For those who see in the patriarchal narratives anything--myth, legend, saga--rather than true biography, there is, of course, a different interpretation of the characters and events portrayed in the familiar Genesis-stories, and a different value placed upon the stories themselves.
Apart from the allegorizing treatment accorded them by Philo the Jew and early Christian writers of like mind (see specimen in ABRAHAM), these views belong to modern criticism. To critics who make Hebrew history begin with the settlement of Canaan by the nomad Israelites fresh from the desert, even the Mosaic age and the Egyptian residence are totally unhistorical--much more so these tales of a pre-Mosaic patriarchal age. Yet even those writers who admit the broad outlines of a residence of the tribes in Egypt, an exodus of some sort, and a founder of the nation named Moses, are for the most part skeptical of this cycle of family figures and fortunes in a remote age, with its nomads wandering between Mesopotamia and Canaan. and to and fro in Canaan, its circumstantial acquaintance with the names and relationships of each individual through those 4 long patriarchal generations, and its obvious foreshadowing of much that the later tribes were on this same soil to act out centuries later. This, we are told, is not history. Whatever else it may be, it is not a reliable account of such memorable events as compel their own immortality in the memories and through the written records of mankind.
1. Personification of the Hebrew Nation:
The commonest view held, collectively of the entire narrative, specifically of Jacob, is that which sees here the precipitate from a pure solution of the national character and fortunes. Wellhausen, e.g., says (Prolegomena(6), 316): "The material here is not mythical, but national; therefore clearer (namely, than in Ge 1:1-31 through Ge 11:1-32) and in a certain sense historical. To be sure there is no historical knowledge to be gained here about the patriarchs, but only about the time in which the stories concerning them arose in the people of Israel; this later time with its inward and outward characteristics is here unintentionally projected into the gray antiquity and mirrored therein like a glorified phantasm .... (p. 318). Jacob is more realistically drawn than the other two (Abraham and Isaac)." In section IV, 4, above, we observed that, while many of Jacob's personal qualities prefigured the qualities of the later Hebrew people, there were some others that did not at all fit this equation. Wellhausen himself remarks this, in regard to the contrast between warlike Israel and the peaceful ancestors they invented for themselves. In his attempt to account for this contrast, he can only urge that a nation condemned to eternal wars would naturally look back upon, as well as forward to, a golden age of peace. (An alternative explanation he states, only to reject.) He fails to observe that this plea does not in the least alter the fact--his plea is indeed but a restatement of the fact--that this phenomenon is absolutely at variance with his hypothesis of how these stories of Jacob and the rest came to be what they are (see Meyer, Die Israeliten und ihre Nachbarstamme, 250 ff).
2. God and Demi-God:
This general view, which when carried to its extreme implications (as by Steuernagel, Die Einwanderung der israelitischen Stamme in Kanaan, 1901) comes perilously near the reductio ad absurdum that is its own refutation, has been rejected by that whole group of critics, who, following Noldeke, see in Jacob, as in so many others of the patriarchs, an original deity (myth), first abased to the grade of a hero (heroic legend), and at last degraded to the level of a clown (tales of jest or marvel). Adherents of this trend of interpretation differ widely among themselves as to details, but Jacob is generally regarded as a Canaanitish deity, whose local shrine was at Shechem, Beth-el or Peniel, and whose cult was taken over by the Hebrews, their own object of worship being substituted for him, and the outstanding features of his personality being made over into a hero that Israel appropriated as their national ancestor, even to the extent of giving him the secondary name of Israel. Stade attempted a combination of this "mythical" view with the "national" view in the interest of his theory of primitive animism, by making the patriarch a "mythological figure revered as an eponymous hero." This theory, in any form, requires the assumption, which there is nothing to support, that Jacob (or Jacob-el) is a name originally belonging to a deity and framed to fit his supposed character. At first, then, it meant "'El deceives" or "'El recompenses" (so B. Luther, ZATW, 1901, 60 ff; compare also the same writer, as well as Meyer himself, in the latter's Israeliten, etc., 109 ff, 271 ff). Meyer proposes the monstrosity of a nominal sentence with the translation, " `He deceives' is 'El." Thus, the first element of the name Jacob came to be felt as the name itself (= "Jacob is God"), and it was launched upon its course of evolution into the human personage that Genesis knows. It suffices to say with regard to all this, that in addition to its being inherently improbable--not to say, unproved--it goes directly in the face of the archaeological evidence adduced under I, 1, above. The simple fact that Jacob(-el) was a personal name for men, of everyday occurrence in the 2nd-3rd millenniums BC, is quite enough to overthrow this whole hypothesis; for, as Luther himself remarks (op. cit., 65), the above evolution of the name is essential to the "mythical" theory: "when this alteration took place cannot be told; yet it has to be postulated, since otherwise it remains inexplicable, how personal names could arise out of these formations (like Jacob-el) by rejection of the 'El."
3. Character of Fiction:
The inadequacy of the two theories hitherto advanced to account for the facts of Genesis being thus evident, Gunkel and others have explicitly rejected them and enunciated a third theory, which may be called the saga-theory. According to Gunkel, "to understand the persons of Genesis as nations is by no means a general key to their interpretation"; and, "against the whole assumption that the principal patriarchal figures are originally gods is this fact first and foremost, that the names Jacob and Abraham are shown by the Babylonian to be customary personal names, and furthermore that the tales about them cannot be understood at all as echoes of original myths." In place of these discredited views Gunkel (compare also Gressmann,ZATW , 1910, 1 ff) makes of Jacob simply a character in the stories (marvelous, humorous, pathetic and the like) current in ancient Israel, especially on the lips of the professional story-teller. Whereas much of the material in these stories came to the Hebrews from the Babylonians, Canaanites or Egyptians, Jacob himself is declared to have belonged to the old Hebrew saga, with its flavor of nomadic desert life and sheep-raising. "The original Jacob may be the sly shepherd Jacob, who fools the hunter Esau; another tale, of the deceit of a father-in-law by his son-in-law, was added to it--the more naturally because both are shepherds; a third cycle, about an old man that loves his youngest son, was transferred to this figure, and that youngest son received the name of Joseph at a time when Jacob was identified with Israel's assumed ancestor `Israel.' Thus our result is, that the most important patriarchs are creations of fiction" (Schriften des Altes Testament, 5te Lieferung, 42).
It is so obvious that this new attitude toward the patriarchs lends itself to a more sympathetic criticism of the narrative of Genesis, that critics who adopt it are at pains to deny any intention on their part of rehabilitating Jacob and others as historical figures. "Saga," we are told, "is not capable of preserving through so many centuries a picture" of the real character or deeds of its heroes, even supposing that persons bearing these names once actually lived; and we are reminded of the contrast between the Etzel of saga and the Attila of history, the Dietrich of saga and the Theodoric of history. But as against this we need to note, first, that the long and involved course of development through which, ex hypothesi, these stories have passed before reaching their final stage (the Jahwist document (Jahwist), 9th century BC; Gunkel, op. cit., 8, 46) involves a very high antiquity for the earlier stages, and thus reduces to a narrow strip of time those "so many centuries" that are supposed to separate the actual Jacob from the Jacob of saga (compare ABRAHAM, vii, 4); and second, that the presuppositions as to the origin, nature and value of saga with which this school of criticism operates are, for the most part, only an elaborate statement of the undisputed major premise in a syllogism, of which the minor premise is: the Genesis-stories are saga. Against this last proposition, however, there lie many weighty considerations, that are by no means counterbalanced by those resemblances of a general sort which any student of comparative literature can easily discern (see also Baethgen, op. cit., 158).
James Oscar Boyd