Robert Alter - Parshat HaShavua Vayigash Genesis 44:18-47:27 - Is this Real Life or Just a Story?

"This is, in sum, a story with a happy ending that withholds any simple feeling of happiness at the end. " - Alter's Note on Genesis 47:9 about the life of Jacob.

[MS: Did Jacob have a happy life? Jacob had many successes, but did his lifetime of successes make him a happy man? Alter asks if anyone can be "happy" after a long life on Earth given human circumstances and given that a Divine plan set forth in the Bible often collides with their lives.

So much can go wrong. What seems like an assured success may be one of life's many passing moments, as insubstantial, as Kohelet says, like "herding the wind" (per Alter's new translation of Kohelet.)

And what seems like a moral victory may look like wrongdoing in light of future events. Worse, it may look like bad choices that caused suffering to others, even crimes.

In Alter's Note on verse 47:9, he discusses the human dilemma of living in a world where very little seems reliably clear or within our real control; nor undone by ignorance, error, tyrants or bad people; nor in the confusing hands of God or Fate - like doing the right thing but apparently overruled mysteriously by the Divine Plan. These themes of "Narration and Knowledge" are explored in Chapter 8 of Alter's The Art of Biblical Narrative. Alter unpacks how the Bible's literary style is a precious medium for making "this sort of difficult sense." p.219 below

Judah and Love: What's Love got to do with this? Why does Judah reconcile with Jacob and Joseph - or stated in a better question, how can Judah find the feelings: to forgive Jacob, his father, for favoritism among his wives and children; forgive himself for rash youthful choices; and to forgo understanding of God's Plan? Standing before Joseph, he feels the shame and can see the full consequences of his long ago crimes of kidnapping or near murder of Joseph. Alter writes about the power of love and acceptance of Fate - the terrible human dilemma stated in the Bible's unique way of storytelling about humans, Fate and the Divine. See Alter pp. 217-19, excerpts below]

"And Jacob said to Pharaoh “ The days of the years of my sojournings are a hundred and thirty years. Few and evil have been the days of the years of my life, and they have not attained the days of the years of my fathers in their days of sojourning.” [MS: Alter uses "evil" instead of "hard" - highlighting how life isn't only "hard" - it's also about how we must make choices when faced with moral dilemmas.]

Alter's Two Notes on Verse 9

The days of the years of my sojournings. The last noun here probably has a double connotation: Jacob’s life has been a series of wanderings or “sojournings,” not a sedentary existence in one place, and human existence is by nature a sojourning, a temporary dwelling between non-being and extinction.

Few and evil have been the days of the years of my life . Jacob’s somber summary of his own life echoes with a kind of complex solemnity against all that we have seen him undergo. He has, after all, achieved everything he aspired to achieve.... But one measure of the profound moral realism of the story is that although he gets everything he wanted, it is not in the way he would have wanted, and the consequence is far more pain than contentment. From his “clashing” (25:22) with his twin in the womb, everything has been a struggle. He displaces Esau, but only at the price of fear and lingering guilt and long exile. He gets Rachel, but only by having Leah imposed on him, with all the domestic strife that entails, and he loses Rachel early in childbirth. He is given a new name by his divine adversary, but comes away with a permanent wound. He gets the full solar-year number of twelve sons, but there is enmity among them (for which he bears some responsibility), and he spends twenty-two years continually grieving over his favorite son, who he believes is dead. This is, in sum, a story with a happy ending that withholds any simple feeling of happiness at the end.

p. 193-94 .... biblical narrative as prose fiction ... entails an emphasis on deliberate artistry and even playfulness that may seem a little odd according to common notions, both popular and scholarly, of what the Bible is. ... I think it may be useful now to restate a basic question raised near the outset of this inquiry....

The ancient Hebrew writers, .... were obviously motivated by a sense of high theological purpose. Habitants of a tiny and often imperfectly monotheistic island in a vast and alluring sea of paganism, they wrote ..... biblical narrative ... as a kind of discourse on God's purposes in history and His requirements of humanity ... The degree of mediation [MS: Emphasis in original] involved in talking about what the LORD requires by making characters talk and by reporting ... their actions and entanglements opens up ... a Pandoras box.

For would it not be frivolous on the part of an anonymous Hebrew writer charged with the task of reformulating sacred traditions for posterity to indulge in the writerly pleasures of sound-play and word-play ....

[T]he makers of biblical narrative gave themselves to these various

pleasures of invention and expression because, whatever their sense of

divinely warranted mission, they were, after all, writers, moved to work out their vision of human nature and history in a particular medium, prose fiction, over which they had technical mastery ….

p.217-18 A basic biblical perception about both human relations and relations between God and man is that love is unpredictable, arbitrary, at times perhaps seemingly unjust, and Judah now comes to an acceptance of that fact with all its consequences. His father, he states clearly to Joseph, has singled out Benjamin for a special love, as he singled out Rachel’s other son before. It is a painful reality of favoritism with which Judah, in contrast to the earlier jealousy over Joseph, is here reconciled, out of filial duty and more, out of filial love. His entire speech is motivated by the deepest

empathy for his father, by a real understanding of what it means for the old man's very life to be bound up with that of the lad. He can even bring himself to quote sympathetically (verse 27) Jacob's typically extravagant statement that his wife bore him two sons--as though Leah

and the concubines were not also his wives and the other ten were not

also his sons. Twenty-two years earlier, Judah engineered the selling of

Joseph into slavery; now he is prepared to offer himself as a slave so

that the other son of Rachel can be set free. Twenty-two years earlier,

tunic they had brought to Jacob sent their father into a fit of anguish; now he is willing to do anything in order not to have to see his father suffer that way again. ... Judah, then, as spokesman for the brothers, has admirably completed the painful process of learning to which Joseph and circumstances have made him submit....

P219 All of this, of course, makes a very compelling story, one of the best stores, as many readers have attested, that has ever been told, But It

also unforgettably illustrates how the pleasurable play of fiction in the

Bible brings us into an inner zone of complex knowledge about human nature, divine intentions, and the strong but sometimes confusing threads that bind the two. ...

The consummate artistry of the story involves an elaborate and inventive use of most of the major techniques

-the deployment of thematic key words;

-the reiteration of motifs;

-the subtle definition of character, relations, and motives mainly through dialogue;

-the exploitation, especially in dialogue, of verbatim repetition with minute but significant changes introduced;

-the narrator's discriminating shifts from strategic and suggestive withholding of comment to the occasional flaunting of an omniscient overview;

the use at points of a montage of sources to catch the multifaceted nature of the fictional subject....[MS indentation and emphasis added, for the six major techniques of Biblical narrative]

pp.219-20 All these formal means have an ultimately representational purpose. What is it like, the biblical writers seek to know through their art, to be a human being with a divided consciousness--intermittently loving your brother but hating him even more; resentful or perhaps contemptuous of your father but also capable of the deepest filial regard, stumbling between disastrous ignorance and imperfect knowledge, fiercely asserting your own independence but caught in a tissue of events divinely contrived; outwardly a definite character and inwardly an unstable vortex of greed, ambition, jealousy, lust, piety, courage, compassion, and much more? ...

That may help explain why these ancient Hebrew stories still seem so intensely alive today, ... as artful stories. It was no easy thing to make sense of human reality in the radically new light of the monotheistic revolution. ...

The fictional imagination ... provided a precious medium for making this sort of difficult sense. By using fiction in this fashion, the biblical writers have bequeathed to our cultural tradition an enduring resource in the Hebrew Bible, and we shall be able to possess their vision more fully by better understanding the distinctive conditions of art through which it works.

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- End of Chapter 8 -