Loopers

He returned to his brothers and said, “The boy is not there; as for me, where am I to go?”  Genesis 37:30  NASB

Is not there – The translation reads the way we expectit to read, but that isn’t what the verse actually says.  In Hebrew it reads, einenu, that is “he is not.”  Of course, we expect that Rueben is reporting about the location of Joseph; that he is no longer in the pit.  So we add “there,” as if that’s what the text means.  But this isn’t what the text means, because the detour about Judah and Tamar comes between the story of Joseph’s sale to the Midianites and his experiences with Potiphar.  A few days ago we examined the haker na phrase of Tamar, confronting Judah and, in effect, requiring Judah to deal with the repressed emotional trauma of his role in the exile of Joseph.  But there is more.

Reconsider Rueben’s announcement.  Joseph is not.  As far as the brothers are concerned, he is as good as dead.  He is gone, Lord knows where (literally).  Now consider the circumstances.  Rueben goes to the pit, an empty water cistern not shaped like a well but rather like an upside-down gourd.  Once full of life (water in the desert), it is now empty, barren. The child it contained is not.

And so with Tamar. She is the empty life-giver.  She is the dry cistern.  The child promised to her is not.  Unless she can contrive a way for one of the brothers to confront her emptiness, the denial of a promise, she will remain empty.  Her internal emptiness is a precursor to the emptiness of Joseph, in both cases brought about by a failure of responsibility at the hands of a son of Jacob.  Judah is not only responsible for the brother who is not, he is also responsible for the child who never was.

Do you remember “Colonel Mustard in the Library with the Candlestick”?  Well, here is another layer of clues in Scripture.  The dots connect in multiple ways, not just with repeated vocabulary.  Here we have a repetition of theme, a different way of viewing the same emotional trauma of emptiness from the perspective of another person.  The idea of human culpability seeps into both stories, stories that revolve around metaphors about empty containers.  “ . . . life is an attempt to clothe itself in its own metaphors,”[1]said Richard Rorty.  That’s the Bible, not as a theological textbook but as a storyabout revolving human tragedy.  Zornberg adds an important insight about why the Bible is such a book:

“A world based on fear and humility . . . risks human atrophy; for such fear and humility grant all power to God.  Only a vision in which the plot is unclear, in which anomalies bewilder serene faith and integrities are torn apart, can open the possibility of human action. Cognitively, action means the capacity to reintegrate the fragments of experience into new wholes: in re-remembering, to create something unprecedented, a personal language of self-description.”[2]

Tamar and Judah is a story of the emptiness of Joseph.  Two plots running side by side with radical implications and amazing outcomes. Two stories that just seem like so much event narrative, dry bones history, until we realize that there are things happening here well below the surface; things that reach out to us and ask us to find a parallel to our story that needs to be reintegrated in order to make sense of fragmented pasts.

Topical Index: Tamar, Joseph, Reuben, einenu, is not, Genesis 37:30

[1]Richard Rorty cited in Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis, p. 279.

[2]Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis, pp. 278-279.