Saturday, October 28, 2006

Noah: Genesis 6:9-11:32

The Flood 6:9-8:19
Would Jews in exile in Babylon have identified themselves with those who perished in the flood or would they have identifies themselves with Noah who survived?.

In the flood story God decides to uncreate the world and start over because the people have forgotten the expectations for them from the garden. In the prophetic accounts of exile, God allowed Babylon to conquer Jerusalem because Jerusalem’s leaders violated the covenant by not caring for the orphans and widows but instead relied on attempted military alliances to fight the Babylonians. The choice by Noah, to rely on God for salvation, no mater how preposterous and irrational it may have seemed to do so, is the path that the ruling classes exiled to Babylon did not take and so they were swallowed up by the Babylonian flood, and the Temple was destroyed.

While the prophetic account makes clear that many good people suffered and died despite their righteousness due to the greed for power of their rulers (the suffering servant of Isaiah) it is very disturbing that the Flood story does not appear to include this truth. In the flood story, we are told that the righteous survive and the wicked suffer. Since so many of the characters in Genesis act sometimes righteously and sometimes wickedly it seems clear that the Torah generally has a far more sophisticated view of human nature than that given in the beginning of the flood story. In fact, Rabbinic commentators have remarked that Noah does not act righteously in the story, given the standards of the text, since he does not negotiate with God to save the people as Abraham did to save Sodom and Gomorrah.

I believe that the flood story serves to expose as wrongheaded the view of human nature that there are good people and bad people.

The message of the story is that the flood solved nothing and If God can’t rid the world of evil by killing people, then surely it would be the greatest folly for people to presume that violence would work for them.

Aftermath and Covenant 8:20-9:17
Noah gets off the arc and the first thing he does is sacrifice animals to God despite the fact that God has not yet given authority for people to do this. God is portrayed as gaining an insight of human nature from this experience, and dispenses with the notion that some people are born good and remain so while others are born bad and remain so. God now realizes that people learn how to act from the social structures that they experience in their youth and that there is good and bad in everyone just as the air is sometimes hot and sometimes cold.

With this awareness, God blesses people to be fruitful and multiply and to fill the earth. God’s blessing is in the setting up of social structures to temper peoples’ tendencies towards perpetuating violence. Without this blessing, people would have killed each other off long before they would have the opportunity to fill the earth. Respect for life is encouraged through the restriction not to eat animals “with its life-blood in it” and human vengeance is restricted to the taking of one human life and only if that person is found guilty of murdering another (in contrast to the seven that would have been required for Cain’s murder or Lamech’s fear that seventy seven of his family will be required for whatever he had done.)

Rabbinic tradition considers these societal reforms to be the minimum necessary for the awareness to grow that people living and working together in harmony is the image of God. However people who really want to put this awareness into practice would feel compelled to order their community lives with social rules that are less violent than the minimum acceptable rules set out here. After all, God originally expected humans to be vegetarians and God did not require Cain’s life when he killed Abel. In the time of Noah before the flood, the people turned to violence because they have forgotten who they are and what is expected of them. We have the Torah to remind us (as God has the rainbow), so more is expected of us (and of God).

Curse of Cannan 9:18-28
This story has many allusions to the garden temptation story. First, Noah is described as a tiller of the soil, so we immediately envision him working in a garden like Adam and Eve. Next we are told that Noah is the inventor of wine (I wonder if this is the reason for his name. See 5:29) and drinks his fill of the fruit of the vine (presumably with his wife and possibly sons and their wives too. Perhaps Noah should be read as “the family of Noah.”). In keeping with the temptation stories, at this point we should expect someone to act in a domineering way as Adam did to Eve when he named her or when Cain killed Abel. What follows though is very sparse and many scholars believe that something was left out for reasons of modesty. Similarities with the story of Lot and his daughters, as well as Leviticus referring to having sex with a man’s wife as exposing that man’s nakedness, as well as the story of Jacob’s first wedding night, indicate that Ham (who might have been drunk) took advantage of his father’s (and mother’s) drunkenness to have intercourse with his mother, attempting thereby to assert his authority by displacing his father as the head of the family (all of humanity). Cannan was the result of the union.

And so Noah’s story is concluded with a sexual union that transgressed boundaries for the purpose of domination, just as the flood was initiated by God as a consequence of sexual unions that transgressed boundaries, showing again that the violence of the flood resulted in no positive consequences.

But why does Noah curse Cannan who, although the product of the temptation to domination, is not the responsible party? Perhaps this is another example of why it is so important for people to leave vengeance up to God, since people are notoriously bad at identifying the guilty.

Branching out of humanity 10:1-32
Humanity is described as branching out around the earth, each group with its own land and language. Nimrod, the founder of Babylon, is described as a mighty hunter, indicting domination and empire.

Babel 11:1-9
Now we are in Babylon and are told that everyone on earth speaks one language, in contrast to the previous section. It is part of the ideology of empire to think of everything under its control as the entire civilized world, with everyone outside it as savages. The story is another temptation story in which people transgress boundaries and try to be like God. Again people are expelled for their transgression. In the beginning of Isaiah, the prophet refers to the architectural excesses of the ruling class in Jerusalem as an example of its misplaced priorities. With the Babel story likely in mind, the prophets say that God allowed Babylon to invade because the rulers of Jerusalem were acting no different than Babylonians.

Sunday, October 15, 2006

Bere’shit/ B’reishit Genesis 1.1-6.8

First creation narrative. 1.1-2.4a
Humankind is created in God’s image. The image of God is in the harmonious relationships between all people, men and women, working together as equals. We must be careful not to read enlightenment individualism into this text where community, not individuality is stressed. The reference to dominion or rulling over animals in verse 26 is a reference to domesticating animals to help with work. Eating animals in excluded in verse 29. The ruling or dominion in this verse is a non-abusive leadership between unequals that brings sustenance, similar to the intention of verse 16, where the ruling of the sun and the moon is for shining light and for use as a calendar, necessities for agricultural work.

Garden narrative. 2.4b-3.24
God creates the animals to be Adam’s partners but Adam gives names to all of them, symbolizing his dominion over them. None are his equals. Then God creates the woman and Adam recognizes her as his equal. He does not name her. Although he does call her woman, the Hebrew word for name is not used. But the immediate consequence of expulsion from the garden, is that Adam names Eve, the Hebrew word for name is used just as it was used for the animals earlier, signifying inequality entering into human relationships.

One interpretation of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is that it signifies the ability, reserved for God alone, to use evil means for good ends. In other places in the bible the phrase “knowledge good and evil” refers to the kind of worldly wisdom of the kings, like Solomon, who form military alliances, use capital punishment, and enslave the people to accomplish their ends. This should be contrasted with divine wisdom which does not exhibit equality with God through conquest but through suffering for others.

The snake is cunning or shrewd, words used to describe someone who is able to manipulate others for their own ends. In Hebrew, the nakedness realized by the humans after they eat the fruit looks like the word for shrewd.

God places winged sphinxes with a flaming sword at the entrance to the garden. One can not enter back into the garden through the same means with which one left it, the means of domination of humans over humans. Instead we are called to model our institutions on the basis of cooperation, equality, and love, in the image of God to get back home.

Cain and Abel. 4.1-4.24
Abel violates God’s commandment and slaughters animals while Cain continues to live by the rules that were given in the garden. Yet Abel prospers while Cain does not. Why does God allow the wicked to prosper while the righteous suffer? The bible gives no answer although it frequently asks the question. Cain does in reality what his parents did symbolically. He takes justice into his own hands, usurps God’s prerogative to do evil so that good will come, and kills Abel. As Cain’s crime was patterned after that of his parents, so is his punishment, expulsion from home. But he makes a new life and raises a family in Nod, the land of wandering. The story is followed by a genealogy of Cain (where the desire for many wives and a violent temper are correlated in the person of Lamech.) A midrash holds that Cain repented of his killing.


Both the garden narrative and the Cain and Abel narrative can be read as allegories of exile. The prophets’ explanation for exile was that the rulers of Israel and Judah did not rule justly. They did not care for the widows and orphans (meaning all people who do not have means of support). If they had done this, the God would have been their warrior. Instead of doing justice they sought to form military alliances with Egypt and other nations and usurp the warrior role of God while the ruling class exploited the poor. Expulsion followed. But in exile, according to this week’s haftarah portion, Isaiah 42.5-43.11, God has not forsaken the children of Israel and God will lead the people to their home provided they leave the warrior stuff to God and instead devote themselves to being a light to the nations.

Seth’s descendents 4.25-6.8
Adam and Eve beget another son Seth, from which humanity through Noah will descend. Perhaps Cain represents Israel which was dispersed in the Assyrian invasion while the line of Seth corresponds to Judah. There is again mixing between the human and the divine realm but this time it isn’t through humans usurping God’s role but members of god’s divine court mating with human women, perhaps representing the exploitation of the poor by the ruling class of Jerusalem. God is appalled at the injustices in society. The stage is set for the flood, in next week’s Torah portion, which symbolizes the destruction of the temple and the Babylonian exile.