The Folktale in the Old Testament 9781474266598, 9781474231602, 9781474231619

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INTRODUCTION

In April 1911 Gunkel wrote to his friend Hugo Gressmann, 'I count it as one of the great good fortunes of my life that I was able to find you.. . You are the one whom I have to thank for drawing my attention to folktale'.' This generous praise explains why Gunkel dedicated The Folktale in the Old Testament to Gressmann. It is also a reminder that it was not until he was in his late forties that Gunkel began to appreciate fully the implications of folktale research for Old Testament study. Hermann Gunkel was. born in May 1862 in Springe, seventeen . ~ studied at miles fEom Hanover, the son of a Lutheran p a ~ t o r He Hanover's university of Gottingen, where his teachers included the systematic theologian Albrecht Ritschl and the famous classicist Wilamowitz. He also spent a year in Halle where he heard the great historian of dogma Adolf von Harnack. Back in Gottingen, he joined the group of young scholars who had gathered around Albert Eichhorn, and who were to represent what later came to be called the 'history of religions' school. This was not a group concerned primarily with comparative religion, but rather, a group that believed that in order to understand something hlly, it was necessary to know its history. In the'case of biblical studies this meant probing back behind the text of the Bible to trace the history of the elements that made up the final form of the text. In some cases, these elements would have their origins in religions different from that of Israel and the early church. In what follows in this introduction, there will be many instances of how this programme was carried out by Gunkel. At this stage of his career, Gunkel was not specifically an Old Testament scholar. The two dissertations on the basis of which he gained the right to lecture in the theological Faculty in Gottingen

Chapter One POETICAL STORIES IN THE OLD TESTAMENT

By its nature the folktale [Mikchen] belongs together with myth [Mythus], saga [Sage] and legend [Legende]; these four forms are the main components of the class of 'poetical stories' [poetische Erziihlungen] in antiquity. Our first task is to examine how this narrative type stands in relation to 'historiography' [Geschichtsschreibung] in the strict sense. Historiography

Historiography is essentially a learned literary genre. For the historian wants to depict the real facts of the events: he or she wants to break through the popular prejudices concerning the facts of the past and thereby show their interconnections, which means that historiography is always accompanied to some degree by historical criticism and a philosophy of history. Such an appreciation of past events is not, however, an inborn gift of human intellect, but it arises at a particular level of general intellectual development. Resolute historical thought, which does not ask what people imagine the past to have been, but purely and simply what it was really like and which attaches a very high value to these impartial findings, can only come about when humankind has awoken fiom its early 'dreamtime'. And even later on only a small number of intellectuals can manage to attain this high level of objective observation. The majority of humankind remains on a lower level. Accordingly the historian-even in our own time-does not appeal to every single person, but only to a particular group, to those who are of like mind. In the world of antiquity, the same is

Chapter Two THE FOLKTALE IN GENERAL AND IN THE OLD TESTAMENT

We shall first bring together some simple observations concerning the nature of the folktale in order to give the reader a certain idea of what is to to be understood by this genre. Only when we have such a general idea can we move on to our real concern of whether and to what extent folktales and folktale material are present in the Old Testament as well. At the same time, it is, of course, part of the nature of the present study that we shall be unable to go too deeply into the results of folktale research and into the numerous problems yet unsolved.' The Nature of the Folktale

On hearing the term 'folktale' or 'fairytale', readers who are uninitiated into this field of research probably think first of all of the German tales known to them from Grimm, or perhaps also the Arabian 'Thousand and One Nights', and are inclined to call 'folktales' those stories in which they rediscover the guileless tone of the German or the fantastic nature of Arabian stories. We, however, use the word in a much more general 1 [9] sense in calling the poetical stories of primitive people 'folktales' and we are of the opinion that essentially the same type of narrative continues to exist also among the more developed civilized peoples as a lower form of narrative art. Characteristic of folktales in contrast to myths is the fact that the figures of the great gods are still not yet present; but it should be noticed here straight away that in the folktales handed down to us by a later period the gods have forced their way in, here and there,

Chapter Three NATURE FABLES AND NATURE FOLKTALES

Our best starting point is with nature fables, a genre whose existence in the Bible is indisputable and totally unobjectionable to all concerned. Nature Fables The wooing of the thorn bush When the king of Judah once impudently challenged the king of Israel to battle, the latter is supposed to have sent him the 'story of the wooing of the thorn bush' in a message to warn him against such an enterprise. The thorn bush*' sent to the cedar in Lebanon saying: 'Give your daughter as wife to my son!' But the wild beasts on Lebanon ran over the thorn bush and trampled it (2 Kgs 14.9).

The story is related with extraordinary economy: it presupposes that the cedar is the most noble and the thorn bush the most miserable of plants; and in the middle of the story we have to supply the fact that the cedar, offended by the suit of the thorn bush, summons up its army, i.e. 'the wild beasts on Lebanon', against the bush. It is all a fable, for it obviously contains a moral: the base should not dare to raise their eyes to the great, otherwise they will be humiliated and suffer a downfall. What is significant, however, is that the fable in ancient times was so refined a genre that even kings could have them on their lips when engaged in state affairs. As this story does not deal with a challenge to war but with a marriage proposal-in other words, it does not completely coincide with the

Chapter Four FOLKTALE MOTIFS DRAWN FROM NATURE Apart from the more extensive passages which we have just examined there is also an abundance of separate motifs deriving from the primitive view of nature-motifs which we can view as characteristic of folktales. These kinds of motifs can be found most especially 1[31] in sagas, though they reappear also in legends. The Power of Speech

The ancients even thought of animals as having the power of speech and of some of them as being extremely clever. Thus we see that the serpent in paradise is a very sly animal indeed, wiser than the still rather dull human: it knows what is special about the tree of knowledge and, in malice, tries to incite the humans to disobey God (Gen 4). On the other hand Balaarn's donkey sees the angel threatening her master with drawn sword before Balaam himself does, even though he is a man of God. She, by moving out of the way at the right moment, acts reasonably, whereas he, by beating her for doing so, acts stupidly. But then she defends herself by speaking; and the power of speech is something very special for the narrator: 'Yahweh had opened her mouth'. Yet just as the humans in paradise are not shocked by the serpent speaking, so here Balaam answers without showing any sign of amazement, quite innocently starting a conversation with her (Num 22.23fQ. Such acceptance of animals speaking1 as a natural process is the clearest sign of the spirit of the folktale: Little Red Riding Hood shows just as little astonishment when the wolf addresses her;

Chapter Five FOLKTALES ABOUT TOOLS AND OTHER OBJECTS Quite frequently, primitive thought has attributed a kind of life even to human-made objects. The ancient regarded his weapons in a way similar to the savage of the present day who marvels at firearms or views the telephone with amazement. 'They were not dead tools with no will of their own; rather they seemed to be alive and animated by demonic powers'; they were given names like living beings; 'Sword worship has been reported of several barbaric peoples, among the Teutons the Quadi in particular'.' According to Herodotus (IV 62), the Scythians held an 1 [56] annual festival to an ancient, holy sword. In Knossos on Crete the double-headed axe was the holy symbol whose associated cult spread, probably from Asia Minor, over an extraordinarily wide area.' According to Habakkuk (Hab 1.19), the Chaldeans 'sacrifice to the fishing line and make offerings to their nets' with which they had captured the whole world. Even the Israelite prophets speak of a demonic sword which they call Yahweh's 'sword', but which they sometimes envisage as an independent being (Isa 27.1; 34.5; Jer 47.6; Ezek 21.8fIJ3 Such concepts linger on in folktales. Thus 'the flame of the flickering sword' stands guard before paradise; painters put it in the hand of a cherub sentry, but in the text it is thought of as a being in its own right (Gen 3.24). A Greek counterpart to such living tools is the hammer of Hephaistos.

In one of his most sublime passages, rejecting Assyria's rebellion against Yahweh as foolish presumption, Isaiah has a parable that sounds like an allusion to a fable (Isa 10.15):

Chapter Six TALES OF SPIRITS, DEMONS AND SPECTRES

We come now to the real religion of the folktale. Anyone who knows these stories, even superficially, realizes that there are no higher gods in them or that, at least, they remain in the background. By contrast, all kinds of spirits, demons, goblins, demonic animals, spectres and giants play a much larger r6le. Of course, at its most elevated level Yahwistic religion was strictly monotheistic and excluded all such lower beings. Thus stories dealing with them are only preserved in sundry fragments and reinterpretations. Nevertheless we still come across a rich abundance of such figures in our texts-proof of how much they once dominated the imagination of ancient Israel. It is also often the case that these figures found their way in from foreign sources. Jacob at Penuel

A quite clear example of the after-effect of an ancient goblin tale on Israelite tradition is the story of Jacob's fight with the divine being at Penuel (Gen 32.23-32). Preserved in a very terse narrative style withholding much information, the story has been handed down both by the Yahwist and the Elohist, the two older narrative sources in the Pentateuch. Both variants, now welded together, can still be separated with some degree of certainty. First the narrative of the Yahwist, which, though not quite complete, can be reconstructed as follows: That same night he arose, took both his wives, his maids and his eleven children; and he crossed the ford at Jabbok. There someone wrestled with him until the sunrise came. But Jacob dislocated his

Chapter Seven TALES ABOUT GIANTS

Among the superhuman beings, giants play a particularly important role in the fblktales of many peoples.' Even in the Old Testament there are some traces of these stories. Such giants are so large that normal humans are like grasshoppers by comparison (Num 13.33). Typical is Goliath: he is six cubits and a span tall, his armour weighs 5,000 shekels, the shaft of his spear is as long as a weaver's beam and has a point that weighs 600 shekels (1 Sam 17.4E). A man of this kind can slay 1,000 men with a donkey's jawbone Uudg 15.15) and can carry a whole city gate with the posts and bars on his back Uudg 16.3). We may understand perhaps the famous Nimrod as a giant: a saying circulated about him, 'a mighty hunter before Yahweh like Nimrod' (Gen 10.9), and he invites comparison with the figures of the Greek Orion 1 [94] and the German 'Heavenly Hunter' Uager am Himmel). Alternatively, the giants were thought of as mighty warriors of the primaeval period. People must once have spoken a great deal of the 'nephilim7-giant, valiant warriors, comparable with the Titans or the Gigantes of the Greeks. 'They were the heroes of the ancient times, the famous men', is how it is explained in a short fragment in Genesis (Gen 6.1-4) which might once have prefaced all kinds of stories about the deeds of the 'nephilim', explaining their origin in mythological fashion as the cominghng of the sons of God with the daughters of humans. It was assumed that when such warriors died they were buried in the full panoply of their armour; perhaps there were old songs about this. They were the ones (Ezek 32.27)

Chapter Eight TALES OF MAGIC

As everyone familiar with folktales knows, the real practical religion of these primitive stories is sorcery, that is, the attempt of humans to steer the higher powers to their own benefit by means of certain mysterious actions. Now the Israelite religion-particularly at its zenith-had always on principle rejected magic, with its manipulation of the gods and its strange, dark, concealed forces (Exod 22.17; Lev 20.17; Deut 18.10; 1 Sam 15.23; 2 Sam 28.3; 2 Kgs 21.67; Isa 8.19 etc.), even though sorcery was endemic in the population and was constantly seeping in fkom abroad (Isa 2.6); the typical sorcerer in the Israelite 1 [97] sagas is Balaarn-a non-Israelite (Num 22Q. This opposition was not caused, however, by people doubting the efficacy of such secret arts; it was rather that they desired help solely from Yahweh in all their fictions. In these circumstances, certain things which belonged in essence to the world of sorcery were still able to live on under the cloak of higher religion. So, too, were some fragments of magic folktales preserved in Israel, even though they had to endure being transferred to the Israelite men of God, particularly Moses and Elijah, and so serve to glorifl the true God and his emissaries.' Power in the magician's body

According to ancient belief, magic power is located especially in the body of the magician. So, in Israel, also, there is the story of Elijah stretching his body three times over the dead son of the widow of Zarephath and thus bringing him back to life (1 Kgs 17.21). One is even more struck by the magical dimension in the related Elisha

Chapter Nine FOLKTALES WITH PRIMITIVE BELIEFS ABOUT THE SOUL

Following on fiom the preceding discussion, we can now add the different kinds of motifs or narratives arising fiom primitive conceptions of the mind or soul. The secret place of the soul

According to very ancient belief, the soul of a person can be in some place other than its normal one, so that only someone aware of this secret can master the person, who otherwise remains out of every one else's reach. Folktales then go on to relate how, despite this, the person can still be overcome: blindly unsuspecting, he himself reveals the secret information to the woman for whom his heart has fallen, and she betrays the secret to his enemies, so bringing his downfall. This motif is applied to Samson in the Old Testament. His secret is that his mighty strength is contained in his hair-he is strong as long as he has his locks of hair; if they are cut off, he will be 'like any other man'. Cunning Delilah, however, whom he loves too well, is successful in enticing the secret fiom him and in robbing him of his strength by cutting his hair, with the result that he can be overcome by his enemies, the Philistines (Judg 16.4fQ. In the folktales and sagas of ancient and modern times, we can meet once more this, for us so peculiar, motif We need only mention the Greek saga of Pterelaos whose single golden hair afforded him victory and life. However, when he found himself in combat against Amphitryon, his daughter, Komaitho, pulled this hair out because of her love for the latter, and the father lost his life.2 Even the hrther

Chapter Ten FOLKTALES ABOUT CHILDREN

In addition to religious motifs there are also all kinds of secular ones. In the narratives, and especially in the older ones, they lie alongside each other or are intermingled. Given the extremely wide variety of these secular motifs there is not the remotest possibility of our including everything here. To achieve a simpler overall view, we will deal with them in order, by age-group, by sex, and finally by social status. We begin, in the present chapter, with those motifs that concern children. In primitive tales,' especially in those of the orient, children are regarded as the most precious treasure of their parents. Sad is the lot of the man and woman whose dearest hope has come to nothing and who must leave this life without descendants. 'Among the many poor people who there have always been on this earth, there was once a man and a woman who were most particularly poor, for they did not even have a child'-so begins a Bosnian f ~ l k t a l e .When ~ Yahweh promises him a rich reward, Abraham answers: 'lord Yahweh, what would you give me? I am going from here without children' (Gen 15.2). All the greater is their joy when this hope is fulfilled after long waiting. With what rejoicing they welcome such a child of old age! The child of the barren mother

For this reason it is a favourite motif in folktales that the hero be born after his mother has been long barren, a motif with which the stories often begin. In the Old Testament this is a recurrent feature 1 [I 131 of the Abraham sagas, one which, however, also recurs at the births of Jacob and Esau (Gen 25.21), Joseph (Gen 30.23f), Samson

Chapter Eleven FOLKTALES OF YOUNG MEN AND WOMEN

First, we look at sundry tales about youths of various ages. It is peculiar how much the folktale-in Hebrew no less than in German-takes the part of youth,1 a sign that such stories were told The energetic lad, the enterprising youth especially to ~hildren.~ before whom the whole world lies open, was just as much a subject to enjoy in former times as in our own. Indeed, such a young person striding boldly along life's path might even find a kingdom at the end of his way! How many German folktales have this happy ending! Thus Saul, too, dispatched by his father to look for some lost donkeys, comes to be anointed king without having any inkling of this outcome or even wanting it (1 Sam 90; and Joseph must become at least first in the land after Pharaoh (Gen 41.41% cf Mordecai in Esth 10.3)! On children are bestowed the most important oracles: the boy Joseph has dreams about the future, and young Samuel hears God's voice (1 Sam 3).3 Further, though little more than children, they succeed in great deeds: just as Siegfked, while still almost a boy, slays the dragon, so David, when hardly grown out of childhood, kills the mighty Philistine (1 Sam 17); Daniel, although still very young, decides over the difficult trial of Susanna (Addition to Daniel); and, as a twelve-year old, Jesus arouses the amazement of the scribes through his cleverly posed questions and his apposite answers (Lk 2.46f). Youth and age juxtaposed

The primitive tale particularly likes to place a boy or young man side-by-side with an older man and to give preference to the former.

Chapter Thirteen TALES O F SOCIAL STANDING

It is not an infrequent occurrence in folktales for certain social classes to be depicted. In German folktales, we have farmers, woodcutters, smiths, cobblers, tailors, shepherd and goose-boys and many others.' Even in the Old Testament some similar 'tales about social standing' have been handed down. Herdsman and hunter: Jacob and Esau

Thus Jacob and Esau are contrasted as herdsman and hunter. The folktale raises the question of which of them deserves precedence, and answers this question in two narratives. Both accounts agree that the hunter is, naturally, the firstborn, but the herdsman has learnt how to rob him of this advantage of birth: Jacob purchased Esau's birthright for a lentil soup (Gen 25.29-31) and by deception deprived him of the 'blessing' from his ageing father, Isaac (Gen 27). Thereby, in this simple form, have the folktale writers excellently observed and handed down an event of considerable cultural and historical moment, namely the retreat of the uncultivated hunter before the cultivated herdsman. Moreover, they have portrayed both modes of existence in ways that are splendidly true to life. The tale of the birthright The hunter-according to the tale of the birthright-lives from hand to mouth. If he finds an animal, he kills it. Often he returns home exhausted and without a catch and must then go hungry. If he has something to eat today he does not think about tomorrow. The herdsman, however, is more astute: he does not kill the animals, but

Chapter Fourteen FOLKTALE MOTIFS IN THE PRIMAEVAL HISTORY

In the previous discussion, we have come across some folktale motifs which have been handed down to us in the biblical 'primaeval history'. Among these we might single out especially the concept of a beautiful far-away land where humankind once dwelt, with its mighty waters and magnificent trees, particularly the 'tree of life'; also the serpent, thought of as a demonic animal (see above, ch. 4). In addition, there are other motifs of a similar character. ![I531 The Yahwist's paradise narrative, which includes the above details, has the overall purpose of explaining humankind's present situation, i.e. it is an 'aetiological' story. Man, here presented as a farmer, experiences much misery and affliction in his fields; similarly, his wife, his companion, has much to bear in the trials and tribulations of her sex. Their lot is without hope, ending only with death. This story then relates how this condition came to pass. Once it was different: then humankind was content, they did not have the tedious job of being farmers, but were gardeners in paradise. Further, woman was not a childbearer, because man and woman had not yet discovered their sex, but they lived together like children: 'They were naked and were not ashamed before each other'. But they forfeited this initial happiness by a sin. The deity in whose realm they dwelt had forbidden them to eat from 'the tree of knowledge', lest they exalt themselves too much. But they, seduced by the evil serpent, transgressed this command. They thus achieved greater 'knowledge': they moved from their dull childishness into the light of reason. However, because of this sin they were driven out of paradise and their future life was cursed. It is evident that a people that indulges in such contemplations

Chapter Fifteen REVIEW OF T H E MATERIAL ACCORDING T O FORM AND CONTENT The material presented here is so extraordinarily diverse that our observations require summarizing and ordering. Folktale characteristics

First, let us review the characteristics by which the narratives collected in the preceding chapters reveal themselves as folktales. Fantasy What is particularly distinctive of folktales is the 1 [I581 fantasy that is their peculiar nature. How many strange stories we have encountered! A tree grows so high and broad that all the birds of the heavens can nest in it and all the animals of the field can give birth under its branches (above, ch. 3). Not only can humans speak but plants also and even the body's members struggle against each other (ch. 3). On the wall there appears a mysterious script written by a supernatural hand (ch. 13). Demons wrestle with humans in the night or ensnare women with their passionate desire (ch. 6). Or a man thrown into the sea is rescued fiom death by a fish which swallows him and spews him up onto land (ch. 12). Another flies up to heaven on a fiery chariot (ch. 4). A shepherd boy ascends the throne (ch. 13), and a young girl of unknown parentage becomes queen (chs. 10, 13). The sun and the moon stand still on the command of the man of God; the sea divides when he raises his st&, the dead return to life (ch. 8). Credulity Yet all this and much more is reported in the majority of these narratives (excluding only the fables, parables and allegories) as