Three stories that are central to the Book of Genesis; namely, 12:10-20, 20:1-18, and 26:6-11, all tell a similar story that has stood out as a source of consternation for many readers. Essentially, the stories involve a patriarch that is visiting (passing through) a foreign land with his wife. Fearful of the attraction his wife will receive, the patriarch contrives a narrative of subterfuge where his wife will be passed off as his sister. Of course, in each of the three instances that this occurs, the results are less than desirable and, for the reader who wishes to exhaust every means at pedestaling the patriarchs, a bad taste is left in the mouth following a robust defense of their head-scratching actions.
What are we to make of these decisions by men whose namesake will forever be tethered to a threefold company that always seems to answer back to an association with Jehovah? How can we answer to this seeming travesty of wife-sister motif in narratives that vie for the conquest of a righteous bloodline; whose formation will span the collective whole of the Torah and find realization in the overshadowing of a soon-to-be impregnated virgin? Really, these narratives disrupt ones view of chivalry. They disappoint ones aspirations of heroism. But, is there an easier way to look at these narratives? Can we collaborate with antiquity and wrest from the fragile finds of the Ancient Near East solutions to help alleviate our discomfort with these occurrences? This is what we shall endeavor to do.
First, in order to bring light to these accounts, we need to review each instance in question. (1) Abraham, before arriving in Egypt, surmises to pass his wife off as his sister in an attempt to save his own life in the certain event that Pharaoh will wish to steal her away from her husband. (2) Again, Abraham is the mastermind of the same plot, but the ruler is another; namely, Abimelech of Gerar. (3) This time, while the same Abimelech is the ruler, the mastermind of the wife-sister plot is Isaac. In each instance, the reason for the subterfuge comes down to the recognized beauty of the wives—-Sarah and Rebekah—-and, since a brother would not serve as a problem to the ruling monarchs, the avoidance of violence, imprisonment, or death could be secured on the part of the fearful husband. Couple these bizarre instances with the backdrop of a defensive Elohim, and you are left capitulating reason and rationality to outlandish theories and/or attempts to annotate denials like many that are found in Rabbinical writings. Resisting the glamorous elucidations of Documentary Hypothesizers, one distinct clue that may provide a solution to these narratives can be traced to the discovery of an Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) society known as the Hurrians.
The Hurrians, with Urkesh considered their cosmopolitan capital city throughout the middle part of the 3rd millennium and into the middle of the 2nd, is believed to have neighbored the biblical city of Haran. When coupling this knowledge with the realization that Urkesh is also commonly translated as Ur Kasdim, the likelihood that this is the Ur from which Abraham hails is strong. Though the power of the Hurrians would decline, it is believed that the Hurrians were still scattered throughout various areas including Canaan which, according to E.A. Speiser, could later be identified as the biblical Horites. [1] The impact of the Hurrian culture, especially in light of biblical narratives, was to be discovered when Nuzu, a Hurrian city at the Southeastern area of their influence, was unearthed.
This discovery of Nuzu produced a treasure-trove of tablets that would come to be called the Nuzi Tablets. Spanning six generations of familial archives, the tablets documented social, economic, and legal customs that dominated the Hurrian civilization. Among these tablets were found affinities with many biblical customs that we often struggle to understand such as, “contractual stipulations that a barren woman give a slave girl to her husband as a wife, the ranking of heirs and the preferential treatment of the designated eldest, the association of house gods with the disposition of family property, the conditional slavery of freeborn daughters, and the institution of babiru-servitude.” [2] Also, among these tablets the wife-sister motif is found in which a man could adopt his future wife as a sister so that she could enjoy a higher status within Hurrian society.[3]
This, at least to me, is deeply insightful to the metanarratives of the Book of Genesis. It is possible, based on the contemporaneous Hurrian influence, that the Patriarchs were merely a byproduct of their environment. This also lends toward the high probability that God’s calling of Abraham was progressive in nature and would not find true footing until after God visited the nation of Israel at Sinai. The patriarchs, unlike post-Egyptian Israel, were not governed by a well-documented moral, civic, or ethical code that descended from on high as a means to carve out a space for God’s sacred dwelling. God did not Tabernacle among the patriarchs! The patriarchs were simply men who, by faith, believed God and it was counted unto them as righteousness (cf. Rom. 4:3). But, based on the future stipulations of moral law, many of the things the patriarchs did would have qualified as sin in the eyes of God!
This lends to a very important idea that may prove beneficial in ones reading of the patriarchal narratives. God, while calling Abraham out from Ur, never expected for Abraham to miraculously break free from years’ worth of cultural influences that helped shape and define his customs and practices. God seems to have tolerated these customs, no matter how outlandish they appear to the modern reader and focused on a covenantal plan whose reach would span the entirety of biblical history and live on among believers today.
References
[1] E.A. Speiser, “Hurrians and Hittites” in The Dawn of Civilization: World History of the Jewish People, Vol. 1 (Tel-Aviv: Jewish History Publications, 1961; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1964).
[2] Eichler, Barry, “Nuzi and the Bible: A Retrospective,” in DUMU-E2-DUB-BA-A: Studies in Honor of Ake W. Sjoberg, ed. H. Behrens et al. (Philadelphia: Samuel Noah Kramer Fund, 1989), 108-9.
[3] See, especially, “The Wife-Sister Motif in the Patriarchal Narratives,” in A. Altmann, ed., Biblical and Other Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 15-28.