The first eleven chapters of Genesis have traditionally been assumed to be universalist in outlook, while chapters 12 onwards have been seen as having a more or less exclusively particularist perspective.
Lately, commentators have shown that this strict division between a universalist Genesis 1-11 on the one hand, and a particularist Genesis 12-50 on the other, cannot be maintained. Rather, the boundaries are blurred. Genesis 12-50 maintains the universalist outlook that emerges from the primeval history (e.g. God’s blessing of Abraham in 12:1-3), but sets it against a particularist focus that was not evident in the earlier chapters. The tension between these two perspectives is explored throughout Genesis, so that particularist narratives such as the love affair of Dinah and Shechem (Gen. 34), or Isaac’s and Rebekkah’s discomfort when Esau marries daughters of the land (Gen. 27) are nuanced by universalist narratives, such as the marriages Judah and Joseph to ‘non-Israelites’, or Pharaoh’s warm welcome of Jacob and his family.
Genesis 18-19 is important in this regard; its texts set the most strongly particularist concerns, such as the continuation of family lines, circumcision, and covenant, against the intensely universalist themes of hospitality, living among strangers, God’s relationship to Israel and the nations, and the limits of intercession.
In this seminar, we intend to re-examine Genesis 18-19 as a microcosm for the interplay between particularism and universalism that is present throughout Genesis, asking whether how textual problems such as these following might require different solutions in this light.