A short post this evening, which I sort-of-wrote at the weekend, but which subsequently got lost in the excitement of the last few days (which included me getting a new job! As a medieval archivist’s assistant! Finally, my medieval history degree makes good.) I also have posts on Ali Smith’s Hotel World (I want to have her babies) and Walter Scott’s Waverley (his too) in the draft stages…just awaiting a day when I have several moments to spare to finish them. Soon I hope.
I finished Genesis a couple of days ago and have to say: all the juice is in the first half. That is, up until the point when God destroys Sodom and Gomorrah, after which the ‘narrative’ (such as it is) becomes the preserve of generational family saga. The family in question is that of Abraham and Sarah, whose son is Isaac, who marries Rebekah, whose son is Jacob, who marries Leah *and* Rachel (by accident!), whose son is Joseph. The end. Those are the bones of it at least – the names of those men (the patriarchs) who are highly favoured by their God; (there are a myriad of other sons (and a few daughters) - by wives, servants and slaves - who eventually found the twelve tribes of Israel, but they feature little on their own accounts.)
…Which confirms what my introduction to Genesis tells me: that the book places extraordinary, exclusionary emphasis on a single line of divinely chosen men. What it doesn’t do is take this statement to its logical conclusion: that the ‘God’ of Genesis is a *family* god, similar in reputation to the many other gods worshipped throughout the book (even by the wives of the Patriarchs themselves); it also fails to mention that the ‘God’ of Genesis makes no claims to being the ‘only god’. Far from it, the text seems to accept the existence of a multitude of deities and religious powers.
Nevertheless, the God of the family of Abraham does all the things a family god should do: he supports their efforts to multiply and prosper; he ensures successful procreation; he favours them in disputes with non-believers; he loves them best. But his love is not equal or unprejudiced, not in any sense. He is a God with decidedly personal tastes and is partial to specific members of the Abrahamic dynasty, bestowing his caring attention in unfair dollops. Joseph’s rise to power in Egypt is one example; Jacob’s inheritance of all his father’s and brother’s property is another. And don’t be fooled into thinking God likes first sons best – Genesis is a book of patriarchs but it is not a book about primogeniture. In fact, first sons – like Ismael, Esau or any one of Jacob’s early brood – get decidedly short shrift, being disinherited, or exiled, or worse.
This second half of Genesis is odd in other ways too. It moves out of the mythical mode of the early part of the text, and into a topos of oral, tribal history – it juxtaposes, and to some extent commingles, the creation of the world and the origins of the ‘tribes of Israel’ as though the two were one and the same thing. It is an ideological confluence that is hardly alien to human understanding: the world was created when *I* was created, nothing existed before me that wasn’t preparing for my coming etc. Babies seem to experience something akin to this in their earliest infancy. They cannot comprehend that anything outside their field of vision, or beyond the scope of their physicality exists: mummy leaves the room, and mummy is gone forever; a toy disappears, and it is as if it never existed. Similarly, and for a much longer period, they are unable to comprehend the possibility of life existing before they were born. Even later they have trouble comprehending the distinction between self and the other, be it a sibling or a friend. The infant experiences it’s body as all-encompassing – as a packet that contains everything and is everything. There is nothing else. It strikes me this is the philosophical proposition made by Genesis. Nothing could have existed before humanity because humanity is contiguous with ‘being’ – nothing could ‘be’ without ‘me’. This ‘me’, the Mesopotamian ‘I’ implicit in the authorship of Genesis, is concerned with two different types of origins – abstract and concrete, which in turn leads to the bizarre weaving of mythical ‘creation’ narratives on the one hand and passages about the naming and ownership of water wells in the Middle East on the other which I read this week.
Another little thought to ponder: it would be a mistake to think that God is the central character of Genesis. He isn’t. It is always about the earth and the creatures that live on it. God is a side character; a catalyst; the deus ex machina. The action is never directly about him, it is about the men who serve him. Leading me to conjecture that, when read as a purely literary text, Genesis is a human, rather than divine, drama.
Now on to Exodus...
~~Victoria~~