If you are going to hand in homework on the 21st, please write thoughtful responses to three of these questions. But do please think about all of them (even if you aren’t planning to hand in writen responses).
1. How would you characterize Jacob and Esau? If you had to cast them for a movie, who would you cast? Why?
2. What do you think happens at the ford of the Jabbok? Who is the man Jacob wrestles with? What are some of the ways you might interpret this story?
3. Chapter 34 is another one of those “interpolated” narratives (like Sodom and Gomorrah). How do you make sense of it in the narrative sweep of this half of Genesis? (Those of you who have read The Red Tent will be very familiar with one particular interpretation of this story.)
4. The note at the bottom of page 55 (that would be my page 55, it’s probably a little earlier in your book) explains that the saga of Joseph and his brothers enacts “a drama of divine providence that ties together all the themes and concerns of Genesis.” How would you define some of those themes and concerns–think in terms of?
5. As should by now be clear to you, one of the things that Robert Alter is most interested in is characterization: how do the narrative strategies of the Hebrew Bible work to further our sense of the characters in the stories, he asks. He, of course, is most interested in the text’s “major” characters, and most of those characters are (arguably) male. But there are a lot of female characters in Genesis as well, and one of the most important is Tamar, from Genesis 38. Drawing on the reading strategies Alter is introducing us to, discuss her character.