Art, imagination and the Bible: an interview with Robert Alter - Interview

Christian Century, Dec 18, 1996

Let me illustrate how I think the source critics get a little trigger-happy. After Jacob has stolen the blessing from Esau in Genesis 27, the chapter ends with Esau seething with resentment and planning to kill his brother as soon as Isaac is out of the way. When Rebecca hears of it, she says to Jacob, "Look, you have to get out of here; I'm sending you off to brother Laban in Mesopotamia, and when your brother cools off you can come back." Then in the subsequent verse she turns to Isaac and tells him that she is utterly distraught because Esau has brought home these Hittite brides. She says she'll go crazy if anything similar happens to jacob. She plants the idea with Isaac: "Lets send jacob back to the old homestead, to find a nice girl from the clan."

The source critics say these are two conflicting stories that offer two different explanations for why jacob was sent off to Mesopotamia. These critics may be right, but I'm not convinced. There are no strong stylistic grounds for discriminating between the two stories. But, more important, the story's unity seems self-evident. Esau wants to kill jacob, and Rebecca wants to save the life of her favorite son. But she is not going to go to her husband and say, "Hey, your favorite son wants to kill my favorite son."I She has already demonstrated how shrewd and calculating she is in the previous part of the story. Instead of just blurting out the real situation, she finesses Isaac. She says, l can't stand these foreign brides that Esau has brought; home; lets send jacob off. Wouldn't that be better than having him take up with a Hittite?" Even if we assume for a moment that the source critics are right, that there was an X tradition and a Y tradition - two different explanations for why jacob was shipped off to Mesopotamia - I think you can still see that the finished product is a carefully redacted narrative unity.

What would you do with the first two creation stories?

That's a bit different. The sources there are P and J, and they are very different stylistically. The alleged sources at the end of Genesis V, E and J, are really almost impossible to discriminate on merely stylistic grounds. The people or person who composed P presumably was close to or even identical with the circle of the redactors, I think. So the question in the case of the creation stories is, why didn't P simply displace j with his own story?

You could say, as many scholars have, that J is an old authoritative text. But how could the author of P do something so stupid as to put together the J story with his own when the two so clearly contradict each other in certain significant elements? I think there is a kind of perspectivist maneuver here. The stories are placed side by side, and, in the matter of the creation of woman, for example, there is a blatant contradiction. In P human creation is simultaneously male and female, in J woman is made out of the humans spare parts. What's at stake is two different cultural perceptions of woman's role. Woman is perceived in terms of a patriarchal culture in which she's subordinate, but nevertheless she is very powerful.