The Patriarchs' Wives as Sisters—Is the Anchor Bible Wrong? 022
One of the best known insights in E. A. Speiser’s Genesis (the Anchor Bible series) is wrong, according to independent studies by Professor R. David Freedman of the University of California, Davis and Professor Samuel Greengus of Hebrew Union College. Speiser, they say, misunderstood the Hurrian material from Nuzi on which he relied. In his Anchor Genesis, Speiser attempted to bring new light to three episodes which have perplexed scholars for centuries. The three episodes have the common theme of a patriarch passing off his wife as his sister. In the first episode (Gen. 12:10–20), Abraham (or Abram, as he then is) sojourns in Egypt during a Canaanite famine. Abraham is fearful that the Egyptians will kill him for his wife who is an extraordinarily beautiful woman. So he instructs her to say that she is his sister rather than his wife. Sarah (at that time, Sarai) is indeed recognized for her beauty; and she is taken into Pharaoh’s “household”—not to put too fine a point on it. (According to the Midrash, later Jewish interpretive materials, when Pharaoh went to touch Sarah, an invisible angel struck him a blow with a stick and in this way Sarah’s virtue was saved. In the story itself, however, Sarah seems to have been taken by Pharaoh— Pharaoh refers to Sarah as his wife. ) Because of Sarah, things go very well with Abraham and very badly for Pharaoh. Somehow Pharaoh discovers the cause of his troubles. He calls Abraham before him and asks why Abraham did not tell him that Sarah was his wife. Pharaoh then sends Abraham away with his wife Sarah. Abraham takes with him all his accumulated possessions. In the second episode (Gen. 20:1–18), Abraham passes off his wife as his sister to the king of Gerar, one Abimelech. But this time, before the king takes her, the Lord comes to him in a dream to warn the king that if he takes Sarah, he will die. Abimelech confronts Abraham with his deception. Abraham replies that he did not realize that God was feared in this place. Furthermore, Abraham suggests that he was not lying, because Sarah is in fact the son of his father though not his mother (a fact which is attested nowhere else). In the final episode (Gen. 26:6–11), it is Isaac who passes off his wife Rebekah as his sister to the same king of Gerar. Again the king does not sleep with her, but discovers that Rebekah is Isaac’s wife when he sees Isaac fondling her. That the patriarchs were willing to pass off their wives as their sisters for this 1
purpose has posed a difficult exegetical problem for Biblical commentators almost since commentaries were first written. In 1963 major new light was brought to the question in a scholarly article by one of the world’s greatest authorities on ancient Near Eastern texts, E. A. Speiser of the University of Pennsylvania. These views received a major popular airing in Speiser’s best selling commentary on Genesis for the Anchor Bible series, a commentary which is generally recognized as the most brilliant in the series and one of the great commentaries on Genesis. Speiser based his insights on some cuneiform tablets he was studying from the famous library of Nuzi, an ancient city in Iraq which thrived at the time of the patriarchs. Nuzi itself was one of two cultural centers of the Hurrian ethnic area. The other was Haran where Abraham lived after leaving Ur and before coming to Canaan. Because Haran and Nuzi were part of the same ethnic and cultural milieu—they were both centers of Hurrian society—it is often thought that Nuzi social customs and laws can shed important background light on the age of the patriarchs. Among the tablets Speiser studied were 023a number dealing with family relations. According to some scholars, the Hurrian family is unusual among Near Eastern societies because of the emphasis it places on the role of the brother. The family in some important respects is fratriarchal rather than patriarchal. In Hurrian society, the brother frequently arranges marriage for his sister and gives her to her husband. Or the brother might give his sister to another man as daughter or as sister. When he gives her as daughter it is with the understanding that the new father may either marry her himself or give her to someone else. When the brother gives her as a sister, the new brother has the right to marry off the girl and receive the standard 40 shekel bride-price. One tablet which Speiser read was a marriage contract in which the brother gave his sister in marriage—that is, as wife—to another man. The bride-price is fixed (in this case 1 ox and 10 shekels), with an indication that this is only the initial amount to be paid by the husband, a kind of down-payment. A further provision contains the conditions on which the wife may be resumed to her brother, and a final clause assures the wife that if she bears a son, her husband will not take another wife. Speiser then noticed another tablet which startled him because it involves the same three people. In the second tablet, the same brother gives the same sister to the same man—but this time with a crucial difference. Instead of giving her as wife he gives her as sister. A third table also involves the same three parties. In the third tablet the brother declares that he has now received from the girl’s husband the full 40-shekel bride-price for having given his sister to him “in marriage”, and that this acquits 2
the full debt. The girl also declares that she was given “in marriage” with her consent. Finally, the tablet gives the place it was entered and provides a penalty for breaking the contract. (The penalty is one mina of silver and one mina of gold). The crucial fact for Speiser was that the same girl who is given in marriage as wife in the first tablet is also given as sister in the second tablet. From this, “it follows”, according to Speiser, “that a wife could have simultaneously the status of sister”. In other words, she could be wife and sister at the same time. Moreover, “The fact that a separate sistership document was deemed necessary, in addition to the usual marriage contract points up the husband’s concurrent status as brother.” The importance of the woman’s status as sister as well as wife is emphasized, says Speiser, by three other facts. First, the girl must give her consent to the sistership contract. (In this case, her consent is recited in the third tablet.) Second, part of the bride-price is paid with a ceremonial payment; that is, not with money, but with animals at a fixed rate of payment. “The animals play a monitory part, based on the fate of sacrificial beasts,” says Speiser. And this “rigid mode of payment is always reserved for cases of unusual gravity.” In short, “It is highly significant that this ominous type of payment is typical of the sistership transactions.” Finally, “Violations of such sistership arrangements were punished more severely then breaches of marriage contracts.” For these reasons, Speiser concludes, the wife who was also a sister must have “enjoyed exceptional socio-religious solicitude and protection which was not enjoyed by ordinary wives … It was evidently a mark of superior status.” Speiser uses this Hurrian background to understand the Biblical narratives in which the patriarchs passed off their wives as sisters. The original version of the three patriarchal travel accounts, Speiser suggests, contained the notice that the patriarchal wives were also sisters because they therefore “enjoyed a privileged status by the standards of their own society. It was the kind of distinction that may well have been worthy of emphasis in the presence of their royal hosts.” But there was another reason for tradition’s thrice-repeated emphasis of the fact that the patriarchs’ wives were also their sisters. According to Speiser, the wifesister position was a mark of a cherished social status which guaranteed the purity of the children. The purpose of these Biblical genealogies was to teach the superior strain of the line through which the blessing was transmitted. The purity of the contents was guaranteed by the quality 024of the container. These patriarchal stories were transmitted over the centuries and were finally written down after the Israelites had already settled in Canaan. From the point of view of those writing down the stories, the Hurrian marriage practices were 3
peculiar to another locale and another era. Gradually, even the transmitters of the story lost their memory of the significance of the fact that the early patriarchs’ wives were also their sisters. The meaning of details that were originally intended to impress royal hosts with the cherished status of patriarchal wives and were originally preserved to reflect the superior status of the matriarchs— through whom the blessing was transmitted—were forgotten even by the narrators themselves. Tradition faithfully preserved the details, but the significance of these details was lost. Hundreds of miles from Hurrian centers like Haran and hundreds of years after the events took place—in a society where these details had no meaning—the story tellers themselves did not understand the significance of the notices concerning patriarchal wives who were also sisters. Faced with this situation, the tradition gradually developed new motives, new reasons why the patriarchs displayed their wives as sisters, reasons more in keeping with familiar conditions and common human inclinations. Thus, the narrators of the stories invented the theory that the patriarchs passed off their wives as sisters to protect themselves who, as husbands rather than brothers, would be killed so that their hosts could take their beautiful wives. Thus, according to Speiser, when the “narrators themselves were no longer aware of the full import of their subject matter”, they resorted to “half-truth, if not outright deception” in order to explain it. Speiser’s interpretation of these difficult texts based on the Nuzi material is certainly ingenious. But, according to Professors Freedman and Greengus, he has built a house of cards which crumbles under their independent attacks. His entire reconstruction depends on the validity of the wife-as-sister-too concept, which, in turn, is based on a single instance inferred from two separate tablets. The fact that the simultaneous wife-sister relationship is attested only once at best, is, at the outset, a suspicious circumstance. The Nuzi library contains a large number of tablets (over 60) in which a man takes a woman in various kin relations—as daughter, as daughter-in-law, as sister, and as wife. Thirteen of these are sistership transactions. Yet only once is there any suggestion of a simultaneous wife-sister relationship. Moreover, there is a peculiarity about the particular sistership tablet on which Speiser relied for his theory. The customary formula in the tablets for adopting a woman as sister is that the man takes the woman “in sistership” (“ana ahËaµtuµti” in Akkadian). But in Speiser’s crucial tablet, it says “ana ahËaµti,” not “ana ahËaµtuµti”. As Freedman points out, “ahËaµti” does not appear elsewhere with the meaning of sisterhood and does not yield meaning in this context. Speiser is forced—incorrectly, according to Freedman—to read “ahËaµti” as a by-form of “ahËaµtuµti”. Freedman believes that the scribe made an error and meant to write the Akkadian word for wifehood— “ana asËsËuµti”. 4
However, aside from the linguistic problems with Speiser’s theory, the characteristics which Speiser attributes to sistership status are not to be found in the Nuzi tablets as a whole. For example, Speiser infers that the sistership relation is of special importance because sistership tablets recite the girl’s consent. But Freedman points out that only three of the thirteen sistership contracts which were found at Nuzi recite the girl’s consent. And these three cases are explainable on the ground that the brother is paid less than the customary 40-shekel payment. Thus, the girl’s consent appears to be recited not because she is being given as a sister to the man, but because less than the customary price is being paid for her. Accordingly, the recitation of consent has nothing to do with the importance of the sistership relationship compared to the wife relationship. Freedman also points out that Speiser is incorrect in stating that sistership contracts require a ceremonial payment in terms of animals. The texts simply do not bear him out. Speiser also claims that “violations of sistership arrangements were punished more severely than breaches of marriage 026contracts”. But this is not so, says Freedman. The penalty involved “is the standard fine for breaking any kind of contract in Nuzi: one mina of silver and one mina of gold.” Professor Greengus in his study of the Nuzi documents emphasizes that sistership adoptions typically involved women of very low social status. Speiser argues that the sistership status was such a privileged one that the patriarchs boasted of it to their royal hosts. But at Nuzi, Greengus points out, four of the 13 sistership documents—including the crucial one on which Speiser relies to establish that a woman could be a sister as well as a wife—involved a girl who had originally been a slave. In a number of cases, the adoptive sister was a woman “off the street” who had to act on her own behalf in arranging the relationship; she had to give herself away. Moreover, in almost all the sistership documents, the adoptive brother openly announces his intention to marry off his new sister to another man and to receive the bride-price. In one case, he reserves the right to use his adoptive sister as a prostitute. This is hardly the sign of a privileged or cherished status. As Greengus puts it, “Sisterhood adoption was not in any way co-terminus with marriage nor was it a relationship conferring high status.” It was a “business arrangement” that “typically involved manumitted slaves or lonely unattached women who needed familial protection. It was a lower class institution and was not practiced by the highest level of Nuzi society.” According to Speiser, the notice that the matriarchs were sisters as well as wives was originally preserved in the tradition because this cherished status of the mother evidenced the superior status of the children who carried the 5
blessing. Interestingly enough, says Freedman, Israelite ideology is precisely the opposite; not inherited status, but individual worth is the test. He points out that not one of the following was a first-born son: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Jephthah, David, Solomon. Indeed, Solomon was born of an adulteress; David, to a descendant of a Moabitess; and Jephthah of a whore. As Freedman puts it, “Isn’t the Bible trying to say instead that individuals prove their own worth rather than inherit it?” Thus, there appears to be no solid basis for concluding that a wife would simultaneously become a man’s sister as a sign of a specially privileged or protected status. (Professor Greengus regards the three documents on which Speiser focused as successive agreements each superseding the preceding contract.) Unfortunately, Professor Speiser died before these attacks on his position were written, so we cannot know what his response would have been. But it would seem that we are now left, once again, with the puzzling stories in which the patriarchs pass off their wives as sisters. (For further details, see E. A. Speiser, ed. The Anchor Bible Genesis (New York: Doubleday & Co. Inc. 1964), pp. 91–94, 151–152; E. A. Speiser, “The Wife-Sister Motif in the Patriarchal Narratives” in A. Altmann, ed., Studies and Texts, I: Biblical and Other Studies (Waltham, Mass. 1963); David Freedman, “A New Approach to the Nuzi Sistership Contract,” The Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society of Columbia University, Vol. 2, p. 80 (1970); Samuel Greengus, “Sisterhood Adoption at Nuzi and the ‘wife-Sister’ in Genesis,” to be published in The Hebrew Union College Annual, Vol. 46 (1975)). Source URL (modified on 2015-11-05 20:34): http://members.bib-arch.org/biblical-archaeologyreview/1/3/5
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