II. Polity and History

1. Oden, The Bible Without Theology, pp. 106-30, especially 106-12 and 130.

2. Ibid., 107-8, 113-14, 117-18.

3. See Wilson, Genealogy and History in the Biblical World, pp. 167-83, for a comprehensive discussion of genealogies in Genesis 36. Note, however, that he excludes verses 31-39 on the grounds that they do not constitute genealogy. This reinforces my use of the material as being more significant as a place list.

4. All of the point plots are based on H. May, ed., Oxford Bible Atlas (New York: Oxford University Press; 1984).

5. See especially, Lorrain, “Social Structure, Social Classification and the Logic of Analogy,” and Lorrain, Réseaux sociaux et géométrie des structures sociales.

6. Tree-diagrams used by certain Jewish mystics rely on chaining processes which are similar to those used in kinship modeling, and in some cases apparently tap into the same elements of cultural or rhetorical structure.

7. See C. Lévi-Strauss, “Do Dual Organizations Exist,” in Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology. For technical development of some of these arguments see my “ ‘Do Dual Organizations Exist’ Revisited.”

8. For an example of how these references carry social meaning in Genesis, see Carmichael, Women, Law, and the Genesis Traditions, pp. 36, 47-48, 71-73.

9. The animal translation is considered dubious by many scholars. It appears in The New American Bible (Washington, D.C.: World Publishing Company; 1970) and a few other contemporary English translations.

10. Wilson, Genealogy and History in the Biblical World, pp. 187-88.

11. The analysis was part of an exploratory reading of Exodus 21-22 against several Genesis narratives in the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar on Biblical Law in Historical Perspective/University of California, Berkeley, summer 1988.

12. My renderings of names are based on the New American Bible, text and notes of pp. 38-40, 56; see also Plaut, The Torah, Genesis.

13. Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh, pp. 318-23.

14. Numbers 3:38 ends with the statement: “Any layman who came near the sanctuary was to be put to death.” I take “layman” in the context to include Levites outside the Aaronite priesthood. I do not mean to imply that such a distinction necessarily applied in other biblical contexts, especially in the territorial context provided for in Joshua.

15. Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh, pp. 237-337.

16. Ibid., p. 340.

17. affine: i.e., in-law, or relative by marriage.

III. Structural Hermeneutics

1. Form criticism and the documentary hypothesis are closely related terms covering a very wide range of biblical studies. A large number of form critics emphasize the recognition of textual types, their primary interests being the construction of classifications relating materials stylistically. This orientation does not necessarily imply interests in dating the materials precisely or linking the recognized parts in historical reconstructions of editorial process. The historical questions permeate the documentary orientation so much, however, that it becomes difficult to speak of genre or style without creating implications about dating and the nature of editorial circles. Yet after a century of such criticism, debate still rages on questions of single versus multiple authors, the place of oral tradition in the formation of the texts of the Torah, and the classifications of literary forms in general. The uninitiated will find R. N. Whybray’s The Making of the Pentateuch: A Methodological Study, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 53, (Sheffield, England: JSOT Press—Sheffield Academic Press; 1987) most helpful. For Genesis, Coats’s Genesis with an Introduction to Narrative Literature is the most definitive recent work.

2. Stephen Langton was an Archbishop of Canterbury whose chapter system for Genesis, reflecting the culmination of several competing strands of thinking about textual organization in the 13th century, has become the standard in the modern Bible. Much earlier traditions of chaptering and verse citation were introduced by the Masorites, basing divisions on ancient appreciations of biblical material and the scriptural reading system forming the core of Jewish education in the Torah. Among the divisions are the parashah (paragraphs or minor sections) and sidrah, major sections associated with weekly reading in the synagogue. In some Hebrew Bibles the sidrah are marked with a triple or . The divisions created by these marks also have names, usually derivations from words in the first line of the division. All of the named sections in Genesis except Vayyehi, beginning at Genesis 47:28, are so marked. Jewish reading of the Torah since at least the 9th century has been aided by signs of vocalization, texts with signs for vowels added to the original consonantal characters. Earlier vocalized texts are likely to have existed, though the standards of pronunciation were carried through oral readings originally. Other marks introduced into the text at a relatively late time control the melodic sense of the reading. The Hebrew Bible, then, provides an ancient system of divisions which has undergone considerable elaboration in form related to religious practice. For a fuller discussion of these forms, including association of the Haftarah recitations with reading, see Philip Birnbaum’s introduction in The Torah and the Haftarot (New York: Hebrew Publishing Company; 1983); cf. also the introduction and text provided by Plaut, The Torah, Genesis.

3. See C. Kluckholn, Anthropology and the Classics (Providence: Brown University Press, 1961), pp. 43-68 (especially pp. 47-50); and Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology.

4. In addition to his initial article “Themes as Dynamic Forces in Culture,” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 51 (1945), pp. 198-206, the essay defining the general notion of cultural themes within the configurationalist perspective, Opler extended his ideas in the following key articles: “An Application of the Theory of Themes in Culture,” Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, vol. 36 (1946), pp. 137-66; “Some Recently Developed Concepts Relating to Culture,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, vol. 4 (1948) pp. 107-22; “The Context of Themes,” American Anthropologist, vol. 51 (1949), pp. 323-25; and “Component, Assemblage, and Theme in Cultural Integration and Differentiation,” American Anthropologist, vol. 61 (1959) pp. 955-64.

5. See the philosophical introduction to semiotics of J. Deely, Introducing Semiotic: Its History and Doctrine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press; 1982), the technical exposition of U. Eco, A Theory of Semiotic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press; 1979), and the many applications of semiotic perspective which cut across our appreciation of texts, space, and action; for example: J. Bunn, The Dimensionality of Signs, Tools, and Models; An Introduction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press; 1979); T. Sebeok, The Sign & Its Masters (Austin: University of Texas Press; 1979); R. Barthes, S/Z, R. Miller, trans., (New York: Hill and Wang; 1974 [original French edition 1970]); A. Greimas, Semiotique. Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du language (Paris: Hachette; 1966) also as Semiotics and Language—An Analytical Dictionary, L. Crist, D. Patte, J. Lee, E. McMahon II, G. Phillips, and M. Rengstorf, translators, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press; 1982).

6. My initial feelings that Genesis includes prefigurements of law have been bolstered by the lectures of David Daube in the NEH Summer Seminar on “Biblical Law in Historical Perspective” (1988). This does not mean that Genesis itself includes codes or straightforward legal examples or legal precedent, but that the legal codes, legal proverbs, and legends associated with contracts and obligation form a rhetorical system that takes nonlegal scriptures into account. On the level of rhetorical or literary practice, narrative supplements law in much the same way it supplements genealogy. Some striking examples of how complex the relationships can be are given in Daube’s many writings, among which I shall cite but a few: see in particular “Nathan’s Parable,” Novum Testamentum 24 (1982), pp. 275-88; “Codes and Codas in the Pentateuch,” Juridicial Review 53 (1941) pp. 1-20; and Witnesses in Bible and Talmud, Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies (1986); these all in addition to his Biblical Law and Ancient Jewish Law noted earlier (note 6, chapter 1); also see “Rabbinic Methods of Interpretation and Hellenistic Rhetoric,” Hebrew Union College Annual, vol. 22 (1949), pp. 239-64; “Texts and Interpretation in Roman and Jewish Law,” Jewish Journal of Sociology, vol. 3 (1961), pp. 3-28; and “How Esau Sold His Birthright,” Cambridge Law Journal, vol. 8 (1942), pp. 70-75.

7. For example, G. Plaut states in The Torah, Genesis, p. xxii: “In general, our commentary favors the position just outlined, namely, that Genesis (with which we are here concerned) is essentially the repository of centuries of traditions which became One Tradition and One Book. At what time it was set down as we have it now will likely remain a matter of conjecture; what is important is to treat the book as an integral unit rather than a paste-up amalgam.”

8. See D. Patte and A. Patte, Structural Exegesis: From Theory to Practice (Philadelphia: Fortress Press; 1978); also D. Patte, ed., “Genesis 2 and 3. Kaleidoscopic Structural Readings,” Semeia, vol. 18 (1980); and Coats, From Canaan to Egypt.

9. The toledoth divisions occur at Genesis 2:4, 6:9, 11:27, 25:19, and 37:2.

10. John Gammie, “Theological Interpretation by Way of Literary and Traditional Analysis,” pp. 120-24; and M. Fishbane, “Composition and Structure in the Jacob Cycle (Gen. 25:19—35:22),” Journal of Jewish Studies, vol. 26 (1975), pp. 15-38. Both papers employ chiastic analysis of subchapter blocks as a means of expanding the theological interpretation of the Jacob Cycle. See also A. Ceresko, “The A:B:B:A Word Pattern in Hebrew and Northwest Semitic, with Special Reference to the Book of Job,” Ugaritische Vorsehungen (1975), pp. 73-88; A. Ceresko, “The Chiastic Word Pattern in Hebrew,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly, vol. 38 (1976), pp. 303-11; and A. Ceresko, “The Function of Chiasmus in Hebrew Poetry,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly, vol. 40 (1978), pp. 1-10.

11. My analysis of Genesis 1-14 was developed with strong critical input by John Gammie, and additional comments by Daniel Patte and Jean-Claude Choul concerning the integration of chiastic representation and my application of Greimas’s “semiotic square.” See also D. Patte, “Greimas’ Model for the Generative Trajectory of Meaning in Discourses,” American Journal of Semiotics, vol. 1 (1982), pp. 59-78; this article prompted my treatment of Genesis 1, 7, 8, and 14. An earlier version of the structure presented here was discussed in a symposium on biblical analysis at the 1983 meeting of the Semiotic Society of America in Snowbird, Utah.

12. Cf. Carroll, “Leach, Lévi-Strauss, and the Garden of Eden,” American Ethnologist, vol. 4 (1977), pp. 672, 675.

13. Plaut, The Torah, Genesis, p. 35.

14. Ibid., p. 46.

15. Ibid., p. 41.

16. Ibid., p. 85.

17. Ibid. Translation is the New Jewish Version.

18. Ibid., p. 55, note 3, points out that “disgrace” is tied to an uncertain translation which can be rendered “My spirit shall not shield man forever, . . .” (emphasis added). Note also that Shem and Japeth, in their protective action toward Noah, cover his nakedness with a cloak.

19. I make this statement at considerable risk of being accused of complicating, rather than simplifying, our view of the text. Let me point out again, then, that Whybray, The Making of the Pentateuch, and Coats, Genesis with an Introduction to Narrative Literature, offer highly readable, straightforward, and informative views of what can be a treacherous subject.

20. Vawter, On Genesis, pp. 61-62; also Plaut, The Torah, Genesis, p. 11.

21. Oden, The Bible Without Theology, pp. 98-105, treats the subject of clothing and status with specific reference to several stories in Genesis.

22. Coats, From Canaan to Egypt, especially pp. 53-54 and 80-89. Although on the analysis of political themes I have come to many different conclusions than Coats, his view of the text as a coherent and well-developed structural whole is not that different from the one being developed here. See also Coats, Genesis with an Introduction to Narrative Literature, pp. 263-65 and his following detailed analysis of the Joseph story.

23. Gammie, “Theological Interpretation by Way of Literary and Traditional Analysis.” Fishbane, “Composition and Structure in the Jacob Cycle (Gen. 25:19—35:22).”

24. C. Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” a chapter in Structural Anthropology, but better read in its context in T. Sebeok, ed., Myth: A Symposium (Bloomington: Indiana University Press; 1958—originally 1955), pp. 81-106.

25. Carroll, “Leach, Lévi-Strauss, and the Garden of Eden,” pointed out the “drifting” parallels of these stories quite independently of any “whole-text” structural considerations. The broad structure of the narratives helps make sense of why Carroll’s parallels rest among “intended” meanings of the text.

26. Calum Carmichael is quick to stress that metaphorical readings must be justified with detailed textual support in word-forms and meaning-generating contents. Those metaphorical readings cited here derive from other relationships between the Mishpatim and Genesis, specifically readings of rules in the form “Thou shalt not . . .” which bear morphological similarities to names in Genesis 31, 34, and 37-38, and a few other segments of the Jacob/Joseph cycles. See Carmichael’s Women, Law, and the Genesis Traditions for several of the animal/name correspondences. Carmichael’s warning is consistent with the Jewish reading tradition emphasizing the most careful forms of textual support for interpretation. I have strong sympathy with this view but see also structural opposition of broader narrative units as carrying more general “meaning pattern” correspondences and important literal connotations. My readings of legal material from Exodus, though they imply relationship between the processes of production of the texts, are used here mainly to draw points of general legal concern from the Genesis text.

27. See Carmichael, Women, Law, and the Genesis Traditions, pp. 33-48.

28. The laws involved have the form “Thou shalt not . . .” but are not clearly Deuteronomic. The interweaving of laws of different form is common in the codes of the Near East in general, and is attributed by most scholars to the gradual addition of material over long periods of time. Calum Carmichael has noted correspondences of rule sequences and narrative development, especially Genesis narrative development, with regard to some of the Deuteronomic material, and for those rules of “similar” form in Exodus. David Daube’s more traditional view of the rule forms and patterns recognizes, even if many narrative correspondences to Genesis are not totally convincing, that the material of Exodus 21-22 is not the consistent work of a single legal circle. From the point of view of structural analysis, the origin and redaction of the rules is less important than their pertinence to the narrative situation.

29. Calum Carmichael’s reading of Judah’s blessing stresses diverse metaphorical slurs on Judah’s character. This is not inconsistent with a provision for Judah’s kingship, and given the broad nature of elder/younger blessings in Genesis is not a surprising feature. It is apparent that the text “cleans up” many of the rougher confrontations of paternal interests and political antics of sons, as in the account of Jacob’s blessing and departure north and the confrontation of Jacob with Simeon and Levi. Such features support the idea that the political “reality” behind composition of the text is distant from some of the original narrative intent of elements in Genesis. Another example of how complex the political intrigue of narrative can be is to be seen in Daube, “Nathan’s Parable.”

30. The brothers’ fear of Joseph is handled in the text in verses 14-21. Philip Birnbaum’s note for this section reads: “Joseph, who reiterates his belief that his brothers’ intentions were overruled by God for his own beneficent purposes, freely forgives them, and reveals his high moral and religious character. The selling of Joseph had been a sinful action, but through his coming to Egypt, God brought about a great blessing to many. God often brings good out of evil, though Evil is not to be done in order that good may come. Joseph himself demonstrates this great lesson in his life, so far at least as his brothers are concerned” (Birnbaum, The Torah and The Haftarot, p. 83). Compare the comments by Coats, Genesis with an Introduction to Narrative Literature, pp. 312-13, which point out that Joseph’s brothers’ fear is in contrast to their lack of request for forgiveness in Genesis 45, and that Joseph’s response refers to the “saving of many people” rather than to the preservation of Israel. The theological interpretation supporting Joseph’s high moral character is built, in spite of its obviously positive tone, on the undercurrent of mistrust and potential discord, a process which must continue in the lives of the characters. Thus, we have a further justification for the process of enslavement. Bloodshed has been averted in the constant intergroup rivalry, but coordinated action by the brothers as tribes must await their deaths, just as the entry of Israel into Canaan under Joshua must await the deaths of the generation born in Egypt. In this sense the “political” and “historical” intent of Genesis is maintained. Recalling that we may read the sons of Israel as individuals in the narrative or tribes in a political array, there is room to see both the positive and negative senses of Joseph’s character as a key to interpretation of political and historical formulae.

31. Compare, for example, Vawter, On Genesis, or G. von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary, both of which preserve the narrative order, and Gunkel’s Genesis which sorts the text into blocks destroying the original order. Yet each style of commentary accomplishes a restructuring, inasmuch as material inserted between blocks of text, or subordinated to the new narrative, breaks the experience of reading. Structural analysis has the potential of channeling the order of reading into new orders while maintaining some sense of the original linear whole. It is therefore not too radically different from other forms of commentary, except in the formality of its models.

32. M. Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (New York: Random House; 1953), pp. 150-51.

IV. Mythos and Ethos

1. P. Ricoeur, “Metaphor and the Main Problem of Hermeneutics,” in Reagan and Stewart, eds., The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, p. 146.

2. Probably the best, and most difficult, essay in Lévi-Strauss’s Structural Anthropology is “Social Structure.” This essay systematically develops the notion of “structural models” in a manner consistent with the full sweep of Lévi-Strauss’s work, and hence for structuralism in general.

3. This point runs through all of Lévi-Strauss’s writings, but is explicitly stated in his essays on linguistics in Structural Anthropology.

4. See “The Structural Study of Myth” in Sebeok, ed., Myth, pp. 84-85; or in Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology. I consider much more of the content of Genesis and other parts of the Torah to be “mythic” than most biblical scholars—that is, I believe oral narratives functioning as myth served as sources for many of the stories. The literary construction which has come to us, however, probably represents a radical reshaping of these original stories, and cannot be placed in the literary or folkloric categories of myth per se. For a more restrictive idea of myth in Genesis see Coats, Genesis with an Introduction to Narrative Literature, p. 10. Also see the discussion of myth in Oden, The Bible Without Theology, pp. 40-91.

5. See Aristotle, “Poetics,” chapter 6 (sections 1449b:21-1450a:14), in R. Kassel, ed., Aristotelis de Arte Poetica Liber (London: Oxford University Press; 1965), pp. 10-11.

6. Ibid., chapter 6 (section 1450a: 15-1450b:20), pp. 12-13.

7. The most direct expression of this approach is found in the very well known book Patterns of Culture (Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.; 1934), in which Benedict developed her famous “Dionysian” and “Apollonian” categories.

8. General readers may want to see Kluckholn’s Mirror for Man (McGraw-Hill; 1944), although Anthropology and the Classics is a readable and informative technical application of configurationalist principles.

9. See Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Lorrain, Réseaux sociaux et géométrie des structures sociales. Continuing development of the mathematical and cultural principles of kinship is to be found in the literature of French and Dutch anthropology, especially in the journals L’Homme and Current Anthropology (see again note 37 for “Genealogies” in this volume for several key articles). It should be stressed that these principles are fully integrated into Lévi-Strauss’s approach to myth, such that kinship structure and myth structure constitute a coextensive system.

10. Coats, Genesis with an Introduction to Narrative Literature, pp. 3-10; pp. 317-22.

11. Ibid., pp. 3-4.

12. Ibid., pp. 13-34 and individual treatments following throughout the work.

13. Ibid., pp. 30; also continuing references, as in pp. 35-36.

14. As Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh, effectively demonstrates, no clans or other formal marriage-defining categories are clearly evident through the analysis of biblical usages of social categories. Certainly no marriage systems such as those found in Australia were in use by ancient Israel, nor do agnatic groups seem to have the formal “sib” status we observe in some patrilineal societies. We must clearly distinguish between the “mechanical” ideal presented in the text, and the “statistical” marriage system operating through shifting alliances; see also Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, for a full discussion of “mechanical” and “statistical” models within his “Social Structure” chapter.

15. Coats, Genesis with an Introduction to Narrative Literature, pp. 109-13, 149-51, 188-92, provides a commentary overview and excellent bibliography.

16. What is clear is that the term “sister” is not intended to contradict the laws of incest. It is also somewhat parallel to Abram’s use of the term “brother” for Lot.

17. A wonderful modern treatment of Near Eastern polygamy is to be found in E. Fernea, Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village (New York: Doubleday; 1965).

18. See also E. Neufeld, Ancient Hebrew Marriage Laws: With Special References to General Semitic Laws and Customs, (New York: Longmans, Green and Co.; 1944), pp. 77-88.

19. Coats, Genesis with an Introduction to Narrative Literature, pp. 151, 190-91.

20. Aristotle, “Poetics” (section 1450b:4-13), pp. 12-13; translation from T. S. Dorsch, transi., Classical Literary Criticism, (New York: Viking Penguin Inc.; 1965), pp. 40-41.

21. The most comprehensive formal treatment of the “atom” principles introduced by Lévi-Strauss is P. Courrege, “Un Modèle mathématique des structures élémentaire de parenté.” The kernel idea is presented in Structural Anthropology and served as a basis for much of The Elementary Structures of Kinship, all work accomplished by Lévi-Strauss before the 1950s.

22. David Daube draws our attention to this and a few other Torah scriptures as examples of “shame culture” (see also, for example, Deuteronomy 22:13-19, 23:10-15, 24:4, 24:10, 25:3). Calum Carmichael, on the other hand, brings emphasis to the metaphorical sense of the “sandal” and “foot” in Deuteronomic treatment of the levirate and in Ruth. These elements can be read as references to the female and male sexual organs, giving the notion of a woman stripping a man’s sandal and spitting in his face strong sexual force.

23. Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City, presents a functional treatment of ancient Greek and Roman religion. The early chapters outline his general thesis involving the idea of ancestor worship and the definition of family, drawing heavily from Greek myth.

24. See also D. Daube, “How Esau Sold His Birthright,” Cambridge Law Journal, vol. 8 (1942): 70-75.

25. Neufeld, Ancient Hebrew Marriage Laws, pp. 23-55, especially pp. 37-38.

26. J. Deely, Introducing Semiotic, pp. 65, 107-23.

V. Semiosis

1. The notion of the “promiscuous sign” was introduced in a paper read at the annual meeting of the Semiotic Society of America in 1983 by Philippe Desan, “For a Promiscuity of the Signifier,” in Jonathon Evans and John Deely, eds., Semiotics 1983 (University Press of America, 1987) pp. 605-12. Although I did not care for the wording originally, I have become increasingly impressed by its descriptive efficacy for matters of listening/reading.

2. Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” in Sebeok, ed., Myth, pp. 105-6; or in Structural Anthropology.

3. Deely, Introducing Semiotic, p. 122.

4. Ricoeur, “Explanation and Understanding,” The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, p. 154.

5. “Competence” may be thought of as the “ideal” grammar of a hypothetical “perfect” speaker of a language. Since the notion was introduced in Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge: MIT Press; 1965), it has undergone a number of sinister transformations in psycholinguistic and educational psychology circles. I do not particularly recommend reading “Aspects” or its derivative literature; it is not as much fun as reading Genesis, nor is it likely to be as informative about the nature of language.