 Can you all hear me? Is the, yeah it is working, okay. I have to remember that if I take a drink from this bottle that not to turn the label that way because apparently this is being filmed and I don't know that the company that makes this juice has actually paid for the advertising. The only other part of my bio that I will mention is just because I'm quite excited about it this year and I hope to have a chance to engage with some of you during the course of the year. But I've been invited to advise the Vice President of Student's Office here at UBC on the complexities of inter-religious issues as they relate to student development, student well-being, access and diversity, accommodation, capacity building and things of that nature. And I'd love to talk with you about how you think this wonderful experience we have here on campus can be complicated in interesting ways by the role of religion, spirituality, faith in all of its complexity. So other than that, I'm really happy to be here. Well, I'm happy about that as well. But I'm especially happy because I love having a chance to talk about this particular text, the book of Genesis. And I've been studying this text for decades and every time I look at it and think about it and have an opportunity to teach some aspect of it, particularly with other people, not by myself, something else emerges from the experience and I hope that will be the case for you. Whenever you engage any great text, any great work of literature, the Bible isn't only literature, it's also a cultural phenomenon of a particular complexity because of the role that it has played in what some people refer to as Western civilization. And there's a wonderful new book out by a scholar just a few years old by named Ronald Handel, who teaches at Berkeley called Genesis, A Biography. And it's all about the life of Genesis after it came to be more or less settled in the shape that we have it in. So that gets at the philosopher and literary critic, Walter Benjamin's idea that texts have a life and then they have an afterlife. And the afterlife, in a sense, is what has been engaging the minds of a lot of people over the last couple of thousand years or so since the text, more or less stabilized. And I say more or less because that's a really important characteristic, the text of Genesis, for us to be aware of. When you pick up any edition of the Bible, whether it contains what some people call the Hebrew Bible, what some people call the Tanakh, using the acronym for the three parts of the Bible in Jewish tradition or the Old Testament, as some refer to it, that is those who might see it as part of a Bible that has an Old Testament and a New Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures, the First Testament. As you can see, it has all kinds of different names. Whenever you pick up an edition of it, you have an experience not that different from the way that a lot of people talk about the Bible in the media, on the radio or on television. That is, when you pick up this book, it has a beginning point and an end point. If it's a Hebrew edition, it will open from the right and go that way to the left. If it's an English edition, it'll open from the left and go to the right. But when you pick it up, if it's bound as this one is, it has a beginning and an end. It's stitched together. You know where the book starts and you know where it stops. And it's pretty clear what somebody or some group of people thought that it meant because they went to the trouble of printing it. And it's not an erasable ink. It's not like an etch-a-sketch. It's got a fixed text. So it tells you what the letters are and it tells you where the punctuation goes and it tells you what it means. Now sometimes it will also have some kind of commentary. It'll have notes either on the page or around the page or in the back of the book that'll tell you what it means. But that is a little bit misleading in the sense that, well, if I were to ask you, what does the Bible say about the meaning of life? We would wanna know, well, where? Let's look up the verse. Or to be a little more precise, what does the Bible say about abortion? Let's listen. I have this microphone here and it's turned on. So let's hear what the Bible says about abortion. Let's hear what it says about creation. I don't know if the volume's turned up enough. I can't say anything, actually, about those things. No text says anything about those things. I suppose if you get a book on tape, then it will speak to you. And books of all kinds speak to us, however we understand their origins. Some people understand the origin of this book as something revealed by a supernatural force being deity of some kind. And some people understand this particular text as being composed by people or by groups of people and combined together into the version that we have. The fact that you have such a vast range of opinions about how this particular text came to be gets at some of the cultural complexity of this book in whatever form it comes and in whatever edition it comes and in whatever translation we read it in, it gets at some of the ways in which it is different than another book you might pick up. Now that doesn't mean that if you pick up one edition of Shakespeare and another, you're not going to find a lot of differences. You are. But there's something about this book that's different from Shakespeare in that however one might understand the genius of Shakespeare and the genius of particular works of Shakespeare, and some might say that great writers or artists are inspired by something beyond the individual person or mind, you would have a hard time convincing a lot of people that God revealed Shakespeare's works to Shakespeare, whereas you could get a lot of otherwise serious people who get collected paycheck and don't get pulled off the road and examined by psychiatrists, you could find a lot of such people who think very seriously that this book was revealed by some sort of supernatural being. And so that's one of the reasons that it has had a particular currency in many cultures and why it arouses a lot of passions. Now some of those passions have been channeled into very rigorous scholarship by people who would describe themselves as religious believers and by people who would describe themselves as believers in something else. And the ways in which that scholarship has had an impact on our experience or reading of this text is one of the things I want to talk with you about. The other thing I want to talk with you about is some aspects of the text itself that have contributed to the afterlife of the book, and particularly Genesis will use that as an example. That is not only because it's called a religious text, but in the same way as a great work of art that keeps calling you back to look at it and pick it up again and engage it. There's something about this text that is really quite remarkable. And I'm not saying there aren't other texts that are also remarkable in all kinds of ways, and some great literary works are remarkable in many ways that are similar to this particular text. But each text has its own unique qualities and this one does as well. So Genesis is a particularly interesting text to look at for a session this year where you're looking at the theme of remaking and remixing because Genesis in many ways is a really good illustration of some aspects of that phenomenon. Well, first of all, it is about the making or creating of the world in some sense, but it immediately invites questions. And this is one of the most interesting things about the text in that it doesn't only explain it once, it tells us twice, and it doesn't give us all the information that we're interested in. It tells us about some aspects of the creation of the world and not about others. It leaves gaps. It seems on the surface to contradict itself. It repeats itself in all kinds of interesting ways. And I want to talk with you about some of those features as particular devices that contribute to the work's complexity, to its artistry, to its beauty. In other words, some of those features, gaps, enigmatic statements, repetitions, some of the curiosities of the text seem to be or seem to have become at a certain stage part of the nature of the work that was intended by those who touched it last. Now you're saying those who touched it last, I thought it was a revealed text. Well, here's where it gets a little bit complicated. I'm going to give you an example here. If you look at this book here, this is a book that's used by some scholars who study the Bible and who are able to work with Hebrew. And there's a way to translate this. I think that's autofocus, yeah? Well, you can't quite get it, but you can sort of see the point here. That is, well, I don't know if you can, but basically you have parallel columns here. On this side, you have something that is not that different from what was found in the caves in what some refer to as the Judean Desert. The Judean Desert texts or the manuscripts or the Dead Sea Scrolls, which is another name by which it's known more popularly. That is, clay jars were found, they started to be found in significant numbers in the 1940s. And some have been found not that long ago. So it's been accumulating that cache of texts, scrolls written on parchment, and they don't have vowels. So you can't really see because it's not quite clear enough, but this column here is not that different from the way that it looks on those parchment that were found in the Middle East that were last, the ink was last set, onto the parchment, onto the animal scroll. There's some on metal, but there's one on metal, but mostly on these animal skin hides, they don't have vowels because 2,200 years or so ago, 2,100 or so years ago, when the last of these scrolls that we've now, not we, I personally, but some have uncovered, were the ink dried, they didn't have vowels. And the column on this side does have vowels, and what the vowels are was determined by a process of scribal study and oral transmission that reached its peak in the Middle Ages. In other words, there are hundreds of years separating the additions, the form of the text 2,200 or so years ago, and the form of the text in the Middle Ages when the vowels got set down. Now you're probably asking yourself, how does that make sense? How do you write in a sentence in English without vowels, with just consonants? And then you're also probably asking yourself, so what, why does it matter? I'm gonna show you why it matters. I hope. So if I were to write a sentence for you, some of you will remember this example because I've been here before, what does that say? Just consonants, who wants to buy a letter? Just kidding, yes. My name is Robert Dam, yes. And I live in Vancouver, I live in Vancouver. I left and out, right, or I'd have an ND in there. Now the reason that you were able to do that and that we haven't had to be here all day is because you have a context. You have a few contexts. One context is you heard my name or you saw it somewhere. Another context is you are able to predict with fairly good accuracy where I live. And Vancouver is something that you're familiar with even if you don't see it in vowels, do you see? You also have another context which is a familiarity with the English language with English grammar and syntax. Syntax, sentence structure in particular so you were able to kind of fill that in. Well the same thing was the case with the text of the Bible when it was either circulating orally, being transmitted orally, being heard orally or even for the passages, the units of the text that we're pretty sure most of us who work with this material were composed in writing but were then performed orally. And so people memorized them and they heard them and they had a context so they could read it. If I were to show this same screen to people in other places in the world who never met a Robert and didn't know English grammar and syntax and sentence structure in particular and didn't never heard of Vancouver, let alone knew this was a classroom and knew at the point of why I was doing this, they would have a lot more trouble. So in the Middle Ages as people's ability to reconstruct the text, just working with the consonants in the way that you're just making maybe little notes that you can understand but you're not transcribing it to make an official record so that anyone could pick it up and understand what you're writing down. So if you're writing down what's the point question mark, you know what that means but someone outside might not, right? So likewise there came to be a need to put in vowels. There also wasn't punctuation in the early texts. So one didn't know where one sentence ended and another one began. There also weren't chapter headings. Some editions of the Bible will tell you the point of this is or this is the story about, right? And then we get of course into translation. Translation creates another huge problem for us. It also enables our reading of the text in a language that many people don't understand but it also creates a barrier between the reader and the text. This idea of the untranslatability of a text is one that well many people who love literature and read it in a particular language who will say that and others will be familiar with the example of the Holy Quran for many Muslims who believe that it can only be read in Arabic that a translation is not the same text. And there's a very deep insight there that I think many who work in translation theory and practice would understand immediately. When we read the Bible it becomes only more significant perhaps than reading the average work of literature, say a novel published last Tuesday because the Bible has a certain cultural role in many discussions in our society and has for a long time, okay? So I want to give you three different ways of thinking about how we read the Bible that I find particularly instructive and I'm borrowing this from another work of Ronald Handel's, I'll refer to a few other scholars from time to time, not in a name dropping exercise but so that you'll be curious and want to go on and read their work. Ronald Handel from Berkeley. He talks about the way in which we can read this particular text, we can approach it, building on the work of some who approach it almost from a sociological perspective. Who are the people who contributed to the making of and transformations of the societies that first experienced this text? So who were they? So we start thinking about class and gender and social position and nation and tribe and ethnicity and geography and all sorts of things, social frameworks through which the text is experienced and sociology becomes a really important discipline as Handel suggests. In another way of approaching a text like this is of course to ask historical questions of it. Handel uses a term that another scholar articulated called Nemohistory or Nemohistory. By which folks who use this language refer to a set of cultural motifs or themes or tropes or patterns, symbols that are passed on through time and then there's a kind of dissonance between the symbols and oneself, particularly if you're working with symbols and stories and themes that have been around for hundreds or thousands of years. So there's a bit of a distance between where we are and where those symbols and themes were at the time that they were set into the text. And so to ease the dissonance between where we are and where those symbols were or those motifs were, you know we work through that, how to transcend that gap in all kinds of interesting ways. So we find meaning in the text in all kinds of ways. And one way that people have looked at this text that has been quite important, quite dominant, certainly very important in the 19th century and still is for many scholars, is to look at it as a historical document to try to understand what it tells us about the past, about what actually happened. So we could read it as a historical work. And others, and then you get into all kinds of debates over whether it's real or not real. Other scholars think that perhaps it's better to approach the Bible not as a work of history, but as a history-like text, as some put it. It's somewhat realistic. It's history-like, but it's somewhere between history and fiction. So there's stories and other moments, other scenes, other kinds of texts that are history-like, but to try to label it as either history or fiction is missing some of the complexity of the text. And so sociology, a kind of history, but a cultural history approach. And then the third category that's become very important and very popular is one which we'll spend most of the rest of our time on and that is a literary study. Literary analysis, literary appreciation. Poetics, narratology. What are the rules of operation in this particular text? How does this text work as a text? What are some of the devices that it uses to capture your attention, your imagination, to invite you in? So let's talk about some of those. Well, one of them is the issue I mentioned earlier about repetition. It's very strange. We have at least two creation stories at the beginning of Genesis. We get one creation story, then all of a sudden we get another one. So what's going on there? Now some scholars have identified different sources behind the Bible. Some argue, although we've never found the original versions of those discrete sources, there's a source that many refer to as the J source. That's because of a German transliteration of a particular way of reading one of the names for God used in the text. So that's why it's called the J source. And then the E source is because of another transliteration using the first letter here in English of another name for God that's used. And that E name is the name that is used in the first verse of Genesis. It's the God called by that name who creates the world at the very beginning in the first verse of Genesis. And then there's another source, which is called the P source, which stands for priestly, the priestly source. And that source is by those who identify or hold to such a theory as a source that was generated by, shaped by priestly elements. And so it has particular characteristics as do the other two. In other words, these first two sources are seen to be distinctive, not only because of the particular name by which they designate the deity, but also particular ways of using language and particular approaches to stories that are told. And the same thing with the P source. And another major source is the D source. And that's the source called D because it's deuteronomic for the book of deuteronomy, the fifth book of the five books of Moses or the Pentateuch, and not only that fifth book, but other characteristic features, turns of phrase, approaches, themes that are believed by some to have been, to be reflective of other moments in the other four books. And so it's seen to be the last by some of the set, although it's possible that we have some later interventions by a priestly oriented author, contributing to a few different layers of the P source. Now, what does all this mean? What it means is that most scholars who teach in universities like UBC who write their research for peer-reviewed journals generally believe that the book that we have is a composite. That is, it's made up of more than one source. And that's one way of explaining the fact that we have two creation stories. And it's another, it's also a way of explaining contradictions like a caravan passing by that in one verse is described as an Ishmaelite caravan referring to a particular ethnic designation on the scene as the story is imagined. And in the very next verse, it's referred to as a Midianite caravan, the same caravan. Now, interpreters who for a long time have seen this book as being divinely inspired and therefore perfect will sometimes also see the work as being literally true. If it's at least perfect, whether they see it to be literally true, if it's at least perfect, then all of these contradictions, seeming discrepancies are resolvable. So some might say, well, they're Midianite and they're Ishmaelite. It's just called Midianite here and Ishmaelite there. That's one way of explaining it. Or the two creation stories, one of them seems to describe a kind of composite human being who is both male and female in some way, right? An androgyne and there was a very ancient interpretation that explains this phenomenon. Male and female God created the human being, right? So male and female, one being undifferentiated, a male-female being, an androgyne. Androginos, using the Greek, is the term used in a very ancient source to explain that particular strange verse, how the human could be both male and female. But then right after that, we get this other creation where the earth creature, the Adam, is then differentiated into male and female. So it's another story and one in which, in the second one, we have something that looks like a subservient female and a dominant male. A very different creation story. So one way of resolving that is to say, well, we could say one is ideal and the other is the way it's experienced in society by some. Or we could say that they're both true in some sense. And religiously inspired interpreters worked with texts a lot to try to resolve those discrepancies. In the modern period, scholars who follow this idea of there being composite sources, and some people were kind of hinting in that direction already before the 19th century, people who hold to that view are a rather more interesting way of resolving the fact that we have seeming repetitions, discrepancies, and redundancies by suggesting, and to this day, a very popular approach, is that this is deliberate. That actually, perhaps we could use the analogy of four gospels in the New Testament or the Greek scriptures. That is somehow they all tell a part of the story. And the tension is there for a reason. So that's one way that repetition or redundancy can work. But repetition or redundancy is a much more complex phenomenon in the Bible and it's really fascinating. And I'll give you one example that I really enjoy. And that is there are cases in the Bible where there seems to be a kind of an intimacy established between the narrator and the reader or hearer with a kind of wink about the difference between what the narrator is telling us has happened and what a character reports to other characters in the story. And it tells us something about the character who's reporting the story or the scene differently than the way the narrator has just explained it to us that helps us to understand something about what the author or authors seem to be trying to tell us about that character. So one example is when the servant of the character Abraham is sent off to find a bride for his son, Isaac, and his servant finds, he's told to go back to the area where the master Abraham comes from and find a woman from that particular area because that's the bride from that area that the master wants. Well when he gets there and he finds the woman he feels is the perfect bride for his master's son, he finds out not only is she from that area but she's also a relative, a distant cousin. And so he repeats almost verbatim the speech with the instructions that his master gave him but he adds one element. I mean he adds the element, one very important element which is he adds the instructions to go back to my kinfolk and find a bride there, which his master hadn't said. And that's important because his master actually left the place where his family was from as part of his journey to become who he was going to become. He left. So it's a strategic change. There's another great example when there are stories about a practice of in traveling around when you're a stranger traveling around and sometimes we have a few cases actually, three particularly interesting and troubling stories where a man is traveling with his wife and a powerful figure or figures encounter them and there's at least a suggestion as a theme in the story that a practice in this context, whether imagined or real was in that time to seize the woman and kill the man and take the woman into the household of the king or the ruler, okay? So we have these three stories where the husband passes off his wife as a sister, okay? Very troubling and thorny texts that we could puzzle over and should for a long time. But there's one, so there are three different times that this happens with a few characters. And there's one scene in particular that's really interesting where the third powerful male ruler figure who is now has taken the wife but whom he thinks is the sister, right? He thinks she's the sister of his guest, right? And he has this troubling dream. He seems to be in bed with her but he's not able to consummate the sexual experience if you know where I'm going. And so he has this dream and God seems to be, the God character seems to be communicating with him in the dream and he protests because he hasn't touched her. And he says, I didn't touch her, I have clean hands and a pure heart. And the God character repeats to him, I know you have clean hands. Now a biblical audience or reader would have noticed that the God character in the dream didn't say and a pure heart. You see, it's a subtle deviation from the verbatim repetition that we're expecting. And the Bible does this all the time, all the time. So it's not exactly repetition. It's a subtle shift and the second iteration of a speech or of a line will be slightly ever so slightly different and that slight deviation is extremely important and often very interesting. When King David is in a kind of competition with his father-in-law Saul and his brother-in-law Jonathan, eventually David will replace Saul as the king, there's a kind of competition over who can be a more valiant and effective warrior. And so Saul and his son Jonathan return from the battle and so does David. And David has killed a lot more of the enemy and so their returning warriors are praised and the verses something like Saul and Jonathan have slain their thousands, David tens of thousands. Do you see? That's how that repetition works. It's a slight deviation and the difference is really, really interesting. Another wonderful feature of the biblical text is gaps, gapping. In other words, Eric Auerbach long ago noticed, well others did as well, but Auerbach particularly in an important book called Mimesis, published in 1946, he formulated an expression about how the Bible is fraught with background. It's fraught with background. There's a lot behind it, but it's also very laconic. It holds a lot back. So we don't know a lot about a character's motivations. We don't get a lot of interior monologue. We don't hear a lot about what a character is thinking. Some characters are very enigmatic and so one of the fascinating things about the Bible that Auerbach talked about, that in many ways as one of my teachers, Robert Alter, has emphasized and others I think are in agreement on this is that the Bible seems to have anticipated to use Alter's formulation to have anticipated the modern novel, continuing building on Auerbach's argument in that. And this is a famous argument of Auerbach's in comparing the Odyssey and the Bible. That, you know, the Odyssey, I mean Odysseus he wakes up and as Auerbach argues and he's pretty much the same every day. I mean things happen but he's pretty much the same guy. Whereas for some biblical characters and especially the long novel-like stories, say the character of Jacob which is a really an extended narrative or the character of Joseph which is even longer. The story of Jacob and Joseph and that whole family it's the second half of Genesis basically. Or the really long story even longer of David. We have characters who are becoming individuals and their individual experience and development and transformation is notable. Whereas Odysseus is pretty much as I said pretty much the same guy. So in some ways one of the aspects of the Bible that accounts for its fascination for many people is not just that I think and others I think will agree, not everybody, of course that's what makes the world interesting. It's not just its role as a text that some people think is revealed and you know more power to them that's fine. I don't know one way or the other. I don't have an opinion on that. But actually there's something about it as a literary work that is some of its literary characteristics are really quite brilliant. And one aspect of it is like the modern novel it provides us with a portrait of a character who is becoming an individual, transformed by various experiences, going through changes and we get the sense of the growth of these characters. I mean if you look at Joseph the spoiled brat at the beginning of his story and then Joseph the kind of somewhat wiser and chastened man toward the end of his life. Jacob a kind of trickster figure outwitting his brother and then others throughout his life and then experiencing downfall after downfall despair the death of his beloved wife Rachel and the deaths he thinks of his son Joseph and the death of his son Simeon and the rape of his daughter Tamar. And then on and on through his life that Jacob is a very different character at the end of the story and it's that feature that our back and alter and other critics have noticed as a particularly interesting aspect of biblical stories. Another really interesting feature is names. You can't tell this when you read the Bible in English unless it has an annotated, unless it has comments to explain it. But the names are really, really interesting. Sometimes they're interesting in enigmatic ways that is it doesn't spell out immediately in an obvious way what is significant about the name but they're very interesting. And we can only really get that if we know what the Hebrew means. And I'll give you an example of the enigmatic but still significant name Adam which some people will just translate as Adam but Adam is very, very interesting. At the level of the language, Hebrew words are like Arabic, they're root based and if you take apart the root, you can break it into blocks and it means it has meaning. And then when you combine those blocks in certain ways, they're very interesting. So Adam looks like it has, first of all, the word Adam which means red. And remember that he's made of clay of the earth in one way to understand the way he's shaped out of clay and the red clay of that region which gives its name to the nation of Edom, to the east of biblical ancient Israel, that's connected to this Edom, red, Edom, that nation, Adam, earth creature or clay creature, red clay creature and dam which means blood, right? Which this Adam has inside. Adam, earth. So you can see the connection between these roots and these words and it helps in some way to illuminate something that's going on in the story. Jacob's another great example. A cave means heel and remember in the story in the womb Jacob and his brother Esau are their twins and Jacob is trying to literally trip up Esau who's on his way out of the womb first and he holds on to his heel to try to slow him down so he can get out first because in the ancient world, in that time, in that region there are at least two different dominant modes of determining primacy in family, inheritance and status of children. One is that the first born has the most important role and another is that the father can determine who is going to be the most significant heir. So you can see those tensions at play in a number of stories but one of these tensions here is of course the tension between being the first born and being the second born. So from the very beginning, Jacob and Esau are struggling and Jacob is holding on to Esau's heel to try to slow him down and the root of his name in Hebrew Yaakov the root also means to deceive or to trick and Jacob is a kind of trickster figure, right? Remember working with the help of his mother Rebecca who has heard the prophecy when she's in the story when she's pregnant with the two boys that the elder is gonna serve the younger as she understands the prophecy. So what does she do since her husband Isaac who's been damaged somehow or traumatized by one way of reading it from having been tied to a sacrificial pile of wood and almost sacrificed by his father who would have traumatized me. At any rate the father Isaac is not doing what he needs to to pass on as she understands it the special blessing to the son Jacob the second son, the junior one to enact what was prophesied to her in the womb. So she works with Jacob the younger brother and has like animal skin furry sleeves put on his hand so he'll be kind of hairy and like his older brother Esau who's out hunting for game and they basically outwit Isaac it seems by tricking. So trickery seems to be a device of Yaakov's, okay? Well here's a really interesting complication of that particular scene because if you look at the, I'll just write it out on this board I don't think you'll, I don't know if you can see it but I know that most of you don't read Hebrew but that's okay, I'll explain it to you. So the elder, remember reading from right to left, okay? V'rav ya avod sa'ir. So read in this sort of straightforward the elder will serve the younger but one of the cool things about biblical syntax which is similar as a couple of critics have pointed out and I think altar is the one who compared it to the Delphic Oracle. Oracles are enigmatic and this one is too because it could mean the elder shall serve or will serve or be ruled over by, right? Will serve the younger. It could also be read another way as the elder, the younger will serve, okay? We'll be the servant of. Now, as we read the story, what happens? Toward the end, Jacob does the younger Jacob, he does get the special blessing and in the grand plot of the narrative, Jacob's descendants are meant we think to be understood to be carrying on the lineage of Abraham more so than Esau's line. I mean, it's a much contested feature in the ancient history of the peoples associated with the story. But one of the really interesting features of what happens in this text and altar I think is the one who points this out is that the very last word that Jacob says to his brother Esau, the very last thing he says is my lord. He calls him my master, my lord because Esau and he meet and Esau is at the head of a large and powerful force of warriors. So therefore, and he's bowing, he's prostrating himself before Esau. So there's a tension captured in this very prophecy that was passed on to their mother in the womb which plays itself out in the story and is never fully resolved, okay? Another great example of the significance of names is in the Canaan Abel story. When you read it, two brothers and the first murder, right? It isn't altogether clear what's going to happen in the story when you first hear their names. But if you know that one of them, Abel, in Hebrew his name is Hevel which has a very interesting semantic and semiotic range that is somewhere ephemeral, transitory, shadow, even superficial or vanity. In Ecclesiastes, vanity, Hevel ha-valim, all right? So we're not sure what's going to unfold in the story except that one brother sounds a little bit less durable than the other one. Kain, whose name suggests, you know, a tool, a spear, something really hard and durable. So you can imagine which one is going away. But what's particularly interesting is that we aren't sure why they're called those names. We certainly aren't sure why Abel or Hevel is called that name. Which feature of hevel is being underscored by that name? Is it his transitory quality, the fact that he's not going to live very long? Is it that there's something about him being superficial or even vain? Is that what ticked off Kain? We don't know. It's not excusing the murder, but it's complicating it. Do you see? So names in the text are very, very significant and very, very interesting. Another really, maybe one or two other quick patterns and I'll pause for a few questions is the significance of, well, I'll give you another couple of examples of translation problems. Which translation should you use? You should use as many as you can find. I like to compare translations. They're very, very interesting. I particularly like the alter translation because of recent translations, it's informed by a lot of the mistakes of earlier translations, but it's also a particularly fine translation. I'll just give you one example of a particularly good illustration of its strength in one sense. And it's a scene when Jacob is having a dream. And some of you will remember the scene. There's a kind of a ladder that's going from earth to heaven and angels are going up and down the ladder. And in the Hebrew it says something about the position of Jacob sleeping in his head and there's a rock nearby. And some translators, a very common translation pattern that was used in the King James translation going back several hundred years is repeated in Christian and Jewish translations that are highly regarded. They translate the rock in that particular verse to mean that he had his head on a rock as if the rock was his pillow. And what Alter points out is that first of all, linguistically, this doesn't make sense. That is, it doesn't have to be translated that way. It's, it at his head is a better translation. And it also makes more sense because I don't know if you've ever tried camping out and sleeping with your head on a rock. It's really, it's not a firm pillow, it's a rock. And if you go like that, you'll smash your head on it, right? So it doesn't make sense. It's also linguistically problematic, okay? But not only that, at his head is really important because rocks are an important theme in Jacob's story. And what we experience here is what Martin Buber called a light fort, like in music, a light motif, like a theme. So it's a thematic word that plays a role in a character's life in the story. So rocks are a big theme for Jacob. He has this, he sleeps at a rock. After he has this kind of miraculous dream, he makes a little pile of rocks, right? And then he slides a rock away from the well when he meets his future wife. Now you might say, well, who wouldn't cover up a well with a rock? What's unusual about that? Well, what's unusual about it is, remember what I said about repetition? In the Bible, there's something that, that altar and others call a type scene. That is something that we see in various stories involving various characters and the elements are very consistent. This is the only type scene at the well where the man meets the woman at the well and they turn out to be fated for each other or she's fated for his servant, for his master, et cetera, where a rock is pushed out of the way. The only one. So we are alerted by that deviation to notice the significance of the rock in that scene. We connect it to the rock next to Jacob's head, the piles of rocks he makes at a few points in his life and we can see rocks are important in Jacob's story and we can follow them like homing lights on a runway to thread together something significant in the story. That thematic word or image is what Martin Buber called a light fort, light fort for a light verter. So these thematic words are really, really important. And we also sometimes see not only these recurring motifs of rocks, but we also see a mirror scene. Can you see how that's spelled? It's L-E-I-T-W-O-R-T, like a thematic word, okay? Another pattern to look for in reading biblical tales is a kind of mirror tale, a mirror tale. Alter is written about this in a few different contexts and so have others. That is, you'll have a story at some point and then another story and there are features from the first story that are mirrored in the other story. So one example that is kind of interesting is that Joseph gets a Katonit pasim, an ornamented tunic. And Alter has pointed out that this is very unusual, that he's getting this ornamented tunic. Many readers over the ages have noticed that Joseph is being treated differently than his brothers and it leads to a lot of jealousy. The tragedy of this family of Jacob unfolds in all kinds of ways and some of it is the way that Joseph is treated as special in ways his brothers and his sister are not. But he gets this ornamented tunic and the ornamented tunic we know from another story is what is usually given to the daughter of kings. So we have a very interesting complex gendering of the Joseph character and also a very interesting motif. If we know from another story that it's traditionally given to the daughter of kings it seems to be signaling to us that there's gonna be trouble in the Joseph family which of course Joseph amplifies by telling his family about dreams he's had where they're all bowing down to him. So we've looked at gaps. We've looked and one of the most famous gaps is the gap, one of my favorite ones really is when in the book of Samuel when Hannah is unable to conceive a child in an ancient culture in which a woman who has not been able to conceive a child is less weighty, has less substance within the eyes of people in that culture than a woman who does have a child whatever we may think of what that means. And her husband who sees how inconsolable she is says to her, am I not better than or as good as 10 sons to you? Do you know what she says? Nothing. She doesn't say anything. She just gets up and goes off to pray for a child. That's a gap. Because we're wondering what is she thinking? How sweet, wasn't that thoughtful of him? Or you don't get it, do you? Or you can imagine. So we want it, the reader wants to fill in gaps. People are always telling the David character, they love him. He doesn't respond. What's he thinking? It's a gap. David's a very enigmatic character. So gaps, repetition, the significance of names, translation challenges. Different sources coming in from different perspectives. These are just a few of the examples that help to convey the complexity of the poetics of the Bible, which is one of the ways, lenses through which we read this beguiling text. In addition to cultural memories and how they're negotiated and renegotiated, how we get an orderly creation of the world at the beginning of Genesis, but we have traces remaining even there in Genesis and elsewhere in the Bible of other ancient Near Eastern creation stories with sea monsters and with deities of other kinds who are not, in other words, the deity that creates the world is not alone in those other ancient Near Eastern myths. And there are traces of those left in the text. So different sources that are reinterpreted and reshaped to leave us with the text we have. And then the one we started, which is the social frameworks, as Hendel puts it, through which we read the text, gender location, power location, class, nation, tribe. All of these are swirling about and they are still by readers who read this text and will continue to do so, I think, for a few more years, trying to find meaning in it and significance. Time for a couple of questions? Yes. Yes, yes. Yeah. Exactly, exactly. Very interesting. And then it makes you wonder, well, why is he called that? Yeah. Right? What does it tell us about the story? Yeah, nice. Another question? Yes. Mm-hmm, yes. Yes, absolutely. There are several biblical critics who see this story this way, that the first creature is sexually undifferentiated. And rather than seeing the creation story where the female is split off from Adam, as being the sort of the carving off or hiving off of a ribber, whatever, to make a woman as a subservient secondary character, notwithstanding those themes that are in there as well, some have argued that the first differentiated creature is a woman. In other words, you have an undifferentiated creature and then woman is made first. And the leftover is the man. So it's kind of an interesting way to kind of turn it around. But there were also ancient readers going back almost 2,000 years at least, who saw the first creature as sexually undifferentiated as some kind of androgyne. Yeah. Maybe one more and then we'll part ways. Yes. Yeah, it's very interesting. I mean, the chronologies are kind of, well, unrealistic from what we know, right? I mean, who lives for hundreds of years? So numbers in the Bible are very tricky anyway. There are people who actually, will take these numbers very literally and assume that people lived for hundreds of years at a certain point. I'm not one of those people, although I would love to know the secret, if that's the case. Good reason to exercise. But the numbers are very problematic. Some associate it with tall tales in some cultures notions of, that the prime evils were superior to us in all kinds of ways and one of the ways was that they lived way, way, way longer than we did. Others see them as a way of working out kind of chronology that makes sense of tribal histories and so on. So you can count the generations back and so on. They're very problematic and no one's been able to solve them. I will say one thing about numbers and that'll be, I guess, the last word because it really is time to stop and I don't wanna hold you. And that is that a few years ago there was a kind of a cultural moment for people who read the Bible as a code, right? And they added up words and so on and counted words and thought it prophesied all kinds of things from the date of this war and that war to the, I don't know, where the stock market was gonna be trading at a certain date. I don't find that very helpful or sensible. And it doesn't really work anyway because we have different manuscript editions that would lead to very different word counts. But there is something very interesting in the numerical patterns of the book. And one of the best examples is in the creation story right at the very beginning, the first chapter and a little bit of the second chapter which seems like a book-ended scene of one of the creation versions. It is generally attributed to the priestly source and there are many reasons but one of the reasons is that it is a very kind of orderly and tame creation. It's a very kind of ethereal God, a very transcendent God, a high God, not a God that as we would expect from the J authorship as we suppose has angels going up and down ladders and God appearing in physical form and things like that but rather a kind of transcendent, high, mysterious God who performs things by speech. Let there be light, that sort of God, that kind of cosmic God. That's the God that's associated generally with the p source which is the source that is generally associated with the authorship for those who subscribe to that theory, that documentary method of different sources to the first chapter and a little bit of the second chapter of Genesis. Mathematics is a very interesting tool in defining that unit as a block of material because of the number seven, right? And so there are cycles of sevens. If you add up the numbers of the times that God's name is mentioned and things like that, there are a few words that fit into patterns, seven times something, two times seven for another word and seven times five for another word and so on, right? So there are definite, there's an awareness of numerical patterns that I think is well evidence-based as a lot of my colleagues like to say and I think with good reason in this case but reading it to predict who will win the next Academy Award, I think is that's a whole other, that's a whole other story. Well, I hope you've gotten some sense of the text and I hope you'll enjoy reading it and read and compare different translations and read scholarship that will help you to appreciate it in the same way that when you go through the Vancouver Art Gallery to look at an exhibition, you will have a very different experience if you just walk through on your own than you will if you go through on a tour with a docent or if you go through with the little headphones and listen to an explanation by art historians telling you something about the genre, telling you something about the technique, the artistry, the history, the context that you wouldn't have known simply by walking in without that assistance. Thank you.