Bereishit Rabba 58 - Supplementary Texts use with https://www.sefaria.org/sheets/661505.1

Chapter One
Kohelet as Hevel

The Megillah opens with this brutal salvo; 'Utter Hevel - said Kohelet - Utter Hevel. All is Hevel.' (1:2) Twelve chapters and twenty-eight mentions of this same word later, he concludes with the slightly briefer, but no-gentler, rejoinder 'Utter Hevel - said Kohelet - All is Hevel' (12:8).

In Isaiah, Proverbs and Psalms, Hevel, means vapour, insubstantial and ephemeral – like Propsero’s actors, liable to melt into air, thin air. But we first meet the word as the name given to Cain’s ill-fated brother. Hevel, in Genesis, is usually translated / transliterated as Able. The English name seems so jarring and misplaced; named Able and achieving nothing. And so to Kohelet.

Michael Fox’s definition of Hevel, as it appears in Kohelet, took my breath away when I first read it. In this Megillah, he claims, it means ‘absurd. The absurd [being] a disjunction between two phenomena that are thought to be linked by a bond of harmony or causality, or that should be so linked.’ Gevalt.

On the one hand, Kohelet stubbornly expects good actions will be met by a good response and evil actions will bring evil, see 8:10-13. This is the great nexus of cause and effect that dominates Jewish, and indeed most other, ethical doctrines religious or otherwise. But, on the other hand, In my days of absurdity, I’ve seen it all; the righteous perishing in their righteousness, and the wicked thriving in their wickedness. (7:15)

In Deuteronomistic theology, there is a bridge between the good action and its reward and the evil action and its punishment. Evil action does not cause punishment directly, rather it is supposed to anger God who, in turn, is supposed to decree punishment. Kohelet knows this and expects this, but it just isn’t his experience, and he refuses to sacrifice his experience to a dogma unfit for purpose. Fox puts it this way, the ‘distortions warp the larger pattern rather than fading into it.’

Absurdity arises in the dislocation between expectation and experience. That explains why we laugh at sketches about dead parrots. But not here, here the stakes are too high. Kohelet’s absurdity threatens our entire existential condition. What is our purpose, what is moral and how do we find meaning in a world where everything is absurd?

If this absurdity gnaws at you too, dear reader, if you have the courage to look into this abyss with Nietzsche’s eagle-eyes and grasp the abyss with his eagle-claws, then this is the Megillah for you.

In Pikei D'Rabbi Eliezer Chapt 32we hear
When Abraham came from Mount Moriah, Satan was furious that he had failed to realise his lust to about Abraham's sacrifice. What did he do, he went off and told Sarah, 'Ah Sarah have you not heard what has been happening in the world?' 'No' she replied. He said 'Your old husband has taken the boy Isaac and sacrificed him as a burnt offering while the boy cried and wailed in his helplessness. Immediately she began to cry and wail…Then she gave up the ghost and died. Abraham came and found her dead, as it is said, And Abraham came' (Zornberg Translation)
Ah, so Satan is behind Sarah's death. Having set up the entire Akeda enterprise, presumably to foil divine intentions (see last week's journal) he has been foiled and seeks revenge with a straightforward piece of deceit. He lies to Sarah and kills her. In many ways this is a safe midrash for us. There is a nasty demon out there who is responsible, not a human problem at all. And who, when faced by the knock on the door we all dread, would not believe such a presentation of the worst news any mother could hear? And who would not suffer deeply physically by such a callous presentation of the news of the death of the only one we ever loved?

Tanhuma Vayera 23 turns the screw slightly.
Just as Abraham stretched forth his hand to take the knife a heavenly voice came forth and said to him, 'do not stretch out your hand against the boy, if it were not that he would have already been slaughtered. At that time Satan went to Sarah and met her in the guise of Isaac. When she saw him she said, 'my son, what has your father done to you?' he answered 'My father took me and led me up hill and down dale, till he took me up to the top of one mountain, built an altar, and laid it out and arranged the wood and bound me on top of the altar and took the knife to slaughter me. Had it had not been that Gd told him, 'don’t stretch out you hand against the boy’ I would have already been slaughtered, Satan did not manage to finish the sentence when her soul flew away. (Zornberg Translation)
How much has changed. Now Satan comes dressed as Isaac. Does Sarah recognise him as an apparition, or as a son? If the latter she surely knows Isaac still lives, why does the news then cause her death, before even waiting to hear the 'punchline'. Maybe the ram is not the punchline, but instead it is the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice her one son that provides all Sarah needs to hear. The picture becomes one of a woman who has spent her entire adult life caring for a man and his destiny on behalf of a Gd that she has never had an easy relationship with. Now she sees her husband is willing to slaughter the one fruit of all her labours - all her labouring for Abraham, the time spent with Abimelech and Pharaoh, the catering for un-announced guests and the years of infertility are for nothing. There is no wailing, she just dies. Who is to blame this time? Certainly Satan has played a devious catalytic role, but there is no deceit in his words. We must also now factor into our understanding a woman who has lived her life measuring her own value against the value her husband ascribes to that which she deems important, and a husband whose complicity in the Akeda is so complete it doesn’t dawn on him that his wife be wounded by his fundamentalist fervour. The screw is turned tighter still in Vayikra Rabba 20:2

And know that were it not for that the angel called out from the heaven, he would already have been slaughtered. Know this is so, for Isaac then returned to mother and she said to him, 'where have you been my son, 'My father took me and led me up hill and down dale…' She said, 'woe is the son of the drunken woman! Were it not for the angel would you already be slaughtered?' He said 'Yes', At that she screamed six times…She had not finished doing this when she died' (Zornberg Translation)
Now there is no Satan, perhaps there never was, merely a tool for drawing our attention away from uncomfortable truths of the human condition. Sarah has invested so much in her son that the 'truth' of the Akedah is enough to kill her. For Sarah her son was more than the most important thing in her life, it was the way she measured the value of her life. When she hears the tale of the Akedah she does not have a divine other in whom to take comfort, when her son is deemed sacrificable. Sarah's own life is deemed null. Indeed as Hizkuni argued, without Isaac she considers herself as nothing and confronted by this existential blackness her soul flees from her.

Mass and money
By illustrators of the 1728 Figures de la Bible, Gerard Hoet (1648-1733) and others, published by P. de Hondt in The Hague in 1728 - http://www.mythfolklore.net/lahaye/023/LaHaye1728Figures023GenXXIII16AbrahamWeighsSilver.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8332106

The Babylonian system, which the Israelites followed, measured weight with units of the kikar (talent), mina, shekel, and giru (Hebrew Gerah), related to one another as follows:

1 shekel = 24 gerah
1 mina = 60 shekels
1 kikar = 60 mina
In the Israelite system, the ratio of the gerah to the shekel was altered to 20:1 (Exodus 30:13). In later generations, the minah was renamed to litra, being the Greek form of the Latin libra, meaning pound.[4][43] Thus, the Jewish system was as follows:

1 shekel = 20 gerah
1 litra = 60 shekels (later 100 zuz)
1 kikar = 60 litra
There were, however, different versions of the talent/kikkar in use; a royal and a common version. In addition, each of these forms had a heavy and a light version, with the heavy version being exactly twice the weight of the lighter form; the light royal talent was often represented in the form of a duck, while the heavy royal talent often took the form of a lion. The mina for the heavy royal talent weighed 1.01 kilograms (2.23 lbs), while that for the heavy common talent weighed only 984 grams (2.17 lbs); accordingly, the heavy common shekel would be about 15.87 grams (0.56 oz).[1] According to Josephus, it was the heavy common talent, and its mina and shekel, that was the normal measure of weight in Syria and Judea;[44] Josephus also mentions an additional unit – the bekah – which was exactly half a shekel.

Gradually, the system was reformed, perhaps under the influence of Egypt, so that a mina was worth only 50 shekels rather than 60; to achieve this, the shekel remained the same weight, while the weight of the standard mina was reduced. Moses mandated that the standard coinage would be in single shekels of silver; thus each shekel coin would constitute about 15.86 grams (0.51 troy ounces) of pure silver. In Judea, the Biblical shekel was initially worth about 3⅓ denarii, but over time the measurement had enlarged so that it would be worth exactly four denarii.[1]

The first chapter of Isaiah Berlin’s The Crooked Timber of Humanity, ends as follows “[This] liberal sermon recommends machinery designed to prevent people from doing to each other too much harm, giving each human group sufficient room to realise its own idiosyncratic, unique, particular ends without too much interference with the ends of others. [This] is not a passionate battle-cry to inspire men to sacrifice and martyrdom and heroic feats. Yet, if it were adopted, it might yet prevent mutual destruction, and, in the end, preserve the world. Immanuel Kant observed that ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.’ And for that reason, no perfect solution is, not merely in practice, but in principle, possible in human affairs, and any determined attempt to produce it is likely to lead to suffering, disillusionment and failure.”
Kohelet would have approved.

Historical Setting

Barzillai the Gileadite emerges during Absalom’s rebellion when King David retreats east of the Jordan. Rogelim lies in Gilead, north of Mahanaim. The episode takes place near the close of David’s reign, around 970 BC. Barzillai the Meholathite is connected to an earlier generation under Saul, while the priestly family appears more than four centuries later during the return from Babylonian exile (circa 538 BC).

Barzillai the Gileadite: Loyal Benefactor of David

2 Samuel 17:27-29 records Barzillai’s immediate response to David’s need: “They brought bedding, bowls, and articles of pottery, along with wheat, barley, flour, roasted grain, beans, lentils, honey, curds, sheep, and cheese from cattle, for David and the people with him to eat. For they said, ‘The people have become hungry, exhausted, and thirsty in the wilderness.’”

Ahem, me, Izzun Megilat Ester
Clothing, Levush, always acts simultaneously in two opposite valences, functioning both to protect and disguise of our most intimate naked self and simultaneously as clearest expression of how we expose ourselves to the world. Our self, our inchoate potential (or in Aristotelian terms our matter) is always in need of being clothed, or expressed in a form that both protects and expresses. That’s true even for the ineffable God who ‘wears glory and majesty, like a robe’ (Psalm 104). Metzudat David suggests that God wears the Universe as a person wears a garment.