The Terah Plexus: Testing the Righteousness of Abraham

Chapter 5 The Terah Plexus: Testing the Righteousness of Abraham

Like the Noah plexus before it, the Terah plexus consists of three tôlĕdôt strands: the Shem tôlĕdôt strand, which is a linear genealogy, the Terah tôlĕdôt strand, which is the Abraham narrative, and the Ishmael tôlĕdôt strand, which is a segmented genealogy. The structural purpose of the Shem tôlĕdôt strand is to pick up the line of promise and trace it from Shem to Terah and his three sons. I have argued previously that the purpose of the Ishmael tôlĕdôt strand is to bring final closure to the Abraham narrative by picking up the line not-of-promise, developing it, and then setting it aside while the narrative follows the line of promise. These comments will suffice for understanding the flow of the Terah plexus so that we can focus on the Terah tôlĕdôt strand, or the Abraham narrative, to understand how it develops the plot of Genesis. For the Terah tôlĕdôt our examination of the text will begin with an analysis of the symmetric or chiastic ordering of the text. Once again there is no shortage of suggestions as to how the Terah tôlĕdôt strand’s chiastic organization should be understood.

The Structure of the Narrative

There have been at least five suggestions for the arrangement of the Abraham narrative, which begins in Gen 11:27 and stretches to Gen 25:11. Chiastic or parallel structures have been suggested by Westermann/Sutherland, Alexander/ Wenham, Rendsburg, Yudkowsky, and Wheaton.1 As early as 1964 Westermann

1 Claus Westermann, Forschung Am Alten Testament; Gesammelte Studien (München: C. Kaiser, 1964); Claus Westermann, The Promises to the Fathers: Studies on the Patriarchal Narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980); Dixon Sutherland, “The Organization of the Abraham Promise Narratives,” ZAW 95 (1983): 337–343; T. Desmond Alexander, “A Literary Analysis of the Abraham Narrative in Genesis” (Ph.D. diss., The Queen’s University of Belfast, 1982); Wenham, Genesis 1–15; Gary Rendsburg, The Redaction of Genesis (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1986); Rachel Yudkowsky, “Chaos or Chiasm? The Structure of Abraham’s Life,” JBQ 35 (2007): 109–114, Byron Wheaton, “Focus and Structure in the Abraham Narratives,” TJ 27 (2006): 143–162.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004362512_006 The Terah Plexus: Testing the Righteousness of Abraham 99 suggested that the Abraham narrative is structured by plot and possibly also by a parallel arrangement of texts. In 1983 Sutherland picked up on Westermann and expounded the relationship between the plot and the parallel arrangement. He argued that the Abraham cycle ends with the Nahor genealogy of Gen 22:20–24 and not with the death of Abraham in 25:11. The chiastic structure suggested by Westermann and Sutherland was at several points imperfect but it sufficiently demonstrated the presence of a structure imposed upon the text.2 One year before Sutherland built on Westermann’s work, Alexander had already developed the relationship between the plot of the Abraham narrative and its parallel structure. At the same time, he improved on the chiastic structure and eliminated the inconsistencies. However, the structure suggested by his 1982 dissertation stretched only from 12:10–20:18.3 Contra Sutherland, Alexander referred to all of 22:20–25:11 as an extended conclusion. Subsequent to Alexander, Rendsburg suggested a structure similar to Alexander’s except that in addition to the layers that Alexander identified, he found connections in two additional outer layers. According to Rendsburg, the genealogy of Terah (11:27–32) is parallel to the genealogy of Nahor (22:20–24)4 and the “start of Abraham’s spiritual odyssey” (12:1–9) is parallel to its climax (22:1–19).5 Rendsburg’s overall structure differs in some additional ways to Alexander’s but Wenham picked up on these two additional layers and incor- porated them into Alexander’s scheme.6 Alexander later expressed agreement with these modifications.7 I find the Alexander-Wenham structure to be the best starting point for this study.8

2 Sutherland, “The Organization of the Abraham Promise Narratives,” 340–41. 3 Alexander, “A Literary Analysis of the Abraham Narrative in Genesis,” 26. 4 Cf. Sutherland, “The Organization of the Abraham Promise Narratives,” 340. 5 Rendsburg, The Redaction of Genesis, 29–30. Also see Williamson and his first footnote which outlines the various authors who have argued for this idea, Paul R. Williamson, Abraham, Israel, and the Nations: The Patriarchal Promise and Its Covenantal Development in Genesis, JSOTSup 315 (Sheffield: JSOT, 2000), 217. 6 Wenham, Genesis 1–15, 263. 7 T. Desmond Alexander, Abraham in the Negev: A Source-Critical Investigation of Genesis 20:1– 22:19 (Carlisle, England: Paternoster, 1997), 105. 8 Yudkowsky’s structure differs significantly from the others and she seems quite unaware of them as well. Her suggestion, however, is deficient in that it inexplicably skips over whole sections of text. Wheaton starts with and then builds on the Alexander-Wenham structure by positing that in addition to the palistrophic structure there is an additional overlay of a parallel structure making up two panels in the text (A-B-C … A-B-C …). Since Wheaton’s study builds on the Alexander structure it will be sufficient to deal with the palistrophic aspects of the texts.