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PDF FormatFor the rabbis of the Talmud, events such as the clash between Rome and Judea carried conceptual and religious weight. Just as this debate is representative of the broader clash between Judea and Rome, for example, so too was the war itself symbolic of a deeper conflict: A cosmic struggle between the archetypes of Jacob and Esau, the twin sons of Isaac and Rebecca described in the book of Genesis.
Scratch the surface of our text, and Jacob and Esau appear. Both R. Akiva and Rufus are historical figures, but their names and actions provide an additional, archetypal dimension which was clear to the authors of our text. The representative of Rome bore the name “Rufus,” in Latin “the Red,” probably because of the color of his hair. In the world of midrashic association, this suffices to relate him to the redheaded Esau, spiritual father of the Edomites, who are said to be the forebears of Rome. The corruption of his first name to “Turanus,” or tyrannus, Latin for “tyrant” or “wicked one,” seems to be derived from the rabbinic desire to reinforce the symbolic connection between the brutal governor and the wicked Esau.12
The name Akiva, of course, is an Aramaic variant of the Hebrew Ya’akov, or Jacob.13 Furthermore, it is none other than R. Akiva himself who was the first one to identify the war against Rome with the epic struggle between Jacob and Esau.14 To understand the deeper intentions behind our text, then, will require a look at the original, primordial struggle in the book of Genesis, for only there will we find the keys to understanding the deepest resonances of our tale.
Jacob and Esau are twins, but far from identical. Even before they are born, they are locked in a struggle so intense as to cause Rebecca to inquire of God. She is told that the conflict between her sons is the beginning of a titanic struggle that will sweep through the generations of human history:
And Isaac pleaded with the Eternal on behalf of his wife, for she was barren, and the Eternal granted his plea, and Rebecca his wife conceived. And the sons clashed together within her, and she said, “If it be so, then why is it I?” And she went to inquire of the Eternal. And the Eternal said to her: “Two nations are in your womb; two peoples from your loins shall issue. One nation shall prevail over the other; the older shall serve the younger.”And when her time was come to give birth, behold, there were twins in her womb. And the first one came out ruddy, like a hairy mantle all over, and they called his name Esau. Then his brother came out, his hand grasping Esau’s heel, and he called his name Jacob. And Isaac was sixty years old when they were born. And the lads grew up, and Esau was a cunning hunter, a man of the field, and Jacob was a simple man, a dweller in tents.15
From the very beginning, the portraits of the two brothers are drawn in sharp, irreconcilable tones. The origins of the conflict are prenatal, hidden from view. As they grow, however, they take on the qualities predicted by their appearance at birth: The hairy, animal-like Esau becomes a hunter; the smoother Jacob a “dweller in tents.”
The hunter imitates his natural surroundings. Like an animal, he lives in the field, following the laws that govern the state of nature. Like a predator, the hunter does not nurture or develop his prey: He finds it as it appears, and he seizes it. The hunter makes no attempt to change nature and to adjust it to his will, but instead adjusts himself—to whatever degree his human limitations allow—to the demands that nature makes of him.
By contrast, Jacob the tent-dweller has chosen the pastoral ways of his father Isaac and grandfather Abraham. Like them, Jacob engages in shepherding and farming, signifying the passage from a culture of hunters and gatherers—a culture that accepts the natural system and makes no attempt to alter it—to a culture of raising flocks and crops, a modification of nature that is, in the anthropological view, the beginning of all civilization. The shepherd intervenes; he does not accept nature as static and immutable. Instead, he discovers that artifice is much more profitable: When Jacob comes to an agreement with his father-in-law Laban as to his wages, for example, he intervenes in the rutting process of the sheep to maximize his gain. In Jacob and Esau, then, the Bible gives us the primary contrast between natural man, who sees himself as an animal of the field, and civilized man, who conceives his status as different from all other creatures in the animal world.
All this comes to a head in the story of the birthright. The very notion of a birthright—a special inheritance given to the firstborn irrespective of his merits, achievements, or virtues—exemplifies the natural system. At the moment of birth, Jacob, who has lost this natural advantage by only a few minutes, grabs the heel of his brother Esau in a clear declaration of intent. He is determined to overcome, rather than accept, the deficiencies of nature. Jacob, we realize, is someone who orders reality, someone who—through human aspiration, not predetermination—repairs that which is deficient. So it is with the struggle against his brother, and so, too, with a father-in-law who, himself acceding to the laws dictated by nature, switched his younger daughter Rachel for the elder Leah on Jacob’s wedding night, justifying the act in the name of immutable principles of nature that govern the proper order of human relations.
The birthright episode thus brings to full expression the difference in the characters of the two brothers, closing a circle that began with their birth. In the end, through the force of his will, the younger brother’s declaration of intent is realized. The birthright is his, and his brother, the animal-like hunter, falls into a trap of his own making:
And Jacob prepared a pottage, and Esau came from the field, and he was fatigued. And Esau said to Jacob, “Let me swallow some of that red, red, for I am fatigued.” Therefore is his name called Edom (“red”). And Jacob said, “Sell now your birthright to me.” And Esau said, “Behold, I am at the point of death; what use have I for a birthright?” And Jacob said, “Swear to me now.” And he swore to him, and he sold his birthright to Jacob. Then Jacob gave Esau bread and lentil pottage, and he ate and he drank and he rose and he went off, and Esau despised the birthright.16
Esau’s behavior, both in action and in speech, reminds us of the animal-like life he has come to lead. We see nothing genuinely human in him: He is fatigued, he is famished, he eats, he drinks, he leaves. Neither do his words elevate him to the level of man: He asks for food by saying, “Let me swallow,” hal’iteni, a term usually connoting the feeding of animals. Whereas the narrative describes the food as “pottage,” Esau sees only his favorite color, red, the color of life’s essence, the color of the raw animal flesh that is his daily prize. He is no man, but a beast of prey.
Jacob, on the other hand, represents the opposite qualities. His actions and words are examples of intervention and artifice: He cooks his food, which animals do not. Moreover, though the pottage is seemingly meant for himself, he decides to delay satisfaction for the sake of something more distant and abstract: The birthright. He manipulates his brother in order to achieve his will, and gains the birthright through the power of human agreement—the barter, a human activity without parallel in the animal kingdom. Jacob then anchors the purchase in an oath, a human act even more abstract than barter. For whereas in barter the act is tangible, and its consequences material, through an oath man binds himself with invisible chains to something inaccessible through nature.
Esau’s behavior in this chapter, however consistent with earlier descriptions, nonetheless raises a question: How could the hunter not have controlled his desire? Is not every hunter a master of self-control? His life in the cruel world of nature teaches him to track his prey for days, to wait long hours patiently as he hides in the thorny brush, straining his capacities even when it seems that there is no further hope. Why, then, can he not resist his hunger now? The answer is revealed in the closing verse of the episode. In the sole description of Esau’s inner world, we find him despising the birthright. In his inner world, there is no importance attached even to those cultural definitions which grant human preference on the basis of natural facts. In the eyes of natural man, whatever is not utterly natural is abominable. Deferral of gratification will only be considered in light of immediate, physical profit: One may be patient to kill one’s prey, but not starve for the sake of an abstract hybrid of artifice. In the field, he may control his impulse for the sake of survival; upon arriving home, however, he feels no need to rule over his impulses. He gives them free rein.
The identification of Tineius Rufus with his ruddy predecessor Esau, and of R. Akiva with his namesake Jacob, brings the meaning of our text into clearer relief. A debate over circumcision, it seems, is nothing less than a symbolic clash, not only of two nations at war, but of two conflicting approaches to civilization. On the one side is the worship of nature, a theme that resonates not only in Hellenistic thought, but in both Eastern and Western philosophy down through our own day. The political dimensions of this approach justify the rule of the oppressor as the expression of nature and divine right; as a spiritual and moral doctrine, it encourages man to be passive, deters innovation and self-assertion, and focuses its rage on anyone who would rise up against the foreordained order of things.
On the other side, we find a position represented throughout the Hebraic tradition, from Genesis to the prophets to the rabbinic tradition. This position is unwilling to accept the world as it is, and is therefore characterized by a restless, uncompromising desire for improvement. This view takes on symbolic application with the severance of the foreskin, the marking of the most impulsive organ of the human body with an open and blunt statement: Man is not an animal. Man shares with God the ability to stand outside of and apart from nature. Man is a creation whose horizon of aspirations lies far beyond the satisfaction of his natural impulses. Man wants to change, even to create, the world.
Although the Judean rebellion was crushed, Judaism was not. Refusing to bend to the decrees of nature and fate, the Jewish leadership refashioned even its own religion into something that could survive in conditions of exile. With the final suppression of the rebellion in 135 C.E., rabbinic Judaism abandoned hope for the immediate re-establishment of the Jewish commonwealth, and began a life as a people in exile, in a state of permanent—moral and spiritual, if not military—rebellion against nations that saw themselves as representative of nature, fate, and divine law.
In time, much of Western thought eventually accepted the Hebraic approach over the Hellenistic submission to the edicts of nature. Indeed, Western democracy owes much of its moral vibrancy to the belief that every individual has the power to repudiate destiny, to fashion his own fate and that of his people, and to flout the edicts of the gods. For the Jews, it was the spirit of rebellion and change, preserved across the span of history, that enabled them later to return to their homeland and rebuild the Jewish state, defying the “gods” that had declared their people a relic, and their fate one of wandering the world in infamy. Judea may have fallen to Rome, but the legacy of R. Akiva continues to leave its mark throughout the world.
Ido Hevroni is an Associate Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Politics, and Religion at the Shalem Center.
Notes
1. The decision to read this story as a literary creation and not as a historical record is based on the prevalent modern approach to the literature of the sages, which views stories from the Midrash and Talmud as tools for providing insight into a larger world of ideas, ones often at variance with historical writings. See, for example, Jonah Frankel, Ways of the Agada and Midrash, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Yad Latalmud, 1991), pp. 235-238 [Hebrew]. Apart from this, in the present case there are two specific factors that support the opinion that a description of the history of the time was not uppermost in the writer’s mind: One, the fact that the story first appears in its present form in the Midrash Tanhuma, whereas in the earlier Midrash Genesis Rabba (11:6, Theodor-Albeck pp. 94-95), there is a similar story in which the protagonists are R. Hoshaya and an anonymous philosopher, an indication of a deliberate adaptation that prefers the well-known figures of R. Akiva and Turanus Rufus to the much lesser-known characters of the original story. Two, the attitude depicted in the story of the Roman governor is far more Greek than Roman (which is understandable in view of the previous assumption, according to which the story was taken from an ancient source in which the hero was a Greek philosopher). Thus the fragility of the story as an historical source reinforces its status as a literary creation. Indeed, the decision to read this story as “literature” is crucial: Whereas a historical reading will try to extract as much objective information as possible about the events of the specific period in which the protagonists lived, a literary reading will strive to reveal the meta-historical truths that the narrator tried to convey. Or, whereas the historian’s gaze is directed from the text to the reality it represents, the literary critic looks inward, at the meaning concealed in the text. On this distinction between the historical and the poetical, see also Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Malcolm Heath (London: Penguin, 1996), pp. 16-17.
2. I intentionally employ the term “Hellenist” because the view placed in the ruler’s mouth is not a typically Roman one. Rather, it is a general description of the Hellenistic spirit as understood by the authors of the story. See the following note.
3. See the essays by Moshe David Herr, “Reasons for the Bar Kochba Revolt,” in Aharon Oppenheimer, ed., The Bar Kochba Revolt (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 1980), pp. 57-67 [Hebrew]; and Alfredo Mordechai Rabello, “The Edicts on Circumcision as a Factor in the Bar Kochba Revolt,” in Aharon Oppenheimer and Uriel Rappaport, eds., The Bar Kochba Revolt: A New Approach(Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 1984), pp. 27-46 [Hebrew].
4. Midrash Tanhuma, Tazria 7 (Buber’s edition, p. 18).
5. Jerusalem Brachot 9:5.
6. Maimonides, Mishneh Tora, Laws of Kings and Wars 11:3.
7. Jerusalem Ta’anit 4:6; Lamentations Rabba 2:4.
William Whiston, trans., The New Complete Works of Josephus (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Kregel, 1999), p. 794.
8. Josephus Flavius, The Jewish War, book 3, ch. 8, in
9. Avoda Zara 18a.
10. See, for example, Yevamot 96b, Sanhedrin 98a.
11. This idea is, apparently, what leads R. Akiva to identify Bar Kochba—who was a political leader and not a religious figure, and, moreover, openly denied God’s authority—as the Messiah. The sources (note 7 above) describe Bar Kochba’s speech on the eve of battle, in which he makes a short appeal to God: “Don’t help and don’t interfere.” In light of the sources we have cited, the extreme nature of this appeal can be explained as Bar Kochba’s attempt to distance his fighters from fatalistic notions, and encourage them to believe in themselves and their ability to change their own destiny. In this light, the full force of R. Akiva’s view of Messianism as a clear political, human act is revealed.
12. On the connection between “Turanus” and “Tyrannus,” see Emil Schurer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, vol. 1, trans. Geza Vermes and Fergus Millar (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1973), p. 549; Joseph Derenbourg, Essays on the History and the Geography of Palestine (Hildesheim: H.A. Gerstenberg, 1975), p. 419 [French]; Jacob Levy, The Dictionary of Talmud and Midrash (Berlin: Benjamin Harz, 1924), s.v. turanus [German].
13. The identification of R. Akiva with the patriarch Jacob receives additional support from another source: R. Akiva is the only talmudic sage known to have been a shepherd—Jacob’s profession—and his love for his wife Rachel, as with the case of Jacob and his Rachel, is strongly objected to by her father. See also Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley: University of California, 1993), pp. 151-153.
14. See Gershon D. Cohen, “Esau as Symbol in Early Medieval Thought,” in Alexander Altmann, ed., Jewish Medieval and Renaissance Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1967), pp. 21-23.
15. Genesis 25:21-27.
16. Genesis 25:29-34.
