Page:A Jewish Interpretation of the Book of Genesis (Morgenstern, 1919, jewishinterpreta00morg).pdf/234

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The Book of Genesis

216

O man, what is good, Lord doth require of thee Only to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk luimhly (Micah VI, 6-8.) thy God. It

hath been told thee,

And what

the

Just this conception of repentance the Jacob story trates concretely, dramatically, and convincingly. is

no easy thing

won

to be

in a day.

witTi

illus-

Repentance

Twenty years

of bitter

trial and suffering and purgation in a foreign land are not

too much.

Nor can

a half-won repentance, even

though

it

endure for fourteen years, when followed by a relapse into The purification must be comformer evil habits, suffice. But with him who would truly repent, plete and permanent. God is ever present, strengthening and helping him to overcome and to concjuer in the struggle through the long, dark night with the evil

with the

at last,

new

life

power which seeks

dawn

of the

new

his destruction.

And

day, which ushers in the

of righteousness, he must emerge a regenerate man,

no longer Jacob, "the Deceiver", but Israel, "the Champion of God", strong in the knowledge of God which has come That is to him, and ready and eager to do God's service. the true repentance, which the Jacob story illustrates so In this way alone may repentance be worked. forcibly.

There can be no further question that this is the central theme of the story in its present' form. Its compilers must have been followers of the prophetic ])arty who worked in the spirit of Hosea, and sought in their own way to illustrate They his message concretely, and to enforce it practically. likein all must have lived somewhat later than Hosea, and northern lihood in the southern kingdom of Judah, since the kingdom of Israel was overthrown by the Assyrians in 722 The southern kingdom B. C, shortly after Hosea's time. had become the spiritual and cultural heir of its more advanced sister kingdom. Many, though undoubtedly not all, of the literary treasures of the north had come into the posA group of northern Jacob stories session of the south.