James L. Kugel - The Ladder of Jacob: Ancient Interpretations of the Biblical Story of Jacob and His Children

THELADDER OFJACOB

THELADDER OFJACOB

ANCIENT INTERPRETATIONS

OF THE BIBLICAL STORY

OF JACOB AND HIS CHILDREN

James L. Kugel

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2006 by James L. Kugel

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should

be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,

3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY

All Rights Reserved

eISBN: 978-1-40082-701-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kugel, James L.

The ladder of Jacob : ancient interpretations of the biblical story of Jacob

and his children / James L. Kugel.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Jacob (Biblical patriarch) 2. Bible. O.T. GenesisCriticism, interpretation,

etc., Jewish. I. Title.

BS580.J3K84 2006

222.11092dc22

2005020584

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Sabon and Trajan Printed on acid-free paper.

pup.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For R.

Contents

Jacob and the Bibles Ancient Interpreters

The Ladder of Jacob

The Rape of Dinah, and Simeon and Levis Revenge

Reubens Sin with Bilhah

How Levi Came to Be a Priest

Judah and the Trial of Tamar

A Prayer about Jacob and Israel from the Dead Sea Scrolls

Acknowledgments

wish to express my thanks to my editor at Princeton University Press, Fred Appel, for his help in making this book a reality. Thanks as well to Deborah Tegarden and Vicky Wilson-Schwartz for their editing skills, and to my literary agent, Ellen Geiger. A number of the chapters of the present book have been preceded by articles published in various journals, and I am grateful to those journals for permission to use parts of the articles here. It may be helpful for readers if I mention here the names of the articles and how the present treatment is different from the original.

Most of chapter 2, The Ladder of Jacob, is altogether new, but the section dealing with the Slavonic text The Ladder of Jacob is based in part on an article of mine by the same name, published in the HTR 88 (1995): 20927. I should note that I have translated more of the Slavonic text than appeared in that article and have proposed some new readings as wellin particular, an interpretation of that texts reference to a strange deity named Falkonagargail.

Chapter 3, The Rape of Dinah, and Simeon and Levis Revenge, and chapter 4, Reubens Sin with Bilhah, appear here in essentially the same form as two earlier articles, The Story of Dinah in the Testament of Levi, HTR 85 (1992): 134, and Reubens Sin with Bilhah in the Testament of Reuben, in David P. Wright et al., Pomegranates and Golden Bells: Studies inHonor of Jacob Milgrom (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1995), 52554. I have, however, added a brief section, The Question of Intermarriage, to the first of these articles; I have also modified both articles to fit the present format and updated the footnotes.

Much of chapter 5, How Levi Came to Be a Priest, is new, although the first half of it incorporates some parts of an earlier article, Levis Elevation to the Priesthood in Second Temple Writings, HTR 86 (1993): 164.

Chapter 6, Judah and the Trial of Tamar, is new.

Chapter 7, A Prayer about Jacob and Israel from the Dead Sea Scrolls, is a reworking of 4Q369 Prayer of Enosh and Ancient Biblical Interpretation, DSD 5 (1998): 11948.

THELADDER OF JACOB

Chapter One

JACOB AND THE BIBLES

ANCIENT INTERPRETERS

ne question that troubled ancient readers of the Bible was that of the purpose of the book of Genesis. This first book of the Torah (Pentateuch) was in some ways the most problematic. Those that followedExodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomyall contain divinely given laws, so their purpose was clear enough: they were written in order to guide people along the proper path in life. But Genesis has no laws or commandments to speak of; it is a collection of stories about Israels ancient ancestors, starting with Adam and Eve and leading up to the founders of the Israelite nation, Jacob and his twelve sons. Now, history may be interesting, even important, but to a certain way of thinking, history per se does not deserve a place in the Torah. Why, then, was the book of Genesis included?

Various answers were given to this question in ancient times.

The author of the book of Jubilees (early second century B.C.E.), for example, understood Genesis to be a crypto-halakhic work; that is, although it has no overt laws per se, he maintained, its stories nonetheless contain legal teachings in hidden form, alluding here and there to divine commandments and practices that had been instituted with Israels ancestors long before the great revelation of biblical law at Mount Sinai. Philo of Alexandria (ca. 20 B.C.E to ca. 30 C.E.), somewhat analogously, saw the various people whose lives are recounted in Genesis as walking embodiments of the laws that were to be given later on at Mount Sinai. Many writers from the time of Philo and afterward, including the founders of Christianity and rabbinic Judaism, saw the heroes and heroines of Genesis as moral exemplars, whose lives might serve as models for generations to come. This last, indeed, has been the dominant approach to the book of Genesis from late antiquity almost to the present day.

But when it comes down to cases, this last approach runs into problems, particularly with regard to Jacob and his family. Jacob himself begins life as a bit of a sharpster: he cheats his brother Esau out of his rightful inheritance as the firstborn of the family, then tricks his poor, blind father into giving him a paternal blessing intended for Esau. Next Jacob travels to his uncle Labans house, where he ends up acquiring, apparently by somewhat questionable methods, most of Labans flocks (a prime form of wealth in ancient Israel). Thereafter he departs, like a thief in the night, for his homeland of Canaan. Meanwhile, Jacobs wife Rachel, Labans daughter, is shown in a hardly better light; the narrative reports that she stole her fathers sacred images (