The Surprising Genius of Jesus (eBook)

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Connecting with Genesis

A key group in Jesus’s audience for the story of the two sons was the scribes. Though they may not have spent all their time copying religious texts (they probably provided legal services too), they were clearly deeply familiar with the Jewish Scriptures. By the time of Jesus’s ministry, scribes had introduced very careful textual controls to ensure the correct transmission of the authorized Torah text. Our best evidence for such scribal practices at the time comes from the Dead Sea Scrolls. These are a great source of information, even if the group that collected them was on the social margins of Judaism.

The Dead Sea Scrolls contain high-quality biblical manuscripts made to strict copying standards as well as less formally produced manuscripts. In the high-quality copies, the exact spelling of words is defined, even though in other contexts there may have been more than one way to spell those words. Over time, to help scribes preserve the exact spelling of words and the exact wording of phrases, scribes invented elaborate systems of counting and labeling letters. The labeling systems then became part of scribal training. The Dead Sea Scrolls show that some such scribal signs had begun to develop by the time of Jesus, though there were not nearly as many as there would be in the heyday of the Masoretes, the famous copyists active from the fifth to tenth centuries AD. In order to produce the most careful copies, scribes of Jesus’s day would have had to be very familiar with the precise wording of Genesis.1

My argument is that Jesus’s story echoes details from most of the major stories in Genesis. Whether or not they recognized this, the Pharisees and scribes were being presented simultaneously both with evidence of Jesus’s deep understanding of Genesis and with moral challenges arising from its narratives.

Sometimes in addition to similarities between Jesus’s story and stories in Genesis, we actually see contrasts, so that what happens in Jesus’s story is the opposite of what happens in Genesis. It seems likely that Jesus used both similarities and contrasts to make points to his opponents.

In what follows, we explore the echoes of Genesis as layers of meaning, and I present them in the order in which I first became aware of them, in the hope that this means that I deal with the more obvious layers first.

Jacob and Esau

Jesus’s story begins:

A certain man had two sons. (Luke 15:11)

The question for an expert scribe is this: Where in the Bible do we get a story about a man who has two sons? The two answers I most commonly get from an audience are (1) Abraham, who has Ishmael and Isaac, and (2) Isaac, who has Esau and Jacob. The fact that audiences come up with both of these suggestions shows that they are actually both good replies.

In Genesis, Abraham and his wife, Sarah, are too old to have children, and yet God promises them a son, at first stating merely that the child will be Abraham’s (Gen. 15:4) and later further specifying that the boy will also come from his wife, Sarah (17:16). In the time between these two promises, Abraham and Sarah try to bring about the fulfillment of the promise of a son to Abraham by having him sleep with Sarah’s Egyptian maidservant Hagar. From this union Ishmael is born. Consequently, Abraham becomes a man with two sons: Ishmael and Isaac, the former born from a servant and the latter born from a free woman. But though several passages contrast the two sons, Abraham does not have only two sons. After Sarah dies, he takes another wife, Keturah, and has six more sons by her, though they scarcely feature within the narrative (25:1–6). So Abraham is certainly a candidate for a man with two sons, but Isaac is an even better fit.

Isaac is by far the most famous man in the Old Testament to have two and only two sons. He has Esau and Jacob, from the same mother, Rebekah. These two sons are also famous rivals who contrast significantly. Jacob, his mother’s favorite, prefers the indoors, and Esau, his father’s favorite, prefers the outdoors. Here is the first narrative we have about them.

When the boys grew up, Esau was a skillful hunter, a man of the field, while Jacob was a quiet man, dwelling in tents. Isaac loved Esau because he ate of his game, but Rebekah loved Jacob.

Once when Jacob was cooking stew, Esau came in from the field, and he was exhausted. And Esau said to Jacob, “Let me eat some of that red stew, for I am exhausted!” (Therefore his name was called Edom.) Jacob said, “Sell me your birthright now.” Esau said, “I am about to die; of what use is a birthright to me?” Jacob said, “Swear to me now.” So he swore to him and sold his birthright to Jacob. Then Jacob gave Esau bread and lentil stew, and he ate and drank and rose and went his way. Thus Esau despised his birthright. (25:27–34 ESV)

We notice links between these two brothers and Luke 15. First, Esau, the older brother, connected with the field, comes in from the field when the food has already been prepared (Gen. 25:29), just like the older son in Luke 15:25. Second, Esau says he is dying of starvation (Gen. 25:32), just like the younger son in Luke 15:17. More strikingly, the younger brother, Jacob, takes advantage of his older brother’s desperation and gets him to forgo his right to inherit. Thus, this Genesis story is also about a man with two sons, one of whom has managed to trick the other out of his inheritance.

The question of inheritance underlies the story in Luke 15. Once the younger son returns, having spent all his inheritance, the older son is naturally concerned that his brother will have to be sustained from his own portion of the inheritance.

In Genesis, however, things between the brothers get worse. Isaac grows old and becomes visually impaired, and he asks Esau to go out to hunt meat for him to taste so that he can bless Esau before he dies (Gen. 27:1–4). Their mother, Rebekah, overhears this plan but prefers Jacob, and so she plots to cook food and help Jacob pretend that he is his older brother, Esau, and thereby get the blessing. The food that Rebekah prepares consists of two young goats, the only time in the Hebrew Bible when goats are specifically recorded as a meal.2 She also dresses Jacob in the older brother’s best robe (27:9, 15). Isaac cannot see and so asks for his son to come close. A scribe would likely notice that the verb “draw near” is used six times in seven verses as Jacob draws near and brings food to his father (27:21–27). As a result of Jacob’s successful trickery, Esau loses the blessing and is so murderously angry with his brother that Jacob must flee to a far country, where he does herding work for a relative before returning rather wealthy.

Thus we have at least ten things in common between Luke 15 and the story of Esau and Jacob: (1) a man with two sons, (2) a younger brother going into a far country, (3) the younger brother herding animals in that far country, (4) someone saying he is dying of hunger, (5) a younger brother wearing the best robes given by a parent, (6) an older brother coming in from a field,3 (7) the use of the word “draw near” (Luke 15:25), (8) an older brother being angry, (9) concern about an older brother losing some inheritance to a younger one, and (10) young goats as a meal.

But set amid these connections is one connection that is particularly striking to any scribe because at this point there is a special match with the wording of Genesis.4 When Jesus recounts the younger son’s return, he says,

But while he was still far off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him. (Luke 15:20)

To anyone trained in counting phrases who has copied out Genesis several times, this sentence is striking because there is only one other text in the entire Bible in which someone runs, falls on someone’s neck, and kisses that person. These three actions occur when Esau welcomes his cheating younger brother, Jacob, back from a far country.

But Esau ran to meet him and embraced him and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept. (Gen. 33:4 ESV)

This verse should have been well known to every scribe because it was one of only fifteen places in the whole Bible where scribes had to add special dots above a word, most likely used to show a textual dispute. Scribes were specially trained to place six of these dots over the six letters of the word “and he kissed him,” vayyishshaqehu (וַׄיִּׄשָּׁׁקֵׄהׄוּׄ‎), in Genesis 33:4 (see figure 1). That means that every scribe Jesus addresses in the story of the two sons had themselves placed these dots above the word in this verse.5

Figure 1 Manuscript Or. 4445, folio 23v, from the Pentateuch. Dating from around AD 920–950, this manuscript, like the entire tradition of medieval Hebrew manuscripts, has dots, known as...