Thread by @JoelBaden

#Genesis 29:21-30

Laban pulls a switcheroo on Jacob

Poor Jacob - you take advantage of your dying father’s poor eyesight on his deathbed just once, and now you have to work seven years just to have someone do a body switch on you when you can’t see? FULL CIRCLE, DUDE.

Really the only notable thing here compositionally (aside from the open question of which source anything in here really belongs to) is that the two notices about the handmaids pretty clearly don’t belong, at least not where they are.

They’re patently background information, but presented as if they’re part of the main narrative line (with the wayyiqtol); NRSV puts them in parentheses, JPS makes them pluperfect. Both are recognizing that they are disruptive as written.

They’re there, it would seem, either because they are original to one of the sources that has otherwise been obscured here (an option I tend not to like, as it leaves us with floating shards of text that we call “documents,” which is sort of a mockery of the name)...

Or because someone saw that the two maids entered the story later with no introduction, or explanation of who they were, and took it upon themselves to rectify that perceived gap. Either way, they’re definitely out of place in the story as we read it.

Just for fun, a couple of terms and phrases of note in this passage - in the absence of clear narratological reasons for source assignment, language and style can be (very tentative) evidence. “Give me my wife,” הבה - elsewhere in the Pentateuch only J and D.

“What have you done to me?,” מה-זאת עשית, elsewhere in the Pentateuch only in J, and six times (which feels like a lot when we realize that outside the Pentateuch the phrase occurs only four times total: twice in Judges, once in Jonah, once in Ecclesiastes).

These aren’t much to go on, and it would be foolish to see these and say “this is J” if there were good evidence from the story, the content, that it was from another source. We have to be super careful when using language and style in source criticism.

Despite what you read in textbooks, language and style are neither the main problem with the Pentateuch nor the main solution. They’re supporting evidence at best, and need to be used that way. E can say הבה or מה-זאת עשה once, and only once. No reason why not.