Window and Mirror
Reflections on the Lectionary for July 30th
If I compare the two bibles I know best—the bible I was taught during my days in the evangelical movement, and the bible I have come to know during my career as a scholar and clergy person—one of the differences that stands out is the role of narrative. Stories—texts that have a plot, develop characters, and offer exposition—are everywhere in the bible I read now. But the bible I encountered within the evangelical movement didn’t offer nearly as many stories. That bible—the set of texts that got lifted out of the bible to make up the canon-within-a-canon—tended to consist of sayings and bits of argument, abstracted from the gospels and lifted from Paul’s letters, instead of whole stories. The evangelical bible—at least the one I knew in the 1990s—had been parted out, disassembled, and rearranged into a series of proofs and arguments. A few narratives made it into that reconstructed canon, but most did not.
In this week’s lectionary readings, two stories stand out to me as examples of the kind of narrative richness that the biblical text can offer, and the way the biblical text relies on storytelling to convey ideas. Genesis 29:15-28 is the story of Jacob’s dealings with his relative Laban, laboring for him to win the hand of first one daughter and then the other. And 1 Kings 3:5-12 is the account of God’s conversation with Solomon, in which a genie-like deity offered Solomon something like one wish. Both of them convey information that might have been conveyed more didactically in other forms—and which in fact does show up in less narratively-centered forms in other references to these figures. But by telling stories rather than describing things outright, both of these passages show the power of narrative. These are both vignettes that, like any good story, hold a lot of possible universes of interpretation in them.
The story from Genesis reads like something from another world, which in some ways it is. It describes the sort of family relationships that we might expect from a fictional world like Westeros, but which many people in the modern world would reject as ways of organizing things in our own place and time. In this story, relatives marry each other and even prefer to marry within family systems , and even more alarmingly, daughters are given away by their fathers at a price, without much suggestion of them having their own say in things. Most of us would not accept those practices today. But just like in the stories featured in Game of Thrones, these foreign customs are the backdrop for an intriguing bit of marriage politicking. Laban and Jacob strike a deal, and seemingly not a very fair one for anyone but Laban: Jacob will work for Laban for seven years, in exchange for marrying Rachel. It’s not clear whether Rachel had any say in the arrangement, but if she did, it doesn’t merit a mention in the text. Laban gets seven (and eventually fourteen) years of labor out of the deal, but Jacob seems to be taken advantage of, and the two sisters are pretty inert in the whole thing, not given very much narrative presence or agency.
At the end of the seven years, Laban makes a surprise switch and substitutes Rachel’s sister Leah as the bride. Jacob doesn’t notice until the sun comes up. You can almost imagine the kind of stock folk tale that might have given rise to this story being told this way; it’s the kind of mistaken-identity fraud that might figure in any number of stories across cultures. It’s worth noticing, I think, that the story’s plot depends on the women’s appearance being obscured during the wedding ceremony. This is a story that only really works if Leah is wearing a head covering to the wedding. In the 21st century, head coverings are cause for panic among some Christians, since they code as “Islamic” or even more broadly as foreign. But some of the great heroes of the biblical story are presumed in the text to be wearing them. And this is before we even delve into the fact that Jacob took multiple wives.
This story of Jacob, Laban, Rachel, and Leah does a lot of work that we could broadly call characterization. It tell us who these people are. Well—it doesn’t really tell us who Rachel and Leah are, other than that Leah’s eyes were noteworthy and Rachel was graceful and beautiful. But the story serves to let the reader know that Jacob was love-smitten enough to work for seven years (and eventually fourteen) for a bride, and it tells us that Laban was a little bit duplicitous. The text could have simply announced these things about these characters, but by telling the story this way, it lets the reader come to the conclusion on their own. You can almost picture the young man willing to put in years of work to gain the object of his affection, and the conniving father who knows he holds all the cards.
The same is even truer, I think, for the 1 Kings story. Solomon was supposed to have been wise—that’s his whole thing in the biblical text. There are plenty of places in the text (and in traditions about the text) that claim this for Solomon—that tell, rather than show, about Solomon’s wisdom. But in this story, the reader is privy to a chat between Solomon and God, and the offer that God makes to the king. God offers him something—“ask what I should give you”—and Solomon requests wisdom. Because Solomon asked for wisdom and not something more selfish, God gave Solomon wisdom, and he ended up pretty wealthy and powerful in the bargain too. That’s a far more nuanced way to convey the idea that Solomon was wise than simply saying so. In the trajectory of Solomon as one of the great kings of Israel (and indeed the last one to reign over a united monarchy before the split into north and south), this story figures prominently in the story of how Solomon was successful. His good kingship was owed to his wisdom, which was god-given.
I’ve come around to a real appreciation of these kinds of stories. They show up everywhere, across the whole canon, and these stories are far more interesting to me these days than the lifted-out passages that were once trotted out to me as “the bible” in proof texts or on t-shirts. As a young evangelical, I was part of a culture that asked me to memorize verses, and be able to string them together like beads on a necklace to create logics of things like salvation, eschatology, and ethics. But rarely if ever was I encouraged to consider how those verses worked within a larger narrative, or what they had to do with the book in which they were found. They were little lexemes, meant to be organized for the purposes of orthodoxy, and not meant to be known and understood on their own.
But I have found more recently that it always pays to read the bible as story. Even parts of the bible that are not straightforward narratives, like Paul’s letters or Revelation or the oracles of the prophets, are more readily interpreted and understood when we think about them as stories. Paul’s letters are plot points in a much larger story of a relationship between a missionary and a community. Revelation is part of a story about a small group of churches struggling within systems of power. The sayings of the prophets are pieces of speech that took place in a fuller context of political, religious, and social strife. They make more sense when we read them as pieces of a story. The least narratively-developed parts of the bible, things like genealogies and king lists, tell a story, if you allow yourself to read them that way. And more often than not, those stories are fascinating and exciting.
What’s most useful about biblical stories, though, is not that they entertain us, but that they work as a kind of window and mirror. They are a window into another world, one that we cannot really know, but that we can visit narratively and experience through a text. But they are also a mirror, reflecting ourselves back to ourselves, and showing us the questions we have about our own lives. The story of Jacob and his wives can be read, as literature, with any number of different concerns. We could read it as a story of trickery. We could read it as a tale about siblings. We could read it as a way to think about providence. Or we could read it, as scholars like Wilda Gafney have begun to do, as a feminist or womanist problematic, asking where the women’s voices are in the story. Stories hold so much potential for meaning that we can never exhaust them all. The same is true for Solomon’s story. Your takeaway from that story is likely going to depend a lot on the kinds of questions you ask of it. You can read it as a story about blessing, or privilege, or heredity, or faithfulness, or just about anything else, depending on the questions you bring to it.
These are only two of the thousands of stories available to us in the biblical text. There are other stories besides these, millions of stories outside of the biblical text, or billions, really—as many stories as there have ever been people, many times over. But there is something important about a canon of stories, a set of definitive and defining texts, that forces us to reckon with them and do the hard work of interpreting them. There is something valuable about looking through that window, and looking into that mirror, and discerning what we see.