Commentary on Torah Portion Vayechi (Genesis 47:28-end)

Our parasha brings to a close the story of Joseph with his death. This narrative is truly a unique genre within Torah; it has been called its one "novella". In this, it also concludes the whole book of Genesis/Bereshit. It is short, but packs a punch. There is never any doubt who is centre-stage. Not Joseph, but his father, Jacob/Israel. 
 
It is Jacob who gives his farewell discourse (Gen 49:1ff), blessing his sons (albeit sometimes entirely negatively), in poetry both beautiful and at times impossible to translate (as one may expect, if the impression of archaic origins is desired). It is Jacob who is expressly mourned by the Egyptians for seventy days (50.3). It is Jacob whose dying wish is fulfilled, as his remains are taken, with pomp and ceremony, to his chosen resting-place, with his ancestors in Canaan (50.7ff). What is more, in the only disagreement between Jacob and Joseph, Jacob prevails. Jacob blesses Joseph’s sons as his own, but, in doing so, privileges the second-born Ephraim over the first-born Manasseh, against Joseph’s wishes. Jacob is clear that, whatever the failings of his eyesight, he knows what he is doing (48:19f). It is Jacob’s agency which counts.
 
There is something instructive here, for any who would make plans to shape their own legacy: it can never wholly be in your control; any effort to steer others may fail, on many levels.  
 
What of Joseph’s own death – without poetic farewells, without explicit mourning, without a journey home? He dies at 110 (50.26). Robert Alter, in his notes to his translation, tells us this is the Egyptian ideal age, over against the 120 years of Hebrew understanding. Joseph is placed in a coffin – an entirely Egyptian contraption within the Bible. Is there bathos here? The story that begins with the expanses of the heavens and the earth ends with its focus reduced to a mummified corpse in a box, a box alien to the corpse, as alien as the land into which the box is laid. Is this a warning against assimilation? Is the stage being set for the Pharoah “which knew not Joseph” (Ex 1.8 KJV), and the wretchedness of slavery?
 
Something may be lost if this is our only reading of the brief account of Joseph’s death. Perhaps there is another character in this passage whose legacy is not fully honoured. I refer to Egypt itself. If we limit ourselves to Genesis, it is only fair to describe Egypt as wholly benign, a place of refuge, of rescue, for Abraham, as for Jacob and his children. We hear Joseph say of his own travails: “God intended it for good, so as to bring about the… survival of many people” (50.20, NJPS). The Hebrew is strong: lehachayot: “to cause to live/to make alive”. That giving of life was brought about by the synergies of wise Joseph, and (let it be said) attentive and responsive Pharoah, and the fertility of Egypt itself. We who know the fuller story may miss here the absence of any strictly religious animosity between Pharaohs and patriarchs. In Christian language, this has been called the time of “ecumenical bonhomie” (Gordon Wenham). So Joseph’s coffin, which is called an “aron”, may in fact be a type of the ark (“aron”) of the covenant to come; it houses a memory of divine providence.
 
Biblical Egypt, like every nation since, is not one thing, neither simply refuge, nor simply oppressor. Just as it is folly to hope – or to fear – that our own legacy will be entirely one predictable and predicted thing. This is to the good!

Written for Limmud on One Leg, 2025. 

Sermon for Bible Sunday

Sermon. St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford. 27 October 2019 (Year C)

·       Bible Sunday

Today is unusual; it may be unique. The sheets we have delivered have determined that today is “Bible Sunday”. We don’t normally keep “Bible Sunday”. We haven’t in my time, and I doubt you did before that. I think it is obvious why: if today is “Bible Sunday” what does that say of the other 51 Sundays of the year? Are they “Less-Bible Sunday”? Yet again, if every Sunday is “Bible Sunday”, why call one Sunday “Bible Sunday”?

But… I am happy to “roll with it”, as an “one off”. So we will call today unique, and we will call it (in case you haven’t picked it up yet…) “Bible Sunday”!

What I propose to do with this unique occasion is offer some teaching on the Bible, and you’ll guess that for me that means on the Bible in its original languages. This in turn means I am not going to offer an “exhortatory” sermon. (I know that’s what you were asking yourselves as you came to church today: “I wonder how exhortatory the sermon will be today”!) “Exhortatory” is just a specialist (or posh) way of saying a sermon which says how we should all be living. So you see: I am going to be even less bossy than normal. (And that’s not entirely a joke. It is also a warning: if you think I am normally bossy, you have been spoiled!) I am going to share some bits of knowledge, just to see if we can together agree that the Bible is fascinating.

And so to the Hebrew Bible, which Christians have tended and do tend to call the Old Testament (and I don’t say wrongly). This is, after all, the greater part of the Bible in terms of length, about 4/5 of the Christian Bible.  

The first thing you should know about Hebrew is that the core text does not have any vowels. This is true of every Torah scroll used in a synagogue. But it is also true of many/most newspapers in Israel today. You might think that makes things very hard. I suggest it doesn’t. You can test this. You can write some sentences down in English, but without the vowels – only the consonants – and give it to somebody else. My guess is that they will understand most of it.

Hebrew texts as such tend to have no vowels.

The second thing you must know about Hebrew is that the meaning of the words can change dramatically – utterly – depending on what the vowels in a word are.

For example

·       Lamad means “he learned” (maybe all by himself)

·       Limmad means he taught

·       Lummad means “he was taught” (by another).

That’s changing (pretty much) only the vowels.(1)  

So you can see that there is a problem: the core text has no vowels; the vowels often determine the meaning of the words.

And so it happened that, that between the 6^th and the 10^th centuries of our Common Era, some Jewish scribes started adding vowels to the text. They did this by adding dots and dashes above, below, and sometimes within the consonants. (I can show you later.) So a Hebrew text with the vowels added is called a “pointed” text. And by the end of the 10^th century, the words – the words with the vowels – were fixed. They weren’t added to the Torah scrolls themselves. The text on the scrolls was held to be too holy to have any later additions. But they were added to the books the congregation might have, or the books people practising reading or chanting the text might have.(Again, I have an example.)

Now, does this mean that until the vowels (the dots and the dashes) were added, people could just make up how to pronounce the vowels in the words, and so give the text the meaning they wanted? No, not at all. We have to remember that the early centuries after Christ, both Jews and Christians lived in what was basically an oral culture. They would be hearing these texts, year in, year out, week in, week out, or even day in, day out. So the vowels and the meanings would have been fixed (by and large) long before they were actually written down – written down in the form of those dots and dashes.

So, l am going to take a risk here. I am going to tell you something you may find boring, or you may just, like me, find intriguing. If you find it boring, you can tell me bluntly, as I won’t be preaching on “Bible Sunday” again. If you find it boring, but no more boring than any other sermon from me – that you don’t have to tell me.

Here goes. If we consider the Hebrew Bible as fixed by the addition of the vowels, how does the Bible begin? What is at the very opening of the book of Genesis? This is a real question…

Actually, the very opening of the book of Genesis does not say “In the beginning”. It does not work as a translation of the “pointed” Hebrew. The Hebrew says: “In a beginning”. The definite article – the word or the sound for “the” – is missing. But “In a beginning, Gd created heaven and earth” sounds strange in English, and more or less as strange in Hebrew. What might it actually mean? So it leads the grammarians/the translators to think creatively. So some modern translations read “When Gd began to create…” And I have to say: that is a fair translation of the Hebrew, really. “In beginning creating” might be the underlying idea.

This example also provides evidence for the point I was making earlier – that the later scribes did not invent new meanings from the consonantal text (the text that was just consonants) out of thin air. I say this because if we turn to the main Greek translation, the Greek also says: “In a beginning”. In the Greek, too, the word for “the” is missing. And this Greek text (which I also have with me) was written down a couple of centuries or more before Christ. It is unquestionably ancient.

And indeed, so fixed is this idea that the story of creation begins with the strange words “In a beginning”, that when St John wants to write his great meditation, reflecting and maybe going behind the story of creation, which he wants to relate to the Word of Gd who becomes a human being in Jesus Christ, he too writes as he starts his Gospel: “In a beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Gd, and the Word was Gd.”

Have I bored you to tears? I have really just wanted to drop the smallest hint that, if we do dig down into the biblical text in the original languages, things will become not easier, but more difficult and stranger for us, but – at least sometimes - more intriguing, deeper, richer.  

As for New Testament Greek, Greek does have vowels, and always has had vowels. What the oldest Greek texts do not have is.. gaps. Gaps between the words. Each word just runs on from the word before. Oh, and all in capitals, in the oldest texts. That makes like harder in another way. But – worry not – I won’t unfold all of that here. We’ll either have to keep “Bible Sunday” another year, or find another way of having some Greek for fun!  

Let us return to the Hebrew. I offer what I believe is one fair interpretation of Genesis 1, taking seriously the absence of that “the”.

When Gd began to create the heavens and the earth (you see, the earth was waste and void(2) and a darkness was on the surface of the deep, and a divine wind would sweep over the waters…) when Gd began creating, he said: Let there be Light, and there was Light.”

You may say that this sounds pretty similar to the traditional translation. Is anything at stake in preferring this new version? Oh yes. Most certainly. What? I am sorely tempted to tease you now and ask you to settle down while I outline the top twenty points why it matters. But that would indeed be to tease you. Instead, I will dare to hope that we might have seen that the Bible is a little bit more strange than we realised, and so intriguing, drawing us in. A blessed “Bible Sunday” to us all.

Amen.

(1) Readers rather than hearers will see that it also involves a doubling of the middle consonant. However, in Hebrew this too is shown not by a second written consonant, but a dot in the middle of the single consonant, i.e. here too the consonantal text does not as such determine the meaning. 

(2) The Hebrew is tohu va-bhohu, terms it is excruciatingly difficult to translate. Do they refer to some substances which predate creation as we can imagine it? The rabbis were apparently willing to imagine them as different types of slime – as one option among many, not an authoritative reading.   

Sermon. Jacob, Israel, and Your Own Name(s)

Sermon. 20 October 2019. St Mary’s, Great Ilford.

Trinity 18 (Year C)

·       Genesis 32.22-31.

What’s in a name? For example, how does the name “St Mary’s Little Ilford?” (where I am from) relate to the name “St Mary’s Great Ilford?”… Is the former small and of no account, while the latter is grand and stands tall in the world? You’re right to offer no answer. These are of course rhetorical questions.

What’s in a name? Does it matter, for example, that I go by my middle name (I’ll leave you to guess my actual first name)? What of people who have alternative names? I’m confident that you, like me, know people of African heritage (for example), who have an English and an African name. Surely something to rejoice in there, that there is such richness of diversity in the world.

What’s in a name? Some of us were given new names at baptism or confirmation or on taking vows, the name of a saint we are aiming to follow and whose help we are seeking. Do we make the most of this?

What’s in a name? What do we make of the really quite common biblical practice, which begins in Genesis and goes forward into the New Testament, whereby Gd or a hero of faith re-names someone, gives them a new name (whether as replacement or addition), after some significant encounter or crisis.

The Bible says that life can change things for you, change things for you so radically that you come away from an experience with nothing less than a new name.

What’s in a name? You know why I am asking this now. It’s because in today’s first reading from the Hebrew Bible (from the Old, the Original Testament) Jacob is given a new name.

Jacob becomes Israel.

If I say Jacob-who-becomes-Israel is an interesting character, that is an understatement. Let us refresh our memory of what has brought him to this place, the place he finds himself in, in our reading.

Jacob is a twin. His mother, Rebecca, has a difficult pregnancy. The two brothers fight in her womb. Esau is born first, but Jacob is holding onto his heal. He wrestles, then, even at the very point of birth. The Bible says that his name, Jacob, itself means “he grasps the heel”. And indeed that is a good translation. There is a related noun (aqev) which means “a heel”. And there is a related noun (aqav), which means “to be at the heel of” – and not without menace [acted out]– and so to struggle with, to beat, to supplant.

But it’s not just a matter of language. In Genesis, Jacob really does supplant the first-born. Remember: he buys Esau’s birthright, for a bowl of lentil soup. Later, in a wholly different story, he tricks his father Isaac into giving him (Jacob) the blessing due the first-born (Esau). Esau accepts this, but is enraged. Jacob has to flee. He flees on the pretext of finding a wife from among his own people. That leads to yet another turbulent story, and Jacob finds himself not with one wife but two. He succeeds as a farmer, however, and has children with his wives, eleven of them, at this point.  

This, then, is the Jacob whom we meet today. He is coming home. Home to his father, Isaac, but also to his brother, Esau. So he is afraid. He sends his family and his possessions off the beaten track, so that he can think things through, deal with his anxiety, come to terms with things, pray things through. And he is met by another, a stranger (we are not actually told who this stranger is). They wrestle, and Jacob is judged the winner. The other blesses him, and gives him his new name, Israel. Israel is held to mean something like “He prevails against Gd”. He beats Gd. Interestingly, though, as good a translation is “Gd prevails”. Gd wins. This echoes the fact that it is not altogether clear who won the fight.

So what? What to make of this? I’d like to draw attention to a few things.

Firstly, many of us can take great hope from Jacob-Israel, who is a great hero of faith, indeed a saint. Sometimes, some of us somehow get the impression that to be a saint means to spend the morning looking like this [pious expression], and the afternoon looking like this [pious expression mirrored]. Or, more seriously, we may have a sense that a saint is someone who is always calm, placid, peaceful, unshakeable and unflustered. Some saints undoubtedly are like this. But not all. There are as many ways of being a saint as there are human beings in the world.  

Saint Jacob-become-Israel is difficult. He is fiery. He seems compelled to fight, and obsessed with rivalry. And… all is well. Not despite these things but through these things (through working these things through) he comes to be a great hero of faith, one we can rightly name our children after, whether as Israel, or Jacob, or in the fully “Anglicised” (English) form of Jacob, namely… James. If you’re fiery like Jacob-Israel, take heart!

Secondly, notice that Jacob has to be alone to be given his blessing, and to be given his vocation, that of being Israel in the world. He sends away his family, his nearest and dearest. He sends away his possessions, all that might make him comfortable during the night, or for that matter safe. There is a lesson for us here, too.

•        Some matters can only be sorted, if we choose solitude.
•        Some encounters with Gd can only come about, if we choose solitude.
•        Some discoveries about ourselves, can only come to light, if we choose solitude.

Note my emphasis on choosing. It is not just that we find ourselves alone. It’s that we set out to spend some sustained time – maybe indeed a whole night – contending with Gd in prayer. I don’t need to remind you that this was Jesus’ own practice, again and again. So let us take heart, and take note!

Thirdly, there is something you don’t see in today’s text but can find in Genesis if you read on. It is that this encounter, this wrestling match, bears fruit. To be fair, even after it, Jacob-Israel is still frightened of Esau. After all Esau comes to meet him with 400 men. Jacob-Israel arranges his family carefully for their own protection.

But! But the two brothers show no hostility. Esau actually welcomes Jacob-Israel, and Jacob-Israel says these remarkable words to his brother: “Seeing your face is like seeing the face of Gd” (Gen 33.10).

Seeing your face is like seeing the face of Gd. The interpreters debate precisely what he meant, and it is genuinely open. But we are free to choose to see these words in their full sense. Seeing your face is like seeing the face of Gd.

So we may say that Jacob-Israel,

• fiery though he be,
• sought out solitude,
•  to wrestle and wrestle and wrestle with Gd – or just perhaps with his own fieriness,
• and so he comes through to the most profound biblical truth:
•  in seeing the other, yes, in seeing the rival, yes, in seeing the difficult person, yes, in seeing the enemy, we truly do see the image of Gd?

This is a core truth, one, frankly, we cannot be reminded of enough.

I will say one more thing. What if Gd were saying to you:

“Come away, and I will tell you your new name. It is not a name for your passport, or even for your neighbours to call you by. It is a secret name. It is between you and me. It tells you what your truest vocation is.”

Would you come away?

What would Gd tell you?

I invite you to seek to find out.

Amen.  

Sermon. On (Mis)Hearing the Voice of Gd.

Sermon. St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford. 12 March 2017.

Lent 2 (Year A)

Genesis 12.1-4a

John 3.1-17

I'd like us to spend some moments attending to the first reading, the reading from the Old Testament. People who like short sermons – I catch no one's eye - should not be too reassured by the fact that this reading is so brief. It is actually one of the most evocative passages in the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible. In part, this is because there are special features in the Hebrew, which get lost in translation. Let me refer to just one.

The English has Gd saying to Abram (who is Abraham, a name he is given a bit later in Genesis): 'Go'. That is perfectly standard English, as in 'Go and get a bag of chips'. But the Hebrew is unusual, indeed very unusual. It is Lekh Lekha, which means literally something like 'Go to yourself' or 'for yourself'. Sometimes it is translated 'Go ye'/'Go you'. It may mean 'Go for your own sake', or it may mean 'Gather yourself together and get gone'.

It is actually such a rare form that it only occurs one more time in the whole of the Hebrew Bible. Any ideas where? Well, again, Gd is speaking to Abraham... It is when Gd seems to ask Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. 'Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering...' [Gen 22.2]. 'Go you to the land of Moriah.'

The story of the near-sacrifice of Isaac is the climax of the story of Abraham, and today's passage is the very beginning of that story. (We only know the barest details about Abram's family at this point.) So this phrase, 'Go you', 'bookends' the story of Abraham. And it is hard, very hard, to resist the idea that the phrase is found in these places - and in these places alone - because it tells us something momentous is about to happen.

Indeed, something momentous is happening here (make no mistake). Abram is told to leave his country, and his kindred, and his father's house. To flee. To desert. To leave behind all comforts, and points of identity, in increasing intensity.

Think of it for yourself.

• You are to leave your nation. That troubles most of us, as we know of the uncertain lives of migrants and refugees.
• You are to leave your clan. Think of it. The equivalent for some of us would be: 'Take yourself far from the West Ham grounds'.
• And you are to leave your own family. Think of it. By far the most painful for many of us. Even when we don't feel especially close to our family, we do want them 'sort of' around. 'Go you'. Gd demands something truly momentous. Gd, being Gd, is free to do that.

But! But I want to suggest there is something even more momentous in the passage which we can easily miss... It's actually those first words. 'The LORD said to Abram'. Nothing dramatic about that, you might say. But that's my point. That's the difficulty. I mean: what does it mean?

Remember, before these simple words, we know virtually nothing about Abram. We might well ask: why did Gd single him out to speak to? And – how? What actually happened?

• If it was something dramatic, like to Moses at Sinai, why do we not hear of that?
• If it was perfectly undramatic, what made Abram think or know that it was Gd speaking?

The text tells us nothing at all at all about this. Just '[And] [Gd] said the Abram.

This created a problem, or, better, a challenge, for later Jewish readers. They told stories around the story (something which, to be fair, they loved to do anyway). They told a back-story, which is not found or implied in the text, about how Abram's father was a maker of idols, and Abram through his prayers got a sense that idolatry was wrong, and one day smashed all his father's handiwork, the idols. In this way, the Jewish story-tellers and story-hearers would build up some sense of why Gd spoke to Abram: why? Because Abram was himself seeking after the one true Gd, and was rewarded.

But still nothing on the how. How did he know it was Gd speaking?

This is not a problem for Abram alone. It can be said to be the theme of today's gospel too. Nicodemus meets Jesus, and Jesus speaks with his own authority, and upsets Nicodemus' ideas radically. Nicodemus doesn't get it (like pretty much everybody in John's gospel). But note that Nicodemus does have a real problem. Is he here to recognise in Jesus' words the voice of Gd, or not? Is Jesus's new message from Gd, or is he just another young upstart? How to tell?

And the difficulty that Abram may have had, and the difficulty that Nicodemus truly did have – in wondering whether or not this is the voice of Gd – is the same difficulty we all have. We have it in two ways.

• It is a problem when we wonder how any biblical character heard the voice of Gd (what that means);
• it is also a problem when we wonder whether our own intimations and intuitions, our dreams and hopes, might themselves be the voice of Gd.

Bluntly, however special the message seems, however dramatic the form of delivery, there just is no automatic, or self-evident, or guaranteed way of knowing that this is actually Gd speaking. How could there be?

One response to this in the Bible is indeed from Jesus, though it is an idea that is found in earlier parts of the Bible too. Jesus says this:

'You will know them by their fruits' [Matt 7.16].

You see, we cannot really recognise Gd by insightful messages or dramatic moments. We recognise Gd when the message we are given points to, and helps us inhabit:

holiness,

forgiveness,

compassion,

awe,

love,

rejoicing,

service,

feasting,

connectedness.

Whenever we find ourselves better oriented towards holiness, forgiveness, compassion, awe, love, rejoicing, service, feasting, connectedness,

then we can say we have heard the voice of Gd.

And that is surely a huge, and proper challenge, for us, in Lent. It is a timely reminder that, if we want to convince others about Gd, there may, from time to time, be a place for arguments and debates and discussions. But vastly more important is the question of what fruit we are bearing. How are we living? By our fruits, others will know whether we ourselves are taking Gd seriously. That is what will count.

But note: that does not mean we have to be perfect, or free of sin. No. Actually, some of the best fruit we can bear is our repentance, which is itself a journey, and our self-forgiveness and our self-acceptance, in our imperfection. But fruit - fruit - we must most surely bear. By Gd's grace. Some echo of – some whisper of - some aroma of - holiness, forgiveness, compassion, awe, love, celebration, service, feasting, connectedness.

Amen.