Robert Alter - Parshat HaShavua - Vayeishev Genesis 37:1- 40:23 - Is the Story of Tamar Jammed into the Wrong Place? Is it of the Divine? How should We Know?

[MS: Before reading Alter's analysis of the narrative in the Parsha about Tamar and Judah, here is one more framework: Is Alter's approach anti-religious? Does Alter say the Bible is just literature and not a "religious teaching text"? Does Alter disrespect Midrash and even the Divine? The answer I believe, is no.

In Alter's discussion of Tamar in the Parshat HaShavua there is one example of many discussions of the Divine, that Alter wrote in a lifetime of books, articles and lessons. See pp. 23-24 in The Art of Biblical Narrative (emphasis and formatting added) and resources and analysis in MS Sheets at Robert Alter - MS Sheets Collection]

"What we need to understand better is that the religious vision of the Bible is given depth and subtlety precisely by being conveyed through the most sophisticated resources of prose fiction. In the example we have considered, Judah and Jacob-Israel are not simple eponymous counters in an etiological tale ... but are individual characters surrounded by multiple ironies, artfully etched in their imperfections as well as in their strengths. A histrionic Jacob blinded by excessive love and perhaps loving the excess; an impetuous, sometimes callous Judah, who is yet capable of candor when confronted with hard facts; a fiercely resolved, steel-nerved Tamar—all such subtly indicated achievements of fictional characterization suggest the endlessly complicated ramifications and contradictions of a principle of divine election intervening in the accepted orders of society and nature. The biblical tale, through the most rigorous economy of means, leads us again and again to ponder complexities of motive and ambiguities of character because these are essential aspects of its vision of man, created by God, enjoying or suffering all the consequences of human freedom.



...Almost the whole range of biblical narrative, however, embodies the basic perception that man must live before God, in the transforming medium of time, incessantly and perplexingly in relation with others ...

[A] literary perspective on ... narrative may help us more than any other to see how this perception was translated into stories that have had such a powerful, enduring hold on the imagination. Alter, Robert. The Art of Biblical Narrative (pp. 23-24).

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[MS: Formatting, emphasis and excerpts supplied.]

[MS: The Issue: Does the story of Tamar and Judah "interrupt" the main narrative about the sons of Jacob, because it was part of some other lost manuscript and was just stitched into scroll of Bresheit? Or is it part of the Bible's unique literary style that produces a complete, whole powerful story with implications for Jewish life and for Divine intentions? (See page 10: "the divinely appointed process of election cannot be thwarted by human will or social convention." If so, how does the Bible's literary style integrate the story, including the Divine?]

p.1 Let me propose for analysis a supposedly interpolated story, because it will give us an opportunity to observe both how it works in itself and how it interacts with the surrounding narrative material. I should like to discuss, then, the story of Tamar and Judah (Genesis 38), which is set in between the selling of Joseph by his brothers and Joseph’s appearance as a slave in the household of Potiphar. ...

This story is characterized by E. A. Speiser, in his fine Genesis volume in the Anchor Bible series, as “a completely independent unit,” having “no connection with the drama of Joseph, which it interrupts at the conclusion of Act I.” .... Speiser’s failure to see its intimate connections through motif and theme with the Joseph story suggests the limitations of conventional biblical scholarship even at its best.

p. 2 I shall begin with the last five verses of Genesis 37 in order to make clear the links between frame-narrative and interpolation. [MS: Alter explains Genesis 37 and the build up to adding in the story of Tamar. The Bible leaves Joseph and switches to Tamar and Judah. Alter will explain three points: what does the Tamar story say, how is that connected to the preceding story about Joseph and how does the next story gather up both stories and go forward, ie, a whole, unified story.]

.....

p. 4-10 At this point (Genesis 38), with an appropriately ambiguous formulaic time indication, vayehi baʿet hahi, “And it happened at that time,” the narrative leaves Joseph and launches on the enigmatic story of Tamar and Judah. From the very beginning of the excursus, however, pointed connections are made with the main narrative through a whole series of explicit parallels and contrasts ....

p.9 If some readers may have been skeptical about the intentionality of the analogies I have proposed between the interpolation and the frame-story, such doubts should be laid to rest by the exact recurrence at the climax of Tamar’s story of the formula of recognition, haker-na and vayaker, used before with Jacob and his sons. The same verb, moreover, will play a crucial thematic role in the dénouement of the Joseph story when he confronts his brothers in Egypt, he recognizing them, they failing to recognize him. ...

p. 10 This precise recurrence of the verb in identical forms at the ends of Genesis 37 and 38 respectively is manifestly the result not of some automatic mechanism of interpolating different traditional materials by the same writer, J, but of careful splicing of sources or traditions by J, who is a brilliant literary artist. (Alternatively, the seemingly interpolated story may simply be his own contrivance.) ...

The first use of the formula was for an act of deception; the second use is for an act of unmasking. Judah with Tamar after Judah with his brothers is an exemplary narrative instance of the deceiver deceived, and since he was the one who proposed selling Joseph into slavery instead of killing him (Gen. 37:26–27), he can easily be thought of as the leader of the brothers in the deception practiced on their father. Now he becomes their surrogate in being subject to a bizarre but peculiarly fitting principle of retaliation, taken in by a piece of attire, as his father was, learning through his own obstreperous flesh that the divinely appointed process of election cannot be thwarted by human will or social convention. In the most artful of contrivances, the narrator shows him exposed through the symbols of his legal self given in pledge for a kid (gedi ʿizim), as before Jacob had been tricked by the garment emblematic of his love for Joseph ....

p.10 Finally, when we return from Judah to the Joseph story (Genesis 39), we move in pointed contrast from a tale of exposure through sexual incontinence to a tale of seeming defeat and ultimate triumph through sexual continence—Joseph and Potiphar’s wife. ...

pp. 10-12 [MS: Alter discusses Midrash - how it supports his point of view on the unity of the stories - the intentionality. But Midrash differs from Alter's approach in two ways. 1- Midrash will focus on a specific text or phrase and weakens the fact of the "real narrative continuum," undercutting the Bible's "literary integrity". 2- Midrash uses "didactic insistence" - that is making a moral point and teaching that point. This can overwhelm the Bible's narrative story itself' Midrash might even reorganize the Biblical text to support the Midrash's moral lesson at that point in the text. Alter gives an example at p. 12.]

p. 10 It is instructive that the two verbal cues indicating the connection between the story of the selling of Joseph and the story of Tamar and Judah were duly noted more than 1,500 years ago in the Midrash: “The Holy One Praised be He said to Judah, ‘You deceived your father with a kid. By your life, Tamar will deceive you with a kid.’ ... The Holy One Praised be He said to Judah, ‘You said to your father, haker-na. By your life, Tamar will say to you, haker-na’” (Bereishit Rabba 84:11, 12).

This instance may suggest that in many cases a literary student of the Bible has as much to learn from the traditional commentaries as from modern scholarship. The difference between the two is ultimately the difference between assuming that the text is an intricately interconnected unity, as the midrashic exegetes did, and assuming it is a patchwork of frequently disparate documents, as most modern scholars have supposed. (In the case we are considering, the source critics do assign both blocks of material to one document but nevertheless tend to view the narrative material in Genesis 38 as a kind of interruption.) ....

With their assumption of interconnectedness, the makers of the Midrash were often as exquisitely attuned to small verbal signals of continuity and to significant lexical nuances as any “close reader” of our own age. There are, however, two essential distinctions between the way the text is treated in the Midrash and the literary approach I am proposing. First, although the Midrashists did assume the unity of the text, they had little sense of it as a real narrative continuum, as a coherent unfolding story in which the meaning of earlier data is progressively, even systematically, revealed or enriched by the addition of subsequent data.

What this means practically is that the Midrash provides exegesis of specific phrases or narrated actions but not continuous readings of the biblical narratives: small pieces of the text become the foundations of elaborate homiletical structures that have only an intermittent relation to the integral story told by the text.

The second respect in which the midrashic approach to the biblical narratives does not really recognize their literary integrity is the didactic insistence of midrashic interpretation. One might note that in the formulation recorded in the passage just cited from Bereishit Rabba, God Himself administers a moral rebuke to the twice-sinning Judah, pointing out to him the recurrence of the kid and of the verb “to recognize” that links his unjust deception of his father with his justified deception by Tamar. That thematic point of retaliation, as we have seen, is intimated in the biblical text, but without the suggestion that Judah himself is conscious of the connections. That is, in the actual literary articulation of the story, we as audience are privileged with a knowledge denied Judah, and so the link between kid and kid, recognize and recognize, is part of a pattern of dramatic irony, in which the spectator knows something the protagonist doesn’t and should know. The preservation of Judah’s ignorance here is important, for the final turn of his painful moral education must be withheld for the quandary in which he will find himself later when he encounters Joseph as viceroy of Egypt without realizing his brother’s identity.

The Midrash, on the other hand, concentrating on the present moment in the text and on underscoring a moral point, must make things more explicit than the biblical writer intended. Indeed, an essential aim of the innovative technique of fiction worked out by the ancient Hebrew writers was to produce a certain indeterminacy of meaning, especially in regard to motive, moral character, and psychology. (Later we shall look at this indeterminacy in detail when we consider characterization in the Bible.)

Meaning, perhaps for the first time in narrative literature, was conceived as a process, requiring continual revision—both in the ordinary sense and in the etymological sense of seeing-again—continual suspension of judgment, weighing of multiple possibilities, brooding over gaps in the information provided. As a step in the process of meaning of the Joseph story, it is exactly right that the filial betrayal of Genesis 37 and the daughter-in-law’s deception of Genesis 38 should be aligned with one another through the indirection of analogy, the parallels tersely suggested but never spelled out with a thematically unambiguous closure, as they are in the Midrash.

pp. 12-13 This sort of critical discussion, I would contend, far from neglecting the Bible’s religious character, focuses attention on it in a more nuanced way. The implicit theology of the Hebrew Bible dictates a complex moral and psychological realism in biblical narrative because God’s purposes are always entrammeled in history, dependent on the acts of individual men and women for their continuing realization. To scrutinize biblical personages as fictional characters is to see them more sharply in the multifaceted, contradictory aspects of their human individuality, which is the biblical God’s chosen medium for His experiment with Israel and history.

Such scrutiny, however, as I hope I have shown, cannot be based merely on an imaginative impression of the story but must be undertaken through minute critical attention to the biblical writer’s articulations of narrative form. ... By literary analysis I mean the manifold varieties of minutely discriminating attention to the artful use of language, to the shifting play of ideas, conventions, tone, sound, imagery, syntax, narrative viewpoint, compositional units, and much else; the kind of disciplined attention, in other words, that through a whole spectrum of critical approaches has illuminated, for example, the poetry of Dante, the plays of Shakespeare, the novels of Tolstoy.

These themes are considered in several Sheets, see links at MS Robert Alter Collection of MS Sefaria Sheets for resources and further discussion.]

"What we need to understand better is that the religious vision of the Bible is given depth and subtlety precisely by being conveyed through the most sophisticated resources of prose fiction. In the example we have considered, Judah and Jacob-Israel are not simple eponymous counters in an etiological tale ... but are individual characters surrounded by multiple ironies, artfully etched in their imperfections as well as in their strengths. A histrionic Jacob blinded by excessive love and perhaps loving the excess; an impetuous, sometimes callous Judah, who is yet capable of candor when confronted with hard facts; a fiercely resolved, steel-nerved Tamar—all such subtly indicated achievements of fictional characterization suggest the endlessly complicated ramifications and contradictions of a principle of divine election intervening in the accepted orders of society and nature. The biblical tale, through the most rigorous economy of means, leads us again and again to ponder complexities of motive and ambiguities of character because these are essential aspects of its vision of man, created by God, enjoying or suffering all the consequences of human freedom.

...Almost the whole range of biblical narrative, however, embodies the basic perception that man must live before God, in the transforming medium of time, incessantly and perplexingly in relation with others;

[A] literary perspective on ... narrative may help us more than any other to see how this perception was translated into stories that have had such a powerful, enduring hold on the imagination.

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