Interludes and Irony in the Ancestral Narrative

The stories of Hagar, Dinah, and Tamar stand out as strangers in the ancestral narrative. They deviate from the main plot and draw attention to the interests and fates of characters who are not a part of the ancestral family. Readers have traditionally domesticated these strange stories. They have made them "familiar"--all about the ancestral family. Thus Hagar's story becomes a drama of deselection, Shechem and the Hivites become emblematic for ancestral conflict with the people of the land, an