To the Editor:
I particularly enjoyed Robert Alter’s article, “Scripture and Culture” [August], but was confused by his biblical references on page 48, which seem to be wrong, and by his use of the word “deceit,” which I find translated as “subtilty” in my copy of the Bible.
The Esau-Jacob story is really one of the most harrowing episodes in the Bible for me. In my youth, I thought it was an unacceptable example of God’s unfairness because Esau’s fate defied the concept of free will with which man was supposedly endowed. Even worse than God’s answer to Rebekah’s question, “Why am I thus?,” was that of Rashi, who said that the reason for the struggle “within her” was that when Rebekah passed a temple of the infidel, Esau struggled to emerge and when she passed a synagogue, Jacob struggled to emerge. In utero, then, one fetus had already been sanctified, the other stigmatized. Why, then, did the Lord go to all the trouble of making Esau the firstborn? In fact, why did God wish upon his parents this loathsome creature whom, according to Malachi (1:2-4) and Romans (9:11-13) repeating Malachi, the Lord hated (“And I hated Esau, and laid his mountains and his heritage waste”).
I always thought the Esau-Jacob story, with Jacob grabbing Esau’s heel during childbirth, was an inexplicable manifestration of celestial injustice. Why should a just and merciful God hate an unborn child? The Esau-Jacob story documents the indefensible doctrine of infant damnation. And what shall we say about Elisha—he who in the name of the Lord cursed the little children who mocked him and his bald head? And so “there came forth two she-bears out of the wood and tare forty and two children of them.”
The Midrash tells the story that when Pharaoh ordered the Jewish children to be walled in alive in the pyramids, the Angel Michael seized one of them and held him up to the heavenly court. When God saw the frightened child, He was moved to such compassion that He decided then and there to end the exile. So we have another question, one raised by Elie Wiesel: “One Jewish child succeeded in moving God, but one million Jewish children did not. I try to understand and I cannot.” Who can? And who can understand the condemnation of the unborn Esau who, when he met Jacob twenty years later, generously forgave his brother?
Arnold Beichman
Naramata, British Columbia
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Robert Alter writes:
My thanks to Arnold Beichman for calling attention to two errors of chapter reference that crept into my text. The initial occurrences of the phrase “took the blessing” are both in Genesis 27, verses 35 and 36, and not, as I had it, in Chapters 32 and 37. As for “subtilty” instead of “deceit” for the Hebrew mirmah, the King James Version uses the former in its older sense of “craftiness, especially of a treacherous kind” (OED), so there is no real difference between my translation and the KJV.
Questions about the dooming of innocent children are of course unanswerable. I would only observe that the notion that Esau was “hated” by God from the womb is less an element of the original story than the consequence of later archetypal readings. That process, building on the eponymous character of the two brothers, was obviously well under way by the time of Malachi. In the rabbinical period, Esau’s fate was sealed as Esau-Edom became the symbol of Rome, the archetype of pagan iniquity and brutal oppression. Rashi, writing in the 11th century, reads Genesis through the optic of that archetypical tradition, but the original story offers a more multifaceted portrait of Esau and leaves God’s moral judgment of the older twin in the realm of uncertain inference. Esau is clearly destined to lose the birthright, but we are left to wonder at times about the moral status of the brother who wrests the birthright for himself.
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