Midrash and Mashal: Difficulty in the Blessing of Esau

David Richter

The notion of "difficulty" is something I am sure we all intuitively understand well enough, but it is often tempting to define and categorize it anyhow. Two decades ago, for example, George Steiner defined "difficulty" in terms of an implicit contract between author and reader that is challenged by various sorts of resistence encountered in a text._ Here I am going to be using the term specifically as James Phelan uses it in his essay "Toward a Rhetorical Reader-Response Criticism: The Difficult, the Stubborn, and the Ending of Beloved." There Phelan defines the "difficult" text as one that resists readerly interpretation till we find just the right "code that allows us to claim cognitive understanding of the text, to hear the 'click' of the numerous signals of the text rearranging themselves into our new system of intelligibility" (713). Phelan contrasts the difficult text with what he calls the stubborn or recalcitrant text that will not ultimately yield, where the text has no single coherent and consistent explanation, where every attempt at explication leaves something out. The recalcitrant text is not merely ambiguous, possessing several explanations; it is rather that the disparate explanations that might explicate the text as a whole do not cohere with one another phenomenologically, cannot be part of the same experience of reading._

This theoretical suggestion of Phelan's is wonderfully productive not only for Toni Morrison but for biblical narrative, and I plan to use it in a monograph at which I am currently working. But in the process of reflecting on my own explications of biblical texts and those of others I was struck by some complications that arise with the biblical text, from the peculiar interaction of midrash with mashal.

These terms may need definition. Midrash is a noun formed from the Hebrew verb "lidrosh," meaning to inquire. The Midrash with a capital M is an anthology of commentaries explicating various books of the bible that began theoretically with Ezra the scribe in post-exilic Judea and ended almost two millenia later in the high middle ages. But in the lower case, it can denote any textual inquiry or interpretation, and is often used for those stories we add or supply or invent to supplement and explicate the ones in the Bible. Midrash in this sense is something we all help to make: every rabbi's sermons, every secular teacher's textual explanations are midrashim. This essay is going to skim the interface between the Midrash and our own midrashim. The second term, mashal, is literally a similitude, a simile or a metaphor, with the derived sense of a parable or fable, a story with moral or emotive significance; I am going to use it within stories that are not structurally ordered as meshalim to indicate the rhetorical or ideological dimension of any narrative.

For my key example I am going to take one of the great narrative passages of the J document, the blessing of Esau in Genesis 27. The blind patriarch Isaac has sent his firstborn and favorite son Esau to hunt for venison and to make his favorite savory stew before he gives his ancestral blessing; hearing this, Rebecca incites her own favorite twin, Jacob, to masquerade as his brother, dressing him in Esau's best clothing, with animal skin to mimic Esau's hairy hands and neck, and making her own version of the delicacy out of kid. Isaac is a bit suspicious ("the voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau"), but he is also hungry, and despite his doubts he gives Jacob the blessing. No sooner has he done so when Esau comes back with the real venison stew. As soon as Isaac hears the voice of Esau, he trembles violently, realizing what has happened. And then the passage focuses on the other recognition--Esau's realization that his brother has purloined the blessing meant for him---after swindling him out of his birthright. The pathos swells as Esau asks Isaac if his father has only one blessing to bestow, whether there cannot still be a blessing for him too. But Isaac has already given Jacob everything: he has made Jacob lord over his brethren and given him all the material things of life besides: what is left to give Esau? Esau persists: Bless me too, my father, and bitterly bursts into tears. And Isaac relents and blesses Esau too.

What is most obviously "difficult" about the passage in Phelan's sense is the language of Esau's blessing. In Hebrew the first part of it goes

mi-shmanei ha-aretz yihiyeh moshavekha u-mi-tal ha-shamayim me'al.

Literally the morphemes run "from the fat of the land shall be your encampments and from the dew of the heavens thereon." What exactly does this mean? Comparing a King James and a Revised Standard Version of the bible, you can see that this is an interpretive crux: the two translations give the blessing opposite meanings. KJV translates it as follows: "Behold, thy dwelling shall be the fatness of the earth, and of the dew of heaven from above." RSV has quite a different blessing: "Behold, away from the fatness of the earth shall your dwelling be, and away from the dew of heaven on high." The source of the discrepancy is grammatical ambiguity, Empson's sixth type. It is caused by the particle mi which is used twice, the first syllable of mi-shmanei and the second of u-mi-tal. It is the connective form of min which means "from." Like the French "de" and the Latin "ex," min can operate as a partitive ("some of the fat places of the land") or it can express a direction ("away from the fat places of the land"). Which it is depends on the context.

Well, for what Phelan calls "standard academic interpretation" (712), the context is set primarily by the adjacent narrative and the surrounding structure of plot and values in which it plays out. The first consideration is that Isaac has told Esau that he has already given Jacob the jackpot and there is nothing left for him. In that case, the blessing cannot be a duplicate of Jacob's. And Esau's blessing goes on "And by thy sword shalt thou live and shalt serve thy brother, and it shall come to pass when thou shalt have the dominion, that thou shalt break his yoke from thy neck." If Esau is to live by the sword then he is to be a raider, not a farmer, who has no use for the dew of the heavens. Furthermore, after the blessing the narrator continues, "And Esau hated Jacob his brother on account of the blessing with which his father had blessed him and he said in his heart, when the days of mourning for my father are come I shall kill Jacob my brother." Why would Esau want to kill Jacob if he had just been given some of the fat places of the land?

What clarified the situation and intensified the pathos was going back to the blessing Isaac had given the disguised Jacob. In the Hebrew that blessing begins V'yiten l'kha ha-Elohim mital ha-shamayim umishmanei ha-aretz.

Here the morphemes go: "The Lord shall give you from the dew of the heavens and from the fat places of the land." With the verb "to give" the mi is unambiguously partitive, as the French "de" is with "donner" or the Latin "ex" with "dare." And by contrast, the mi then seemed unambiguously privative in Esau's blessing. The click of intelligibility came when I realized that Isaac, looking for a way to bless Esau, had chosen language that almost precisely duplicated the language with which he had meant to bless him, even though with the change of the verbs (yihiyeh instead of yiten; the verb "to be" instead of "to give") it actually meant the opposite. What was the motive for this play on words? Was Isaac trying to pull the wool over the eyes of that notoriously poor grammarian Adonai?_ Was he trying to reassure Esau? Conceivably a little of both.... I rather thought, though, that it was primarily a gesture meant for his own ears, trying to pretend a little that everything was still all right and the blessing had been given as planned.

Isaac is not the only member of his family given to rueful wordplay and ironic punning at times of high emotion. Esau himself asks within this passage "Is not he rightly named Jacob (ya'akov) for has he not now tricked me (ya'akveni) twice?--- had not Jacob taken his birthright (bikhorati) and now his blessing (birkhati)? Those two words look almost exactly the same, with just two consonants reversed, particularly in a torah scroll without the vowels.

This reading of the episode was strengthened by the way its themes echo down the rest of the book of Genesis. You will recall that Jacob, escaping from Esau's anger, goes to his uncle Laban in Haran, where he falls in love with his cousin Rachel and works seven years for her, then is fooled in the dark--when he cannot see any more than his blind father Isaac could--into taking the older daughter Leah instead of the younger: the trickster tricked. The Hebrew underlines the relation between the two events: When Laban explains the ruse to Jacob--"It is not our custom to marry the older daughter before the younger"--he doesn't use the usual word for "older": instead the word is bekhirah meaning "the woman with the birthright" like the birthright Jacob had taken from Esau (Genesis 29:26). And when finally after leaving Laban with four wives and a dozen children and flocks and herds, Jacob once again encounters Esau, he attempts to mollify his brother's anger by sending in advance a tremendous present of livestock. Jacob tells his servants to bring what he calls his minkhah (or gift) to Esau, but Esau refuses it till they have met face to face, when Jacob urges his brother "kakh-na et-birkhati" ("take, please, my blessing") as though metaphorically he could thus return the blessing he stole from Esau---and Esau then accepts (Genesis 33:11).

The consequences of the swindle continue on into Jacob's later life, when the sons of Leah the bekhirah sell into slavery Joseph the son of Rachel, Jacob's own favorite child, clouding his old age with sorrow and suspicion, and even into his final moments, when giving his own patriarchal blessing to his children, the eternal trickster inverts the order of Joseph's two children, Ephraim and Manassah, crossing his hands so as to put his right hand on the head of the younger brother Ephraim instead of the one with the birthright.... So the blessing of Esau is a little like the primal crime in the house of Atreus, the act of transgression that sets into motion several generations of consequences, except that in Genesis the consequences are serious but not tragic: no one dies at once and horribly, brothers forgive brothers eventually. Esau forgives Jacob, Joseph forgives the sons of Leah and provides them with corn and pasture land in Goshen. Yet ultimately the result is to move the children of Jacob down from Canaan into Egypt from which another patriarch is going to have to liberate them.

In a still broader perspective, looking at the book of Genesis as a whole, one can view the wanderings of the forefathers as establishing two complementary motifs: the first is the sojournings of the forefathers within Canaan, from where Abraham dwelt in the south, near Beersheba, to where Jacob tended Laban's flocks in the north near Dan, establishing the right of original habitation in an area equivalent to the kingdom of the Davidic monarchy; the second is the departure from Canaan, requiring an Exodus from Egypt to reclaim and reconquer that kingdom. Within this double-motived narrative of the land, the blessing of Esau acts as the hinge.

It might seem as though my problems are over. But when I examined the Midrash with a capital M on this passage, I discovered that my own difficulty didn't trouble the rabbis at all, while the rabbis had located a very different set of problems to solve. Rabbi Johanan, for example, wonders about Isaac's trembling: "When a man has two sons and one goes out while the other comes in, does he then tremble? Surely not! The reason, however, was that when Esau went in, Gehenna [Hell] went in with him" (Bereshit Rabbah 72; II: 606). The doubling of words in Isaac's question, "Who is this that has hunted game?" (Hu hatzad tzayid) provokes a fierce reaction from Rabbi Leazar ben Simeon: "Thou snarer, how hast thou been ensnared! Thou breaker of gates, how are thy gates broken and destroyed!" (607). An anonymous commentary in Bereshit Rabbah on the phrase "The days of mourning for my father are at hand...." turns Esau from a filicide into a parricide: "Esau reasoned thus: Cain slew his brother yet it availed him naught, for Adam begot other children who inherited the world together with him. So I will first slay my father and then my brother and inherit the world alone." (695) Apparently none of the rabbis saw Esau as the sympathetic victim I did. One even suggested that Esau, unsuccessful at his hunt, made his stew out of dog. (Kasher V: 228, citing Torah Shelemah 27: 140, 143).

Predictably, perhaps, my own question, about the interpretation of the particle mi in Esau's blessing, got the opposite answer. Within the Midrash, Jacob gets the blessing that counts, but Esau gets his blessing too, including the fatness of the land._ The Encyclopedia of Biblical Interpretation quotes an old source to the effect that "In recompense for the two tears that fell from eyes, Esau was given Mount Seir, a place which is never without the kind of rain that falls as a blessing." (Kasher, V: 60, citing Torah Shelemah 27, 175). But the Rashi annotates verse 39 to give Esau a somewhat different inheritance: "Zo Italia shel Yavan" he says, meaning that "Esau's dwelling place was in the south of Italy, in Magna Graecia [or Sicily]"---surely one of the lushest places on earth._

The Rashi's suggestion that Esau's heritage was Sicily, of all places, might seem peculiar, given the Canaanite location of the fraternal struggle, until one recalls that, like Augustine and Aquinas, the medieval rabbis read biblical narratives not merely for literal meaning but as historical allegory, moral parable and apocalyptic revelation._ And in the prophetic dimension, Esau, known also as Edom, the Red, the Man of Blood, had become identified over the centuries with Rome.

The process of that allegorical connection of Edom with Rome was historically complex. The most direct link between Edom and Rome was through the Herod family, Edomite converts to Judaism who had become, under the Roman hegemony, the tributary rulers of Judea. Herod the Great had supported the Temple cult and had enlarged the Second Temple, but was no more popular with the Pharisee sect--out of whom traditional Judaism later emerged--than with the messianic sects that eventually united into Christianity and who made the name "Herod" a byword for a tyrant. Unfortunately, the dating is wrong for that link: midrashim explicitly connecting Edom with Rome do not appear until the second century A.D., several generations after Herod (Herr, 626). Instead the connection between Esau and Rome has to do with the participation of the Edomites in the destruction of the First Temple by Nebuchadnezzar in 587 B.C., about six centuries earlier. Exactly how the Edomites participated is not clear. Psalm 137 ("By the waters of Babylon") suggests merely that Edom had encouraged the Babylonians when Adonai is asked to "remember it against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem, how they said 'raze it, raze it to its foundations'" (Ps 137: 7). But Obadiah's prophecy of destruction insists on the literal "violence done" by Esau "unto your brother Jacob" when Edom "entered the gate of my people..., looted his goods..., stood at the parting of the ways to cut off the fugitive,... delivered up his survivors on his day of distress." (Obadiah 10, 13-14). By the Apocryphal period, Edom had replaced Babylon as the nation that actually burned the Temple ("Thou hast also vowed to build thy temple, which the Edomites burned when Judah was laid waste by the Chaldees" [1 Esdras 45])._ When the Romans under Titus destroyed the Second Temple in 70 A.D., the metaphorical/historical link between Edom and Rome was forged that would last for more than a millenium._

At this point one can see how upsetting this whole episode had to have been to the rabbis moralizing the book of Genesis. It was not merely that Jacob, the great ancestor of the Jews, the progenitor of the twelve tribes, gets Adonai's blessing through a lying masquerade. Given the fact that Esau was read as the ancestor of the Romans, he was responsible (as Leasar ben Simeon had suggested) for the breaking of the gates of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Holy Temple. Given the fact that Rome was itself a metonymy for the Roman Catholic church, Esau was responsible for the persecutions of the Jews throughout the middle ages, which may explain the appeal of Rabbi Johanan's observation that when Esau came into his father's tent, Gehenna arrived with him. Given all this, it was clear why the pathos and irony inherent in my literal reading of Genesis 27 were largely unreadable by the creators of the Midrash: the mashal, the ideological dimension, of the story I read was entirely unacceptable._

On a theoretical level, I am suggesting this historical dimension of readerly interpretation might impose a qualification on James Phelan's notion of textual difficulty as an ambiguity that can be clarified or a complexity that can be simplified by means of a special code. If the mashal of a given passage is unacceptable as a social text to the historical reader, the passage will have to be reinscribed until it becomes readable._ The difficulties that appear on the literal level will be ignored. Indeed, the simpler the text, the more desperate may be the need to recomplicate it, or to create ambiguities by means of special codes so that it can be read with a difference.

The story called the Akedah, of the binding of Isaac as a sacrifice in Genesis 22: 1-19, is what almost anyone would call a transparently simple text, narratologically. God has decided to test Abraham by commanding him to sacrifice Isaac, that son miraculously given to Abraham's previously barren wife. After the command is given, Abraham's setting out with Isaac and servants is presented in rapid summary. Once the destination, Mount Moriah, is sighted, the narrative slows down its pace. As the servants are left behind at the foot of the mountain, the narrative becomes highly dramatic, with trenchant dialogue between Abraham and his son emphasizing the extraordinary pathos of a father whose faith leads him to the very edge of sacrificing his own son: "Look, here is the fire and the wood," says Isaac, "but where is the lamb for the burnt-offering?" "My son, God will provide himself a lamb for the burnt-offering." Meanwhile even the tags to the dialogue emphasize over and over again the filial relationship between Abraham and Isaac: "And Isaac spoke to Abraham his father, and said, 'My father,' and he said, 'Here I am, my son.'" As the moment of the sacrifice approaches, every action Abraham takes is mentioned in detail, gesture by gesture, slowing the action down nearly to "real time" right up to the moment that Abraham "stretched forth his hand and took the slaughtering-knife to slay his son"---at which point the Angel of the Lord intervenes._ The narrative choices are clearly designed to heighten, in a text nearly devoid of psychonarration or other inside views, the reader's sense of the tremendous torment and suspense inherent in the testing of Abraham.

But of course no narrative in Genesis has come in for more elaborate reinscription than the Akedah, because its transparent mashal has seldom been in tune with our ideas of God and the limits of sacrifice._ As Shalom Spiegel elaborately demonstrated in The Last Trial, many of the medieval midrashim on the Akedah renarrated the story so that Abraham actually perpetrates the sacrifice of Isaac._ Under their historical circumstances, one can understand the temptation : the chroniclers of the massacres in Mainz and Cologne at the end of the eleventh century tell of parents who killed their own children swiftly and humanely to prevent them from falling into the hands of those who would have tortured them to death. Relative to such parents, an Abraham who suffers only the anticipation of having to sacrifice his favorite son would seem to have gotten off very cheaply indeed.

Today the opposite reaction seems to have occurred: it is too uncomfortable to pray to an Adonai who would be so unfeeling as to test His faithful servant by sending him off to an unknown mountain to cut his son's throat and burn him to ashes, even if He intends at the last instant to countermand the order. Last year at Rosh Ha-Shanah, the Jewish New Year, when the Akedah is the prescribed Torah reading, I heard two sermons on the text in my synagogue. Our rabbi emeritus presented an elaborate midrash about Abraham being the one who was testing God's goodness and justice, which the patriarch had questioned at the destruction of Sodom, going through the motions of the sacrifice waiting for what he knew had to be the proper outcome for a just and merciful God. No suspense can be implicit in that narrative revision. And our new rabbi at the junior service told my children that the Akedah was a story about whether Abraham was listening carefully. His point was that when Abraham hears God say "V'ha-aleihu sham l'olah al akhad he-harim asher omar eilekha," he does not understand it as God had intended: "and you shall bring him up there to go up on one of the mountains that I shall show you." Instead he mistakenly hears God saying "and you shall sacrifice him there as a burnt offering." So by this ingenious midrash (which defies Hebrew grammar),_ the Akedah is changed into a comforting amiable comedy of misunderstanding: God never wanted Abraham even to think of sacrificing Isaac.

So contemporary rabbis too, like their medieval counterparts, rewrite the biblical text, interpreting it to achieve the mashal they think we need to hear. So great has been the ingenuity with which we have created midrashim that it is rare for any commentator to admit to experiencing anything like the recalcitrance of the sort James Phelan describes at the heart of Toni Morrison's Beloved. In the long narrative between Genesis and 2 Kings, it would be hard to find a passage whose interpreters have thrown up their hands---although, as I hope to show some day, there are in fact many such disturbingly unreadable passages, whose intentionality can be seen as part of a strange and complex rhetorical effect, so long one restricts one's method to standard narratological interpretation, a strict reading of reading._

But if I ultimately plan to decline the complicating ingenuity of midrashic exegesis---with its homiletic, allegorical and mystical interpretations---I think I can understand its sanctifying motives. Literary scholars like ourselves can always just avoid teaching a text of the secular canon should we find it offensive. Those who are unhappy with the mashal of Tom Jones or Huckleberry Finn can always teach Pamela or Uncle Tom's Cabin instead. If enough of us do so, whatever is politically incorrect or morally offensive may fade into obscurity._ But the exegete cannot hope to adjust the biblical canon, which was set for all time two thousand years ago. Barring a few variants from the manuscripts found at Qumran, the texts we were given are the only texts we are ever going to have. And for the inheritors of the Western tradition, these texts contain the deepest truths of life. So if, reading the texts one way, we cannot live with the mashal, we must learn to read them differently, we must have a new midrash. Interpretation thus becomes an industry that, given the evolving needs that each progressive generation finds for the stories the Bible tells, can have no end._

Works Cited

Ackroyd, Peter. Exile and Restoration: A Study in Hebrew Thought of the Sixth Century B.C. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1968.

Bereshit Rabbah. Volumes I and II of the Midrash Rabbah. Translated by H. Freedman and Maurice Simon. 3rd Edition. 6 volumes. London: Soncino Press, 1983.

Charles, R.H., ed. and trans. Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament. Two volumes. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913.

Dante. "Letter to Can Grande della Scala." Pp. 118-122 in David Richter, ed., The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Boston: Bedford Books, 1989.

Herr, Moshe David, "Edom." Pp. 370-379 in volume 6 of Encyclopaedia Judaica. 16 volumes. New York: Macmillan, 1972.

Hertz, J.H., ed. Pentateuch and Haftorahs. 2 vols. New York: Soncino, 1941.

Kasher, Menachem Mendel, ed. Encyclopedia of Biblical Interpretation: A Millenial Anthology. Translated and abridged from the Humash Torah Shelamah under the editorship of Harry Freedman. 20 vols. New York: American Biblical Encyclopedia Society, 1953---.

Nachmanides (Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman). Commentary on the Torah. 5 vols. New York: Shilo, 1971.

Newton, Adam Zachary. "At Play in the Piels (and Niphals) of the Lord, or, The Home of the Free and the Grave(n)" Narrative 4:2 (November 1996): pp?

Online Bible CD-ROM version 6.12. Winterbourne, Ontario: Larry Pierce, 1994.

Phelan, James. "Toward a Rhetorical Reader-Response Criticism: The Difficult, the Stubborn, and the Ending of Beloved." Modern Fiction Studies 39:3-4 (Fall/Winter 1993): 709-32.

Rad, Gerhard von. Genesis: A Commentary. Translated by John H. Marks. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1961.

Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzkhaki). Pentateuch with Targum Onkelos, Haphtaroth and Rashi's Commentary. Translated into English and annotated by M. Rosenbaum et al. Jerusalem: Silbermann Family, 5733 [= Gregorian year 1973].

Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. "Contingencies of Value." Pp. 1320-1343 in David Richter, ed., The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Boston: Bedford Books, 1989.

Speiser, Ephraim Avigdor, ed. Genesis. The Anchor Bible, vol. 1. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964.

Spiegel, Shalom. The Last Trial: On the Legends and Lore of the Command to Abraham to Offer Isaac as a Sacrifice: The Akedah. Translated from the Hebrew by Judah Goldin. New York: Schocken, 1969.

Steiner, George. On Difficulty and Other Essays. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Notes

_Steiner found four categories of "difficulty": [1] contingent difficulties like difficult or foreign words, or unusual names, which "aim to be looked up" and are solved with homework (40); [2] modal difficulties that involve "a stance towards human conditions that we find essentially inaccessible or alien" (28); [3] tactical difficulties, reefs on which authors intentionally run readers in order "to deepen our apprehension by dislocating or goading to new life the supine energies of word or grammar" (40). All these are meant to be solved. In a different class are [4] ontological difficulties that actually break the writer-reader contract by confronting us with "blank questions" about the nature of language, meaning and literary communication (41). Steiner's "ontological difficulty" is a bit like Phelan's notion of "recalcitrance", though his authorial notions of difficulty do not map exactly onto Phelan's readerly ones.

_Phelan also includes a category called "the erroneous" (715). This is what we might call the trivial case of recalcitrance, where a mistake on the part of the author (Toni Morrison's inconsistency about the time frame of Beloved is Phelan's example) creates problems of interpretation that cannot be resolved (at least by any interpretive schemes that make sense), but whose contradictions do not lead to any significant interpretive movement. Trivial contradictions abound in biblical narratives as well (was it the Ishmaelites or the Midianites who sold Joseph in Egypt?) and there are also many mini-narratives that are not inconsistent but which instead seem to have been truncated to the point where their significance is hard to read. The casual mention of Reuben's lying with his father's concubine Bilhah in Genesis 35:22 seems a part of an important story that has been lost. Even more puzzling is the "bridegroom of blood" episode at Exodus 4:24-26 where Adonai tries to kill Moses on the way back to Egypt but is appeased by Zipporah's circumcising their son and touching the bloody foreskin to Moses's "feet" [probably his genitals, for which "feet" are often in Biblical Hebrew a favorite metonymy].

_For example, at Numbers 4:1, 14: 26-28, and elsewhere in the Pentateuch, the Lord addresses "Moses and Aaron" with an imperative verb form used for singular subjects. The Lord's warning to Adam and Eve and his promises to Noah also contain misleading grammatical ambiguities. Even the name Yahweh itself (the tetragrammaton YHWH pronounced "Adonai" ["the Lord"] by pious Jews) is an grammatically peculiar futurative form of the copula.

_Nachmanides reads the blessing of Esau as inferior to Jacob's but of the same kind: "Isaac did not give him "plenty of corn and wine" as he gave to his brother, since he wanted to honor the one who had been blessed first above him" (I : 344).

_Pentateuch with Commentary of Rashi, Volume I, 128. The name "Rashi" is an acronym for Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki, the greatest of the medieval commentators on Torah and Talmud, who lived in eleventh-century Provence. Nachmanides agrees that "Esau would have the dew and fat places of another land" than Canaan (I: 344).

_The fourfold method of biblical interpretation is known as PARDES after the initial letters of the four modes of interpretation of scripture current in the thirteenth century: peshat, remez, derash, and sod. These correspond roughly to the four modes of interpretation in Dante's "Letter to Can Grande della Scala," the literal, the allegorical, the moral and the mystical.

The Rashi is usually characterized as belonging to the peshat or literal/contextual school of interpretation, but I characterize his equation of Esau with Rome as "prophetic" or "allegorical" in Dante's sense. Rashi's sense of the context that can be applied to a given text is usually wider than most "standard academic" interpreters would think proper. For example, in Genesis 37:15 a "man found Joseph straying in the field" and lets him know where his brothers have taken their flocks. For Rashi this "man" (ha-ish) is actually "the angel Gabriel" because in Daniel 10:21 the angel is referred to as "the man Gabriel" (ha-ish Gavriel). (Pentateuch with Rashi I: 182). Daniel, a text written by two different authors nearly seven centuries after Genesis, so late that it is partly in Aramaic, seems a long way to stretch in the wrong direction for an allusion. Indeed, for a present-day academic, a phrase like "the man" does not seem sufficiently idiosyncratic to be any sort of allusion.

_This crescendo of reinscription of Edom as the prime destroyer of the Temple follows the suggestions of Herr in Encyclopaedia Judaica, "Edom," who assumes that there is something historical lurking behind the prophecy. Peter Ackroyd to the contrary suggests that no reconstruction of a historical relation of Israel with Edom is possible, that Edom, Israel's bad neighbor to the south, was merely "the 'type' of enemy nation. To argue from ... oracles" by post-exilic prophets "to precise exilic experience is inappropriate; the expression of hostility to Edom... belongs to the development of Israel's experience of the hostile world, that which is opposed to God and his purpose" (224). Post-exilic Israel may have found it easier to blame Edom, the enemy always on their southern border, rather than Babylon, whose empire collapsed two generations after the sack of Jerusalem. Whatever the historical basis, by the late second century B.C., the pseudepigraphal book of Jubilees reinscribed the conflict between Israel and Edom back into the lives of the patriarchs. In that reconstruction of Genesis, Isaac ends his "blessing" of Esau with: "Thou shalt sin a complete sin unto death, and thy seed shall be rooted out from under heaven" (Jubilees 26: 54; Charles II: 54). In Chapter 37 war between Jacob and Esau breaks out immediately after Isaac's death, concluded by the death of Esau in Chapter 38 (Charles II: 68-69).

_Arnaldo Momigliano suggests that it was rather the unsuccessful Bar Kochba rebellion of 135 A.D. that froze the Edom-Rome metaphor into place. See "Some Preliminary Remarks on the 'Religious Opposition' to the Roman Empire" in On Pagans, Jews and Christians, 132.

_My own initial reaction to the midrashim on the blessing of Esau was an instance of what Steiner would call modal difficulty, and it dissolved for me as I began to understand how Esau-Edom fit into the thought of the commentators.

While rampant hostility to Esau dominates the classical and medieval midrashim of this episode, many modern orthodox Jewish exegetes read the episode with an ear for the pathos of Esau's situation. For example, J. H. Hertz, the deeply conservative Chief Rabbi of the British Empire and the commentator to the Soncino Torah, says: "Those tears of Esau, the sensuous wild impulsive man, almost like the cry of some trapped creature, are among the most pathetic in the bible" (I: 100).

_My argument is in a sense the obverse of Adam Newton's in "The Home of the Free and the Grave(n)." Newton approvingly quotes a midrash on the text from Exodus "the writing was graven [kharut] by the Lord": "read not kharut [graven] but kheirut [liberty]." <page ref to Newton's article>. Where Newton sees midrash as the scene of unbounded textual play, a deeply personal response controlled only by the answerability of the reader to his relation to tradition and to God, I tend to view the inventiveness and productivity of biblical interpretation as reined in relatively tightly by the forces of history, which require us to read the biblical text in tune with the ideology of our own times. If I am right, the lay reader should have found my "bible as literature" explanation of the blessing of Esau easily understandable, if not compelling, and found the rabbinical midrashim on Esau nearly incomprehensible till their historical grounding was explained.

_Commentators back to von Rad have noticed the agonizing quality of the pacing here.

_My assumption is that the original mashal of the Akedah was twofold: that any righteous son of Abraham should be prepared to sacrifice for his Lord the dearest thing in his possession, but that Yahweh desires no human sacrifice, unlike the gods of the other nations who required the sacrifice of the firstborn. The date of the "original" is difficult to determine, however: the J and E texts, which flow together at this point in Genesis, are usually dated in the tenth and ninth centuries B.C., respectively, while the postexilic redactor of Genesis was at work in the sixth century. Cultic practices, needless to say, must have undergone tremendous change over that stretch of time.

_Not irrevocably, of course. But it is interesting that he is not mentioned at the time of the death of his mother and does not appear in person for two further chapters. Isaac of course returns, as he must do, miraculously resurrected by the Lord, at some later point. One ingenious midrash is that when Rebecca falls off her camel at the appearance of her destined husband Isaac, in Genesis 24:64, it is because she has seen him descend from the heavens. See Spiegel 37.

Though the medieval midrashim on the completed sacrifice of Isaac are the most striking, Shalom Spiegel traces the theme back to the classical tradition, the tannaim and amoraim, the Talmudic commentators of the first through the fifth centuries A.D. There is even the possibility that the tradition goes much further back than that. When Abraham descends the mountain, Isaac is not mentioned as being with him. Grammatical awkwardnesses and textual inconsistencies at the point where the angel holds Abraham back from the sacrifice suggest an uneasy redaction of the E-text with the J-text here, and some textual scholars have suggested that the tradition of the E-text contained a human sacrifice carried out, while the J-text had the sacrifice prevented. Spiegel, skeptical of the Graf-Wellhausen documentary hypothesis, indeed mildly contemptuous of the interpretive freedom it ratifies, mentions the issue only tongue in cheek (122-124).

_4Because sacrifices were traditionally held on high places, the verb "to go up" is cognate to the noun for "burnt offering": both words are spelled ayin-lamedh-heh. "Bring him up there" and "sacrifice him there" are both acceptable translations of ha'aleihu sham. But "to go up" should be la'alot, not l'olah, so this reading is grammatically impossible. The real ambiguity is (as with Esau's blessing) over the sense of a preposition: the l' preceding the word olah (sacrifice). This can mean either "as a sacrifice" or "to a sacrifice." Reading the full implications of the ambiguity, we see Abraham incorrectly assuming the former reading, judging perhaps from his upbringing in Ur that Yahweh requires human sacrifice. In fact the order is to bring Isaac to a sacrifice---which is what ultimately happens: the word of God is precisely fulfilled. That, I suppose, is the implication of one early midrash: Rabbi Akha tells a story of Abraham on Mount Moriah wondering to God whether in countermanding the sacrifice "Thou indulgest in prevarication." God replies that He does not "alter what has gone out of My lips.... Did I tell thee, Slaughter him? No! But 'Take him up.' Thou hast taken him up. Now take him down!" (Bereshit Rabba 56:8; I: 498).

_Passages I have found recalcitrant under close reading include, for example, the rape of Dinah (Genesis 34), the episode of the concubine at Gibeah (Judges 19) and the rejection of Saul (1 Samuel 15)

_This is the acknowledged motivation behind much canonical theorizing today. For example, Barbara Herrnstein Smith's epochmaking theoretical essay, "Contingencies of Value," was designed to support a feminist revision of the secular canon of literature.

_Here I would like to express my warmest thanks to Rabbi Lawrence Pinsker of Toronto, to whose love of scholarship and e-mail communication I owe my understanding of the complex historical links between Edom and Rome. I would also like to thank my fellow students in the Advanced Hebrew class at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue--Rita, Ellen, Elliot, Michael, Nahum and Maron, with whom my love of biblical text and scholarship was reborn.