Judah and Joseph: The 'Confessional' Video

So I have a finite reservoir of creative production, and the blog has not been getting it lately. But I have several nearly complete posts, so brace yourself for a flurry of whatever it is I do here. But in the mean time, here is where my creative energy has been going (actually, not really, because this scene was written by Peter Nittler and shot and produced by Landon Ellis (the actors)…but this is the kind of thing I have been investing in).

This was part of a 4 Act effort (which I hope to post in its entirety) to tell the intertwining stories of Judah and Joseph in the latter chapters of Genesis. This is act 2 and covers the 'sex scenes' of Genesis 38 and 39. Judah discusses his darkly complicated relationship with Tamar to his therapist and Joseph explains to a cell mate how he ended up in jail. The idea was to do a kind of 'reality show confessional room' thing, and it kind of went from there:



This effort started out as a blog post last summer. After I wrote that I thought, well ok, my mid spring quarter talk is pretty much done. But when I revisited it is seemed REALLY dull. So I enlisted the help of a couple of our creative students and we each wrote a 4 act play over spring break and then melded them into a story. I called it an exercise in ‘experimental exposition.’ The whole script is here.
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Some stuff I’m working on:

3 part series on the evolution of religion
Music Themed Fragments and Links
So 5 seconds ago: Chesterton and that annoying cell phone commercial
The psychology of motivational story telling: Brooks, preaching, and the brain.
I am not the 99%: Thoughts on my tax return
Failure is an Option: Innovation born of Atonement
Comic Collection on Existential Dread
Comedian’s and Quarterbacks: Peer Effects in Belief

Tyler Durden on Theophanies

I’m teaching on my favorite Genesis passage on Tuesday night.[1] Jacob’s mysterious wrestling match.[2] Genesis 32 is alternately vivid, complicated, dramatic, confusing and thrilling. The characters [3] are complex and layered. But there was one fun and surprising parallel that I thought warranted a post:

Introductory Thoughts on Genesis 32

The pericope culminates in an unhelpfully parsimonious verse…

32:24 “So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.”

Which leads to the big question. Who, precisely, did Jacob wrestle?

The text frankly is coy. It’s abrupt. Honestly I wish verse 24 was like 5 times longer. The author spends 33 words detailing precisely how many of each ungulate Jacob set aside for his brother.

The verse calls him ‘a man’, elsewhere the Scriptures call him ‘an angel’ but neither of those can be the whole story, because at the end of the smack down…when everything is said and done…Jacob has a moment of recognition. It is like those final moments of a movie with a great twist ending, a film like the Sixth Sense of The Usual Suspects where someone we thought we had pegged is actually not even close to who we thought they were. Jacob realizes that his opponent was not just a man or even a cosmic messenger.

At the end of the fight Jacob realizes that he has in a confusing but indisputable way…fought God himself.

32:30 “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered.”

And it gets weirder, because this actually happens several times in Genesis. A corporeal character will show up and the text is ambiguous about whether it is a person, an angel or God himself. But, these appearances are more than a curious spandrel of an ancient text…they compose a theme of the greater story.

You see, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is a God who in a confusing but indisputable way tends to show up…I mean actually show up…in a corporeal, physical, form, from time to time…usually at the climax of the story. Christian theologians call these appearances ‘theophanies’ which essentially is a fancy word for ‘times that God shows up’. Historically, Christians have interpreted the shadowy Genesis figures as appearances of the second person of the trinity…previews of the pre-incarnate Logos [4] …or, in other words…Jesus shows up.

Which means my favorite passage in Genesis shares elements of narrative structure with my favorite film…Genesis 32 functions like a scene from Fight Club…

Tyler Durden on Theophanies

You see in Fight Club, before we actually meet Brad Pitt’s character, he shows up five times…which incidentally is an important clue to how the story will play out. Now you probably won’t notice it the first time…most people don’t even notice it the third time. In all but one case he just blips on the screen for a single frame…but if you watch this film as many times as my wife and I have, you eventually notice that Tyler Durden makes shadowy and indisputable appearances before he is introduced as a main character. See if you can catch it in this clip: [5]


That is what I make of these theophonies…the places where God ‘shows up’ in an ambiguous but undeniably corporeal form…it is a preview of the coming main character.

It is a hint that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is predisposed to enter time and space as a corporeal human figure at the climax of the story. It foreshadows the incarnation…it foreshadows the climax of the story…it foreshadows the reality that God will ultimately wrestle with evil and with us in Jesus…and he will win.

This post was written while listening to the All Sons and Daughters Pandora Station
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[1] This is essentially a stand alone excerpt lifted from that talk. I’m sorry if that is lazy blog content…but our house has pass around roughly 6 discrete illnesses in the last month. A family is kind of like a patch network for meta populations of nasties. One of the theories of why less robust species persist is that in a discrete patch network with periodic disturbances, poor competitors who are good dispersers and early colonizers can essentially jump from patch to patch. This may or may not explain the species scale evolutionary persistence of poor competitors, but it sure does seem to explain how illness that hits a 6 patch (person) household will stick around for weeks.
[2] Genesis 32
[3] Jacob is, easily, the most disappointing of the patriarchs…and easily my favorite. He is complicated, self willed and clever. God literally has to throw down with him to finally get his attention…but he does. Such a great story.
[4] “He was with God in the beginning” (John 1)
[5] There is another clip that shows them all and then slows them down here.