Book of Genesis/Characters

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Adam and Eve

And God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creep upon the earth."

  • Adam and Eve Plot
  • Beauty Equals Goodness: Many biblical scholars argue that Adam was the most handsome man and Eve the most beautiful woman, being directly created by God.
  • Double Standard: Some people have put the blame solely on Eve, others on Adam.
  • Meaningful Name: Adam was the first man, his name means "man". Eve was the first woman. Her name in Hebrew means "living one" or "source of life".
  • Methuselah Syndrome: Not only Adam and Eve, but plenty of their offspring. It is not until after Exodus things start to even out.
  • Sadly Mythtaken: The Bible does not call the fruit an apple (Muslims call it Khuldi). The portrayal of said fruit as an apple is a Stealth Pun on the Latin word malus.
  • Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Picture the most beautiful person of the preferred gender you know of. Thanks to them, you're not hanging out naked with him or her in the Garden.

Sentient Talking Snake, (Satan according to some traditions); sometimes named Nahash

Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field.

  • Brother Chuck: Despite causing the following: Mankind receiving knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve getting kicked out of the Garden of Eden and being cursed, the existence of death, the existence of the entire human race, and the first evil act ever, the snake absolutely disappears off of the face of the earth after the whole "Eden" incident. It is possible that he is Satan, but The Bible is not explicit about this.
  • Snakes Are Evil: Well, it did convince Eve to eat the Fruit.
  • The Corrupter
  • Our Dragons Are Different: One interpretation. Before being made to crawl upon his belly he must have had legs. What would you call a walking, talking serpent with(at least) human level intelligence?
  • Talking Animal

Cain

"Am I my brother's keeper?"

  • Being Evil Sucks: According to Islam, he felt really bad after killing Abel but he never really repented.
  • Biblical Bad Guy
  • Cain and Abel: Duh, they're the Trope Namer.
  • Disproportionate Retribution: Sure you may have gotten shafted in the contest, but was murder really the best way to resolve the issue?
  • Green-Eyed Monster: Murdered his brother because of it.
  • Joker Immunity: The ur-example. He commits the first murder and is protected from retribution ever after by his mark.
  • Name of Cain: Trope Maker
  • Red Right Hand: God gave him a mark to protect him from harm, specifically anyone who might seek vengeance upon him for Abel's death. Exactly what kind of mark is not canonically specified, and interpretations vary.
  • The Resenter: Bible commentators indicate that Cain was this due to his parents having been driven out of the garden of Eden.
  • Walking the Earth: After Cain murdered his bother, he became a wanderer until he settled in the Land of Nod.

Abel

"Why are you angry? Why that scowl on your face? If you had done the right thing, you would be smiling."

Enoch

He spent his life in fellowship with God, and then he disappeared, because God took him away.

Methuselah

And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years.

Nimrod

He was a mighty hunter before The Lord.

  • Badass
  • Biblical Bad Guy
  • Chekhov's Gunman: The nation he built, Babylon, would become a Middle Eastern power.
  • One-Scene Wonder: Amazingly popular in folklore (the Tower of Babel was apparently built on his orders and he tried to have Abraham killed) and pop culture (shares the name as a villain from The X-Men).
  • You Keep Using That Word: His name was, for a long time, synonymous with "hunter". Now, thanks to Warner Bros. cartoons, it's used to mean someone obsessed with something.

Noah

There went in two and two unto Noah into the Ark, the male and the female.

Abraham

"I will bless those who bless you. But I will curse those who curse you. And through you I will bless all nations."

  • Angel Unaware: Is rewarded for entertaining three of these...with a long-awaited son in his old age
  • Bargain with Heaven
  • The Chosen One
  • Cool Old Guy
  • Idiot Ball: Locked his wife Sarah in a box while passing through Egypt, for fear that she would be taken by the Egyptians on account of her beauty. He didn't stop to think that maybe, just maybe the box would have to pass through Customs.
  • I Lied: Well, more like told a half-truth: told the Egyptians (who found her in the above incident) that she was his sister. (She was his half-sister, as well as his wife.) He did this to protect himself from being killed by the men in order to obtain her. (Which they never did, even upon finding out the truth.) The lie causes all sorts of mayhem. Oh, and this happened more than once.
  • Human Sacrifice: Abraham was almost sacrificed (according to a Midrash), but escaped. Later, he almost sacrificed Isaac, * but just barely didn't.
  • Macho Masochism: Within this universe, he's the ur-example of one of the most common in the Old World.
  • Meaningful Rename: God has him change his name from Abram (High father) to Abraham (Father of many).
  • The Mourning After: Averted. After Sarah dies, he marries another (much younger) woman named Keturah. (Who some believe is his concubine Hagar, by another name.)
  • Parental Favoritism: He preferred Isaac over Ishmael, but was ready to sacrifice Isaac to God when God told him to. Good thing it was just a test. The Genesis account indicates that Abraham actually pleaded with God for Ishmael to receive some sort of blessing from God as well. Isaac was really The Chosen One Because destiny says so.
  • Parents as People
  • Sacred Hospitality: God is debating whether to destroy the city of Sodom. Abraham bargains God down to letting the city survive if there are ten good men. God's messengers go to Sodom, and they meet Lot and his family. The Sodomites want to rape them. Lot's even willing to let them rape his daughters rather than these men. The city is destroyed.

Sarah

"Alas for me! shall I bear a child, seeing I am an old woman, and my husband here is an old man? That would indeed be a wonderful thing!"

Ishmael

His hand will be against every man, and every man's hand against him.

Isaac

"Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of."

  • Brick Joke: His name means "To laugh" because that's what his mother Sarah did when an angel told her she will be pregnant in her old age.
  • Human Sacrifice: Narrowly averted. God ordered Abraham to sacrifice his son, but stopped him in the last minute. Turns out it was a Secret Test of Character.
  • Kissing Cousins, Love at First Sight and Perfectly Arranged Marriage: With his wife and cousin Rebecca.
  • Out of Focus: Of the four patriarchs, he's by far the least focused on.
  • Parental Favoritism: Abraham preferred him over his older brother, Ishmael. Granted, that was because God basically told him to. He in turn preferred Esau to Jacob
  • Youngest Child Wins

Rebekah

"Two nations fight in your womb. The lesser will defeat the greater, the older shall serve the younger."

Esau

And he sold his birthright unto Jacob.

  • Cain and Abel: The trope might just as well have been called Jacob and Esau. Esau sells his birthright to Jacob for some porridge, Jacob tricks Isaac into giving him Esau's blessing, Esau tries to kill Jacob, Jacob runs away and comes back with gifts for Esau. End result: Esau repents, makes up with Jacob, and accepts gifts from Jacob. The thing is, it's kind of hard to tell who is Abel and who is Cain in this scenario.
  • Carpet of Virility: Esau was such a hairy man that when Jacob tricked Isaac (who had gone blind in his old age) into thinking he was Esau, he wore a goat skin to simulate Esau's hairiness.
  • Dark-Skinned Redhead
  • Evil Twin: To Jacob. (Unlike most examples, he's not truly evil, just short-sighted, and he and Jacob are Different as Night and Day.)
  • Parental Marriage Veto: Rebekah does not like the Canaanite women he married.
  • Polyamory: As many men of that time and place did, Esau was married to Adath, Basemath, and Oholibama, three local Canaanite women.*
  • Rated "M" for Manly: Why Isaac favors him over Jacob; Isaac admires Esau's hunting skill
  • Self-Made Man: He is not The Chosen One, but after the Time Skip, he already has a lot of wealth and status to his name (almost as much as Jacob)

Jacob/Israel

Behold, Esau my brother is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man.

  • Badass: He fought God Himself and almost won, but God cheated by breaking his hip, after fighting him all day and all night. Jacob gained the nickname "Yisrael" which means "Struggles with God," or, the more popular translation, "Israel" means "Let God prevail" meaning he struggles with God and lets Him win.
  • Bride and Switch
  • Dysfunction Junction: Right in the middle of one. Also applies to his relatives on this list, but he's the one who has to deal with it from all sides.
  • Easily Forgiven: Esau forgives him for stealing his birthright and welcomes Jacob and his family warmly
  • Guile Hero: And how. He gets it from his mother's side of the family.
  • Love At First Sight: Towards Rachel.
  • Manipulative Bastard: Jacob's name means deceiver, and he is often shown using tricks to get his way. He even, at his mother's request, tricked his father into giving him the better inheritance.
  • Parental Favoritism: Jacob was Rebecca's favorite, and later Jacob preferred his (second) youngest son, Joseph. Notice a pattern here?
  • Rape and Revenge: His sons, led by Simeon and Levi, brutally avenging their sister Dinah's rape.
  • Groin Attack: A particularly nasty variant by said sons: convince the rapist and his people to get circumcised, then slaughter them all while they're still in pain.
  • Tenchi Solution: With the sisters (and his cousins) Leah and Rachel. It wasn't his idea, though; he wanted Rachel but was stuck with Leah after the Bride and Switch. Like most other accounts of polygamy in the Bible, it ends badly, here in the form of an ugly Sibling Rivalry.
  • The Trickster
  • Like Father, Like Son: Better said... Like mother, like son.
  • Yamato Nadeshiko: In contrast to Esau.
  • Youngest Child Wins: According to later books in The Bible he nation who will produce the savior of mankind will bear his name while Esau's will vanish from the earth.

Rachel

Rachel was lovely in form and beautiful.

  • Beauty Equals Goodness: She is described as more beautiful than her sister, who turns out to be, if not evil, then certainly angry and bitter.
  • Death by Childbirth: Poor Benjamin
  • Guile Heroine: Stole Laban's idols and hid them in her menstruation couch.
  • No Periods, Period: Averted; her excuse for not getting up to let guards search was "It's that time of the month."
  • Sibling Rivalry: With Leah, because Leah was able to give Jacob lots of sons.
  • Youngest Child Wins: Jacob's favored wife bore his favorite sons, one of which becomes a Prince.

Leah

Leah had tender eyes.

Laban

  • Manipulative Bastard: Not only did he trick his son-in-law into marrying both of his daughters, but he went out of his way to keep Jacob working for him.
  • Stealth Pun: Keeps culling the sheep without speckles or spots from Jacob's herds, before Jacob turns the tables on him with primitive methods of breeding.

Joseph, son of Jacob

Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age: and he made him a coat of many colors.

  • Beauty Equals Goodness: "Joseph was handsome in form and appearance." Additionally, according to Muslim tradition, "One half of all the beauty God apportioned for mankind went to Joseph; the other one half went to the rest of mankind."
  • Chaste Hero: Resisted the advances of his master Potiphar's wife.
  • Dreaming of Things to Come: Had a dream that he would rule over his brothers.
  • The Good Chancellor
  • Guile Hero
  • Hypercompetent Sidekick: To Potiphar, his warden in prison, and eventually to Pharaoh; to the point that Potiphar and the warden felt they didn't need to supervise him, and Potiphar even lost track of all his affairs because Joseph took care of them all.
  • Made a Slave: By his brothers, for the reason below.
  • Matzo Fever: Potiphar's wife apparently had this.
  • Parental Favoritism: Was the favorite son of Jacob, being the first child of his favorite wife.
  • Rags to Riches: Eventually became second to pharaoh in power, sometimes described as being a prince. (Not the same pharaoh that enslaved the Israelites.)
  • Requisite Royal Regalia: A small-scale version; the fancy robe Jacob gave him is believed to traditionally signify a father's choice of successor as head of the family. And of course, he got the real deal when Pharaoh made him second-in-command of all Egypt.

Tamar (daughter-in-law of Judah)

  • Cartwright Curse: She married Judah's first son, who died. Then she married Judah's second son, who practiced coitus interruptus and was killed by God as punishment.
  • Guile Hero
  • Hooker with a Heart of Gold: Briefly. She impersonates a hooker as part of a ploy to get her stingy father-in-law to do as he'd agreed and provide her with a new husband.
  • Youngest Child Wins: Her younger son took his brother's place as first-born as they were being born.

Pharaoh (Genesis)

  • Dreaming of Things to Come: God gave him two prophetic dreams that Joseph interpreted.
  • No Name Given / Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": His real name is never given. Pharaoh is a title.
  • One Steve Limit: Averted, there are other Pharaohs mentioned. In fact, it's likely that Joseph served under multiple Pharaohs.
  • Reasonable Authority Figure: He was willing to accommodate Joseph's relatives in Goshen, a particularly fertile area of Egypt where they would be able to graze their flocks (and also where they would be separate from the Egyptian populace, as Egyptians tended to look down on shepherds).
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