The Power of Succinctness
The extreme compactness of biblical narrative is likely to strike almost any modern reader. Some, naively, will attribute it to the relatively rudimentary state of ancient literature that lacks the means to elaborate the details of the stories it tells. The last several decades of literary analysis of the Bible have shown that this is by no means the case. Still, this is not the kind of narrative with which most modern readers are familiar. At least since the eighteenth century the predominant reading matter for narrative literature has been novels, and they typically proceed through a rich accumulation of descriptive details, narratorial comment, and extended dialogue. There is nothing like such novelistic abundance in the Bible. Thomas Mann deployed four volumes and a few thousand pages to tell the story of Joseph and his brothers, while the biblical narrative with great effectiveness makes do with thirteen brief chapters. What is impressive is how the Hebrew writers were able to convey a fullness in the evocation of emotions, relationships, and motives in just a few words, often only a single brief sentence, or even the strategic choice of one term.
I will begin with a moment that illustrates the breathtaking efficiency of the Hebrew writers in dispensing with narrative exposition. When Moses flees from Egypt to Midian after killing an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew, he arrives at a well where he rescues seven young women confronted by hostile shepherds. The girls rush home and report to their father, “An Egyptian man rescued us from the hands of the shepherds” (Exodus 2:19). How do they know that he is Egyptian? Presumably because he is clean-shaven while the sundry Semitic males to the north and east of Egypt were bearded, and also because he would have been wearing regal Egyptian garments, since he would have had to flee Egypt abruptly in order to escape arrest and possible execution.
If you imagine how a novelist might have handled this narrative information, it might read something like this: “Moses stood on the hilltop looking down toward the valley below, where he could make out people gathered around a well. His fine linen robe covered with dust and splattered with mud after his arduous journey on foot from the south, he leaned on his staff as he began the steep descent down into the valley. Drawing near, he could hear harsh shouts and see a group of young women being driven off from the well.” This is certainly not the way of biblical narrative. All we need to know is conveyed in two small words, ’ish ‘ivri, “an Egyptian man.” Since biblical narrative repeatedly works with thematic keywords, this takes us back to the previous episode of the killing of an Egyptian, when Moses saw “an Egyptian man striking a Hebrew man” (Exodus 2:11). His identification here by the Midianite girls as an Egyptian man then leads us to ponder: what, in fact, is Moses? Outwardly, he is an Egyptian man and has been raised as such in Pharaoh’s court, but inwardly he is a Hebrew man, and he has seen the man being beaten as one “of his brothers.” In just two words, we are given much to think about.
I will now proceed to more complex uses of brevity. In 2 Samuel, when David negotiates a peace agreement with Abner, the commander of the Saulide forces with whom he has been warring, David stipulates that his first wife, Michal the daughter of Saul, must be sent back to him. David had to flee from her father, who was bent on killing him, he has not seen her for years, and in the interim he has acquired two wives and is on his way to creating a small harem. It seems clear that his motive in insisting on the return of Michal is not love but political calculation: the public display of the daughter of the previous king as his wife will strengthen the legitimacy of his claim to the throne. Meanwhile, Saul has married off Michal to a certain Paltiel, an act of questionable legality because she was already married to David. The obvious intention was to effect a kind of erasure of David’s marriage to Michal. No information is given about Paltiel beyond his name and marital status. Neither Paltiel nor Michal has any choice in their separation because they have been ordered to comply by the powerful military commander Abner. This is all we are told about the parting of the spouses: “And her husband went with her, weeping as he went after her, as far as Bachurim. And Abner said to him, ‘Go back!’ And he went back” (2 Samuel 3:16).
No narrative report is given of the marriage between Paltiel and Michal. However it evolved, Paltiel clearly has come to love Michal, and it is plausible that she has returned his love. All this is poignantly conveyed in his wordless weeping as he accompanies her on her departure. Note that at first he is walking “with” her but then “after” her, as she, presumably led away by Abner, is taken off to resume her position as David’s wife. Abner’s brusque command to Paltiel to turn back cannot be disobeyed. Michal has been living with a man who really loved her, something David may never have done, perhaps not even in the early days of their marriage. In this way a few words evoke a domestic tragedy. More than two and a half millennia after they were written, they express, without the slightest elaboration of detail, the pain of loss that we all can understand when a beloved spouse is violently taken away forever.
The great penetrating account of this kind of narrative was offered by Erich Auerbach in the seminal first chapter of his Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. (The German scholar wrote it between 1942 and 1945 in wartime exile in Istanbul; it was published in German in 1946 and in English in 1953.) His memorable coinage, fraught with background, is applicable to virtually all biblical narrative. Here, in Auerbach’s words, are the clauses that lead up to his introduction of that phrase:
The decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies between is nonexistent; thoughts and feelings remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole, permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal (and to that extent far more of a unity), remains mysterious and “fraught with background.”
Expressive succinctness — fraughtness with background — equally plays a role in dialogue. In the ghastly story of the rape of Tamar by her half-brother Amnon, after he has sated his lust and brutally thrust her out of the door of his bedchamber and she walks along screaming, her royal robe torn, ashes on her head, she encounters her full brother Absalom. Seeing her in this utterly devastated state, he says to her, “Has Amnon your brother been with you?” (2 Samuel 13:20). Absalom appears to realize that she has been raped by Amnon, perhaps because he is aware that she was summoned to Amnon’s bedchamber, perhaps also because Amnon’s lust for the beautiful Tamar was generally known in the court. Drawing the obvious conclusion from her torn garment and her despair, he could have said “raped” (‘inah) or “lain with” (shakhav ‘im), but instead he chooses the euphemism “been with.” As subsequent events will reveal, Absalom is not a kind person. He contrives to have his henchmen murder Amnon in revenge for the violation of his sister. Later in the story, he usurps David’s throne through demagoguery and fully intends to kill his father. But the biblical writer understands that a brutal person can have another side in a different relationship.
Absalom is perfectly willing to become a parricide in order to serve his own political interests, but he is affectionate toward his sister, and seeing her shattered by what he infers was done to her, he does not want to upset her further by plainly naming the act of violation, and so, with a delicacy of feeling one would not expect from his behavior elsewhere, he asks whether Amnon “has been with” her. Fraternal affection, the writer realizes, can be exhibited by the same person who will exact harsh vengeance and will be prepared to tear the crown from his father and destroy him. This complex understanding of character, for which a novelist would have used many pages, is expressed here in just two words. Writers such as George Eliot and Proust shrewdly grasped that bad people can have good sides, or at least good moments, and the same is true of biblical writers in all their extraordinary brevity.
Biblical narrative bustles with individualized characters whose distinctive traits invite our attention, and attentive alertness is definitely required. Sometimes the revelatory concise item goes by so quickly that it could be missed. A case in point is the introduction of Laban, Rebekah’s brother, into the larger Genesis narrative in the story of her betrothal. Years later, he will play an important role in the life of his nephew Jacob. Rebekah has just encountered Abraham’s servant at the well in Aram-Naharaim, and after she has passed the test of bringing water for him and also for his camels, he bedecks her with what are in effect betrothal gifts. When she rushes home with the news of the stranger’s arrival, Laban, before running out to greet the man at the well, has taken note of something: “And it happened, when he saw the nose ring, and the bracelets on his sister’s arms, and when he heard the words of Rebekah his sister, saying, ‘Thus the man spoke to me,’ he hurried to the man standing by his camels at the well and said to him, “Come in, blessed of the Lord, why should you stand outside, when I have readied the household and a place for the camels?” (Genesis 24:30–31). Now, one might give this a benign interpretation: seeing the jewelry on his sister, Laban concludes that the stranger’s intentions are honorable, and his consequent invitation to the man is an expression of “Oriental” hospitality. But the more likely implication is that the glitter of gold is what catches his eye. That is what triggers his grand gesture of hospitality to the visitor. No explicit comment on Laban’s character is made, such as “this Laban was a crafty, grasping man,” merely the brief notation of his eye on the precious bangles.
Years later, when his nephew Jacob, fleeing from the wrath of his brother Esau, takes refuge in Laban’s Mesopotamian home, the uncle will make a great display of their kinship, embracing him and kissing him and declaring, “Indeed, you are my bone and my flesh” (Genesis 29: 14). The blood relationship, however, does not prevent Laban from driving a hard bargain with his nephew. After saying to Jacob, “Because you are my kin, should you serve me for nothing?” (Genesis 29:15), he makes his daughter Rachel the payment for Jacob’s labor while stipulating a full seven years of service in lieu of a bride-price. Compounding this calculation, he passes off Leah instead of Rachel as the bride, and when in the morning light Jacob discovers he has been deceived, Laban tells him he will also give him Rachel at the end of the bridal week, but on the condition that Jacob serve him still another seven years without wages. All this is aptly prefigured in Laban’s taking stock of the gold adorning his sister.
A devout reader might wonder why we need to know such things in reading the Bible. After all, the Patriarchal Tales are about the progenitors of the twelve tribes of Israel who will become God’s covenanted people. The biblical writers, however, keenly understood that even if the stories they told were an expression of God’s purposes with Israel and with humankind, the actors in the stories were palpably human, and their actions were driven by human traits and all-too-human imperfections. This meant that the writers’ imagining of the characters was akin to the way good novelists imagine their characters, and that is why they engage us as readers, whether we are believers or nonbelievers. As Jacob’s story unfolds, we see that he has his own calculating bent, and it will prove more than a match for his uncle.
Another swift notation in Jacob’s story should be mentioned. What, we may wonder, was his state of mind over the long seven years of labor during which he had to wait for Rachel, the beautiful woman with whom he was smitten in a coup de foudre from their first meeting at the well, and whom he will continue to love all his life? Here is the crucial narrative report: “And Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed in his eyes but a few days in his love for her” (Genesis 29:20). This is a unique biblical comment on the intensity of a man’s feelings for a woman. The Israeli novelist Meir Shalev, who was deeply interested in the Bible and wrote sensitively about it, picked up the phrase “but a few days” and used it as the title for a novel about consuming love. One might object that for Jacob, burning with impatience to consummate his love for Rachel, the seven years would rather have seemed agonizingly long, but what the writer has in mind is that Jacob would be constantly focusing on the great reward that was to be his at the end of the years of labor, and that with this consciousness the years of labor seem a trifle. It is a moving expression of love in just six Hebrew words.
And because very little in biblical narrative is isolated from the larger context, this undying love will have consequences, some of them dire, as the story continues. Jacob will certainly favor Rachel over her sister Leah, preferential treatment that will not engender domestic harmony. After Rachel’s death, he will extravagantly favor her older son Joseph, who resembles his mother in his beauty; Jacob even feminizes him by dressing him in a ketonet passim (the “coat of many colors” of the King James Version), which, as we learn in the story of the rape of Tamar because she is also wearing it, is a garment “worn by virgin princesses” (2 Samuel 13:18). Jacob on his deathbed is still haunted by Rachel’s death, flashing back to it.
The emotions of the biblical figures are often unstated and left to inference or conjecture. Only occasionally, as in Jacob’s love for Rachel, are they spelled out succinctly. They may sometimes also be intimated by an act. The birth of the future prophet Samuel occurs after his mother Hannah, agonizing through years of childlessness, prays in the sanctuary at Shiloh for a child. She stipulates in her prayer that if she is granted a son, he will be “given to the Lord all the days of his life” (1 Samuel 1:11). After the son is born, she tells her husband that she will fulfill her vow once the child is weaned. In ancient Israel this could have been as much as three or four years. Still, she is constrained by her vow to part from the boy and bring him, not much older than a toddler, to become an acolyte at the Shiloh sanctuary. Her anguish at the separation from the child for whom she has waited so long can be readily imagined. The narrative report in 1 Samuel says nothing about it — yet what is done instead is in its brief manner more eloquent than a direct report.
Little Samuel, we are told, as an acolyte in the sanctuary, was girt in the priestly garment known as the ephod. His mother, on the other hand, in the very next words in the text, brings him something different to wear: “and a little cloak [me‘il] would his mother make him and would bring up to him year after year when she came up with her husband to offer the yearly sacrifice” (1 Samuel: 2:19). The mother’s loving care for the little boy from whom she has been parted is beautifully intimated. She makes the cloak herself, perhaps both weaving and sewing it; and since she brings it to Shiloh year after year, she is obviously mindful of him as he grows, making a bigger cloak each year that she comes. One could scarcely have a more vivid instance of how the biblical writers imagine their characters with very human feelings as they respond to the circumstances of their lives. Even for those who read the biblical narratives solely with an eye to God’s plans for Israel, the humanity of the represented figure is arresting.
Moreover, as with Jacob’s great love for Rachel, the detail here is part of a web of interconnections. The child’s cloak will become a recurring motif in the larger story. At the crucial moment of transition when an angry Samuel foreswears all bonds with Saul, the desperate king clings to the prophet’s cloak, begging the prophet not to reject him, and inadvertently tears it. Samuel, not one to miss a symbolic clue, thunders: “the LORD has torn away the kingship of Israel and given it to your fellow man who is better than you” (1 Samuel 15:28). Even after his death, Samuel is wearing a me‘il. When the necromancer at Endor summons up his ghost, Saul immediately recognizes that it is Samuel because he is wrapped in a cloak. The plurisignificant cloak is eventually transferred to Saul: when David finds Saul asleep in the cave at Adullam, he cuts off a corner of the king’s cloak as evidence of what he could have done to him. And, in a reversal of the cloak motif, in Saul’s concluding encounter with a band of ecstatic prophets, he strips off everything he is wearing and rolls naked on the ground, an emblem of his being stripped of the kingship. The little garment that Hannah makes for her son is thus both poignant in itself and sets in motion a chain of meanings around cloaks.
The terseness of narrative report in the Bible can either point to a fraught significance, as with Hannah and Jacob, or it can open a window into ambiguous possibilities. Modern interpreters of the Bible like to make things unambiguously clear for their readers, but the biblical writers often aimed for uncertainty. One of the strengths of biblical narrative is that at times it cultivates ambiguity in the awareness that personalities and acts exhibit a complexity that may invite explanation in more than one way. A striking example occurs at the end of the last bitter confrontation between David and Michal. As noted above, Michal was forcibly separated from her loving husband Paltiel, almost certainly against her will, and brought back to her public position as David’s wife. After his conquest of Jerusalem, David has the Ark of the Covenant brought up to his new capital and dances before it in the procession, in what is probably a short tunic with nothing underneath. Michal comes out to meet him in front of the palace and sarcastically berates him for “exposing” himself — this is the word she uses — before the eyes of slave-girls. He angrily responds that God has chosen him to be king over Israel instead of her father and that for what she deems dishonorable he will be honored. His defiant rejoinder concludes with these words: “I will play before the Lord! And I will be dishonored still more than this and will be debased in my own eyes! But with the slavegirls about whom you spoke, with them let me be honored!” (2 Samuel 6:22–23). He has the last word in their dialogue.
The narrator concludes the episode with these words: “And Michal daughter of Saul had no child to her dying day” (2 Samuel 6:23). What explains this bleak report? Intriguingly, there are four conceivable explanations, two naturalistic and two theological. The most obvious reason for her never having a child — a grim fate for a woman in ancient Israel — is that in the wake of this bitter confrontation between her and David, they never again sleep together. A second possibility also suggests itself: Michal has been married to Paltiel for a number of years, and there is no indication that she had a child with him, so perhaps she was simply infertile. If, on the other hand, an interpreter prefers to see the story in theological terms, Michal may have been punished by God with barrenness for vilifying the anointed king of Israel in his great moment of triumph. Finally, still from the perspective of divine causation, punishment could have been exacted upon both spouses because her having no child would have deprived David of producing an heir with the daughter of his royal predecessor, an heir who would have provided a clear guarantee for the legitimacy of his successor and for the dynasty he aspired to found. In this understanding, both Michal and David are gravely at fault in their confrontation, she for publicly insulting him (the exchange takes place outside, in front of the palace), he for treating a woman with open contempt who is a king’s daughter and once loved him. We might recall that when they were to be married, it was said of Michal that she loved David, the only woman in the entire Bible about whom it is explicitly stated that she loved a man; and not long afterward she incurred personal risk in enabling David to escape from Saul’s assassins.
Ambiguity of explanation is not too common in literary narrative, ancient or modern, and its presence in the Bible is a manifestation of the ability of the Hebrew writers to represent human actions and relationships in all the shadowing of their uncertainties. Auerbach’s notion that the narrative method of the Bible compels interpretation is quite relevant in this regard.
The examples I will go on to consider are, with one marginal exception, all in dialogue, as were Amnon’s delicate choice of a euphemism in his question to his violated sister and in the use of “an Egyptian man” in the Moses story. The preponderance of instances of expressive brevity in dialogues should not be surprising: biblical narrative swings between drastic summary (a span of eighteen or more years can be conveyed in three or so words) and dialogue, where narrating time and narrative time are equal. The rule of thumb is that when something significant is about to happen, the narrative drastically slows down and expresses the event through dialogue. The dialogues themselves, of course, are much briefer than in later literature, and the crucial aspects of representation are often expressed in half a dozen words or less, sometimes in a single word.
Here are two such instances, which occur in antithetical moments following a sexual act. After David from his rooftop sees the beautiful Bathsheba bathing and orders her to be brought to him for sex, neither speech nor emotional response is assigned to her. Her only words conveyed in the entire episode, presumably after the passage of two months, are “I am pregnant” (2 Samuel 11:5). At this point in the story, we know nothing of Bathsheba except that she is Uriah’s wife and that she is beautiful. What, then, lies behind her words? Is she bewildered, confounded, fearful? Or does she have her eye on the main chance — now that I am pregnant, how are we going to make this work? She evidently has not had a child with Uriah, and bearing the offspring of the king could open grand possibilities for her. This of course is mere speculation, the ambiguity being akin to the ambiguity around Michal’s childlessness.
Bathsheba, after giving birth to Solomon, entirely disappears from the narrative until years later, when she vividly reappears as the aged David is failing and his son Adonijah attempts to usurp the throne. She returns to the story after David’s death when she contrives to bring about Adonijah’s execution. Her wiliness in these last two episodes may encourage the thought that she has her own advantage in mind when she tells David she is pregnant, but that is far from certain. Perhaps she was a naive young wife who unquestioningly obeyed the king’s sexual demand, and then through two or more decades of life in the court she gradually acquired the shrewdness required for negotiating palace intrigues. The very indeterminacy of her first very brief words — not, technically, dialogue at all, but a message, perhaps oral — imparts a piquant ambiguity to the story.
The grisly tale of the concubine at Gibeah in Judges 19 is not a biblical text that would be read in Sunday school. It may be unfamiliar to many readers. A certain Levite is traveling with his concubine to his home in the high country of Ephraim. As night falls, they find themselves near the Benjaminite town of Gibeah, and when no one else welcomes them an old man who lives there takes them in for the night, displaying the sort of generous hospitality that is civilized behavior in the region, as it is in the Greek realm depicted in the Odyssey. As they are dining together, men from the town pound on the door and demand that the wayfarer be brought outside so that they can have sex with him. This is an obvious reprise of the story of the lusting mob assaulting Lot’s house in Genesis 19, even with whole phrases cited from the earlier text. But in this story, there are no angels to zap the assailants, and it ends badly. The old man tries to dissuade the mob, offering to send out to them instead of his male guest the concubine and — astoundingly — his virgin daughter. (This is surely pushing hospitality too far.)
The violent mob persists, and the Levite then “seizes” his concubine — his host’s daughter is left alone — and thrusts her outside. The terrible consequences are predictable: the helpless woman is gang-raped all night long, and at daybreak she staggers to the entrance of the house and collapses there, her hands stretched out on the threshold. When the Levite awakes, opens the door, and finds her there, he addresses to her only two peremptory Hebrew words, qumi weneileicha, “get up and let us go” (Judges 19:28). But she cannot get up because after being brutalized through the night she has died. The two words he speaks are an indelible expression of his scandalous moral character. Hours earlier, he had pushed her outside, leaving her to the assault of the rapists. Now, not at first realizing that she is dead, he issues to her a curt command that they must be on their way. He says nothing solicitous or concerned about her condition. His two words to a corpse, in the making of which he was directly complicit, tell us all we need to know about him.
And there is, moreover, a postmortem expression of his brutality: he butchers her body, cutting it limb by limb into twelve pieces that he sends to the twelve tribes of Israel as evidence of the atrocity that has been perpetrated at Gibeah — an atrocity, of course, in which he has played a key role. There surely could have been another way to get the message out to the tribes. (The sanctity of the body after death was an important value in Hebrew society as it was in Greek society, a value memorably articulated in the Antigone story.) The Levite’s ghastly message to the tribes leads them to launch a bloody war of retribution against the tribe of Benjamin. Things, then, end disastrously not only for the concubine and the Levite but also for the nation, which is torn by civil strife. Perhaps the whole story was meant to show the chaos that prevailed in Israel before the monarchy: “In those days,” the refrain runs in Judges, “there was no king in Israel. Every man did what was right in his own eyes.” But the vile Levite is at the center of this larger picture, his turpitude conveyed in the two abrupt Hebrew words he speaks to a corpse.
Let us move from two words to one in the focusing of meaning. In 1 Kings 2, Adonijah, after his attempt to assume the throne has been upended by the coronation of Solomon, commits a fatal error. He asks of the queen mother Bathsheba “one petition” to convey to the king: that he be given Abishag the Shunamite as his wife. Bathsheba immediately realizes that such a marriage might pave the way to a future claim to the throne, for Abishag, though she did not have sex with David, shared his bed. Bathsheba then goes to Solomon and repeats the exact language of Adonijah’s request, adding one word: “There is one small petition that I ask of you, do not refuse me” (1 Kings 2:20). Adonijah did not say “small.” By adding it, Bathsheba knows she will enrage her son, for he, realizing the political ramifications of the petition, understands it is in fact a very large thing that Adonijah is asking. His immediate response is to issue an order to kill Adonijah, which of course is precisely what Bathsheba intended to bring about. The narrative dispenses with any analysis of Bathsheba’s devious shrewdness — it is conveyed in a single word.
A related use of a single word as a fulcrum of meaning occurs in Genesis 39, when Potiphar’s wife frames Joseph for the attempted sexual assault of which she is guilty. When she voices her accusation to the household servants, she refers to the supposed rapist as “the Hebrew man.” After her husband returns, she repeats her false accusation in the exact same language, changing just one word. This time she refers to Joseph as “the Hebrew slave.” In the throes of lust, all she could say to Joseph was, “Lie with me.” Now she manipulates language with calculating attention to her audience. The household servants, after all, are in all likelihood themselves slaves, so instead of inviting any status solidarity she calls Joseph “the Hebrew man,” as if to say, this is what you might expect from those wild Semitic barbarians from Canaan. When, on the other hand, she reports the supposed event to her husband, she makes a point of referring to Joseph as a slave because she wants to stoke his anger at the thought that one of his slaves should have, outrageously, attempted to violate her. The substitution of the single word shows that Mrs. Potiphar can be shrewd as well as concupiscent. It is microtextual evidence for biblical narrative’s elliptical but vivid imagining of character and motive in the midst of telling the story of the nation’s origins.
A few words in dialogue can be rich in expressing feelings and the complications regarding social relations. At the beginning of the Book of Samuel we see Hannah, who has come with her husband and his other wife to the Shiloh sanctuary for the annual sacrifice, in evident despair over her continued childlessness, exacerbated by being mocked by her co-wife. Her husband Elkanah tries to comfort her: “Hannah, why do you weep and why do you not eat and why is your heart afflicted? Am I not better to you than ten sons?” (1 Samuel: 8). That last brief sentence (still briefer in the Hebrew) is of course a touching expression of a man’s love for his wife. He obviously cares very deeply for her and is distressed by her dejection. At the same time, these few moving words reflect his failure to imagine the acuteness of her suffering as a woman. Given that the bearing of sons was seen in ancient Israel as a woman’s ultimate fulfillment, her very purpose in life, his devotion to her cannot console her for this existential lack. He loves her well and certainly means well, but his hyperbolic assertion that he is better for her than ten sons could only heighten her anguish — she who has no sons is asked to imagine that she possesses something better than ten sons. One short sentence in a dialogue communicates a complex sense of a marriage — the husband’s unquestionable love, which the wife surely understands and appreciates, and his incapacity as a man to fully fathom the terrible turmoil she is undergoing as a woman without child.
Occasionally, the mere ordering of the words in a short statement is revelatory. This is the case for Jacob’s words to Esau in the scene of the selling of the birthright. The exchange is the first reported speech for either of the brothers, and it follows the rule that first words spoken by a character play a decisive role in characterization. Esau’s speech, famously, is crude and abrupt: “Let me gulp down some of that red red stuff, for I am famished” (Genesis 25:30). Jacob’s response — just four words in the Hebrew — is equally characterizing, though in a less obvious way: “Sell now your birthright to me” (Genesis 25:31). The words are simple and seem quite direct, but their ordering is carefully calculated. First, the imperative verb, “sell.” Then the stipulation of an immediate transaction — not tomorrow or next week but “now.” After that, the object of the initial verb — sell what, a deerskin jacket, a hunting knife? No, “your birthright,” a very high price to pay for a helping of lentil stew. Jacob is shrewdly aware that he can take advantage of his brother’s urgent hunger. Finally, at the end of the syntactic chain, like a trap snapping shut, li, “to me.” In these very few words Jacob reveals himself as wily and cunning, and a hard bargainer. It is behavior consistent with how he will continue to act through the first half of the story. Up to this point, we have been told nothing about Jacob’s character, but as with our previous examples no further exposition is needed. This is one reason, evident here, though by no means the only one, for why these stories in all their brevity strongly engage our perception of the human entanglements that they represent.
I will offer one final example from dialogue; it is a bit longer for biblical narrative practice but still fairly brief, and in its relative brevity it opens up a deep perspective on the life of the speaker. Jacob, after being brought down to Egypt, is led by Joseph to an audience with Pharaoh. The Hebrew patriarch is now very old, as Pharaoh can plainly see. So Pharaoh, with a certain solemnity, asks him, “How many are the days of the years of your life?” Jacob, in a solemn reply, pointedly substitutes “sojourning” for “life,” and tells Pharaoh that he is one hundred and thirty years old, which would have been twenty years beyond what the Egyptians assigned as the ultimate human lifespan. Having pronounced this prodigious number, Jacob continues: “Few and evil have been the days of the years of my life, and they have not attained the years of my fathers in their sojourning” (Genesis 47:8–9).
What does this gloomy declaration tell us about Jacob? In his long life he has gone through much, buying the birthright and garnering the firstborn’s blessing by deception, fleeing to his uncle’s home in the east, working seven years for Rachel but then finding he has been given Leah before her, then his return to Canaan with two wives, two concubines, twelve sons, a daughter, and abundant livestock. It would seem that Jacob has attained everything he could have wanted, the paternal blessing manifestly fulfilled — but everything he has gotten has come at a price, as his words to Pharaoh show. Rachel was the love of his life, but he had to marry her sister first, and the consequence was years of domestic strife. Then, after Rachel gave birth to Joseph, she died in childbirth with Benjamin, a loss from which Jacob never really recovered. Then his daughter Dinah was raped, and he was dismayed by the blood vengeance enacted by his sons Simeon and Levi. Perhaps worst of all, for some twenty years he was convinced that his beloved son Joseph was dead. What happened in his wrestling through the night with the divine stranger is an emblem of his life: he fights his mysterious adversary to a draw of sorts and is given a new, divine name, but he is hurt in his hip socket and will bear the evidence of the struggle in a limp for all his days. Jacob’s story has what may seem to be a happy ending — he is reunited with Joseph and gets to see him in all his regal splendor, and he is able to bless the two grandsons Joseph has given him before he dies. Yet this is no fairytale. The taste of bitterness does not disappear. On his very deathbed, he flashes back to Rachel’s death. All this is a token of the moral realism suffusing biblical narrative: “Few and evil have been the days of the years of my life.”
Finally, here is what amounts to a zero-degree case of brevity, where something significant is communicated by a character’s not saying anything. In the episode of the rape of Jacob’s daughter Dinah, he berates Simeon and Levi for perpetrating vengeance, the massacre of all the men of Shechem. The objection that he voices is not moral but prudential. He and his family are only a “handful” of people, and they will now be exposed to the wrath of the Canaanites. Simeon and Levi yield no ground to their father: “Like a whore should our sister be treated?” (Genesis 34:31). The episode ends with these words, and the implication is that Jacob has no rejoinder to his two fierce sons. His silence is important because this is the moment in the larger story when Jacob, once a resolute and resourceful master of his large family, allows the power to be seized by his insistent sons. (David, too, will begin to lose power after the rape of his daughter Tamar, an act in which he was unwittingly complicit by directing her to Amnon’s bedchamber.) Not long after the incident of the rape, at least in the canonical ordering of the episodes, Jacob will be cruelly deceived by his sons when they send Joseph’s bloodied robe as evidence of his supposed death, and the once canny Jacob, now deceived, will slide into twenty crippling years of manipulated mourning for his beloved Joseph.
A related episode, reported with the sparsest notation, is inserted in the next chapter: “And it happened, when Israel was encamped in the land, that Reuben went and lay with Bilhah, his father’s concubine, and Israel heard” (Genesis 35:22). This is a grave transgression: it amounts to incest and is also an implicit challenge to his father’s authority, for whatever Reuben’s desire-driven impulse, in ancient Israel to take sexual possession of the dominant person’s bedmate is to lay claim to his power. Jacob hears of it but he does not speak. At this point in his life he seems unable to confront his wayward sons. It is only at the end of his days, when he intones a long poem that spells out the destiny of the twelve sons through the tribes they will found, that he will curse Reuben for “profaning [his] couch.” The poem is almost certainly from a different literary source and antedates the prose narrative by many years, but its editorial placement at the end of the Jacob narrative picks up that enigmatic silence upon his hearing that Reuben has slept with Bilhah. When it happened, he did not speak, perhaps afraid that he no longer possessed the paternal authority to castigate one of his sons. If, then, one views the narrative and the poem as a continuum, even if created by editorial artifice, Jacob figures as a powerless father harboring resentment for years and allowing himself to express it only as his life draws to an end.
Revelatory silence occurs also in David’s grief over the death of Absalom. He is famously, and movingly, shattered to hear that his son has been killed, and he expresses his grief in an anguished stutter. Then his brutal, tough-minded military commander Joab, who in fact is Absalom’s killer, arrives after the battle and berates David for grieving over someone who was his deadly enemy. If David does not reverse course, Joab tells him, the troops will disperse and he will be left to a terrible fate. Joab issues a peremptory order to the king: “And now, arise, go out, and speak to the heart of your servants. For by the Lord I have sworn, if you go not out, that not a man will spend the night with you, and this will be a greater evil than any evil that has befallen you from your youth until now” (2 Samuel 19:8). David is compelled to obey Joab’s command, so he goes out and shows himself before the troops, but he simply stands there and does not say a word.
As the Dutch Bible scholar J. P. Fokkelman has brilliantly observed, David at this juncture looks like “a man beaten to a pulp, who can barely stand, and does only the minimum requested or expected of him.” David’s silence in this respect resembles Jacob’s silence: it is the speechlessness of an eloquent man who was once powerful but now, torn between the political demands of kingship and the emotions of a bereaved father, falls silent. The fulcrum of power has passed to the strongman Joab, just as Jacob has lost power in the face of his angry sons. David, too, can give vent to his resentment only on his deathbed, when he enjoins Solomon to see to it that Joab will be killed in retribution for his murderous career. He mentions in his words to Solomon only two victims of killings, the two army commanders, Abner and Amasa, but he surely sooner or later would have heard of Joab’s murder of Absalom and would have had that in mind as well.
Eric Auerbach drew a conclusion that in its time would have been somewhat surprising — that it was biblical narrative, not Homer, that was the precursor in ancient literature of the great realist novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As I became engaged in biblical narrative over the years, I was completely persuaded by the rightness of this conclusion, and I came to see certain ramifications of it not spelled out by Auerbach. But there is one respect in which Homer and not the Hebrew writers was a forerunner of the novel, and that is in the sumptuousness of descriptive detail. This is especially true of the Odyssey, which revels in the representation of the accoutrements of aristocratic life and the fine craftsmanship that produced them — the golden bowls, the beautiful woven cloths, the exquisitely carved wood of the furnishings, and much more. There is a line of affiliation from all this to Balzac’s elaborate rendering of Parisian interiors as reflections of their inhabitants and Dickens’ vivid description of the choking London smog that is the medium for the troubled fate of many of his characters. The ancient Hebrew writers chose an antithetical path. They contrived numerous ways to package complexity into highly compressed units, using just a few words or even a single word to intimate depth of character, coiled tension in relationships, unstated emotions. Among the many means through which biblical narrative grips its readers, the resonant, subtle deployment of terrific compactness stands out. Indeed, it stands out even more conspicuously, even more admirably, in our culture of verbiage and verbosity.
