In advance of bicentennial, cities make competing claims for Poe legacy

by Maud | November 19th, 2008

Richmond & Boston join Philly & Baltimore in the City of Poe championships. How long before da Bronx steps into the ring?

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The Begats

I’m increasingly interested in the prominence of household deities, or some kind of ancestor worship, in the history of almost every place and every religion — even Western Europe before medieval Christianity began to supplant ancestors with saints.

Household gods appear several times in the Old Testament. In Genesis Rachel steals her father’s household gods as she, her husband, Jacob, and her sister (and sister wife), Leah, flee her father Laban’s house. Jacob has spent many years in virtual servitude to Laban, and received little to show for it apart from one wife he wanted and one wife he did not particularly want. Laban comes after the caravan and searches it for his household gods, but Rachel, who’s sitting on the idols, says she can’t dismount from her camel because she has her period.

Many argumentative gymnastics have been performed over time in trying to reconcile this passage with Judeo-Christian monotheism but Susannah Rutherglen argues that Rachel took the idols for the most logical reason: they represent a connection to her ancestors, to her father and his forebears, blood relatives she’s leaving behind.

The family packs hastily while Laban is away, shearing his sheep. There must be a great deal of confusion, panic, and prevailing fear that the paterfamilias will suddenly return and discover their preparations.

For Rachel and Leah, the fear is deeper: they are suddenly leaving their home forever, going away to a place they have never seen. They pack essential things. Rachel seizes her father’s teraphim, the gods of the hearth, of the home she knows and with which she has bonds of family and domestic ritual. These gods probably represent the figures of Laban’s ancestors.

She conceals them from Jacob for several potential reasons. First, she has done something instinctual, for her own security and comfort, which Jacob has not explicitly instructed her to do. Second, such a theft, if discovered by Laban, would thwart the escape and lead to unspecified dire punishments. Finally and most importantly, the gods are Laban’s possessions, and they are probably deities representing the worship of ancestors; they thus run exactly counter to all of Jacob’s efforts to differentiate his things and his family from Laban’s. For the panicked Rachel, probably no single reason takes precedence; some uncertain combination of these motives conspires to make her conceal the teraphim.

Three days later, Laban finds Jacob and his convoy. He immediately shows his concern to lie more with the sudden breach of a family bond than with the fact of Jacob’s defiance. “Why did you not permit me to kiss my sons and my daughters farewell?” he asks (31:28). Interestingly, he seems to accept the reasoning behind Jacob’s departure: “And now you have gone away because you longed greatly for your father’s house” (30)—he understands the pull of the father because he himself is attempting to exert that pull. And he is constrained from doing violence to Jacob by a command from God: “It is in my power to do you harm, but the God of your father spoke to me last night, saying, ‘Take heed that you speak to Jacob, neither good nor bad’” (29). Laban has only one way of reclaiming his family, and that is by proving Jacob a thief of objects explicitly belonging to the house of Laban: the teraphim.

It is hard to say why Rachel conceals the teraphim by claiming to be menstruating; perhaps just because the ruse is ingenious, and because it works. I do not think it a coincidence, though, that Rachel’s trick involves her own blood-the one link to Laban that Jacob cannot sever. The objects and symbolism of family lineage are too strong here to be fortuitous: a man speaking to his blood daughter, who is about to go far away from him; the daughter, fertile because she is menstruating, the mother of the twelve tribes of Israel; her blood, which is half her father’s, concealing objects of reverence for one’s ancestors. It is difficult to imagine a more potent convergence of images centering on Rachel’s inextricable bond to the hearth and lineage of Laban, from whom she is about to be irrevocably separated.

The image above is of Chagall’s “Rachel Hides Her Father’s Household Gods,” from his series of Biblical lithographs.
01/21/15

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