20 Elsie Stern
punishment and redemption. Both corpora also include texts that portray
the relationship between God and Israel as one that is marked by confl ict
and reconciliation. However, unlike the canonical prophetic corpus, the
collection of haft arot emphasizes the gentler and more redemptive aspects
of the divine character, thereby constructing a divine portrait that is kinder
and gentler than its canonical counterpart. Th is characterization of God is
also typical of a prominent strand of rabbinic theology that is articulated in
both the liturgy and the midrashic literature.9 In each of these cases, then,
the creators of the lectionary selected texts from the diverse biblical canon
that resonated most closely with central rabbinic ideologies.
Th e second major diff erence between the synagogue Bible and the ca-
nonical Tanakh is the order and arrangement of their material. For readers
of biblical books, the beginnings and ends of episodes are determined by
literary features embedded by the redactors of the biblical books as well as
by punctuation, paragraph markers, and chapter divisions added by later
editors. For Jews who receive the synagogue Bible, the boundaries of epi-
sodes or texts are determined by the framers of the lectionary, who were
responsible for designating where parshiyot and haft arot would begin and
end. Readers of biblical books encounter their contents sequentially ac-
cording to the order of the material in the book. Th us, their understanding
of any individual unit, be it a verse, chapter, or episode, is informed most
immediately by the surrounding context within the book itself. In contrast,
audiences of the synagogue Bible encounter the contents of that Bible in
minianthologies of parashah and haft arah. As a result, the parashah and
the haft arah for any given week provide the most immediate and most in-
fl uential context for understanding the other half of the lectionary pair.
While at fi rst glance, the determination of textual boundaries and context
might not seem particularly signifi cant in determining the meaning of
texts, in practice, these are quite powerful redactional strategies.10
Th e parashah Lech Lecha that begins in Genesis 12:1 provides an exam-
ple of how the designation of textual boundaries can be a powerful tool
for articulating meanings that might not emerge from the texts in their ca-
nonical contexts. Within the book of Genesis, the fi rst mention of Abram/
Abraham occurs in the genealogy of his father Terah.
Now these are the descendants of Terah. Terah was the father of Abram,
Nahor, and Haran; and Haran was the father of Lot. Haran died before
his father Terah in the land of his birth, in Ur of the Chaldeans. (Genesis
11:27 – 28) 11