Family Relationships and Their Consequences

¶ … Family Relationships and Their Consequences

There are a number of distinct similarities between the story related to Jacob and Esau found within the Book of Genesis in the Bible and the story of Myrrha and Cinyras which is part of Greek mythology. Aside from detailing relationships between family members, there is a great deal of incest involved within each of the respective tales. Perhaps more importantly, there is also a substantial amount of incest that takes place in each story as well. Women also play roles in each tale that help to divide the families; it is significant that within both narratives that a woman is the root cause of the sundering of the families. Despite all of these similarities (which also include the presence of supernatural beings), it is highly noteworthy to recognize that the differences between each narrative is probably more profound than the similarities, for the simple fact that there is a reconciliation between Jacob and Esau's family that is not possible with Myrrha and her father's.

The division of each family in both of the aforementioned stories is caused by a woman. This fact is not altogether surprising, particularly since each story reflects a strong religious presence and religion has been one of the chief means of reinforcing a patriarchal society. Still, it is important for the reader to remember that despite Esau's hatred for his brother Jacob for deceiving their father, Isaac, regarding his blessing, Jacob is merely following the wishes of his mother, Rebekah. Rebekah is the one to tell Esau to perform the duty that Isaac had asked of his first-born, it iss Rebekah who instructs Jacob how to successfully complete this gambit, and it is Rebekah who then tells him to flee -- which separates the family members. The following quotation in which Rebekah speaks to Jacob proves this point, "flee to my brother Laban in Haran" (Genesis 27: 43).

Women are also the cause of the misfortune that results in the separation of Myrrha from Cinyras. Myrrha is the one who initially gets the impure thought that she finds her father physically attractive. She delights in kissing him on the lips. However, it is her nurse (another woman) who arranges for her to lie with him while he is drunk. When Myrrha's father finds out that she has been deceiving him by sleeping with him, Myrrha is forced to flee. The following quote proves she left her father's homeland, "Wandering the wide fields, she left the land of Panchaea" (Ovid, 2000). Had she not listened to her nurse and acted on her own sinful desires, she would not have needed to flee.

Both stories also depict incestuous relationships. What is truly revealing about this fact is that in Jacob's tale, incest is portrayed as acceptable, while in Myrrha's it is portrayed as unacceptable. After Jacob follows the advice of Rebekah and runs to her brother's land, he falls in love with his cousin Rachel. In fact, Jacob actually ends up marrying both Rachel and her sister Leah, and effectively takes them from his uncle's amily to his own. It is interesting to note that this fact is not scorned by anyone in the story, and that the incestuous relationship was officially sanctioned by Jacob's uncle Laban, who gave Jacob "his daughter Rachel as wife also" (Genesis 30: 28). Whereas incest functions as merely an aside in the story of Jacob, it is the primary plot function in Myrrha's tale. All of her woes descend from the fact that she finds her father desirable, sexually attractive, and eventually acts on this incestuous urge. However, it is portrayed as wrong and base from a number of different sources including Orpheus who is narrating it, Cinyras when he finds out he has been unwittingly duped into participating in, and most of all from Myrrha who is the one who seeks an incestuous relationship. Her anguish at dealing with this fact is discernible in the subsequent quotation in which she laments the fact that it is "a wicked desire to see Cinyras, touch him…and kiss him (Ovid, 2000). Thus, it is quite apparent that Myrhha desires an incestuous relationship, which is a salient point of commonality between this story and that of Jacob.