Genesis, Revised Edition

A Commentary

Gerhard von Rad

• Editorial: Westminster John Knox Press
• Año: 1973
• ISBN:
  9781611645958
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Biblical Studies

This volume, a part of the Old Testament Library series, explores the book of Genesis.

The Old Testament Library provides fresh and authoritative treatments of important aspects of Old Testament study through commentaries and general surveys. The contributors are scholars of international standing.

III

THE BIBLICAL PATRIARCHAL HISTORY

THE ANCIENT CREDO of sacred history (see p. 14) touched upon the patriarchal period in only one statement: “A wandering Aramean was my father” (Deut. 26.5). And how powerfully this one statement is unfolded in Gen., chs. 12 to 25! In fact, the story of each patriarch (with the exception of Isaac) is itself filled with suspense because of a great display of divine promises and fulfillments. This expansion of the patriarchal stories into such a surcharged narrative is the product of long work at collecting and even more of superior art in theological composition. One should not think that the many individual traditions about the patriarchal period in circulation came together by themselves into such an artistic and theologically deliberate composition.

This simple fact that the biblical patriarchal history is a deliberate composition made up of many originally independent individual narratives means that the expositor’s task is from now on a double one. First he must attempt to explain each individual narrative for itself, because each one contains a relatively compact meaning. But, in addition, he must also occasionally make some remarks about a presumably older form of the narrative in question and comment on its earlier purpose, because that will clarify certain characteristics of its present form. But in this composition the separation of ancient tradition from what was recast by the great collectors (Yahwist, Elohist) is not always possible. In general, one must exercise restraint and not ascribe certain prominent opinions or ideas too readily to the Yahwist. We have reason to suppose that these collectors handled their material very conservatively; we overestimate their freedom in the actual development and accentuation of the old material (see p. 37). So far as we can tell, the narratives came through the ages often with very decisive internal changes in meaning (cf. p. 19) but with surprisingly little external change. Formerly, when they were still cult sagas, was the external form of the narratives Gen. 22.1 ff.; 28.10 ff.; 32.23 ff., different, i.e., with regard to the number of sentences or the vocabulary used, from their present form?

The other task is to understand each narrative as a part of a great thread, and here the exegete comes up against the collector’s work. We are not to think of this collecting as an event that was done all at once; here too, numerous previous states must be reckoned with.* But the arrangement which the Yahwist has given the material is so remarkable that we must consider his molding of the transmitted mass of material as a decisive literary event, which claims our whole theological interest (see pp. 16 ff.). For in this matter the collectors were much freer than they were in molding each individual narrative. The sequence they give the narratives, the focuses and climaxes, or the obstructions and even decelerations they give to events of the patriarchal stories have given the entire composition a theological theme, whose quality one must understand each time, because it determines anew the exposition of the individual narrative.

Of special interest are the few narrative paragraphs in which the collector does not give an existing older tradition, but which he creates to unite larger narrative sections to one another. These “transitional paragraphs” serve primarily, of course, to provide a transition and connection between larger cycles of material; but they are much more than external ties, for they give the collector opportunity to articulate theologically programmatic material, which is significant far beyond the scope of the individual verses for understanding the larger whole. One such transitional paragraph is in the prologue to the Flood, ch. 6.5–8 (the last tradition we met with there was Gen. 6.1–4, the next begins with vs. 9 ff.). But the section ch. 12.1–9 must also be considered transitional, for it is easy to see that these verses do not contain an old traditional narrative that had been previously polished. (Every story contains some kind of exciting event for which a number of characters—above all, conflict and solution—are required; this conflict then also becomes somewhat dramatically vivid.) If in this respect the paragraph is conspicuously poor, it is all the richer in programmatic theological substance. For ch. 18.17–33, see pp. 213 ff.

[12.1–9] God’s promise to Abraham in vs. 1–3 extends through the patriarchal stories like a red line, for it is renewed for every patriarch (cf. chs. 13.14–16; 15.5, 7, 18; 18.10; 22.17; 26.24; 28.3 f., 13–15; 32.12; 35.9–12; 48.16); but never again does the Yahwist let it be pronounced in such full discharge as here. The single formulations certainly derive from the oldest traditions (for the God of the fathers, see pp. 189 f.). Now, however, they are greatly varied by the Yahwist spiritually. Here blessing and curse are no longer a matter for cult and ritual as they were in ancient times; they are meant, rather, in the most general sense as God’s gracious, beneficial, or destructive act in the control of history. In the associations of Israel’s ancestors with the eastern Aramean neighbors the Yahwist preserves an ancient recollection (cf. Deut. 26.5). But one would greatly misunderstand the substance of ch. 12.1–9 if one were to take it only as the echo of a popular recollection. Rather, we shall grasp the narrator’s intention when we consider what signs accompanied the migration which was set in motion by God’s command.

The two promises of great posterity and landed property, which are usually coupled in the patriarchal stories, are curiously separated in our paragraph into two temporally distinct events. Apparently the narrator intends to represent Abraham’s departure as a paradigmatic test of faith. Abraham started out in complete uncertainty (“for a land that Yahweh would show him”), to learn at his destination—but not before!—that precisely this way into uncertainty was the movement toward a great saving good (v. 7)! But the gates of salvation do not swing open at all with the solemn disclosure that God would give this land to Abraham. Rather, this promise is strangely contiguous to the statement that at that time the Canaanites were dwelling in the land. Abraham is therefore brought by God into a completely unexplained relationship with the Canaanites, and Yahweh does not hurry about solving and explaining this opaque status of ownership as one expects the director of history to do. On the contrary, this relationship derives its point from the altar which is erected within sight of the heathen cultic center. (What manifold political and cultic exigencies of later Israel are already implicit in this contiguity!) There is thus a strange contrast between the superlative promise at the beginning and Abraham’s outwardly uneventful road into the south (literally, “wasteland”), because this road appears to lead the recipient of promise into a twilight that begins to limn difficult problems. Surely the Yahwist intends his programmatic transitional paragraph to be read with these thoughts in mind; for he himself in his whole patriarchal history articulates exigencies and temptations into which Abraham is led precisely in his position as the recipient of promise. With shrill dissonance he begins immediately in the first of his Abraham stories (ch. 12.10–20) with this theme.

1. ABRAHAM AND SARAH IN EGYPT. Chs. 12.10 to 13.1

12 ¹⁰Now there was a famine in the land. So Abram went down to Egypt to sojourn there, for the famine was severe in the land. ¹¹When he was about to enter Egypt, he said to Sarai his wife, “I know that you are a woman beautiful to behold; ¹²and when the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife’; then they will kill me, but they will let you live. ¹³Say you are my sister, that it may go well with me because of you, and that my life may be spared on your account.” ¹⁴When Abram entered Egypt the Egyptians saw that the woman was very beautiful. ¹⁵And when the princes of Pharaoh saw her, they praised her to Pharaoh. And the woman was taken into Pharaoh’s house. ¹⁶And for her sake he dealt well with Abram; and he had sheep, oxen, he-asses, menservants, maidservants, she-asses, and camels.

17 But the LORD afflicted Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai, Abram’s wife. ¹⁸So Pharaoh called Abram, and said, “What is this you have done to me? Why did you not tell me that she was your wife? ¹⁹Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her for my wife? Now then, here is your wife, take her, and be gone.” ²⁰And Pharaoh gave men orders concerning him; and they set him on the way, with his wife and all that he had.

13 ¹So Abram went up from Egypt, he and his wife, and all that he had, and Lot with him, into the Negeb.

The composition of the Abraham stories begins with a narrative that is offensive and difficult to interpret. The narrative about the jeopardizing and saving of the ancestress occurs three times in the patriarchal tradition, each time, it is true, in a distinct setting (cf. chs. 20; 26). One can conclude from that that the same traditional material was connected with different figures of the past. But this would scarcely have happened, and the narrative would not have been preserved in these different forms if both narrator and reader had not ascribed to it a special significance. It has long been observed that in the context of the Abraham narratives the story is quite loosely rooted at this place. Abraham’s road from the north to the south (ch. 12.4–9) and from there to Egypt (v. 10), from Egypt back to Bethel (ch. 13.1–4) and from there again into the south (v. 18), is strange enough. Actually an older, simpler, and clearer narrative sequence comes through faintly here, a sequence which knew nothing of Abraham’s excursion into Egypt and in which ch. 13.2 ff. followed directly upon ch. 12.8. The Yahwist then must have had all the more reason for squeezing this block of material into the context here. The narrative itself, by the way, contrasts strangely with its relatively late insertion into the context, for among the three named variants its whole style of representation is by far the most ancient and difficult (cf. pp. 225 f.).

[10] The first event to be reported after the proclamation of the promise and the report of Abraham’s journey to Canaan is the incidence of a deadly threat. Famine has again and again in their history forced the inhabitants of Palestine, that is, of its southern region, into the much more fruitful Egypt (cf. chs. 26; 41.54 ff.; 43; 47.4). The Egyptian representation of admittance to begging “Asiatics” who did not know how “they should keep alive” is known from the period ca. 1350 (AOB, XXXIX, 87; AOT, 93 f.). Abraham too “went down” (the narrative, in contrast to what precedes and follows, does not seem to know Lot). [11–13] But for all that he is worried, as his engaging remarks to his wife show; for he is afraid that the beauty of his wife (whom we must imagine as still young in contrast to the Priestly chronology, chs. 12.4; 17.1–7) could be his undoing. The husband of so beautiful a woman is in far greater danger abroad than her brother would be. When he persuades Sarah to pass as his sister, we must assume that our narrator also knew the tradition according to which Sarah was Abraham’s half sister (ch. 20.12, E). [14–20] The narrative vividly describes how accurate Abraham’s forecast was. Everything develops as one would expect until God intervenes, not to punish Abraham for his lie and betrayal, but to save Sarah. Abraham is severely reprimanded without the possibility of denial and is whisked out of Egypt under military escort. The swiftness with which the narrative ends after the denouement in v. 17 is striking. How did Pharaoh connect his malady with Sarah’s presence in his harem? Did the malady then leave him? The narrative gives no answer to these and other more difficult questions. Apparently all details became unimportant after God’s intervention. Thus the story, which began so humanly and understandably, brings us at its end terribly face to face with the darkness and mystery of Yahweh’s power, for which no explanation is adequate.

In three respects and in exemplary fashion our narrative teaches the interpreter a lesson. First of all, it provides an extreme example of how little suggestion most of the patriarchal stories give the reader for any authoritative explanation and assessment of any occurrence. One will agree that Abraham’s embarrassed silence shows that the author really recognizes Pharaoh’s relative right (Gu.), and it is possible that one may detect the narrator’s sarcasm, particularly in Abraham’s speech in v. 12 (Pr.). But that is little enough. The event can be interpreted either very trivially or very profoundly. How does the interpreter proceed? Some have thought that the narrative makes few claims on its hearers; it extols the beauty of the ancestress and the sagacity of the ancestor who knew how to extricate himself so successfully from so precarious a situation with the help of his God (Gu.). The possibility of this interpretation cannot be dismissed out of hand, when we think of a much older version than the one we have here. Gunkel has already emphasized the fact that the cheerful, almost droll mood of the narrative is softened greatly by its connection with the pious statement about departure. One must, indeed, say that this spirit is now gone from it because of its combination with the composition as a whole. Thus the narrative is an example in the second place of how the collectors occasionally give meaning to a narrative from the overlapping whole. They do not see merely single stories which contain their own meaning, but they see a great divine event with the patriarchs, and there, if anywhere, is where one finds their interpretation. If the great promise, ch. 12.1–3, deserves the programmatic significance that we see in it, then these words overarch the story too! One must remember that the jeopardizing of the ancestress called into question everything that Yahweh had promised to do for Abraham. But Yahweh does not allow his work to miscarry right at the start; he rescues it and preserves it beyond all human failure. The narrative is thus, in the third place, an example of the fact that one must always discern the chief thing in God’s action. Here the narrative is one-sidedly concentrated on that, and we have difficulty in following it because the moral problem of Abraham’s guilt worries us. Was the departure from Canaan already an act of unbelief in the sense of the narrative? Perhaps so. But what concerns us most is the betrayal of the ancestress, and one must not exactly restrain one’s thoughts if they recognize in the bearer of promise himself the greatest enemy of the promise; for its greatest threat comes from him. But though the narrative provokes these or similar reflections, they remain relatively secondary in the presence of Yahweh’s activity. And our determination to understand is limited by Yahweh’s power and mystery. The interpreter has to know about this limitation. Whoever said that everything here must or could be satisfactorily explained? The fact of the event is incomparably more important to our narrator than its manner of occurrence and all its possible interpretations. That this material is varied in three forms in the patriarchal history shows that Israel reflected on this saving intervention by God with special interest. If Yahweh did not go astray in his work of sacred history because of the failure and guilt of the recipient of promise, then his word was really to be believed. (A comparison of our narrative with that of Gen., ch. 20, is instructive; cf. pp. 225 ff.)

2. THE SEPARATION FROM LOT. Ch. 13.2–18

13 ²Now Abram was very rich in cattle, in silver, and in gold. ³And he journeyed on from the Negeb as far as Bethel, to the place where his tent had been at the beginning, between Bethel and Ai, ⁴to the place where he had made an altar; and there Abram called on the name of the LORD. ⁵And Lot, who went with Abram, also had flocks and herds and tents, ⁶so that the land could not support both of them dwelling together; for their possessions were so great that they could not dwell together, ⁷and there was strife between the herdsmen of Abram’s cattle and the herdsmen of Lot’s cattle. At that time the Canaanites and the Perizzites dwelt in the land.

8 Then Abram said to Lot, “Let there be no strife between you and me, and between your herdsmen and my herdsmen; for we are kinsmen. ⁹Is not the whole land before you? Separate yourself from me. If you take the left hand, then I will go to the right; or if you take the right hand, then I will go to the left.” ¹⁰And Lot lifted up his eyes, and saw that the Jordan valley was well watered everywhere like the garden of the LORD, like the land of Egypt in the direction of Zoar; this was before the LORD destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. ¹¹So Lot chose for himself all the Jordan valley, and Lot journeyed east; thus they separated from each other. ¹²Abram dwelt in the land of Canaan, while Lot dwelt among the cities of the valley and moved his tent as far as Sodom. ¹³Now the men of Sodom were wicked, great sinners against the LORD.

14 The LORD said to Abram, after Lot had separated from him, “Lift up your eyes, and look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward; ¹⁵for all the land which you see I will give to you and to your descendants for ever. ¹⁶I will make your descendants as the dust of the earth; so that if one can count the dust of the earth, your descendants also can be counted. ¹⁷Arise, walk through the length and the breadth of the land, for I will give it to you.” ¹⁸So Abram moved his tent, and came and dwelt by the oaks of Mamre, which are at Hebron; and there he built an altar to the LORD.

[2–7] Abraham has returned to the region of Bethel. (Regarding the hypothesis that the narrative ch. 12.10–20 was only later incorporated into the Abraham story and the complication of Abraham’s route which thus came about, see above, pp. 167 f.) To understand the outward life and nature of the pat...