Ambiguity Abounds
Caravaggio. Sacrifice Of Isaac (oil on canvas), c. 1603.
Uffizi Gallery, Florence.
(Listen to an audio version of the blog post above!)
I’ve been studying and teaching the Bible for over thirty years, both on the UCLA faculty and with Logos Bible Study. I’ve taught through the Bible, verse-by-verse, dozens of times. And every time I do, I find something new. That’s the joy of great literature in general and of the Bible in particular.
Two weeks ago I selected the book of Genesis as our online “Featured Course,” with the plan to teach through the entire Bible once again via the “Featured Courses,” which include weekly 2-hour Zoom discussion sessions every Saturday morning from 10:00 AM – Noon (Pacific Time). Forty to fifty students participate in these lively discussions! This week, having completed the “primeval” chapters of Genesis (chapters 1-11) we move on to the story of Abraham and Isaac. Unlike chapters 1-11 which portray the mythopoeic past, the tales of the patriarchs look forward to the future and to the redemption of humanity. But it will be a troubled journey, indeed, one fraught with suffering and repeated failure, the volatile consequences of human freedom that we see so vividly portrayed in the stories of Adam and Eve, the generation of Noah, the builders of the tower of Babel and Abraham’s family itself.
As a narrative, the past portrayed in the “primeval” chapters of Genesis gives way to an uncertain, turbulent future; a past consisting of myth, legend and folklore gives way to a future lived out in the gritty reality of tents, sheep and shepherds and the tensions between husbands and wives, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters; the epic scope of creation gives way to the minutiae of spousal jealousies, sibling rivalries, simmering envy and tribal warfare. Appropriately, the studied symmetry, the formal language and the repetitive rhetorical patterns of the “primeval” chapters give way in the “historical” chapters to a more flexible narrative style, engaging dialogue and intricate character development accomplished through deliberate ambiguity, narrative gaps and clever word play.
Let me illustrate with the well-known episode of “the sacrifice of Isaac,” a story fraught with ambiguity and narrative gaps. Indeed, the German literary critic Erich Auerbach observes in his classic Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 50th Anniversary Edition, trans. by Willard Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003) that the narrative strategy employed in this story—a strategy of creating deliberate ambiguity and narrative gaps—demands that readers bring their own interpretation to the text, constantly reevaluating and revising it, as active participants in the narrative. This is very sophisticated storytelling and very sophisticated reading.
As a point of contrast, consider the scene from Book 19 of Homer’s The Odyssey, when Odysseus finally arrives home in Ithaca, only to find his kingdom in shambles; his wife, Penelope, beset by obnoxious suitors; and his 20-year-old son, Telemachus, struggling to survive in the chaos that Odysseus himself has caused by his 20-year absence at the Trojan War. Odysseus arrives at his palace, disguised as an old, decrepit beggar, giving him opportunity to survey safely the scene and to develop a plan to oppose and correct it. His wife Penelope, who doesn’t recognize her husband Odysseus, commands Eurycleia, a long-time servant, to offer the “beggar” the customary ξενία [“hospitality”] bathing Odysseus and washing his feet. The aged Eurycleia was nurse to Odysseus when he was a child nearly half a century earlier. Notice how the scene’s vivid details occupy the foreground of the story, casting a bright light on the setting, the characters and the action, as Eurycleia says:
“Many a wayworn guest has landed here
but never, I swear, has one so struck my eyes—your build, your voice, your feet—
you’re like Odysseus . . . to the life!”
“Old woman,” wily Odysseus countered,
“that’s what they all say who’ve see us both.
We bear a striking resemblance to each other,
as you have had the wit to say yourself.”
The old woman took up a burnished basin
she used for washing feet and poured in bowls
of fresh water before she stirred in hot.
Odysseus, sitting in the firelight, suddenly
swerved round to the dark, gripped by a quick misgiving—
soon as she touched him she might spot the scar!
The truth would all come out . . .
Bending closer she started to bathe her master
then, in a flash she knew the scar—that old wound
made years ago by a boar’s white tusk when Odysseus
went to Parnassus, out to see Autolycus and his sons.
The man was his mother’s noble father, one who excelled
the world at thievery, that and subtle, shifty oaths . . .
(9: 430-449)
Through the scene’s details we’re drawn into the story and we fall under its spell. The vivid dialogue between Odysseus and the aged Eurycleia brightens the language and makes it sparkle: the adjectives—“wayworn guests,” “old woman,” “burnished basin,” “fresh water,” “old wound,” “white tusk,” “noble father”; the repetition of sound—“all say who’ve seen,” “say yourself,” “burnished basin,” “suddenly swerved,” “spot the scar,” “white . . . when . . . went”; and the final description of Odysseus’s grandfather, Autolycus, who is at once “noble” and one who “excelled the world at thievery, that and subtle, shifty oaths,” much like Odysseus himself!
The poem then makes an elaborate 78-line excursus on how Odysseus as a boy received the scar while visiting his grandfather (lines 450-528), all providing a long, drawn-out background to Eurycleia’s sudden recognition of Odysseus, as well as Odysseus’s sudden realization that he’s been found out:
That scar—
as the old nurse cradled his leg and her hands passed down
she felt it, knew it, suddenly let his foot fall—
down it dropped in the basin—the bronze clanged,
tipping over, spilling water across the floor.
Joy and torment gripped her heart at once,
tears rushed to her eyes—voice chocked in her throat
she reached for Odysseus’ chin and whispered quickly,
“Yes, yes! You are Odysseus—oh dear boy—
I couldn’t know you before . . .
not till I touched the body of my king!”
(9: 528-538)
That is excellent storytelling. The details—the dialogue, the language, the action . . . even the background details on how Odysseus got the scar—all occupy the foreground of the story. As readers, we can witness Odysseus and Eurycleia before our very eyes, sharp and distinct. There is no ambiguity at all.
That’s in sharp contrast to the “sacrifice of Isaac” story in Genesis 22.
Here’s how it starts out:
“Some time afterward, God put Abraham to the test and said to him: Abraham! ‘Here I am!’ he replied. Then God said: Take your son Isaac, your only one, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah. There offer him up as a burnt offering on one of the heights that I will point out to you . . .”
(22: 1-2)
This is startling on several counts, especially if we read it right after the Homeric account of Odysseus’s scar:
What’s the context for this scene? What leads up to it? In Genesis 21 Isaac was born; Hagar and Ishmael were exiled; Abraham made a covenant with Abimelech; and Abraham, Sarah and Isaac were living in Be’er-sheva. Nothing that happened previously suggests anything leading up to or foreshadowing this!
Where are the two speakers, God and Abraham? Presumably, God is not physically present with Abraham, sharing a meal, as he did earlier under the great tree of Mamre; rather, he just speaks “out of the blue,” as it were. And where is Abraham? At Be’er-sheva? Indoors? Outdoors? We’re not told.
When God calls Abraham, he says abruptly, “Abraham!” without any prefatory gesture or introductory words; and Abraham answers just as abruptly, “Here I am!,” a single word in Hebrew: הִנֵּֽנִי, hinneh—something like “present!” or “behold!” Abraham does not prostrate himself before God, as he did when the three “men” visited him at Mamre, nor does he extend a greeting. God’s call and Abraham’s response are so abrupt as to be shocking. We don’t even know if the exchange is audible, or if it is something simply within Abraham’s own head.
What’s the reason for God tempting Abraham so outrageously, so terribly? Is God’s demand in response to something Abraham did? Or is it motivated by other external or internal compulsions, either on Abraham’s part or God’s?
Whatever the case may be, we’re told:
“Early the next morning Abraham saddled his donkey, took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac, and after cutting the wood for the burnt offering, set out for the place of which God had told him. On the third day Abraham caught sight of the place from a distance.”
(22: 3-4)
This is stunning. Abraham and Sarah had longed for a child—a child promised by God, who would fulfill the covenant; Abraham had expelled Hagar and his first-born son, Ishmael, to protect Isaac; and now God wants Abraham to kill Isaac by offering him up as a burnt offering. And Abraham agrees to do it. We know nothing about how he comes to that decision during the night that passes. Think about that for a moment.
Erick Auerbach rightly summarizes the Homeric style as representing “phenomena in a fully externalized form, visible and palpable in all their parts, and completely fixed in their spatial and temporal relations” (p. 6); that is, a Homeric story like The Odyssey takes place in a specific time and place with nothing hidden or unexpressed. All thoughts and actions are fully revealed. With Homer, there is no ambiguity; there are no gaps in the story that we the reader need to fill in, in order to understand what’s going on. It is just the opposite in biblical narrative.
To understand any literary work, we have to answer several questions in the course of our reading:
What is happening in the story?
Why is it happening?
What connects the present event to the preceding and following actions?
What are the characters’ motives?
How do they view their fellow characters?
What are the cultural and social norms that govern the world of the narrative?
The answers given by each reader enable him or her to reconstruct the reality devised by the text and to make sense of the world represented in it. Often, biblical narrative provides few answers to those basic questions. In most cases, we the reader provide the answers, some temporary, partial or tentative, others wholly and completely. The act of reading fills in the gaps created by the narrative itself. This “gap-filling” may involve simply arranging textual information in a linear sequence, or it may be more complex, demanding that the reader develop an intricate network of associations, laboriously, hesitantly and with constant modifications as additional information is disclosed at later stages in the story. The placement of the gaps and their size are a direct function of the narrator, who chooses what to tell the reader, when to tell it, how much to reveal and in what sequence.
That’s a really complex way to tell a story and it demands a lot of the reader. And learning to reading those gaps is what we must do to become “educated readers” of scripture.