Footnotes

1.

Jacob is also fleeing from his jealous brother Esau who seeks to kill him because Jacob stole his birthright (Genesis 27:41–44).

2.

In one instance other than the life of Jacob, a matzevah does appear in a positive light. It is in the account of the ratification of the Sinai covenant, where we are told (Exodus 24:4) that Moses set up twelve matzevot at the foot of the mountain. But even here it seems to be connected with Jacob (= Israel), for these matzevot are intended to correspond to the tribes of Israel, that is, to Jacob’s twelve sons.

3.

Other translations often omit the bracketed words.

4.

That Joseph was very young and dependent on his mother can be inferred. First, Genesis 30:25 informs us that Jacob decided to leave Haran right after Joseph’s birth. Jacob seems to have gone through one or two breeding cycles for the flocks before actually departing (Genesis 30:31–43). Thus, Joseph may have been one or two years old, perhaps three. Moreover, in the scene after Gal-Ed, at Penuel, we are explicitly told that Joseph was with Rachel (Genesis 33:2).

5.

That is, he overprotected Joseph because he lost his mother at such a young age. But Jacob’s favoritism was actually destructive, placing Joseph in jeopardy from his brothers. Jacob must have been aware of this. Such illogical behavior must be due to something much deeper than the premature loss of Jacob’s wife.

6.

Her statement to Laban that she was menstruating cannot be an objection to this point, for that statement was a subterfuge to prevent her father from finding the teraphim beneath her.

7.

Mwt is the Hebrew infinitive of the verb “to die,” of which metah is the third-person, female, singular conjugation in the past tense (“she died”). It is standard practice to transliterate infinitives in consonantal form, without vocalization. Thus, mwt represents the Hebrew consonants mem, waw, and taw, which together form the root of the verb “to die.” ‘Al is an uncompleted preposition (functioning here as an adverbial phrase), the translation of which is what is at issue here. ‘Alai completes that preposition with the first-person, singular pronoun.

8.

Met is the second-person, male, singular, present conjugation. The preposition ‘al here is completed in the biblical text by the following word ha-ishah, “the woman.”

9.

’Amut is the first-person, singular, future conjugation. ‘Aleha completed the preposition ‘al with the third-person, female, singular pronoun.

Endnotes

1.

Fokkelman, Jan P., Narrative Art in Genesis, (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1975), p. 235.

2.

Fokkelman argues that this matzevah is intended to be a concrete “postfiguration of the theophany” at Beth-El, an eternal vertical symbol of the connection to God first experienced by Jacob as the ladder in his dream. See Narrative Art in Genesis, pp. 66–68.

3.

The Rabbis later read this phenomenon into a biblical verse in Ecclesiastes (10:5), which they understood (more literally than they might have) as speaking of “an error which issues from a ruler.” Although it is not the contextual meaning of the verse, it is true to the biblical mindset. According to this mindset, Jephthah must sacrifice his daughter to fulfill his vow: “If you deliver the Ammonites into my hands, then whatever comes out the door of my house to meet me on my safe return…shall be the Lord’s and shall be offered by me as a burnt offering” (Judges 11:30, 31), and even Ahasuerus’s misbegotten genocidal decree to permit the nations to “destroy, massacre and exterminate” the Jews (Esther 3:13) cannot be revoked, but only counteracted (Esther 8:8). The Rabbis not only understood the biblical point of view here, but themselves subscribed to some version of it, at least to the extent that it appears as a motif in some legends in the Talmud and Midrash (for example, Palestinian Talmud Shabbat 14d and Babylonian Talmud Ketubot 23a).

4.

In the second-century B.C.E. pseudepigraphic book of Jubilees, it is said that “they gave up the strange gods and that which was in their ears and which was on their necks, and the idols which Rachel stole from Laban her father she gave wholly to Jacob” (Jubilees 31:1–3). But the import of this statement seems to have eluded the author of Jubilees. Josephus relates that “while [Jacob] was purifying his company accordingly, he lit upon the gods of Laban, being unaware that Rachel had stolen them; these he hid in the ground beneath an oak…” (Antiquities, (xxi) (2)–(3)). Again, however, the momentous implications of this, given his oath before Laban, are not drawn. Finally, Fokkelman (Narrative Art in Genesis, 1975), in commenting on the purification prior to revisiting Beth-El, states in passing that the Jacob-God relationship “may no longer be clouded by the presence of teraphim and other foreign gods,” and thus that the household gods of Haran must suffer the definitive humiliation of being put underground. How Jacob got the teraphim, and the effect that would have had on him, seems again to have been missed.

5.

Fokkelman, p. 235.

6.

This much has been understood by some, but by no means all, commentators. Many understood the interpolation of 48:7 as an apology to Joseph for not burying Rachel in the ancestral tomb in Hebron, even as Jacob extracted an oath from Joseph that he would bury him there (see, for example, Rashi, Rashbam, ibn Ezra, and Ramban). This explanation fails because Jacob’s instructions to Joseph to bring his body back to Hebron were given in a previous conversation (recorded in chapter 47), and the present conversation concerned only Jacob’s adoption of Ephraim and Manasseh.