 Texts like Gautra Haasus and Gilgamesh leave us a lot of interpretive work to do since they come down to us in only broken fragments. But even texts that appear complete can contain gaps that can only be filled by interpretive inferences based on something outside of the text itself. We typically do this automatically without noticing that we're doing it. So when we read a text of familiarized genesis, familiarization is our default mode. We know what schemata we're supposed to add into the text because we've been taught to add it since the first time we encountered the narrative. So we may not even notice that things like the fall of man or the original sin or even the devil are actually in the text. That doesn't mean that these interpretations are not ancient interpretations. This identification of the serpent in chapter 3 with an evil angel is around 2,000 years old. But that interpretation was added still centuries after the narrative in its present form was recorded. In the text itself, there is already a conflict of interpretations between schemas and scripts from different cultures. As scholars, our goal is not to decide whether or not genesis is historically accurate or how to apply it ourselves. We don't just judge the value of the Babel narrative by how well it does or does not explain the historical ziggurat at Timmananke, or the nature of the population of Babylon. We have other sources for historical analysis. Our goal is to understand how the authors of the book of Genesis and its sources conceived of the story they were telling each time they told it, and how these understandings changed over time, viewing the text alongside its historical context, but not replacing the text with its historical context. It requires us to separate the text from later interpretations, such as the assumption that the Babylonians were actually trying to enter a physical heaven in the sky, something which is not in the text. But it also requires us to separate it from the historical backdrop. To hold both of these representations in our heads side by side, we don't replace the Tower of Babel with the historical Temple of Marduk. Instead, we compare the two schemata as two iterations of a story that is not constrained by any single narrative. Then we can see how the narrative has evolved across different cultural worlds, but we must always want to allow the text its own autonomy, let it show us the way that past people thought. In the first twelve chapters of Genesis, we saw just how much influence Babylonian narrative had on biblical narrative, especially in the priestly source, which was written during or after the Babylonian captivity of Judah. The Babylonian literature had an undeniable influence, but the way it was incorporated shows a distinctively Hebrew framing and reworking of that narrative, a process that we call syncretism. The ancient Hebrews didn't passively accept the Babylonian cultural hegemony, they reworked it and its narratives to fit their understanding of themselves and of their God. But beginning with chapter twelve, even as we begin with Abraham living in Mesopotamia in the city of Urur, we begin a narrative that doesn't sound anything like what we've read from Mesopotamian literature. The story of Abraham and his descendants is very much original to biblical literature, not something that seems to owe anything at all to the literature of other nations. We are still dealing with a composite text that redacts multiple sources, but we see a growing unity that ties all these sources together. They all share certain larger themes that are evident in specific motifs. A motif is a conventional situation or a literary device or interest or incident, especially one that serves as a recurrent unifying element. It can be an image, it could be a symbol, a character type, an action, an idea, object, or phrase, or a particular type of description. A motif is not the same thing as a doublet, although any time we see a repetition it could be one or the other, or perhaps both. Doublets are redundant and usually show some sort of incoherence or contradiction. Motifs repeat certain elements, but they do not narrate the same event. Motifs show a unity between different elements, whereas a doublet shows a difference even when it repeats the event in the story. Most of the time when we see a repetition we can classify it either as a motif or a doublet with a few exceptions, and there will be a few examples where it's unclear if an iteration of a motif is actually a doublet or if it's both a doublet and a motif. For example, one motif is the frequent call and answer reply, where a guide calls to somebody or another authority figure, one of the patriarchs calls to his son, so when Abraham calls to Isaac and Isaac says, here I am, the Hebrew is henene, guide calls to Jacob and he responds, here I am. This is something that we see frequently throughout over and over that's not a repetition. It is something that tells us something about the relationship between the person doing the calling and the person being called. There are at least three divine speeches in which a patriarch is given travel directions and the promise of blessing. So in chapter 12 verse 1 God says to Abraham, go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation and I will bless you and I will make your name great so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and the ones who curse you, I will curse. And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. And again later God says something similar to Isaac when he's about to go to Egypt. God says in chapter 26 verse 2, do not go down to Egypt, settle in the land that I will show you. Then he repletes that promise, that covenant of many offspring. And then when Jacob sits out on his journey, he's coming into Beersheba and God speaks to him and says, Jacob, Jacob and then Jacob says, here I am, henene. Then he says, I am God, the God of your father, do not be afraid to go down to Egypt. He told Isaac not to go to Egypt, he's telling Jacob to go to Egypt. So all of these involve God not only making a promise about future success in multiple generations, but also saying, go to this place, I will choose a place for you, you go there. We also have three incidents, excuse me, four incidents of a barren wife who God says will have children later on. And all three generations, God promises Sarah many descendants, he makes the promise to Abraham in chapter 17, he makes the promise to Sarah and Abraham in chapter 18. In chapter 25, Isaac prays to God for his wife because she was barren. And the Lord said to her, quote, two nations are in your womb, two peoples born of you shall be divided. And then in chapter 30, Rachel bears Joseph. God remembers Rachel and God heated her and opened her womb and she conceived and bore a son and said, God has taken away my reproach. We have this, another common motif that kind of borders on a doublet because it happens three times and it happens in such similar terms. Notice it's not just the story itself but the narrative starts to resemble each other first. Abraham goes down to Egypt and he's afraid that Pharaoh will see his wife, Sarah, and kill Abraham in order to take his wife away. So Abraham tells Sarah, say that you were my sister and it may go well with me because of you and that my life should be spared on your account. And so they pretend that Sarah is actually his sister. She's taken to Pharaoh and we're told in this is chapter 12 verse 16. For her sake, he, Pharaoh, dealt well with Abraham and he had sheep and oxen, male donkeys, male and female slaves, female donkeys and camels. But the Lord afflicted Pharaoh and his house with the great plagues because of Sarah. In other words, because of this pretense that Sarah is not actually Abraham's wife. She goes to Pharaoh. Pharaoh thinks Abraham is her brother so he gives Abraham all of his wealth, all this animal wealth and gives him slaves. So Abraham's actually making out pretty well because of this. But the Pharaoh is not because he's done this and God is afflicting him and he doesn't know why. And later he figures out the deceit and he tells in verse 20, Pharaoh gives his men orders concerning them and they sent him on his way with his wife and all that he had. So after Pharaoh figures out the deception, he sends Abraham and Sarah away but they get to take the wealth that they've been given. Well the same thing happens again in chapter 20. At the very beginning we're told that Abraham journeyed toward the region of Negeb and King Abimelech sent and took Sarah. But God came to Abimelech in a dream by night. This is after in verse 2, Abraham says of his wife Sarah, she is my sister and King Abimelech sent and took Sarah. But God came to Abimelech in a dream by night and said to him, you are about to die because of the woman who you have taken, for she is a married woman. And then later in verse 14, Abimelech took sheep and oxen and male and female slaves and gave them to Abraham and restored his wife Sarah to him. Abimelech said, quote my land is before you, settle where it pleases you. And then to Sarah he says, look I have given your brother a thousand pieces of silver. And so Abraham is given all this wealth and it's only when he's given this wealth and Sarah is released from Abimelech that Abimelech's affliction is healed and all of the women of his house are again able to have children because we're told in verse 18, the Lord had closed fast all the wombs of the house of Abimelech because of Sarah, Abraham's wife. And like father like son, Isaac in chapter 26 settles in the same region with the same king, King Abimelech. And this time he says of his wife, quote she is my sister. For he was afraid to say my wife thinking or else men of the place might kill me for the sake of Rebecca because she is attractive in appearance. But Abimelech has to do the same thing. Abimelech figures out what he's done and says, you know, what is this you've done to us? One of the people might easily have lain with your wife and you would have brought guilt upon us. So Abimelech warned all the people saying whoever touches this man or his wife should be put to death. And Isaac sowed seed in that land and the same year reaped a hundredfold. The Lord blessed him and the man became rich. He prospered more and more until he became very wealthy. He had possessions of flocks and herds and a great household so that the Philistines envied him. So three times we have a story about one of the patriarchs either Abraham or Isaac lying to a king that his wife is actually his sister and making in that king giving him a lot of wealth either during that deception or immediately after that deception. We have two identical disputes or almost identical disputes where Abimelech and Fikall settle a dispute but it's at two different times one time with Abraham one time with Isaac in almost identical terms but obviously differing about which patriarch it is. Now the most frequent and most central motif throughout the book of Genesis is the covenant. This is an agreement between God and the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. In chapter 12 is the first promise given to Abraham. And then in chapter 15 we have a more specific covenant. The word of the Lord came to Abraham, look toward the heaven and count the stars if you're able to count them. And he said to him, so shall your descendants be. And this is a sort of a famous passage where God says you'll have more descendants than there are stars in the sky. And he follows that by saying to your descendants I will give this land. So not just you're going to have so many descendants but they're going to have this land from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, remember who were descendants of Cain. The Kennesites, the Cadmonites, the Hittites, the Parasites, the Rephime, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Gergesites, and the Jebusites. In other words I'm going to take the land away from these people and give it to you. That then becomes part of the covenant as well. Then we have two promises of descendants in chapter 17 and chapter 18 that I'll come back to in a minute. Also after the binding of Isaac, the almost sacrifice of Isaac in chapter 22, another renewal of that covenant. And then these are all with Abraham and then in chapter 28, God appears to Jacob in a dream and reconfirms or reaffirms that covenant. So this idea of a covenant between God and man may seem sort of odd to us today if there is one God who is the creator of all life on earth and of all people. Why is it that he's picking one group? And why is it that this one group needs to affirm that they have a spatial relationship with him instead of other gods? And this is one of several clues that has throughout the years led scholars, but also archaeologists and historians examining other cultures in the region to ask what sort of belief system was there about God? Of course in Exodus, we have the commandment, you shall have no other gods before me. What does that mean before me? Does that mean there are other gods that you might have? So we tend to assume that the Bible contains only monotheism. In other words, there's only ever one God. Only one God exists and all the other gods are either demons or false idols that are nothing. And we typically think of the opposite of that of being the sort of polytheism of the, similar to what the Greeks and Romans and other cultures around the world have, where there are many gods and they're often in conflict. We saw this conflict between a polytheistic pantheon of gods in Atrahasis. But what actually seems to be the case is neither one of these things, but actually this third option what's called henotheism. And that's a belief in the existence of many gods in which you and your people are devoted only to one God. So you are really putting your God before all other gods, but still accepting that other nations have other gods. And this is one of the reasons for later warnings throughout the Pentateuch about mixing with other nations because their gods will corrupt your people. And there's several clues that henotheism seems to be the rule in these early books, these early sources of Genesis. God is identified as the God of particular worshipers rather than just as God. He's not presumed to be the only God. So in chapter 24 verse 27, we hear, Blessed be the Lord, the God of my master Abraham, who is not forsaking his steadfast love and his faithfulness to my master. People are asking him, oh, which God are you talking about? Oh, let me tell you which God. It's the one that Abraham worships. Similarly in chapter 46, when Israel, Jacob, set out on his journey with all that he had and came to bear sheba, he offered sacrifices to the God of his father, Isaac. Now, why would we need that extra specification? Why can't we just say offered sacrifices to God? Later, Laban and his household have to move and he's not condemned for taking with him these household gods in chapter 31. Now, chapter 17 and 18 have versions of the revelation of the covenant. So God says, I will make my covenant between me and you and I will make you exceedingly numerous. This is my covenant with you. You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful. I will make nations of you and kings shall come from you. Over and over again this promise that you're going to have lots and lots of descendants. I will establish my covenant between me and you. Again, reference to the covenant. And I will give you and to your offspring after you a land where you are now alien, all the land of Canaan. So in addition to consistent reference to the covenant, consistent reference to this great nation coming after him, the connection of that with the granting of land. This is my covenant which you shall keep between me and you and your offspring ever after. Every male among you shall be circumcised. Now this connection of circumcision with the covenant is very important in this source because this is the priestly source. This repetition seems not to be a doublet. It seems to be emphasis reminding Abraham, but not only Abraham, but anyone reading this text of this continuing tradition. Not just that a promise was made to Abraham at one point, but a reminder that the covenant means connection to the land and the covenant means continued circumcision. And bear in mind that circumcision is something that is part of a ritual and the ritual is something that the priestly class are occupied with. This is something that is in their purview. So their defining of the covenant and their role in the continued enactment of the covenant is the process of circumcision. So obviously something very important to the priestly class is going to be very prominent in that text. And if we look at that same text, chapter 17, side by side with the following chapter, Genesis 18 tells a very similar story in which God tells Abraham that he will have a son with Sarah, but this time it's the Yahwist or the J source. If we look at the priestly source in chapter 17 next to the Yahwist account in chapter 18, we see enough redundancy to characterize it as a doublet, but there's enough difference to suggest it can narrate two different incidents that show the same motif. The characteristics of the two sources are noticeable. In the P source, we have one reference to Yahweh at the top. This is the narrator speaking rather than either God himself or Abraham. This is important because the P source, like the E source before it, will use the name Yahweh after God reveals that name to Moses in Exodus, but they won't use it in dialogue until then. So Abraham doesn't know that name Yahweh yet, and Yahweh doesn't use that name, so he refers to himself as Elohim or El Shaddai or other names like that. But in the J source, we see God constantly referred to by that name, both in the narration and in the dialogue. So God refers to himself as Yahweh in verses 27 and 31, and then Abraham says, let me take it upon myself to speak to Yahweh, and then verses 30 and 32 he says, oh, do not let Yahweh be angry if I speak. The priestly source focuses on the change of names as well, both Abraham and Abraham, or the priestly source focuses on the change of names of both Abraham to Abraham and Sarah to Sarah. This could indicate that it is reconciling two traditions from different dialects, which have slightly different names for the couple. As we've seen already, the priestly source is focused on the covenant specifically as it relates to the priestly ritual circumcision, whereas the Yahweh source is more interested in portraying Yahweh as a character, including the back and forth dialogue between Abraham and Yahweh. Both chapters relate how God tells Abraham that he will have a son by Sarah, and both chapters, someone laughs at that revelation. In Abraham, or it's Abraham in the p source, Sarah in the J source. Having different people repeat the same reaction preserves the possibility that one event follows the other in the narrative chronology rather than repeating the other in the narrative chronology. But it seems odd that the birth of Isaac needed to be announced twice and that each laughing parent is described with a very similar dialogue. These similarities connect the two chapters and suggest that they're different narratives telling the same story, but that also prompts us to pay careful attention to the differences and what they tell us about the individual authors. Chapter 18 is the J or Yahweh source, and look at the difference in the way God is portrayed. We're told, quote, the Lord appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre. His appearance is in a specific location, and he's described as one of three men who are walking. When Abraham brings up food, they're described as eating it. The term for this type of representation is anthropomorphism. That's the addition of imagery depicting human characteristics such as a physical body or specific location in place and time, emotion, limited knowledge, communication through language, and that sort of thing. In contrast to the later idea that we're more familiar with, that God could not be seen, and that even later that the idea that he was omnipresent or omniscient, he was everywhere at the same time and that he knew all things at the same time. In contradiction to this, this is a very human characterization. This individual is clearly identified as Yahweh. Remember that every time an English translation of the Bible writes the Lord in all capital letters, it's adapting the Jewish tradition of substituting the word Adonai, which literally means the Lord, but was used to replace the four-letter name, Y-H-W-H, or Yahweh. But Yahweh is the name printed in the Hebrew text. Every time you see the Lord. Yahweh is consistently described not only as having a human-like body that is physically present, but also having limited knowledge. This contradicts our familiar notion that God is omnipresent or everywhere at once, or omniscient, knowing all things. But these notions don't show up in Hebrew literature until centuries later. Remember that it's not until the Book of Deuteronomy, written sometime between 640 and 609 BC that we have a clear insistence that God cannot be seen and that he acts from a distance. The J-Source clearly characterizes God as coming and going, especially for the purposes of learning something about the world. We've already seen this in the Tower of Babel story when God says, quote, let us go down and confuse their speech. In other words, he has to go down from somewhere up, presumably in heaven. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve hear God, quote, walking about in the garden at the time of the evening breeze. That's in Genesis 3-8. After Abel is dead, God asks Cain, where is your brother Abel? And it's only in the next sentence, when he presumably comes closer to Cain, he says, I hear your brother's blood calling out to me from the ground. That's in Genesis 4-10. And this limited knowledge kind of helps make the sacrifice of Isaac make sense later in Chapter 22. But because we have inherited this later interpretation that tries to make God less anthropomorphic, we're often told that these men are angels rather than God himself. When we see visual representations, they look like the medieval notion of an angel, with white bird wings and wearing a white robe. But the text clearly confronts us with a pretty blunt reference to Yahweh as walking, talking, an entity that is at first thought to be a man, who looks like a man, eats like a man. This gradual realization of what at first appears to be a person, that that person is actually God or an angel or some spiritual being, this happens pretty frequently in the Hebrew Bible. It is its own motif. The biblical scholar James Kugel calls this the moment of confusion. He says, quote, the biblical account of these meetings always goes to the trouble of narrating a moment of confusion during which the people in question think they are talking to some ordinary person. This confusion goes on for a while and then somehow it suddenly dawns on the human that they're actually talking to an angel or to God himself. And the distinction is not always clear. Kugel explains it this way. He write in the book How to Read the Bible. There were, in fact, two quite different ways of conceiving God in biblical times. One is familiar to us because it's the later conception of God, the one that was consequently passed on to Judaism and Christianity by the end of the biblical period and has been with us in some form ever since. According to this model, and he means model in the sense of today's physicist using the word as a way of trying to conceptualize something that is not directly perceivable by the senses, God is everywhere all at once. That is, he is omnipresent. And concomitantly, he is omniscient. He knows everything. Indeed, he is all-powerful or omnipotent. And this is a much later model. It's beginnings are to be located in the 6th century BCE or so, though it does not appear fully until the end of the biblical period. The Bible's earlier way of representing God is not a poor version of the later way. It's based on a completely different model, a completely different way of conceiving God's being, one that could hardly be described as many modern scholars imply unsophisticated. In some ways, in fact, it is more sophisticated than the later model that replaced it. So we don't want to assume that this is just some sort of mythological version that the ancient Israelites, that's the best they could conceive of, because they were quite capable of describing him the way we are capable of describing him now. And we have other incidents of this. In chapter 16, God appears directly to Hagar at the well, and of course later we'll have Jacob wrestling the angel. But it's an angel that tells him that he has just wrestled with God. And then in chapter 22, by the time God declares the covenant again, he is promised it four times already. This time, however, before reaffirming the covenant, he tells Abraham to kill Isaac and to burn his body as a sacrifice. He doesn't actually make Abraham go through with it, of course, but the request, the sort of psychological torment it would have engendered, in addition to the deceitful way Abraham goes about it, have raised questions about Yahweh's moral ambiguity ever since ancient times. In Genesis 22, we're told, or God tells Abraham, take your son, your only son, Isaac, who you love, and go to the land of Moriah, offer him there as a burnt offering, on one of the mountains I shall show you. And so Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on Isaac to make Isaac carry the wood that's going to burn him. And he himself carried the fire in the knife. So the two of them walked together. Isaac said to his father, father, and Abraham said, here I am, my son. He said, the fire and the wood are here, but where's the lamb for a burnt offering? Abraham said, quote, God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son. So the two of them walked on together. The story culminates in Abraham demonstrating total obedience and God sending an angel to save Isaac at the last second. And then the angel tells him yet again that he will give him numerous offspring, all because Abraham showed unquestioning obedience. But this leads us to ask critical questions like, how could God, even as a test, order someone to kill his own son? Why would God ever need to test Abraham if he's omniscient, and he knows how the whole thing will turn out? And if Abraham is morally good, how could he deceive his son Isaac by leading him into the wilderness under these false pretenses? Well, this story was distressing to ancient interpreters as well. It led people to look for ways to explain the story that would make God look less sadistic and more compassionate and more omniscient. Some ancient authors focused on the first line of the chapter, after these things. In the last lines of chapter 21, we're told that Abraham dug well and planted a tamarisk in the land of the Philistines. There's nothing relevant to the sacrifice of Isaac. But the ancient interpreters suggested that something had been left out, that the phrase after these things referred to a wager between God and Satan like in the book of Job. As far as how to deal with the fact that Abraham deceived his son with the intent to kill him, interpreters focused on a creative reinterpretation of verse 8. In ancient Hebrew, there's no punctuation and there's no word for to be or is. So you can interpret the line, quote, God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son. To read instead, quote, God himself will provide, period, new sentence, the lamb for a burnt offering will be my son. End quote. So since the next sentence says that the two of them walk together, that would imply that Isaac understood that he was, you know, the lamb. The lamb for the burnt offering will be my son, but he understood that and that he was willing to be sacrificed. Interpretations like these collect over centuries and were passed on alongside the text itself. The Hebrew word for these traditions is midrash. Midrash is the term for commentaries on a text from the Hebrew scriptures, specifically characterized by non-literal interpretation based on later theological dogma and traditions that eventually become viewed as authoritative interpretations. And we have the same thing in Christianity. It's referred to as exegesis or hermeneutics. In Islam, it's called hadith, this collection of interpretations. Even the Upanishads in Hinduism are commentaries on the Vedas. So the Vedas themselves were a sacred text, but then you have all these commentaries that are interpretations derived from those texts alongside them. James Cougill defines midrash by saying that interpretation is probably the best one word translation of this Hebrew word, but midrash has a particular connotation that it was a non-obvious interpretation. So that anybody could tell you that God tested Abraham, but it took a skilled interpreter to show that words in the text hinted at why he had wanted to, as well as Isaac's willingness to participate in this episode. A similar or morally ambiguous incident or series of incidents comes at the beginning of the story of Jacob. So Jacob is the secondborn of Isaac, meaning that he will not inherit his father's estate, and moreover his father Isaac prefers his brother Esau. But twice Jacob resorts to cruel or deceitful tactics in order to take away his brother's inheritance. First in Genesis 25 after Esau has been out hunting, and he returns very hungry saying, I'm famished, I'm about to die. His brother Jacob refuses to give him anything to eat unless first Esau surrenders his birthright. Then with the help of his mother, he not only lies to his father Isaac, claiming to be Esau in order to get that birthright, but he disguises his arms with animal fur so that they seem hairy, so his father gives him Esau's birthright by mistake. This is not a very noble characteristic for a patriarch, and so that left early interpreters with a quandary. Should they admit that Jacob was dishonest, or was there a way to rationalize this kind of conduct? So, since the Hebrew Bible had no capitalization and no punctuation, it was a matter of interpretation where a sentence begins and it also has no verb like is, no B verb, you had to infer where something like is might go, like the word is, where that B verb might go in the sentence. That allowed ancient interpreters to divide up a sentence that as a whole would be a lie, into two sentences that individually would not be lies. So when Isaac asks, who are you, my son, it could be interpreted as if Isaac is only asking if the person before him is his son. And when Jacob responds, I am Esau, your firstborn son, that sentence could be divided into two sentences to mean I am your son, period, new sentence, Esau is your firstborn son, just in case Isaac had forgotten that Esau was his firstborn son. As these sorts of explanations accumulate through Midrash, we have new additions to the text, such as that God always loved Jacob and hated Esau. This starts in the book of Malachi, which tells us that Yahweh said, quote, I have loved Jacob, but I have hated Esau, end quote. Later, this line gets further rationalization with the addition of the line, quote, because of his deeds, end quote, implying that Esau had done bad things that were not recorded in Genesis. In the first century of the common era, Paul of Tarsus, Saint Paul, writes in his letter to the Romans, quote, even before they had been born or had done anything good or bad so that God's purpose of election might continue, not by works but by his call, their mother was told, the elder shall serve the younger. As is written, I have loved Jacob, but I have hated Esau. Because Paul doesn't cite his sources and say, this is from the book of Malachi, people typically assume that this is from Genesis or that this line about hating Esau is in Genesis. When it appears in Malachi, it's actually a reference to the misfortunes suffered by the nation of Edom, which Esau was supposed to have founded. This conflation of the people with the nations they were supposed to have founded should be a clue that we're not just dealing with a historical account of two individual people. From the beginning, the narrative frames Jacob and Esau as two nations. Jacob is the founder of the nation of Israel, Esau is the founder of the nation of Edom. The references to Esau's redness, the word for red was Adam, which sounds like the later nation, Edom. Edom's mountains are called Seir, which sounds like the word for Harry, which is Sire. When we compare this narrative to the history of the nation of Israel and Edom, we see that the younger nation, Israel, was able to conquer the older nation of Edom, at least for a little while. So the story serves as an etiology of the political history of Israel and Edom. The reason Jacob gets Esau's birthright in the narrative isn't because he's more moral, it's because at the time the story was written, the nation of Israel ruled over the nation of Edom. And the narrative generates a past that will explain the writer's present circumstances. Interpretations which do not deal with historical connection and instead look for some timeless moral generalization have a hard time rationalizing these chapters. So if we come to the Bible looking for simple answers, the only ones we're going to find are the ones we add ourselves. This is particularly true with the incident we usually refer to as Jacob wrestling the angel. At no point is the angel called an angel. The narrator calls him a man, and the man then refers to himself as God when he says you have striven with God and with humans and prevailed. Jacob then says in verse 30, I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved. This has left all the passages, readers, a lot of interpretive work to do. Was it a man? Was it God? Was it an angel? And do we really understand how the authors conceived the difference between these three concepts? In other words, do we have the right schema to understand what's going on here? Artists representing the scene have a hard enough time to figure out how to depict it. Well, the text tells us that Jacob had the upper hand in this wrestling match, that the opponent had to resort to striking his hip in order to win, in order to beat him. But that conflicts with our schemata for any kind of divine being, even if it's just an angel. How could a human win in physical combat with any kind of Elohim, any kind of spiritual being? It is significant that this is where Jacob is renamed Israel and takes on his role as the patriarch of the later nation that would tell his story. From the United Monarchy of David and Solomon to the modern nation state and everything in between. In this historical context, the origins and the iterations of the text make available a range of interpretations that are obscured if we try to force it to be a literal history or a universal moral guide, or somehow both. You might say that the last 2,500 years have seen that wrestling match continue. The people of Israel, the name of Jacob, and their descendants in the 3 Abrahamic faiths continuing to wrestle over interpretations of these inherited scriptures, not to mention wrestling over the land that produced it. And whether you believe Genesis is the inerrant truth or an anthology of ethnocentric fables or something in between, the only thing you can't say about it is that its interpretations haven't or don't continue to influence many aspects of western civilization. People use it today to justify military conquest in Israel or Palestine and to discredit scientific research and scientific education here on the other side of the globe. These modern attempts to oversimplify or exploit the text for a course of ideological purposes are really unfortunate, since they attempt to hide the complex nature of the text and the society that produced it. One of the founders of modern psychology, William James, described it this way, quote, if our theory of revelation value were to affirm that any book to possess it must have been composed automatically, in other words, directly by the a spirit controlling the hand of the author, or not by the free caprice of the writer, or that it must exhibit no scientific or historic errors and express no local or personal passions, the Bible would probably fare ill at our hands. But if, on the other hand, our theory should allow that a book may well be a revelation in spite of errors and passions and deliberate human composition, if only to be a true record of the inner experiences of great soul persons wrestling with the crises of their fate, then the verdict would be much more favourable, end quote. So I should repeat that how you apply a book like Genesis outside of the confines of literary scholarship is entirely up to you, or to your chosen theological authorities. But for that matter, how you interpret Gilgamesh or Atrahasis is also up to you. The goal we have in this class is to see the range of interpretations that have been attached to this text throughout its history. So for next time, we're going to move further west to Ancient Greece with the story Prometheus, told to us in two different genres and two very different points of view. One is by the 7th century BC poet Hesiod, and two of his works. One is the Theogony and the other is Works and Days. And the other is by the 5th century