Image: Aert de Gelder [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
Once an Intro student asked me, “Rabbi, some of the stories in the Torah are awful! Can’t we just scissor some of them out?”
After I recovered from the mental image of someone taking scissors to the Torah, I agreed that some of the stories there are truly horrible. Parashat Vayera has some real doozies:
- Lot offers his virgin daughters to a mob bent upon rape. (Genesis 19)
- The destruction by fire of two entire cities. (Genesis 19)
- Abraham tells the King of Egypt that his wife Sarah is his sister, thereby saying, “If you want her, fine by me!” (Genesis 20)
- Jealous of the servant Hagar’s son by Abraham, Sarah demands that Abraham toss mother and son out to die in the desert. (Genesis 21)
- Abraham believes that God has told him to go make a human sacrifice of Sarah’s only son. He takes Isaac up to Mt. Moriah and is stopped at the last minute before the kill by another vision. (Genesis 21)
These stories are ghastly, no doubt about it. It is tempting to turn away from them, or to do what some traditional and modern commentators have done, and try to explain why they are really OK.
There’s another way to engage with these narratives, though: that is to tackle them as the dreadful stories that they are. Biblical scholar Phyllis Trible has done exactly that in her groundbreaking book Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narrative. As the title suggests, she doesn’t try to sugarcoat the horror stories in the Bible; instead, she demands of them “What can we learn here?”
Every generation of Jews encounters these stories anew, and sees new things in them. If you find them off-putting, join the club. While I learned them at a young age and initially simply accepted them, I now think about these cruelties in a different light. Maybe Sodom deserved destruction, but Lot’s daughters? Isaac? Ishmael? Hagar? Sarah? These are brutal stories, and they should raise serious questions within our souls.
The stories aren’t there to say, “Offer your daughters to rape mobs!” They are there to get us to ask, “Why did Lot do such a horrible thing? Did he have other alternatives?” “Should people who hear voices always just go do what the voices tell them, or should they talk with someone – their wife, their rabbi?” They may serve to remind us that Ishmael’s descendants are our cousins, and that my 21st century family is not the first to be dysfunctional.
Those questions are Torah at work upon us. Torah is not merely the words in the scroll; it is also those words at work on our hearts.
Happy studying!
God put them there for a reason; it’s up to us to figure out why.
If the stories weren’t important, they wouldn’t have been passed down for all the thousands of years.
True, Lurk! Certainly, there is evidence of missing bits elsewhere in the text, so it’s safe to assume that everything there is there because it WASN’T scissored out!
Part of the reason for these recountings I believe, is to assure us that our fore-parents are just as human as we are, for all their sterling qualities they too used poor judgment, were guilty of crimes and sins, and yet HaShem still has patience with them, and so with us, up to a point. This way we are challenged to live more conscientiously and to strive for better relationships.
Very insightful, Meredith! So there is grace and mercy in the text, even in the gruesome bits. Thank you so much for commenting.