Genesis

I. Summary

The Book of Genesis begins with the creation of “the heavens and the earth” (p. 8) and eventually man and woman. Adam and Eve are then cast out of the garden of Eden because they both eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and bad. They give birth to two children, Cain and Abel. Cain murders his brother out of jealously, and God curses Cain and all of his descendants. Meanwhile, Adam and Eve have another child, Seth. Genesis then traces Seth’s genealogy down to Noah, at which point we receive the familiar story of Noah and the great Flood. After surviving the Flood, Noah’s genealogy is traced through his son Shem all the way to Abraham. Before this, in two small paragraphs, the story of the Tower of Babel is relayed, and men and women are scattered to all ends of the earth, speaking in languages unintelligible to each other.

God promises to Abraham that his descendants will be as countless as the stars. Abraham’s wife Sarah (Sarai) gives him a concubine, Hagar, by which to have a child. Thus Ishmael is born. Shortly after Ishmael’s birth, God blesses Sarah to conceive, though she has been barren, and she births their son Isaac, whose line the Covenant of Abraham will follow. Between the birth of Abraham’s sons, God destroys Sodom and Gomorrah because their citizens have been having homosexual “intimacies” (p. 23).

Isaac marries Rebekah, and they have two sons, twins, Esau and Jacob. While Jacob is younger, with the help of his mother he deceives Isaac, and the patriarchy extends through his line, not Esau’s. Jacob marries Leah and Rachel, daughters of Laban, Abraham’s brother’s (Nahor’s) grandson. By Leah, Rachel, and their respective concubines, Jacob has 12 sons and a daughter. The second youngest son, Joseph, is despised by his brothers, and he is sold into slavery in Egypt.

There, in Egypt, Joseph interprets the dream of the pharaoh, predicting seven years of abundance and seven years of famine, at which point the pharaoh makes Joseph the equivalent of second-in-command. When the famine strikes, Jacob, now Israel, sends his sons to Egypt to collect grain for food. Joseph recognizes his family, and eventually reveals himself to them. The family brings Israel and the rest of his family to live in Egypt, where Israel and eventually Joseph die by the end of the book. The book ends with the 11 sons and their families living abundantly in Egypt.

II. Response

Reading Genesis in this context was difficult for me. I tried to read always one step back, and think about the narrative and the devices at work. Still, I could not help but be impressed on a spiritual level. I think the bridge between the two – objectivity and spirituality – is crossed most easily during Abraham’s story. Because even for a non-Hebrew, non-Christian, or non-Muslim, the faith Abraham demonstrates is extraordinary. Now, anyone who claims Abraham as a religious ancestor has millions or billions of others who believe the same as they do. Abraham didn’t. He was truly the first. Though he was a descendent of Noah, someone who was loved by God, after Babel there seems to have been a long-tern rift between God and all people. Abraham is the first of the “chosen people.” His own brother had separate gods. And yet, there seems to be no conflict because of Abraham’s faith. I wonder if there were so many different beliefs back then that Abraham did not stand out for faith in his particular God. But over time and over terrain, others acknowledge the power of the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. However, that power is not presented as superior to any other gods, as there are no others in questions. It must not be until Moses and Aaron lead the Hebrews out of Egypt that we see God triumph over the gods of the Egyptians. Moses then receives the Ten Commandments, the first of which is “I am the Lord your God, you shall not have any other gods besides me.”

I was surprised by how much sex is in Genesis. I was even more surprised by how much sex takes place between unmarried men and women, either as concubines or “temple prostitutes.” Women are not given much agency, nor are they shown much respect throughout Genesis. Rebekah helps Jacob to receive his brother’s blessing, but if that is the best moment for women in the book, then the worst must be when Joseph is deceived by his master’s wife in Egypt. The wife of Joseph’s master attempts to seduce him, giving the impression that this woman must have nothing else to do other than offer herself sexually to Joseph. When she doesn’t get her way, she gets him thrown in jail. Men are not the only ones called to faith, and though I understand Genesis is not the only book for Jews and Christians to turn to for an understanding of their faith, it is the first, and there are no empowering female role models. There wouldn’t be, because that wasn’t the culture when the stories were collected (“redacted”), but what would I do if I were a young Christian or Jewish woman?  What more would I get from Genesis other than bear as many children as possible for my husband?

III. Context in Literature: Similarities and Differences.

Compared to The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Odyssey, the biggest noticeable difference is the scope of time Genesis covers. If read literally, Genesis covers well over 2000 years, if not 3000. Even if the events from the Creation to the Flood are read as mythology, the latter two-thirds of Genesis closely follow four entire generations from Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. I suspect the reason for this difference is a difference of intent.

All three books deal with their respective deities and those deities interactions with men and women. But Gilgamesh, Odysseus, and their fellow players simply show how the gods work with and through men. In this respect Genesis sets up a new kind of God, one with an ultimate purpose. While we see through each character – at least through each patriarch – how God’s will is to be fulfilled on earth, we see through the generations – from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob to Joseph – how a grander “design” is being fulfilled. The life of one man, no matter how long he lives, proves significant only insofar as his life has served to further God’s purpose through his people. However the lives of Odysseus and Telemachus, or Gilgamesh and Enkidu, however didactic or demonstrative they are supposed to be, are limited by their humanity. One might even say in these older “mythologies,” the gods are limited by man. Any greater purpose they might have, either in their construction or in their action, is obscured and lost by a human perspective. In this way, I am beginning to see why the Torah and the Bible, by their narrative construction, may have outlasted the others. Although, by making such a statement I recognize my own potential biases and the line between my new knowledge and remaining ignorance of these texts and their enormous impact.

IV. Teaching and Learning

The Book of Genesis is the first book in this world literature independent study that retains its religious relevance, and concurrently, its potential for controversy. On one hand, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all agree that Genesis is a holy text, and those are the three main belief systems we encounter in the contemporary American classroom – though there are others. However, even though all three religions acknowledge the book, they each have unique, subsequent interpretations. Opening any sacred text to discussion in the classroom is risky business on multiple levels, and I will discuss this more in my reflections on The Qur’an.  First of all, students need proper coaching about being respectful of each other’s viewpoints, and secondly, parents (and consequently, administration) need a rock solid rationale for opening up their families’ sacred text for criticism.

I realize that in a public school setting – even in a private or parochial school setting – I would probably never teach the entire Book of Genesis in a literature class. However, in many cases, even students who seem to be devout practitioners of their faiths remain ignorant of their scriptural history, or of the actual stories that comprise their scripture. For this reason, I am glad I read Genesis as a part of this independent study, as it gives me a background knowledge that I could utilize if a religious controversy arose while studying another text, or if a conflict arose out of some external situation that penetrated the school. Knowledge of this cornerstone text may give my students common ground to discuss differences in interpretations of the text by acknowledging its existence as a text, as a compilation of words that are open to interpretation.

If I were in a school system, even a public school system, in which religion, especially Christianity, played a fundamental role in daily life, there are various excerpts that I could pull from different sections of the book that could serve as good windows into unit themes. For example, if I were doing a theme on “cruelty and injustice,” or some variation (for example, many of my classmates are dealing with the Holocaust in their placements), I might intro with Abraham’s plea to God regarding the destruction of Sodom:

While the two men walked on farther toward Sodom, the Lord remained standing before Abraham. Then Abraham drew nearer to him and said: “Will you sweep away the innocent with the guilty? Suppose there were fifty innocent people in the city; would you wipe out the place, rather than spare it for the sake of the fifty innocent people within in? Far be it from you to do such a thing, to make the innocent die with the guilty, so that the innocent and the guilty would be treated alike. (New American 23)

Questions of innocence and guilt, and the treatment of both, are moral dilemmas that appear in the other literature students will be reading. As mentioned before, this could introduce a lesson on the Holocaust (The Diary of Anne Frank or Anne Frank the play). This passage could also relate to any text on racism and other prejudices, as well as dystopian works. I could see this applying to Things Fall Apart as well, in which there is a constant tension between who is guilty of different crimes and the appropriate way to punish those crimes.