CUBIST HISTORY
Aleron Zemplin
The reader who is familiar with the book of Genesis will notice that some episodes from Genesis have been rearranged in An Accidental God. For instance, the confrontation between Abram and the townsmen of Harran, in front of the house of Terah, is similar to the confrontation between Lot and the men of Sodom in Genesis 19. In An Accidental God, the confrontation in Sodom cannot occur because Sodom is only a memory of a place that was destroyed under mysterious and terrifying circumstances in the legendary past. The conversation between God and Abraham in Genesis 18, in which Abraham protests God’s plan to punish the innocent along with the wicked, becomes a conversation between Sarah and Lot’s wife, in Chapter 42, which is overheard by Abraham, while he is resting half asleep against a nearby tree. Perhaps a confused Abraham later recollected the exchange as divine voices in his head.
In Chapter 47, three visitors traveling to the region of the Dead Sea stop at Abraham’s tent and tell him a well known local legend, an episode from the Ugaritic Tale of Aqhat in which a visiting god informs the character Dan’el that he will finally have a much desired son. The legend they recite is the original model for both their own visit to Abraham in An Accidental God, and that of the three heavenly strangers in Genesis 18: The visitors tell Abraham and Sarah that they will soon have a son. The parallels between the Aqhat legend and the Genesis account are quite close even including the preparation of a feast for the visitors by the host’s wife and laughter upon receiving news of the impending birth.
Genesis Chapters 12 and 20 recount two apparently separate instances in which Sarah is taken to bed first by the Egyptian Pharaoh and then by Abimelech, the king of Gerer. In both instances, Abraham fails to defend Sarah’s honor and instead claims that she is only his sister. In An Accidental God, these two episodes are combined into a single abduction which, nevertheless, results in a tryst with Abimelech and an attempted tryst with Pharaoh.
The relationship between events in An Accidental God and similar events in Genesis is intended to illustrate the relationship between real events and how humans remember those events and pass them on in legend. Memories get confused, and retellings tend to exaggerate or scramble the stories. Elements of other stories or legends may get incorporated. However, the scrambling often occurs in a block-wise fashion similar to a cubist painting. Blocks of truth get remembered and passed on intact, but they are sometimes put back together in different arrangements. So, a speech might be remembered more or less correctly but attributed to the wrong person. An event that happened at a certain time to a certain group of people might be later recounted accurately, but attributed to a different time and a different group.
An Accidental God represents a hypothetical series of events, a series at least as plausible as the events in Genesis, which could, through the processes of memory and legend, have given rise to the recorded Genesis account.
In Chapter 47, three visitors traveling to the region of the Dead Sea stop at Abraham’s tent and tell him a well known local legend, an episode from the Ugaritic Tale of Aqhat in which a visiting god informs the character Dan’el that he will finally have a much desired son. The legend they recite is the original model for both their own visit to Abraham in An Accidental God, and that of the three heavenly strangers in Genesis 18: The visitors tell Abraham and Sarah that they will soon have a son. The parallels between the Aqhat legend and the Genesis account are quite close even including the preparation of a feast for the visitors by the host’s wife and laughter upon receiving news of the impending birth.
Genesis Chapters 12 and 20 recount two apparently separate instances in which Sarah is taken to bed first by the Egyptian Pharaoh and then by Abimelech, the king of Gerer. In both instances, Abraham fails to defend Sarah’s honor and instead claims that she is only his sister. In An Accidental God, these two episodes are combined into a single abduction which, nevertheless, results in a tryst with Abimelech and an attempted tryst with Pharaoh.
The relationship between events in An Accidental God and similar events in Genesis is intended to illustrate the relationship between real events and how humans remember those events and pass them on in legend. Memories get confused, and retellings tend to exaggerate or scramble the stories. Elements of other stories or legends may get incorporated. However, the scrambling often occurs in a block-wise fashion similar to a cubist painting. Blocks of truth get remembered and passed on intact, but they are sometimes put back together in different arrangements. So, a speech might be remembered more or less correctly but attributed to the wrong person. An event that happened at a certain time to a certain group of people might be later recounted accurately, but attributed to a different time and a different group.
An Accidental God represents a hypothetical series of events, a series at least as plausible as the events in Genesis, which could, through the processes of memory and legend, have given rise to the recorded Genesis account.