Footnotes

1.

See Pieter Willem van der Horst, “Did Sarah Have a Seminal Emission?” BR 08:01.

3.

Nazirites in the Bible are those who specially dedicate or consecrate themselves to God through the performance of specific ritual acts, especially by letting their hair grow and by abstaining from wine and other strong drink.

4.

See Lawrence E. Stager and Samuel R. Wolff, “Child Sacrifice at Carthage—Religious Rite or Population Control?” BAR 10:01.

6.

See Itzhaq Beit-Arieh, “Fifteen Years in Sinai,” BAR 10:04.

7.

Biblical scholars are generally agreed that 66 chapters of the Book of Isaiah contain the words of two, or perhaps even three, different prophets: First Isaiah, who prophesied between, 742–701 B.C.E. in Jerusalem; Second Isaiah, who prophesied in about 540 B.C.E. during the Babylonian Exile; and perhaps a Third Isaiah who prophesied in Jerusalem after the return from Exile in 538 B.C.E.

Endnotes

1.

Robert Alter, “How Convention Helps Us Read: The Case of the Bible’s Annunciation Type-Scene,” Prooftexts 3 (1983), pp. 115–130.

2.

For example, Hagar and her taunting of Sarah in Genesis 16:4; Leah and her antagonism toward Rachel in Genesis 30:15; Peninnah and her provoking of Hannah in 1 Samuel 1:6.

3.

This is the case in the story of Sarah (Genesis 18:12), of Manoah’s wife (Judges 13:8–14) and of the Shunammite woman (2 Kings 4:16); it is also the case, somewhat, in the story of Rebeccah (Genesis 25:22). She, although raising no doubts about the promise that she will conceive, does wonder, when she begins to sense mighty strugglings in her womb (the twins fighting), whether the divine promise will be fulfilled and the offspring carried to term.

4.

Alter, “How Convention Helps Us,” p. 126.

5.

Alter, “How Convention Helps Us,” p. 126.

6.

I make this claim concerning the larger pattern of the life story of Isaac even though Genesis 21:1–8 and Genesis 22:1–19 come according to the documentary hypothesis, from the hands of different sources (Genesis 21:1–8 contains elements of J, E and P; Genesis 22:1–19 is E). It is for my point enough that whoever the original authors, the final redactor of Genesis thought to juxtapose the stories.

7.

Athalya Brenner, “Female social behaviour: two descriptive patterns within the ‘birth of the hero’ paradigm,” Vetus Testamentum 36 (1986), p. 257–273. This paradigm has been described by Otto Rank, Myth of the Birth of the Hero, reprinted in Robert A. Segal, ed., In Quest of the Hero (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 1–86; Joseph Campbell, The Hero with A Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1933); Alan Dundes, “The Hero Pattern and the Life of Jesus,” reprinted in Robert A Segal, ed., In Quest of the Hero (Princeton Univ. Press 1990) pp. 177–223.

8.

Brenner, “Female social behaviour, p. 258.

9.

Brenner, “Female social behaviour, p. 257.

10.

Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel (Edinburgh, Adam and Charles Black, 1995), p. 433, n. 1.