Canter Bridge

A brief codicil to the story of Jacob/Israel’s death and burial displays how deeply suspicion and fear had intruded themselves into the cells and sinews of Israel’s earliest generations:

Realizing that their father was dead, Joseph’s brothers said, ‘What if Joseph still bears a grudge against us and pays us back in full for all the wrong that we did to him?’

Joseph wept when his brothers approached him with their ugly negotiation about becoming his slaves if only Joseph would swear off the sad tradition of blood vengeance. After all they had been through, it seems to grieve this half-Hebrew, half-Egyptian head of state to learn that his brothers still did not consider him to be one of them. (more…)

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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. (more…)

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Positions of large responsibility rarely allow one to follow his feelings. Like Michael Corleone in the Godfather movies—though hopefully with more redemptive outcomes—stewardship over the lives and fate of others requires us to become reasonable men or reasonable women.

Elevated to improbably sovereignty over the famine-time life of Egypt, the biblical Joseph is in many ways a model of self-control. The wife of Potiphar, for examples, finds her charms useless to her attempts to seduce Joseph. His discernment of dreams and the courage to articulate their meaning to people whose lives will be enriched or cut short in consequence show Joseph to be a man who knows who he is, what truth is, and how to reconcile the competing demands of each. (more…)

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In the midst of one of its less inspiring genealogies, the Bible offers us a brief glimpse at the remote fringe of what must have been a remarkable story. As it is wont to do, rabbinical tradition would fill in the absence of detail regarding a certain Enoch. The biblical text presents this man in its most sparing voice:

When Enoch had lived sixty-five years, he became the father of Methuselah. Enoch walked with God after the birth of Methuselah three hundred years, and had other sons and daughters. Thus all the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty-five years. Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him. When Methuselah had lived one hundred eighty-seven years, he became the father of Lamech.

The comment about Enoch ‘walking with God’ and about God taking him—whatever these things might mean—stands out against a strictly patterned genealogy that merely names biological antecedents, successors, and their respective life spans. (more…)

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The serpent figures in the paradigmatic story of human origins as the Bible’s first cynic. He has strong ideas about the arbitrary nature of God’s decrees and the selfish motive that lies behind them:

But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’

The serpent has some convenient data with which to work. God in fact does not give a reason for his unexpected ring-fencing of just one tree when he has already given the whole ranch over to the first couple. It seems so unreasonable and, certainly, asymmetrical. It is the kind of thing that raises suspicions. (more…)

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