outWORD by Matte Downey

Jacob's Dream by Jusepe de Ribera This is the second in a series: Stories from Exile. You can read part one  here . The biblical texts are full of stories featuring people who leave home for one reason or another and find themselves in an in-between place. The entire saga of Abraham and Sarah is underscored by a sense of un-belonging. The history of Israel is filled with tales situated in liminal spaces. People are running from danger, travelling to find a wife, searching for livestock, going to war, passing through a foreign land, or wandering in the wilderness.  One of these in-between stories is found in Genesis 28. Barbara Brown Taylor summarizes the familiar tale: There he was, still a young man, running away from home because the whole screwy family had finally imploded. His father was dying. He and his twin brother, Esau, had both wanted their father’s blessing. Jacob’s mother had colluded with him to get it, and though his scheme worked, it enraged his brother to the p...

The Hebrew Bible, also known as the Old Testament, sometimes gets a bad rap. So much violence, so many harsh judgments and prophecies, so much bad behaviour, so much patriarchy. At first glance, it seems to paint a rather unattractive picture not only of the people of God but of God himself. But if we look a little closer, we find that things are not always as they seem. Take patriarchy, for example. Patriarchy is a societal and familial system in which the father and the eldest male are the authority figures. The first-born son dominates the family in power, wealth, and privilege. It is a system very unfriendly to women and anyone not lucky enough to be the firstborn male. And this objectionable, unjust system seems to lie at the very foundation of Judaism and Christianity. What is one to do with those pesky patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? The first thing we can do is note that while patriarchy is the context of the story of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, it is not t...