Jacob's Cattle

I have been wrestling with Jacob's angel all night long. (More like weeks, really.)

How can I explain that a folk belief, which we in the twenty-first century know is only partially true, worked to Jacob's advantage? Of course, we know that Jacob has God's favor. But we also find out that, typical of our savvy trickster hero, Jacob makes a plan so he will come out ahead.

Here's the story. In exchange for Leah (whom he marries by Laban's trickery) and then Rachel (whom he loves), Jacob has promised to work seven years for each sister.

During his service, just in case Laban asks Jacob to take his share when they part ways, Jacob practices selective breeding. He makes sure that the strongest sheep and goats breed with each other, in the hope that he will get strong offspring. (True.)

And he makes sure that these sheep and goats gaze upon branches carved with mottled, striped, and spotted patterns during conception, in the hope that, according to an old wives' tale, his flocks will have mottled, striped, and spotted offspring as his own and he can pick them out. (Not true.)

Several years into service, Jacob asks Laban to let him go home. Laban reworks their deal and agrees to give him everything he asks for, all the mottled, striped, and spotted sheep and goats he has hoped to take with him, and to move his camp, all the way not home, but close by.

Now there is a white bean, Phaseolus vulgaris, marked with mottled, striped, and spotted patches of maroon and known by the lovely old name, "Jacob's Cattle." It is the bean used in traditional New England baked beans and is now sold as an "heirloom" seed.

So I was concerned that I could make these ideas all come together, and then: Synchronicity! I was reading a book called The Coat Route (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2013), by Meg Lukens Noonan, about the bespoke tailoring of a luxurious overcoat, and ran into the word "flocculent." Rule Number 1: look up unfamiliar words. Flocculent means "fleecy."

A sign! It was a sign that I should write this post straightaway and an assurance that I could, in some small way, pull it off. Call it superstition or synchronicity, we still want to impose an order on the not-so-orderly.

Tower of Babel

Remember the story of the Tower of Babel from Genesis? God found the people speaking one language and sharing all their knowledge, and, more than that, building a tower all the way to Heaven. So He put a stop to this alarming train of events. He made sure the people scattered, their languages became incomprehensible to each other, and the tower was never completed.

Genesis 11, 1-9
1 And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech.

2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.

3 And they said one to another: 'Come, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly.' And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.

4 And they said: 'Come, let us build us a city, and a tower, with its top in heaven, and let us make us a name; lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.'

5 And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.

6 And the LORD said: 'Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is what they begin to do; and now nothing will be withholden from them, which they purpose to do.

7 Come, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.'

8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth; and they left off to build the city.

9 Therefore was the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth; and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

Now we know that balel is the Hebrew word for confound or mix up; we are given this etymology right in the last verse of the story. It is not much of a stretch to think that, just as the Greeks heard "bar, bar, bar," when barbarians spoke, or we hear "blah, blah, blah," the Hebrews heard "bal, bal, bal."

We also know that Babel is a Hebrew loan word from the Akkadian word "bab-ilu," meaning "gate of God."

And we know that the particle el (cognate to "ilu" in Akkadian) means God or god, first in Canaanite and then in Hebrew. (So all those Biblical names that include the particle el, like Elizabeth or Daniel, have a little bit of God in their meaning.)

Like the story of the flood in Noah's Ark (in Genesis chapters 6 to 8), I have the fanciful notion that the story of the abandonment of the Tower of Babel and the confounding of languages has some basis in communal memory.

Once upon a time, linguists hypothesize, Indo-European peoples spoke a common language, now called the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language. During prehistoric human migration, each group spoke whatever it called PIE, but added to the language as its circumstances required and borrowed from whatever native languages it came into contact with.

The people thought they could reach Heaven if they built the tower just a little higher. The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1563. Held by the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Dcoetzee.