PATRIARCH CYCLES.
WHAT ARE THE PATRIARCH CYCLES?
By the time Israel emerges at the advent of the Iron Age ( late 1200s BCE), Near Eastern urban centers are really, really old. They are ancient. The Sumerians, the Old and Middle Babylonian cultures have come and gone. Egypt has risen to imperial power and faded to the periphery. This is all before Israel is on the map.
Here’s why this matters: The biblical writers knew they were late to the game. This is why the stories of creation and the primeval history make use of familiar cultural conceptions and even storylines. And most importantly for today, this is why we have Patriarchal stories.
The writers of the Hebrew Bible placed the cycles of four patriarchs between the Primeval History (Genesis 1-11) and Israel’s cultural origin story of exodus, delivery, and promised land. They placed a series of stories about their forefathers set in historical framework rather than mythic stories.
These stories tell of a pastoralist named Abram (“exalted father”) who would become Abraham (“the father of a great people”), and the father of Israel as a nation. He is their ultimate patriarch in the literature of the Bible. And so we have four generations from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob to Joseph. Through these cycles of stories the writers of the Bible explain how Israel migrated from Mesopotamia through Canaan and eventually settled in the Nile Delta of Egypt. In Egypt, Israel remained 400 years and grew in number to become the nation of Israel.
THE HISTORICAL PROBLEMS WITH THE PATRIARCHS.
We should begin by owning that the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph are very difficult to read closely at face value. That is, if you have slowed down and read these stories closely and it has raised questions for you that are difficult and frustrating— you are not alone. Show me the person who blindly accepts these stories as history and I will show you someone who has never read them closely and with ancient eyes.
We run into all sorts of problems. But this is a beautiful thing— those problems are going to unlock how the Bible actually works as literature. But in this post, let’s just outline some of the issues that might have bothered you in past readings of the stories of the Patriarchs in genesis 12-50. You are not alone if the stories of the Patriarchs have raised difficult questions for you before.
TERAH OR ABRAM?
You can ask the question whether it was Abraham or Terah who immigrated from Ur to Haran or to Canaan…if you read between the lines it becomes clear we may have a Terah legend and an Abraham legend being combined by our authors in order to keep both traditions. You are not alone if you have wondered this before.
DOUBLE VERSIONS OF STORIES.
You may have noticed duplicate stories or close variations of the same stories. Maybe the most famous example is the “sister-wife” narratives in Genesis 12.10-20, Genesis 20, and Genesis 26.6-11. In each story a Patriarch (two times Abraham and one time Isaac) tries to pass off his wife as his sister. Not the best idea, to be sure, but even more problematic— did this really happen three times? Or which version of the story happened and when? You are not alone if you have wondered this before.
PLACE NAMES AND CHARACTER NAMES.
We have place name and character names that are anachronistic. That is to say, they reflect a later time than the settingof the stories. This is similar to Homeric verse, which tells of Bronze Age heroic battles and sensibilities but speaks from the Dark Ages of Greece, some 500 years later. The Bible, writes of Bronze Age characters in the Iron Age and the latter period is where the place names and character names make sense. Why do all the character names seem to name larger ideologies, like “being the father of a great people,” or why are there camels in the stories…which were not introduced to the region until the Iron Age? You have to know a little bit about the historical geography of the Near East to catch it, but you are not alone if you have wondered this before.
PATRIARCH CYCLES ARE GENERATIVE.
The Patriarch Cycles of Genesis 12-50, whatever historical kernel they preserve, are not trying to record history. They are weaving together stories with a theological overlay that God has uniquely adopted a people beginning with these four characters. In doing so, the Patriarch Cycles are using stories of ancestors to generate an identity for later Israelite readers.
The goal of these stories is to ask what it means to be God’s unique people and to make sense of exile and restoration by seeing the same pattern in the forefathers of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. We might say Genesis through 2 Kings asks later readers the question, how did we end up in exile and what does it look like to be the children of God now?
This is why it is said:
WHAT IS SAID IN SCRIPTURE OF THE PATRIARCHS
INTIMATES WHAT IS TO HAPPEN
TO THEIR DESCENDANTS, THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL.
BABYLONIAN TALMUD, BAVA BATRA 100a.