PATRIARCH WITHOUT A NARRATIVE: DECONSTRUCTING / RECONSTRUCTING THE SAGA OF ISAAC IN GENESIS 25-26 DAVID RICHTER The book of Genesis is often referred to as the book of the Patriarchs, the Patriarchs of ancient Israel being Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But these three patriarchs by no means get equal time. Abraham is the central figure in four- teen chapters, Jacob in fifteen, Joseph – who isn’t even a patriarch, actual- ly—gets the last fourteen chapters. But Isaac figures in only four chapters. And his first and most vivid appearance is as the uncomplaining child taken to be sacrificed in God’s test of Abraham (Gen. 22), and in his last appear- ance, in Genesis 27, Isaac is old and blind when he blesses the disguised Ja- cob by mistake. Scholars have talked about Isaac as a transitional figure, a mere link be- tween Abraham the hero of faith, the folk hero of southern Judea, and the crafty trickster figure Jacob, associated more with the northern plains. Is there a real Isaac to talk about, other than the child of Abraham, the father of Jacob? We get a truncated saga of Isaac as a grownup, but it occupies only the last half of chapter 25 and all of chapter 26 of Genesis. A suspicious or deconstructive reading of this Isaac saga would decompose it into a series of type-scenes, story sequences that appear in slightly different form in other biblical texts, with the same roles played different characters. These type- scenes are blocked out in Appendix A, almost every event in the Isaac saga seems to be a variation on similar episodes in the much longer Abraham saga. Isaac tries to pass off Rebekah as his sister (Gen 26:7) just as Abraham had introduced Sarah as his sister to Pharaoh in Egypt Gen 12:13) and to Abimelech in Gerar (Gen 20:2). Isaac leaves Gerar wealthier than he arrived, just as Abraham left both Egypt and Gerar loaded by gifts from their kings. Isaac experiences theophanies, divine appearances, advising him on conduct and promising blessings of land and progeny, just as Abraham did. And as in the Abraham saga, there are disputes over water rights, negotiations with David H. Richter is Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Queens Col- lege and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His most recent books are Reading the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Wiley-Blackwell 2017) and A Companion to Literary Theory (John Wiley and Sons 2018). 74 DAVID RICHTER foreign monarchs, ending in covenants of friendship between peoples. In Ap- pendix C the events of the Isaac saga are displayed in parallel columns with both wife-sister episodes from the Abraham saga, and the number of similari- ties is striking. It reads as though a scribe had patched a rudimentary Isaac saga from bits and pieces of the Abraham saga, and even telegraphed his in- tentions with a hint to the reader: Isaac dug anew the wells which had been dug in the days of his father Abraham. and he gave them the same names that his father had given them (Gen 26:18). I think we need to deconstruct the Isaac saga in a different way, because arguably the time sequence has become jumbled, and to understand what is going on in Genesis 26 we need to restore the correct order. Once we have done so, it will be clearer what happens when, and where, and why. We begin by mentioning five peculiarities of the Isaac saga that indicate that the se- quence had been disordered. The most obvious is the fact that Jacob and Esau are born and grow up in Genesis 25, which ends with Esau the hunter selling his birthright to Jacob for the proverbial mess of pottage. But the twins play no part in chapter 26, until the two final verses of the chapter, where we are told that Esau, now forty years old, and has married two Canaanite women who make Isaac and Rebekah completely miserable. But in the first 33 verses of chapter 26, Isaac and Rebekah seem to be a young couple without any children in tow, so much in love that they sport with one another in broad daylight.2 At the min- imum, therefore, we might take chapter 26 to be an unmarked flashback, but as we shall see, it’s a bit more complicated than that.3 A second peculiarity has to do with the wife-sister episode. Unlike the two wife-sister episodes in the Abraham saga, this one does not result in the wife going into the foreign monarch's harem. Instead Isaac is reproached by Abimelech for attempting to deceive the Philistines about their relationship in a way that created danger for Rebekah. Nor does it result in gifts from the foreign monarch to the patriarch, as in both the Abraham stories. Isaac does become wealthy in Gerar, but it is by farming the land and reaping rich re- wards for his labor: Isaac sowed in that land and reaped a hundredfold the same year (Gen 26:12). It will become significant, as we shall see, that Isaac is the only patriarch who is primarily a farmer rather than a herdsman, like Abraham and Jacob. JEWISH BIBLE QUARTERLY PATRIARCH WITHOUT A NARRATIVE 75 The third peculiarity is the discontinuity between Genesis 26:22 and 26:23. Isaac’s servants have found an excellent water source in Reḥoboth that is uncontested by the natives of Gerar, but after naming it Isaac immediately leaves for Beersheba for no apparent reason. Why would he do that? The fourth peculiarity begins at 26:26. Isaac has already left Gerar and its environs, so why has Abimelech come all the way to Beersheba with a pro- posal for a treaty between him and Isaac? What does either of them get out of the deal aside from a nonaggression pact that could have been achieved simp- ly by ignoring each other? In connection with this treaty, we have met King Abimelech before, and when Abimelech wanted a treaty with Abraham he brought along his muscle man, Phicol chief of his troops (Gen. 21:22). And in chapter 26 Abimelech and Phicol have again both come to Isaac, but there seems to be a third person present, Ahuzzath his councilor (Gen. 26:26). Who is this fellow Ahuzzath and why has Abimelech brought him along? Finally, there are two theophanies in chapter 26, the first at verses 2-5, and the second at verse 24. In both God promises blessings upon Isaac through the merit of Abraham. But why are there two of them? Appendix B contains a hypothetical reconstruction of the entire Isaac saga beginning with his marriage to Rebekah. Isaac and Rebekah are married at Beer-lahai-roi at the end of Genesis 24. Then there is a famine, and they move to Gerar, where God makes his appearance. God approves their move to Gerar, but warns them not to go to Egypt. In Gerar Isaac farms and be- comes wealthy, his wealth inspires the envy of the natives, and Isaac is there- fore told to move out. The household moves to the Wadi of Gerar, where Isaac and his servants dig wells, concluding with a successful and uncontest- ed well at Reḥoboth. It is at this point that Isaac makes the unexplained move to Beersheba. It is possible that the reason they have done this is that Rebekah is barren, and Beersheba, as we can tell from a close reading of Genesis 21, is Isaac’s birth- place, the place where his mother Sarah’s barrenness came to an end in Isaac’s own miraculous birth. It is also the place from which Isaac set out with his father for the sacrifice on Mount Moriah. This is clearly the appropriate place for Isaac to pray to God for children. God responds right away that he will multiply Vol. 48, No. 2, 2020 76 DAVID RICHTER Isaac’s descendants. In other words, Rebekah will conceive, conceive multi- ply; in fact she is going to have twins. While he is still at Beersheba right after the second theophany, King Abimelech arrives together with his muscle man Phicol: he wants to make a pact with Isaac for reasons we will get to later. After the covenant has been made, we return to Rebekah and the twins struggling with each other within her womb in chapter 25, which exasperates Rebekah to thoughts of suicide. Then, following chapter 25 to the end, we learn about the birth and youth of Esau and Jacob, their very different characters, followed by the trade of the lentil stew for the birthright at the end of chapter 25, which is followed by the two verses at the end of chapter 26 about Esau's second mistake, his disas- trous marriages, which in turn lead to the drama of the stolen blessing in chapter 27. I think this re-ordering makes better sense of the events of Isaac and Rebekah’s life together. Shuffling verses around may not seem a very respectful way of treating the book of Genesis, but strange sequences, incoherent chronologies, abound in the Hebrew Bible. The most obvious of these is Exodus 25-31, in which God gives Moses instructions and specifications for the creation of the Tabernac- le. But the function of the Tabernacle, as we are told much later, was to cre- ate a separate space for God away from the Israelites, because of God’s rage against them over the creation and worship of the Golden Calf, an episode that is in chapter 32 of Exodus.