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patriarchal-narrative

4 studies tagged with patriarchal-narrative.

Torah23 min

Jacob and Esau: The Womb-Oracle, the Birthright, and the Verb of Contempt

Genesis Genesis 25:19-34

Two boys crush each other in the womb of Rebekah, an oracle inverts primogeniture before they are born, and a bowl of red stew costs Esau the birthright. The Septuagint of Genesis 25:23 becomes the verbatim five-word election text Paul quotes at Romans 9:12; the closing Hebrew verb of contempt at Genesis 25:34 returns at Obadiah on the nation Esau fathered.

Torah22 min

Isaac and Rebekah: The Akedah Blessing on Aramean Lips and the First Husband-Loves-Wife

Genesis Genesis 24:29-67

Bethuel and Laban speak the Akedah blessing back over Rebekah without knowing what they echo. Isaac brings her into Sarah's tent and loves her in the canon's first husband-loves-wife, and is comforted by a verb that runs forward into Isaiah's promise and the Paraclete.

Narrative27 min

Isaac and Ishmael

Genesis Genesis 21:1–34

Genesis 21 opens with the verb that will become the canon's word for divine intervention and closes with the divine epithet that will become the canon's word for God's eternity. Between them the narrator stages a birth, an expulsion, a wilderness rescue, a seven-fold oath, and a tamarisk planted at a well. Sarah speaks the Edenic expulsion-verb in the imperative; Yahweh ratifies her. God opens Hagar's eyes the way Eden's were opened, but to a well of water this time. The chapter is built as the Akedah's dress rehearsal, and two of its verses become the most exact verbatim citations of Genesis in the New Testament.

Narrative26 min

The Three at Mamre

Genesis 18:1-15

Yahweh comes to the door of Abraham's tent at midday and eats a meal of fine flour cakes and curds under a tree. The Hebrew names the visitor singular; the eyes see three men; the speaker is Yahweh; two leave for Sodom as angels. Sarah laughs inside the tent and the divine voice draws the laugh into the open. The vocabulary of her cakes is the vocabulary of the altar that does not yet exist; the formula of her birth-promise is the formula Elisha will speak to the Shunammite; her inner question about pleasure (ednah) is preserved by the Hebrew and erased by the Greek. At Mamre God comes to a domestic table and names the time of Isaac's life.