Two weeks ago, I played tour guide on an aerial survey of the family dysfunctions threaded through the Old Testament. It was far from an exhaustive tour; it’s sort of like the Grand Canyon—even in an airplane, if you want to see everything there is to see, you’re going to be up there long enough for your brain to overload and shut down. Even the curated version was a lot to take in, and I know a few of you were surprised at how much is there, and how bad it is. That’s a perfectly reasonable response, and quite unsurprising. For one thing, churches generally aren’t in the habit of focusing on the ugly stories; one of the times I got myself in trouble was for preaching on Genesis 38, the story of Judah and Tamar, on the first Sunday of Advent. I’m still proud of that Advent series on the women named in Jesus’ genealogy, but I admit having that as the main Scripture passage on a Sunday when the reader was a 13-year-old boy was not good judgment on my part . . . even if, given his family circumstances, I suspect he was rather less shocked by it than a number of adults wanted to believe.
There’s another consideration here, though, which I suspect is just as significant, and this is one which is nobody’s fault: the cultural difference between us and the ancient Israelites, and particularly as it comes to how we do narrative. Ours is the culture that created the soap opera, the stream-of-consciousness novel, and the third-person-omniscient narrator. We’re used to a lot of detail about what the characters are thinking and feeling. We can do all that, and we can make all that work, because we are a written culture—we have words on a page to do the remembering for us. Ancient cultures depended on oral transmission, which meant narrative form was determined by the strengths and limitations of human memory. As such, ancient narratives—including those we find in the Old Testament—are, by our standards, plot-heavy and sparse on emotional detail. You get what’s in the dialogue and that’s about it. As a consequence, the text isn’t going to open up the emotional world for you. You have to feel your own way in.
That’s part of our task this morning. It’s also the reason I sent out the links to Rich Mullins’ song “Jacob and 2 Women”—which I guess didn’t go out until last night; sorry about that. No doubt some appreciate the song more than others, and it’s only a three-minute song so it’s obviously incomplete, but it’s more about feeling the story than telling it. If it shapes you a little as you hear and think about Jacob and his family this morning, that is well. If not, no doubt that is also as the Lord wills. However you come to our text this morning, I encourage you to listen with your imagination and try to put yourself in the story.
