Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis

by Robert Graves

  The first woman to reach the well was young, stately and dressed as a virgin. She descended the steps, and soon re-appeared with a brimming pitcher on her shoulder. Eliezer asked leave to quench his thirst from it. The woman answered: ‘Drink, my lord,’ and handed him the pitcher. Eliezer drank, then awaited her next words. When she said: ‘I will also water your camels,’ and emptied the pitcher into a trough, he knew her for God’s choice. Eliezer fetched the bridal gifts—a golden nose-ring weighing half a shekel, and two golden bracelets of ten shekels’ weight—then, having set the ring in her nostrils and the bracelets on her wrists, he asked: ‘Whose daughter are you?’ She replied: ‘Bethuel is my father: Nahor’s son by his wife Milcah. I am named Rebekah.’

  Eliezer asked again: ‘Will there be lodging for us in your father’s house?’

  She said: ‘Yes, we have sufficient lodging, also straw and green fodder for your camels.’

  Eliezer at once prostrated himself and thanked God that he had been led to Abraham’s kinsfolk.

  Rebekah hurried home to announce Eliezer’s arrival; and when her brother Laban saw the golden ornaments she wore, he ran to the well and cried: ‘Come, stranger, with God’s blessing! I have made ready a room for your lodging, and a stable for your beasts.’ He took Eliezer and his fellow-servants to Bethuel’s house, where they ungirded and fed the weary camels. Water was brought to wash the travellers’ feet, and platters of food placed before them. But Eliezer said: ‘First let me reveal my errand!’ He then told Bethuel and Laban of his mission, of Abraham’s riches, and of his own providential encounter with Rebekah, ending: ‘Pray decide at once, my lords, whether you will gratify my master’s wish, or whether you will not.’

  Bethuel and Laban both replied: ‘Since the hand of God is manifest in this matter, how dare we oppose Him? Take Rebekah and go; she shall be Isaac’s wife, as God wills.’

  Eliezer bowed low in thanksgiving, then took out bridal garments and more jewels from the saddle-bags; presenting rich gifts also to Rebekah’s mother, and to Laban. Then they all feasted merrily. The next day, Eliezer was for going home, but Laban and his mother desired Rebekah to stay ten days longer. Eliezer said: ‘Do not delay a servant of God! I must return to my master.’ They asked Rebekah: ‘Will you accompany this honest man at once?’ When she answered: ‘I will,’ they let her go with their blessing. Laban said: ‘May you become the mother of unnumbered thousands, sister; and may they hold the city gates of all who hate them!’

  Rebekah, attended by her nurse Deborah and other bond-women, followed Eliezer to Canaan. Some days later, at sunset, they reached the well of Lahai-Roi, where God had once comforted Hagar. Rebekah alighted from her camel, and asked: ‘Who can this be: walking across the field to greet us?’ When Eliezer replied: ‘It is my master’s son,’ she quickly veiled her face.

  After hearing Eliezer’s story, Isaac brought Rebekah into the tent which had been Sarah’s. That night they lay together, and he ceased mourning for his mother.295

  (b) Some say that Abraham formerly planned to choose Isaac’s wife from among the daughters of his friends Aner, Eshcol and Mamre who were pious men, though Canaanites. But God, when blessing him on Mount Moriah, revealed the bride-to-be as his brother Nahor’s newly born grand-daughter—Isaac’s paternal cousins having first claim on him as a husband.296

  Yet since a girl cannot be given in marriage until at least three years and one day old, Abraham refrained from sending Eliezer on his mission until this time had elapsed; others even say that he waited fourteen years, until Rebekah should be nubile.

  When forbidden by Abraham to choose Isaac a Canaanite wife, Eliezer offered him his own daughter. Abraham, however, replied: ‘You, Eliezer, are a bondman, Isaac is free born: the cursed may not unite with the blessed!’297

  (c) Some say that among the Aramaeans a father would deflower his virgin daughter before her wedding; and that Bethuel, upon agreeing to Rebekah’s marriage, would have dishonoured her in this manner, had he not suddenly died. According to others, Bethuel, as King of Harran, claimed the sole right to deflower brides and, when Rebekah became nubile, the princes of the land gathered around, saying: ‘Unless Bethuel now treats his own daughter as he has treated ours, we shall kill them both!’298

  (d) According to others Laban, seeing the rich gifts Rebekah brought back from the well, had planned an ambush for Eliezer, but awe of his gigantic stature and numerous armed retainers made him desist. Instead, he pretended great friendship, and set a platter of poisoned food before Eliezer. The archangel Gabriel, entering unseen, exchanged this platter with Bethuel’s, who died instantly. Though Laban and his mother wished Rebekah to stay until they had mourned Bethuel for a full week, Eliezer mistrusted Laban and demanded that Rebekah should leave home at once. Being now an orphan, she could make her own decisions, and told Laban: ‘I shall go, even if it be against your will!’ Thus constrained to agree, he blessed her with such mockery that she was barren for many years.

  (e) When the travellers neared Hebron, Rebekah saw Isaac on his way back from Paradise, walking on his hands, as the dead do. She took fright, fell off her camel and was hurt by the stump of a bush. Abraham greeted her as he stood at the tent door, but said to Isaac: ‘Bondmen are capable of any deceit. Take this woman into your tent, and finger her to see whether she is still a virgin after this long journey in Eliezer’s company!’ Isaac obeyed and, finding Rebekah’s maidenhead broken, sternly asked how this had come about. She answered: ‘My lord, I was frightened by your appearance, and fell to the ground, where the stump of a bush pierced my thighs.’ ‘No, but Eliezer has defiled you!’ cried Isaac. Rebekah, swearing by the Living God that no man had touched her, showed him the stump still wet with her virginal blood; and he believed at last.

  As for the faithful Eliezer, who had been near death because of a suspected crime, God took him alive into Paradise.299

  ***

  1. Abraham refused to let Isaac marry a Canaanite wife (Genesis 11. 24) by the ancient matrilocal law which insists that a husband must leave home and live with his wife’s kinsfolk. Instead, he chose him a wife from among his patrilocal cousins at Harran. (Doubtless he would have preferred a daughter of his ally and nephew Lot, but both had made themselves ineligible by their precipitate acts of incest.) Later, Isaac and Rebekah similarly refused to let their son Jacob marry a Canaanite or Hittite maiden (Genesis XXVII. 46; XXVIII. 1—see 45). Matrilocal marriage was also the rule in Mycenaean Greece, and the first woman said to have made a patrilocal marriage, despite parental opposition, was Odysseus’s wife Penelope; who veiled her face, when headed for Ithaca, in a manner reminiscent of Rebekah.

  2. Midrashic embroideries on the Rebekah myth incorporate various ancient traditions. Hebrew patriarchs demanded virginity from brides, and in several Near and Middle Eastern countries the bride’s maidenhead is still tested on her wedding night by the bridegroom’s finger. Canaanite women, however, were promiscuous before marriage, as was customary among all matrilineal societies of the Eastern Mediterranean.

  A legend that Isaac came to meet Rebekah walking upside down, after a stay in Paradise (see 11. 6), is an example of rabbinical humour, explaining her startled question: ‘Who is this that comes walking?’

  3. That Bethuel’s wife and son are left to settle the marriage contract with Eliezer on his behalf; and that Laban, not Bethuel, blesses Rebekah, is unusual enough to call for an explanation: this the midrash supplies by presuming his sudden death. Perhaps the chronicler emphasizes Laban’s part at Bethuel’s expense because Laban’s daughters Leah and Rachel subsequently married Isaac’s son Jacob (see 44).

  4. The jus primae noctis of many primitive tribes (see 18. 8) is exercised sometimes by a girl’s father, sometimes by a chieftain. Herodotus reports it among the Adyrmachidae, a Libyan people settled between the Canopic mouth of the Nile and Apis, about whose customs the midrashic commentator may have heard. Laban’s use of the word asor suggests that the Genesis account is based on an Egypto-Hebra
ic source—‘asor’ being an Egyptian ten-day week.

  5. Nahor’s twelve sons show him to have ruled a twelve-tribe confederacy, like those of Israel, Ishmael, Etruria and the Amphictyonic League of Greece—twelve in honour of the Zodiac. His capital seems to have been Padan-Aram, or Harran (see 23. 1 and 24. 10). Some of Nahor’s eight sons by Milcah (‘Queen’) later migrated from the neighbouring desert to Northern Arabia. Three of Reumah’s four sons are recorded by place-names in Southern Syria and Northern Transjordan, which proves a West-Semitic tribal federation of Nahor to have existed before the Aramaean conquest.

  6. The leading character in Genesis XXIV, first described as Abraham’s ‘chief-steward’, is afterwards termed either ‘the servant’, ‘Abraham’s servant’, or ‘the man’. He even withholds his own name when introducing himself to Bethuel and Laban. Yet all Biblical commentators assume him to have been Eliezer of Damascus, whom Abraham, while still childless, regretfully mentions as his prospective heir (Genesis XV—see 28. a). The chronicler clearly wished to emphasize that Eliezer had been no more than Abraham’s slave and God’s instrument.

  7. When Abraham orders Eliezer ‘Put your hand under my thigh!’, this was a euphemism for ‘touch my sexual organ’, a most solemn form of oath, which served to remind him of the circumcision rite that bound Abraham and all his household in God’s service. Jacob used the same oath when he made Joseph swear to bury him in the Cave of Machpelah (Genesis XLVII. 29—see 60. a). Rwala Bedouin of the Syrian Desert still preserve this custom. A. Musil has written lately:

  When a chief wishes to extract the truth from a tribesman, he springs forward, lays his right hand on the man’s belly underneath the belt, so as to touch his sexual organ, and exclaims: ‘I adjure you by your belt, by this thing that I touch, and by all that lie down to sleep before you at night, to give me an answer that will please God!’

  The belt which is laid aside for intercourse, signifies a man’s wife; the sexual organ, children; and ‘all that lie down to sleep’, his herds.

  37

  ISAAC IN GERAR

  (a) Isaac made ready to visit Egypt because of a famine in his own land; but since God forbade him, while renewing the benediction bestowed on Abraham, he went to Gerar as a guest of Abimelech, King of the Philistines. There, guided by Abraham’s example, he passed the lovely Rebekah off as his sister. One day the King happened to look out of a palace window and saw Isaac and Rebekah making marital love. He reproached Isaac, saying: ‘Why have you deceived me? Some courtier of mine might have secretly enjoyed your wife, and thought no harm of it.’ Isaac said: ‘I would rather thus be dishonoured, than murdered by a jealous man!’

  Isaac was given land in Gerar, and for every grain sown he reaped a hundredfold. The Philistines so envied his flocks, herds and riches that, soon after the famine ended, Abimelech asked him to leave the city.300

  ***

  1. This is the third instance of the same borrowing from the Egyptian Tale of the Two Brothers (see 26 and 30); but here the King, having made no attempt to seduce his guest’s wife, does not need to compensate him; and Isaac deliberately lies, rather than telling a half-truth like Abraham. Midrashic commentators identify the Abimelech whom Isaac deceived with Benmelech, son of Abraham’s host Abimelech, who adopted his royal title (Mid. Leqah Tobh Gen. 126; Sepher Hayashar 84).

  2. This myth bridges the gap between Isaac’s youth and old age; justifies the use of deception when Israelites are in danger abroad; and demonstrates God’s care for their ancestor. One midrash enlarges on Isaac’s wealth by quoting a proverb: ‘Rather the dung of his mules, than all Abimelech’s gold and silver!’ Another records that as soon as Isaac left Gerar, the prosperity that he had brought vanished with him: bandits sacked the royal treasure-house, Abimelech became a leper, wells dried up, crops failed (Gen. Rab. 707, 709; Mid. Leqah Tobh Gen. 126; Targ. Yer. ad Gen. XXVI. 20, 28).

  38

  THE BIRTHS OF ESAU AND JACOB

  (a) When Isaac prayed that God would lift the twenty-year curse of barrenness from Rebekah, she at once conceived twins. Soon they began struggling with each other in her womb, so violently that she longed for death; but God reassured Rebekah, saying:

  ‘Two nations are in your womb;

  Two peoples will rise therefrom.

  One shall be proved the stronger:

  For the elder shall serve the younger!’

  Esau, Rebekah’s first-born, was covered with red, shaggy hair; and, because the other came out clutching his heel, she named him Jacob. Esau grew up to be a cunning hunter, a man of the rocky wilderness; whereas Jacob lived quietly at home, guarding his flocks and herds.301

  (b) Some say that the colour of Esau’s hair signified murderous inclinations; and that Jacob was conceived before him, since if two pearls are placed in a narrow phial, the first to enter emerges last.302

  (c) Whenever Rebekah passed a Canaanite shrine during her pregnancy, Esau struggled to get out; whenever she passed a house of righteous prayer, Jacob did likewise. For he had addressed Esau in the womb: ‘The world of flesh, my brother, is not the world of spirit. Here is eating and drinking, marriage and procreation; there, none of these are found. Let us divide the worlds between us. Take which you prefer!’ Esau hastily chose the world of flesh.303

  (d) Others say that Samael helped Esau in this pre-natal struggle; and Michael, Jacob; but that God intervened on Jacob’s behalf, saving him from death. Nevertheless, Esau so cruelly tore Rebekah’s womb that she could never conceive again. Otherwise Isaac might have been blessed with as many sons as Jacob.304

  (e) Jacob was born circumcised—as were only twelve other saints, namely Adam, Seth, Enoch, Noah, Shem, Terah, Joseph, Moses, Samuel, David, Isaiah and Jeremiah; though some add Job, Balaam and Zerubbabel. Isaac circumcised Esau at the age of eight days; but in later years, he subjected himself to a painful operation which made him look as though he had never been circumcised.305

  (f) At first the difference between the twins was no more than that between a myrtle-shoot and a shoot of thorn. Afterwards, however, while Jacob piously studied the Law, Esau began to frequent Canaanite shrines and do acts of violence. Before the age of twenty, he had committed murder, rape, robbery and sodomy. God therefore blinded Isaac: which preserved him from the neighbours’ silent reproaches.306

  ***

  1. Like Sarah, Rebekah gave birth only once, after years of barrenness. So did Samuel’s mother, Hannah the Levite (1 Samuel I). Rachel was long barren before bearing Joseph, and waited many years more until she conceived Benjamin and died in childbirth. None of these women had daughters, and in each case the son was peculiarly blessed by God. Does this perhaps record a tradition of childlessness required from a naditum priestess (see 29. 2) over a certain term of years—as from the Vestal Virgins at Rome—and of a peculiar sanctity enjoyed by any son born afterwards?

  2. Another pre-natal struggle between twins occurs in the myth of Perez and Zerah (Genesis XXXVIII. 27–30), whom Judah fathered on his daughter-in-law Tamar; but whose post-natal wars have not been recorded. These two Hebrew instances are paralleled in Greek myth by the struggle between Proetus and Acrisius in the womb of Queen Aglaia (‘Bright’), which portended a bitter rivalry for the Argive throne. When their father died, they agreed to reign alternately; yet Proetus, having seduced Acrisius’s daughter Danae, was banished from the kingdom and fled overseas. There he married the Lydian King’s daughter and returned to Argolis at the head of a large army. After a bloody but indecisive battle, the twins agreed to divide the kingdom and each rule half. Acrisius, who claimed descent from Belus (Baal), twin-brother of Agenor (Canaan), was not only grandfather to Perseus, whose exploits in Palestine have enriched the night sky with five constellations—Andromeda, Cassiopeia, Cepheus, Draco and Perseus—he was also an ancestor of the Achaean Kings Menelaus and Ascalus (see 35. 6). The Achaeans who came to Syria and are referred to in the Bible as Hivites (see 30. 4) may have brought a myth with them of a pre-natal fight between twins, w
hich was applied to the division of Abraham’s patrimony between Israel (Jacob) and Edom (Esau); the same motive may have been used again in a lost myth about Perez and Zerah to account for an early partition of Judah. Esau probably begins as the shaggy Hunter-god Usöus of Usu (Old Tyre), mentioned in Sanchuniathon’s Phoenician History as brother to Samemroumus (see 16. 5). But his hairiness foreshadows the Edomite occupation of Mount Seir, which means ‘shaggy’—that is to say ‘covered with trees’—and he had red hair because Edom was popularly construed as meaning adorn or admoni, ‘tawny red’.

  3. The Edomites, or Idumaeans—at one time tributaries to Israel, though earlier arrivals in Palestine—seized part of Southern Judaea after Nebuchadrezzar’s capture of Jerusalem (Ezekiel XXXVI. 5) including Hebron. However, in the second century B.C., Judah the Maccabee destroyed Hebron and the villages surrounding it (1 Maccabees V. 65), and subsequently the Idumaeans were defeated and forcibly converted to Judaism by John Hyrcanus. Two generations later, Herod the Edomite became King of the Jews, murdered the last Maccabean prince, and was confirmed in power by the Romans. Though officially respecting the Mosaic Law, and rebuilding God’s Temple at Jerusalem, he raised several shrines to pagan deities. The midrashic Esau is thus a combined portrait of Herod and his Romanized sons Archelaus, Herod Antipas and Herod Philip. Esau’s uncircumcised appearance refers to these ‘sons of Edom’ and their associates who had the operation known as epispasm performed on themselves, so that they could participate without embarrassment in Hellenistic sports, which required complete nakedness. The view of Esau as an evil-doer is midrashic, however, not Biblical.

  4. The Law given Moses on Mount Sinai was held to have been in existence before Creation and taught in Pharisaic style by Noah’s son Shem, alias Melchizedek (see 27. d). Three further names added to the twelve saints born circumcised brings their number to fifteen, probably celebrating the fifteen holy steps of Ascent in the Temple.