Elliot Friedman of the University of California has gone further. In
Who Wrote the Bible?
he says that “D” can be dated to 622
B.C.E.
and attributed to Baruch, a scribe in the court of Jeremiah. The redactor, he says, a fifth person who combined the various sources, was named Ezra and lived in the time of the Second Temple.

Recently, the Documentary Hypothesis has come under increased criticism, with scholars complaining that the identifications are weak, convoluted, or just plain unhelpful. One German scholar declared Wellhausen’s theory “dead.” For a newcomer, trying to make sense of the alphabet soup was far more daunting than enlightening, and just the hint of the subject from Professor Malamat had me nearly jumping, like one of Dr. Freud’s patients, on his couch.

“Basically there are good things in it,” he said. “But times have changed. It’s been one hundred years. Many people, good writers, say they can take a page of Goethe and find four sources. He was in a bad mood two hours after he wrote the first two lines. Let me show you a book you haven’t seen.” He sent me into his office and up a ladder, to the top shelf, where I removed a frail volume,
The Book of Genesis,
by C. J. Hall. “No other teacher has this book,” he said.

I opened the book from the back, where the Hebrew text of Genesis was divided into four fluorescent colors, each assigned to a source.
With its intersecting blocks of varying lengths it looked like a Mondrian painting. “You see!” he cried. “Can you read just the blue? Can you read just the yellow, the orange. Can you read it?!? Now you see how impossible it is.”

“So you’re saying I should forget the sources.”

“If you can.”

“How can I forget them, once I know them.”

“Look, it’s a game,” he said. “In my class I call it phantom. These are phantom sources. There are certainly different styles to the stories: Sometimes there is poetry, sometimes prose, sometimes long lists of laws. Probably these stories were written down by different people. But you will never meet these people, you cannot shake hands with them. Therefore I don’t deal with it. You should take the story as a whole. You shouldn’t divide it into sections and say this came from the fifth century, this from the eighth. You read it like Goethe, like literature.”

“You’re telling me that as a historian you read it as literature.”

“It is literature,” he said. “In Oxford once I bought this book that said that from the Bible to Shakespeare there was no great literature. To hell with Shakespeare! The Bible is better than Shakespeare. From the Bible to eternity there will be no greater literature.”

“So it’s the best thing ever written.”

“I think so.”

“And the best thing that ever
will be
written?”

He banged his cane on the floor approvingly.

If literary criticism was destabilizing to the Bible, archaeology was downright revolutionary.

The day after meeting Professor Malamat, I took a bus to a house just south of the Promenade. When I knocked on the door, a gentle man appeared, with a trimmed beard, a slight shuffle, and an averted glance. He fussed with a cigarette and poured me a Sprite. Like many archaeologists, Gabriel Barkay seemed uncomfortable with the details of modern life. Archaeologists, I had observed, seem to exist in a complex, multidimensional notion of time. Walk onto a site and they make
instant connections: This piece of pottery from Mesopotamia is similar to that piece of art from Egypt, which from the eighteenth century
B.C.E.
to the fourteenth century
B.C.E.
completely dominated Canaan, which was later attacked by the Phoenicians, who wrote something in the ninth century
B.C.E.
that is uncommonly similar to something the Israelites wrote in Genesis, while they were in Mesopotamia, dreaming of Egypt. Got it? Now document it.

As a boy I used to like going with my father, a builder, to construction sites. While he would go inside to check the workmanship, I would stay outside in the piles of white sand and construct imaginary communities. I was reminded of this on occasion when Avner would lurch to the side of the road and plunge to the ground. No matter where we went, he always came back dirtier than me. Ultimately that’s the image I carry of archaeologists: grown-ups playing in the sand. They’re adult versions of sandbox architects, taking materials they find in the ground, arranging them in a certain coherent order, and sprinkling in their own imaginations to create a thriving reality where the rest of us would see nothing, or worse, pave it over and build a mall. They’re squabblers at times; absentminded often. But, at their best, they’re sort of inverted prophets. If prophets foretell the future, warning of what might come, archaeologists foretell the past, warning of what already happened.

And, best of all, they’re not modish. As Agatha Christie, whose second husband, Max Mallowan, was a prominent Assyriologist, wrote: “The great thing about being married to an archaeologist is the older you get, the more he loves you.”

Gabi Barkay was not particularly old, but he was a veteran of Israel’s academic wars and a student of the relationship between the Bible and archaeology. I had come to discuss this relationship, which in two hundred years has altered both the world of science and the world of religion. Archaeology, or the “study of beginnings,” was invented in Europe in the nineteenth century largely for two reasons: to dig up
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey,
and to dig up the Bible. European Christians believed that they, not the Jews, were the rightful heirs to Palestine and needed to safeguard it. This had been the motivation behind the Crusades and now inspired a multinational scavenger hunt. As historian Moshe Pearlman
wrote:“It was the greatest hunt in history, mounted on the largest scale, at the most lavish cost, pursued over the longest period over the broadest area by the most remarkable assembly of hunters ever committed to a search for buried treasure.”