Saturday, October 31, 2009
Friday, October 30, 2009
twenty things about the detroit art gallery
- they are renovating the asian art collection, so had a small amount in an out of the way corridor, but in that corridor, they had a korean moon jar, so i have seen two this year (an excellent example, but slightly off centre, and not nearly as gleamingly white as the one in the met)
- john terronao's glittery pink and grey canvas, with an affixed pattern of rhinestones and crystals, a queered, decorative remake of modernism
- a good frankenthaler, a great lewis, a fairly unique still, a medicore kline, and one of the best newmans ive seen
- two chardin's, a v. tight, v. small still life of eggs and copper pots, in the midst of a display of contemprous severes pottery; and a large dead hare painting, with purple flowers. the face of the rabbit was mournful, and suffering, i have this thesis that the dutch and french game paintings of esp rabbits and foxes have a cultural heritage of the descended christ, this is the only one that i saw that had the suffering.
- a room with a big andre cedar peice, a great irwin perspelx disk, and a kelly from the early 60s was too crowded
- a huge early stella in lemon yellow and rasberry proved how strong a coulourist and a composer her was, a bigger, ugly stella from teh 80s proved how throughly he lost his shit
- small room of fluxusm, late 70s conceptualism sort of does not workin the musuem
- the canvas underneath lichenteins ben days is an off linen, resembling news prints.
- one of the best rberg combines ive seen, from the early 60s, the flattening of the gestural instinct
- fontanna's gaps and rips become holes because of the black backing, and have an element of scuptural energy
- landseer are so fucking big
- a great, brilliant rachel reyer, so much visual energy, so much colour, with flowers thick but distinct, and then bees, spiders, ants and the like climbing thru them
- some great english paintings, including a landseer, a holman hunt, and some others
- my favourite whistler, fireworks, all greens, and blacks with a bright yellow and crimson splashes
- a gaugin self portrait, with a colour field of gold and pine green
- half a dozen of the best late matisses i have seen, including some persian portraits, and coffe from 36
- riveria's murals are better paintings and worse propganda then i imagined
- imewood polychrome christs and madonnas, including one palm sunday peice that has an almost 1-1 scale donkey,
- a german oak carving based on weydons discension, almost real time interperation
- a bunch of dutch paintings, some nice church interirors from the 18th century, one of carrot selling, some caruousing tavern scenes, brughels wedding feast, and the like
- a 1532 Holebin Tempera portrait with a bright blue background, a oaken lectern, and a woman with an elabroate linen wimple, no more then 8x11
- a version of the toronto arts centre cranach, with the snake, the two nudes, and the stag. i do not know what the stag symbolizes
- they do this great thing where the decorative objects, including furntiure, serving dishes, and the like are in wiht the traditional art
- yorubhttp://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=3101723a terra cotta portraits
- assionbane sheilds and drums
- byzantine drawings on slip pottery
- avedon fashion fotos, he loved his models, his realtionship to tree, lake and davima like man rays rship to kiki
- mike nichols and suzy lake meta contextual papparazzi shot from 61, really early, really clever
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Monday, October 26, 2009
The story of Jacob and the Angel is one of the most cryptic in the Hebrew Scripture. Most commentators cannot agree on the basic components of the text, and many are unsure of its details or origins. The narrative is a scant 9 verses, from Genesis 32:23 to 36. But in those 9 verses, the narrative begins abruptly, repeats on itself, has significant gaps, has figures that are unidentifiable, and has what could be considered a double ending. There are sections that remind us of ancient Canaanite cultic practices, and sections that indicate possible E or even J sources. Even within the book of Genesis itself, the section does not fit. There are some allusions that can tie it back to Exodous 4:24-26, and there is some discussion of wrestling in the fetal narrative of Essau and Jacob, but both of those texts are tenuous at best. There is controversy, ambiguity, and an unsettling almost hostile ambiguity to everything about the text. Every significant word and most significant actions seem primeval, and the inclusion of it in the weft and weave of the Hebrew scripture seems deliberate but strange. The attempts at making it more cohesive result in a poor plastering, so the lack of structure shows through clearly and explicitly.
Concentrating on the words that have the most ambiguity, the most darkness, and refuse most loudly at integrating into the larger text seems to be the best way of limning the text, pointing at its structure. To be true to the text itself, there will be no attempt at creating a narrative, no attempt at a grand thesis. The passage itself is filled with darkness, with a struggle towards cohesion, with a begging, and a desire for wholeness that leads to brokenness. The story comes from the darkest places in the Hebrew mindset, and to throw light on it will result in long linguistic shadows.
In this paper, the words and phrases that cast the longest shadows are “man” (Gen 32:23), “wrestled” (ibid) “daybreak” (ibid), “hip” (v. 26), “blessing” (v. 26), “Jacob” (v. 27), “Israel” (ibid), and Peunel (v. 30). Using each of these words, will point out the sources for the texts, the ancient controversies, the geographical realities, the cultural contexts, the textual awareness, and the profound ambiguity that marks this as a passage that should be mediated on, and not necessarily understood.
To put these words into context is to recognize the structural elements of the text. There are three important ways to do this, to realize the structure of and to the text, to see if there is any where else in the Pentateuch where this structure occurs, and to note what the narrative says (including all gaps, brokenness, textual slips, and lacunae.) Starting at the least of these, let us find what the narrative of the scripture actually says, then note where the content is absent, and where it is repeated, where textual work has been done, where it has been done, and what the differences between those texts say.
Beginning with the story: Jacob has been traveling through hostile territory with “his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children,” (Vs 22). He finds himself in the middle of the night at a ford in the Jabbok (an interesting word, because it functions as a triple pun, as a footnote in the Oxford reference Bible notes “ta compicated word play on the names of Jacob (Heb: “ya'qob”, the river “yabboq”, and wrestled “wayye'abeq; v.24). Jacob leaves his property and family unguarded, he fords the river. He finds a mysterious man on the other side, who asks to wrestle so Jacob can pass. They wrestle to a draw. Just before the dawn breaks, the angel flicks or strikes Jacob's hip or thigh, permanently maiming him. Jacob and the angel ask each other their names., and refuse the naming. The angel leaves before day break, his strength significantly weakened, and in this weakening strength, he gets a new name—Israel, which is translated as father of nations. The story ends with a priestly prohibition against eating any flesh that is near an animals thigh bone.
In the midst of this basic story, there are structual elements that might repeat themselves, but there are also gaps, and things left unsaid. The text begins in medias rea, the fording seems to come from almost nowhere. There are two mentions of day break, which may be a repeating and may be a poetic device. There is a significant narrative gap in the second half of verse 23. There is a moving back and forth between the j source and the e source in versus 23 to 26. The verse ends with a dangling, seemingly randomly inserted P source dietary prohibition. There are few parallels in this story to any where else in the first testament.
There are some textual parallels within the various stories of Jacob himself, including some chisamistic connections between the story of Jacob dreaming the ladder, and the story of Jacob wrestling—but even in the ladder narrative, there is a history of prophetic dreaming, and that kind of prophetic dreaming. The lessons that can be gleaned from Jacobs ladder are simpler and cleaner, as clean as Joseph's tales of the thin and fatted calf. These lessons cannot be gleaned as easily and those parallels seem so far away from similar stories of say, Moses or Abraham. Even Jacob's name change into Israel, from “I am struggling” to “father of nations” does not stick, there are any number of examples throughout Genesis where his name changes and functions seperately. Even in becoming Jacob, he never stops becoming Israel.
That even the renaming, something that is supposed to remain permanent, and slips without any solidity, could be construed as a metaphor for the eternity of the text. The structural lack of cohesiveness matches the critical lack of consensus of confusion and confrontation that underlies most of the paratextual working through that surround this passage. Even the most basic questions seem almost unanswerable. There is something so primeval, so basic, and so profoundly other about this text, that it seems to come from the ancient ground of the near east. It does not seem to be a Hebraic text or a Moabite, or an Assyrian, but something stranger, older, and more intensely human. Going through each of the core words here, and pulling the meaning and context from them, I hope to prove that the story is a patched up, plugged in, contextualized attempt to re-moor a story unique in the biblical context.
The first word that has power in the story is man, found in versus 24. Man as in he who wrestled with. The identity of who the man who he wrestled with could be any number of beings, including but not limited to a river demon, a hostile deity, an angel, YHWH or the dark elements of Jacob's own personality itself. Each of these personae has a strong argument behind it. Jabbok is a rough and tumultuous place, with a fast flowing cataract pinched between two almost sheer cliffs. It would be a place where danger lurked, and where enough danger occurred that a demon would be thought to protect it. There is even a river demon, Hubbal, who is popular among the Canaanites, and who the jews of the first testament are warned about repeatedly..
Though this argument has some strength, and it is one that Westerman makes, but it is adroitly torn apart by Bayford “Even more mysterious is the unidentified man whose features and actions have much in common with characters found in cross cultural folk stories, such as the dangerous river demon, a spirit that guards or protects a body of water and a being that must vanish by day break, Westerman therefore identities the being who takes Jacob as a hostile demon or evil spirit...Sarna on the other hand denies the association. Noting , he contends explicitly portrays the man as a dangerous river spirit that blocks humans as they attempt to cross the river. Everyone and everything that Jacob carried across was safe on the other side. Furthermore most often humans attempt to appease these river spirits to ensure a safe cross. Jacob does nothing of the sort. Finally, the mysterious assailant ends up blessing Jacob, an action that Sarna argues cannot be done by a demon in a biblical story. (Bayford, 373)
If the blessing cannot be done by a demon, then who can a blessing be done by? The list would be limited to YHWH or an angel. The other deity, or the spirit of Jacob itself would seem to be eliminated. Gunkel makes several solid arguments that the man who is wrestled, and is convinced that is some kind of deity who is not YHWH or an angel. Most of these arguments centre around issues of naming. The wrestler does not know Jacob, and cowers when his name is asked, suggests that the blessing is done under duress. There are classical and Ancient Near Eastern parallels to demons that disappear in the night, who lose power not only in being named but who lose power when the sun emerges. He continues: “the fact that the deity evades the question among his name... and may be explained by the ancient belief wide spread, among many people that the knowledge of the name gives power over the bearer...(Gunkel, 317)
This makes an interesting argument, and an almost convincing one. It allows for the possiblity that contextualizes ancient practices into a Jewish experience. This could mean that the blessing was an attempt to make Hebrew the world view in which these nomadic/exillic people live. This also could bring the possibility of the wrestling being Jacob himself back on the table. The New Torah commentary explains it thusly: this may be an account of Jacob's wrestling with his conscience, torn between his human tendency to avoid an unpleasant encounter and the divine impulse in him that urges him to do the difficult but right thing. The position my find support in the text "you have striven with beings divine and human (v. 29) which can also be translated "you have striven with God and with men" ...” (New Torah Commentary, 535).
All of this could function simultaneously in a text that is profoundly unstable. It could be an internal struggle, one with a river demon, one with a mysterious deity, none of those are inconsistent with a mutual interest. The one that would prevent a mutuality is if he is wrestling with YHWH, himself. In his president's address to the Canadian Bible Society, Glen Taylor makes the strongest argument in favour of this exclusivity, making the unique argument that Jacob walks across the sun itself, that the sun in quesiton is YHWH: “...Jacob is referring to the sun when he claims to have seen Penuel; “the face of God” In other words, the man with whom Jacob was wrestling was becoming “the face of God” in the form of the rising son. The theory not only accounts for Jacobs reference to seeing God face to face, but it accounts for his own marveling at his survival; just as one cannot look a t the sun in its full intensity, so Jacob survived seeing the face of God because he was tenacious enough to hang on to his opponent long enough to see him only begin to turn into the rising sun. There is a possible problem with the theory. It entails the assumption that the story-writer equates the sun with the face of God, which seems to many people unlikely for an ancient Hebrew patriarch. In partial defense of the theory, recall that by any and all reckonings this story conveys a primitive and highly unusual portrait of the God of Israel. Moreover, I am not interjecting the sun into the story, as if in a desperate attempt to link it with the “face of God” “Dawn” is specefically mentioned twice in the story and “sun” in the summation in v 32. The theory accounts for the presence of references to the sun both in the first and second parts of the story as well as the emphasis on early morning. Contrariwise, most if not all the other explanations fail to reckon with the role of the sun, including it's role as the only common denomination linking man and seeing the face of God”
This would be a useful, if not entirely convincing way, of sorting out the ancient implications of the text, of YHWHizing the text, and by extension, explaining away how Jacob saw God, and was not destroyed. . There are several examples of theophany in the Hebrew scripture, but they are clouded and distant. No one talks to the divine directly, no one wrestles with him literally. They see Him as fire in the sky like Elijah or through a burning bush, like Moses. was not destroyed like Moses would have been. As well, Moses and Elijah saw Jacob in the daytime. There was none of the retreating night and emerging day that mark similar passages.
Bringing this back to the text itself, it might be useful to be reminded that we do not know, that the passage might be about not knowing itself, and the desire to limn it works functionally against what is on the page. This assumption is made explicitly clear by Robert Alter in his notes on the translation of the 5 books of Genesis: “he initial identification of the anonymous adversary is from Jacob's point of view and so all he knows of him in what he sees, that he is a man.”
This spirit of plain common sense and textual closeness marks an attitude we should take, that the desire for answers does not exist, and the text should be trusted itself. That the person he wrestled with could have been any number of people, but what exactly did the wrestling mean. The first meaning of the wrestling might connect with the second half of the Torah Commentaries narrative. They brought up the possibility that it was Jacob wrestling with himself, and the second half of that commentary is full of the same kind of plain narrative sense: “We can imagine Jacob saying to himself, "Until now, I have responded to difficult situations by lying and running, I deceived my father. I ran away from Esau. I left Laban's house stealthily instead of confronting him. I hate myself for being a person who lies and runs. But I'm afraid of facing up to this situation" By not defeating his conscience, Jacob wins. He outgrows his Jacob identity as the trickster and becomes Israel, t he one who contends with God and people instead of avoiding or manipulating them., At the end of the struggle, he is physically wounded and emotionally depleted. Nevertheless the Torah describes him (in 33:18) as Shalem, translated safe, with connotations of "whole", at peace with himself (shalem is related to the word shalom", possessing an integrity he never had before. " (s'fat emet) Rashbam sees God as sending an angel to wrestle with Jacob to prevent him from running away as he may have been tempted to do, compelling him to do the right thing. And B. Jacob writes" God answers a person's prayers if the person prays by searching himself, becoming his own opponent"
This paradox, the breaking of Jacob to make him whole or striving with the divine in order to become the father of nations girds other discussions of this word and this text. The Torah suggests that there is a punishment aspect of this, that the wrestling is because of God's desire to change Jacob, but Jacob never really changes. His name, and his behaviour does not engage in the radical split that a cosmic struggle like this one would assume that a radical change in behaviour. The one argument against the story being about moral change is this lack of change. The New Jerome makes this commentary explicit: “...Many Suggest that God responds to Jacobs history of deception; the story constitutions a disciplinary move on God's part to teach Jacob that he cannot proceed in to the future relying on his own devices. Hence, some claim the story presents Jacobs conversion to a life more attuned to the ways of God. Yet, we find no evidence of that in the narrative--no negative judgment of Jacob's behaviors, no repentance on Jacob’s part and no fundamental change in Jacob’s subsequent life pattern. Indeed, in giving Jacob a new name, God commends Jacob for struggling and names him in view of who he has been in the past, and given his response to the divine challenge, still is. (New Jerome, 34).
The wrestling with Jacob then, might be something that he does, something that is the core to his personality. He strives with God, with the divine throughout his relationship with the divine. Alter talks about this: “The image of wrestling has been implicit throughout the Jacob story; in his rolling away the huge stone from the mouth of the well, and in his multiple contending s with LAban. Now in this culminating moment of his life story, the charactering image of wresting is made explicit and literal. (Alter, 179) . The wrestling then marks Jacob's life, his desires and his relationship with t he divine. He becomes a trickster figure, whose role is one of manipulation and trickery. That the wrestling is a draw and that no one wins or loses also indicates that there is no moralism. Jacob wrestles to name his opponent, and to get his blessing. But his blessing does not come from the usual sources—he got his first blessing via trickery, nd his second blessing does not emerge from any real known tradition. There is nothing patriarchal, and really nothing in the Hebrew tradition that would mark this as from the rest of the hebrew scripture. All we have is a continued and almost seemingly cryptic permanence. We still wonder why he wrestles, and what exactly the blessing could contain function as still operational questions.
We then ask the next obvious question, what does the blessing consist of. Usually in Hebrew blessings, the word suggests a radical change in personality—like what occurs from Abraham when he moves from Abram, or from Sara to Sarah. We have already maintained that Jacob's first blessing comes from chicanery, and the second blessing comes from a figure who actually might not be YHWH, that might be demonic. That his name is Israel and not Israyah, also suggests ancient precedents—that this name change does not feature the suffix that was given to the nation that marks it as a unique people.
There are other components to the blessing, complications and implications that mark the naming. Gerard Rad in his commentary to Genesis talks about some of these implications: “the late Jewish midrash understands the demand to be released as follows: “I must sing in the morning choir before God's throne. Now one must assume that Jacob has discovered something of the divine nature of his appointment, for in an odd contrast to his previous defense, he struggles to wrest a blessing from him, viz. divine vitality. It is better not to explain this as an especially pious quality; it is more correct to encounter with God. This clutching at God and his power of blessing is so elemental that it goes beyond what we understand by piety or impiety. This request for knowledge is not granted at all. Rather Jacob must first be asked who follows one must bear in mind that the ancients did not consider a name as simply sound and smoke. On, the contrary, for them the name was linked with the bearer with such a way that the name contrived something of the character of the one who bore it. “
Even with the suspicion that the wrestling figure is not YWHW , there is a definite tying into the blessing with the renaming. The blessing itselgf maybe the renaming, but the renaming does not stick, there is not a permanence that comes from other blessings to other patriarchs. The begging, the clasping and the gathering are fundamental to the Jacob story.
The important bit from Rad though, is that the language transcends and escapes from traditional ideas of piety. The ancient nature of the text betrays any attempts to work through the religious quality of the text afterwards. The blessing then, might not be the name change, or even calling him to be the father of nations, is a later inclusion, a priestly attempt to normalize and recontextualise an impossibly slippery text of a time that occurred before the lingusitic implications of the twelve tribes. Bayford talks about this naming, and it's closeness but not interconnectedness with the text. “The significance of the name , like the identity and function of Jacob's wrestling partner, is debated. The major problem is that its grammatical structure has no exact parallel among biblical names, and its trilateral root...is only found elsewhere in Hosea 12:4. (Bayford, 373)
If there is no piety, no religious lesson, to be found in the ancient desires that provide Jacob is onea bedrock of the story, and the change between what was named and what is named is ambiguous, then it is important for us to find out what the name Jacob meant, and what the name Israel means. Beginning with the name of Jacob. Alter describes the problem with this text best, when he describes other naming rituals in relation to Jacob: “Abraham's change of name was a mere rhetorical flourish compared to this one, for all of the patricahs Javos is one whose life is entangled in a moral ambiguties. Rashi beautifully catches the response of the name change: “It will no longer be said that the blessings came through deviousness (ooqbah, a word suggested by the radical of “crookedness” in the name Jacob but instead through lordliness (sarrah, a root that can be extracted from the name Isreal) and openess. It is nevertheless noteworthy—and to my knowledge has not been noted—that the pronouncement about the new name is not completely fulfilled. Whereas Abraham is invariably called Ab raham once the name is changed from Abram, the narrative continues to refer to this patriarch in most instances as Jacob. Thus, Israel does not really replace his name but becomes a synonym for it. A practice reflected in the parralleism of biblical poetry, where Jacob is always used in the first half of the line and Israel, the poetic varation, in the second half...(Alter, 181). This poetic parallelism is noted especially in verse 27, where the referent keeps jumping around, is the reference to Jacob, to Israel, to that who is wrestled, or that who wrestles—that who strives, and that who is crooked merge in a muscularly linguistic struggle with that who is being wrestled. Even when the struggle breaks, even in the breaking the language of the naming and the blessing that Jacob begs so ardently for never truly leaves.
The name Isreal is equally confusing, equally slippery. The New Interpretaters commentary spends some time figuring out exactly what the meaning of struggle found in the text: “although Israel may actually mean something like “God rules, the narrator claims otherwise. The NRSV footnote s suggest a purposeful ambiguity in the name: “God Strives” (God intintes and engages in the wrestling, and “the one who strives with God” (Jacob responds in kind. Jacob cannot struggle with God if God refuses to be so engaged. God's giving this name, then has implications for God as well as for Jacob. It affirms a divine commitment to stay with Jacob in this struggle.” If this is the case, if this becomes a verb, that moves throughout the Gospel, and talks about how the divine breaks us, it provides a kind of narrative outside of the text—it provides at least one way out of the text, a way that can be explained using the last three words: daybreak, hip, and Penuel.
The hip, the brokenness of the hip and how that brokenness extends to a new kind of freeing strangness is one of the metaphors that Rad uses to complicate, but also liberate this passage. The text is written on Jacob's body, and for Rad: “By the time of the Yahwhist many interpertations of the story had been made, and that it had become quite broken in the traditon. But precisely because of its breaks and joints it received it's essential spaciousness; preciously the looseness in the inner d every connection of the statements to one another makes room for many ideas, for the indvidiual proceedings and words in the evenet, as every expositer sees are not prescily limited with respsecft to their meaning and their significance. And every exgente will likewise encounter something somewhere in this narrative which can no longer be interpreted. (Rad, 319)
The breaking of the body, the striking of the hip, is the crux of the entire story, and the one that suggests that the text itself is broken, as Rad suggests. The strugge mle between the man and between Jacob lasted for a very long time. It was eternal, and it was if the firmament had broken from the sky itself. That he needs the blessing adds to the desperatio of the story. The wrestling portion is a place where both Gunkel and Rad notice a tension in the text itself, a breaking apart of the story. (verse 25). It becomes almost meta-contextual, the wrestling of the angel, the wrestling of Jacob, the wrestling of history, and the wrestling of the reader.
The reader becomes Jacob and Jacob becomes us. Rad describes the darkness of the text: “the struggle was indecisive for a long peroid, until the mysterious antagoist touched Jacob's hip, which was put out of joint by the touch, as though by a magical power. Here is a passage where a much older form of our saga is revealed. The words in v. 25 are so strangely unrelated that one might think at first, in view of the hopelessness of the fight that Jacob had won the upper hand of his antoginist through a trick of fighting. This interperation would best suit the contiuation in versuis 26, where the antognist asks Jacob to let him go, and then also the later statement that Jacob had prevailed. (Rad. 316)
What exactly did Jacob prevail over? It might have been the history of Isreal, over his enemies, over itself, and its polytheistic history. Rad talks a bit about this, continuing on in his history: “the notation conceals an earlier etiology of a cultic dance, eg a lamping dance. (Cf 1 Kings 18:26) It can no longer be decided. It is further reported that the Israelites reverently rememd this crippling of their ancestry in a very curious cultic usage connected with their slaughter pf animals. Of all the things which happened on that night when the name Israel was recoded, this crippling of the ancestor become the subject of an especially nurtured memory...(Rad, 319)
In this case then Jacob becomes like Isaac, who is bundled by Abraham to a cultic mountain, and is almost sacrificed as a reminder that unlike their neighbours, they no longer sacrifice children. But in this context, they once did, and they once worried about what their pagan, polytheistic neighbours thought. The uniqueness of this text then, is how it attempts over and over again to make Hebrew that which is weirdly isolated from that context. The last two words, one a time and one a place, are like putting cement blocks in an attempt to weed a garden. The weeds push forth and the cement breaks. The text emerges as one of continued instability.
The time is daybreak, which has emerged in the narrative when talking about Taylor's idea that the wrestler was the face of God, and that Jacob is moving on the face of God itself, in Gunkel's discussion of the night deity that loses power during the day, and in the Torah commentaries discussion of Jacob's dark night of the soul, But there is greater power in it elsewhere. There is an element of the story that argues that Jacob's adversary loses power as the night emerges into day break, but it is almost as if that whom Jacob wrestles is night itself. The darkness and the light then become poetic elements for Jacob's personal, family, and collective history. The darkness is not only a personal dark night of the soul, but a collective social and poltical one as well.
Alter makes this argument explicit: “But the real point, as Jacob's adversary himself suggests when he refuses to reveal his name, is that he resists identification. Appearing to Jacob , he is the embodiment of portentous antagonism in Jacob;'s dark night of the soul. He is obviously in some sense a double of Esau as adversary but he is also a doubling of all with whom Jacob has had to contend and he may equally well be an externalization of all that Jacob has to wrestle with within himself. A powerful physical metaphor is nitmatied by the story of wrestling: Jacob, whose name can be construed as "he who acts crookedly" is been, permanently lamed, by his nameless adversary in order to be made straight before his reunion with Esau (Alter, 180) .
While Jacob might have been made straight morally, while his trickster ways may have been replaced with a blessing of great ambiguity and shadowy power, and that blessing would result in an emergence of a new kind of power, he is still broken or crooked in his body. Seeing the face of the supernatural results in a body that cannot be sacrificed. To limp and to be lame has a negative power in the ancient world. A blemished animal cannot be placed upon the alter, but Jacob with his limp that comes from struggling can now lead his people. The paradox there, a paradox that remains ungaurded, is central to this story.
The paradox continues in where the wrestling took place, and this becomes the last element, before a conclusion. The wrestling took place at a place called Pienel. Note the el suffix, and how it is like Israel the person, and Bethel, the place where Jacob had his first vision. Pienel means the face of God, and has we have talked about before, el being an old name for God, Elohim not fully attaching itself to YHWH but having a gap or a disconnect. In verse 21, just before the narrative of wrestling, there are 5 references to various faces in a little over 4 lines. The name becomes a place loaded with psycholinguistic baggage. It also ends the tale, finishing after the strange priestly verse, the verse that seems disconnected. The place becomes a way to acknowledge the texts liminal working from a historical basis to a new future for the Isrealites.
The Torch Bible commentaries place all of this naming in a proper context: “yet this story is told with a quite remarkable economy of language and is quite unforgettable. WE note that the story is linked with a place-name which by its very form suggests an ancient cult center. It is also linked with a dietary law (which is not otherwise mentioned in the Law, a taboo on eating the sciatic muscle. Thirdly it is related to the giving to Jacob of a new name, Israel which is, to our mind, most unnaturally interpreted, Again the word for Wrestle is nowhere else used in the bible and has obviously been chosen for its similarity in sound to Jabbok. Although this must not be pressed too far, the supernatural antagonist is not described as Yahweh, and if the name Israel and Peniel are a guide, it is at El, a Canaanite god. Lastly the location is important, it is at the crossing of the river, the threshold of the land of Canaan, and in popular thought, thresholds were always dangerous to those who crossed for the first time. All this suggests that we have here a very ancient story which, because it had so strong a hold on the imagination, was particularly valuable for interpretation and reinterpretation. In its final form in the book of Genesis, it at least points to the fact that Jacob is entering the new land, the land of promise..."
Peinel then, becomes a mark of the continued history, a refusal to forgot and a desire to keep a place firm in the history of a people who were nomadic, whose only contuinued narrative they had was the history, was an oral tradition that worked multiple attempts in a single way.
That the story ends with a new kind of dietary restriction, and also ends in a geographic place that had not only ancient history but a profound kind of collective history allows for the Israelites to acknowledge or at least find a way to live with their ancient past. The passage pockmarked with forgettings, and refusals, seems to me an attempt to break through, to contextualise and to remmemebr their history. The wrestling, the breaking, the impurity, and the making pure but not whole are all new ways of functioning, new ways of finding a way to become this new kind of category set.
The passage then is an argument against seeking of answers. It becomes a way to live in our uncomfortable collective histories, and to acknowledge them to move forward. It becomes a way, in it's full and complete understanding to spend time with the mystery. We do not know who we are struggling with, we do not know why our bodies are broken, we do not know what we are begging for, and when we finally receive the gift of blessing, it does not often come in a form or even a lingustic context we are expecting. We grapple in the dark with dangerous strangers, who may be compoenets of ourselves and our history, alone and naked before a power that might be beneveolent or might be malovent, but is never simple, is never ready. We tell the story of this struggling, but the narrative we have is frequently in the dark, as dark as that night was. We do this, not because we want to or feel called or even because we seek wholeness or completion, but because there is not another option, not another way of seeing Pienel, or the face of God. When we finish the wrestling, when we get the blessing of a new name, we do not lose our old name. The naming becomes a way to move between old and new, between what was and what will become. In this capacity, We are Jacob, and Jacob is us.
Concentrating on the words that have the most ambiguity, the most darkness, and refuse most loudly at integrating into the larger text seems to be the best way of limning the text, pointing at its structure. To be true to the text itself, there will be no attempt at creating a narrative, no attempt at a grand thesis. The passage itself is filled with darkness, with a struggle towards cohesion, with a begging, and a desire for wholeness that leads to brokenness. The story comes from the darkest places in the Hebrew mindset, and to throw light on it will result in long linguistic shadows.
In this paper, the words and phrases that cast the longest shadows are “man” (Gen 32:23), “wrestled” (ibid) “daybreak” (ibid), “hip” (v. 26), “blessing” (v. 26), “Jacob” (v. 27), “Israel” (ibid), and Peunel (v. 30). Using each of these words, will point out the sources for the texts, the ancient controversies, the geographical realities, the cultural contexts, the textual awareness, and the profound ambiguity that marks this as a passage that should be mediated on, and not necessarily understood.
To put these words into context is to recognize the structural elements of the text. There are three important ways to do this, to realize the structure of and to the text, to see if there is any where else in the Pentateuch where this structure occurs, and to note what the narrative says (including all gaps, brokenness, textual slips, and lacunae.) Starting at the least of these, let us find what the narrative of the scripture actually says, then note where the content is absent, and where it is repeated, where textual work has been done, where it has been done, and what the differences between those texts say.
Beginning with the story: Jacob has been traveling through hostile territory with “his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children,” (Vs 22). He finds himself in the middle of the night at a ford in the Jabbok (an interesting word, because it functions as a triple pun, as a footnote in the Oxford reference Bible notes “ta compicated word play on the names of Jacob (Heb: “ya'qob”, the river “yabboq”, and wrestled “wayye'abeq; v.24). Jacob leaves his property and family unguarded, he fords the river. He finds a mysterious man on the other side, who asks to wrestle so Jacob can pass. They wrestle to a draw. Just before the dawn breaks, the angel flicks or strikes Jacob's hip or thigh, permanently maiming him. Jacob and the angel ask each other their names., and refuse the naming. The angel leaves before day break, his strength significantly weakened, and in this weakening strength, he gets a new name—Israel, which is translated as father of nations. The story ends with a priestly prohibition against eating any flesh that is near an animals thigh bone.
In the midst of this basic story, there are structual elements that might repeat themselves, but there are also gaps, and things left unsaid. The text begins in medias rea, the fording seems to come from almost nowhere. There are two mentions of day break, which may be a repeating and may be a poetic device. There is a significant narrative gap in the second half of verse 23. There is a moving back and forth between the j source and the e source in versus 23 to 26. The verse ends with a dangling, seemingly randomly inserted P source dietary prohibition. There are few parallels in this story to any where else in the first testament.
There are some textual parallels within the various stories of Jacob himself, including some chisamistic connections between the story of Jacob dreaming the ladder, and the story of Jacob wrestling—but even in the ladder narrative, there is a history of prophetic dreaming, and that kind of prophetic dreaming. The lessons that can be gleaned from Jacobs ladder are simpler and cleaner, as clean as Joseph's tales of the thin and fatted calf. These lessons cannot be gleaned as easily and those parallels seem so far away from similar stories of say, Moses or Abraham. Even Jacob's name change into Israel, from “I am struggling” to “father of nations” does not stick, there are any number of examples throughout Genesis where his name changes and functions seperately. Even in becoming Jacob, he never stops becoming Israel.
That even the renaming, something that is supposed to remain permanent, and slips without any solidity, could be construed as a metaphor for the eternity of the text. The structural lack of cohesiveness matches the critical lack of consensus of confusion and confrontation that underlies most of the paratextual working through that surround this passage. Even the most basic questions seem almost unanswerable. There is something so primeval, so basic, and so profoundly other about this text, that it seems to come from the ancient ground of the near east. It does not seem to be a Hebraic text or a Moabite, or an Assyrian, but something stranger, older, and more intensely human. Going through each of the core words here, and pulling the meaning and context from them, I hope to prove that the story is a patched up, plugged in, contextualized attempt to re-moor a story unique in the biblical context.
The first word that has power in the story is man, found in versus 24. Man as in he who wrestled with. The identity of who the man who he wrestled with could be any number of beings, including but not limited to a river demon, a hostile deity, an angel, YHWH or the dark elements of Jacob's own personality itself. Each of these personae has a strong argument behind it. Jabbok is a rough and tumultuous place, with a fast flowing cataract pinched between two almost sheer cliffs. It would be a place where danger lurked, and where enough danger occurred that a demon would be thought to protect it. There is even a river demon, Hubbal, who is popular among the Canaanites, and who the jews of the first testament are warned about repeatedly..
Though this argument has some strength, and it is one that Westerman makes, but it is adroitly torn apart by Bayford “Even more mysterious is the unidentified man whose features and actions have much in common with characters found in cross cultural folk stories, such as the dangerous river demon, a spirit that guards or protects a body of water and a being that must vanish by day break, Westerman therefore identities the being who takes Jacob as a hostile demon or evil spirit...Sarna on the other hand denies the association. Noting , he contends explicitly portrays the man as a dangerous river spirit that blocks humans as they attempt to cross the river. Everyone and everything that Jacob carried across was safe on the other side. Furthermore most often humans attempt to appease these river spirits to ensure a safe cross. Jacob does nothing of the sort. Finally, the mysterious assailant ends up blessing Jacob, an action that Sarna argues cannot be done by a demon in a biblical story. (Bayford, 373)
If the blessing cannot be done by a demon, then who can a blessing be done by? The list would be limited to YHWH or an angel. The other deity, or the spirit of Jacob itself would seem to be eliminated. Gunkel makes several solid arguments that the man who is wrestled, and is convinced that is some kind of deity who is not YHWH or an angel. Most of these arguments centre around issues of naming. The wrestler does not know Jacob, and cowers when his name is asked, suggests that the blessing is done under duress. There are classical and Ancient Near Eastern parallels to demons that disappear in the night, who lose power not only in being named but who lose power when the sun emerges. He continues: “the fact that the deity evades the question among his name... and may be explained by the ancient belief wide spread, among many people that the knowledge of the name gives power over the bearer...(Gunkel, 317)
This makes an interesting argument, and an almost convincing one. It allows for the possiblity that contextualizes ancient practices into a Jewish experience. This could mean that the blessing was an attempt to make Hebrew the world view in which these nomadic/exillic people live. This also could bring the possibility of the wrestling being Jacob himself back on the table. The New Torah commentary explains it thusly: this may be an account of Jacob's wrestling with his conscience, torn between his human tendency to avoid an unpleasant encounter and the divine impulse in him that urges him to do the difficult but right thing. The position my find support in the text "you have striven with beings divine and human (v. 29) which can also be translated "you have striven with God and with men" ...” (New Torah Commentary, 535).
All of this could function simultaneously in a text that is profoundly unstable. It could be an internal struggle, one with a river demon, one with a mysterious deity, none of those are inconsistent with a mutual interest. The one that would prevent a mutuality is if he is wrestling with YHWH, himself. In his president's address to the Canadian Bible Society, Glen Taylor makes the strongest argument in favour of this exclusivity, making the unique argument that Jacob walks across the sun itself, that the sun in quesiton is YHWH: “...Jacob is referring to the sun when he claims to have seen Penuel; “the face of God” In other words, the man with whom Jacob was wrestling was becoming “the face of God” in the form of the rising son. The theory not only accounts for Jacobs reference to seeing God face to face, but it accounts for his own marveling at his survival; just as one cannot look a t the sun in its full intensity, so Jacob survived seeing the face of God because he was tenacious enough to hang on to his opponent long enough to see him only begin to turn into the rising sun. There is a possible problem with the theory. It entails the assumption that the story-writer equates the sun with the face of God, which seems to many people unlikely for an ancient Hebrew patriarch. In partial defense of the theory, recall that by any and all reckonings this story conveys a primitive and highly unusual portrait of the God of Israel. Moreover, I am not interjecting the sun into the story, as if in a desperate attempt to link it with the “face of God” “Dawn” is specefically mentioned twice in the story and “sun” in the summation in v 32. The theory accounts for the presence of references to the sun both in the first and second parts of the story as well as the emphasis on early morning. Contrariwise, most if not all the other explanations fail to reckon with the role of the sun, including it's role as the only common denomination linking man and seeing the face of God”
This would be a useful, if not entirely convincing way, of sorting out the ancient implications of the text, of YHWHizing the text, and by extension, explaining away how Jacob saw God, and was not destroyed. . There are several examples of theophany in the Hebrew scripture, but they are clouded and distant. No one talks to the divine directly, no one wrestles with him literally. They see Him as fire in the sky like Elijah or through a burning bush, like Moses. was not destroyed like Moses would have been. As well, Moses and Elijah saw Jacob in the daytime. There was none of the retreating night and emerging day that mark similar passages.
Bringing this back to the text itself, it might be useful to be reminded that we do not know, that the passage might be about not knowing itself, and the desire to limn it works functionally against what is on the page. This assumption is made explicitly clear by Robert Alter in his notes on the translation of the 5 books of Genesis: “he initial identification of the anonymous adversary is from Jacob's point of view and so all he knows of him in what he sees, that he is a man.”
This spirit of plain common sense and textual closeness marks an attitude we should take, that the desire for answers does not exist, and the text should be trusted itself. That the person he wrestled with could have been any number of people, but what exactly did the wrestling mean. The first meaning of the wrestling might connect with the second half of the Torah Commentaries narrative. They brought up the possibility that it was Jacob wrestling with himself, and the second half of that commentary is full of the same kind of plain narrative sense: “We can imagine Jacob saying to himself, "Until now, I have responded to difficult situations by lying and running, I deceived my father. I ran away from Esau. I left Laban's house stealthily instead of confronting him. I hate myself for being a person who lies and runs. But I'm afraid of facing up to this situation" By not defeating his conscience, Jacob wins. He outgrows his Jacob identity as the trickster and becomes Israel, t he one who contends with God and people instead of avoiding or manipulating them., At the end of the struggle, he is physically wounded and emotionally depleted. Nevertheless the Torah describes him (in 33:18) as Shalem, translated safe, with connotations of "whole", at peace with himself (shalem is related to the word shalom", possessing an integrity he never had before. " (s'fat emet) Rashbam sees God as sending an angel to wrestle with Jacob to prevent him from running away as he may have been tempted to do, compelling him to do the right thing. And B. Jacob writes" God answers a person's prayers if the person prays by searching himself, becoming his own opponent"
This paradox, the breaking of Jacob to make him whole or striving with the divine in order to become the father of nations girds other discussions of this word and this text. The Torah suggests that there is a punishment aspect of this, that the wrestling is because of God's desire to change Jacob, but Jacob never really changes. His name, and his behaviour does not engage in the radical split that a cosmic struggle like this one would assume that a radical change in behaviour. The one argument against the story being about moral change is this lack of change. The New Jerome makes this commentary explicit: “...Many Suggest that God responds to Jacobs history of deception; the story constitutions a disciplinary move on God's part to teach Jacob that he cannot proceed in to the future relying on his own devices. Hence, some claim the story presents Jacobs conversion to a life more attuned to the ways of God. Yet, we find no evidence of that in the narrative--no negative judgment of Jacob's behaviors, no repentance on Jacob’s part and no fundamental change in Jacob’s subsequent life pattern. Indeed, in giving Jacob a new name, God commends Jacob for struggling and names him in view of who he has been in the past, and given his response to the divine challenge, still is. (New Jerome, 34).
The wrestling with Jacob then, might be something that he does, something that is the core to his personality. He strives with God, with the divine throughout his relationship with the divine. Alter talks about this: “The image of wrestling has been implicit throughout the Jacob story; in his rolling away the huge stone from the mouth of the well, and in his multiple contending s with LAban. Now in this culminating moment of his life story, the charactering image of wresting is made explicit and literal. (Alter, 179) . The wrestling then marks Jacob's life, his desires and his relationship with t he divine. He becomes a trickster figure, whose role is one of manipulation and trickery. That the wrestling is a draw and that no one wins or loses also indicates that there is no moralism. Jacob wrestles to name his opponent, and to get his blessing. But his blessing does not come from the usual sources—he got his first blessing via trickery, nd his second blessing does not emerge from any real known tradition. There is nothing patriarchal, and really nothing in the Hebrew tradition that would mark this as from the rest of the hebrew scripture. All we have is a continued and almost seemingly cryptic permanence. We still wonder why he wrestles, and what exactly the blessing could contain function as still operational questions.
We then ask the next obvious question, what does the blessing consist of. Usually in Hebrew blessings, the word suggests a radical change in personality—like what occurs from Abraham when he moves from Abram, or from Sara to Sarah. We have already maintained that Jacob's first blessing comes from chicanery, and the second blessing comes from a figure who actually might not be YHWH, that might be demonic. That his name is Israel and not Israyah, also suggests ancient precedents—that this name change does not feature the suffix that was given to the nation that marks it as a unique people.
There are other components to the blessing, complications and implications that mark the naming. Gerard Rad in his commentary to Genesis talks about some of these implications: “the late Jewish midrash understands the demand to be released as follows: “I must sing in the morning choir before God's throne. Now one must assume that Jacob has discovered something of the divine nature of his appointment, for in an odd contrast to his previous defense, he struggles to wrest a blessing from him, viz. divine vitality. It is better not to explain this as an especially pious quality; it is more correct to encounter with God. This clutching at God and his power of blessing is so elemental that it goes beyond what we understand by piety or impiety. This request for knowledge is not granted at all. Rather Jacob must first be asked who follows one must bear in mind that the ancients did not consider a name as simply sound and smoke. On, the contrary, for them the name was linked with the bearer with such a way that the name contrived something of the character of the one who bore it. “
Even with the suspicion that the wrestling figure is not YWHW , there is a definite tying into the blessing with the renaming. The blessing itselgf maybe the renaming, but the renaming does not stick, there is not a permanence that comes from other blessings to other patriarchs. The begging, the clasping and the gathering are fundamental to the Jacob story.
The important bit from Rad though, is that the language transcends and escapes from traditional ideas of piety. The ancient nature of the text betrays any attempts to work through the religious quality of the text afterwards. The blessing then, might not be the name change, or even calling him to be the father of nations, is a later inclusion, a priestly attempt to normalize and recontextualise an impossibly slippery text of a time that occurred before the lingusitic implications of the twelve tribes. Bayford talks about this naming, and it's closeness but not interconnectedness with the text. “The significance of the name , like the identity and function of Jacob's wrestling partner, is debated. The major problem is that its grammatical structure has no exact parallel among biblical names, and its trilateral root...is only found elsewhere in Hosea 12:4. (Bayford, 373)
If there is no piety, no religious lesson, to be found in the ancient desires that provide Jacob is onea bedrock of the story, and the change between what was named and what is named is ambiguous, then it is important for us to find out what the name Jacob meant, and what the name Israel means. Beginning with the name of Jacob. Alter describes the problem with this text best, when he describes other naming rituals in relation to Jacob: “Abraham's change of name was a mere rhetorical flourish compared to this one, for all of the patricahs Javos is one whose life is entangled in a moral ambiguties. Rashi beautifully catches the response of the name change: “It will no longer be said that the blessings came through deviousness (ooqbah, a word suggested by the radical of “crookedness” in the name Jacob but instead through lordliness (sarrah, a root that can be extracted from the name Isreal) and openess. It is nevertheless noteworthy—and to my knowledge has not been noted—that the pronouncement about the new name is not completely fulfilled. Whereas Abraham is invariably called Ab raham once the name is changed from Abram, the narrative continues to refer to this patriarch in most instances as Jacob. Thus, Israel does not really replace his name but becomes a synonym for it. A practice reflected in the parralleism of biblical poetry, where Jacob is always used in the first half of the line and Israel, the poetic varation, in the second half...(Alter, 181). This poetic parallelism is noted especially in verse 27, where the referent keeps jumping around, is the reference to Jacob, to Israel, to that who is wrestled, or that who wrestles—that who strives, and that who is crooked merge in a muscularly linguistic struggle with that who is being wrestled. Even when the struggle breaks, even in the breaking the language of the naming and the blessing that Jacob begs so ardently for never truly leaves.
The name Isreal is equally confusing, equally slippery. The New Interpretaters commentary spends some time figuring out exactly what the meaning of struggle found in the text: “although Israel may actually mean something like “God rules, the narrator claims otherwise. The NRSV footnote s suggest a purposeful ambiguity in the name: “God Strives” (God intintes and engages in the wrestling, and “the one who strives with God” (Jacob responds in kind. Jacob cannot struggle with God if God refuses to be so engaged. God's giving this name, then has implications for God as well as for Jacob. It affirms a divine commitment to stay with Jacob in this struggle.” If this is the case, if this becomes a verb, that moves throughout the Gospel, and talks about how the divine breaks us, it provides a kind of narrative outside of the text—it provides at least one way out of the text, a way that can be explained using the last three words: daybreak, hip, and Penuel.
The hip, the brokenness of the hip and how that brokenness extends to a new kind of freeing strangness is one of the metaphors that Rad uses to complicate, but also liberate this passage. The text is written on Jacob's body, and for Rad: “By the time of the Yahwhist many interpertations of the story had been made, and that it had become quite broken in the traditon. But precisely because of its breaks and joints it received it's essential spaciousness; preciously the looseness in the inner d every connection of the statements to one another makes room for many ideas, for the indvidiual proceedings and words in the evenet, as every expositer sees are not prescily limited with respsecft to their meaning and their significance. And every exgente will likewise encounter something somewhere in this narrative which can no longer be interpreted. (Rad, 319)
The breaking of the body, the striking of the hip, is the crux of the entire story, and the one that suggests that the text itself is broken, as Rad suggests. The strugge mle between the man and between Jacob lasted for a very long time. It was eternal, and it was if the firmament had broken from the sky itself. That he needs the blessing adds to the desperatio of the story. The wrestling portion is a place where both Gunkel and Rad notice a tension in the text itself, a breaking apart of the story. (verse 25). It becomes almost meta-contextual, the wrestling of the angel, the wrestling of Jacob, the wrestling of history, and the wrestling of the reader.
The reader becomes Jacob and Jacob becomes us. Rad describes the darkness of the text: “the struggle was indecisive for a long peroid, until the mysterious antagoist touched Jacob's hip, which was put out of joint by the touch, as though by a magical power. Here is a passage where a much older form of our saga is revealed. The words in v. 25 are so strangely unrelated that one might think at first, in view of the hopelessness of the fight that Jacob had won the upper hand of his antoginist through a trick of fighting. This interperation would best suit the contiuation in versuis 26, where the antognist asks Jacob to let him go, and then also the later statement that Jacob had prevailed. (Rad. 316)
What exactly did Jacob prevail over? It might have been the history of Isreal, over his enemies, over itself, and its polytheistic history. Rad talks a bit about this, continuing on in his history: “the notation conceals an earlier etiology of a cultic dance, eg a lamping dance. (Cf 1 Kings 18:26) It can no longer be decided. It is further reported that the Israelites reverently rememd this crippling of their ancestry in a very curious cultic usage connected with their slaughter pf animals. Of all the things which happened on that night when the name Israel was recoded, this crippling of the ancestor become the subject of an especially nurtured memory...(Rad, 319)
In this case then Jacob becomes like Isaac, who is bundled by Abraham to a cultic mountain, and is almost sacrificed as a reminder that unlike their neighbours, they no longer sacrifice children. But in this context, they once did, and they once worried about what their pagan, polytheistic neighbours thought. The uniqueness of this text then, is how it attempts over and over again to make Hebrew that which is weirdly isolated from that context. The last two words, one a time and one a place, are like putting cement blocks in an attempt to weed a garden. The weeds push forth and the cement breaks. The text emerges as one of continued instability.
The time is daybreak, which has emerged in the narrative when talking about Taylor's idea that the wrestler was the face of God, and that Jacob is moving on the face of God itself, in Gunkel's discussion of the night deity that loses power during the day, and in the Torah commentaries discussion of Jacob's dark night of the soul, But there is greater power in it elsewhere. There is an element of the story that argues that Jacob's adversary loses power as the night emerges into day break, but it is almost as if that whom Jacob wrestles is night itself. The darkness and the light then become poetic elements for Jacob's personal, family, and collective history. The darkness is not only a personal dark night of the soul, but a collective social and poltical one as well.
Alter makes this argument explicit: “But the real point, as Jacob's adversary himself suggests when he refuses to reveal his name, is that he resists identification. Appearing to Jacob , he is the embodiment of portentous antagonism in Jacob;'s dark night of the soul. He is obviously in some sense a double of Esau as adversary but he is also a doubling of all with whom Jacob has had to contend and he may equally well be an externalization of all that Jacob has to wrestle with within himself. A powerful physical metaphor is nitmatied by the story of wrestling: Jacob, whose name can be construed as "he who acts crookedly" is been, permanently lamed, by his nameless adversary in order to be made straight before his reunion with Esau (Alter, 180) .
While Jacob might have been made straight morally, while his trickster ways may have been replaced with a blessing of great ambiguity and shadowy power, and that blessing would result in an emergence of a new kind of power, he is still broken or crooked in his body. Seeing the face of the supernatural results in a body that cannot be sacrificed. To limp and to be lame has a negative power in the ancient world. A blemished animal cannot be placed upon the alter, but Jacob with his limp that comes from struggling can now lead his people. The paradox there, a paradox that remains ungaurded, is central to this story.
The paradox continues in where the wrestling took place, and this becomes the last element, before a conclusion. The wrestling took place at a place called Pienel. Note the el suffix, and how it is like Israel the person, and Bethel, the place where Jacob had his first vision. Pienel means the face of God, and has we have talked about before, el being an old name for God, Elohim not fully attaching itself to YHWH but having a gap or a disconnect. In verse 21, just before the narrative of wrestling, there are 5 references to various faces in a little over 4 lines. The name becomes a place loaded with psycholinguistic baggage. It also ends the tale, finishing after the strange priestly verse, the verse that seems disconnected. The place becomes a way to acknowledge the texts liminal working from a historical basis to a new future for the Isrealites.
The Torch Bible commentaries place all of this naming in a proper context: “yet this story is told with a quite remarkable economy of language and is quite unforgettable. WE note that the story is linked with a place-name which by its very form suggests an ancient cult center. It is also linked with a dietary law (which is not otherwise mentioned in the Law, a taboo on eating the sciatic muscle. Thirdly it is related to the giving to Jacob of a new name, Israel which is, to our mind, most unnaturally interpreted, Again the word for Wrestle is nowhere else used in the bible and has obviously been chosen for its similarity in sound to Jabbok. Although this must not be pressed too far, the supernatural antagonist is not described as Yahweh, and if the name Israel and Peniel are a guide, it is at El, a Canaanite god. Lastly the location is important, it is at the crossing of the river, the threshold of the land of Canaan, and in popular thought, thresholds were always dangerous to those who crossed for the first time. All this suggests that we have here a very ancient story which, because it had so strong a hold on the imagination, was particularly valuable for interpretation and reinterpretation. In its final form in the book of Genesis, it at least points to the fact that Jacob is entering the new land, the land of promise..."
Peinel then, becomes a mark of the continued history, a refusal to forgot and a desire to keep a place firm in the history of a people who were nomadic, whose only contuinued narrative they had was the history, was an oral tradition that worked multiple attempts in a single way.
That the story ends with a new kind of dietary restriction, and also ends in a geographic place that had not only ancient history but a profound kind of collective history allows for the Israelites to acknowledge or at least find a way to live with their ancient past. The passage pockmarked with forgettings, and refusals, seems to me an attempt to break through, to contextualise and to remmemebr their history. The wrestling, the breaking, the impurity, and the making pure but not whole are all new ways of functioning, new ways of finding a way to become this new kind of category set.
The passage then is an argument against seeking of answers. It becomes a way to live in our uncomfortable collective histories, and to acknowledge them to move forward. It becomes a way, in it's full and complete understanding to spend time with the mystery. We do not know who we are struggling with, we do not know why our bodies are broken, we do not know what we are begging for, and when we finally receive the gift of blessing, it does not often come in a form or even a lingustic context we are expecting. We grapple in the dark with dangerous strangers, who may be compoenets of ourselves and our history, alone and naked before a power that might be beneveolent or might be malovent, but is never simple, is never ready. We tell the story of this struggling, but the narrative we have is frequently in the dark, as dark as that night was. We do this, not because we want to or feel called or even because we seek wholeness or completion, but because there is not another option, not another way of seeing Pienel, or the face of God. When we finish the wrestling, when we get the blessing of a new name, we do not lose our old name. The naming becomes a way to move between old and new, between what was and what will become. In this capacity, We are Jacob, and Jacob is us.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
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A77, Ryman, ca 1977.
A tragic tale of a colarodo llama and it's interactions with a mountain lion.
these joseph noderer works are tiny, and well constructed, with mossy/muddy colours. (mostly landscapes, but tight and self contained minitures, nothing epic at all about them)
Seven Chalices of Vomit and Blood
dozens of feild recordings from ghana and some bush taxi recordings from Mali.
wild thing adult wolf suits
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Alain Delon, source unknown.
abby macdonald does a gendered analysis of whip it's box office, that talks about womens movies now.
a new oklahoma law will require all those who have had abortions in the state to answer the following questions on a public website:
1. Date of abortion
2. County in which abortion performed
3. Age of mother
4. Marital status of mother
(married, divorced, separated, widowed, or never married)
5. Race of mother
6. Years of education of mother
(specify highest year completed)
7. State or foreign country of residence of mother
8. Total number of previous pregnancies of the mother
Live Births
Miscarriages
Induced Abortions
via here
100s of underconstruction animated gifs, from web 1.0.
Elephant giving birth.
average cats a v. funny lolcat parody.
nazi gnomes.
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I have no context for this.
great vintage fotos of the H arwell Computer, the worlds oldest funcitoning one.
fotos from the 1970 edition of the Practical Enclyopedia of Good Decorating and Home Improvement.
Jim Dale Cell Phone Song (watch this, funny and v. clever)
the Guttmacher instituite new study finds that there is no evidence that bans on legally available abortion do nothing to end it.
vivian maier is a mid century Chicago street photographer, who has recently been re discovered.
Jesse Jackson talking about having no shame about being poor, or being non-white, or being on welfare, in a self esteem rock out, early 70s sesame street.
fotos of the cervix thruout the entire menstrual cycle. Just Gorgeous.
ars techinca collates 100 years of technological copyright paranoia, from the player piano to the vcr.
fotos from cameras attached to arctic albtrosses suggest that they follow killer whales, and eat scraps left over. kind of amazing.
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Quiz from an early 60s Catholic Marriage Manual, Just before V2.
moving article decimating the sentimalist arguements in favour of gay marriage.
the nyt does not tell the whole truth about the reasons why Hockney moved from LA back to his Native yorkshire, because those reasons suggest an uncomfortably queer politics.
Bidisha explains instutional misogyny so the rest of the world will understand.
aquraias records has produced and distrubated at least 14 volumes of something called sounds of american doomsday cults. including some pretty amazing stuff from Elizabeth Clarae Prophet. Link goes to Vol 14.
there is also a japanese version.
i love how crotchety Ralph STanley is in this nyt story.
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Anon Street Campaign, LES, NYC.
sholem on anna wintour's new doc.
Cass Elliot Sings Jesus Wasa Cross Maker.
the bathhouse fire last week in winnipeg is now considered a murder.
top irish hurling star comes out
knitted tentacle scarf
During an appearance yesterday on Hardball, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) jokingly suggested that former Vice President Dick Cheney is a vampire.
Chris Matthews asked Grayson what he thinks of Cheney's attacks on President Obama for "dithering" on Afghanistan.
"Well, my response is -- and by the way, I have trouble listening to what he says sometimes, because of the blood that drips from his teeth while he's talking," said Grayson. "But my response is this: He's just angry because the president doesn't shoot old men in the face. But by the way, when he was done speaking, did he just then turn into a bat and fly away?"
Even Matthews, no Cheney fan himself, was shocked: "Oh God -- we gotta keep a level here. Let me ask you this: Don't you have any Republican friends?"
Grayson laughed, and said that some of his best friends are Republicans.
from here
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Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Monday, October 19, 2009
nancy spero, whose reworking of history into femminist critiques of language and violence, and whose cribbing of ancient systems of representation worked as instutional critiques of nation and musuem, often simetenously, died on sunday. there is an excellent example of her work at the AGO, on the first floor.
from gunkel on genesis, translated by mark biddle, mercer press, 1997
- river fording reported twice
- opinon of most that 23-32 belongs to J
- Dillman claims it for E
- the name Israel moves b/w E and J sources
- Jacob traditionally means overcome by how "he smote the diety during the struggle" (346)
- a lack of coherence b/w 26a. 27-29
- "the diety appears at night dreadfully mysterious" (349)
- classical parrels to odyessus 11:23 )
- jacob as trickster figure (with the thigh smack
- jacob discerns hje is in the presence of a god (not G_D) (349)
- (my note: the angel does not know jacob, and the angel cowers (gunkel calls him a diety), means that the belessing is under duress--classical and near eastern parrells to dieties that disappear in the sunlight, that literally gain power thru darkness (VAMPIRES MOTHERFUCKER)
- "the fact that the deity evades the question concerning his name has a parrell in judges 13:17-18 and may be explained by the ancient belieg wide spread among many peoples that the knowledge of the name gives power over the bearer , even a god or demon. (350)
- formally a large amount of dual recession
- v 29 victorious
- v 31 Barely Escaped with his life
- v 25 the narrator/v 27 God reports that the dawn is breaking
- v 28 God asks Jacob his name
- v 30 Jacob asks God the same
- v 31 the narrator intentionally overrides the name of YHWH
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Gunkel
L Schmidt
Martin Archard
Claus Westerman, GEnesis 12-36
rituals of naming
exodus 4:24;26
ellinger
mount of gilead
j source
face of god
why are both names retained
gilead/edom
tutleraly spirt
rashi
river demons
other notes:
"By means of a dietary regulation (not mentioned elsewherei nthe OT) Isreal's memory will be continually jopgged regarding the struggle between jacob and god. This regulatrion instutionalised the memory. It provides an ongooing mark of self infentifaction for Jaov;s desenceants. Thsi memory, asscoiated with bodily ritual, draws attention to Jacob/Israel's self-idneity, invluding not simplay a psirutal reality, but all of Isreals life as well. An animal--part opf Gods creation--focuses on this human memory" (also perhaps a breaking away from the human sacrifices required by el?) (new interperters, 535)
Gunkel claims vs 29 is unclear. general crit. consensus that 33 is a later addition to explain the dietary taboo. less of a clear conensus that 28-29 might be, because of the later discussion of israel, and some limited discussion of a later inclusion on v 26, because it just doesnt fit in.
what is contested is what has been added subsquently and when, and hence the meaning and the purpose of the text as a whole ... (Claus Westermann, commentary on gen 12-36, Fortress Press, 26)
Westerman's Schematic:
vv. 23-24 Interniary
v. 25 a man wrestles with him
26-30 outcome of the struggle
26a-27a opponents request to let him go
27a-30a Jacob's counter, condition, request for name.
30b attacker refuses name, blesses Jacob
31 Jacob Names the Place
32a Merging into inteniary
no memorial stone, no cultic place?
32:26b is unattached to the rest of the story, maybe all of 26
L Schmidt
Martin Archard
Claus Westerman, GEnesis 12-36
rituals of naming
exodus 4:24;26
ellinger
mount of gilead
j source
face of god
why are both names retained
gilead/edom
tutleraly spirt
rashi
river demons
other notes:
"By means of a dietary regulation (not mentioned elsewherei nthe OT) Isreal's memory will be continually jopgged regarding the struggle between jacob and god. This regulatrion instutionalised the memory. It provides an ongooing mark of self infentifaction for Jaov;s desenceants. Thsi memory, asscoiated with bodily ritual, draws attention to Jacob/Israel's self-idneity, invluding not simplay a psirutal reality, but all of Isreals life as well. An animal--part opf Gods creation--focuses on this human memory" (also perhaps a breaking away from the human sacrifices required by el?) (new interperters, 535)
"the late jewish midrash understands the demand to be relweased as follows: "I must sing in the morning choir befoires Fod's throne. Now one must assume that Jacob has discovered something of the divine nature of his opponenet, for in an odd contrast to his previous defense, he struggles to wrest a blessing from him, viz. dinvine vitality. It is better not ot explain this as an especially pious quality; it is more correct to encounter with God. This cluthcing at God and his power of blessing is so elemental that it goes beyond what we understand by peity or impeity. This request however, is not granted at all. Ratyher, Jacob must first be asked who he is. In the entire secion which follows one must bear in mind that the ancients did not consider a name as simply sound and smoke. On the contrary, for them the name was clsoely linked with its bearer in such a way that the name continaed something of the schatachter of the one who bore it... (Gerhard Von Rad: Genesis: A Commenatry, New Westminster PRess, 316)
(We saiod above that by the time of the YAhwist many interperations of the story had been made, adn that it had become quite broken in the tradition. B ut preceisley because of its breaks and joints it reciived ins essential spaciousness; presciously the looseness in the inner connection of the statemens to one another makes room for many ideasl tfor the indincidual procesdings and words in the event, as every espositor sees are not presceily limited with respect to their meaning and their siginifcance. And every exegete will likewise encouvneter something somwhere in this narrative which can no longer be intereopreted. (Rad, 319)
Gunkel claims vs 29 is unclear. general crit. consensus that 33 is a later addition to explain the dietary taboo. less of a clear conensus that 28-29 might be, because of the later discussion of israel, and some limited discussion of a later inclusion on v 26, because it just doesnt fit in.
what is contested is what has been added subsquently and when, and hence the meaning and the purpose of the text as a whole ... (Claus Westermann, commentary on gen 12-36, Fortress Press, 26)
Westerman's Schematic:
vv. 23-24 Interniary
v. 25 a man wrestles with him
26-30 outcome of the struggle
26a-27a opponents request to let him go
27a-30a Jacob's counter, condition, request for name.
30b attacker refuses name, blesses Jacob
31 Jacob Names the Place
32a Merging into inteniary
no memorial stone, no cultic place?
32:26b is unattached to the rest of the story, maybe all of 26
Rachel has a show at Trinity Square Video right now, part of a group show with Alex Morrison and Rhizome head Mark Tribe about the aesthetics of protest (the show is named after the port huron statement, which seems slightly out of time) Rachel's work "It's a Computer" , a mash up of various political speakers from High Park in London, does more with issues of control, free speech, digital dissemination and the curation of information then most--it is a taut, difficult, and profoundly discomforting work, and it stands up to a cryptic but lovingly shot peice about SFU and vancouver's protest history by Morrison, and Tribe's Port Huron work (which was the inspiraiton for right now)
Friday, October 16, 2009
I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end. My field is the history of thought. Man is a thinking being. Aunite Michel.
- where does the text come from
- what are the key words
- what is it's context within the hebrew tradition
- what is its context within the near east tradition
- what are the implications of it within the narrative
- what is it's narrative structure
- what are the major gaps
- what does the work have going on formally
- what questions remain to be answered.
- does it feature a llama
key words in the passage:
- "yet this story is told with a quite remarkable exonomy of language and is quite unforgettable. WE note that the story is linked with a place-name which by its very form suggests an acient cult centre. It is also linked with a dietary law (which is not otherwiuse mentioned in the LAw, a taboo on eating the sciatic muscle. Thirdly it is related to the giving to Jacob of a new name, Israel which is, to our mind, most unnaturally interperted, AGain the word for WRestle is nowhere else used in the bible and has obviously been chosen for its similarityy in sound to Jabbok. Although this must not be pressed too far, the supernatural antagonist is not described as Yahweh, and if the name ISrael and Peniel are a guide, it is at El, a cannanite god. Lastly the location is important, it is at the crossing of the river, the threshold of the land of CAnaan, and in popular thought, thresholds were always dangerous to those who crossed for the first time. All this suggests that we have here a very ancient story which, because it had so strong a hold on the imagination, was particullary valuable for interperation and reinterpertaion. In its final form in the book of GEnesis, it at least points to the fact that Jacob is entering the new land, the land of promise..." (107, Torch Bible Commentaries, Gensis 12-50, AS Herbert,SCM PRess, London, 1967)
- breaking of the day/night
- (because supernatural visitors only happened in the night)
- "...it was a commonplace that God's face would not be seen "no one shall see me adn live" This reflects a concern not for God but for the life of the one seeing. In this story, God is not only the one endangered by the daylight, it is Jacob! To see God in the full light of day would have meant death for Jacob. If Jacob holds on until daybreak, he is a dead man! at the same time, the continued grapsing of God on Jaocob's part in the near-dawn light also says something about JAcob. GHe is willing to risk death for the sake of the dicvine bleassing. JAcob's action suggests that he will risk seeing the face of esau too. (New Interperters, 566)
- the folkloric charatchter of this haunting episode becomes especialyl clear at this point. The notion of a night spoiurt that loses its power or is not permitted to go about in daylight is common to many folk traditions, as is the troll or gaurdian figure who blocks access to a ford or briudge. This temporal limitation of activity suggests that the man is certainly not God Himselfg and porably not an angel in the ordinary sense. It has lead Claus WEstermann to conclude that the nameless wrestler must be thought as some sort of demon. Nahum SArna, follwoing the midras, flatly idneitifies the wrestlr as the tutelary spirit of Esau. But the real point, as Jacob's adversary himself suggests when he refuses to reveal his name, is that he resists identification. Appearing to Jacob , he is the embodiment of portentious atagonism in Jacob;'s dark night of the soul. He is obviously in some sense a double of Esau as adversary but he is also a doubling of all with whom Jacob has had to cotend and he may equally well be an externalziation of all that Javob has to wrestle with within himself. A powerful physical metaphor is nitmatied by the story of wrestling: Jacob, whos name can be construed as "he who acts crookedly" is ben, pernanetly lamed, by his nameless adveredary in order to be made straight before his reunuion with Esau (Alter, 180)
- "flocks and caravans often travel at night,. To lead a large flock over the Javvok, which flows through a deep gorge, the modern NAh ez-Zerqa, was a difficult task...: (Rad, Conmmentary on Genesis, Westminster Press, 1966)
- Angel (Torah Commentary: "the classic commentaries are nearly unanimous in seeing him as evil, a maligh force. He may have been Esua's gaudian ange (Gen R 77:3) "Before encountering Esau in the flesh, his spirit struggled with the spirit of ESau) He may have been the demonic gaurdian of the riger, his proouse seems to have been to weaken Jacon on the eve of his confrantion with Esau)
- the initial identifaciton of the anonymous adversay is from Jacob's point of view and so all he knows of him in what he sees, that he is a man. (Alter, The Five Books of Moses, A Translation with Commentary, Norton and Co. 2004)
- Even more mysterious is the unindentafied man whose featrures and acitons have muich in common wiht charahcters found in cross coultural folk stories, such as the dangerous river demon, a spirit that gaurds or protects a body of water and a being that must vanish by day break, Westerman therefore idnetides the being who taccakcs Jacob as a hostile demon or evil spirit...SArna on the other hand denies the association. Notiong , he contends explicitly portrats the man as a dfangerous river spoirit that blocks humans as they attempt to cross the ribver. Everyone and everything that Jacob carreid across was safe on the other side. Fuithermore most oftne humans attempt to appease these river spirits to ensure a safe cross. Jacob does nothing of the sort. Finally, the mysterious assialint ends up blessing JAcob, an action that sarna argues cannot be done by a demon in a bliblical story. (Bayford, 373)
- Closterman claims as man
- thigh, hip
- ...."the struggle was indeseuves for a long peroid, until the mysterious antagoinst touched Jacob's hip, which was put out of joint by the tourch, as though bny a magical power. Here is a passage where a much older form of our saga is revealed. The words in v. 25 are so strangely unrleated that one might htink at first, in veiw of the hopelessness of the fight, that Jacob hjad won the upper hand over his angangist (by a trick of fighting). This interpertation would best suit the continuion in v 26, where the antagionist asks Jacob to let him go and then also the later statement that Jacob had prevailed (rad, 316)
- whether this notation coneals an earleir aetiology of a cultiuc dance, eg a limping dance (cf 1 Kings 18:26 can no longer be decided. It is further rpoerted that the Isrealites reverently remembed this crippling of their ancestory in a very curious cultic uisage connected with their slaughter of animals. OF all the things which happend on that night when the name ISreal was recieved, this cripping of the ancersor became the subject of an especaally nutyured memory (Rad, 319)
- the inclination of modern transations to render the verb here as "struck" as unwarranted, being influenced either by the context or by the the cognate noun nega, which means plauge or affliciton., But the verb naga in the qal conjugation always means "to touch" even "to barely touch" and only in the pi'el conjugation can it mean "to afflcit" the adversdary mamis jacob with a magic touch, or if one prferes, by skillful pressure on a pressure point.
- wrestle:
- (Torah Commentary: this may be an acocunt of Jacob's wrestling with his consicence, toron between his human tendency to avoid an unpleasent enounter and the divine impulse in him that urgers him to do the difficult but right hting. The position my find suppourt in the text "you have striven with beings divine and human (v. 29) which can asl e trandlated "you have striven wqith God and with men" We can imagine Jacob saying to himself, "Until now, I have responded to difficult situtuations by lying and running, I deiced my father. I ran away from Esau. I left Laban's house stealthily instead of congronting him. I hate myself for being a person who lies and runs. But I'm afraid of faciing up to this situation" By not defeating his concieince, Jacob wins. He outgrows his Jacob identity as the trickster and becomes Israel, t he one who contends with God and people instead of avoiding or manipulating htem., At the end of the struggle, he is physically wounded and emotionalyl depleted. Neverletheless, the torah descibes him (in 33:18) as shalem, translated safe, with connoations of "whole", at peace with himself (shalem is related to the word shalom", posessing an intergrity he never had before. " (s'fat emet) Rashbam sees God as sending an angel to wrestle with Jacob to prevent him from running away as he may have been tempted to do, complelling him to do the right thing. And B. Jacob writes" God answers a person's prayeers if the person rays by searching himself, becoming his own opponent")
- "it is not really clear who the victor is" (new jerome bible commentary, roland murphy, prentice hall, 1990,33)
- abaaw is a play on the name of the river yabboq (new jerome, 34)
- did Israel see itself engaged in a fateful combat with God, such as teh testing of father barham in Gen 22 suggests. (new jerome, 34)
- "why does god wrestle with Jacob. Many Suggest taht God respoonsds to Jacobs history of deception; the story constituioes a disciapanry move on God's part to teach Jacob that he cannot proceed in to the fture relying on his own devices. Hence, some claim the story presents Jacobs conversion to a life more attuned to the ways of God. Yet, we find no evidence of that in the narrative--no negative judgement of Jacob's behaviours, no repetence on Jaocb';s part and no fundamental change in JAcob's subsuqent life pattern. Indeed, in giving Jacob a new name, God commends Jacob for strugglign and names him in view of who he has been in the past, and given his rpsoen to the divine challenge, still is.
- the image of wrestling has been implicit throughout the Jacob story; in his rolling away trhe huge stone from the mouth of the well, and in his multiple contending s with LAban. Now in thsi culimanting moment of his life story, the charachtezintg image of wresting is made explicit and literal. (Alter, 179)
- After doing so, however, he reamins on the other side, his possesions. AFter doing so, however, he ramins on the other side and has another expereine of the netherworld between fantasy and realtily, between the divine and the mundane. In a narrative nortourous for its ambiguity, Jacob wrestles with a 'man' until morning. The first example of ambiguity is ecvident in the abudnance of third person masculine singular verbs, many of which have no explicit referent. As a result it is often uncluear who is speaking. (Susan A Brayford, Genesis, from the Septaugint Commentary Seires, Koninklijke Brill NV, 207, 373)
- classical antcedents in the idea of wrestling a demon who only has strength at night (Jupiter in the Amphityron of Plato (Westerman, 518)
- jacob
- among its listery featuers, the story plays on various wrods, espexcialy the names JAcob and ISreal, and the words face, esp. ion 32:21, 30 and 33:10. (The new Interperters Bible Vol 1, Abingdon PRess, Nashville, 565, 1994)
- both names retained in the narratives that follow (new inteperters, 566)
- Abrahams change of name was a mere rhetorical flourish compared to this one, for all the patricahs Jacob is one whose life is engangled in moral ambiguites. Rashi beautifully catheces the resopnse of the name change: "It will no longer be said that the blessings came t oyou through decisouing 'oqbah, a word suggested byt the radical of "crookedness" in the name Jacob but intsead through lordliness (serrah, a root that can be extracted from the name Is real) and openness. It is neverthelss noteworthy--and to my knowledge has not been noted--that the pronouncement about the new name is not completely fulfilled. Whereas ABraham is invrabibly called Abraham once the name is changed from Abram, the narrative continues to refer to his pateriach in most instances as Jacob, Thus, Irsreal does not really rpleace his name but becomes a synomyn for it--a practive reflected in the parrallleism of biblical poetry, where Jacob is always used in the first half o f the line and isreal, the poetic variation in the second half..." (ALter, 181)
- the he pronoun jumps around, where the referent is unclear in v. 27 (is it the angel, jacob, both?)
- israel (there are no fewer then three etiologies: the explanation of the name Isreal, the reswaon for the name Penuel/Peniel central event, and the wrestling with a man retains its mytstery) (new jerome, 33)
- the change of the name to ?Israel provides an etiology. The real etymology of yisrae'el is unknown (may god rule? but the popular explanation given here flows out of the encounter (you have struggled) sarita) The struggle has been with elohimn and anasim with God (or gods? elohim beings ? and humans (Esau and Laban?)_ according to the explanation given by the man... (new jerome, 34)
- "although isreal may actually mean something like "God rules" the narrator claims otherwise. The NRSV footnotes suggest a purspoeful ambiguity in the name:" God STrives" (God initates and engages in the wrestling_ and "the one who strives with God" (Jacob responds in kind. Jacob canot struggle with God if God refuses to be so engaged. God's giving this name, then has implications for God as well as for Jacob. It affirms a divine ommitment to stay with Jacon in the struggle. God will be caught up in the realtionship (New Itnerperters, 566)
- The name Isreal, which will be given to Jacob once more, is here interpetrted very freely and contrary to its original lingustic meaning (MAy God rule) in such a way that God is not the subject but the object of Jacob's struggle. Our translation strive is not quite assured What the addition and with men means here has long been asked. To relate it to the disputes with LAban or Esau seems to the only possiblty, though it is somewhat forced. PErhaps "God (gods) and men is only a superlative, stirring idiom, which may not be pressed. (317)
- blessing (Torah Commentaroy) The blessing must be one I will have earned in my own right, not by guile (Rashi) The angel asks Jacob, what is your name, the last time he sought a blessing, when hs father asked him, who are you, he answered that quesiton falsely, now that you are perared to testify truthfully as to who you are, you have shed that previous identity and are prepared to take on a new one, Isreal) (201)
- Penuel, Face of El (and Face in Verse 21)
- the two forms of the name, Penuel and Peniel, differ unessentialy only in the archaic nominal ending, the latter is used in v 30 because it makes the pun on the word for face, which is udes in the longe of the narratior, clearer. this narrative was therefore once aetiological ie it eplained the name of the city east of thje Jordan, which later became so imporntat. It may have been the saga about the acutary at teh cultic centre, which detrived its holiness from this very expereince. ,Since Mahanaim most porably and the "Mount of Gilead" certainly were south of the Jabbok , one must considuer that JAcob crossed the Jabook from soutth to north after he had moved along the south side of the Jaobbok on his journey from the east. (rad, 318)
- the name builds on "face to face", the face component being quite transparent in the hebrew. Again the term is elohim and there is no way of knowing whether it is singular or plular. The Hebrew says literally: My Life (or life-breath) was saved. (Alter, 190)
- Jabbok River (The Torah may be punning on the term ma-avor Yabbok, the crossing or transit point of the Jabbok--and the transition of Jacob to becoming a different person. Also note the word play b/w Jabbok (Yabbok) and the word for "he wrestled" Ye-avek) (Etz Hayim, Torah and Commentary. The Rabbinical Assembly, The United Synagouge of Coinserative Judaism, 2001, 200)
- "the present day WAdi Zerka which empties inothe Jordan ca 25 mil N of the DEad SEa, the movements of Jacob are confusing. Hios adventure occurs at Peneul, N. of the Jabbok did he cross that deep ravine with his family and possesionj and then return to the N side when he is alone (v 25) (New Jerome, 34)
- jabbok (an eastern tributary of t he Jordan , about twenty miles north of the dead sea), a frontier point for the promised land (deut 3:16)
- the danger of the ford is personifed in the spirit or femon who does not want to let the traveller cross the river... (Westerman, 515)
- rivers name changed, due to this incident, because previous name had become offensive, so three namings, one of the ford, one of jacob and one of the new nation (closterman, 519) (but not a naming of the angel)
doing the work i am doing with jason, esp. the work that surrounds sex, has mirrors in the work i did with the bishops, with fthr hero, and even with shepered--the same banal offices (offices in the literal sense, but also now that i think about it offices in the liturgical sense as well), the same questions, the same narratives about sex, power, gender, and redemption--except jason never offers redemption, and jason is not doing ecclestical work, he does not control the ability to baptise the dead or doling out hail marries...i have begun to realise then, though this mirrors my historical realtionship with men, there is a break in the narrative where other kinds of discourses can sort thru...
i want jason to bless me, to declare me whole, but i know that is not his job.
there is power there.
i want jason to bless me, to declare me whole, but i know that is not his job.
there is power there.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
some notes on wycliffe:
a) i dont fit in
b) i wont fit in
c) though i never fit in, so i need to figure if this is usual not fitting in or something larger
d) i am not paticulalry good at being proper, and the place sort of runs on this low lever properity
(low level propoerity)
e) there is a v. obv. heirachy, several times in the last week or so i have been reminded me of that
f) i feel uncomfortable in places that reward keeping things in check, in being proper, in knowing yr place
g) my values are radically difft then most peoples here
(i like the people, a lot, and there is this sense that the work i do will always put me on the radical edge of theological discourse, and by extension the theological community, and theologians don't tend to be as loud as others)
so four questions:
a) can i move
b) will place a be better then place b or c or d.
c) is the general isolation of wycliffe a spec. problem to the institution or a larger problem vis a vis the work i am doing.
d) if it is the latter, will it be solved by going to knox or the like.
e) will it be easier to move or will it be easier to stay?
(i mean talk to chris, etc, but jason talked about having no backstage right now
always having to be on--thats one of the things about being an aspie, is having to spend so much time of yr emotional energy calibrating
and so if i have no time to store up the reserves,)
a) i dont fit in
b) i wont fit in
c) though i never fit in, so i need to figure if this is usual not fitting in or something larger
d) i am not paticulalry good at being proper, and the place sort of runs on this low lever properity
(low level propoerity)
e) there is a v. obv. heirachy, several times in the last week or so i have been reminded me of that
f) i feel uncomfortable in places that reward keeping things in check, in being proper, in knowing yr place
g) my values are radically difft then most peoples here
(i like the people, a lot, and there is this sense that the work i do will always put me on the radical edge of theological discourse, and by extension the theological community, and theologians don't tend to be as loud as others)
so four questions:
a) can i move
b) will place a be better then place b or c or d.
c) is the general isolation of wycliffe a spec. problem to the institution or a larger problem vis a vis the work i am doing.
d) if it is the latter, will it be solved by going to knox or the like.
e) will it be easier to move or will it be easier to stay?
(i mean talk to chris, etc, but jason talked about having no backstage right now
always having to be on--thats one of the things about being an aspie, is having to spend so much time of yr emotional energy calibrating
and so if i have no time to store up the reserves,)
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Christan identity is foundationally an exilic absence from the world. This exile is not one that is forced upon all of us, though because we are part of the Abrahamic covenant, there are originating narratives stored deep within us that talk about that exile at the hands of murderous enemies. Like Moses, who never saw the promised land, or like Christ, who wrestled with the desert the narratives function through refusal and absence. This originating absence is reflected in listening to the parables and stories that are told by Jesus in the gospel. These stories, the messages that the early followers wanted us to internalize, are cryptic and oblique. They seem to tell us that to be Christian is not only to be exillic not in the Jewish sense of being without a messiah, but in a new synergistic sense of being without a land, and being beyond language.
If Christianity is an identity that one chooses, and if by that choosing one moves into the obliqueness of a leader who speaks in tight stories of mystery and wonder, the believer is deliberately choosing to engage in any number of scriptural traditions. Each believer brings his story, the story of his exile, his peoples exile, the new exile of Christianity, the ancient exiles of the Jews and the slightly more recent exiles of the Christians. To be exiled is to live in a set of Chinese nesting boxes of self-contradictory positions and negotiations. To enter these boxes requires our autonomy. This autonomy engages in these traditions means to (in the best of our limited human understanding) discern the will and nature of YHWH, not only as a singular but as a collective noun.
This push me/pull me tension centralizes the believer between a profound personal relationship and a seeking of the communal. This tension seems to be one that swerves like that snake—it is in the gospels, and can be seen in many of the parables. One can think of how the sharing and hording implications of the miracle of the loaves and fishes, or how Christ heals one-on-one, and then asks them to spread the gospel, or even larger acts that are about the isolation of speaking, the cryptic mysticism that grounds the gospels. Is the loneliness of the desert or the garden of Gethsmani not a parable that speaks the same lessons as Matthew 6:6 (But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. )
It makes sense that the parables mentioned so far, the ones that creep from meaning, show a tension that makes problematic calls toward justice and peace. The secretiveness of prayer abuts miracles of abundance. Calls towards justice clash loudly with the use of racial slurs, or the impossible to parse phrase “the poor will be always with us”. These clashes are not only in the Gospels though, they are embodied in the texts of our traditions—in reading Judges, which contains the horror of mass rape and the rousing Song of Deborah. These desires, these problems, this profound call for completion, for finding a new way of seeking the gospel that allows for the contradiction, for internalizing the multivalent power of being Christian is found deeply, belovedely in the reform theologian Walter Bruggerman, and his short book Cadences of Home, which assumes that we as Christians who are part of the world can strength in the exile that Christ calls of us. This idea is seductive, there is a loveliness in enshrining the loneliness that seems de rigeour in this post capitialist world.
But there is something profoundly problematic in calling people who are marginalized, who have their exile thrust upon them, to be exiled again, exiled by choice...the isolation of the marginalized, while absent from the gospels is often mirrored in the traditions of the church. (Bruggerman does his best in acknowledging that his privilege makes the exile easier for him: “As white, male, Western privlege comes to an end, some are likely to experience that “ending” as terrible loss that evokes fear and resentment”( 23) or talking about “abrasive blacks and aggressive women, and those whose vision require us to redefine what we think about our cozy definitions of power and money and sexuality and humanness. It takes no great imigation to think that wee might resist such emancipation, might prefer to stay bondaged in dear and isolation, if that is the only alternative offered by God.” (70)
The snake again, that slithers through these narratives, is present here, thinking that there is only two choices, of furling and unfurling—or to put it more prosaically, between exile and assimilation. Bruggerman understands the problems of his birth right, but he cannot interalize the problems of being called to break into a tradition that is often (and it could be argued essentially) violent to him. The femminist systematic theologian Sarah Coakley attempts to work through the same minefield as Bruggerman, except as someone who by her gender has been exiled from the exilic tribes that Cadences of Homes encourages so deeply.
Coakley has spent her life figuring how to submit to God and not to submit to the patriachary, and so she answers Bruggerman in the same tradition as Christ spoke to the Pharisees or how the late prophets spoke to the people of Israel. She writes of the problems of the marginal, and the instability of texts that do work against those who read them, via a brilliant feminist exegesis of Phillpines 2:6
"Where the question of gender then insidiously inserts itself into this scholarly divide is in the willingness... to construe forms of 'weakness,' 'passivity' or 'vulnerability' (all traditionally demerits for the male, but manifestly present in Jesus' passion) as either normatively human or even revelatory divine...if Jesus' 'vulnerability' is a primary narrative given, rather than a philosophical embarrassment to explain away, then precisely the question is raised whether 'vulnerability' need be seen as a female weakness rather than a...human strength." (Choking on Fishbones, 106)
Pushing Bruggerman and Coakley agaisnt each other, to define what it means to be open to the message of Christ, a message ethat is traditionally viewed as both submissive to a divine power and resilient against a state one, is a good indication of the paradoxical desire for a liberating Christ for a people in exile, considering that those who seek or need liberation are contained by the church, is constrained by how we construct narratives of autonomy. Constructing personal and political narratives and by extension these parables become the dominant way to pattern right living and right speech—they become heavily moralized fables, in the style of Aesop or Le Fontaine. To move against this simplfacation of the mystical or cosmic Christ, may be a way not only out of the kind of gendered exile that Coakley talks about, but also a way of internalizing the shadowing exile that we find in the prophets, Christ, the desert fathers, and that tradition.
One of the ways of working through those two structures, is to live in the mystery, that the parables are texts to be mediated on and not problems to be solved. This approach has been advocated by John Addison Dally in his guide to missional preaching—Choosing the Kingdom: “to apply the Word of God to our lives has always sounded topical at best, irreverent at worst. Yet Congreations everywhere cry out for it, and homiletics professors regularly teach it---this in spite of the fact that Jesus in the memory of the church repeatedly refused to answer the quesiton of how his teaching applied to the listerners. Agand and Again, Jesus turned such questions back to the asker...” (116)
How do we live the parables, go into the desert, engage in the city, and desire for the Kingdom of God, which is supposed to be within. Or to put it simply, how does one choose exile? This leads to other questions, raised but not answered in the texts mentioned here, or even the gospels-perhaps because these questions like which dramas are enacted, which roles are to be played, which narratives are engaged with, or how does one know that the exillic desires of YHWH, of moving away from the world, are the correct ones? How did Andrew and James know that abandoning their nets was the right descesion?
Bruggerman talks about this call towards narrative completion: “it is not our story simply because it is the story of everyone...it is our story because we have been prompted by it , had it take over our imaigation, been occupied by it and been caused to linger over it” (64). In this sense YHWH does not call us, but occupies us , like children born in refugee camps, whose home is only known through vague stories and lingering hope.
In this sense, the call towards god is one of liberation, against those that contain and break us, and perhaps figuring out that bondage, those problematic traditions and words, allow us to return home, though home is never explicit, it is never a place but an idea of place. This imperence, and the narratology of how are we included and excluded from the multivalent narratives of history---what Coakley does above, in her femminst reworking of a passage that causes great pain---Coakley does it in other places as well—embodying and sexualizing the trinity for example—and her influence allows to ask one more question.
If we are born in this refugee camp, and we live through the wandering, not knowing where we are going, but trusting the divine to take us there, how do we maintain our narratives. How do we avoid having our own stories subsumed under the grand narratives of Christianity...how do we remain the autounomous self when the history of the religion requires us not only to be isolated from the world, but paradoxically in commune with strangers.
I am unsure that these questions be answered. This thick bramble of personal and collective history is something that can only found in the wandering of the desert, it requires a long view, and I remain unconvinced that it can be externalised in a way that will aid other people---the history of the churhces attempt to make this intenral struggle extrernal, in fact, has proven to be the exact opposite of heelpful.
Monday, October 12, 2009
on The Mountain Goats song ezekiel 7.
I have been doing godwork, formally, for a few months now--and i am finding some important things about myself. I do not have a missional realtionship to christ. I am most likely not a christian. I do not feel called to ministry, to an intense and personal relationship with God. My queerness, my autism, my depression, my prickly/spiny nature in addition to the above as made the communal work that godtalk entails almost impossible and profoundly lonely. This loneliness is compounded with a never ending quest for completeness, for holiness, for purity, that if i am devout enough or together enough, or even if i do nothing, God in her infinte mercy would make me whole. I do not believe in the Divine, and I want her to make me whole. This album, and esp this song, is the best expression of that profound/postmodern paradox. I could talk about it musically, but the mystery of grace is foundaitonal to the push me/pull me tale of the fallen and the redeemed. Darinelle is CAtholic, he is not Protestant, and my move from the Catholics to the Protestants is one of seeking Grace--Here is Luther (another fallen Catholic) on Grace: It is like the case of a man who is ill, who trusts the doctor who promises him a certain recovery and in the meantime obeys the doctor’s instructions, abstaining from what has been forbidden to him, in the hope of the promised recovery (in spe promissae sanitatis), so that he does not do anything to hinder this promised recovery...Now this man who is ill, is he healthy?.
I feel as if Christ, or the narratology of Christianity has been forbidden to me, that I have had to abstain from it. This song, the album that this song comes from, has broken the hobble, I feel healthier listening to it, I feel less ill.
I feel like sometimes that the confusion, the narrative stumbling, the devotion to brokenness that Darnielle enages in, is a post-Catholic pushing around the history of his childhood, hoping that under that Sisyphian stone, there will be grace, that to make stories about it will make us healthier.
I have my doubts it will, but i like the hope.
I have been doing godwork, formally, for a few months now--and i am finding some important things about myself. I do not have a missional realtionship to christ. I am most likely not a christian. I do not feel called to ministry, to an intense and personal relationship with God. My queerness, my autism, my depression, my prickly/spiny nature in addition to the above as made the communal work that godtalk entails almost impossible and profoundly lonely. This loneliness is compounded with a never ending quest for completeness, for holiness, for purity, that if i am devout enough or together enough, or even if i do nothing, God in her infinte mercy would make me whole. I do not believe in the Divine, and I want her to make me whole. This album, and esp this song, is the best expression of that profound/postmodern paradox. I could talk about it musically, but the mystery of grace is foundaitonal to the push me/pull me tale of the fallen and the redeemed. Darinelle is CAtholic, he is not Protestant, and my move from the Catholics to the Protestants is one of seeking Grace--Here is Luther (another fallen Catholic) on Grace: It is like the case of a man who is ill, who trusts the doctor who promises him a certain recovery and in the meantime obeys the doctor’s instructions, abstaining from what has been forbidden to him, in the hope of the promised recovery (in spe promissae sanitatis), so that he does not do anything to hinder this promised recovery...Now this man who is ill, is he healthy?.
I feel as if Christ, or the narratology of Christianity has been forbidden to me, that I have had to abstain from it. This song, the album that this song comes from, has broken the hobble, I feel healthier listening to it, I feel less ill.
I feel like sometimes that the confusion, the narrative stumbling, the devotion to brokenness that Darnielle enages in, is a post-Catholic pushing around the history of his childhood, hoping that under that Sisyphian stone, there will be grace, that to make stories about it will make us healthier.
I have my doubts it will, but i like the hope.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
fifteen points for the reflection paper:
- to be Christian requires exile and absence from the world.
- xian's origin is one of obliquneess,
- but also deliberately choosing to engage in any number of scriptual traditions
- one cannot be forced, this choice is about our autonomy
- choosing to engage in these traditions means to (in the best of our limited human understanding) discern the will and nature of god
- there is a tension then between a profound personal realtionship and a seeking of the communal, a tension that can be seen in many of the parables (inc. lazarus, the good samaratian, the fisherman, loaves and fishes, the widows mite, and others)
- this tension is often contained wihtin calls towards liberation and justice.
- there is something profoundly problematic in calling people who are marginazlized, who have their exile thrust upon them, to be exiled again, exiled by choice...the isolation of them marginialised, while absent from the gospels is often mirrored in the traditions of the church (Bruggerans DWEM comments, but also from Coakley: "
"Where the question of gender then insidiously inserts itself into this scholarly divide is in the willingness... to construe forms of 'weakness,' 'passivity' or 'vulnerability' (all traditionally demerits for the male, but manifestly present in Jesus' passion) as either normatively human or even revelatorily divine...if Jesus' 'vulnerability' is a primary narrative given, rather than a philosophical embarrassment to explain away, then precisely the question is raised whether 'vulnerability' need be seen as a female weakness rather than a...human strength." (Power and Submission, find the page number) - all of this tension, this paradoxical desire for a liberating christ for a people in exile, considering that those who seek or need liberation are contained by the church, is constrained by how we construct narratives of autonomy.
- to construct narratives, to treat t he parables as examples of right living, is required as a missional preacher, is required as a way of speaking about christ, at least w/i the euro-american proddie tradition, or even w/ i the anglican corpus.
- how does working against interpertation, and against applicaiton (as dally requires of us), sontag: Thus, interpretation is not (as most people assume) an absolute value, a gesture of mind situated in some timeless realm of capabilities. Interpretation must itself be evaluated, within a historical view of human consciousness. In some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping the dead past. In other cultural contexts, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling...(against interpertation, online source, find dead tree)
- or to put it simply, how does one choose exile?
- which dramas are enacted, which roles are to be played, which narratives are engaged with, or how does one know that the exillic desires of YHWH, of moving away from the world, are the correct ones? (call of the fisherman)
- Bruggerman page 64--the call towards god is one of liberation, against those that contain and break us,
- How are we included and excluceded from the multivalent narratives of history (cf Cone)
- how do we rewrite the narrative of history
- how do w emantain our own narratives while doing the above work
- can these questions be answered, or is this something that is found in the wandering of the desert, the abandonment of our own purposes and a seeking of the divine (bruggerman's woodwork metaphor, or dally's idea of metaonia, that we are converted thru attempts at remaking ourselves.)
Saturday, October 10, 2009
40 women more attractive then kate beckinsale, who according to esquire is the most beautiful woman in the world.
- susan sarandon
- sigourney weaver
- aishwarya rai
- li gong
- alfre woodward
- miranda lambert
- liz benson
- padmi laksi
- catherine denuve
- charollette rampling
- tilda, (oh, tilda, my tilda)
- karen o
- virginie leydon
- thandie newton
- sophie okonedo
- zaha hadid
- elizabeth peyton
- shohreh aghdashloo
- michelle williams
- natahlie portman
- zooey dacheneal
- anne hathaway
- beth ditto
- sophie dahl
- lucinda williams
- neko case
- zadie smith
- michelle rodiguez
- jodie foster
- michelle yeoh
- lily cole
- kate moss
- gemma ward
- agness deyn
- helen mirren
- julie christie
- rita dominic
- dita von tease
- crystal renn
- buck angel.
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