Speaking of the South’s slaveholders and those fighting in their defense, Lincoln suggests it’s “strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces…”
Jacob
Dickinson’s poem is her paraphrase (as she confirms in line 2) of the events recorded in GENESIS 32 : 24-32, which left Jacob, now called Israel, convinced that he had “seen God face to face” (GENESIS 32 : 30).
Ishmael
From the first sentence of the novel, the reader knows Melville’s narrator, Ishmael, whose motive for his time on the sea is to escape civilization. He says it is his “substitute for pistol and ball,” revealing violent tendencies. GENESIS 16 and GENESIS 21 : 9-21 introduce Ishmael as the child of Abraham (Abram) and Hagar…
Enoch
In chapter 11, Reverend Dimmesdale “longed to speak out, from his own pulpit, at the full height of his voice, and tell the people what he was. ‘I, whom you behold in these black garments of the priesthood,– I, who ascend the sacred desk, and turn my pale face heavenward, taking upon myself to hold […]
Mark of Cain 2
In chapter five, Hawthorne describes his novel’s namesake in saying society “had set a mark upon her [Hester], more intolerable to a woman’s heart than that which branded the brow of Cain.” For an explanation of the Biblical allusion to the mark of Cain in GENESIS 4 : 8-15, see the entry for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Arsenal at Springfield.