Day 11 -- Genesis 34-36

Every word of scripture was good news for someone at some point in time. It is hard for us to grasp that, as we slog our way through the genealogies in the Book of Genesis. These passages--chapter 36 of today's reading is an excellent example--do not have much interest for us. But ancient people believed strongly in the power of words, especially names. Simply saying the name of a dead person brought that person momentarily back to life. They remembered, just for the sake of remembering.

It is worth considering that the passages we are now reading in Genesis were transmitted for hundreds of years as oral tradition before they were written down. They were remembered, word for word, and passed down. Whenever those ancestor names were spoken, the people themselves and their stories lived again in the memory of the hearers. That is really quite remarkable when you consider it, and helps us understand why even the tedious bits were"good news."

The people we meet in the Book of Genesis had a rich culture, but it was a culture built upon the spoken rather than the written word. It was not as rich a culture materially as ours is, of course, but it was spiritually rich. These people heard the Lord speak to them. They walked with him. The wrestled with him. They passed on the memory of their experience of God as part of their culture in long lists of ancestors, as well as in the most wonderful stories.

The mores--the ethical norms--of their culture can seem barbarous to us. (Maybe some of ours would seem barbarous to them.) The story of the rape of Dinah and the terrible revenge of her brothers in chapter 34 is a good example of this. There is nothing much for us to admire in that story. It seems heartless and cruel from beginning to end. There is no concern whatsoever expressed for the feeling of Dinah in all this. What did she think--no one cares. Family honor trumps individual happiness.

From the point of view of the story, what matters is purity--a union of the family of Israel with the pagan Canaanites will not do. The overarching concern in these texts is with the survival of the Family of Promise. God is working to separate the house of Israel from its pagan neighbors so that the covenant made with Abraham may continue and the promise be kept.

The Promise always comes first.

Individual tragedies are not as important as the survival of the Family of Promise. With our concern for the individual--for individual rights and happiness--it is hard for us to think our way into a world where the community is always more important than the life of the single man or woman, where the group's best interest always trumps individual happiness. It is a world where the people undertstand that and take that for granted--I am not as important as my family and my people.

That is where we are in the Book of Genesis, in that "communitarian world." If we reserve our judgments and open ourselves to these stories, they will open that new world to us in all its richness and complexity. And the experience will teach us something about living together. . . .