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🦋 Jacob's Travels: Bad Faith in Genesis

So after some further reading and reflection, I'm not so convinced that José Arcadio Buendía's dream at Macondo is intended as a reference to Jacob's dream at Beth-el... There doesn't really seem to be enough parallels between the two stories to give the reference any weight or any explanatory power. I got the idea from a footnote in the edition of Cien Años de Soledad that I'm reading (ed. Jacques Joset, 2003). Overall the footnotes in this edition seem pretty weak -- or that is to say, there are just unnecessarily many of them. The footnote references Michael Palencia-Roth's book Gabriel García Márquez: La línea, el círculo y las metamorfosis del mito -- who knows, maybe a convincing case for the reference is made there.

I am glad to have seen the note though, since it led me to reread the story of Jacob (Genesis 27 - 35, roughly), a story which I had by and large forgotten, in the kjv translation and in Crumb's illustrated version, and because I found Blake's painting of Jacob's Ladder -- highly productive weekend research! Reading about Jacob's travels back and forth across what would one day be the Holy Land, I felt distressed -- and remembered feeling this same distress in years past -- by the sheer universality of bad faith in the characters' dealings with one another; a bad faith that seems to me to be most pronounced among those who are identified as blessed by God. Just to take a few of the most brazen, least sympathetic instances --

• (This happens in an earlier chapter, but very much setting the tone for the stories to come) Isaac tells the Philistines, when he and Rebekah are staying with them, that Rebekah is his sister rather than his wife, apparently in the expectation that they will rape her but will not molest him. When this deception is exposed, Abimelech shows himself to be just and honorable, forbidding his subjects from troubling either Isaac or his wife. What is this doing in the Hebrew people's national mythology?
• Jacob, at his mother Rebekah's urging, deceives Isaac into giving him the blessing intended for his brother Esau. (This scene strikes me as pretty comical -- why should the lord's blessing be such a limited resource? Is a blessing bestowed under false pretenses even theologically binding?)
• Rebekah deceives Isaac into thinking she is concerned about the lack of non-Caananite brides for Jacob locally, so that Isaac will send Jacob away and he'll be safe from Esau's vengeance.
• Laban deceives Jacob by sending in Leah in place of Rachel on their wedding night. (And again I am befuddled -- what is Rachel's take on this? Leah years later accuses Rachel of stealing her husband, but that does not seem to be consistent with the rest of the narrative.)
• Jacob and Laban deceive one another many times over in the matters of what Jacob will be paid and how Laban's flocks will be managed.

posted afternoon of Sunday, March 27th, 2011
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It is obvious that you are very well read. For more than I am, I am sure. I have been preaching through the book of Genesis and I stumbled upon this blog in my studies of Jacob's journey. Your struggles with the text have actually featured highly in my sermons, but not in the way you might think.

If this is, as you call it, purely mythology, and the point of the myth is to show us men and women whose examples we are to follow in moral and ethical living, as Persian, Greek and Roman myths tend to do, then your questions are certainly valid. It has always facinated me that in these ancient myths it is the gods who behave badly, while the men are most often penecles of virtue. Not so in the holy book of the Jews.

In the Bible everything God does is good and wise, except his choice of human heroes. Almost all of them are deeply flawed individuals, right from the beginning. Adam and Eve dote so much on their first-born that he becomes such a self-centered brat that he murders his brother over the acceptance of a sacrifice. Noah, after saving his family and all the animal world from destruction, makes wine, gets drunk, and falls asleep naked in his tent. And so it goes. Jacob, in many ways, is almost the most flawed of them all.

However, when Jacob deceived his father into giving him the blessing of the first-born, he was tricking his father into doing what God had already said should happen, so one could say that Jacob was in the right, and Isaac was wrong. I think they were both wrong. There had to be a better way to get Isaac to do the right thing than deception. In many ways, what happens to Jacob in Haran is what the eastern religions would call Karma, but the judeo-christian religion calls it instruction. The trickster gets tricked, the deceiver gets deceived. He learns what it is like to be at the other end of the kind of living he has chosen up to that point in his life, and it teaches him well.

When Jacob finally returns home his behavior toward his brother is completely different than before. He does not come home trying to trick his brother into giving him the inheritance of their father. Rather he give Esau, who has become quite wealthy by this time, gifts from the little property he managed to earn from his theiving uncle. He does not treat Esau as the one who lost the rights of the firstborn, but calls him "lord," and refers to himself as "your servant." In short, Jacob has finally learned the old addage, "You can attract more flies with honey than with vinegar."

However, the main answer to your quandry is that these are not myths! No myth writer of those days would have recorded the humans to be so flawed. This looks far more like the way things really are, not the way we would like things to be. These are more like Aesop's fables, the stories of Confuscious, or Grimm's Fairey Tales, all of which have their roots in real human drama, flawed, broken, deceptive humans from whose actions we can learn a valuable lesson of what not to do.

I am convinced that the utterly flawed nature of all of the biblical heroes is the greatest evidence that these are not myths, but historical stories of real people. Real people are flawed, sinful, broken, co-dependant, self-destructive, chemically addicted, and in need of help from a real God who cares for them in spite of all of their flaws. Again and again Jacob is praised, not for his moral behavior, which was certainly lacking, but because of his faith in God. He kept trusting in God's promise in spite of the fact that he knew he didn't deserve it. "I am not deserving of any of Your gracious acts, but You have promised to do good to me..." Therefore he goes to meet his brother, in spite of the fact that it looks like his brother is coming to kill him.

posted morning of November 14th, 2012 by Tim Stout

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