From Gods to God: How the Bible Debunked, Suppressed, or Changed Ancient Myths and Legends by Avigdor Shinan

Author:Avigdor Shinan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-10-30T10:13:00+00:00

The prophet Jeremiah, wanting to illustrate the prevalent depravity and deceit among the people, triggers the memory ofJacob and Esau. It is not only friends whom one cannot trust; beware even ofyour brother! These verses, constructed in a chiastic arrangement (i.e., "friend ... brother, brother ... friend"), identify the brother, and not the friend, as the deceiver, like the nation's Patriarch in his dealings with his sibling.

We find an additional verse in Jeremiah that reflects the same tradition about Jacob's cheating, which was known to both the prophet and his audience (Jeremiah would not allude to an event that did not resonate with his listeners): "Most deceitful ['aqov] is the heart, it is perverse-who can fathom it? I the LoRD probe the heart, search the mind, to repay every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds" (17:9-10). Though this verse does not speak about Jacob, the use of the root `-q-v is not coincidental, and it seems most likely that listeners and readers pictured the figure ofJacob, the model deceiver. We surmise this from the last words ("to repay every man according to his ways [drakhav], according to the fruit of his deeds"), which are borrowed from Hosea's words about Jacob ("and punished Jacob for his ways [drakhav], according to his deeds") and are placed right before that prophet's interpretation of Jacob's name: "In the womb he deceived [agav] his brother" (12:4).

A different tactic for dealing with the meaning of Jacob's name was in changing it so as to convey the opposite of "deceit" and "cheating." This explains the creation of Jacob's other name, Yeshurun, in which we hear the element yashar, "honest." Its success in entering the canon was limited, appearing only in the poems of Deuteronomy: "So Yeshurun grew fat and kicked" (32:15); "Then He became King in Yeshurun" (33:5); "0 Yeshurun, there is none like God" (v 26). The name appears also in Isaiah 44:2, where it is part of a polemic against the view that Jacob cheated while in his mother's womb: "Thus said the LORD, your Maker, Your Creator who has helped you since the womb, Fear not, My servant Jacob, Yeshurun whom I have chosen." The prophet makes the point that Yeshurun/Jacob was chosen by God-and was even given the name Yeshurun-already in his mother's womb.

Alongside the partial acceptance of the name Yeshurun were attempts to impose the meaning of yashar, an antonym of 'aqav, to an other of Jacob's names, Israel (yisra'el), in which the consonants y-s-r also appear (in Hebrew, the phonemes sh and s are both produced by the same letter). So we see in the words of Balaam: "Who can count the dust of Jacob, number the dust-cloud of Israel? May I die the death of the righteous [yesharim], may my fate be like theirs!" (Numbers 23:10). The prophet Micah knew well that this meaning was related to the name Israel, and he drew upon it to lay blame on the people: "The one who

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