Blood, Earth, Doubling & Completion
When her term to bear grew full, then behold! There were twins in her womb. The first one emerged red, entirely like a hairy mantle; so they named him Esau… but Jacob was an honest man, abiding in tents.
A world of pain and history of torture, dispossession and identity-theft has been built around Esav’s sale of his birthright to Jacob. But for our purposes, the fact that the brothers are twins and in various ways reflections and completions of each other is the central feature of the narrative; that and the fact that Esav’s nature is linked by etymology to goats, blood, soil and the food he demanded in exchange for his birthright.
These harmonics cannot be appreciated by studying an English-only version of the Hebrew Scriptures; they emerge clearly in the Hebrew and the connotations of the key words clustered around the names and nicknames of the twins, including the word, “twins” which is essential to this study of image-work. In the Hebrew original, one notes that the word is derived from the epithet of Jacob, tam, “simple, naïve, honest and integrity, that it is spelled differently in different contexts (the twins in Tamar’s womb, Genesis 38:27) and that it is cognate with the “lights” on the breastplate of the high priest which are translated literally as “perfections” but more commonly as “reflections” when the word, thumim, is translated at all. The word “twins,” first mentioned regarding Jacob and Esau is thus associated with perfect lights that are letters rooted in names, the names of the tribes on each precious stone of the breastplate.
Like most names in Hebrew Scriptures, those of the brothers encode their identity or distinctive nature. While this essay will not include analysis of the values of the Hebrew letters that structure their names, it is noteworthy that each includes he silent consonant ayin which means “eye” or “fountain” and thus the concepts of seeing, reflection and gushing forth or nourishing. The name of Esav has three letters, that of Jacob four.
The contrasts in the brothers are well-known, a source of continuing contention as the inheritors of Esav continue their attempt to absorb Jacob and take his birthright, the one Esau scorned. As important in understanding the nature and potential resolution of the dispute of these twins, a figure of splitting essential to this study is the nature of their complementarity as well as difference. Names, nature and nicknames swirl around the basics of identity and indicate the way through the maze of history.
“Pour into me now some of that red, red stuff,” Esav demands of Jacob when he returns from a day out in the fields, his natural habitat, essential to his name and identity as “a man of the field. The “red stuff” is lentil stew, HaAdom and, with Esav’s impatience, emphasized by his repetition of his demand for the stew, gives him his nickname, Edom, a near cognate rooted in the words “earth” and red. The sub-root of both words is blood, dam.
Blood, earth and red seem simple connections but they become complex and profound in their association with twin-ship and the doublings or reflections of poeisis and meiosis. The roots of Jacob’s name, hidden in the English mispronunciation include the meanings of heel (the source of the initial name, for Jacob, Ya’akov, emerged “grasping the heel,” akeiv of Esav); “footstep,” and, as a noun and verb both, “trace” and “track.” Ya’akov also is denoted as an ish tam, a “perfect” or “wholesome” man. The adjective also has connotations of simplicity, honesty, eternal, of being complete, innocent, naïve, of having “integrity,” and being “integral.” These latter attributes are denoted when Jacob returns “shaleim” to Shechem with the additional meanings of “whole” and intact.”
The source of the conflict is in the blood and in the fact of twin-ship and genetic splitting. Hebrew tradition explains that this splitting and conflict of contrasts was providential, a fact that will be resolved in time, after effort and suffering. The conflict goes to the heart of the relation between poeisis and meiosis broached in previous chapters and essential to the doubling that occurs in image-work and the various and problematic idealization, displacement and eventual death of the self or culture we observe in Hellenism. It appears also in this Hebraic substrate of the West with significant differences that illuminate a distinct sense of completion, reflection and perfection. These differences suggest a comedic and peaceful rather than an apocalyptic-elegiac resolution of history.
The splitting, then, is a conflict between two different kinds of completion: that of the wholesome or simple man struggles forward on the “track” of integrity and perfection and that of the bloody man of the field who is “complete” in his red, goat-like covering from birth and whose name, Esav is cognate with “complete,” “done” or “made.” Esav is made by nature, completely hairy like a goat (“sai-ar, sa’ir) with a constellation of attributes, from his love from the fields to his marriages that embitter his parents that associate him with the satyrs. He has the red covering or completion of a natural man whose love for the redness of meat, stew and blood suggested his eventual association with Rome and its ‘red’ Empire and god, Mars.
In regard to the relation between naming, identity and destiny, the story of Jacob and Esau presents a form of the myth, among many others, of Hippolytus, the “unbridled horse” whose joint reaction against and adoption of his Amazon mother’s wild nature embedded in gender conflict, leads to exclusive worship of the virgin huntress, Artemis, the lethal enmity of Aphrodite and his death. The story of Jacob and Esau eschews the magical theurgies of the Greek story, re-locating it in a historical conflict expressed via character, behavior and genetics. Indeed, for the Hebrew tradition this ‘doubling’ of the seed of Isaac is both the template of history and an analysis of human potential of lasting hermeneutic value. This durability is why its implications generate conflict to this day.
These different approaches to being “complete” or “whole” are the difference between being naturally “complete” and becoming spiritually and physically perfect. The distinction is embodied in the covenant of circumcision which changes the names and destinies of Abraham (and Sarah) and in the fabulous, often imperial projects of the West, the hybrid sprung from Greece, Rome and Israel, and of the Jews, embedded in the Torah, commentaries, perfection of spirit and deed and trust that these twinned endeavors will produce the conditions for restoration of the people to their inheritance of land which will enable both Scripture, study and deeds to be perfected, entire and whole, tamim…
Esau’s condition at birth, name, character, deeds and nicknames relate him to blood, earth and the promiscuous mixture of the two in the “red, red” stew he demands Jacob “pour into” him when he returns from his domain, the field. These qualities of impatience and of boundary transgression (the field of hunting and the tent of mourning) gain salience in the context of an essential prohibition against consuming blood, emphasizing the relation between life and blood. No member of the House of Israel, proselyte or born may consume blood:
For the soul of the flesh is in the blood and I have assigned it for you upon the Altar to provide atonement for your souls… anyone who shall trap a beast or a bird that may be eaten [kosher] shall pour out its blood and cover it with earth. For the life of any creature – its blood represents its life. So I say to the Children of Israel, “You shall not consume the blood of any creature; for the life of any creature is its blood…”
It is an irony befitting the inversions of poeisis and its mirrorings that a prohibition long observed by Jews, but permitted to (and indulged in by gentiles) should be ascribed to Jews as a defining evil by the institutions of the West (Edom). The irony gains weight as an ironic inversion or denial when one notes that consuming ‘the redeemer’s blood’ in the ritual called “transubstantiation” (magical metamorphosis many forms of which are found in basic Greco-Roman texts from Hesiod to Ovid) is considered necessary for conducting the believer into mystical communion and unity that re-produces in sanitized form the dissolution of individual and conscious boundaries effected by the orgia (“secret rites” or mysteries) of Dionysus and other gods and cults of antiquity. The dead or shades (derived from Hebrew shadim, “demons”) in Hades must drink a bowl of blood before they can speak. The Hebrew prohibition contains hygienic protections and guards against man becoming bestial in behaving like a beast
The covering of blood for sacrifice or food with earth is akin to burial. In anthropological terms, it is keeping essential matter in its place and avoiding boundary transgression. In his marriages in his libeling of and murderous hatred for Jacob, Esau was a violator of essential boundaries. Though the explicit text is often overlooked, Esau’s claim that “he took away my birthright” conveniently suppresses the fact that “Esau sold [and] scorned his birthright” and the obligations and challenges it entailed. The culture and individuals who are committed to slandering and degrading Jacob and his descendants, for all their intellectual gifts, overlook the transparent slander and deceit of Esav, transferring them to those whom the formulators of their creed, like Augustine, teach them to degrade and “scatter.” They also overlook the fact that in the blindness of his eyes and heart, his desire to elicit the potential goodness of Esau, Isaac was prepared to commit a wrong that his prophetic wife prevented. Esau’s subsequent desire that his father soon would die so he could murder his brother, without incurring a curse indicates that Rebecca was right and that Isaac was saw better in refusing to retract his blessing; instead, he reiterated it and explicitly connected it to the blessings received by Abraham. Similarly clear in import is Esau’s response to the reiterated blessing: to marry Machalat daughter of Ishmael in addition to the Canaanite wives that his parents abhorred. The example of Abraham and Isaac (Genesis 24) and the dismay of his parents had taught him nothing, reinforcing the message of his “spurning his birthright” and the goatish connotations of his birth. These impulses and deeds reinforce his reputation as a “bloody man,” a prototype for the disturbing ambiguities that initiate and shroud Macbeth and Esau’s comparison, through his nickname, Edom to the Roman empire by the sages of Israel: “He was red, his food red, his land red, his warriors were red, their garments were red, his avenger will be red” (Rome will perish by the sword, in battle and rapine). Similarly, the sages teach that Esav issued first “so he might come out together with the offensive [bloody] matter” and in complementary fashion, reason that “the first drop” [of seed] was Jacob. “If you place two diamonds in a tube, does not the one put in first come out last? So also, the fist drop was that which formed Jacob.” This comment coheres with the explicit metaphoric statement delivered to Pharaoh: “Israel is my first-born son!” “First-born” is explicitly a figure for “chosen” or selected.
As mentioned above, the word “twins” is derived from the root of Jacob’s descriptor, tam innocent, and simple, naïve, honest, entire and whole. “Entire,” “whole” and simple seem counter-intuitive as terms to designate twins which evoke splitting, doubling and reflection, carrying meiosis and physical nature into the realm of poeisis, metaphysics and history. This suggests that from the Hebraic perspective, the word-based and DNA-based processes are complementary and that a process of replication and re-unification, a reflection that is not image-making per se and certainly not idealization is essential to perfection and understanding. The message in the text is complicated by the fact that in the two uses of the word “twins” in Genesis the words are spelled with different combinations of silent consonants. Since every Hebrew letter has conceptual and numerical as well as phonetic and grammatical value we must examine these uses to appreciate the connection between twins, reflections, perfection, completion and providence.
When the narrative tells us regarding Rebecca, “behold, there were twins in her womb” the word is spelled simply (tomim), with one silent consonant, slightly different from the word tamim. In speaking of Tamar’s delivery of twins, the word is spelled “full,” with three silent consonants, though pronounced almost identically, t’omim. The first “twins” is spelled “defectively” Rashi argues because Esav was evil. Some explain that Isaac had the potential to sire all twelve tribes but did not, producing only their progenitor, Jacob. Others note the numerical value (twelve) of the last word (zeh) of Rebecca’s question, “why am I thus” as an indication of an unrealized potential. The exposition of “thus” in the subsequent verses includes six pairs of attributes describing the twins to come: six doublings. In contrast, both children of Tamar were righteous and one was a direct ancestor of David so the spelling is elaborated more fully from the root tam.
Unrealized potential, splitting, and the drawn-out fulfillment of potential and reunion of the qualities of the brothers, physical might, aggression, and the ‘blood of the field’ with earnest study, innocent wholeness and filial duty are the purpose of history in the Hebraic sources. The overriding fact of a purpose or Providence distinguishes the Scriptures from the Greek and Western (hybrid) sources we have been examining.
The key point for the purposes of this study is the etymological and conceptual relation of “twins” to perfection, wholeness and simplicity. Additional perspective on the role of doubling and reflection in Hebraic culture may be found in Exodus.
The relation of Jacob to Esav, the asymmetric doubles whose conflict rooted in diverse modes of completion must be resolved is hinted in the preparation of the Tabernacle in Exodus, after the giving of the commandments. A feature of the vestments and rituals that made Israel “whole” and integral was the “four rows” of precious stones in mountings on the breastplate of the High Priest. The making of this “breastplate of judgment” stresses the importance of the names of the twelve tribes as essential to the prophetic function of the garment and its reflections:
The stones shall be according to the names of the sons of Israel, twelve according to their names, engraved like a signet ring, each according to its name shall they be, for the twelve tribes.
The name of the precious stones often is not translated but rendered in the Hebrew, urim v’thumim, “perfect,” “honest” or true lights (urim). Thumim is spelled in similar fashion to “twins” in the verse referring to the commotion in Rebecca’s womb, a hint that perfection was potential in the twins and in the “lights” they would, eventually, shed on the world. More explicit is the reiteration of “the names of the sons of Israel, twelve according to their names…for the twelve tribes.” In discussing Hippolytus, I noted how character and destiny is encoded in name, pre-figuring identity. But here the text does not deal in idealization or projection but uses the letters of the names to emphasize that all history and truth is contained in them, when questions are asked simply, in a quiet voice and with the assistance of the Judge or High Priest as an interpreter. Letters in the names of the tribes “engraved” on the gems would stand out shining in high relief. But this optical reflection is not an image but the integration of phonetics, literacy and light. The experiential situation and its potential for action leads, via careful questioning to the use and direction of light for action; the activation of the names of the tribes leads not to an idealized image or fiction but to fulfillment of proper direction in the world. In this way it supports the purpose of the Torah itself, ‘walking’ the proper way through life. Art and craft in the design and making yield to the identity, potential and action in the names.
It is notable that every time the word, “you shall make” is used in the sections of Exodus dealing with the construction of the tabernacle, its sacred objects and vestments there is an overtone of the name and potential of Esav who emerged fully “made” covered with ‘blood and soil’ (Admoni, adamah – Edom, supra). The ubiquity of the verb – name of Jacob’s brother indicates how his abilities are needed in their tam form, in the simple, naïve and honest application of Jacob and his descendants. The reiteration of “names” and “the twelve” indicates that the positive qualities of Esav are being assimilated to the world historical function of sanctifying life given to Israel, a role that this study links to the primacy of the name and cultural body over its imagery or reflections.
The doubling and re-doubling in the birth of Jacob and Esau, the twins whose name and condition has instructive meanings is a commentary on image-making, on splitting and re-unification pre-figured in the story of the previous generations. Abraham and Sarah long were childless which led to his taking their servant Hagar as a wife who bore Ishmael. The resulting contempt of the younger wife and mother for Sarah led to conflict resulting in the submission, return of Hagar and a blessing for Ishmael and promise of the Creator that He would establish his covenant with the son, Isaac, yet to be born to Sarah and Abraham. The covenant to be fulfilled through Isaac and his descendants, Jacob who eventually gets the blessing affirmed and reiterated as the covenant of Abraham involves changing the names of Avram to Avraham and Sarai (“my princess”) to Sarah.
God heard the prayer of Hagar for her child’s life, and Abraham’s repeated requests that the child be blessed and acceded giving him life, royal descendants and, when separated from Isaac and the covenant, many gifts and the land to the east in an arc from Assyria south and then west to Egypt. Ishmael returned to the Machpelah (“double”) cave in Hebron-Mamre to bury Avraham in a paradigm of the cooperation and honor that may result from the poetic-meiotic doubling. The blessings and inheritance of Isaac and Ishmael remain distinct as should those of the twins, Jacob-Israel and Esau who reiterate the doubling and division motif but in more dangerous fashion. The high hostility reflects the closeness of the genetic bond and its potentials as encoded in the words for twins and different word-concepts for completion, finish and perfection. To be perfectly honest, the text suggests, requires a degree of naïveté, artlessness and wholeness that cannot simply or innately be made but must be acquired by “dwelling in tents,” that is, by study and reflection.
An additional doubling occurs in the differently problematic marriages of the twins. Esau marries two Canaanite women, “a source of spiritual bitterness to his parents” and against the explicit instructions of Abraham and example of Isaac; he also marries a daughter of Ishmael, Machalat-Basemath. This trio may not be exhaustive for the Hebrew Scriptures only give the names and dates that establish the main concepts and timeline of history. Or it may indicate a further divergence from Jacob who by the deceit of his uncle, Laban and the desire of his wives for children wound up with four wives, a double doubling. This mixture of trickery and striving for offspring reflects in part that “Esau spurned his birthright,” turning to Canaanite women and the daughter of Ishmael for the elder sister, Leah ideally would have been his wife and the youngest, Rachel, as intended, would have been Jacob’s. The episodes illustrate the Hebraic view of free will expressing character and altering history; similarly the characters of Jacob’s sons are “engraved” in the stones of the breastplate and then reflect their characters, in varying combinations into possible realization in history. These doublings are embedded in the dramatic tetrad I discuss in other essays. Here the tetrad is conflict-ridden but comedic, not tragic.
Perhaps most foundational in identifying Jacob in substance and temporal sequence or history is the association of doubling with the burial place of the patriarchs and matriarchs, M’arat HaMachpelah, “the double cave” which is Kiryat Arba in Hebron. Abraham acquires the place to bury Sarah and he, in turn is buried there as are Isaac and Rebecca, Leah and Jacob (47:30, 50:12-14). Writings of the sages explain that Kiryat Arba (“four couples”) is so named because it also was the burial place of Adam and Eve. The willingness of Ephron the Hittite to sell this invaluable site foreshadows Esav’s sale of his birthright for stew. Perhaps more importantly, the double-cave focuses the paradigm of generation by which one becomes two (Adam becomes Adam and Eve) and two (one couple) becomes four couples eternally alive at the entry to “the apple orchard” or garden in Eden. In Hebraic writing, the tetrad is not a pattern of trauma and displacement but of continuity, inheritance and generative complementarity of genders; a root of history and avenue of blessing. This structure of abundance is fixed in four bonds of which the DNA pattern and intertwining of heaven and earth by two pairs of angels on the ladder-helix is a type bonded to the destiny and potential of Jacob.
But my main concern, because of the meanings embedded in the word “twins” is with Jacob and Esau and the number and descendants of their wives as a process in which the relations of poeisis, “to make” or “transform a world” and meiosis, the chromosomal divisions that occur within the dam, or blood. The bowing of Jacob to Esau may be seen as an attempt to integrate as one man the materials divided by character. But the time and assertion of the difference was not ready. The history of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and through them of mankind, is theurgic poeisis in the broadest sense; but the Creator does not direct and ‘doom’ the characters but rather establishes a general template whose ‘program’ and software are written by them. This is very different from the control and channeling of the action by the Greek gods and goddesses from the Iliad to the tragedies.
The events by which Jacob wound up with four wives are a paradigm for the interaction of human intentions, designs and history, the integration Scriptures presents as the Design of the Creator, or Providence. Laban’s various schemes to exploit the labor, skill, honesty and genius of his nephew led, through the multiplication of wives and the desire of Rachel and Leah for children to the twelve sons who became tribes whose names are engraved on the breastplate, lights perfected in names. These doublings prepare for the problematic reunion of Jacob and his family with Esau and his four hundred armed men, the renewed separation of the brothers to the places that reflect their names and natures (Seir and the tents of Succoth) and the arrival of Shechem of Jacob, shaleim, “intact,” “whole,” “integral” and “complete,” a synonym of his essential epithet as a “perfect man.” There “he set up an altar and proclaimed, ‘God, the God of Israel,” closing the circle with his grandfather Abraham who raised the first altar to the Creator at Shechem –Elon Moreh centuries earlier (Genesis 33:18-20; 12:6-7). This repetition or exemplar is not an idealization or “identical” but a reiteration, a full-bodied deed by a living man, not an image or magic as the following events, both immediate and to this day, demonstrate. In the same way, the elaboration of Jacob’s vows to “the Eternal One, the God of Abraham and Isaac…God Almighty” at Beit E l is self-development and an expansion into history of his family of the altar, prayers and blessings of his fathers. The message of this text is that the realization of miracles (as millennia later in King Lear) requires many deeds by many people, that is requires commitment, pain and suffering, unlike the fatal directness of magic and that it has a good ending: a pastoral of life abundant rather than the elegiac ironies of Hippolytus’ grave becoming a receptacle for maiden hair prior to the marriage rituals he spurned.
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Briefly above I noted that the tragic tetrad, a common feature of Western poetics seems present in the three generations of the Hebrew patriarchs. The Abram – Sarai bond is complicated by infertility and the role of Hagar as wife and consort. The threatened displacement of Sarai is resolved in the flight and subsequent submission of Hagar that leads to the changes of names to Abraham and Sarah and the covenant of a son and eternal identity in a people. At Abraham’s prayers, the displacement of Ishmael by Isaac is moderated by gifts, a blessing and dynasties for the first son.
Sarai = Avram = Hagar Avraham = Sarah —– Hagar
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Ishmael Isaac —- Ishmael
In each case the instability of the tetrad is replaced by a theurgy that confers identity, bestows blessing, inheritance and historical place on the characters. After Ishmael and Hagar are sent with gifts to the East, the tetrad is restored by the prominence of Eliezer as a servant (replacing Hagar) whose role is to secure a wife for Isaac after the death of Sarah. This is a critical moment: the tetrad has become a dyad, Abraham-Isaac; Eliezer not only takes the place of Hagar, his loyalty and intelligence in slightly modifying and fulfilling Abraham’s goal establishes a new household to fulfill the covenant that roots the family as an alternative to the practices of Canaan and other idolaters (image worshippers). It also establishes a dramatic tetrad that comprises two generations and stresses the principle of culling or distillation initiated when Abram went forth from his father’s house and the idolatry of Mesopotamia. Just so Rebecca is withdrawn (saved) from the house of Bethuel-Laban; similarly, Rachel and Leah will be distilled from this house and leave with Jacob and their children as they too will “go forth.”
Abraham = Keturah
Eliezer
Isaac = Rebecca
Like strands of DNA, Rebecca is teased out of the house of Laban, leaving by her own choice not be theurgy, and her qualities are integrated with Isaac the confluence of Abraham and Sarah, the names of the covenant and their new identity. Names-identity and history are an active process. Abraham instructs, Eliezer selects and invites, Rebecca assents and the new marriage follows, “Isaac brought her into the tent of Sarah his mother; he married her, she became his wife, and he [Isaac] loved her.” Not only does Rebecca thus, by this series of human decisions and actions occupy the place in history marked out for her by Abraham and Sarah but, in reference to the discussion above, her placement emphasizes the integrity and perfection of “dwelling in tents” inherent in the nature and name of her son, Jacob.
Jacob’s name has four letters; the first is the first letter of the Tetragrammaton which is not present in Esav. When Jacob dreams of the ladder, there are two angels ascending and two descending. “Standing over” the ladder is the Creator who blesses Jacob, states that he will be a blessing and links his name and identity to that of Abraham and Isaac. A similar fourfold pattern appears when Jacob returns to Beth-El and the covenant of the land and the essential human blessing, to “be fruitful and multiply” is repeated. The link of generation and elaborated replication in the text and history evokes the four DNA nucleotides and the letters of Jacob’s name with the Creator in a role analogous to that nucleotide that links between DNA and RNA, its messenger.
The displacements and re-positioning within these tetrads and that of Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob and Esau differs strikingly from that of Greek myth and the great tragedies of the West, textual weavings as diverse as Hamlet, “Christabel” and Heart of Darkness. The nature of theurgy is such that the Greek term may not cover the Hebraic material. The dreams or promises God conveys to the patriarchs are not coercion; they have the status of confirmed promises the nature of whose realization is conditional on human behavior. There are no battling deities, like Aphrodite and Artemis, jealous of their unique qualities and fierce in punishing any slight. The sole and totally unified divine Being ‘speaks’ only in a metaphoric sense. A great part of the narrative, that is, of history’s development depends on the responses of the human beings who are not actors, as in the great plays of antiquity or the “Renaissance, or the characters of Western fiction from Chretien to the personae of Stevens but historical beings in a divine script that the characters write. Modern-Postmodern attempts to mimic this pattern produce a recessive or Escher affect, an involution like that of Narcissus, the “inanimate savoir” of Stevens or his mind-poet, “a metaphysician in the dark” testing pseudo-divine powers. Perhaps that is intrinsic to the difference to the tragic poeisis of Greece and the comedic pattern of Scriptures. The former shows the image or fiction or god absorbing the human in dramas of erotic trauma and magical transposition. In the latter, erotic trauma and transgression is infrequent and its familiar medium, composite creatures absent. This is an important inheritance for humanity that guards against individual madness and cultural collapse. Thus, the ‘new, improved’ script of “Esau, he is Edom,” disintegrating at an ever faster rate as its fantastic imagery displaces its cultural body will dissolve like an insubstantial pageant and the Hebraic pattern will re-emerge according to the verse, “You have removed my sackcloth and girded me with gladness.” Shades and veils of imagery, glorious fictions will dissolve into the light of simple human joy. The twelve children will become tribes, whose four camps will surround the tabernacle in which the sacred will be invested in the world by human action, including the perfect lights of their names in the urim v’thumim.