Inventions and Devises of Man: Usury and Hybridity in the Early Modern Period

Anah, one of the sons of Zibeon, makes only a brief appearance in the Bible: in Genesis 36:24, we are told that he "found mules in the wilderness." Midrashic commentary had interpreted this reference to Anah's discovery of mules to mean that he deliberately bred them, thus making him the first man to violate the biblical injunctions against creating hybrid creatures. Although this tradition lost much of its currency when Jerome, in the Vulgate, replaced the word "mules" with the phrase "hot springs," it reemerged with the revival of interest in the Hebrew Bible and Hebrew commentary in the early modern period. Mules once again roamed the desert in Genesis 36:24, and once again Anah became guilty of an act of transgressive generation. This essay explores how Anah, who could be said to present the Judeo-Christian tradition with its first problem case in bio-engineering, became a cautionary example of uncontrolled, and hubristic, human invention, and provided a point of intersection between two seemingly unrelated topics: usury and hybridity.