Counter-Stories in The Bible Rebekah and PDF

Counter-Stories in the Bible: Rebekah and her Bridegroom, Abraham's Servant
Author(s): Menakhem Perry

Source: Prooftexts, Vol. 27, No. 2, Special Issue: Before and After The Art of Biblical Narrative (
Spring 2007), pp. 275-323
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/pft.2007.27.2.275
Accessed: 24-08-2015 13:16 UTC
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/
info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content
in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.
For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Prooftexts.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 132.66.11.211 on Mon, 24 Aug 2015 13:16:19 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
y 275
Counter-Stories in the Bible:

Rebekah and her Bridegroom, Abrahams Servant
Menakhem Perry
Abs t r a c t
Interpretations of the Wooing of Rebekah (Gen. 24) tended to banalize Rebekahs
position. The activation of her perspective, through a close reading of the text, will
radically change our understanding of the story, turning it into a tale about
bridegroom-swapping. The analysis of Gen. 24 will lead into a broader discussion
of counter-stories in the biblical narrative. It is my contention that behind every
biblical story there is a latent counter-story that takes part in a conflict of ideologies.
The biblical narrative is a polyphony of human perspectives, which reflects a
hierarchy of clashing human agendas, whose conflict ultimately serves a divine
agenda. Many of the counter-stories in the Bible are driven by women: the divine
agenda, which requires voices that are lower in the hierarchy in order to undermine
higher ones, maintains a continued coalition with women. This coalition opposes
patriarchal and national voices. My analysis is meant to demonstrate how
listening to female voices in the biblical narrative increases the texts exhaustion
and can establish a significant factor in the biblical plots and meanings. In doing so
we are not projecting on the text an interpretation imposed a priori by a feminist
reading strategy, but rather tread its main road.
W hen I wrote (in collaboration with Meir Sternberg) the essay

The King through Ironic Eyes on the story of David and Bathss
sheba, nearly four decades ago, we were two young scholars of
the Tel Aviv School of Poetics, concerned mainly with a theory of reading that
this biblical story was meant to demonstrate.1 The essay initially stirred up a
hornets nest of reproachful responses by Bible scholars, to which we responded
PROOFTEXTS 27 (2007): 275323. Copyright 2007 by Prooftexts Ltd.
276 y Menakhem Perry
in a lengthy sequel, Zehirut, sifrut! (Caution, a Literary Text!)2 From then on

we found ourselves, each in his own way, drawn further toward what Robert Alter
labeled a specific poetics of biblical narrative.3 Thus, The King through Ironic
Eyes turned out in retrospect to be a programmatic essay on biblical narrative,
attracting much comment in the intervening years and becoming the ancestor of
many roughly similar studies.4
Over the last four decades many scholars have described the biblical narrative
as a treasure trove of devices and techniques, narrative conventions, ironic wit,
and effective strategies to promote ideology, and as a stimulator of a dramatic
reading process full of twists and turns. Studies aimed at illuminating the Bibles
poetics have enhanced the pleasure of reading specific stories, while drawing
attention to the texts brilliant use of minute detail and to its semantic density.
But today it seems to me that most of these effortsmy own work included
ultimately served conventional ideologies and mainstream thematic conceptions.
The innovation and radicality of these approaches was limited to the realm of
rhetoric and the drama of reading. They didnt do very much to crack open the
plots themselves.
My recent work attempts to employ the accumulated reading tactics that
multiple readings have generated, in order to tell the neglected, untold stories; to
construct counterplots behind the manifest ones. This present focus does not
lie in the artfulness and literariness of the text, but rather in recovering previos
ously unnoticed plots and thematics. It is my contention that behind every biblical
story there is a latent counter-story, which takes part in a conflict of ideologies.
The biblical narrative, to my mind, is an arena of ideological dialogism, a
polyphony of human perspectives that reflects a hierarchy of clashing agendas,
whose conflict ultimately serves a divine agenda that is not identical to any of
them. This supreme plan advances from success to success at the expense of the
subordinate human agendas, nurturing each of them, stirring them up, and
exploiting the disharmony between them. Moreover, as the hierarchy of human
agendasfrom individual psychology, through the family, clan, and tribe, up to
the nationintersects with the gender dichotomy, many of the counter-stories in
the Bible are driven by women. The divine agenda, requiring voices that are lower
in the hierarchy in order to undermine the higher ones, maintains a continued
Counter-Stories in the Bible y 277
coalition with women (even if the women themselves are not aware of it). This
coalition opposes the patriarchal and national voices, thus making women an ezer
ke-negdoa helpmate of God, the biblical protagonist, against male antagonists.
In this article I illustrate through the Wooing of Rebekah what I mean by a
counter-story. In the process I hope to flesh out my reading method, and to show
how a female voice, while working against the patriarchal story, advances the
global divine plan.
1 . W e W i l l C a l l t h e D a ms e l , a n d I n q u i r e a t H e r M o u t h 5
The Wooing of Rebekah (Gen. 24) was the subject of several excellent interps
pretations that followed the story from the perspective of Abrahams servant, who
takes pains to succeed in his mission and surmises the perspective of the men in
Bethuels family in order to skillfully maneuver them. These readings subordins
nated the servants perspective to that of Abrahamsthe patriarch striving to
properly marry off his son to a bride from his kinsfolkand took for granted the
supporting divine perspective: God corroborates the choice and lets the servant
prosper. Unlike the rabbis of the Midrash, these interpreters did not consider how
the servants tricks are seen from the divine point of view. And primarily, they
banalized Rebekahs position.
Despite Rebekahs industriousness by the well, her initiative to have the
servant invited to her fathers house, and her role in towing the plot back into line
(verse 58) when, a day later, it seems for a moment that the servants easily gained
achievement is hanging by a threadin these interpretations the text appeared to
be a story about traffic in women,6 as if the story passed through Rebekah and
settled upon men. Rebekah was subjected to the patriarchal story, and was
perceived as proving her worthiness and exhibiting her enthusiasm to marry her
fathers cousin and to fulfill her role as the second of the four matriarchs. Even
though she allegedly consented to her marriage to Isaac, she could not be consides
ered as a partner in the full sense of the word, for she was not in a real position to
give herself away, as this marriage was determined twice behind her back: first
between the servant and God, and then between the servant and the men in her
family. None of the interpreters enabled Rebekah to tell her own story, to
actively desire and seek a response; they all denied her the ability to experience or
wish anything not in line with the mens story. During the millennia in which
Rebekahs story was read, the question never seriously arose of what her position
is, and in which story she thinks she is participating.
Contrary to these readings, I suggest we listen to Rebekahs own voice and
illuminate her consciousness from within the text. And I claim that in doing so
we are not anachronistically projecting on the text an interpretation imposed a
priori by a feminist reading strategy, compelling us to tell the story as
Rebekahto alter the understanding of a given text under the hypothesis of a
female reader, in order to heighten the awareness of cultural codes; nor are we
speculating some alternative, antipatriarchal tradition, or some other discourse,
only residues of which survive in the text as wandering rocks that have allegedly
evaded the narrators attention.7 Indeed, we enhance what usually passes unseen,
and relativize what is usually emphasized, but in doing so we tread the main road
of the text. My analysis is meant to demonstrate how listening to female voices in
the biblical narrative, while attending to the texts details, can establish a significs
cant factor of the biblical plots and meanings.
There is no direct reference to Rebekahs thoughts and emotions in the text
of Genesis 24, and it seems that the narration is never combined with her point of
view. Only the servants mind is presented (except in the last verse, 67); and since
he is present in most of the scenes, and moves the story from one scene to the
next, from place to place and from country to country, he is perceived as the
perspectival center of the story. Rebekahs inner life can only be speculated from
her behavior and words. But the conjecture of Rebekahs mind is not just a filling-
in of blanks or places of indeterminacy that readers can ignore or complete as they
like. Within my reading proposal, by constructing Rebekahs perspective the
mutual relevancy of the texts details will greatly increase: free, marginal details,
commonly deemed inessential, will become informative with regard to main
aspects, and thus will move to the center, giving rise to an additional patterning
of those details that were considered central in the first place. In this way, not
only will the threshold of the texts exhaustion be elevated, but the whole story
will be inverted. The drama of reading will push to the focus of attention unconss
sidered or unnoticed details, from the rubbish heap, as it were, of our observats
tions (to borrow Freuds wording in The Moses of Michelangelo), and these
accumulated details will suddenly click into a convergence that will offer us a
new key to the main aspects of the story. And the other way around: only in light
of a decision to raise the threshold of exhaustion will my reading proposal be
considered effective and preferable. Anyone not seeking a maximal reading will
have no need for my reading hypotheses.
The story of Rebekahs perspective is thus offered as another round in the
process of readingas a latent story lurking in the depths, to be revealed in a
second reading. Counter-stories are always an opposite, additional processing of
surface stories: by better using the residues, the textual details that the overt
stories leave out, they subvert these stories, encouraging us to see them in a
different light. And their effect is derived precisely from their status as surprising
counter-stories. The texts exhaustion increases since these counter-stories do not
eradicate the manifest ones. On the contrary, they are dependent upon them,
positioning them within a different perspective, relativizing them; and the relats
tions between these two levels, the overt and covert, make a new double-story. In
the biblical narrative, the double-story finds its motivation in the divine perspect-
tive, which is interested in this particular relationship between story and
counter-story.
Indeed, in any given story a reader may choose to dwell on events from
different human perspectives, with the intention of placing the characters in a
lifelike reality. But in the biblical narrative, at least three perspectives will always
be relevant to the organization of textual details: the perspectives of two clashing
human agendas, and that of the divine agenda. Accordingly, in the Wooing of
Rebekah, the activation of Rebekahs perspective will radically change our underss
standing of the other perspectives, turning the story into a tale about when a
slave reigns and about bridegroom-swapping.
Our reading-hypothesis will accumulate verifications through its efficiency
in a close reading of the text. But first let us justify the notion of giving a voice to
Rebekah by means of an apparently trivial detail.
2. Who is This Man?
The narrator of Genesis 24 refrains from naming Abrahams servant, in order to

refer to him only by appellations.8 The characters in the story refer to him among
themselves (whether he is present or not) as man (ish)Thus the man spoke
to me, Rebekah says to Laban; Will you go with this man? Laban asks
Rebekahand when spoken to directly, in verse 18, Rebekah addresses him as
my lord (in Hebrew: adoni, literally, my master).
On the other hand, in the narration, in the narrators pure discourse, this
person is referred to at times (twelve) as servant (eved) and at times (seven) as
man (ish), as in, And the servant took ten camels; And the servant ran toward
heras opposed to, the man took a gold nose ring; And the man did obeisance.
Since every servant is also a manthough not vice versathese two terms
are not mutually exclusive and it is possible to offer a simple motivation for this
alternation: the narrator variegates the appellations to prevent monotony. But a
reading-as-literature, or a reading within the norms of an institution that
encourages the raising of the threshold of exhaustion, will prefer a hypothesis
that is more informative with regard to the text, one that will motivate the distribs
bution of terms more specifically: when it is servant, when man, and when
servant again. If we were asked to recount the story from memory, with an
insistence on using the appellations in accordance with the text, we would have to
learn the sequence of alternations by heart. However, guided by a more informats
tive hypothesis, we will not need to memorize these alternations: their order will
result from their connection to information that is quite central to the story.
Variations in names and appellations (or the choice of one option over others)
are the most sensitive apparatus the biblical narrator has at his disposal for tacitly
reflecting different perspectives.9 Such alternating appellations, when they appear
in the narrators discourse, become loci in which his voice is flexible and adaptive,
absorbing a position, an emotion, a lack-of-knowledge, or a mask of a repress
sented character. These appellations always split between the voice that speaks
(the narrator) and an additional hue that colors it, originating in one of the
narrated characters. In other words, the narrators discourse becomes, at these
points, what I call combined discourse.10
And that is exactly what we find here. The narrator refers to Abrahams
servant as servant up to the point where Rebekah notices him (the moment he
prays her to sip a bit of water); from here on he is a man. He is staring at her
as a man; he gives her jewels as a man. When Laban, her brother, runs to him,
he runs to the man; and to Bethuels house the man comes. Between verses 18
and 33, where neither Rebekah nor anyone else from her family knows that he is
a servant, he is not referred to even once as servant. But after he declares I am
Abrahams servant and his identity is revealed to Laban and Bethuel, he immeds
diately reverts to being a servant in the narrators language (52), and thus persists
tently, up until the end of the story (except for one instance, to which I shall
return shortly). From verse 18 on, from the first contact between him and
Rebekah, there is a correlation between the servant/man alternation, at the level
of narration, and the ignorance/knowledge of the localsRebekah or her kin
present in the scenewith regard to the persons identity. Clearly, in his use of
appellations the narrator assimilates an aspect of their minds. This covariance
between the two series, the one at the level of narration and the other at the level
of events, splits the I that voices the appellations from the I who knows them.
In this way a trivial or incidental detail, which anyone not insisting on raising
the threshold of the texts exhaustion will ignore, begins to activate Rebekahs
consciousness as an organizing factor in the text: at the encounter by the well, of all
of Bethuels family only Rebekah is present, and thus the narrators term man
highlights her ignorance of the persons identity as a servant and a surrogate. She
will address him as My Lord, and this will have far-reaching consequences.11
One verse (61) seems to contradict this account for the shift from servant to
man. Laban and Bethuel are already aware of the servants identity, the narrator
has reverted to calling him servant, and Rebekah is about to depart for the Land
of Canaan, when the following sentence appears: And Rebekah rose, with her
young women, and they mounted the camels and went after the man, and the
servant took Rebekah and went off.
At first sight, a muddle. But perhaps what we see here is a bifurcation into
two perspectives: on the one hand that of the informed family members present
at the scene, from whose point of view the servant is taking Rebekah to marry his
masters son; and on the other hand that of Rebekah, who believes that she is
following the man. To which bridegroom did Rebekah consent when her brother
asked her, Will you go with this man? (59). Is it possible that we are witnessing
the height of a deceit, where Rebekahs brother is sending her with a fictitious
bridegrooma preview of the swapping of his nephews wives?
We may now realize in what sense reading-as-literature, or maximal
reading, reflects a readers decision and is not a statement about the nature of the
text. In this context, the question whether the biblical narrative can be considered
literature loses its meaning. In principle, such a reading can be employed for any
text. Thus, one is entitled to ask if it yields significant and interesting results in a
given case, and we can compare specific performances of this interpretive activity.
But it is not possible to ask whether having a maximal reading of the biblical text,
or of any other text, is the right thing to do.
Texts are dependent upon an understander and a reading process. Their
givenness is not an objective and autonomous fact. The meanings of the sentences,
and the gaps that need to be filled in, do not exist beyond a given reading, and in
different readings the text is not identical to itself: its elements and their status
change according to the specific system of hypotheses under which that text is
read. Reading-hypotheses, and texts themes, are supplied by readers; interpretats
tion is necessarily a readers response, and it creates the text that it pretends to
describe. But after hypotheses have been suggested, it is possible to make comparis
isons between the respective degrees of exhaustion they enable; that is to say,
between the relations of each one of them with the text that it produces. In
preferring, out of those available, the one with the highest degree of exhaustion,
we can claim that in this dialogue between a text and a reader we do listen to the
text, and not only to our voice, and can account for our interpretation as being
based on the text.
3. Bride and Bridegroom next to the Well:

Evidence from Type Scene
One of Alters major contributions to the poetics of biblical narrative is his systemas
atic writing on type scenes that hover in the background of the biblical narratives,12
and especially on the effects of the variations or permutations in their different

occurrences. The biblical narratives, according to Alter, count on the familiarity of
their readers with these conventionally fixed sequences of motifs, and the convents
tion helps us read and recognize the inventive freshness of each specific instance.
One such type scene is the betrothal scene, the encounter between a future bride
and her bridegroom.13 This accidental first meeting between the man and a young
woman (almost always referred to as naarah) takes place next to a well or spring, in
a land foreign to the man, that he has reached as a fugitive fleeting from some
authority. The man enables the drawing of water: he rolls off a heavy stone covering
the mouth of the well, or finds himself protecting the girl from hostile men, using
great effort or heroic courage. He draws water and waters the flock, and then the
pace begins to accelerate: the girl is hurrying, running, keen to inform a member of
her family, who, in turn, runs and invites the man to a feast, at which the betrothal
agreement will be concluded.14
Each of the elements forming this sequence has a sexual-erotic metaphorical
potential. Traveling to a foreign land is associated with female otherness; the
watering suggests fertility; the well is a feminine sexual symbol, and the sealed
spring is associated with virginity.
But here of all places, in the first and most detailed occurrence of a betrothal
scene in the biblical continuum, the bridegroom himself is absent, represented by
a surrogate, his fathers emissary. And the mans conventional role of drawing
water is played by the girl: she is the active agent who takes pains and runs to pour
water from a jug into the trough in order to water ten camels, thirsty after a long
journey, until they drink their fill (gallons of water); it is she who performs the
fertility symbolism. At the same time, Isaac is next to a distant well, in the Negeb
region: Beer-Laai-roi, Well of the living one who sees me.15
As we shall see, the innovative tilt given to the betrothal convention is more
radical than might be expected. But it may be that next to the well in the city of
Nahor, the bridegroom is only apparently absent, and the scene is faithful to the
paradigm in more features than initially evident.
4. Beginnings and Retardations
The customary reading of the Wooing of Rebekah sees it as a sequence of proper

and harmonious deeds. As a caring father, Abraham seeks to marry off his son.
In order to keep the son from assimilating with the Canaanites, whose land he is
destined to inherit, he decides to import a bride for him from his birthplace.
Given his age, he has no choice but to entrust his chief servant with this mission.
The brilliant servant excels himself by choosing a perfect bride and obtaining her
familys approval. God also shows unequivocal support, and the bride, too, is
enthusiastic. The story ends with an excited encounter between bride and bridegs
groom. Thus, all the good wills have joined forces to proceed to the second stage
of the patriarchal dynasty, and we are left to admire the art of biblical narrative
in presenting this plot.
The counter-story begins much earlier. The boundaries of biblical counter-
stories never coincide with those of the conventionally read stories; antithetical
readings are based on the creation of a new, unexpected relevancy. Our story will
begin with Abrahams departure from Mesopotamia by divine injunction: Go
forth from your land and your birthplace and your fathers house to the land I will
show you (12:1).
Over a period of sixty-five years God promises Abraham, repeatedly and in
similar formulas, a land and abundant seed, as uncountable as the dust of the
earth and as numerous as the stars in the heavens. His promises are usually
shrouded in ambiguity: it is not clear whether by the second-person singular God
is referring to Abraham himself, or to Abraham as a metonymy of his descends
dants. But some of these promises are more unequivocal, such as And I will give
unto you [lekha] and your seed after you the land in which you sojourn, the whole
land of Canaan, as an everlasting holding(17:8).
To be God means to be salient and perceptible as God in humans consciousns
ness, without habituation. Digressions, obstacles, and retardations are the fundams
mental devices for the deautomatization of God. God has commanded/blessed
mankind to Be fruitful and multiply, and has thus entrusted it with an awarens
ness of its ability to give life, to create like God, in his likeness by his image
(5:3). Later, throughout the whole of Genesis, God repeatedly inflames in the
patriarchs the importance of fertility and seed, as a kind of obsessive supreme

value: The narrative is preoccupied with reproduction and threats to reproducts
tion, to the exclusion of nearly everything else in human experience.16 But despite
all these promisesup to the beastly propagation recounted in Exodus, the multips
plication of the prospective nation is a mockery. God abuses precisely the fertility
of his chosen ones. The gift bestowed upon the human is partially taken away
from them. That is why the wives of the elects are so often barren, pregnancies
are delayed, and it is necessary to plead with God and thus to include him
metonymically as a partner in procreation. I will make you most abundantly
fruitful and turn you into nations, God repeats his promise for the fifth time to
the ninety-nine year-old Abraham, who has up until then only Ishmael as a son;
and then immediately proceeds to encumber him with the duty of the sign of the
covenant between Me and you (17:11): from now on the organ of fertilization
itself will carry on its flesh, as a lack, Gods seal.
Digression, obstacles, and retardations are evident also in the gift of the land:
among these, four hundred years of affliction in Egypt (15:13), forty years of
wandering in the desert, and the delay in the complete conquest of the land. From
the point of promise or first expectations to the point of fulfillment, there is no
short line.
Another device God uses in order to increase his perceptibility is to invert a
natural chronological order. The privilege of primogeniture, and the task of
continuing the dynasty, are not obtained by default, but require Gods intervents
tion. This results in the ongoing dethroning of firstborn sons, to which Gods
chosen are continuously exposed: in order to be perceptible, God reshuffles the
natural hierarchy, with the assistance of women.
Gods last promise to Abraham was made after the binding of Isaac. But in
the beginning of chapter 24, at the age of one hundred and forty, it turns out that
Abraham has nothing but forlorn hope; he has neither uncountable offspring nor
land. So far Abraham has managed to beget only two sons, both of whom are
born in his old age. The firstborn, Ishmael, is banished with Gods encouragems
ment, and Isaac is nearly slaughtered, as the result of an exemplary obedience to
Gods command. He is not banished, but it seems that he runs away: the narrator
is silent with respect to Isaacs response to the aqedah, but the texts continuum
gives us the impression that he takes to his heels. The phrase that is repeated like a
refrain before the aqedah, referring to Abraham and Isaac, And the two of them
went together (22:6, 8), is echoed in a third: And they went together, after the
aqedah, so that we may notice that this time those going-together are different:
And Abraham returned to his lads and they rose, and they went together to Beer-
Sheba (19 [AR]). Only Abraham returns to the lads. Where is Isaac?
The texts silences are loaded. As we have seen, Isaac ends up near the Well
of Laai-roi, a place associated with Hagar, the absolute antithesis of his father
an exemplary mother who, unlike Abraham, refuses to collaborate in her sons
death.17 Hagar finds herself at this well after fleeing from her mistress Sarah, at
the onset of her pregnancy. Her escape then to the desert, and her banishment
years later, are two events that create a minutely detailed counter-analogy to the
two peaks of Abrahams life story: The Covenant between the Pieces and
Isaacs aqedah. This analogy, which throws ironic light on Abrahams plot,18
justifies my choice to entitle Hagars and Ishmaels banishment to the desert
(21:1421) Ishmaels aqedah.
The story of Isaacs aqedah deserves to be read verse-for-verse, segment-for-
segment, against the preceding story of Ishmaels aqedah. Each detail needs to be
read in the context of the counter-scene in the former story. On the basis of several
parallel details, the text enables us to discover a masterwork of seemingly countless
opposing details: once the principle is grasped, every additional reading reveals new
contrasting features, including sentences and even sounds in one scene that are
reflected as if in a reversed mirror image in the other. In Ezer ke-negdo I needed
five pages to describe these oppositions, which culminate in the angel calling out
from heaven in each scene. Abraham is ordered to take his hand away from his son,
Do not reach out your hand against the lad, and do nothing to him (22:12), while
Hagar is asked to do the exact opposite, Lift up the lad and hold him by the hand
(21:18). The mother who reaches out her hand toward the child who lies under one
of the bushes, lifts him up and keeps her hand next to his bodyand the father who
suddenly grasps his son, binds him on top of the wood, and reaches out his hand to
slaughter him, but is ordered to withdraw his handsymbolize the heart of this
counter-analogy, which can be summed up under the heading, A caring and
anxious mother, as opposed to an insensitive, alienated father, concentrated on his
larger-than-life project. The trial Abraham was put to is twofold: he was tried as a
believer and as a father. And in the second trial he failed miserably, unlike Hagar
who was acting in accordance with the familialfeminine agenda of a motherson
relation. The theme of Abrahams failure as a father is not projected onto the text in
discordance with its values. On the contrary, it rises from the texts meticulous
organization, which creates the counter-analogy between Abraham and Hagar. The
perfect believer is a very deficient person, and this is all the more so on account of
the very actions that establish him as a perfect believer from the perspective of
another agenda.
At the end of Ishmaels aqedah, his mother takes him a wife from the land of
her birthplace, Egypt. Given the elaborate counter-analogy, we would expect to
find a counter-segment at the end of Isaacs aqedah, but it seems to be missing:
we are not informed that Abraham does not marry off his son. Instead, the text
apparently shifts to another issue, the news from Abrahams birthplace: a
complete list of the children of Nahor, Abrahams brother, is presented (22:20
24). Boring lists of this kind become exceptionally interesting when their relevs
vancy to the latent stories is established. It so happens that Abrahams brother,
who was never promised abundant seed as numerous as the stars in the heavens,
has already fathered exactly twelve progeny, eight from his wife and four from his
concubine, an achievement that the chosen patriarchal family will attain only in
its third generation (with eight sons of wives and four sons of slave girls). Soon
(25:1218), just before Rebekahs two decades of barrenness will become known,
we shall also hear about Ishmaels twelve chieftains according to their tribes.
The system of teasing retardations is at work.
Not only are the readers informed about Nahors children, but Abraham too
is given this knowledge: And it happened after these things that it was told to
Abraham, Look, Milcah, too, has born sons to Nahor your brother. Look, Milcah,
too...is there a greater mockery than this? Exactly how many sons did he have
from Sarah?
Moreover, the list of sons that Milcah bore contains an oddity: an irrelevant
name has sneaked inRebekah, the daughter of one of Nahors children, Bethuel.
Not only is none of Nahors other grandchildren mentioned, but among Bethuels
children a daughter is mentioned rather than the son, Laban. Thus Abraham
knows that in Mesopotamia there is a relative called Rebekah, a possible candids

date to marry his son,19 yet he ignores this information and does nothing. So events
tually, the missing counter-segment is found: the list of names can be placed
opposite to the marriage of Ishmael.
It would seem that after the aqedah, Abrahams family life is in tatters. He and
his wife Sarah live apart. He dwells in Beer Sheba, she in Hebron, and he has to
make a special journey to attend her funeral (23:2). No longer will she bear him
offspring, and despite the promise that he will be given a land, an ever-lasting
holding (17:8), all he has to his name is a burial holding (23:4), purchased at full
price. His relations with Isaac are severed. Isaac does not show up at his mothers
funeral, and later on, when his bride will finally arrive, she will be brought to the
area of Beer-Laai-roi rather than to Beer Sheba. Neither will he introduce her to
his father. He will meet him only more than thirty years later, to get his inheritance
(chapter 25); finally, he will come with Ishmael to bury their father (9).
The story I am telling about Abrahams shattered family is not written
anywhere in the text. Nevertheless, I claim that it is floating in the background as
a network of details, since within its framework it is possible to create mutual
relevancy between pieces of information concerning locations and ages otherwise
scattered uselessly in the text.
The story of the patriarchs Abraham and Jacob is about older men competing
with their sons on procreation, and retarding as much as they can the transference
of their multiplication task to their sons.20 How ironic that when the task of
furthering the seed will have been already passed on to Isaac, making Abraham
irrelevant to Gods fulfillment of his promiseprecisely then, Abrahams fertility
will burst forth and he will father many sons: six from a new wife and others from
his concubines (25:16).
However, right after Sarahs death, and with Isaac absent, it is as if Abraham
has returned to his childless starting point. Rather than Isaac managing all that
he has, a surrogate, a senior servant, manages his estate, just as Eliezer his
steward had done previously when Abraham was still childless (15:23). 21 And
this replacer will also be sent to Mesopotamia, where next to a well he will take
Isaacs place.
5 . T h e B u ds o f t h e C o a l i t i o n
With great delay, and because he has no other choice, Abraham decides to pass
on to Isaac the privilege of multiplying the seed. Being advanced in years (24:1)
and a widower, he tries to find a suitable bride for his forty-year-old son. In Isaacs
absence, and without his knowledge, Abraham commissions a representative. The
bride should be from his own birthplace (i.e., a metonymy of himself); his son
will not take a wife; he will give him one from his own, and thus participate
symbolically in the procreation.
A maximal reading will find in Abrahams instructions to the servant an
implied bitter defiance of Gods failure to keep his promises. Abraham makes the
servant swear by the Lord, God of the heavens and God of the earth (3) and
sends him to my land and to my birthplace (4). These last words echo Gods
words to Abraham when he left Mesopotamia in the opposite direction. God
used three terms then: your land; your birthplace; your fathers house
(12:1).22 Now, decades later, Mesopotamia is still the land of his birthplace, but is
it his land? He left it many years ago and it is not meant to be a component of his
new identity, even if his ownership of the new land still exists only in Gods
words. The servant, whether knowingly or unintentionally, corrects him as the
dialogue proceeds, when he refers to Mesopotamia not as your land, but rather
as the land you left (24:5); and Abraham, as if he accepts this implied reproach,
does not speak anymore of Mesopotamia as my land, but shifts to a proper varias
ation of Gods previous threesome: The Lord God of the heavens, Who took me
from my fathers house and from the land of my birthplace (7). The problematic
phrase my land has been elided, and the three terms have been melted into two.
Abrahams ambivalence toward Isaacs marriage is reflected in the carelessns
ness with which the servant is appointed for the mission, as if Abraham were only
going through the motions. Without any concrete instructions, he just sends him
off to Mesopotamia, certainly not to his clan. 23 If Abraham remembers Rebekah,
he fails to mention her. How will the servant know whom to choose? He does not
need to know. God, who spoke to Abraham, and who swore to him and promised
him seedif he wants it so badly, then let him work it out.
If we understand Abrahams speech in the context of his bitterness, this is
what his words would seem to imply. And yet, his indifferent approach can also
be understood as an expression of faith: you will not need to deliberate, as God
will show you his choice: He shall send His messenger before you and you shall
take a wife for my son from there (24:7). And if so, he might have actually
remembered Rebekah and was confident that God will lead the servant, in his
own way, to the right choice. There is no need to decide between these opposing
intentions, the one skeptical and embittered and the other most faithful. It is
possible to attribute both to Abraham.
In the phrase, He shall send his messenger before you, I suggest we underss
stand before you quite literally. Matters will take care of themselves, before you do
anything, and by the time you arrive the choice will be self-evident. And indeed,
for Rebekah to arrive at the well so punctually, as the servant had barely finished
speaking (15), she would have had to depart before he began. God voices his
opinion in silence, by designing the plot according to narrative conventions, with a
click of a surprising coincidence that evokes the impression of a guiding hand.
This is what happens to Jacob in a similar scene: he raises his eyes and sees an accids
dental well, asks the shepherds about his kinsman Laban, and while he is talking
with them, Rachel shows up, and the shepherds can point to her, saying, Look,
Rachel his daughter is coming with the sheep (29:6), and then everything is clear.
Judging by the servants behavior, there seems to be little doubt that he has
different ideas on how the world operates. And indeed, when he recounts the chain
of events to Laban and Bethuel, he unwittingly puts a different wording into Abrahs
hams mouth: The Lord...shall send his messenger with you (24:40). With rather
than before; and as we shall see, it is according to this assumption that he will act.
Before you shows up in Abrahams words in response to the servants quests
tion, Perhaps the woman will not want to come after me. The servant is bothered
by a simple practical question: if he, the servant, chooses an appropriate woman,
and if this woman refuses to emigrate to Canaan, should he then take Isaac to
Mesopotamia? In this hypothetical situation the only obstacle results from the
question of where the couple will reside. But Abrahams reply shifts this technical
issue to a more critical level: (1) under no circumstances should Isaac be brought
back to Mesopotamia; (2) the identity of his wife is a divine decision; (3) but if the
woman herself should not want to go after you, you are exempt from continuing
your task.
In contrast to the servants insinuation at Bethuels house, Abrahams words
clearly prohibit him from seeking another bride if the first nominee will not
marry Isaac. On the contrary: according to his instructions, since this is the
chosen bride, the servant should refrain from seeking any other woman in her
place. And since Isaac should not be brought back to Mesopotamiaif the
woman refuses to follow him back to the Land of Canaan, Isaac will not be able to
marry. And then what? Let God sort that out.
Perhaps unintentionally, Abraham grants the destined woman here the power
to prevent not only her own marriage to his son, but also any other marriage of
Isaac. The pairing will be concluded only when two wills coincide, Gods and the
womans. In his double criterion for the actualization of the match, Abraham is
sprouting the future coalition between God and Rebekah: the pairing is
dependent upon them and only them. But in the end, the pairing will turn out to
be a story of two failures in clarifying the two wills: God will be queried impropes
erly, and Rebekah will be asked neither at the right time nor the right question.
6. Repetitions
The Wooing of Rebekah is known as the most detailed story in the Bible. Over
and over again the text returns to the act of choosing the bride. Abraham refers
to it in general terms when he instructs the servant; later on the servant voices his
plan of action to God; then the actual scene unfolds; Rebekah reports it to her
brother; and the servant tells Laban and Bethuel about Abrahams instructions,
about his plan of action and about the actual performance; finally (66) the servant
reports to the amazed Isaac All [all?] the things he had done.
Among these, the summary option is exploited by the narrator only in the
servants report to Isaac and in Rebekahs report to Laban. When the servant
recounts his deeds to Laban and Bethuel, the readers are compelled to read everyts
thing anew. This redundancy gives the impression of a rather chatty story. The
rabbis in Bereshit Rabbah (60:8) complained about the privilege awarded to the
servant in being quoted and requoted at such length.
The repetition involves variation. For example, there are differences between
what the servant and Abraham actually said and the way they are quoted in the
servants report to Rebekahs brother and father; or between the facts as they were
presented by the narrator and what is told later on by the servant. These differes
ences have been crucial in readings of the servants speech along the generations.
Such readings filled in blanks by reconstructing the servants hidden intentions in
altering the facts. In more sophisticated readings, the sporadic details are systemas
atically organized and become significant within the framework of a much more
comprehensive story that accounts for them.24
Discussion about whether the varied repetitions in biblical narrative are
meaningful, or whether they are merely insignificant noise, have been going on
for at least nine hundred years, since the days of Abraham ibn Ezra and Radak,
who claimed that When these things get repeated, there occurs a change of
words, but the meaning is one (Radak to verse 39 of this chapter). From a certain
angle, this is a sensible claim. Usually, anyone quoting himself or herself, or
others, will after a while not repeat the utterances verbatim, nor remember the
exact wording. Indeed, reliability and authenticity require random variations in
repetitions of the kind we find in the servants speech. Moreover, the assumption
that these nuances reflect a sophisticated intention on behalf of the servant
obliges us to assume not only that he minutely remembers the sentences quoted,
but that like an interpreter who strives to exhaust a text, he treats every choice of
one word over another as informative.
But as long as the controversy is about whether variations in repetition have
any function in the text itself, this is a futile discussion. Only a readers decision
to reduce the texts arbitrariness constitutes the functionality of these nuances.
And only a readers intention to find the text as good and as meaningful as
possible, to save it from being a boring, chatty text with tiresome repetitiveness,
encourages the justification of the very choice of repetition, thus making the varias
ations a central feature of the reconstructed story. A reading-as-literature prefers
to infer from the text the reality that will turn it into a good text, one that
enables the reading to exhaust it. In other words, our presuppositions on the
desirable text determine what it presents: the represented events are a product of
considerations concerning the discourse, rather than a given reported by it.
The rabbinic exegeses of the Wooing of Rebekah, as well as contemporary
scholars, laud the servants worldly wisdom, which most notably finds its expresss
sion in the rhetoric of his speech to Laban and Bethuel. In quick alternations of
sticks and carrots, the servant changes facts and finds the best words, so that the
brother and father will have no choice but to immediately endorse the match
and this after he has already shown great resourcefulness in picking out the right
bride for Isaac. The accumulated writings about the story over the centuries,
which portray the servant as a talented and self-conscious trickster, manage to
account for many variations in the repetition and to raise the threshold of the
texts exhaustion to an impressive height. 25
I accept this interpretative course, but with one significant qualification: the
story it tells does not reflect the omniscient perspective of the narrator, but solely
the limited perspective of the self-satisfied servant. It is only he who believes that
he has managed to impress Rebekahs family; only he who is convinced that at the
end of his speech the marriage is consented to and his mission is accomplished
and he bows to the ground before God (52) and takes out presents. The next
morning even he will realize that his happiness was somewhat premature. And
most importantly: with respect to the scene by the well, he knows something that
he prefers not to disclose to his hosts.
My reading will exploit the distortion of facts in the servants recount for a
second round: his way of reporting will be used to validate the counter-story.
7. A M a r r i a g e P r o p o s a l
The seed of trouble has been sown by Abrahams vague instructions. The servant
approaches the city of Nahor with ten bountifully laden camels, but what should
he do now? Where do girls hang around? Before dusk, when the girls come to
draw water, he stops by the citys well (24:11). But how will he choose? An idea
crosses his mind: to conduct an intricate signs-test in order to clarify Gods intents
tions; hence, he implores God to cooperate, to assure that a girl who comes his
way, and is requested to do so-and-so and says so-and-so in reply, and even offers
him more than he asks forwill indeed be the designated one.
He treats God as a familial God at his disposal, as the God of my master
Abraham (12); as if Gods messenger was not sent before him, but is present
with him. Jack Miles is right in saying: No one, to this point...has come
remotely this close to bossing the Lord around.26
Against the major group of the servants admirers, who applaud the device he
invented in order to be assisted by God, I find myself with the skeptical minority
that disputes his cleverness and admonishes his effrontery (along with the sages
of Bereshit Rabba 60:3, and of the Babylonian Talmud in Taanit 4a and in ulin
95b, and with Maimonides in his Hilkhot avodat Kokhavim 11:4). Had one
handmaid gone out and gave him drink, would he have married her to the son of
his master? How strange, is said in Bereshit Rabbah. The servant is one of the
four who asked, or demanded, improperly (the others were Caleb, Saul, and
Jephthah). Three of these conducted a betrothal test: whosoever shall do so-and-
so will be the bride (or bridegroom). But the servant is the worst of the quartet,
since his test is meant to directly disclose Gods very intentions, and indeed the
tractate of ulin, and especially Maimonides, see here a prototypical case of
naash, of divination, a forbidden activity that deserves punishment.
But the broad consensus of the servants admirers believes that beyond the
attempt to divine Gods intention lies an additional sophistication. Even if God
were not to cooperate, the servant would still have in his hands an efficient charas
acter test: By this he will know clearly that she is a woman endowed with good
manners and with modesty, with generosity and compassion, writes the Malbim.
The test is supposed to reveal a girl who excels in hospitality, and is thus worthy
of Abrahams household; a woman who would make an effort to be a helpmate to
her husband Isaac and would take initiatives to please him; one who is not too
delicate for the rough life of shepherds awaiting her. And it would seem that
Rebekah passes the test with flying colors!
In all likelihood, when the servant first conceives the supplement of watering
the camelswhich the young woman is supposed to suggest in her first replyhe
intends to identify an obedient woman who will devote herself to her husband
and do for him more than he shall request. But by doing so he has to deduce from
Rebekahs actual reaction to him, in a specific situation, her prospective reactions

in quite different situations, and toward another person.
In practice the test points at a strong-willed and physically abled woman, indeps
pendent and industrious, similar to the Rebekah we know from the chapters to
follow, who controls her passive husband behind his back. She can hardly be said to
be her husbands helpmate. He is not even particularly fond of her cooking.
But as a character test it is particularly revealing about its inventor, who
apparently forgets himself and his status and stumbles. What sort of mind can
come up with such an intricate test? After all, according to his plan, he will not
appeal to her as a thirsty person who just asks for a drinklet me drink. His
planned request instead betrays other hidden intentions: Pray, tip down your jug
that I may drink (14); namely, he does not intend her to remove the jug from her
shoulder and pass it over to him, but rather to slant it (hai) so he may drink. And
in the actual performance, the moment he sees a young girl who is very comely
to look at, he immediately runs toward her, and for a second it seems that he is
trying to help her pass the test by lowering its demands, because he now asks only
for a bit of waterbut in fact this request suggests a much bolder flirt: let me
sip [hagmiini-na] a bit of water from your jug (17). To the readers of the Hebrew
original it is evident that hagmiini-na does not mean that he will drink by
himself, but rather that she will pour water into his mouth. In order to comply
with his request, she needs to be at close, intimate quarters with him. And indeed,
she fulfills his expectation: And she hurried and lowered her jug onto her hand
and watered him [va-tashqehu] (18 [AR]; let him drink, in Alters translation;
gave him drink, in KJV). Thus, the test has issued a flirtatious and liberated
young woman, while the servant, under the cover of divining Gods will, is busy
solely with the young womans response toward him. Even without the sexual
echoes of the jug and the well, mutual courting is insinuated here. The masters
son is obliterated and the servant takes his place; it is as if the well of the betrothal
type scene is denied from Isaac.27
The manner in which the servant will recount the scene will verify, in retross
spect, the erotic overtones I see here. Before Laban and Bethuel, he tries to make
the situation more decent, meticulously minimizing this part of the scene (cutting
it by 50 percent), and censuring precisely those features I have marked. According
to his report, he simply asks her, laconically, for water, with no mention of the
jug, pray, let me drink (45), and she in turn completely removes it from her body
and hands it over to him: Va-temaher va-tored kadah me-alehaAnd she hurried
and removed her jug from herself (46 [AR]). And so, while she in fact waters
him, the servant now tells that he drank on his own: va-eshtso I drank
(46[KJV]; these words are mistakenly omitted in Alters translation).
Let me now return to the two verses on Rebekahs arrival: He had barely
finished speaking when, look, Rebekah was coming out, who was born to Bethuel
son of Milcah, the wife of Nahor, Abrahams brother, with her jug on her
shoulder. And the young woman was very comely to look at, a virgin, no man had
known her (1516). Three points of view are implicitly condensed here.
The male gaze (look) perceives Rebekahs beauty immediately, and the
servant is running toward her. He doesnt know the rest of the information reported
to the readers, but these additional facts adopt the possessive male view: not only is
the young woman comely to look at, but she also originates from a respectable
family, and is (1) betulah, a virgin; and (2) no man had known her. This double
characterization fired the imagination of the Midrashic rabbis, who considered
the possibilities of knowing a woman without defloration, or defloration without
knowing her. As Freud states in his essay The Taboo of Virginity (1918), the
value of womens virginity from the male point of view is the logical continuation
of the right to exclusive possession of a womanit is the extension of mens
monopoly to cover the womens past. A woman is not supposed to bring to her
marriage any memory of previous relations with another man: her husband has to
be her first and exclusive lord (alas, Rebekahs whole life with Isaac will be shados
owed by her memory of another man).
The readers, men and women alike, will look at these verses from a narratols
logical perspective, and since life in the biblical world is always under Gods sight,
the narrative logic will be perceived as reflecting Gods will. When the servant
arrives at the city of Nahor, and Rebekah, Nahors granddaughterwhom we
already know from the counter-segment of Ishmaels marriageshows up at the
well, no additional information is needed in order to comprehend who was chosen
to be Isaacs bride. The convergence of details (timing, location, identity, analogy)
informs this without words. The only thing that remains to be seen is how the
servant will find this out; when he will understand that with regard to his original
mission, he is dealing with trifles.
But these verses also open up Rebekahs perspective. She is a betulah in
another biblical sense: she has arrived at a phase in her lifea certain age and a
mental statethat lies on the verge of ripeness; the betulim (as in Judg. 11:37)28
designate her internal experience of nubility at her fresh debutnot as an object
of gift to be exchanged between men, but rather as a young woman who will soon
be approached for the first time in her life by a man she fancies.
For how might a young woman like Rebekah understand the situation? She
has no idea that the man who addresses her is an emissary on behalf of another
bridegroom, nor is she aware of any test in which God is supposed to be pulling
her by the strings. According to the traditional readings of this story, Rebekah is
reciting by the welllike a speaking doll, without realizing why she is doing so
the text of a ghost writer, which will grant her the role of the wife of the patrias
archs son, some Isaac whose existence is still unknown to her: The young
woman, not knowing who the man is, took on herself to be paired with Isaac, as
she was worthy of from her mothers womb (Pirqey Derabi Eliezer 16; Yalqut
Shimoni 109). Amazingly, those readings were not bothered by the question of
Rebekahs own motives, as a character, not as a pawn. As a matter of fact,
nowhere does she recite, in one breath, the exact text that the servants plan put
into her mouth, Drink, and your camels, too, I shall water, but instead acts
according to her own logic, in solidarity with her personal agenda. Even though
her utterances throughout the story are laconic responses to the requests or quests
tions of others, nevertheless she is the resourceful active doer. She runs and acts,
while the servant stares at her passively, wondering at her (21 [KJV]).
It all starts when Rebekah sees a man running toward her. He has ten camels
laden with goods, and she notices that there are other people with him, waiting for
his orders (the readers will hear about their presence only later [32], when they
enter Bethuels house, but Rebekah sees them now). The man speaks to her; she
responds to his ambiguous request and lets him drink in physical proximity,
because she likes it. She prolongs this pleasureful situation as much as possible
(giving him not a bit of water as he requested, but his fill), and when it is not
possible to keep up this deed any longer, she looks for an excuse to continue the
adventureand suddenly occur to her his kneeling camels, which he himself did
not mention. Why does she volunteer to water them? Is it out of exemplary hospits
tality? But she does not offer water to any of the men accompanying him (his
servants in her eyes), who remain thirsty. All her deeds are directed at this man
personally, not at the others who are with him, or at any Isaac.29 She goes out of
her way in order to impress this stranger with her skills and her strength by means
of her treatment of his camels. She does not offer to give them the water left in
her jug (a ridiculous suggestion, which the servant invents when he presents his
plan before God), but announces that For your camels, too, I shall draw water
until they drink their fill (19); and with heroic effort she again and again runs up
the hill, carrying all this water in a small jug and pouring it into the trough until
all ten camels, after their long journey, quench their thirst. As mentioned above,
in terms of the betrothal type scene it is Rebekah who plays the mans part. Her
jug doesnt take in water that a man had drawn, but pours water into a trough. It
turns from a feminine container into an abundant phallus. This ardor, all her
running and drawing, will of course be censored in the mans report to her brother
and father and will shrink to and the camels, too, she watered (46).
From Rebekahs point of view the scene is indeed a meeting with a future
bridegroom, who has come from a foreign territory. The servant, on the other
hand, who gets carried away with the flirtation and enjoys taking Isaacs place, is
in a sense getting away from an authority and driving off a competitor. From a
helper he turns into an opponent.
The verbs of running and of hurrying, which are a feature of this type scene
and are usually linked with bringing home the news of the mans arrival, are more
numerous here than in any other betrothal instance, and appear earlier, in the
context of Rebekahs activity at the well. But it seems that the marriage proposal
breaks the record of haste: it precedes the mans second utterance in the scene,
and takes place even before he inquires into the young womans identity.
For what would a girl who has been trying so hard to impress a foreign man
understand when he takes out expensive jewelry, and without any explanation
puts a gold ring in her nose and two heavy bracelets on her arms? Undoubtedly
she would conclude that her heroic efforts have borne fruit, and that he has
serious intentions; that he too likes herfor what she is, not on account of her
pedigree, since when he gave her the jewels he had not yet bothered to inquire,
Whose daughter are you?
He asks this question in passing only later (23), and does not give her a
chance to reply, but rushes on to the next query. To the readers, who at this stage
are still oblivious of the other people with him, this query might seem moments
tarily ambiguous, nearly an indecent proposal: Is there room in your fathers
house for us to spend the night? (23).
She responds in order; at last he is informed that she is the granddaughter of
Abrahams brother. In a miraculous coincidence, the first young woman who
caught his attention next to the well is his masters relative!30 What better proof is
there for the presence of a guiding hand? In retrospect, in order to succeed in his
mission there was no need for him to conduct this futile test. It would have been
sufficient to inquire the womans identity, without bothering God with a jug and
a watering of camels. Actually, it seems that he has already acknowledged the
inconclusiveness of the test, because even after the young woman excels in it, he is
still wondering whether the Lord had granted success to his journey (21). It is
only after being informed that she is Abrahams relative that he does obeisance
and bows to God, thanking him for his steadfast kindness: me on this journey
the Lord led to the house of my masters kinsmen (27). At last, the logic of
narrative coincidence is leading him too. Moreover, in a sense the test that he
planned has hardly been executed at all: neither he nor Rebekah voices the exact
wording that appeared in his plan.
Seeing him bowing down his head, Rebekah may think that he is expressing
his gratitude for her implicit invitation to the house of her father. This wealthy
man, who gave her jewels without asking who she was, and who is now doing
obeisance, is surely a charming exaggerator. She cannot hear his internal speech
(27), in which he mentions his master Abraham (it is apparent from his recount
to her brother and father that his words to God are silent: I had barely finished
speaking in my heart [45]).
From Rebekahs point of view, it is she who actively chooses her future bridegs
groom and decides that he will be invited to her fathers house. Now she has to
bow to the cultural norms, and hence must excite her greedy brother and make
him believe that he is the initiator of the invitation. This will also be her manner
with her husband throughout their lives: she will make the decisions, and delude
him to believe that he made them himself.
8 . T h e I n - L a ws
It would seem that the servant does not need to ask Rebekah if she wants to go
after him. All her enthusiasm and efforts have indicated that she is willing to
follow him to the end of the world. Laban, too, runs out to welcome the potential
bridegroom, as if in order to invite him to the conventional feast of the type
scene. There can be no doubt that right up to the moment the servant opens his
mouth, neither Rebekah nor any other member of her family can possibly know
that he is not an actual suitor.
So it is time to revert to his original mission and to obtain the familys
approval. The servants rhetoric of persuasion is based on retelling the whole story
while adjusting it to the assumed mentality, beliefs, and values of his addressees.
For this end he must change words and twist facts, and his speech is a complex
combined discourse in which the utterance is shaped by the imagined positions of
the audience.
This is what the servant believes that he is smartly doing. He emphasizes the
bridegrooms wealth, and blurs differences of faith between the brides and the
bridegrooms families, and in quoting Abraham omits those details that might
plant in their heads the idea of demanding that the bridegroom will come to
Mesopotamia, and so on; but in his sophisticated maneuver we can also witness
his attempt to erase his forbidden adventure with Rebekah. As a matter of fact, a
close reading of his speech will show the servant in a rather ridiculous light:
behind every minute detail that his admirers have highlighted as another demonss
stration of his dazzling rhetoric (and here no stone is left unturned), it is possible
to find a new slip in the slope of trouble.
In order to speak to the men of the family in their own terms, without irrits
tating them with differences of faith, he now omits from Abrahams original
swearing-in the phrase the Lord, God of the heavens and God of the earth
that is to say, the monotheistic God who manages the whole world. Only the god
of my master Abraham (42) remains, a sort of a Mesopotamian personal or

familial god whose name is Yehova, who deals solely with the affairs of his client
Abraham (in Abrahams mouth he puts the wording: Yehova, in whose presence
I have walked [40 (AR)]). As we shall see, at the end of the servants speech this
diminution of God will have an undesired effect.
Wishing to impress his listeners with the bridegrooms wealth, the servant
turns to its originthe property that this personal god has granted his protg
Abraham (35). Thus, instead of speaking about the bridegroom, he lists the
catalog of his fathers possessions, and only much further on does he finally
mention fleetingly the prospective bridegroom, while lying by saying that
Abraham has already given his son all that he has (36). And since he intends to
match Abrahams son with the granddaughter of his brother, he wishes to set his
addressees at ease with regard to the bridegrooms age, by indicating that he was
born in his mothers advanced old age (And Sarah, my masters wife, bore a son
to my master after her old age [36 (AR)]). Consequently, instead of referring
directly to the bridegrooms merits, it seems that the servant tries to hide him
behind his parents back, until one gets the impression that the proposed pairing
is between the two branches of the clan, rather than between Isaac and Rebekah.
Curiously enough, the servant fails to mention even once the name of Isaac. Does
this betray some latent wish to suppress his existence? The name of Isaac is
purged even from his quotations of Abrahams words and from his own address
to God. Instead, he uses the appellation the son of my master. Therefore, at the
end of his speech, Laban and Bethuel learn nothing about the bridegroom
himself, not even his name; they, too, refer to him as the son of your master.
The dominance of the son Laban as the prominent speaker in Bethuels house
greatly emphasizes the faded presence of the other son, Isaac.
The issue of Rebekahs will is also expunged. Abrahams actual if the woman
should not want (8) is substituted with the false if you come to my clan and they
refuse you (41), according to which the right of refusal belongs only to the men
of the family. Rebekah herself is treated here as merely an object of negotiation,
subjected to the will of others. In order to amplify their good will, the servant
tells them that Abraham directed him straight to them: To my fathers house you
shall go and to my clan (38); Abraham, it will be recalled, had sent him to my
land and to my birthplace (4). But the carrot allows him to smuggle in a hidden
stick, by substituting my vow with my curse: he switches Abrahams And if
the woman should not want to go after you, you shall be clear of this vow of mine
[mi-shvuati] (8) into if you come to my clan and they refuse you, you shall be
clear of my curse [me-alati] (41 [AR]). The threat is clear: Abrahams curse will
befall on those responsible. In the original scene, Abraham did not threaten the
servant directly with any curse of his own, but he had only sworn him in by the
God of the heavens and the earth. And again, by increasing Abrahams part,
the servant belittles that of God.
In censoring the circumstances of the choosing of Rebekah, the servant
conceals not only their flirtation, but also his haste in giving her jewels. According
to his current story of interfamilial marriage, he first asks her whose daughter she
is, and only afterwards, when he learns that she was Bethuels daughter, does he
adorn her with the jewelry. Since Abraham sent him to his family, he is not
supposed to hand out jewels to a woman before he makes sure that she is a relats
tive. For the same reason, he cannot disclose having asked the girl whether there
is room for him in her fathers housethe house he was initially sent to, according
to his version. (It does not occur to him that Laban might have already heard
from Rebekah the exact sequence of events and is now an ironic witness to his
manipulation.)
So far so good. But if he knows exactly where he is supposed to go, and from
where he should get a bride, why does he turn to the well in the first place? And
why entangle himself with the test of watering the camels, that is meant to inform
him whom to choose, if Abraham himself has already guided him to the solution?
Sensing the confusion that he has established, he is quick to transform the
encounter by the well from a test aimed to reveal the appointed girl (she it is whom
You have marked) into an impudent double test intended mostly to examine
Abraham himself, or rather to detect the opinion of his masters god on Abrahams
instructions! According to his renovated story, although Abraham sent him to his
family and assured him that God will grant him success (40)he digresses to the
well in order to inquire of God if this way is indeed right and prosperous, if You
are going to grant success to the journey on which I come (42). In order to test his
master, a random girl, whom he approaches, is not only supposed to comply with
his request and use the words he expects her to use, and also to add the watering of
camels, but after she passes stage 1, she has to fulfill the grand requirement of stage
2 as well and to happen to be Nahors descendant! And when all this actually takes
place (so he tells her family), he blesses Abrahams God, Who guided me on the
right way to take the daughter of my masters brother for his son (48)31that is, to
do what Abraham, allegedly, instructed him to do.32
Such an astonishing proof of Gods approval of Abrahams instructions must
bind Laban and Bethuel as well, and it would seem that they have no alternative but
to give him Rebekah immediately. And indeed, this is how he understands their
short and sharp wordsqa va-lekhTake [her] and go (51). His mission is
accomplished. He bows to the ground before the Lord (at the well he only bowed
down his head [26]), and turns to his baggage to take out jewels and garments for
Rebekah, and gifts for her brother and mother. But alas, when morning comes,
Laban and his mother are not quick to give him Rebekah, but instead postpone the
occasion by a month or ten months.33 Labans famous stalling tactics show up here
for the first time, echoing in the background the Delayed Guest type scene.34
Retrospectively, Laban and Bethuels answer from the preceding night seems
less unequivocal. It is neither a response to Abrahams wish to be bound to them
by marriage, nor to the wealth that the masters son has inherited. The whole
rhetoric of this part of the servants speech was wasted in vain, given the suspect
and too-good-to-be-true proof of the will of a god who isnt even their own.
There is more than a touch of irony in their words: From YHWH this thing has
come; we can speak to you neither good nor evil. Here is Rebekah before you.
Take her and go and let her be wife to your masters son as YHWH has spoken
(5051 [AR]). It is as if they are saying, We cannot say yes and we cannot say no.
Who are we in comparison with such a decisive word from your masters god?
This is not a direct no, but given the fact that Laban does not allow the
servant to take the bride, we may understand him as saying: If your masters god
is such an ardent supporter of the marriage, then let him show his strength by
carrying it out. In the meantime, let the young woman stay with us.35 The rhetos
oric of presenting God as a personal god (40; 42; 48) acts as a boomerang: they
are not overly excited by this god.
And yet, unintendedly, it is precisely Laban and his mother who reinstate the
double criterion that Abraham set for the conclusion of the marriage: Gods
choice and the womans will. The customary paternal approval is irrelevant in this
marriage, the father shall speak neither good nor evil; this thing comes from
God, and its conclusion still depends on the girls consent. This is what the
servant learns in the morning, when he urges the brother and the mother not to
hold him back when the Lord has granted success to my journey (56). Laban,
who is looking for every possible excuse to detain him, seems to say, there is also
a second criterion: Let us call the young woman and ask for her answer (57).
If Laban hopes that Rebekah will not be too quick to consent, he will be disapps
pointed. And if he fears that she will refuse and thus oblige him to return the bride
price, he will be proven wrong. But Rebekah is not asked, Will you follow him to
be a wife to his masters son? but only: Will you go with this man? (58), as if he
himself is the bridegroom. To this misleading question she responds right away with
one short and resonant Hebrew word: elekhI will go.
9. She Took the Veil, and Covered Herself
Might it be that even at this stage Rebekah doesnt know that the man she is
going with is only a surrogate? Is it likely that Rebekah heard nothing of what
was spoken in the house, or was not informed about the servants real identity,
despite seeing him again at night, when he gave her presents?
Though not completely free of difficulties, the radical hypothesis that
Rebekah is not aware of the servants true identity even at the time of their departs
ture is more efficient in exhausting the text than the opposing one (Rebekah
learned this at night).
Several prominent details support the hypothesis of Rebekahs ignorance, but
first let me link it to an old mystery: the strange disappearance of Bethuel from
the text. At night he sits with his son Laban and with the servant, without the
mother; but later, when the servant hands out gifts, they are given only to Rebekah,
to Laban, and to the mother, not to the father; and in the morning only the brother
and mother speak to the servant, while Bethuel is not mentioned. Some midrashic
collections go so far as to claim that Bethuel died during the night, and in exuberant
flights of imagination ascribe to him sexual iniquity, for which he was punished.
Textual critics claim that the very mentioning of his name in verse 50 is a redactors
rial insertion, and that Bethuel is already dead at the time.
In fact, it is possible to account for Bethuels disappearance by means of a
simple locational supposition. Bethuels house has more than one wing and
includes the mothers house and the fathers house (compare this to the situats
tion in Labans house, in 31:33). The servant asks Rebekah if there is room in
your fathers house (24:23), and this is where he is taken by Laban later on. But
when Rebekah hurries home to bring the news, she runs to her own place: And
the damsel ran and told them of her mothers house these things (28 [KJV]).
Bethuel is staying at the fathers house, while Rebekah and her mother are staying
at the mothers house (see Bereshit Rabbah 60:7); only Laban, who meddles in
everything, runs about to and fro. And indeed, when Rebekah arrives at her
mothers house she finds him there, and from there he runs to greet the man.
The nocturnal conversation of the three men takes place in the fathers house,
and thus Rebekah, who lives in the other wing, cannot hear it. 36 On the other
hand, after the servant takes out presents, he goes to the mothers house, to
Rebekah, and therefore gives the precious things only to Rebekah and to the
mother and brother, but not to Bethuel. And the same in the morning: when the
servant wishes to take Rebekah, he is turning to the mothers house; hence
Bethuel is again absent, and only Laban and the mother are speaking to him.
This way of unraveling Bethuels disappearance allows us then to assume that
even in the morning Rebekah has no knowledge of the mans true identity.
Rebekah, a strong and independent woman, has chosen a bridegroom by herself.

But the manner in which she is treated by her family presents an invidious denial
of her subject position. The very question that her brother asks herwill you go
with this man? (58)which apparently places her in the arbiters position, is in
fact the culmination of her oppression. And whether Laban is aware or unaware
of her ignorance, she would feel deceived.
Rebekahs lack of knowledge accounts for the muddle of appellations in
verses 59 and 61 as a splitting of foci: she and her young women go after the person
they believe is a man, while the others present, those sending her off, know that
the person who takes her is a servant: And they sent off Rebekah their sister, and
her nurse, and Abrahams servant and his men....And Rebekah rose, with her
young women, and they mounted the camels and went after the man, and the
servant took Rebekah and went off.
In a short cut, the story shifts to the Land of Canaan, without supplying any
information about the long journey. This place of indeterminacy is filled in by a
series of midrashic flights of fancy, according to which the journey makes a leap
forward to prevent the servant from coupling with the young girl at night, but
nevertheless Isaac, who did not find hymen in her, suspects the servant and
blames Rebekah. Eventually Rebekah is cleared, but it would seem that these
midrashic stories anticipated my article.37
What happens en route is of course not a gap I can fill in within the framews
work of my reading, yet until Isaacs appearance, the hypothesis Rebekah is not
aware of the servants identity serves me well. The meeting with her real bridegs
groom is a parodic, diluted version of a betrothal type scene. Next to the well in
Mesopotamia, toward evening, Rebekah first responds to the man, and only
afterward moves on to the camels. In the Land of Canaan, toward evening, Isaac
is going out for a stroll in the field, in the surroundings of a well, and sees camels,
not a woman (and he raised his eyes and saw and, look, camels were coming
[63]). But Rebekah sees him. She probably notices also the commotion of the men
around her at the sight of their masters son. This man, with whom she went
and to whom she says next to the well, Drink, my lord [adoni, my master]a
man who was, during the journey, the master of the others accompanying himis
now reverting before her eyes to his natural proportions. She begins to grasp the
hierarchy: it would seem that there is a greater master above him, who is walking
toward them. Confused and startled, she falls off the camel (64), And she said to
the servant: Who is that man? (65). The appellation servant in the narrators words
(emphasized against the term man in her own speech), is saturated with the
knowledge that pierces her. And the servant said: He is my masterHe is
adoni (65), as if saying, he is the real master, not I. Her first self-initiated words
in the text (not in response to a question or to a request) shutter her world. Upon
hearing the servants answer, she suddenly realizes, to her shame, that she has
been riding on the camel immodestly exposed, intimately free with a stranger
who is not her fianc; thus she hurriedly takes her veil and covers herself. 38
The story that began with Abraham ends with Sarah. Abrahams emissary
does not bring Rebekah to his master; Isaac meets them both by chance. And
instead of taking his bride to be introduced to his father at Beer Sheba, he takes
her to Hebron, to visit the tent of his late mother, whose funeral he avoided
because of his fathers presence. From the well of one mother he goes to the tent
of another mother, as if protesting against his father.
Alter does not link this stage of the story to the type scene (unlike the midrash
in Shemot Rabbah, see note 15), yet the meeting between Isaac and Rebekah is a
wonderful example of how convention helps us read. It is a dry encounter: we have
before us the field, and the thirsty camels, but the Well of Laai Roi is distant.
The bridegroom is someone who has run away from the authority of a father who
had intended to slaughter him, but it is the woman who arrives at a new territory.
Instead of the uncovering of the well, the bride covered herself. There is no
running toward (unlike 24:17; 29:13), and no one is in a hurry; instead, there is a
startled fall from a camel. All the things are recounted neither to a father nor to a
brother (compare with verses 28, 30; and also with 29:13; and Exod. 2:1819), yet
bridegroom A tells bridegroom B all the things he had done (61). And neither is
the bridegroom brought to the house of the brides father, but instead the bride is
brought to the bridegrooms dead mother. Despite her husbands love, the curtain
falls on the young womans fresh and optimistic debut.
1 0 . S n o wb a l l
This is the overture to Rebekahs life with Isaac and to the history of the family
that will follow. The text abandons the new couple for eighteen verses and for
twenty years. In the intermezzo we are told about Abrahams new thirteen sons
and grandchildren, and about the twelve grandchildren that his son Ishmael begot
him. All these details will of course turn out to be sadly ironic when the couple
returns (25:21): Isaac is by now nearly sixty years old, and Rebekah has had
twenty years of barrenness. Isaac pleads with God, but God does not answer him.
The schematic sequence of the annunciation type scene (barrennessdivine

promiseconception and birth) is violated here. 39 Gods answer is given silently,
in the very fact of Rebekahs pregnancy, while the annunciation is displaced to
another time and another addressee: it is reserved for the mother, Rebekah, at her
advanced pregnancy, when she is troubled by the commotion in her belly. This
time it is Rebekah who appeals to God, and the juxtaposition of And Isaac
pleaded with the Lord in front of [le-nokha] his wife (21 [AR]) with and she
went to inquire of the Lord (22) highlights the fact that unlike Isaac, Rebekah is
going to inquire of God independently, by herself. She is the first woman in the
Bible who addresses God, and moreover on a personal feminine matter, a gynecols
logical problem (Why am I suffering?). God, who remained wordless in front of
Isaac, replies to Rebekah, but also demonstrates to her the level on which he tends
to speak to the patriarchs.
Rebekah seeks a causal explanation in personal terms, which might help her
overcome the hyperactivity in her belly, while God answers her with poetic paralls
lelism, and in ambiguous teleological terms, concerning the distant future history
of nations: Two nationsin your womb, / two peoples from your loins shall
issue. / People over people shall prevail / the elder, the youngers slave (23). What
has all this got to do with her present condition of a difficult pregnancy? In what
way is it relevant to her motherhood, or to the personal near future of the babies?
Are the fetuses supposed, in their clashing together, to be practicing in the womb,
as progenitors, in preparation for the struggles between their nations in centuries
to come? As it turns out, Rebekah does not understand from this poetic and
prophetic reply even the simple fact that she is carrying twins. While the readers
get this information (And the children clashed together within her), she herself
is extremely surprised at the birth: And when her time was come to give birth,
look, there were twins in her womb (24). The elliptical and somewhat strange
wording of the question that she asked herself before she went to inquire of God
(Then, why me? [Then, why am I?]) could function even better as a response
to the two-nations answer that she receives: Then, why me?fine, but what
has all this got to do with me?
An annunciation of the sort given to Rebekah would have been worthy of the
patriarchs, but was never told to Isaac. In vain he took pains to cherish Esau. The
divine plan is disclosed, instead, to Rebekah, and it implies that the younger son
will be promoted and that the elder will be dismissed. Rebekah will strive, for her
own reasons, to attain the same goal, unaware that in this she is realizing a
specific divine plan, which also exemplifies a general principle: God is fond of
dethroning firstborns, especially if it involves the humiliation of their fathers.
Had Rebekah understood Gods terms, she neednt have lifted a finger. Her goal
was to obtain for Jacob his fathers blessing, and attaining this goal yielded Isaacs
wish: May people serve you / and nations bow before you. / Be overlord to your
brothers, / may your mothers sons bow before you (27:29)namely, the very
same state-of-affairs that God had already guaranteed her many years earlier
(the elder, the youngers slave).
Is the irony here directed at Rebekah, the narrow-minded woman who
couldnt grasp serious matters of paramount national significance? Surprisingly,
there is as much irony here (with divine support) toward the grandiose male
national agenda, which is so distant from Rebekahs mind. Like Hagar in Genesis
16, and like Samsons mother, Rebekah is impervious to an annunciation at the
level of the history of nations. She is one of a series of women who act with
complete alienation to the national dimension, and who are interested solely in an
agenda of self-realization by means of childbearing. These women are privileged
with the texts sympathy, which casts irony on the men, who are busy with the
dynasty and the national future.40 The Bible doesnt spare its irony from the
national agenda that God fosters in his chosen men.
From here on, Rebekah acts as a wife and a mother, within the framework of
her personal agenda, unaware of any divine plan. It would seem that this strong and
resourceful woman loves her younger son, a peaceful man, a dweller in tents
(25:27 [AR]), precisely because her passive and weak husband loves the other son,
the hunter who brings him game, a bold exemplar of the masculinity he desires so.
Rebekah nurses and promotes a son who complies with a feminine stereotype, in
contrast with the other, manly son. Jacob is domestic (by contrast to his brother
who is a man of the field); he is smooth-skinned (by contrast to his red and hairy
brother); he looks after lambs and kids (by contrast to Esau the hunter); he cooks,
and prepares vegetable stews (while Esau is with game in his mouth [28, AR]so
many important matters are decided in this family around likes and dislikes of
dishes). In one scene (27:16), we are told that the mother dresses her more-than-
forty-year-old son Jacob...His voice and style of speech are distinct from Esaus
vulgar speech. He will be the most emotional and loving among the patriarchs.
As someone who was harmed by not listening to a conversation at her fathers
house, Rebekah becomes an eavesdropper and a compiler of rumours (27:5, 42).
She maneuvers Isaac behind his back. Now it is Isaac who becomes a puppet
whose strings Rebekah pulls. And as if in reaction to the bridegroom swapping,
she interchanges the sons for her blind husband: instead of his favorite son, he will
have to unwittingly bless her beloved son.
In her struggle to maintain her selfhood, Rebekah unwittingly transforms
the divine plan into a gender plan under disguise, which culminates in her
bestowing on her son the mothers blessing, camouflaged as a fathers blessing.
Her voice will speak from Isaacs mouth. For that to happen, meat of tender
domestic animals, kids, will serve as pretended game; the smooth-skinned son
will be changedwith the skins of kidsinto a hairy one, and the domestic son
will smell like a field. Her husband will be tempted to eat a dish cooked by his
wife and to believe that these are the delicacies he loves, prepared for him by a
hunter. The mothers blessing, given through the medium of the father, wishes
Jacob agricultural abundance and a future of continuous status quo and peace,
while the one given to Esau destines him to struggles and to living by the sword.
Only Jacobs voicea voice that listened to the voice of Rebekah (27:8) and
echoes itcannot be disguised. Rebekahs voice cannot be denied.
With the switched bridegrooms, and with the retaliatory interchange of Esau
with Jacob, starts a recurrent pattern of substitutions and counter-substitutions,
of replacements and scandalous role-snatchings, which involve identity coverups
and deceptions, or direct, blatant struggles. The third instance of this pattern will
be the switching around, under the cloak of darkness, of Jacobs beloved Rachel
and her despised sister. From here on the pattern will roll like a snowball right up
to the end of Genesis, and will shape the personal dramas of Jacobs family in its
way to becoming a nation.41
At her marriage to Isaac, Rebekah did not arrive on a path strewn with roses,
but out of a bitter mistake. The male-national agenda does not advance in a happy
collaboration with women who joyously subjugate themselves to it, but on the ruins
of their own values and under their protest. Rebekahs protest is a latent voice that
the text cultivates, just as much as it promotes the opposing voice, since the divine
agenda is greatly interested in the very clash between them. Rebekah is most instrums
mental in transforming Isaac into a parody of a patriarch. But her shady deeds turn
out to be positive from the perspective of the divine agenda. The marriage story
inaugurated the coalition between God and Rebekaha unilateral alliance,
concealed from Rebekahs sight. In the end, all her actions will assist Gods interest
in upholding the difference and the distance between him and the nations fathers.
1 1 . M e n w i t h o u t W o m e n , F e m i n i sm w i t h o u t G o d
With which overall conception of the biblical narrative does this kind of reading
fit in? What is the master story that I am telling? Isnt it a provocative inverse
reading that transplants into the text voices alien to it? What is the divine agenda
that I tease out of the biblical narrative?
The orchestration of the biblical world I am proposing is, of course, a speculs
lative construct, and cannot be deduced from a single story. One of its tests is its
efficiency in providing consistent explanations for what happens time and again.
And yet, its main validation is drawn from its ability to supply hypotheses that
substantially raise the threshold of the texts exhaustion, story after story. Thus
my view of the biblical world can find its verification only in the close reading of
many biblical stories. In other articles, I explicated and demonstrated this through
the stories of Abraham and Hagar, Samson, Deborah and Jael, the Concubine of
Gibeah, Tamar and Judah, and Joseph and his brothers.42
Contrary to Miles, who in his God: A Biography tried to reconstruct from the
Bible a biography of God and to describe him as a dynamic and developing
character, my work focuses on the divine program that advances at the top of a
hierarchy of human agendas. The human is actualized in the Bible as a multi
layered identity story: as an individual in solidarity with his own personal interes
ests and his own depth-psychology; as member of a familial unit; as a member of
a household or a tribe; and as a member of a wider imagined communitythe
people or the nation. The gender dichotomy intersects this hierarchy: women are
agents of feminine personal agendas of self-realization, and of familial agendas

of motherhood, while men carry male personal agendas, a manly familial agenda
that is interested in the prospects of the family and of the dynasty, and the tribal
and national agendas.
Every human activity in the biblical narrative attains meaning from the
perspective of more than one agenda. Thus every event can be read within the
framework of more than one plot, as a junction of agendas, and is explained
through multiple causality. The central point of my conception is the antithetical
relations between the various levels of the human multiple plot: a bivalent view of
almost every deed is typical of the biblical narrative, and the multilayerdness of
the plot turns into an ideological polyphony.
The divine agenda annexes to itself all the plots beneath it and plays them
off against one another. It intends all of them, and especially the tensions
between them. It is therefore a mistake to assume that patriarchy has God on its
side,43 and that the biblical world identifies God with maleness, patriarchy, and
nationalism. The divine agenda wishes to establish a difference between God and
the males, and all the more so if these men are his chosen ones. The recurring
story is one of a rivalry between God and his chosen males. Gods need to sustain
his prominence and his uniqueness results in making every dominant human
ideology the target of subversion by lower values in the hierarchy; the biblical
narratives attitude towards the manly national unity, and toward typical male
institutions such as judges or kings, is always ambivalent. The divine agenda thus
joins together with the lower voices in the hierarchy against patriarchal and
national voices. Women who excel in motherly love are foregrounded, as are indeps
pendent women who take their fates into their own hands, and the protest of
despised women becomes a valuable voice. God uses these women in order to
demean male ideologies and male figures.44
As should be clear by now, my reading of the biblical story is not a woman-
oriented reading that looks for underexamined fragments on the margins of
biblical historiography45 in order to read them against the rest of the text, relying
on the texts heterogenic nature. I do not seek assistance and meaning in the texts
genesis, and the female voices that I find in it are not mutilated ruins and relics
that have survived in the text and testify to some past biblical period, outside
the texts internal field of reference; I am not drawing up antipatriarchal perspects

tives [which] have been partially preserved, against all odds, in the
canon...marks of patriarchal modes of censorship...antithetical undercurrs
rents that call into question the monotheistic repression of femininity.46 On the
contrary, in my reading these voices are of vital importance for the exhaustion of
the text, and thus are a necessary component of its monotheism, while the object
of investigation is not the historical world in which these stories happened, or
were told, for which the text is merely a vehicle. The reading of the text itself
cannot be substituted by speculations concerning some independent context
preceding it, some alleged outer-textual existence of a woman, whose story we are
asked to recover...from the fragments that remain,47 in order to consequently
discover a truth which the text distorts, to present a different version of women
who were raped by pen.48
It would seem that the main difference of opinion between my reading
proposal and feminist readings concerns the narrators position. Feminist readings
of biblical narratives tend to place themselves against the voice that tells the stories,
and to develop a reasoning that enables them to describe details and meanings as
slipping away from the awareness of that voice, arguing that the subject of narrats
tion does not always realize what meanings the expressions convey;49 e.g., while
the narrator of the Concubine of Gibeah protects his [male] protagonist50the
text per se, betrayed by a guilty narrative consciousness,...criticizes its own
ideology.51
But the narrators reticence in the Concubine of Gibeah, his everyday tone in
rendering the horror, does not make him a partisan of the husband or of the other
men, just as the narrators pseudo-objectivity in the narrative of David and Bathss
sheba does not make him a supporter of Davids misdeeds. This reticence is an
object for interpretation, and can become functional only within the framework
of a specific interpretation. Furthermore, the narratological construct of an unrels
liable narrator, who distorts a story that happened differently, or whose underss
standing and norms differ from those of the text, is inapplicable to the corpus
of the biblical narrative. Its omniscient narrator is an agent of the divine position,
and the story he tells is meant to exemplify that position. His selections and
combinations narrate a history in which the divine agenda prospers, and the very
demonstration of this history in a narrative is one of Gods interests, part of his

public relations. In order to reconstruct the narrators position, we need to listen
to that of God as it is expressed in the plot. These are the rules of the game.
Mieke Bal criticizes Tribles attempts in Texts of Terror and in God and the
Rhetoric of Sexuality to exonerate Yahweh from the scandal caused by male charas
acters. Even if all narrative agents treat women horribly, the voice of the deity is
often invoked [in Tribles readings] to save the ideological tenor of the overall
text.52 Bals criticism is from the point of view of narrative theory, which
according to her does not accommodate such a view. It places the divine charas
acter on the same level, as a character that is, as the other characters. But a narrats
tive theory does not place on the same level a powerful, omnipotent character
with marginal ones. Moreover, it locates the narrator on a different level; and if
that narrator, despite his extreme omniscience, is just an agent of the persistent
presence of a higher authority, then narrative theory has to accommodate this
state-of-affairs too. Cleaving to her approach, Bal misses a central aspect of
Delilah and of Jael, in her two summits of feminist close reading.53 The alliance
between each of these two women and the divine agenda would grant their voices
a much wider ideological resonance.
Indeed, God is not a member of the womens league, nor is he interested in
defending specific women. His preferred history contains events like the banishms
ment of Hagar and Ishmael to the desert, which he supports despite Abrahams
opinion. But his global agenda still promotes feminine values. Hagar and Ishmael
were sent away mainly in order to establish, both historically and in the readers
eyes, Hagars motherliness in opposition to Abrahams agenda. All the rhetoric
that the text invests in evoking empathy toward Hagar cannot be separated from
the irony that her contrapuntal subplot casts on the male national project, which
God simultaneously nourishes in Abraham.
It is her function in the divine agenda that gives the concubine in Judges 1921
a resonance far exceeding the tacit moral protest against a horrendous abuse. The
rare national unity accomplished in this narrative, unprecedented in the entire Book
of Judgesthe gathering together as one man, from Dan even to Beer-sheba, with
the land of Gilead (20:1 [KJV])is a paradoxical unity: its purpose is a civil war,
that could only be rectified by resorting to another civil war, culminating in the
violent abduction and rape of four hundred young women, and of another two
hundred later. This united congregation was initiated by one man, the Levite, who
did it solely because his manliness had been threatened by the gangsters intention
to rape him as a woman. Using his young wife as a scapegoat, he laid hold of her
and expelled her to the outside, abandoning her to be gang raped. The narrative in
its entirety turns this expulsion into one of the most penetrating anatomies of
national unity and of the comradeship of warriors, a male bonding of men-
without-women, whohaunted by the ghost of threatened masculinityexclude
to the border feminine features that disturb their manly identity (elsewhere I have
suggested a queer reading of this story).54 God tries to teach the callous male union
the hard way, at the expense of forty thousand dead, to hesitate, to be remorseful, to
weep and have brotherly feelings towards the enemy, to play the woman (20:19
28). The deed that purports to unite the tribes is the distribution of the fragmented
woman to the bordersher decentering and exclusion to the margins; and it is
responded to by a movement in the opposite direction, a centring of males knit
together as one man (11 [KJV]). The abject body of a woman, tortured all night
until the morning in the male unity of a gang rape, is a sarcastic contrapuntal metaps
phor of the male bonding that repudiates feminine features.
Again and again we need to call the woman and ask for her answer.
Department of Literature
Tel Aviv University
notes
This article is based on a paper presented at the conference The Literary Study of
the Bible: Prospects and Retrospects, held at the University of California,
Berkeley, in April 2005. The conference took place on the occasion of the thirty-
year anniversary of Robert Alters first article on the art of biblical narrative (in
Commentary, December 1975), and nearly forty years after the publication by
Perry and Sternberg of The King through Ironic Eyes, which was positioned by
Alter as one of the primary stages of a new research orientation in the study of
the biblical narrative (Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative [New York: Basic
Books, 1981], 1719). See Menakhem Perry and Meir Sternberg, Ha-melekh be-
maba ironi: al ta bulotaw shel ha-mesaper be-sipur dawid u-bat-sheva u-shetei

haflagot la-teoryah shel ha-prozah, Hasifrut 1, no. 2 (1968): 26392. English
translation in Poetics Today 7, no. 2 (1986): 275322. The article was published
with minor changes as chapter 6, Gaps, Ambiguity, and the Reading Process,
in Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1985), 186229.
An earlier version of my interpretation of the Wooing of Rebekah was offered
in Reading as Rebekah, a paper presented at the Thirteenth World Congress of
Jewish Studies, Jerusalem, 2001.
1 Long before Isers reception-aesthetics and Minskys frame-theory became

fashionable, Perry and Sternberg combined the idea of frame and the idea of gaps
and gap-filling, independently and interestingly, into a theory of the reading
process (further elaborated in Perry, Literary Dynamics: How the Order of a
Text Creates Its Meanings, Poetics Today 1, nos. 12 [1979]: 3564; 31161 and
other publications), which they apply to the 2 Sam. 11 case (Mieke Bal, The
Semiotics of Symmetry, or the Use of Hermeneutic Models, Versus 35/36 [1983]:
736; revised version in Bal, Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical
Love Stories [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987], 1036).
2 Menakhem Perry and Meir Sternberg, Zehirut, sifrut!li-veayot ha-inerpreatss

syah ve-ha-poeikah shel ha-sipur ha-miqrai, Hasifrut 2, no. 3 (1970): 60863.
3 Alter, Art of Biblical Narrative, 17.
4 Frank Kermode, Poetry, Narrative, History (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell,

1990), 34.
5 KJV. Unless otherwise stated, the biblical quotations are taken from Alters translats
tions (1996, 1999, 2004). Occasionally, the King James Version [KJV] will serve
me better. [AR] indicates authors revision.
6 Following the suggestive title of Gayle Rubins famous article, The Traffic in
Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex, in Rayana R. Reiter, ed.,
Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975).
7 See, e.g., Mieke Bal, Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of
Judges (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 23536; Ilana Pardes,
Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach (Cambridge, Harvard Universs
sity Press, 1992), 12. The differences between my reading and feminist readings
will be explained in section 11.
8 This anonymity is a widespread technique in the biblical narrative (e.g., the
concubine and the Levite in the Concubine of Gibeah, or Samsons mother in

Samsons Birth, or the Shunammite woman in Elishah and the Shunammite
Woman, or Ishmael in Gen. 21). When a central figure is not mentioned by name
throughout a biblical narrative, it is in order to be referred to by a variety of
appellations, which alternate functionally. See Menakhem Perry, Alternative
Patterning: Mutually Exclusive Sign-Sets in Literary Texts, Versus 24 (1979):
83106; The Flexible Voice: Combined-Discourse in Biblical Narrative, paper
presented at the conference on Biblical Narrative and Modern Poetics (The
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1981); and Ezer ke-negdo: ha-qoalitsyah shel
elohim im ha-nashim ba-sipur ha-miqrai, Alpayim 29 (2005): 193253. This
technique is applied to men and women alike, and has nothing to do with the
absence of narrative force, or with the Bibles androcentric attitude toward
women, as feminist interpretations state repeatedly (No names; no narrative
power....A name that makes them into subjects, that makes them speakable
[Mieke Bal, Dealing/With/Women: Daughters in the Book of Judges, in Regina
M. Schwarts, ed., The Book and the Text: The Bible and Literary Theory
(Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 19].) Moreover, assumingprior to
the interpretation of the specific textthat narratological categories are endowed
with an automatic ideology, as in Bal, Death and Dissymmetry, is a problematic
procedure.
9 Perry, The Flexible Voice. Alternations of names in the narrators discourse are,
e.g., Jacob/Israel, Gideon/Jerubbaal.
10 The term combined-discourse has been known in Israel since the 1970s as part of
my narrative theory. It was developed out of an attempt to overcome the difficults
ties in describing what is usually called free indirect style, but the phenomenon
of combined discourse is much broader. English readers can find an early
presentation of this concept, exemplified in a biblical story, in Perry, Alternative
Patterning. In The Flexible Voice, I made use of the hypothesis of combined
discourse to justify even the textual alternations of The Lord/God (YHWH/
Elohim), e.g., in the story of Moses and the Burning Bush (Exod. 34).
11 I already discussed the servant/man alternation in The Flexible Voice, but the
complete story arising from it had not occurred to me at that point.
12 Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, 4762; How Convention Helps Us Read: The
Case of the Bibles Annunciation Type-Scene, Prooftexts 3, no. 2 (1983): 11530.
13 Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, 5262; Genesis: Translation and Commentary (New
York: Norton and Company, 1996), 115.
14 Alter makes clear that a type scene is not simply a recurrent pattern in the text: its
complete set of components does not appear in any of its occurrences. His
discussion of allusion (in Sodom as Nexus: The Web of Design in Biblical
Narrative, Tikkun 1, no. 1 [1986]: 3038; and The World of Biblical Literature
[New York: Basic Books,1992], 11213) distinguishes type scenes from a mere
allusion, which is a dialogue between specific narratives. In the case of type
scenes, even if there is a dialogue between specific narratives, it exists because the
convention acts as a mediator, and the main dialogue is between the narrative and
the convention. Judging by his analyses and examples, we may say that a type
scene is also not just a family resemblance between a series of concrete scenes in
the text, which share certain features but not the complete set. Similarly, a type
scene is not a single prototypic scene within the text, which other scenes resemble
to greater or lesser degrees, and are read in its light. Alter, to my mind,
(re)constructs a scheme or scenario, that includes several critical features (a source
of water, a foreign man and a young woman meeting, watering, marriage), but
these are not sufficient; under them there is an order of slots for optional
instantiations by one of two alternatives. Each of the specific narratives in the
text fill in some of these slots, but not all of them (e.g., obstacles to overcome in
drawing water: a heavy stone covers the mouth of the well, vs. a gang of hostile
shepherds). The scenario that Alter sketches has the structure of a story organis
ized according to its own logic. Besides the proper exemplars of type scenes, the
biblical text contains some poor exemplars, which only allude to the type scene
(see section 9). These faded exemplars include only part of the critical features,
but have some of the optional ones (e.g., in 1 Sam. 9 there is a betrothal type
scene with maidens [nearot] who are going to draw water from a well, [lost] asses,
a man who has wandered to a foreign territory, a hurry, a feast, but instead of a
marriage, a kingdom will ensue).
15 The Midrash in Shemot Rabbah 1:32 says: Three got their couplings from the well:
Isaac, Jacob, and Moses. About Isaac it is written: And Isaac had come from the
approach to Beer-Laai-roi etc., and more, that Rebekah was coupled to Eliezer
to the spring [!]
16 Jack Miles, God: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 90.
17 The Well of Laai-roi, Well-of-the-living-one-who-sees-me (16:1314), is an

antithesis of water and life to the fire and smoke and carcasses of the Covenant
Between the Pieces (chapter 15), and to the fire and slaughter of the Moriah, a
name derived from YHWH-yireh, The Lord will see (22:14), to commemorate
God will see to the sheep for the offering my son (8).
18 I discuss it in Ezer ke-negdo, 21726.
19 All this genealogy was written just for Begot Rebekah, writes Rashi.
20 Menakhem Perry, Hadran al sipur yosef, Alpayim 29 (2005): 25478.

21 Despite what the Midrash and the medieval commentators say, it is unlikely that this
is still the same Eliezer.
22 Alter, in Genesis: Translation and Commentary, 50, is undoubtedly right in his reasons
for translating, in chapters 12 and 24, the word moledet as birthplace (and not
kinfolk, or as in the KJV and other translations, kindred). In 12:1 there is a
descending order of land/birthplace/fatherhouse, moving from the general to the
more specific, and these three terms are scattered in chapter 24 between verse 4
and verse 7. In the servants speech (38) a fourth term is added to the descending
order, mishpati (my family)a word that the servant puts into Abrahams
mouth. Thus when the KJV, which translates moledet as kindred, uses the same
word for mishpati in verse 38, it distorts the context of the servants fabricating
speech. More on the sense of moledet, see in the commentaries of Abraham ibn
Ezra and of Radak on verse 4; Sternberg, Poetics, 13435; Menahem Zevi
Kaddari, Milon ha-ivrit ha-miqrait (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press,
2006), 588.
23 One need only to compare this with the detailed instructions that Isaac gives Jacob
(28:2)to go to the house of his mothers father and to take a wife from the
daughters of his mothers brotherin order to appreciate the difference.
24 This interpretative paradigm was initiated, and was extensively demonstrated

through close reading, in The King through Ironic Eyes. Alter (in The Art of
Biblical Narrative) and Sternberg (in The Poetics of Biblical Narrative) have written
systematically on the poetics of repetition in the biblical narrative. The long
tradition of biblical commentary also dealt with accounting for the variations in
verbal repetitions, but offered local motivations that did not crystallize into a
comprehensive reading-proposal of which the variations were only one aspect.
Imaginative interpreters could always fill-in blanks and furnish ad hoc motivats
tions for every such difference, but only connecting them to a wider system of
diverse textual details would validate the motivations and turn them into a gap-
filling in the true sense of the term.
25 For an extensive and systematic presentation of this trend see Nehama Leibowitz,
Iyunim be-sefer be-reshit (Jerusalem: World Zionist Organization, 1972), 180207;

Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, 13152. Sternbergs is the best
interpretation of this kind.
26 Miles, God: A Biography, 62.
27 How ironic that in all of Isaacs chronicles to follow, the only segment in which
Rebekah does not take part (26:1233) deals with wells that his father dug and
the hostile Philistines blocked up, and with quarrels over wells that the shepherds
of Abimelech stole from him. Two alternative instantiations of one of the slots of
the betrothal type scene (see note 14), the covered well (which appears in the story
of Jacob), and the hostile shepherds (who appear in the story of Moses), are
conjoined here parodically (together with a feast and a concluding agreement)
nearly sixty years after Isaacs marriage, as an overture to the following story of
Rebekah swapping Isaacs sons. Vengeance should be served cold...
28 See also Bal, Death and Dissymmetry, 48; and Peggy L. Day, From the Child Is
Born the Woman: The Story of Jephtahs Daughter, in Peggy L. Day, ed.,
Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), 59.
29 It is reasonable that a man who sets out on a long journey with ten camels will have
people at his side, but the text does not mention them until verse 32, and it is
doubtful if any reader thinks of them beforehand. This distribution of informats
tion along the texts continuum is effective. It allows, temporarily, a space for the
manifest story to be established, and only retrospectively, when receiving the
information about the people who were with him, will the readers be able to
understand the full significance of watering the camels while not offering water
to the men. Moreover, delaying this information allows us to read verse 23 in an
odd, ambiguous context (see below).
30 In her reply to his question Whose daughter are you? she refers to her father, like a
proud feminist, as the son of her grandmother: Bethuel the son of Milcah (24;
as with the narrator in verse 15), whereas the servant, when reporting to the men
of her family, alters her words to Bethuel son of Nahor (47).
31 Rebekah is not the daughter of my masters brother, but his granddaughter. This
comic slip-of-the-tongue seems to result from the servants attempt to adapt his
words from the original scene (27)in which he thanked God who led me to
the house of my masters kinsmen [beit aei adoni]to the new context. Beit
aei adoni transforms here to bat ai adoni, the daughter of my masters
brother.
32 This sequence of events indeed happened, but not within the framework of a test
that was meant to reveal if Abrahams instructions were the right way. Subordins
nating it to this framework weakens the effect of Rebekahs appearance next to
the well: it is a testimony not of Gods choice, but only of his post-factum
approval of Abrahams choice. Had the servant claimed that the test by the well
was meant to determine which one of his masters relatives is the designated
bride, he could have extricated himself from the problem that his speech had
produced (the unnecessary digression to the well), but unfortunately, this simple
solution never crossed his mind. Even at the end of his speech he still insists that
the right way (as the test proved) is to take the daughter of my masters brother,
i.e., not necessarily Rebekah, and he intimidates that if Rebekah will not be given
to him, he will look for another girl from Abrahams clan, an option which will
equally be considered as the right way.
33 As medieval commentators understood it, and definitely not ten daysa meaningless
period for Laban, who would have been satisfied to delay the delivery even by
ten years.
34 David Penchansky, Staying the Night: Intertextuality in Genesis and Judges, in

Danna Nolan Fewell, ed., Reading between Texts: Intertextuality and the Hebrew
Bible (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox, 1992), 80. In the other three
instances of this scenethe staying of Jacob with Laban, the first scene of the
Concubine of Gibeah, and the staying of the messengers with Lotthe delay will
have unfortunate results.
35 Rabbi Abraham Bechor Shor comments ad loc.: This thing does not depend on our
position, since the Holy One has already given her to you. Take her and gothat
is to say: you yourself will take her without our permission.
36 Behold, Rebekah is before thee (51 [KJV]), which is addressed to the servant, does
not necessarily attest to Rebekahs presence in the same room, or tent. Compare
with Abimelechs dramatic address to Abraham, Behold, my land is before thee
(20:15 [KJV]), and with 1 Sam. 9:12.
37 In a compelling article by Yair Zakovitch and Avigdor Shinan, Va-tipol me-al ha-
gamal: le-gilguleha shel masoret miqrait temuhah, Hasifrut 29 (1979): 1049;
and in its shorter version twenty-five years later, in Lo kakh katuv ba-tanakh (Tel
Aviv: Yedioth Ahronoth Books, 2005), 21218, Zakovitch and Shinan wonder
about a blatant Midrashic tradition of at least ten stories, from the eleventh to the
fourteenth centuries, that deals with the possibility of an act of lechery that
happened between Rebekah and the servant. Such a vulgar tradition is,
according to Zakovitch and Shinan, most alien to the text, which is in their
minds an innocent story concerning a respectable meeting.
38 Here we have a small but characteristic instance of mutually exclusive systems of

gap-filling (a frequent structure in the Bible, which was first exposed in The
King through Ironic Eyes). Up until verse 65, all the instances of the appellation
man in the narrators discourse are accounted for by the hypothesis Rebekah is
ignorant about the servants identity, while they remain unaccountable under the
competing hypothesis, Rebekah knows. Yet, from the moment that Isaac
appears, the narrator constantly uses the term servant, even before the servant
tells Rebekah that Isaac is his master. This textual detail weakens the hypothesis
that Rebekah is ignorant, because it necessitates extensive gap-filling for verse
65 (as I have done). Hence, it is a strong point in favor of the possibility that
Rebekah has already found out the servants identity during the journey. On the
other hand, her covering herself with the veil in response to the servants answer
supports the first hypothesis. Has Rebekah already heard on the way who her
bridegroom is, and is ignorant only about his looks, or does she find it out only
now? Of course, it might be that Rebekah is excited by the sight of an unknown
man (64), and only later on will his identity be revealed to her, but this possibility
fits both hypotheses. This undecidability between the competing alternatives, the
oscillation between two incompatible hypotheses both of which are equally
dubious, and with no third possibility, is typical of many places in the biblical
story (see Perry and Sternberg, Zehirut, sifrut!: 648660; Perry, Alternative
Patterning).
39 Alter, How Convention Helps Us Read: 122.
40 I have discussed this extensively in Perry, Ezer ke-negdo.
41 Perry, ibid.
42 Perry, ibid., and Perry, Hadran al sipur yosef.
43 Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Ballantine, 1969), 72.
44 Yet, I do not claim that the private/domestic vs. public/national opposition is in

the Bible part and parcel of the gender dichotomy. The tension between the
private and the public-national is indeed central to the Bible, but the counter-
plots that dismantle the national perspective are often those of men who are
completely preoccupied with their personal life, and with the inner-drama of
their depth-psychology (like Samson, a judge and a national deliverer, who is
unaware, right up to his last day, of his national task, and whom none of his
people consider as a deliverer).
45 Pardes, 11.
46 Pardes, 2.
47 Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 27.

48 J. Cheryl Exum, Fragmented Women: Feminist (Sub)versions of Biblical Narratives
(Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press, 1993), 201.
49 See Bal, Death and Dissymmetry, 23435.
50 Trible, Texts of Terror, 80.
51 Exum, 191.
52 Bal, Death and Dissymmetry, 34.
53 Bal, Lethal Love; Murder and Difference (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1988); Death and Dissymmetry.
54 Menakhem Perry, Repudiation of Femininity: A Queer Reading of The Concubs

bine of Gibeah, paper presented at the Fifth Conference for Queer Theory in
Israel, Tel Aviv University, 2005.

Counter-Stories in The Bible Rebekah and PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Counter-Stories in The Bible Rebekah and PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Counter-Stories in the Bible: Rebekah and her Bridegroom, Abraham's Servant

Author(s): Menakhem Perry

Counter-Stories in the Bible:

W hen I wrote (in collaboration with Meir Sternberg) the essay

PROOFTEXTS 27 (2007): 275323. Copyright 2007 by Prooftexts Ltd.

in a lengthy sequel, Zehirut, sifrut! (Caution, a Literary Text!)2 From then on

2. Who is This Man?

The narrator of Genesis 24 refrains from naming Abrahams servant, in order to

3. Bride and Bridegroom next to the Well:

and especially on the effects of the variations or permutations in their different

4. Beginnings and Retardations

The customary reading of the Wooing of Rebekah sees it as a sequence of proper

patriarchs the importance of fertility and seed, as a kind of obsessive supreme

knows that in Mesopotamia there is a relative called Rebekah, a possible candids

Rebekahs actual reaction to him, in a specific situation, her prospective reactions

of my master Abraham (42) remains, a sort of a Mesopotamian personal or

9. She Took the Veil, and Covered Herself

Rebekah, a strong and independent woman, has chosen a bridegroom by herself.

The schematic sequence of the annunciation type scene (barrennessdivine

agents of feminine personal agendas of self-realization, and of familial agendas

the texts internal field of reference; I am not drawing up antipatriarchal perspects

demonstration of this history in a narrative is one of Gods interests, part of his

maba ironi: al ta bulotaw shel ha-mesaper be-sipur dawid u-bat-sheva u-shetei

1 Long before Isers reception-aesthetics and Minskys frame-theory became

2 Menakhem Perry and Meir Sternberg, Zehirut, sifrut!li-veayot ha-inerpreatss

4 Frank Kermode, Poetry, Narrative, History (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell,

8 This anonymity is a widespread technique in the biblical narrative (e.g., the

concubine and the Levite in the Concubine of Gibeah, or Samsons mother in

17 The Well of Laai-roi, Well-of-the-living-one-who-sees-me (16:1314), is an

18 I discuss it in Ezer ke-negdo, 21726.

20 Menakhem Perry, Hadran al sipur yosef, Alpayim 29 (2005): 25478.

24 This interpretative paradigm was initiated, and was extensively demonstrated

Iyunim be-sefer be-reshit (Jerusalem: World Zionist Organization, 1972), 180207;

26 Miles, God: A Biography, 62.

34 David Penchansky, Staying the Night: Intertextuality in Genesis and Judges, in

38 Here we have a small but characteristic instance of mutually exclusive systems of

39 Alter, How Convention Helps Us Read: 122.

40 I have discussed this extensively in Perry, Ezer ke-negdo.

42 Perry, ibid., and Perry, Hadran al sipur yosef.

43 Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Ballantine, 1969), 72.

44 Yet, I do not claim that the private/domestic vs. public/national opposition is in

47 Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 27.

49 See Bal, Death and Dissymmetry, 23435.

50 Trible, Texts of Terror, 80.

52 Bal, Death and Dissymmetry, 34.

54 Menakhem Perry, Repudiation of Femininity: A Queer Reading of The Concubs

You might also like