Reading Questions for 2/2

Posted on January 18, 2006

Sorry these are a little late; hopefully they are not too late to be helpful. These questions should help you focus a bit on the reading from the second half of Genesis:

How would you characterize Jacob and Esau? If you had to cast them for a movie, who would you cast? Why?

What do you think happens at the Jabbok? Who is the man Jacob wrestles with? What are some of the ways you might interpret this story?

Chapter 34 is another one of those “interpolated” narratives (like Sodom and Gomorrah). How do you make sense of it in the narrative sweep of this half of Genesis? (Those of you who have read The Red Tent will be very familiar with one particular interpretation of this story.)

The note at the bottom of page 55 explains that the saga of Joseph and his brothers enacts “a drama of divine providence that ties together all the themes and concerns of Genesis.” How would you define those themes and concerns?

As should by now be clear to you, one of the things that Robert Alter is most interested in is characterization: how do the narrative strategies of the Hebrew Bible work to further our sense of the characters in the stories, he asks. He, of course, is most interested in the text’s “major” characters, and most of those characters are (arguably) male. But there are a lot of female characters in Genesis as well. Keeping in mind the reading strategies Alter is introducing us to, think about the female characters from the second half of Genesis and consider some of the ways in which they are characterized in the text.