Robert Alter - Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks: Translations - Literary Style - Type Scenes

[MS: Rabbi Sacks frequently discusses Robert Alter's contributions to the study of the Bible's literary style and his translations, as well as points of disagreement. See the searchable link above and some examples below.]

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Type Scenes: We owe to Robert Alter the idea of a type-scene....

"Joseph is now the ruler of Egypt. The famine he predicted has come to pass. It extends beyond Egypt to the land of Canaan. Seeking to buy food, Joseph’s brothers make the journey to Egypt. They arrive at the palace of the man in charge of grain distribution:

Now Joseph was governor of all Egypt, and it was he who sold the corn to all the people of the land. Joseph’s brothers came and bowed to the ground before him. Joseph recognised his brothers as soon as he saw them, but he behaved like a stranger and spoke harshly to them . . . Joseph recognised his brothers, but they did not recognise him.

Gen. 42:6-8

We owe to Robert Alter the idea of a type-scene, a drama enacted several times with variations; and these are particularly in evidence in the book of Bereishit. There is no universal rule as to how to decode the significance of a type-scene. One example is boy-meets-girl-at-well, an encounter that takes places three times, between Abraham’s servant and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel, and Moses and the daughters of Jethro. Here, the setting is probably not significant (wells are where strangers met in those days, like the water-dispenser in an office). What we must attend to in these three episodes is their variations: Rebecca’s activism, Jacob’s show of strength, Moses’ passion for justice. How people act toward strangers at a well is, in other words, a test of their character. In some cases, however, a type-scene seems to indicate a recurring theme. That is the case here. If we are to understand what is at stake in the meeting between Joseph and his brothers, we have to set it aside three other episodes, all of which occur in Bereishit...." [MS Rabbi Sacks devotes many pages to the analysis of type-scene that closely follows Alter's methods.]

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"This seems like a minor matter. I want in this essay to argue the opposite. It turns out to be a very major matter indeed. The first thing we need to note is that the Torah as a whole, and Genesis in particular, has a way of focusing our attention on a major theme: it presents us with recurring episodes. Robert Alter calls them “type scenes.”[1]

[[1] Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, New York, Basic Books, 1981, 55-78.] There is, for example, the theme of sibling rivalry that appears four times in Genesis: Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau and Joseph and his brothers. There is the theme that occurs three times of the patriarch forced to leave home because of famine, and then realising that he will have to ask his wife to pretend she is his sister for fear that he will be murdered. And there is the theme of finding-future-wife-at-well, which also occurs three times: Rebecca, Rachel and (early in the book of Exodus) Jethro’s daughter Zipporah.

The encounter between Joseph and his brothers is the fifth in a series of stories in which clothes play a key role. The first is Jacob who dresses in Esau’s clothes while bringing his father a meal so that he can take his brother’s blessing in disguise. Second is Joseph’s finely embroidered robe or “coat of many colours,” which the brothers bring back to their father stained in blood, saying that a wild animal must have seized him. Third is the story of Tamar taking off her widow’s dress, covering herself with a veil, and making herself look as if she were a prostitute. Fourth is the robe Joseph leaves in the hands of Potiphar’s wife while escaping her attempt to seduce him. The fifth is the one in today’s parsha in which Pharaoh dresses Joseph as a high-ranking Egyptian, with clothes of linen, a gold chain, and the royal signet ring.

What all five cases have in common is that they facilitate deception. In each case, they bring about a situation in which things are not as they seem...."

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"Rashi’s grandson, Rabbi Shmuel ben Meir (Rashbam, France, c.1085-1158). Rashbam had a strikingly original approach to biblical commentary.[2] He felt that the Sages, intent as they were on reading the text for its halakhic ramifications, often failed to penetrate to what he called omek peshuto shel mikra, the plain sense of the text in its full depth.

Rashbam felt that his grandfather occasionally erred on the side of a midrashic, rather than a “plain” reading of the text. He tells us that he often debated the point with Rashi himself, who admitted that if he had the time he would have written further commentaries to the Torah in the light of new insights into the plain sense that occurred to him “every day”. This is a fascinating insight into the mind of Rashi, the greatest and most famous commentator in the entire history of rabbinic scholarship.

All of this is a prelude to Rashbam’s remarkable reading of the night-time wrestling match. He takes it as an instance of what Robert Alter has called a type-scene,[3] that is, a stylised episode that happens more than once in Tanach. One obvious example is young-man-meets-future-wife-at-well, a scene enacted with variations three times in the Torah: in the case of Abraham’s servant and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel, and Moses and Tsipporah. There are differences between them, but sufficient similarities to make us realise that we are dealing with a convention. Another example, which occurs many times in Tanach, is birth-of-a-hero-to-a-hitherto-infertile-woman."

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Robert Alter - Ishmael imitates his younger brother Isaac [Footnote 11] Robert Alter makes the ingenious suggestion that it means that Ishmael was “Isaac-ing,” imitating his younger brother (Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses: a translation with commentary, Norton, 2004, 103).

"Then Isaac trembled with a very great trembling, and said, “Who then was it who hunted game and brought it to me and I ate it before you came and I blessed him?—and he will be blessed.” When Esau heard his father’s words, he cried an intensely loud and bitter cry, and said to his father, “Bless me, me too, my father!”

Gen. 27:33-34

These are among the most powerful descriptions of emotion in the whole of the Torah, and they are precisely the opposite of what we would expect. We would expect the Torah to enlist our sympathies for the chosen: Isaac and Jacob. Instead it almost forces us to empathise with the unchosen: Hagar, Ishmael and Esau. We feel their pain and sense of loss.

So, why Isaac and not Ishmael? Why Jacob and not Esau? To this there are two types of answer. The first is given by Midrash. On this reading Isaac and Jacob were righteous. Ishmael and Esau were not.

Ishmael worshipped idols.[1] He violated married women.[2] He tried to kill Isaac with his bow and arrow while making it look as if it were an accident.[3] Esau was attracted, even in the womb, to idolatrous shrines.[4] He trapped not only animals but also his father Isaac by pretending to be pious when he was not.[5] God cut short Abraham’s life by five years so that he would not live to see his grandson violate a betrothed woman, commit murder, deny God, deny the resurrection of the dead, and despise the birthright.[6] Such is the way of Midrash. It helps us see Isaac and Jacob as perfectly good, Ishmael and Esau as dangerously bad. That is an important part of our tradition.

But it is not the way of the written Torah itself, at least insofar as we seek what Rashbam called omek peshuto shel mikra, the “deep plain sense of Scripture.”[7] The Torah does not portray Ishmael and Esau as wicked. The worst it has to say about Ishmael is that Sarah saw him metzachek (Gen. 21:9), a word with many meanings, most of them not negative. Literally, it means, “he was laughing.” But Abraham and Sarah also laughed.[8] So did Isaac.[9] Indeed Isaac’s name, chosen by God himself,[10] means, “He will laugh.” There is nothing in the word itself that implies improper conduct.[11] [MS See Alter in footnote.]"

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“When he takes the throne of his kingdom, he must write for himself a copy of this Torah on a scroll before the levitical priests.”

"He must “read it all the days of his life” so that he will be God-fearing and never break Torah law. But there is another reason also: so that he will “not begin to feel superior to his brethren” (Kaplan translation), “so that his heart be not haughty over his brothers” (Robert Alter). The king had to have humility. The highest in the land should not feel himself to be the highest in the land."

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"What Does This Avodah Mean To You?"

"To understand the power of the Yerushalmi’s reading we need to go back to a passage at the opening of the Torah’s narrative of slavery. Here is the text in the Kaplan translation:

The Egyptians started to make the Israelites do labour designated to break their bodies. They made the lives of [the Israelites] miserable with harsh labour involving mortar and bricks, as well as all kinds of work in the field. All the work they made them do was intended to break them. (Ex. 1:13-14)

And here it is in Robert Alter’s translation:

What these translations fail to convey – inevitably, because of the literary conventions of English – is that these two verses contain the word avodah in one form or another five times." [MS: Alter translation and note seem to reflect the point about work. Due possibly to different editions, Alter's note on 1:14 is not recognized. It expressly picks up the repetition of word Avodah. The title is: "Work...Work...Work..." Alter states in the Note, it is a "prevalent stylistic practice in Hebrew literature," a literary technique of repetition that Alter discusses at book-length.]

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