Harris, Emily (2016) Making a home: the difficulty of dwelling in Genesis and its intertexts. MTh(R) thesis. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/7470/ Copyright and moral rights for this thesis are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Glasgow Theses Service http://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] ! Making a Home: the difficulty of dwelling in Genesis and its intertexts Emily Harris MA (Joint Hons) English Literature and Theology and Religious Studies Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Theology and Religious Studies, MTh (Research) University of Glasgow Theology and Religious Studies School of Critical Studies, College of Arts September, 2015 (c) Emily Harris, September 2015 Abstract Using an inter-disciplinary range of research on the home-space, home-making practices and the concept of ‘dwelling’, I achieve a new understanding of a central thematic concern in Genesis: its characters’ struggle to build stable, lasting homes upon the earth. Genesis starts with a lost home-space named Eden, before progressing towards other temporary dwellings such as the ark Noah builds, and Abraham’s tents. The biblical ‘home’ is constructed from a mix of materials: the birth of children, divine instructions and journeys, dreams, homemaking acts and so on. Alongside social scientific criticism, this thesis uses literary and midrashic intertexts as a way into re-imagining the ‘unhomely’ experiences of certain characters, or drawing out tensions in acts such as home-unmaking or homecomings. The investigation of the concept of ‘home’ in Genesis contributes to the study of this space more widely, as well as reinterpreting familiar biblical themes such as identity, family and community. Acknowledgements With thanks to my supervisors Dr. Sarah Nicholson and Dr. Heather Walton for their guidance. Contents Introduction There is a magic in that little world, home p.1 Methodology The makings of a house p.15 Chapter one - ‘Eden’ A lost home p.20 Chapter two - ‘Exile’ To make an end p.41 Chapter three - ‘Homeland’ Entering the tents p.60 Chapter four - ‘Homecoming’ Stealing Away, We Returned p.80 Conclusion Dwelling, then, brings us home p.99 Bibliography p.103 In the beginning There is a magic in that little world, home1 ‘to face homeward is a turn toward the most primordial of places’2 The first book of the Hebrew Bible3 begins with the world as a a ‘formless void’,4 ready for God’s inscription. In the first passage of Genesis, God shapes raw materials into ‘Earth and the cosmos we inhabit’.5 A habitable space has been crafted, upon which the Hebrew Bible’s mythical figures will trace their well-known histories in the book of Genesis ,bereshit. This Hebrew phrase ;’בְּרֵ אשִׁית‘ and beyond. The first word, in the Hebrew, is translated as ‘in the beginning’, is also the book’s name in Jewish scriptures. With bereshit, as and in ’ב‘ the Jewish writer Elie Wiesel identifies, ‘The Bible begins with the letter bet or Hebrew, ‘Bet is a house’.6 Mimi Levy Lipis, a cultural studies researcher, has also noted that the letter’s acrophonic name means house in Hebrew; furthermore, she argues that its visual shape can be read as the ‘simplest depiction of the floor plan of a house […] a square with an opening for the door’.7 For Lipis, the strong ‘base line’ of the letter bet symbolises the house’s ‘roots’ in its environment, and ‘rootedness’ is itself an important theme throughout Genesis,8 one I will return to in each chapter. In a similar vein, the Hebrew Bible scholar Aviva Gottlieb 1 Robert Southey, English poet and writer. 2 Forrest Clingerman, ‘Homecoming and the Half-Remembered: Environmental Amnesia, the Uncanny and the Path Home’ in Daniel Boscaljon, ed. Resisting the Place of Belonging: Uncanny Homecomings in Religion, Narrative and the Arts (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp.33-46, p.41. 3 Known as the ‘Tanakh’ to Jewish people and the ‘Old Testament’ to Christians, I will refer to it as the ‘Hebrew Bible’. 4 Genesis chapter one, verse two - The Bible with Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Version (Oxford: University Press, 1995). All following biblical references taken from the NRSV will be indicated in-text in brackets. 5 Anne Elvey, ‘Matter, Freedom and the Future: Reframing Feminist Theologies through an Ecological Materialist Lens’, Feminist Theology Vol 32, No. 2 (2015), pp.186-204, p.187. 6 Elie Wiesel, ‘Longing for Home’ in Rouner, Leroy S. The Longing for Home (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), pp.17-29, p.17. 7 Mimi Levi Lipis, Symbolic Houses in Judaism: how objects and metaphors construct hybrid places of belonging (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp.119-21. This reminds me of a line in Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space: ‘Words - I often imagine this - are little houses…’ (Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1992), p.147. 8 Ibid., p.121. Page !1 of !112 Zornberg sees the story of man as ‘the story of the quest for amidah, for a solid reality on which to base his life.’9 The letter bet is our way into these questions. his habitable earth10 The opening chapters of Genesis constitute the ‘description of a home - the world’, as Lipis phrases it, and it is only after their ‘dwelling place [is] completed’11 that the first humans are made. The world is a house on a grand scale. As it is phrased in Isaiah: ‘He did not create it [the world] a waste [tohu]; but formed it for habitation’.12 A theoretical discourse through we can understand the world as ‘home’ on a larger scale is that of ecofeminism. ‘As oikos (Greek for home) translates to the English prefix eco of ecology’, Kimberly Carfore argues, ‘it is important to extend our conception of home to include earth as home’.13 Karen J Warren, an eco-feminist philosopher, writes: it is here, on planet earth that we build our houses, establish intentional communities […] it is on the planet earth that we build our earthly homes. The earth truly is our home.14 When the sky is formed, in Robert Alter’s (1996) translation, it is a ‘vault’ which divides the water: ‘The Hebrew’, he notes, ‘suggests a hammered-out slab’ so ‘the English architectural term [is] appropriate.’15 This idea of the sky as a roof is present elsewhere, as the Bible scholar and rabbi Benno Jacob identified in his early twentieth century commentary on Genesis: ‘[i]n other biblical passages [the sky] which seems to arch over the earth is described 9 Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), p.24. 10 Proverbs 8:30-31 (Soncino translation), quoted by Zornberg, pp.110-1. 11 Lipis, pp.121-2. 12 Isaiah 45:18, referenced by Zornberg, p.132. 13 Kimberly Carfore, ‘The Paradox of Homecoming: Home is Where the Haunt Is’, in Daniel Boscaljon, ed. Resisting the Place of Belonging (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp.61-72, p.69. 14 Warren, p.228, her italics. 15 Robert Alter, Genesis: Translation and Commentary (London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1996), p.3 - I will use Alter’s translation throughout my thesis in addition to the NRSV, in order to compare word choices, and to make use of Alter’s valuable explanatory notes. Page !2 of !112 as […] like the roof of a tent’.16 The sky/roof’s placement is followed by land and sea (1:9-10): the ‘dry land’, of course, will be the ‘habitation of men’,17 and can be viewed within this world/house metaphor as the floor or ‘foundation’ of the earth/home. Plants and trees (1:11-2) follow, and after four days, in Jacob’s words: ‘the house of the world is ready for its inhabitants.’18 What began as a silent, empty wasteland has been shaped into an expectant dwelling-place. What has occurred in this first chapter is the establishment of a setting, within which – ostensibly – the narrative events of the following chapters and biblical books occur. The creation of this peaceful, fertile environment is God’s first act: the framework is put in place before it is storied, before ‘everything […] happens and lives’,19 as Jacob puts it. In verse twenty-seven, the final inhabitants of the earth are created: man and woman. God is an ‘architect’ here, who ‘builds man’s house, furnishes it and places him at a well decked table’.20 The world is His ‘founding construction’,21 to use Iris Marion Young’s phrase. One of the central concerns of the book of Genesis is thus contained within its very first letter, the bet of bereshit, which foregrounds the idea of a house, and stability. In the Bible, ‘the home precedes everything else’,22 to use Wiesel’s words: this is true on both a typographical and thematic level. Furthermore, its presence is not limited to Genesis chapter one: ‘In the tissue of words of Genesis,’ the biblical critic Mieke Bal has written, ‘the house is surely a motif of great importance’.23 For a reader of the Hebrew, on a micro-level, each reoccurrence 16 Jacob gives the example of Isaiah 40:22 (‘It is he… who stretches out the heavens like a curtain,| and spreads them like a tent to live in’, NRSV) - Benno Jacob, The First Book of the Bible: Genesis Abridged, edited and translated by Jacob, Dr.