[In the following essay, Brisman highlights the method by which Biblical scholars study the composition of Genesis, and suggests that literary motivations, rather than sociological ones, guided the development of the source material of Genesis into its final form.]

In the King James translation, the Decalogue begins (or almost begins) with the injunction “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.” Although the Hebrew ‘al pānaî (as opposed to lěpānaî) clearly means “to my face” rather than “before my time,” there is a familiar truth represented in the English “before Me”: God's insistence on unrivaled priority of importance seems to require also a denial of antecedents. Christians and Jews may differ about whether the command is the first or the second in the Decalogue, but it is not hard to agree that the added ambiguity of the English accords with a theological absolute: This god tolerates no rivals, mediators, or predecessors. He is the original.

Human originality is a more problematic thing. Did any biblical writer “begin at the beginning,” or were all forever collecting, revising, transmuting material in more or less complicated relationship to the past? Today we are fascinated by Babylonian and Canaanite analogues or sources for Elohim and Yahweh stories, and modern scholarship routinely questions whether there was an original unity between the Elohim who is to have no others before him and the Yahweh (right before him—in the preceding verse) who spearheads the Exodus. We have come to regard the active worker who forms Adam from the earth in Genesis 2 as a very differently conceived character from the sublimely white-collar deity of chapter 1. The question “Which version of the creation of man is the more original?” may be in part a question about the relative antiquity of the various strands of Pentateuchal narrative, but it mingles easily with the literary question about which seems the more “original” in the sense of the stronger, more imaginative achievement.

From the literary study of the Pentateuch, there has emerged a general consensus about the “originality” of the J author in both the temporal and evaluative senses—at least when a major J author-compiler is distinguished from source-fragments, redactions, or additions “in the school of J.” For most readers who regard J as an author, he is the Pentateuchal author most gifted in producing the uncanny, most oblivious of the moral sensibilities and institutional needs that have been thought to mark other Pentateuchal sources. From the classical documentary study of the Pentateuch—i.e., the work of Graf, Wellhausen, and their followers—there emerged a consensus about the antiquity of J in relation to the other sources, a consensus regarded, for a hundred years, as close to fact as the Darwinian hypothesis of natural selection. Even in the flurry of recent challenges to the neatness of the documentary hypothesis, there have hardly been any adherents of the old notion of Hermann Hupfelt that (what we now call) P is the precursor text and groundwork for redactional additions.

Although there was some philological evidence for the relative earliness of J, the Wellhausen hypothesis was advanced less by the rigors of a scientific discipline than by the lure of a single, sweeping idea about the development of the text. Despite subsequent refinements in the history of religion and appreciation of narrative differences, the consensus about the earliness of J remains buttressed by the overwhelming simplicity of the idea of a melancholy progress from the amoral to the moral, from the lawless to the regulated, from the naïve to the partisan, from the unexpurgated to the decorous. In this assumption, the orthodox and the irreverent have stood united: Cynics—with Wellhausen at their lead—pointed to the pristine qualities of J and the loss as we give up his “many-colored robe of fancy” for the somber dress of scribe and priest; looking at the same facts but reading black where others saw white, some pious critics who took over the study of higher criticism pointed to the grand scheme of revelation, the unfolding in time of greater and greater understandings of religious truth.

Let us consider a well-known example of Wellhausen arguing for the priority of J. One of the most shocking and indisputably J verses of the Pentateuch is Exodus 4:24: “On the way, at a rest spot, Yahweh met [Moses] and sought to kill him.” Wellhausen assumes that Moses at this point in the narrative is uncircumcised, that he ought to have been, and that Yahweh is more disturbed by this omission than he was by Moses' uncircumcision of the lips. Here is the leader of the people about to take office, and the congressional subcommittee of One uncovers a troublesome flaw that can kill the nomination—strikingly troped as killing the nominee. But just what expectation of circumcision was there? Wellhausen argues that there must have been a tradition of circumcision before marriage, and that J recognized such a practice here as in Genesis 34, the story of Shechem. When Zipporah circumcises her son instead of her husband, throwing the son's foreskin at Moses' genitals and thus symbolically making him a h^atan dāmîm (bridegroom of blood), she delivers her husband from the wrath of Yahweh—and inaugurates the concept of infant circumcision as a milder substitute for the nasty adult practice.

This much is undoubtedly an impressive interpretation in its own right, and perhaps it gains further weight if we see Wellhausen's reading of the Zipporah story as an etiology of circumcision in line with his reading of the Adam and Eve story as an etiology of human misery. Both J texts get rewritten, in the Priestly accounts of circumcision and creation respectively, as part of “the convulsive efforts of later Judaism to deny that most firmly established of all the lessons of history, that the sons suffer for the sins of the fathers” (Prolegomena, II.viii.I.i). Both the narrative act of rereading an obligation and the representation of a central Hebrew ritual as being about revision (substituting a milder for a harsher cult practice) make the Exodus 4 passage too sophisticated for Wellhausen to claim that he spots the amoral, folkloric element in unadulterated form. But he holds on to the judgment that we have here a great piece of J narrative, in distinction from the circumcision story of Genesis 17, where the institution of the ritual “throws into the shade and spoils the story out of which it arose” (Prolegomena, II.viii.II.3). Wellhausen hails the imaginative triumph of the J story by reading it as revisionary in relationship to a ritual practice, though “original” in relationship to the belated Genesis 17 story.

The most surprising element of Wellhausen's interpretation remains his assumption of a sin of omission on Moses' part: Wellhausen so readily normalizes the sudden declaration of Yahweh's uncanny hostility! Usually such normalization is attributed to a belated, priestly writer or the redactor of the text. Suppose, however, that the J writer gains his power by unwriting a more normative account of the circumcision of the son. Suppose, that is, that behind the eerie encounter as we have it lay not the historicity of adult circumcision in Israel but a milder story of the institution of child circumcision at the time of Moses, or even a story like the Binding of Isaac, where God's apparent bloodthirsty will is a fictional “given,” necessary for the story's subsequent representation of a truer, kindlier divine nature. We can believe that Wellhausen's supposition about the uncircumcised Moses is more J than the normative, rabbinic readings that Moses failed only in regard to the circumcision (or the hour of circumcision) of his son—but we can do so without accepting the assumption that the story was invented to change, or to reflect a real change, in the practice of circumcision. If Zipporah calls upon Yahweh to “read” the circumcision of her son as the circumcision of Moses, J can call upon us to read the whole episode as a strong quarrel of man (woman) with god—or poet with precursor. The suddenness of Yahweh's attack on Moses would then be not a sign of a story that has been wrested from its introduction, but the story's own best wrestling move against the god of Stories Old. It would be in line with the argument developed in this book that if we suppose the Priestly account of circumcision in Genesis 17 to be a prevenient text, or if we let it represent the sort of text in the context of Mosaic materials that J encountered, then we can better appreciate the uncanny Exodus legend. Zipporah's moral initiative remains as surprising as Abraham's passive obedience to a no less terrible command, but we need no more suppose a history of adult circumcision than a history of child sacrifice in Israel. Zipporah's response—and the fact that only her voice endorses her response—accords with the dramatic attack of Yahweh in the same way that Abraham's silent response suits the Elohist's story of a god who does not take argument for piety. The originality of each author may be both a product of the writer's reworking of a more pallid precursor text and a theme exhibited in the characters and action of the text itself.

If it is incorrect to turn the tables on Wellhausen and to suppose the priority of Genesis 17, or even the priority of a Mosaic legend instituting circumcision in the way that Genesis 17 does, one might in any case suppose the priority of the expression h^atan dāmîm, a minimal text, perhaps, but a text all the same and not simply a sociological fact. The general point is that the originality of J does not depend on the absence of prevenient Elohistic or Priestly stories and laws, and that creative reworking of a legend and brilliant redactional tinkering may be activities of the same sort of mind—or the very same hand. If I close my books of Higher Criticism and read the Pentateuch itself, the originality of J often seems to me equally or better explained as involved in a swerve from a text like that which we also find preserved in scripture as we have it. For certain stories, therefore, the non-J material might best be appreciated as though it were in fact the scripture as J read it. On the other hand, it is not clear to me that in the evaluative sense of “original” J has a total monopoly on the quality. Some of the passages attributed to E in classical source-criticism are strikingly original, and there are a few P texts that on the basis of literary merit could hardly be passed off as belated, partisan, hack writing. To read the Pentateuch with a sense of its composite structure but without a predisposition toward the particulars of the attributions and datings of the Higher Critics is to confront a complex agon of voices that compete for authority, originality, or what is sometimes represented as “blessing.” We may feel that we know the tension to be fictitious since a redactor has assembled pieces of text from strands that do not have single authors or from strands whose authors were not conscious of one another. But actually we know no such thing, at least not while we are engaged in the actual reading of the text, however composite. We may have been repeatedly told such things, but the experience of reading the Pentateuch, and Genesis in particular, is an experience of confronting the copresence of voices that someone has assembled into some sort of uneasy harmony with one another. As soon as we add to the idea of tension the dimension of time—whether we regard sequentiality as relevant to the narrative strands themselves or only to the relation between the strands and a redactor—we introduce the analogies, and perhaps the models, of writer and precursor, man and God. Like Jacob wrestling with the angel, the writers of the various documentary strands make of their strife the quintessentially Israelite experience, where that adjective ambiguously denominates “mastery of” or (to borrow William Blake's term) “incorporeal war with” the God who has none other before him.

If most scholars of biblical studies dismiss the thought of influence or tension between the strands, strands representing single individuals at least one of whom was aware of others, purists of literary analysis scorn the personification of literary strands as themselves authors, persons with anxieties, debts, and wills to power. Yet if we are to pursue the literary study of scripture as anything other than the technical study of the redaction of the text, we do need to hypothesize authorial voices, with personality and intention. Or at least I need to do so, for my purpose in this book is to experiment with the thought of a truly literate and literary composition of Genesis. By literate I mean to suggest the possibility of one author actually able to read a text of another author, just as the author of Matthew could read the Gospel of Mark (most scholars believe) or the talmudic midrashist could read the text of the Pentateuch. By literary I wish to suggest the primacy of intertextual, as opposed to sociological or political, motives for invention. I cannot really hope to restore the dating of the documents as understood by Hupfeld; but I can hope to tilt the course of the literary study of the Bible, however slightly, from form criticism to literary criticism, from typological to agonistic models, from what Northrop Frye has popularized as the great code to what I would regard rather as the great competition, or the great competing codes of scripture. My immediate desire is to experiment, for once, with the thought of “originals” or originators of Genesis in inspired competition for divine benediction—or readers' allegiance.

In a startling parody of such a competition, Henrik Ibsen offers us, in Hedda Gabler, a helpful word of caution. The dreaded competition in the play concerns a professorship in history, valued as a stable source of income; Ibsen does not allow us to romanticize the competition into so noble a thing as a rivalry for a lady's affections or a mutually inspiring effort at great writing. Both Eilert Løvborg, the unconventional, J-like writer, and George Tesman, the priestlike groveler “best at putting other people's papers in order,” show themselves to be insufferable egoists who botch both life and work, and we can hardly consider it the moral reformation or spiritual self-transcendence of Tesman when (whether out of guilt or pure addiction to old scraps) he undertakes to piece together and preserve something of the dead Løvborg's work. When he first hears that Løvborg has published a new book, his immediate reaction is, “It must be something he has had lying around from his better days.” This careless, dismissive remark has haunted me for years as a representation of what we too often assume in supposing a Pentateuch that has been compiled by George Tesman. Løvborg's published book is new work, not something that has been lying around, and his really great book is very new work, still in manuscript. I cannot deny the basic truth of the Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis that the biblical equivalent of Løvborg's work falls, at some point, into Tesman-like hands. But scholars of the documentary hypothesis have tended to assume that the J stories must be relics of former days, and that the sorters and redactors have sometimes devotedly preserved, sometimes piously rewritten, the old J fragments, never matching their pure inspiration. Even Van Seters, perhaps our most creative proponent of a late J strand, does not return us to an aboriginal P source. He assumes that a more refined J version is a later version, but he still imagines a Tesman rewriting a Løvborg, not a young Løvborg making inspired use of the scraps left by a Tesman.

Although my aim is exegesis, not dramatic fiction, I need, like Ibsen, to flesh out the portraits of two characters—for whom I want names rather than just capital letters so as to keep in mind the idea of individuals rather than anonymous collections of materials from better days. When I started this experiment, I began with four names for four characters whom I expected to identify, more or less, with the traditional J, E, P, and R (redactor). Yet it soon became clear that my business in pursuing the thought of literary composition was to challenge the distinction between strand (ancient source) and redaction (the actual composition of the text as we know it). I wished to consider the possibility that literary motives, rather than sociological ones, were responsible for the differences between the strands, strands that emerged not as separate records of oral traditions but as text and ur-text, with an inspired author reading, modifying, recasting, or undoing his sources. In short, I wished to consider that Genesis had been composed in something of the way that the history plays of Shakespeare were composed—by one author of distinct personality quoting or revising freely the work of his sometimes noble, sometimes pedestrian predecessors. The analogy may seem particularly frail if we conceive of the strong revisionist in Genesis having the added obligation of being, unlike Shakespeare, the preserver of the very precursor text he is modifying and reshaping, but the analogy may be useful for reminding us of a distinction between what was history (at least familiar, authoritative text) and what is being introduced or rewritten for literary reasons.

My approach led me further into speculation about the literary methods and the psychology of the later author but revealed little about the separate identities or strands that made up the “precursor” text. Indeed, it seemed to me more and more to be the case that however composite in origin, the precursor held—for the revisionist—the status of a sacred text and is therefore best thought of as an ancestor rather than several. Granted the possibility of such intertextuality, one still must choose between two broad outlines of the history: In one, a character more or less to be identified with the author of the P strand reacted to a composite of the J and E texts; in another, a character more or less to be identified with the author of the J strand reacted to a composite of the E and P texts. The present book is the result of my gradual conviction that, despite more than a century of scholarly work affirming the historicity of the former of these hypotheses, the second has much more to commend it for the understanding of the Bible as literature. This book makes no claim to refute, on scholarly grounds, the documentary history as it has come to be generally accepted; my subject is speculation on a possible history of the literary imagination in Genesis—a subject necessarily more involved with fancy than with demonstrable facts, however hard one tries not to betray the philological facts. I realize that I may be naïve in trying to understand how the same person could introduce some of the most bizarre tales and some of the most normative, nationalistic formulas. I realize that I may be wrong in working with some of the documentary strands as though they actually constituted a precursor text, the precursor text, available as text to a midrashically imaginative revisionist. And I realize how much I endanger the credibility of a few “strong misreadings” by working through the same hypothesis for a multitude of what may be weak, redactional tinkerings. Yet even if these shadows of doubt were to grow into “presences that are not to be put by,” I would hold that a student of Genesis might come to a better understanding of the competition of theologies, the agon of literary voices, by supposing—at least for the “interposed ease” of this study's “false surmise”—that a belated author had before him an ur-text corresponding to the work actually preserved in certain fragments of our present text.

I shall call the belated author Jacob, after the character in Genesis who is his special hero and representative. To keep in mind the prevenience of the non-Jacobic material, I would like to call its author Isaac. But to suggest the association of this precursor with the (currently unpopular) idea of an Elohist, I shall indulge in the solecism of Eisaac when I mean the author rather than the character. My Jacob and Eisaac are not exactly J and E, for I am aware of the fiction by which I am substituting E and P texts for a hypothetical ur-text available to J. I will also be attributing more Priestly text to Eisaac than any scholar since Hupfeld has assigned to E, and I will be attributing additional passages and some “redactional misprisions” to Jacob. But concomitant with the reattributions, a certain consistency in what Wallace Stevens calls the “motive for metaphor” will typify these authorial characters.

In borrowing biblical names for our authors, I would like to borrow also something of the histories of the eponymous heroes, and we might begin with what could be called their birth trauma. Isaac is born of Sarah's desiccated loins and is named (at least as interpreted by Sarah) to suggest not joy or laughter but embarrassment: “God made a joke of me; everyone who hears will laugh at me” (Gen. 21:6). The traumatic event that Eisaac is destined to repeat and represent is the conflation of the sublime and the risible. Isaac is the most sage and serious of the patriarchs and would like to be regarded as “child of the Promise,” but his name invariably suggests “playing around,” sometimes specifically sexual playing, and is thus a reminder that children are engendered in the loins, not in the mental “conception” or wishful thought of their parents. As a scriptural voice, Eisaac represents the aspiration for dignity and the suppression of the risible, of the all-too-human. From the perspective of the dreaded Jacobic irony, Isaac is an “accident,” a quirk of late menopause. But from an Eisaacic context, Isaac's birth is an emblem of timely deliverance from childlessness and therefore from death. Insofar as he is born to Sarah he is a welcome embarrassment, a natural joy, but insofar as he is born to Abraham he is an object of sacerdotal care, and the very sentence announcing his birth proclaims the moment to be a religious occasion: “Sarah bore, to Abraham, a child against his old age [a defense “against” old age or death], on the timely occasion of which God spoke” (21:2). The word I have translated as “timely occasion,” rendered in the King James as “set time,” is also the Hebrew word for religious holiday. And so it has justly become in Jewish history: The birth of Isaac is the scriptural reading for the first day of the Jewish New Year's holiday, symbolizing the opportunity for rejuvenation that distinguishes this new year from the seasonal one. Isaac's birth trauma, then, is the jolt that turns naturalistic fact into religious occasion. Not himself a priest, he becomes the very essence and emblem of priestly activity, the child bound to or on the altar. Though the episode we call “the binding of Isaac” is of course about the eventual release of Isaac, it is the binding that constitutes Eisaac's human bondage to a religious institution's representation of substitution or the deferment of death. Isaac will go free, but he will go forth ever fixated on the hill of Moriah, ever fixed in our consciousnesses as the emblem of the sacerdotal. It is small wonder that the text represents Sarah as dying immediately after; the natural child dies in Isaac as though it had gone up in smoke, and the loss of the natural child is all that his mother can bear. Henceforth no youthful Form of Love, Isaac will be married off when the servant who is his alter ego substitutes filial piety for sexual desire.

One of the indications of the enormous pathos surrounding the sacrifice of the natural man to the “Eisaac” idea is that, from Isaac's birth to his parents until the death of his father, Isaac speaks but one line: “Here is the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for sacrifice?” This is a deeply moving moment, regardless of whether it is part of an Eisaacic narrative or a Jacobic interpolation. What must strike us, at the start of a quest for the Eisaacic line in Genesis, is the irony implicit in the idea of “Isaac's lines” (what he says in the Eisaacic script): to Isaac the character belong the most awesome silences, for his destiny has been written before his birth. To Eisaac the writer likewise belong the most awesome silences, for his piety translates composition into transmission, telling into retelling. What he “made up” he made in the image of what he received, always effacing selfhood. Himself “already written,” as it were, Eisaac becomes the symbol of the preservative character of religious tradition. The tradition may help preserve us from the terrors of facing ourselves as isolate, cut off before and aft, but in preserving our sense of continuity with generations past and to come, it preserves also itself. The Eisaacic text is carved in the altar stones, always already inscribed.

Jacob's birth is attended by a trauma of a different order. Born to succeed—at least in the sense of being second in the patriarchal roster—Eisaac's characteristic anxiety is that he might trespass beyond the limits of prescribed secondariness. But Jacob's birth is attended by no annunciation of comparable status, and Jacob's characteristic anxiety is that a less desirable secondariness might prove his lot in life. Where Isaac's birth is announced by an angel, Jacob's has to be specially entreatied of a God who may have slumbered. Where Isaac is born sole child of his mother, and is specially welcomed into the faith with the first party in scripture, Jacob has to share his birth with his brother, and his childhood is completely elided from the biblical account. We can fill in the childhood traumas, however, by voicing for the child a midwife's observation raised beyond natural taunt to nightmarishly internal threat: “Jacob, you are a heel, a hanger-on, an afterbirth or after-word, a secondary talent and no original!” It is against this that Jacob asserts himself as the original, patron of writers who achieve that mastery we call having one's own voice. Crucial to this idea of Jacob is the distinction between the prophecy about Isaac, made to Abraham, and the prophecy about Jacob, made to Rebecca alone. She has to solicit God for some word of comfort concerning the painful struggle in her womb, and God responds, as I understand it, to Rebecca—not to Rebecca and Isaac. What is known to her alone, and absorbed in the very marrow of Jacob's bones, is not only the final outcome but the ferocity of the struggle for priority in matters that count. We can hear, in that prophecy of the two brothers struggling for preeminence, some of the fierce nationalism that so distinguishes the agonistic God of Jacob from the more dignified and distant universal ruler his father worshiped.

It is convenient to represent the theological differences between Eisaac and Jacob by giving the god each worships a separate name. We can call Eisaac's god Elohim, thus transliterating the general name by which he is called. More often we can just say “God.” But Jacob's god has a proper name as well as some other, more human attributes or appearances. This is not a scholarly book, in step with Anglo-American successors to the justly revered Germanic tradition, and so to avoid the scholarly “Yahweh,” and to suggest something of the familiarity bordering on sacrilege that is associated with the appearance and naming of the deity in Jacobic narratives, I shall coin the transliteration Yava. If the coinage in Hebrew really belongs to Jacob, a Jacob who can read and react to Eisaac's text and Eisaac's god, we will not be surprised to find Jacob occasionally referring to Elohim; Jacob can talk about and name the Eisaacic god. The name Yava, on the other hand, is totally absent from the Eisaacic text. Perhaps we can say that the development of the concept of Yava from its Eisaacic predecessor represents, in brief, the development of the voice of Jacob.