Vayera 5786
Now You See Him, Now You Don’t
This week we are reading Parashat Vayera (Genesis 18–22), and it happens that a God who shows up in the very first words of the parashah ends up being rather slippery — hence the title of this piece.
What do I mean? I mean that, while we read, God winks in and out of the picture. If you’re looking through one lens, you as a reader sense that God is there — you’re told that God is there — and through another lens you see three men. Let’s have a look:
Gen 18:1 YHWH appeared to him by the oaks of Mamre while he [Abraham] was sitting at the entrance of the tent at the hottest time of day. 2 He looked up and — whoa! — there were three men waiting for him. As soon as he saw them, he ran toward them from the entrance of the tent and bowed. 3 He said, “My Lord/Sirs [אֲדֹנָ֗י adonai], if it is all right with you, please do not pass by your servant.”
The Tetragrammaton — the four Hebrew letters that spell God’s personal name, YHWH as we transliterate them into English — is usually “translated” into English as “the Lord,” sometimes with small caps (which Substack won’t display) and sometimes with all caps, denoting the euphemism. In any case, the statement in plain Hebrew that YHWH appeared to him would seem to call for dramatic music of some kind and then an experience of great profundity.
Instead … nothing. Three men show up and are invited for lunch. All right, that is not “nothing.” And in fact there is slightly more than nothing in the verse. Abraham doesn’t just notice three men; he Whoa! notices them. It is the Hebrew word הנה hinneh, commonly translated in Bible English as “behold” but really having two functions in the language:
It is a “point-of-view” word, asking us to see the story through a particular character’s eyes. (“Try to see it my way.”)
It’s a word that may indicate surprise.
In our case, rather than telling us that three men were standing there or even that Abraham looked up and saw three men, הנה is calling attention not merely to what Abraham was seeing but to the surprise he was feeling.
If you are sitting at the entrance to your tent out in the open air, you should be able to see three men coming toward you from a long way away. We are left with a vague feeling that the appearance of the three men is how YHWH appeared to him. His greeting to them could be the euphemism by which YHWH is addressed (in the plural because lordship naturally calls for that) or it could simply be a polite address to the three strangers.
Abraham arranges the lunch, prepared by his wife Sarah and a servant, and then there is another shift in the other direction:
Gen 18:9 They said to him, “Where is your wife Sarah?” And he replied, “Right here in the tent, obviously [הִנֵּ֥ה].” 10 Then He said, “I will definitely return to you at this time next year, and, surprise! [הִנֵּה] your wife Sarah will have a son!”
After lunch, the three men speak to him (using a plural verb). Then v. 10 begins with a singular verb — the same verb used when Abraham spoke in v. 9, but introducing a voice that speaks to Abraham. I’ve capitalized the H of “He” referring to God (which I don’t usually do) to make clear that this must be YHWH speaking once more. (Contrast the NJPS translation, “Then one said.”)
The continued use of hinneh throughout our story is not what I’m writing about today. Nonetheless, you see that it occurs two more times in these two verses. I should note that it will appear twice more, in vv. 27 and 31, before our chapter is over. I should also mention that (as always in these columns) I am passing rapidly over even more material that could be an essay in itself — in this case, כָּעֵ֣ת חַיָּ֔ה ka-eit ḥaya ‘at this time next year’. If time is hanging heavy on your hands, here are two explorations that might keep you busy:
Look for the occasion when God does return “at this time next year.”
Look for ka-eit ḥaya in 2 Kings 4, where Elisha tells the Shunemite woman she will have a child. (Amazingly, הנה occurs six times in that chapter as well.)
In any case, if we read on in Genesis 18, we will see the following:
“YHWH said to Abraham” (v. 13)
“The men got up” (v. 16)
“YHWH had said” (v. 17)
And then we get to this:
Gen 18:22 The men turned from there to go to Sodom while Abraham was still standing before YHWH.
Okay! At last the out-of-focus picture resolves — if you prefer a quantum-physics description, let’s say that the waveform collapses — and the men go over there while YHWH is still over here.
What explains the vagueness, however? What is the nature of these three men, and how are we to understand their appearance in the story and their apparent (temporary) interchangeability with God? Here are two answers, given in my Commentators’ Bible translation, from the two great Jewish Bible commentators of the “12th-century Renaissance.” We’ll hear first from Rashbam, grandson of the great 11th-century French commentator Rashi, citing the NJPS translation in bold and quoting his references from it:
The LORD appeared to him. How so? By means of three “men” who were angels coming to him. There are many places where an angel is identified as if it were the Shekhinah, like the angel of whom we are told, “My Name is in him” (Exod. 23:21). God’s representative stands in for God Himself. For example, in Exod. 3:2, “an angel of the LORD” appeared to Moses, after which “the LORD saw that he had turned aside to look” (Exod. 3:4).
Now his peripatetic contemporary, Abraham ibn Ezra, explains something you may have been wondering about:
There are a few who say that the Lord is the “three men” of v. 2—He is one and He is three, inseparable. But they have forgotten that later “the two angels arrived in Sodom” (19:1).
Unless one member of the Christian Trinity is on a coffee break in Genesis 19, Ibn Ezra explains, that cannot be the explanation for what’s going on in our chapter. There are other explanations, though:
Other commentators say that the Lord appeared to him in a prophetic vision, after which he “looked up” and saw three angels, one to give them the news about Sarah and the other two on their way to Sodom, one to destroy and the other to save Lot. Some commentators say that the three men were prophets. You might ask, How can a prophet prophesy to a prophet (for Abraham was a prophet too) unless he were greater in prophecy? (This is how Moses could prophesy to Aaron.) But of course they did not come to prophesy to Abraham, but to Sarah. That is why they asked, “Where is your wife Sarah?” (v. 9) … As for what I myself think, you will find some hints about it in my comment to Exod. 3:15.
The long comment I permitted Ibn Ezra to give at Exod. 3:15 in my Commentators’ Bible version is in fact only a small fraction of the massive essay he includes at that point in his commentary. A neighbor of mine in Nachla’ot has worked for years on a translation of it with extensive notes. In it, Ibn Ezra is inching toward the metaphysical, mystical kind of explanation that will come into flower a century later with Nahmanides.
As for me, I don’t have an explanation that “clicks,” one that I find obviously correct. I will simply end with Nahmanides’s view that the world is full of all kind of natural miracles where things are done that actually are miraculous if we only knew about it but they seem to be happening in the regular course of nature. Perhaps Genesis 18 is pointing us in the direction of that idea.
In any case — like YHWH, like (not to mention them in the same breath) General MacArthur — I too shall return to you at this time, not next year, but next week. Thanks for learning with me.