Vayishlach 5786
Avatars
We’re reading Parashat Vayishlach this week (Gen 32:4–36:43), and when a synagogue reading starts at v. 4, you can see that this is one of the places where the Jewish division of the Bible and the Christian division of the Bible disagree. In this case, Gen 32:1–3 are what’s called the maftir reading of the previous parashah, Vayetze (quotations are from NJPS):
Gen 32:1 Early in the morning, Laban kissed his sons and daughters and bade them good-by; then Laban left on his journey homeward. 2 Jacob went on his way, and angels of God encountered him. 3 When he saw them, Jacob said, “This is God’s camp.” So he named that place Mahanaim.
What follows is headline news: the meeting between Jacob and Esau:
Gen 32:4 Jacob sent messengers ahead to his brother Esau in the land of Seir, the country of Edom, 5 and instructed them as follows, “Thus shall you say, ‘To my lord Esau, thus says your servant Jacob: I stayed with Laban and remained until now; 6 I have acquired cattle, asses, sheep, and male and female slaves; and I send this message to my lord in the hope of gaining your favor.’ ” 7 The messengers returned to Jacob, saying, “We came to your brother Esau; he himself is coming to meet you, and there are four hundred men with him.” 8 Jacob was greatly frightened; in his anxiety, he divided the people with him, and the flocks and herds and camels, into two camps, 9 thinking, “If Esau comes to the one camp and attacks it, the other camp may yet escape.”
Tune in again next week — or, really, keep reading this week as the chapter continues — to find out what happens; clearly, though, the Jewish reading here begins after the angels have disappeared. It begins with the introduction to the meeting of Jacob and Esau. So who is right, the Jews or the Christians?
If you are reading the Bible in Hebrew (as I always encourage everyone to do), you see that there’s actually a very close link between the first three verses of chapter 32, the end of Parashat Vayetze, and the passage starting with v. 4 where Parashat Vayishlach begins.
First of all, in our second story Jacob divides his family and his flocks into two camps. Although the Hebrew does not say it this way — the Hebrew merely says two camps — you may know that Hebrew nouns have a grammatical formulation other than singular and plural. They have something called the dual, an ending that says there are a pair of whatever noun it is.
yom - a day
yamim - days
yomáyim - a pair of days
Similarly:
shana - a year
shanim - years
shnatáyim - two years
And, more to the more for present purposes:
maḥaneh - camp
maḥanot - camps
maḥanáyim - a pair of camps
That, of course, is the place name that is the last word of v. 3, the last word of Parashat Vayetze — immediately followed, at the beginning of Parashat Vayishlach, by a story involving shnei maḥanot, two camps.
There’s another connection as well. V. 2 says that angels of God encountered Jacob and v. 4 says that Jacob sent messengers to Esau, but both of those verses use exactly the same Hebrew word, the word מלאך mal’akh.
A מלאכה m’lakha is a job (of the kind that you are not supposed to do on the Sabbath), and in particular it is a task, something that you assigned to do. A mal’akh is someone who has been sent on a mission. When a human being sends a mal’akh to another human being, the mal’akh is a messenger. If it is God who is sending a messenger, we have a special word for it in English: an angel. Biblical Hebrew uses one and the same word for both.
So the angels of God at the end of Parashat Vayetze are echoed by the messengers of Jacob at the beginning of Parashat Vayishlach. My friend the biblical scholar Benjamin Sommer published a fascinating book called The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel. One of the many, many interesting things he says in that book is that the Hebrew word mal’akh, translated by NJPS as “angel” and “messenger” could (perhaps should?) really be translated as “avatar.”
That is (like an avatar), the mal’akh is meant to replicate the sender in another location. When God sends an angel, the angel is really an avatar of God. Look at the story of the three men whom Abraham feeds in Genesis 18, which we discussed a few weeks ago. When Jacob sends a mal’akh to his brother Esau, the mal’akh opens his mouth and speaks as if he were Jacob, giving Jacob’s message directly to Esau (“I stayed with Laban”) even though Jacob himself is not on the scene.
Something more about these mal’akhim that’s quite interesting: The word occurs 17 times in Genesis out of only 213 times in the entire Bible, a rather high percentage. And the last time it occurs in Genesis — except for once — is in our parasha. The first time it appears is in Gen 16:7, where a mal’akh, an avatar of YHWH, finds Hagar at the spring in the desert on the way to Shur. And all the mal’akhim in Genesis are indeed avatars of God — not messengers of some human being — all the way through Gen 32:2. There are two more occurrences here at the beginning of our parasha,Gen 32:4 and 7, where for the first time the mal’akhim are avatars of a human being, not of God. They are just messengers that Jacob sends to Esau — and that’s the last of mal’akh, except for the very end of the book.
There, the word occurs one more time, when Jacob blesses Joseph’s sons Ephraim and Manasseh and essentially adopts them:
Gen 48:15 The God in whose ways my fathers Abraham and Isaac walked,
The God who has been my shepherd from my birth to this day—
16 The Angel [הַמַּלְאָךְ֩] who has redeemed me from all harm—
Bless the lads.
The two things you see right away are:
The mal’akh here is not a new arrival, but a callback to before our parasha begins.
The mal’akh is essentially equivalent to God — in short, an avatar.
So — the way the book of Genesis tells our story, at least — mal’akh is a word that’s associated with the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: their times, their families, and their surroundings. The first mal’akh does not show up until Genesis 16, with the story of Hagar; the last mal’akhim are at the beginning of Genesis 32: the end of Parshat Vayetze and as Parashat Vayeshev, this week’s parasha, begins. Jacob “converts” the mal’akhim who are angels into his own messengers and that’s it. No more avatars in the book of Genesis except in that blessing at the very end of the book, where Jacob recalls the angel who had protected him.
To return to our original question, the Christian division of the verses keeps both the mal’akhim and the “camps” together. The Jewish division keeps Mahanaim, the double camp of the angels, separate from the two camps of Jacob’s family and the messengers he sends to Esau. It is a step in the direction of the world we live in now, where we see only what is evident to our material senses and not the extra dimensions where dark energy, dark matter, and who knows what else may be hidden from us.