Reading Genesis, page 10
We know what Abraham’s thoughts are because the Lord tells him and the text tells us. What could Abraham say to Him, if he were to attempt an appeal? He is my son, my only son, whom I love. But this appeal is precluded—God knows what He is asking. Abraham’s love for his son is precisely the measure of his obedience in acting on what he takes to be God’s will. Then what of the covenant? What of those teeming nations, waiting to exist and to be blessed? These seem not to be considerations. What of the promises that were the bond between us, which I believed? Abraham might have challenged God in these terms. He could have said, as he had done before, attempting to intercede for any righteous there might be in Sodom, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” But God knows that the crux of it all is that Isaac is Abraham’s beloved only son, and Abraham understands this. The stars of the heavens and the dust of the earth and all the generations that equaled their numbers would seem remote indeed beside this boy struggling under his burden of firewood. The irony of God’s seeming readiness to make all those promises null might correspond to an indifference on Abraham’s side to everything but the loss of his child.
That the very particular history of the Lord’s relationship with Abraham falls away in this long moment makes the story universal. Abraham could have been any ancient worshipper who believed his god or goddess demanded his or her child. Archaeological remains in Carthage include the bones of young animals among those of small children, suggesting the hope that these substitutions would be acceptable, though they seem never to have become customary. In the New Testament, in accordance with Mosaic law, two pigeons are sacrificed in the place of a first male child, the infant Jesus.
If the story of the binding of Isaac is cruel, the cruelty it exposes plagued the lives of those who felt compelled to sacrifice children, whether Carthaginians or those unspecified others who are mentioned among the idolators of that world. The one God, Elohim, might have mourned this suffering and chosen to correct this misapprehension of His nature and His will. The plain statement of the tale is that the Lord does not want the sacrifice of a child, but that He is pleased to accept an animal, here a ram that He Himself has provided.
The God of Scripture tolerates sacrifice rather than requiring it. The festivals established in the laws involve sacrifices that are also feasts, in which the widow, orphan, and stranger are to take part. They define community. We moderns like our turkey dead and plucked before we have anything to do with it, but we know what it is to gather around a turkey and to bond in some way with the community who also participate in the secular consecration of the creature. But actual sacrifice was prone to excesses of every kind. It was thought to be effectively offered, that is, given, to a god or goddess and, at best, to put him or her under a kind of obligation. In The Iliad, the old priest Chryseis prays to Apollo, saying, “If I have ever decked your temple with garlands, or burned for you thigh-bones in fat of bulls or goats, grant my prayer,” and avenge me. Prometheus had tricked Zeus into accepting thighbones wrapped in fat as the gods’ portion of a sacrifice, securing the better part for human consumption. All the same, Apollo is immediately enlisted.
The prophet Isaiah and others voice the Lord’s impatience with the practice: He says to Judah and Jerusalem, “Hear the word of the LORD, ye rulers of Sodom; give unto the law of our God, ye people of Gomorrah. ‘To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the LORD: I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he goats … Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth.’” As He does so often, He asks for justice rather than sacrifice: “Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.” The Canaanite gods would languish if they were not fed by sacrifices. The Lord says in Psalm 50, “I will take no bullock out of thy house, nor he goats out of thy folds. For every beast of the forest is mine, the cattle upon a thousand hills. I know all the fowls of the mountains, and the wild beasts of the field are mine … for the world is mine, and all the fulness thereof.” And, “Offer unto God thanksgiving; and pay thy vows unto the most High.” Human autonomy is unlike all other things. No ritual can make any creature or object more the Lord’s than it is in itself. But in bringing before God justice or righteousness or thanksgiving, we are offering what we might very well withhold. We all know this from experience and observation.
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Ritual sacrifice is a difficult subject for modern Western readers. But then very few of earth’s peoples have fallen into that category. It is surely reasonable to assume that we are not always the Bible’s primary audience. The idea of child sacrifice seems to have been felt as a temptation, perhaps because it might have been thought to have a special efficacy. What could show more devotion than the gift of what is most beautiful, most precious to oneself? After Abraham has shown his willingness to carry out this appalling act, the Lord says, “Now I know that you fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me.” Now Abraham knows that the most passionate worshippers of Moloch or Anat are not more devout than he. The most excruciating sacrifice they made was no greater than the one he would have made if God Himself had not forbidden it. So the seeming cruelty toward Abraham is compassion toward those great nations who learned from him or modeled their piety on his. God’s stated purpose in His dealings with Abraham is to teach righteousness to later generations. If the purpose of the story is to instruct, this puts it into a category readers resist—“didactic” is never a compliment. But it should be remembered that the text intends a God’s-eye view, one meant to shape the nations He is creating. It is true historically that Abraham’s people were spared a profound, self-inflicted misery, which is at the same time a profound misunderstanding of the nature and will of God.
This reading shifts emphasis away from Abraham’s obedience and toward the sacrificial act itself, the killing of a child. Isaac is utterly singled out by the narrative of his father’s life and the miracle of his having been born to a very old woman. Providential history has a role for him. But this does not so much make his death, should it have happened, exceptional as it draws on the singularity of any child, and of the bond of trust between any parent and child. It is impossible not to wonder what Abraham’s thoughts would have been, what nihilism and despair at being brought to the destruction, by his own hand, of hope and promise made flesh in his son. Nor do we know what Isaac thought or felt. Nothing distracts from the unspeakable imminent act. The point is not that Abraham is exemplary in submitting to this demand but that other parents do this also, often enough for the practice in whatever form to persist as a grim concern in Scripture.
In the somber book of Judges, a man named Jephthah vows to the Lord that if he wins a battle he will offer as a sacrifice the first creature that comes through his door. Nothing suggests the Lord does or does not take note of his oath. Jephthah’s daughter opens the door, dancing in celebration of his victory and homecoming. She piously accepts the consequences of his oath and is sacrificed in due course. This is a terrible sorrow to him. “She was his only child; beside her he had neither son nor daughter.” God does not ask for the sacrifice and He does not intervene in it. But the fatherly grief of Jephthah and the unrealized life of his virgin daughter are the burden of the tale.
A reading that sees in the dramatizing of child sacrifice something shocking and transgressive, rejected by God, rather than one more proof of Abraham’s patient obedience, is supported by the two stories of Hagar and Ishmael. Hagar the foreigner, the slave, the concubine, is the one character in the text who is likened to Abraham, and in no small way. She has a great historical destiny through her son, which is announced to her by an angel in exuberant terms that explicitly recall the Lord’s promises to Abraham: “I will multiply thy seed exceedingly, that it shall not be numbered for multitude.” Weary of her mistress’s bitter resentment of a situation her mistress has brought about, her pregnancy, Hagar runs off into the wilderness. This is a text or a world where anything could be true and therefore nothing is without meaning. The angel, who is the Lord, knows where Hagar is and in what state of mind, and He is ready to comfort her. For her as for Abraham His assurances exceed belief—descendants who cannot be numbered can hardly be imagined—but first of all there will be a son. I have mentioned before that for Hagar this promise comes in the language of annunciation, its first appearance in the Bible.
Nothing is described to let us imagine her experience of these two theophanies. Hagar says she has seen God and lived. More to be noted, God has seen her. Abraham is a prince among pastoralists while Hagar is a slave sick of mistreatment. The Lord and the text create an equivalency between them that is unique in the Hebrew Bible.
The desire for children and the love of them is central to the Hebrew Bible, as is loyalty to them despite all and grief at their loss. Like Abraham, Hagar comes near losing her son, in her case because the godly father of the child, to be rid of him, sends the two of them into the wilderness. Ishmael is born because Sarah and Abraham are desperate for a son, and now they send him away, perhaps to die. This is as perverse in its way as the Lord’s demanding the sacrificial death of the long-promised Isaac. We see the grief of the slave Hagar in a choice that seems characteristic of her, to attempt to distance herself, to make at least a gesture toward escape from the unbearable. If the narrative were chronological, Ishmael would be an adolescent at this point, but Hagar “cast the child under one of the shrubs,’” language that suggests he is very young, a babe in arms. There is rage suggested in the possibly ungentle word cast, and care in the fact that she places him in the shade. “And she went, and sat her down over against him a good way off, as it were a bow shot: for she said, ‘Let me not see the death of the child.’” But she cannot leave him, either. Whether she hears the cries of the child from this distance is not clear. But “God heard the voice of the lad; and the angel of God called to Hagar out of heaven.”
The story of the binding of Isaac follows that of Hagar and Ishmael, after some brief business about the use of a well. And just at the point where “Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son,” the Lord intervenes again, and in the same way. “The angel of the LORD called unto him out of heaven.” Hagar sees a well of water, Abraham sees a ram caught in a thicket. The parallel is very close.
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At any time before the era of mass literacy, say before the seventeenth or eighteenth century, the habits of attention to a narrative would have been aural, so repetition and its near equivalents would have been important and welcome. The Baal Cycle, a series of boisterous tales of the Canaanite gods, is full of repetition, speeches, and scenes recounted verbatim and recounted again. The cycle is very unlike Hebrew Scripture, dramatic and incantatory, mythic in the strict sense, having only gods among its characters. The Canaanite pantheon were a turbulent lot. It is easy to imagine a crowd of worshippers chanting along with the more stirring threats and denunciations.
Hebrew Scripture is intended as history, a very different thing. But the conventions of its telling can reasonably be seen as influenced by the cadences of myth. Parallelism is a sophisticated form of repetition used very characteristically in Hebrew poetry for emphasis, clarity, or contrast. These lines are from Isaiah 29: “Thou shalt be brought down, and shalt speak out of the ground, and thy speech shall be low out of the dust, and thy voice shall be, as of one that hath a familiar spirit, out of the ground, and thy speech shall whisper out of the dust.” Each varied repetition reinforces the thought. The story of Ishmael prepares our understanding of the more complex and epochal story of Abraham and Isaac. Both reflect on the nature of God, the first in its intimate care for a very humble woman, the second in its rejection of child sacrifice, and both in that they are instances of God’s ultimate faithfulness to His promises. If the point were to create a flawless narrative, changes would have to be made so that both Ishmael and Isaac could plausibly be older than these narratives suggest they are. Instead the stories are placed together at the climax of the epic of Abraham for the emphasis created by their comparability, without respect to chronology and without change to their traditional form. This combination of freedom and conservatism in the use of traditional materials would be consistent with the historical method of Genesis.
The Baal Cycle is myth and the Genesis stories are history because Scripture is about human beings in human circumstances, which are not only continuously changing but also oriented toward a future time from a basis in a known past. “I will make of thee a great nation,” says the Lord to a man with one child. Obviously a great deal must happen before this promise can be fulfilled. The text, the redactors, the community know that what was needed has happened, that the sacred past makes significant everything that has, and will, come after it.
In the narrative of Isaac’s adulthood, repetition and parallelism are strikingly important elements, leading up to a scene of deep emotional complexity, as great a scene as any in the Hebrew Bible. Before it, Isaac is characterized as a kind of absence. We are told that Abraham’s brother Nahor has had children by his wife and his concubine. This is the beginning of the story of Isaac’s marriage and the next generation of the covenant family. Then we are told that Sarah has died at one hundred twenty-seven years old, the only woman in the Bible to have her age at death recorded. Abraham negotiates with the Hittites for a burial place for her. The Hittites courteously offer to give him the cave, and he courteously insists on paying them for it. Then Abraham, “old, and well stricken in age,” sends a trusted servant to find a wife for Isaac among the family of Nahor. The life of Abraham, first of the patriarchs, has reached its denouement.
Since Isaac is forty, certainly old enough to marry, he might be expected to have some part in arranging his marriage. The servant asks Abraham whether Isaac should return with him to the house of Nahor if the girl will not follow him, the servant, back to Canaan. Abraham says no, he should not. So the servant is to act as proxy. The success of his journey rests entirely with him. He is as richly equipped and attended as if he himself were the prospective groom. This servant might be or might as well be the Eliezer of Damascus who childless Abraham feared would become his heir. The wealth of his entourage will be more remarkable over against the desperate journey of Isaac’s son Jacob to the same family, where he will find two wives, one more than he intended. Here it is contrasted with the meager welcome Isaac will offer his bride.
This is the first time Abraham’s great wealth is made visible—ten camels, weighty gold bracelets, a troop of followers. Rebekah draws water enough to slake the thirst of camels and men, a truly prodigious feat, which it is probably fair to interpret as excitement at all this. The text pauses over and repeats the ceremonious speeches and courtesies that pass among these stranger kinfolk, a status the servant enjoys as proxy. At their first meeting he puts a nose ring and bracelets on Rebekah, like a suitor or a husband. Rebekah’s family ask whether she agrees to this marriage. Then “the servant brought forth jewels of silver, and jewels of gold, and raiment,” and gives “precious things” to her mother and brother. Her family urge her to stay with them a little longer, but she follows the servant without hesitation, accepting the assurance that is intended by all this decorum and munificence.
Rebekah and the servant arrive at the place where Isaac is staying, apparently unannounced. He is walking in the field, meditating. “He lifted up his eyes, and saw, and, behold, the camels were coming.” On his part, no words, no gestures, no gifts for Rebekah. He takes her into the tent—the Jewish Publication Society translation has “the tent of his mother Sarah.” She became his wife and he loved her, “and Isaac was comforted after his mother’s death.” The journey of the servant is the longest continuous story in Genesis. Its ending is an abrupt anticlimax.
The Jewish Publication Society interprets the detail about the tent being Sarah’s to mean that continuity is preserved. This may be true. This understanding of it is not inconsistent with the fact that Rebekah is an unhappy woman, and that her household, the first generation to carry forward the covenant and the tradition of Abraham, is also unhappy.
What is theological about watching domestic malaise and turmoil work its way through these lives? Let us say that God lets human beings be human beings, and that His will is accomplished through or despite them but is never dependent on them. The remarkable realism of the Bible, the voices it captures, the characterization it achieves, are products of an interest in the human that has no parallel in ancient literature. The Lord stands back, so to speak. The text does not blur the unlikeness of the mortal and the divine by giving us demigods. Its great interest is in the children of Adam, who are in every way a mystery, and the singular object of God’s loyalty, which is another mystery. The covenant having been given to Abraham with the understanding that his descendants would learn justice and righteousness through him, these few people, Isaac and his family, then Jacob and his, might be expected to be governed by his history and example. Instead they seem as adrift in error and circumstance as anyone else.
Theology is the study of God; anthropology is the study of humankind. Why are we so brilliant? Why are we so self-defeating and self-destructive? How is the diversity of languages to be accounted for? How do tribes and nations form and spread themselves over the earth? What constitutes a religious culture, and how does it perpetuate itself? These are all questions of anthropology, using the word in the modern sense. The Hebrew Bible raises them and responds to them in its own terms. The questions themselves indicate where the interest of the text lies—with humankind, God’s image, among whom words like justice and righteousness have meaning, as they do when they are used of Him. Modern anthropology has tended to build upward or outward or downward from reductionist definitions, humankind as naked ape, as phenotype of the selfish gene. Biblical anthropology begins with an exalted conception of humanity, then ponders our errors and deficiencies and our capacities for grace and truth, within the world of meaningful freedom created for them by an omnipotent God. This seems paradoxical, but sustaining paradox is the genius of the text.
