Patriarch Without a Narrative

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 fourteen chapters, Jacob in fifteen, Joseph – who isn’t even a patriarch, actually—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 appearance, in Genesis 27, Isaac is old and blind when he blesses the disguised Jacob by mistake.

Scholars have talked about Isaac as a transitional figure,¹ a mere link between 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 by 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 foreign monarchs, ending in covenants of friendship between peoples. In Appendix 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 similarities 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 intentions 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 sequence 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, 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 minimum, 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 rewards 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.

The third peculiarity is the discontinuity between Genesis 26:22 and 26:23. Isaac’s servants have found an excellent water source in Rehoboth 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 proposal 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 simply 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 becomes wealthy; his wealth inspires the envy of the natives, and Isaac is therefore told to move out. The household moves to the Wadi of Gerar, where Isaac and his servants dig wells, concluding with a successful and uncontested well at Rehoboth.

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 birthplace, 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 Isaac’s descendants. In other words, Rebekah will conceive, conceive multiply; 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 disastrous 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 Tabernacle. But the function of the Tabernacle, as we are told much later, was to create 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. So chapters 25-31 are out of sequence. The general exegetical principle is usually stated as en mukdam ume’uhar baTorah, there is no before and after in the Torah – it’s stated in the Talmud at TB Pesachim 6b, and followed by traditional commentators like Rashi (see his commentary on Exodus 31:18).⁴

The reordering of the events in the Isaac saga is echoed by the language of the theophanies in chapter 26. The two theophanies are not identical but complementary; their substance is different: the first is about land as well as offspring, the second is only about offspring. The first theophany, at Genesis 26:3, occurs when Isaac and Rebekah have just arrived at Gerar, and it begins, Reside in this land, and I will be with you and bless you; I will assign all these lands to you and to your heirs. The three Hebrew verbs – ehyeh, avarkheka, eten – are all in the imperfect tense modified by the vav ha-hipuch denoting an indefinite future, and they refer to Isaac’s acquisition of land in the territory around Gerar.

After Isaac has moved to the fertile place that he names Rehoboth, Isaac says Now at last the LORD has granted us ample space to increase in the land (Gen. 26:22). The first part of the first theophany has been fulfilled, but the second part, I will make your heirs as numerous as the stars of heaven has not even begun to take shape (Gen. 26:4). Fruitful land is not enough; it is time for them, Isaac and Rebekah themselves, to be fruitful and multiply. And after the move to Beersheba, in the second theophany, God says to Isaac, I am with you and I will bless you and I will increase your offspring for the sake of my servant Abraham (Gen. 26:24). Here the first clause, I am with thee, is in the present tense (itkha anokhi), but in the next two phrases (uverakhtikha – and I will bless thee – vehirbeti et zarakha – and I will multiply thy seed) the verbs are in the perfect tense modified by the vav ha-hipuch denoting a definite future. So what God announces in the theophany at Beersheba is that Isaac’s prayer for children will be soon fulfilled; indeed Rebekah may at this moment be pregnant with the twins.

Finally, we need to make better sense of the covenant with Abimelech at Beersheba. In the parallel passage to this one, at Genesis 21:22-32, Abraham makes a pact with Abimelech at Beersheba, who brings with him only his muscle man, Phicol, chief of his troops. Here in chapter 26, Abimelech brings with him, in addition to Phicol, Ahuzzath. All the various English translations render Ahuzzath as the name of a person, and they variously render the Hebrew word that follows it, mere’ehu, as “his councilor” (JPS) or “his personal advisor” (NIV) or “one of his friends” (King James Version).⁵ I would like to propose that Ahuzzath is not a person at all but an object.

What sort of object? In Genesis 23, after the death of Sarah, Abraham buys a field from Ephron the Hittite containing the cave of Machpelah. What he tells the Hittites he wants is an ahuzzath-kever, which JPS translates as a burial site (Gen. 23:4). The Hittites at first respond by telling Abraham that he can have the use of any cave he fancies to bury his dead in, free of charge. But what Abraham makes clear is that he isn’t interested merely in permission to use their land; he wants to own this particular piece of land. He wants what today would be called a deed in fee simple, a clear title of possession, and he pays a very fancy price, 400 silver shekels, to buy from Ephron the Hittite this ahuzzah. The word ahuzzah is used three times in this sense in that chapter.

I am suggesting that here in Genesis 26, the ahuzzath mere’ehu that Abimelech brings to Isaac is a deed, an ahuzzah,⁶ from among his neighbors, mere’ehu, giving Isaac title to the land he has settled in and improved at Rehoboth. That land remains in the family; it is in fact mentioned later in connection with a descendant of Esau, Isaac’s firstborn son, at Genesis 36:37.⁷ So the covenant is not just a non-aggression pact but a real estate deal, and one from which Abimelech also benefits, since by implication he gets clear title to the two other wells Isaac’s servants dug, the ones named Esek and Sitnah, just as Isaac gets title to Rehoboth. Both parties can go home happy, especially Isaac, who is not a shepherd moving from meadow to meadow as his flocks graze, but a farmer who needs clear title to the land that he farms and the water to irrigate it.

This will perhaps sound less strange if we recall that in the book of Genesis all three of the patriarchs worry about both land and progeny, and each of them is associated with an ahuzzah. Abraham’s, already mentioned, is the field containing the cave of Machpelah; Isaac’s, as I am arguing, is at Rehoboth; and Jacob, along with his sons, is given an ahuzzah in Egypt by Joseph at the orders of Pharaoh.⁸

The largest of all these ahuzzot, which is the very first ahuzzah of all those mentioned in Genesis, is the one promised by God to Abraham, that the land of his sojourning, the entire land of Canaan, will come to his descendants as an ahuzzat olam, an everlasting possession (Gen. 17:8). That promise is not fulfilled in the book of Genesis. In fact it will not even begin to come true until, after the Exodus and the wandering through the desert, the Israelites cross the Jordan back into Canaan under the leadership of Joshua, when the patriarchs and their wives have all been long at rest in the cave of Machpelah. But that is a very different saga.

Appendix A: The Isaac Saga Marked for Type-Scenes

Barren Wife. Genesis 25:19-26: This is the story of Isaac, son of Abraham. Abraham begot Isaac. Isaac was forty years old when he took to wife Rebekah, daughter of Bethuel the Aramean of Paddan-aram, sister of Laban the Aramean. Isaac pleaded with the LORD on behalf of his wife, because she was barren; and the LORD responded to his plea, and his wife Rebekah conceived. But the children struggled in her womb, and she said, “If so, why do I exist?” She went to inquire of the LORD, and the LORD answered her, “Two nations are in your womb, two separate peoples shall issue from your body; one people shall be mightier than the other, and the older shall serve the younger.” When her time to give birth was at hand, there were twins in her womb. The first one emerged red, like a hairy mantle all over; so they named him Esau. Then his brother emerged, holding on to the heel of Esau; so they named him Jacob. Isaac was sixty years old when they were born.

The Twins. Genesis 25:27-34: When the boys grew up, Esau became a skillful hunter, a man of the outdoors; but Jacob was a mild man who stayed in camp. Isaac favored Esau because he had a taste for game; but Rebekah favored Jacob. Once when Jacob was cooking a stew, Esau came in from the open, famished. And Esau said to Jacob, “Give me some of that red stuff to gulp down, for I am famished” – which is why he was named Edom. Jacob said, “First sell me your birthright.” And Esau said, “I am at the point of death, so of what use is my birthright to me?” But Jacob said, “Swear to me first.” So he swore to him, and sold his birthright to Jacob. Jacob then gave Esau bread and lentil stew; he ate and drank, and he rose and went away. Thus did Esau spurn the birthright.

Famine, Theophany, and Wife-Sister. Genesis 26:1-7 recounts the famine that drives Isaac to Gerar, the theophany in which the Lord repeats to Isaac the promises made to Abraham, and Isaac’s claim that Rebekah is his sister. Abimelech discovers the deception, enriches and protects Isaac (26:8-14), the Philistines then stop up the wells dug in Abraham’s time and expel Isaac (26:15-19), a water dispute over the newly dug wells follows (26:20-23), a second theophany occurs at Beersheba (26:24-25a), and Abimelech, Ahuzzath, and Phicol negotiate and conclude a covenant with Isaac there (26:25b-33).

Appendix B: The Isaac Saga Re-Ordered

Genesis 24:62-67: Marriage of Isaac and Rebekah. Genesis 26:1-11: Famine; move to Gerar; first theophany, promising land and offspring. Genesis 26:12-22: Isaac farms successfully, is forced to move to the Wadi of Gerar, and then to Rehoboth. Genesis 26:23-24 and Genesis 25:21: Isaac goes to Beersheba and prays for children; God responds that Rebekah has conceived the twins. Genesis 26:25: Isaac builds an altar in gratitude. Genesis 26:26-33: Treaty with Abimelech, who grants Isaac title (ahuzzah) to the land he has improved. Genesis 25:22-23: Rebekah prays about the struggling twins. Genesis 25:24-26: Birth of the twins. Genesis 25:27-34: Esau sells his birthright; Genesis 26:34-35: Esau marries two Canaanite women. Genesis 27: The blind, aged Isaac blesses the disguised Jacob instead of Esau.

Appendix C: The Three Wife-Sister Episodes Aligned

The article closes with a detailed synoptic table aligning the wife-sister episode of Isaac and Rebekah in Gerar (Genesis 26) against the two parallel episodes involving Abraham and Sarah — in Egypt (Genesis 12-13) and in Gerar (Genesis 20-21) — matching each type-scene (famine, wife-sister, patriarch enriched, water dispute, negotiations, and covenant) verse by verse across the three narratives.