Gaps and What the Text Leaves Out

The Hermeneutics lesson on narrative introduced Meir Sternberg's phrase for what Hebrew narrative does to its reader: a drama of reading, in which the text withholds, the reader supplies, and the text later shows how well the reader did it. Sternberg, an Israeli literary scholar, set out the argument in full in The Poetics of Biblical Narrative (1985), and his chapter on gaps is the most useful thing in it for a preacher. With Menakhem Perry he had already published, in Hebrew in 1968, a famous reading of David and Bathsheba built on the gaps in 2 Samuel 11; the Hermeneutics lesson worked that chapter, and this lesson does not repeat it.

Sternberg's first move is a distinction that saves a great deal of foolishness. Every story leaves things out, because no story can say everything. Most of what is left out does not matter: what Abraham ate on the second day, the colour of the donkey, the names of the two servants. Sternberg called omissions of that kind blanks. A gap, by contrast, is an omission that matters to the meaning, one the reader feels and is meant to feel, which invites him to weigh possibilities. The question a reader must ask of every silence is which of the two it is. The colour of the donkey is a blank. What Abraham felt when he heard God's command is a gap, and the narrator knows you will ask.

Gaps also differ in how long they last. Some are temporary: the text withholds something and supplies it later, and part of the art is in the delay. Others are permanent: the text never tells you, and the reader has to live with more than one possibility. Sternberg's point was that both kinds are deliberate. The narrator who refuses to tell you what Abraham felt is not careless or primitive. He is placing you where Abraham's servants stood, watching a man act and not knowing why.

There is one more piece of the machinery to see before reading Genesis 22, and it is the opposite of a gap. The narrator sometimes tells the reader what a character does not know. Genesis 22:1 opens וְהָאֱלֹהִים נִסָּה אֶת־אַבְרָהָם (veha'Elohim nissah et-Avraham), and God tested Abraham. The verb is a piel perfect of nasah, to test, in a noun-first clause of the kind you met in Lesson 1, stepping off the chain to give background. The reader is told from the first sentence that this is a test. Abraham is not. Everything that follows is read by someone who knows more than the man on the mountain, and the tension of the chapter depends on that difference.

Open the verse in the Hebrew of the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC). It begins קַח־נָא (qach-na), take, with a small particle attached. The verb is a qal imperative of laqach, to take. The particle נָא (na) is much discussed. Traditionally it softens a command or a request, which is why older English sometimes renders it I pray thee and modern versions often please. The Babylonian Talmud (Sanhedrin 89b) reads it that way here: na, it says, is nothing but an expression of request, and God is asking Abraham rather than ordering him. Thomas Lambdin's widely used grammar (1971) argued instead that na marks a command as the logical consequence of what precedes it or of the situation, so that please is often too weak or simply wrong. Grammarians since have not reached agreement. The BSB leaves it untranslated. Whichever view you take, notice that a gap opens on the first word: you cannot tell from the English, and the Hebrew does not settle, how this command was spoken.

Then the four phrases the inquiry asked you to find. אֶת־בִּנְךָ (et-binkha), your son. אֶת־יְחִידְךָ (et-yechidkha), your only one. אֲשֶׁר־אָהַבְתָּ (asher-ahavta), whom you love. אֶת־יִצְחָק (et-Yitschaq), Isaac. Each phrase narrows the one before, and the name arrives last, when there can be no doubt left. The rabbis heard the slowness as a dialogue with the gaps filled in, as you will see in section 4. A reader does not need the dialogue to feel the effect. The command comes in stages, each one closer to the boy.

Two of those words deserve a second look. יָחִיד (yachid), only, is said of Isaac to a man whose other son was sent away in the previous chapter. It is true in the sense the story cares about, since Isaac is the son of the promise, and it is also said into a fresh wound, and the narrator does not comment. And אָהַבְתָּ (ahavta), you love, a qal perfect of ahav, is the first occurrence of the verb to love in the Hebrew Bible. You can check that with the concordance: search the Strong's number H157 and look at the first result. The first love the Bible names is a father's love for his son, in the sentence that tells him to give the son up.

Then וְלֶךְ־לְךָ (velekh-lekha), and go. The same two words, lekh lekha, open God's first call to Abraham in Genesis 12:1, 'Leave your country, your kindred, and your father's household'. In the whole of Genesis they stand together in only these two places, at the start of his journey and at its hardest point. In 12:1 he is to go to a land God will show him, אֲשֶׁר אַרְאֶךָּ (asher ar'ekka). In 22:2 he is to go to one of the mountains אֲשֶׁר אֹמַר אֵלֶיךָ (asher omar eleikha), which I will tell you. The BSB renders both as show, which is good sense, but the Hebrew verbs are different: see in the first, say in the second. The land of Moriah is named only here and in 2 Chronicles 3:1, which places Solomon's temple on Mount Moriah. And the command itself, וְהַעֲלֵהוּ שָׁם לְעֹלָה (veha'alehu sham le'olah), offer him up there as a burnt offering, is a hiphil imperative of alah, to go up, with a suffix: make him go up. The burnt offering, the olah, is the offering that goes up whole.

Now list the gaps, and test each one against Sternberg's distinction. First and largest, Abraham's inner life. Verse 3 is a single unbroken chain of six wayyiqtol verbs: he rose early, saddled his donkey, took two of his young men and Isaac his son, split the wood, arose and went. No word of hesitation, grief or argument, from the same man who argued with God for Sodom in Genesis 18. This is a gap, not a blank: any reader feels it, and the contrast with chapter 18 makes it louder. Erich Auerbach's famous comparison of this chapter with Homer, discussed in the Hermeneutics lesson, starts exactly here.

Second, Sarah. She is not mentioned in Genesis 22 at all. Is she told? Does she know? The next chapter opens with her death in 23:2. The text makes no connection between the two, and you will see in the next section what tradition made of the silence. Third, Isaac. He is called הַנַּעַר (hanna'ar), the boy or young man, in 22:5 and 22:12, the same word the narrator uses for the two servants, and he is old enough to carry the wood for a burnt offering up a mountain. Beyond that his age is not given. It matters, because it bears on whether he could have resisted, and the text will not say.

Fourth, Abraham's words to his servants in 22:5, which the inquiry asked you to parse: let us go, and we will worship, and we will return to you. Fifth, his answer to Isaac in 22:8: אֱלֹהִים יִרְאֶה־לּוֹ הַשֶּׂה לְעֹלָה בְּנִי (Elohim yir'eh-lo hasseh le'olah beni). The BSB renders it 'God Himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.' The verb is a qal imperfect of ra'ah, to see: God will see to it for himself. Is this faith, evasion, or a father unable to say the truth to his son? And there is an old reading, preserved in Jewish tradition, that hears the last word in apposition: God will see to the lamb for the burnt offering, namely, my son. Most commentators reject it as the plain sense, but it shows how much the narrator has left in the reader's hands.

Sixth, and most haunting, the end. Verse 6 says וַיֵּלְכוּ שְׁנֵיהֶם יַחְדָּו (vayyelkhu shneihem yachdav), and the two of them went on together, and verse 8 says it again. Verse 19 says וַיָּשָׁב אַבְרָהָם אֶל־נְעָרָיו (vayyashov Avraham el-ne'arav), and Abraham returned to his young men, and they arose and went together to Beersheba. Isaac is not named. The two who went up together do not come down together in the text. Is that a blank, because the narrator assumes Isaac is with his father, or a gap? Readers have taken it both ways for more than a thousand years. And seventh, a gap in what is said about God: in 22:12 the angel says כִּי עַתָּה יָדַעְתִּי (ki attah yada'ti), for now I know, that you fear God. Section 5 takes that one up.

The rabbis of the Talmud and the midrash filled the slow naming of 22:2 with a conversation, and Rashi passed it on in his commentary. God says, Take your son. Abraham answers, I have two sons. Your only one. Each is the only one of his mother. Whom you love. I love them both. Isaac. The dialogue is a beautiful piece of reading, and it is honest about what it is: in the rabbinic tradition such filling is derash, interpretation that searches the text, and it was never confused with the plain sense, which Jewish commentators called peshat. It answers a real gap, the slowness of the command, with something the text does not contain.

Other silences drew bolder fillings. Rashi, drawing on earlier midrash, explains Sarah's death in 23:2 as caused by the news of the binding, so that the next chapter opens on its consequence. The absence of Isaac in 22:19 gave rise, in some medieval Jewish traditions, to the idea that Isaac had actually been sacrificed and restored. Shalom Spiegel traced that tradition in The Last Trial (Hebrew 1950, English 1967). The medieval commentator Abraham ibn Ezra rejected it outright as contrary to the text, which is an instructive moment: a commentator inside the same tradition insisting that a gap must not be filled against what the passage plainly says. Christian readers have their own fillings, many of them typological, reading the wood laid on Isaac and the ram in his place alongside the cross.

Søren Kierkegaard, in Fear and Trembling (1843), did something different again. He opened the book by imagining several versions of the journey to Moriah, each with a different Abraham inside it, and he presented them openly as imaginings. His aim was to show how impossible it is for a reader to think his way into Abraham's silence. That is a legitimate thing for a philosopher to do, because he labels it. A preacher who tells a congregation that Abraham wept all night before he rose early has done the same thing without the label.

And then the New Testament. Hebrews 11:19 says that 'Abraham reasoned that God could raise the dead, and in a sense, he did receive Isaac back from death.' The writer supplies exactly what Genesis withheld at 22:5: an inward reason for we will return. For a reader who receives Hebrews as scripture, this is a filling of a different kind, an inspired interpretation, and it carries an authority that Rashi, Kierkegaard and the preacher do not. James 2:21-23 does something else. It does not enter Abraham's mind; it reads his act as faith working together with his deeds. Both are scripture interpreting scripture, and neither licenses you to invent a third. Notice the four kinds of filling, then: canonical, traditional, openly imaginative, and the unlabelled filling of a sermon. Only the first speaks with the authority of the text, and only the last pretends to.

Here is a method you can use on any narrative. First, ask whether the silence is a gap or a blank. If nothing in the story depends on it, leave it alone. Second, ask whether the text fills it later. Many gaps are temporary, and the worst mistake is to fill with imagination what the narrator answers five verses on. Third, ask whether another passage of scripture speaks into it, as Hebrews 11 does for Genesis 22:5. Fourth, if the gap is still open, list the possibilities the text allows, and weigh each by the evidence in the passage itself: the words used, the order, the echoes of other passages, what the characters say and do before and after.

Fifth, when you preach or teach, mark your inference as inference. There is a world of difference between saying 'the text does not tell us what Abraham felt, but a father who has just lost one son might well' and saying 'Abraham's heart was breaking'. The first opens the text; the second adds to it. Sixth, never put words in a character's mouth and present them as the text, and never describe a scene with details the text does not have as though you were reading them. Seventh, accept that some gaps are meant to stay open, and that the discomfort they cause may be the point. Genesis 22 does not want you to know what Abraham felt. It wants you to watch what he did.

Now try the rules on the hardest gap in the chapter, the angel's for now I know in 22:12, because it is a gap about God and the church is divided over it. One reading, held in various forms by the classical tradition, takes the words as speech accommodated to human understanding, or as meaning now it is made known: Augustine, in The City of God, read the sentence as now I have caused it to be known, since God's knowledge does not grow. On this view the test reveals Abraham's faith to Abraham and to the reader, not to God. Another reading, pressed in recent decades by open theists such as John Sanders in The God Who Risks (1998) and Gregory Boyd in God of the Possible (2000), takes the words at face value: God genuinely learned something through the test, because the outcome of a free human decision was not yet settled. Both readings take the text seriously. The first reads 22:12 in the light of passages about God's complete knowledge; the second reads those passages in the light of texts like this one. The Hebrew perfect yada'ti, I know or I have come to know, does not decide between them, and the Systematic Theology track sets out the doctrine. In this lesson, the rule is simply to show your hearers where the text speaks and where the theologian does.

Sternberg wrote with great confidence about the control the biblical narrator exercises over his reader. He argued that the Bible's art is, in his phrase, a foolproof composition: a reader may underread it or overread it, but the text is built so that its basic values cannot be turned upside down. Critics have found this too confident. David Gunn and Danna Nolan Fewell, in Narrative in the Hebrew Bible (1993), represent a more reader-centred approach in which gaps open the text to more than one legitimate reading, and in which readers from different places, including readers attentive to the women and the outsiders in a story, will rightly hear different things. Deconstructive and some feminist readers go further and argue that the gaps can be read against the narrator's own values.

Historical critics raise a different objection. Some gaps, they argue, are not artistic choices at all but the traces of editing. Many source critics have assigned most of Genesis 22 to an older strand and regarded the second speech of the angel, 22:15-18, as a later addition, which would make the chapter's shape partly the work of more than one hand. Literary readers answer that the final form is still the text the community received and read, and that an editor can create a gap as deliberately as an author. A student does not have to adjudicate the composition of Genesis to read the chapter well, but he should know that a silence may have more than one explanation.

And there is a pastoral caution, which comes from readers of every school. Teaching people to notice gaps can become teaching them to fill gaps, and a congregation trained to find meaning in silences can learn to find whatever it wants there. The rules in section 5 are the answer, and they are the reason this module asks you to keep facts and explanations on separate lines of your notebook.

Your step this week: on a new page headed Gaps, take the narrative you chose for your Narrator page. Read it in the BSB and list every silence you notice: a missing motive, a missing feeling, a missing person, an unexplained action, an unspoken reply. Beside each, write G for gap or B for blank, with one sentence of reason. For each gap, check the next chapter and use a cross-reference tool, such as the cross-references on Blue Letter Bible, to see whether the text fills it later or another passage speaks into it. For the gaps that remain open, write two or three possibilities the text allows and one line of evidence for each. Circle the gap you think the narrator most wants you to feel. Lesson 5 brings all four of your pages together on Ruth 1.