Canter Bridge

In the face of the mixed tones, hues, and points of view that show themselves in the ‘five books of Moses’, students of this material have often had recourse to complex theories of composition. Surely, the logic goes, such divergent perspectives require us to conjecture a broad mix of oral and literary traditions that by some mechanism became integrated into the document(s) that lie(s) before us.

It is a reasonable conjecture. In the nature of the case, scholars with their attention fixed on the minutiae of the data will sometimes take a good idea to a less than plausible extreme. Yet this does not discount the probability that complex layers of tradition have made their distinct and varied contributions to our Pentateuch, our Torah, our first five books of the Bible.

Quite apart from the matter of the history of its composition, the Torah as it now stands provides a complex view of the events it narrates. This should not surprise us. C.S. Lewis has elegantly taught us that reality has a tendency to be odd. Neatness in the face of events—human or otherwise—is as often a hint that data has been packed hard into a reigning theory. Reality itself tends to be extraordinary, at least if ordinariness is the hell-bent pursuit of little minds to package and control complicated realities.

The Joseph narrative, for example, is an emotionally turbulent tale of treachery, dream-weaving, unlikely elevations to power, grief sunk deeply into a family’s soil, and extraordinary twists of fate. It does not read, on the surface, as a pretty story about how well God runs things.

Yet near to one of the story’s critical seams, we find the aging patriarch delivering himself of his final thoughts, burdens, and blessings. Sometimes called Jacob and sometimes Israel—both names, in their way, are ominous—this now ancient figure receives his son Joseph and the two grandsons that Joseph has provided to him. His remark is telling:

Israel said to Joseph, ‘I did not expect to see your face; and here God has let me see your children also.’

It is an odd and slightly winning comment, for Jacob/Israel has been a twisting and twisted character throughout his time on the book’s literary stage. He has given us little motive for admiring him. His words usually convey scheming, whining, or self-pity. His voice seems capable of little else.

Yet here we find him exclaiming in an intimate family circle that God has been better to him than he could have anticipated. In fact, we see in the father’s comment something of the son’s hard-won confidence that YHWH has not been absent from contexts of treachery and jealous murdering. Rather, he has actively brought such things to a culminating orderliness by which the lives of human beings have been preserved in time of famine.

As a hermeneutical clue—a frame, even—the dying patriarch’s words cast the entire narrative length of Genesis in a purposeful, favorable light.

Yet shortly thereafter, as the book runs, the same Jacob/Israel turns to deliver his convictions about ‘what will happen’ to his twelve sons and their offspring after he is dead and gone. One finds, in the case of three of the more prominent brothers, a most violent renunciation:

Reuben, you are my firstborn,
my might and the first fruits of my vigor,
excelling in rank and excelling in power.
Unstable as water, you shall no longer excel
because you went up onto your father’s bed;
then you defiled it—you went up onto my couch!

Simeon and Levi are brothers;
weapons of violence are their swords.
May I never come into their council;
may I not be joined to their company—
for in their anger they killed men,
and at their whim they hamstrung oxen.
Cursed be their anger, for it is fierce,
and their wrath, for it is cruel!
I will divide them in Jacob,
and scatter them in Israel.

YHWH may sit unperturbed upon his ordering throne. Yet in the family that earns the principal share of his attention, disorder and deeply engraved trauma persist.

There is no sudden burst of sweet light into a clearing into the woods, a change of circumstances that banishes the wolves of life and history deep into the forest where they no longer threaten.

That would be ordinary. Life and reality are odd.

We are taught in these narrative and throughout the biblical anthology to endorse a most extraordinary hypothesis: that YHWH is ordering his world for justice. And that the people he has selected as his agents will not escape, have not yet escaped the murderous cycles of mutually inflicted damage of which order and justice must surely be polar opposites.

Yet the narrative leans forward in a way that shapes souls to long for the very ordering justice that such reading and hearing sow into them. It is as though such material places its locative and temporal adverbs at critical junctures of the reflection that is incumbent upon careful readers of the stuff. Adverbs like these: ‘not here’; ‘not yet’; ‘but someday’.

One must not give up these little words, these adverbs, these syllables of patience and of hope.