Hitzonim | Outsiders

Last call for virtual, asynchronous book study on the Gospel According to John, through a Jewish lens, using primarily AJ Levine’s very recent release. Read the book, watch some videos, participate in group discussion, all at your own pace. I’m sending the welcome email Monday, and the study officially begins the week of October 14. I hope you’ll join us! Sign up!

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Hey, it’s Hebrew year 5785! It’s the head of the year: Rosh HaShana. Happy New Year! Gut yontif! Shana Tova U’metukah! May you have a happy and sweet new year!

You’re either a Jewish reader who is used to the calendar, or you recall from past discussions about things like Rosh Chodesh, the head, or first, of the month, that the Hebrew calendar is lunar, and days begin at sunset for what the Gregorian calendar considers the prior day. This is why we greet each other with Shabbat Shalom on a Friday, because that evening signals the beginning of the Sabbath day.

Likewise, the Jewish ceremony that ends Shabbat, a ceremony called Havdala, begins after sundown on Saturday night–same Gregorian day, but Shabbat is technically over. Similarly, during the upcoming fast day of Yom Kippur, the fast begins at sunset the evening before, and “break fast” occurs after sun down on the day of Yom Kippur. I think you get it.

I’m sure we’ve talked about it, but in case we need the reminder, this goes back to the Genesis creation account, well, one of them: “God called the light Day and called the darkness Night. And there was evening and there was morning, a first day” (Genesis 1.5; JPS).

Taken together, a lunar calendar that begins at sunset, you need to track the phases of the moon and the setting of the sun. Before we could FaceTime our friends and show them the new moon, our ancient counterparts had to rely on multiple spotters or other means of communication to mark the head of the month. Witnesses would testify before rabbinical authorities that they had seen the new moon, and then the new month would be declared. Because it took time for this news to reach all Jewish communities, especially those far from Jerusalem, to ensure that everyone observed Rosh Hashanah on the correct day, it was celebrated for two days.

The neuroticism really resonates.

The Torah readings for Rosh HaShanah days one and two are Genesis 21 and 22, respectively. Let’s tell the stories and add notes on source criticism, as we usually do around here! These stories are rich and ancient, and I love them.

In Genesis 21, the cast includes Abraham, his wife Sarah, an enslaved woman, Hagar, and two of Abraham’s children, Isaac, Abraham and Sarah’s son, and Ishmael, Abraham and Hagar’s son. The text stipulates that Isaac was Abraham’s beloved son, but we’ll see that Abraham cares also for Ishmael–sort of. The two themes we’ll pick up on are these: First, Sarah gives birth to Isaac at an advanced age, which carries significance, and second, Sarah’s Egyptian enslaved woman, and Ishmael’s mother, Hagar, is expelled, with Ishmael. Isaac is beloved by Abraham, and the text says that Ishmael is “a wild ass of a man” whose “hand is against everyone, and everyone’s hand is against him.”

Gd ultimately promises that a great nation will be made of Abraham, through Isaac, and also, a great nation will be made from Ishmael. This is a hopeful outcome because immediately following their exile, things look spotty for Hagar and Ishmael. They find Gd’s (El/Elohim’s) favor, and Gd provides for them in the desert. Abraham is concerned for Hagar and Ishmael, but Gd tells Abraham not to worry and to do what Sarah asks him to do.

In Genesis 22, Abraham plans to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac at Gd’s request, but Abraham is stopped by an angel at the last minute, and a ram is provided in Isaac’s place.

WTF, Dad?!

So, Happy New Year! Here is an illegitimate child born from, ostensibly, the assault of an enslaved person, who is then exiled from the encampment, followed shortly by child sacrifice. We sure do know how to party.

I don’t mean any disrespect to the text, but I am reminded that the moral and conceptual framework of this literature is both light years away from us, and yet, it also deals with themes of enslavement, sexual assault, and the tension among siblings, however understood, these are very real issues in current events.

You may be asking, what does any of this have to do with Rosh Hashanah, the head of the year? It turns out, the rabbis tell us; don’t look surprised, if there’s anything we can judge about the rabbis, it’s that they always have something to say!

Rabbi Yehoshua disagrees and says: In Nisan [March or April] the world was created; in Nisan the Patriarchs were born; in Nisan the Patriarchs died; on Passover Isaac was born; on Rosh HaShana Sarah, Rachel, and Hannah were remembered by God and conceived sons; on Rosh HaShana Joseph came out from prison; on Rosh HaShana our forefathers’ slavery in Egypt ceased; in Nisan the Jewish people were redeemed from Egypt; and in Nisan in the future the Jewish people will be redeemed in the final redemption (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Rosh HaShana, 11a; emphasis in original.)

We read about Sarah on Rosh Hashanah because she was remembered by Gd on this festival, along with Rachel and Hannah, other women who have sons after some difficulty. Rosh Hashanah carries significance for those wanting to have children but for whatever reasons, biological or biographical, are facing a challenge to that end.

The child who greeted me this year in my reading of this story was Ishmael. I first want to sit with the scene:

Early next morning Abraham took some bread and a skin of water, and gave them to Hagar. He placed them over her shoulder, together with the child, and sent her away. And she wandered about in the wilderness of Beer-sheba.

When the water was gone from the skin, she left the child under one of the bushes, and went and sat down at a distance, a bowshot away; for she thought, “Let me not look on as the child dies.” And sitting thus afar, she burst into tears. (Genesis 21.14-19; JPS)

I want to give us permission, if not prescription, to be moved by this story. Before we say anything else, read anything else, analyze anything else, here we meet an enslaved woman, Hagar, who was impregnated by Abraham, by force one can imagine, who is the “owner” of this woman, and he is husband to Hagar’s direct overseer, Sarah, who the text says, “degraded her [Hagar].”

Hagar and Ishmael face terrible mistreatment, and yet, the following verse:

God (El/Elohim) heard the cry of the boy, and a messenger of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, “What troubles you, Hagar? Fear not, for God has heeded the cry of the boy where he is. Come, lift up the boy and hold him by the hand, for I will make a great nation of him.” Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. She went and filled the skin with water, and let the boy drink.

If things weren’t complicated enough, Abraham was “distressed greatly, for it concerned a son of his.” But God tells Abraham not to worry and to listen to Sarah and do what she says.

I want to pause and take note of the narrative complexity, something that I think a lot of people miss. Especially the so-called “new atheists,” who see fit to reject the text outright for its reporting of scenes like these, and for apologists who may legitimize these actions. I argue that these stories are nuanced and complex, and we should not make the mistake that fundamentalists do; fundamentalist apologists and fundamentalist atheists. Rather, we have literature meant to tell a story of myth and meaning.

We have a woman who has struggled with infertility in a time when male offspring are prized. We have Abraham, an enslaver, who is both directed to exile one of his sons and sacrifice the other, with Gd endorsing both, but a Gd who also exercises compassion for the enslaved and provides for them, and a Gd who releases Abraham from an impossible task, the sacrifice of his first born son.

The story rehearses the later sacrificial requirement of the first born that culminates in the Passover sacrifice of a lamb and is understood as the pidyon haben, the sacrificing of the first born. We may likely have here also a critique of other people’s cultic practices that involved child sacrifice. We say this critique in Deuteronomy, too. Although, we may also have the actual sacrificing of Isaac that later redactors insert the angel to exculpate Abraham and allow Isaac to continue featuring in the Torah narrative.

At any rate, sacrifice is not murder, and so, while I would, of course, not condone child sacrifice! Though, I do have my own Isaac, and at 13 years old, I understand the draw! The theological distinction is salient that sacrifice, even when it involves killing, is distinct from murder.

All of this is to point to the narrative complexity and rich storytelling that are hallmarks of this literature. Should we celebrate Sarah’s birth to Isaac in old age as a prayer answered, or confront her mistreatment of her enslaved person? How do we understand the Gd who is playing all sides against the other, but who is deeply compassionate? How do we conceive of our relationship to other ethnoreligious groups, when both Isaac and Ishmael, two great nations, are both born of Abraham and made great by Gd?

In a very real sense, this is why I think Torah is compelling and interesting and worth reading. How is it the case that this story has survived what, like 3,000 years? It’s a mistake to take this as history, and either accept it blindly, or reject it blindly, when the power is in the wrestling and interpreting.

I remind myself that we are reading a collection of texts that generations of people found important to preserve and to ultimately stitch together into a form that has been around for something like 2,400 years, with the earliest fragments of the text another five or six hundred years older than that.

Considering this, let’s discuss the sources behind Genesis 21 and 22.

The stories here are largely from the E source tradition, but as we’ll see, the J source matters. To recall the characteristics of these sources, both J and E are pre-P (priestly) sources. They reflect an older tradition, and each are associated with a characterization of Gd that is more anthropomorphic than transcendent, at times emotional, and the Gd in the J and E sources are open to negotiation and changing Gd’s mind. The J source is associated with the southern kingdom, Judah, and Aaron’s priestly line. The E source is associated with the northern kingdom, and favors a Mosaic (or Moshite) priestly line.

For our purposes in this post, we’ll pay close attention to Ishmael because his age at various points helps us to reveal the source traditions. Genesis chapters 16 and 21 tell similar stories about Hagar and Ishmael’s dismissal. Why duplicate the accounts? J has Hagar and Ishmael kicked out at chapter 16, while the E source tells of the dismissal at chapter 21.9-21. In that section, there is no Adonai, in English, LORD. Instead, it  is El/Eohim used in this latter half of chapter 21 and the so-called binding of Isaac in chapter 22. Yet, at the end of the binding scene, Abraham names the site, “Adonai-yireh,” Adonai will see (Genesis 22.14), and so, it can’t be by divine name alone that we distinguish sources.

What are the clues to piece this all together? Beyond the names of Gd differing, indicating different source traditions, there is also Ishmael’s seeming age disparities. At chapter 21.15-16, the narrator presupposes a small child (“[Hagar] left the child [Ishmael] under one of the bushes”), but Ishmael was reported as being 13 years old before Isaac was born (“and his [Abraham’s] son Ishmael was thirteen years old when he [Isaac] was circumcised in the flesh of his [Isaac’s] foreskin” Genesis 17.25.)

Plus, Ishmael was already born at the time of Isaac’s weaning (“The child [Isaac] grew up and was weaned, and Abraham held a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned. Sarah saw the son [Ishmael] whom Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Abraham playing (Genesis 21.8). Imagine that weaning happens around age three, Ishmael would be at least 16; not exactly an age where you could place him “under a bush.” So what gives?

In classic source critical insight: We have both a J and an E account of this story. When the redactors brought together the sources to compile something close to the final version of Torah, these differing accounts were preserved and weaved into one continuous narrative, but the traditions have different ages for Ishmael, given slightly differing accounts. The timeline is further complicated by the P source that is instrumental in compiling the final form of Torah and offers its own overarching timeline, at the expense of the narrative continuity of the individual source traditions J and E.

I think this discussion was worth having because often it is assumed that the four sources of the Documentary Hypothesis are isolated principally by the differing use of Gd’s name, but that is only part of the story. Other factors, including the use of certain words and the narrative continuity of isolated sources has a large role to play in the hypothesis.

On this latter point, let me recommend two good books on this. The Hidden Book in the Bible isolates the J source and tells only its narrative. The Cosuming Fire does exactly the same with the P source. Both of these titles are original translations by their authors, and both seek to preserve not merely the language but also the attitude, style, and tone of the original text, in so far as that is possible to do.

Regarding the Binding of Isaac in Genesis 22 (Hebrew: akedah, a critically important narrative to both the liturgy of modern cultic practice and to the understanding of the purported characters of Gd and Abraham) is attributed to the E source. The Elohist source reflects a more abstract and less anthropomorphic portrayal of God compared to the Jawist source. For example, in Genesis 22, God communicates with Abraham through an angel, which is consistent with the Elohist’s emphasis on indirect communication with the divine, whereas we’ve seen more direct communication in the J source.

Admittedly, I’m not sure how to tie a bow around this post to deliver a payoff to you readers here at the conclusion. I think the points I want to draw out are twofold: First, we see an excellent demonstration of the Talmudic rabbis constructing a framework around Rosh Hashana (and Pesach) to explain the significant births of heroic figures from the matriarchs and patriarchs. This demonstration of interpretation is a hallmark of Jewish practice that is understood “religiously,” but y’all know I don’t like that term, religion, for use in the context of Ancient Israel. What I mean to say is that this rabbinic discussion of Gd remembering Sarah is a religious framing.

Second, we have a persuasive story to tell about the source tradition as an explanation for certain inconsistencies in the text, which rather than an apologetic frame, offers an academic frame. I think it is the versatility of these ways of examining the text that make them so beloved to me. I exercise my academic muscles while also seeking the meaning that I may extract from a tradition that has lasted thousands of years. I guess I have my own beloved Isaac and Ishmael ways of viewing the text!

Baruch HaShem, blessed be the Holy One. And Shana Tova!

xx. ❤ -a.

Reminder: No Parsha next week. I’m officially taking the week for Yom Kippur; however, I will send out the welcome email for the book study.