Irish historian Eamon Duffy on the ‘paradoxical power’ and gripping family drama of the Book of Genesis.
Having to nominate one favourite biblical book, I will assume I am also allowed the psalms and the four Gospels, the fundamental texts of Christian liturgy. But how to choose between the rest – the sublime poetry of the Book of Job or of Second Isaiah, the novelistic portrayal of character and narrative pace of the David story in 2 Samuel, or the romantic charm of the Book of Ruth? In the end, I opt for the Book of Genesis, and not just because, at 50 chapters, it is one of the longest books of the Bible, and so best value for money.
Genesis, the first book of the Torah, is the foundation of both the Jewish and the Christian scriptures. It is also one of the most diverse in the Bible, opening in the priestly solemnity of the Creation narrative, a poem constructed in stages like a ziggurat temple enshrining the figures of Adam and Eve, the images of God, at its apex. That solemnity is soon shattered, however, not just by the fairy-tale catastrophe of Eve’s temptation by a smooth-talking serpent, but by the bloodsoaked stories of sex, duplicity and violence that make up the rest of the book. The men of Sodom’s attempted rape of the Angel visitors to Lot’s house, and Lot’s shocking attempt to buy them off by offering his virginal daughters to be gang-raped instead; the rape of Jacob’s daughter Dinah, and the bloody revenge taken by her brothers, who first schmooze the perpetrators into accepting circumcision, and then slaughter them all while they are disabled from the operation. There is an element of black comedy in that story, and folk humour animates other episodes in the book, like Abraham’s haggling with God over how many just men there must be in Sodom to avert God’s vengeance.
At the heart of the book is the story of God’s covenant with Abraham, our father in faith, and the heart of that story is the testing of Abraham’s fidelity when God orders him to kill and burn his son as a ritual offering. The binding of Isaac ends happily, of course, and we are meant to feel the depth of Abraham’s dilemma. But nothing can soften the horror of the father’s readiness to obey the obscene demand, conveyed in his ominous assurance to the boy that God would provide a victim for the sacrifice. In Christian exegesis, the story is understood to foreshadow God’s willingness to give his own son as a sacrifice for sin, but the dark morality of that narrative has troubled generations of interpreters.
The God of Genesis is announced in the opening chapters to be the benign creator of a good universe, but as the book unfolds that same God can seem arbitrary, ferocious, inscrutable. His righteousness is implacable – he sweeps away all but a handful of the human race in a devastating flood, inflicts confusion and incomprehension on humankind at Babel, and destroys the cities of the plain with fire and brimstone for their sins. His purposes emerge from the tangled complications of often squalid human behaviour. Family and kinship dominate the book, but what families! Cain who murders his brother Abel out of envy; Jacob who forces his starving brother Esau to swap his birthright for a pot of stew, and then cheats their blind father Isaac into giving him the blessing that is Esau’s by right; the daughters of Lot who get their father drunk on successive nights so that he will sleep with each of them in turn and make them pregnant; the sons of Tamar, begotten by her father-in-law whom she tricks into sleeping with her, and whose children struggle in the womb for dominance; the sons of Isaac who sell their insufferably cocky younger brother Joseph into slavery.
The Tamar story typifies the way in which God’s purposes emerge in Genesis not despite but even through human sordidness. A childless widow, she is cheated by her husband’s family of her right to conceive a son by a levirate marriage to one of his brothers, so she disguises herself as a shrine prostitute, sleeps with her father-in-law, and then confronts him with the gifts he had given her in payment, forcing him to acknowledge paternity and to admit: “She is more righteous than I.” And yet Tamar’s enforced but enterprising shiftiness made her an ancestress of King David, and therefore, as St Matthew points out, of Jesus. And that is the paradoxical power of Genesis, not merely a storehouse of some of the foundational stories of western culture, but an extended demonstration that God, whose ways are not our way, is neither defeated nor deflected by even the worst we can devise.
Eamon Duffy is emeritus professor of the history of Christianity at Cambridge University.
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