Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis
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(e) Isaac spent the next three years in Paradise; or, some say, at the house of Shem and Eber, where he studied God’s Law. But first he attended the burial of his mother Sarah who, going to Hebron for news of him, heard of his rescue and expired from pure joy—Samael having assured her that he had already been sacrificed.
Sarah died at the age of one hundred and twenty-seven years. Abraham bought the Cave and field of Machpelah from Ephron the Hittite, paying him four hundred silver shekels, buried Sarah there, and mourned her seven days.288
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1. Sacrifice of first-born sons was common in ancient Palestine, and practised not only by the Moabite King Mesha, who burned his eldest son to the God Chemosh (2 Kings III. 26–27); by the Ammonites, who offered their sons to Molech (Leviticus XVIII. 21 and XX. 2 ff); by the Aramaeans of Sepharvaim, whose gods were Adram-melech and Ana-melech; but also by the Hebrew Kings Ahaz (2 Kings XVI. 3) and Manasseh (2 Kings XXI. 6). King Saul’s attempt to sacrifice his warrior son Jonathan after a reverse in the Philistine war is hinted at (1 Samuel XIV. 43–46), though the army elected to save him.
2. Exodus XXII. 28–29 reads: ‘The first-born of thy sons shalt thou give unto Me, and of thine oxen and thy sheep, on the eighth day!’, which Ezekiel (XX. 24–26) later described as one of the ‘statutes that were not good’ and that polluted Israel as a punishment for idolatry. But this law referred to infant sacrifice rather than to that of youths or grown men, and could be evaded by a token sacrifice of the first-born’s foreskin at circumcision. Isaac’s sacrifice was of the kind resorted to in national emergencies—as by Mesha, Ahaz and Manasseh—or at foundation ceremonies, as by Hiel at Jericho (1 Kings XVI. 34).
3. Solomon had introduced into Jerusalem the worship of Molech and Chemosh (1 Kings XI. 7), to whom children were burned in the Valley of Tophet, alias Gehenna (2 Kings XXIII. 10). Some of these victims seem to have been offered as surrogates for the King, the incarnate Sun-god, at an annual demise of the crown. Micah (VI. 7), Jeremiah (VII. 31; XIX. 5–6; XXXII. 35) and Ezekiel (XVI. 20; XX. 26) denounced this practice; which was also legislated against in Deuteronomy XII. 31 and in Leviticus XVIII. 21 and XX. 2 ff. Exodus XXXIV. 20, an amendment to XXII. 28–29, equates the first-born of man with that of the ass: both were redeemable with a lamb, or two young pigeons (Exodus XXXIV. 20; Leviticus XII. 6–8). Abraham’s interrupted sacrifice of Isaac displays his absolute obedience to God, and His mercy in waiving the ‘statute that was not good’, as an acknowledgement of obedience. Isaac, however, was no longer an infant but a ‘lad’ capable of carrying a heavy load of faggots, and Abraham redeemed him with a ram, not a lamb. A midrash that regards Sarah’s death as an indirect consequence of Isaac’s binding, deducts ninety years—her age when she bore Isaac, from 127, her age when she died—and makes him thirty-seven.
4. The ram ‘caught in a thicket’ seems borrowed from Ur of the Chaldees, where a royal grave of the late fourth millennium B.C. has yielded two Sumerian statues of rams in gold, white shell and lapis lazuli, standing on their hind legs and bound with silver chains to a tall, flowering golden bush. This theme is common in Sumerian art.
5. Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac is paralleled in Greek myth: the Cadmean story of Athamas and Phrixus. These Cadmeans (‘Easterners’ in Hebrew) traced their descent from Agenor (‘Canaan’). In the eleventh century B.C., some of them seem to have wandered from Palestine to Cadmeia in Caria, then crossed the Aegean and founded Boeotian Thebes. Cadmeans also figure as ‘Children of Kedmah’ in Ishmael’s genealogy (see 29. 5). This parallel solves three important problems raised by Genesis: first, since Abraham was not founding a city, what emergency prompted him to sacrifice his grown-up son? Next: why was his first-born Ishmael not chosen in preference to Isaac? Lastly: did the quarrel for precedence between Sarah and Hagar, so important in the introductory chapters, bear any relation to the sacrifice?
6. Here is the Cadmean story. King Athamas the Boeotian, having married Queen Nephele of Pelion, who bore him a son named Phrixus, afterwards begot a son, Melicertes (Melkarth, ‘ruler of the city’) on Nephele’s rival Ino the Cadmean. When Nephele heard of this, she cursed Athamas and Melicertes; whereupon Ino created a famine by secretly parching the seed-corn, and bribed Apollo’s priestess to announce that the land would recover its fertility only if Athamas sacrificed Nephele’s son Phrixus, his heir, on Mount Laphystium. Athamas had already grasped the sacrificial knife when Heracles ordered him to desist, crying: ‘My Father, Zeus, King of Heaven, loathes human sacrifices!’ A golden-fleeced ram, sent by Zeus, then appeared; and Phrixus escaped on its back to the Land of Colchis, where he prospered. Ino fled with Melicertes from Athamas’s anger and leaped into the sea, but both of them were rescued and deified by Zeus: Ino as the White Goddess, Melicertes as the New Year God of Corinth.
7. This suggests that, in the original myth, Hagar avenged herself on Sarah by ascribing a famine to some action of Abraham’s; for one famine occurs in the Genesis story when he is already married to Sarah (see 26. a), and another in the account of Isaac at Gerar, which seems to have originally been told about Abraham (see 37. a). It also suggests that the sacrifice was ordered by a false prophet, whom Hagar bribed to do so in revenge for Ishmael’s disinheritance. There may even be a recollection of this in Samael’s attempt to interrupt the sacrifice. Yet the cause of Sarah’s quarrel with Hagar, which is discussed in the ancient code of Hammurabi (see 29. 2), reads more convincingly than the cause of Nephele’s quarrel with Ino and points to Sumeria as the original source of the story. The Cadmean version suggests, however, that Hagar’s second flight from Abraham (see 29. c) took place after the attempted sacrifice of Isaac, not before. ‘Athamas’ may be derived from the Hebrew Ethan, a mythical early sage and poet whose name, meaning ‘lasting’ or ‘strong’, is transcribed in the Septuagint as Aitham. The strange phrase ‘the fear of Isaac’ (Genesis XXXI. 42, 53) recalls the name Phrixus (‘Horror’). Famine in a nomadic society means drought, and the mock-sacrifice of a man dressed in a black ram’s fleece, still celebrated on Mount Laphystium by Boeotian shepherds at the Spring Equinox, is a rain-making rite.
8. Two other myths are to the point here. The earlier one concerns Jephthah’s vow to give God the first living creature that met him after his victory over the Ammonites (Judges XI. 29 ff); the later concerns Idomeneus the Cretan’s similar vow to Poseidon when faced with shipwreck. Jephthah, however, came to no harm after sacrificing his daughter, this being ‘a custom in Israel’; whereas Idomeneus’s men were struck by plague, and he was banished from Crete. The Greeks, who had acquired a horror of human sacrifice at about the same period as the Hebrews, preferred for instance to believe that Iphigeneia, Agamemnon’s daughter, was redeemed with a doe when about to be despatched at Aulis, and then spirited away to the Tauric Chersonese. Plutarch records a case which combines the vow theme with that of a first-born son sacrificed in time of emergency: Maeander promised to reward the Queen of Heaven with the first person who should congratulate him on the storm of Pessinus; this proved to be his son Archelaus, whom he duly killed, but then remorsefully drowned himself in the river which now bears his name. The practice of burning children to Hercules Melkarth continued among the Phoenicians long after the Hebrews had abandoned it; and Micah’s view (VI. 6–8) that God dislikes not only human sacrifices but animal sacrifices, too-preferring justice, mercy and a humble heart—was a shockingly radical one at that epoch.
9. The Jewish New Year ritual commemorates the binding of Isaac. When asked to explain the blowing of a ram’s horn (shofar) in Leviticus XXIII. 23–25, Rabbi Abbahu said: ‘It is done because God ordered our fathers “Blow Me a ram’s horn, that I may remember Abraham’s binding of Isaac; and count it as if you had bound yourselves before Me!”’ (B. Rosh Hashana 16a). The same explanation occurs in the New Year mussaf prayer; and a typically Tannaitic saying attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of St. Thomas: ‘Raise the stone and ye shall find me, cleave the wood and I shall be there!’ clearl
y refers to Isaac’s binding, which was regarded as the greatest test of faith in all Scripture.
10. Midrashic comment on the ram is expansive and fanciful. God had made this particular beast on the First Day of Creation; its ashes became the foundations of the Temple Sanctuary; King David used its sinews to string his harp; Elijah girded his loins with its skin; its left horn was blown by God on Mount Sinai, and the right horn will be sounded in the Days of the Messiah to recall the lost sheep of Israel from exile. When Abraham found the ram, it repeatedly freed itself from one thicket, only to become entangled in another; which signified that Israel would be similarly entangled in sin and misfortune, until at length redeemed by a blast on the right-hand horn.
11. The Genesis chronicler purposely varies between ‘God’ and ‘an angel’ when writing of Abraham’s interlocutor: as he has done in his account of the divine visit to Abraham at Mamre (see 31. 1). To connect the Mountain of Sacrifice with Mount Zion is inept, because it has already been recorded (see 27. c) that Melchizedek reigned there as King of Salem and priest of the Most High God—a midrash emphasizes this point by making Abraham ask God why the duty of sacrificing Isaac had not been entrusted to Shem—meaning Melchizedek (see 27. d). This is to contradict the reliable Samaritan tradition that Mount Moriah was the 2300-foot Mount Gerizim (Deuteronomy XI. 29 ff), which overlooks the ‘terebinths of Moreh’ where Abraham had offered his first sacrifice (Genesis XII. 6). The Authorised Version mistranslates this as ‘the plain of Moreh’, relying on an Aramaic text intended to disguise Abraham’s acceptance of Canaanite tree-worship. Moreh, afterwards Shechem, and now Nablus, was the holiest shrine in Israel—visited by Abraham, blessed by Moses, and famous both for Joshua’s memorial stone and Joseph’s grave (Joshua XXIV. 25 ff). It lost its holiness, however, when a prophecy (Hosea VI. 9) of God’s punishment for the idol-worship inaugurated there by King Jeroboam (1 Kings XII. 25 ff) took effect, and all priests and leaders of the Northern Kingdom were carried off by Sennacherib. Jerusalem then became the sole legitimate centre of worship, and as many early myths as possible were transferred to Mount Zion, including those of Adam, Abel, Noah and Abraham.
12. The Cave of Machpelah had been bought by Abraham from Ephron the Hittite (see 11. d). Sarah’s joyful death is intended by the late mythographer to account for her absence from Beersheba, Abraham’s home, and for his journey to Hebron. Athamas, too, was connected with the Hittites, by being a brother of ‘Sisyphus’, the Hittite God Teshub (see 39. 1). The cave of ‘Ephron the Hittite’ may have been a shrine sacred to Phoroneus, who is called father of Agenor (‘Canaan’) and said to have not only discovered how to use fire, but initiated the Greek worship of Hera (‘Anath’).
35
ABRAHAM AND KETURAH
(a) Though now one hundred and thirty-seven years of age, Abraham continued youthful and hale. He prayed that God might distinguish him from Isaac, for whom he was often mistaken by strangers. God accordingly crowned Abraham with locks white as wool, like His own: the first external sign of old age granted mankind and treated as a mark of respect.289
After Sarah’s death, Abraham married Keturah. Some say that this was a nickname of Hagar’s, who had been bound in service to Sarah; who bound together a garland of sweet-smelling virtues; and who remained bound to Abraham by a vow of chastity, even when she had been driven away. Others say that Abraham chose Keturah, a descendant of Japheth, so that he might have posterity in the female line from each of Noah’s sons: Hagar being descended from Ham, and Sarah from Shem.290
(b) Abraham’s sons by Keturah were Zimran, Jokshan (father of Dedan and Sheba), Medan, Midian, Ishbak and Shuah. He sent them all off eastwards, laden with gifts, to fend for themselves, and pronounced this warning: ‘Beware of Isaac’s fire!’ They took possession of many lands, including Trogloditis and the Red Sea shores of Arabia Felix. Distant nations now claim descent from Abraham through them, even the Spartans of Greece. None of Keturah’s sons kept God’s Law, which explains Abraham’s warning. Among the children of Dedan were the Asshurites, who founded Assyria; the Letushites; and the Leummites. Midian’s sons were Ephah and Epher, Hanoch, Abida and Eldaah.291
(c) Some say that Abraham entrusted Keturah’s sons with the secret names of demons, whom they could thus bend to do their will when making magic; and that all the wisdom of the East, now so much admired, was Abraham’s.292
(d) Others say that Keturah bore Abraham twelve sons.293
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1. This myth is historically important, since it suggests that Abraham’s Hebrews controlled the desert routes to Egypt and acted as agents for trade with various eastern tribes. ‘Medan’ recalls the Yemenite god Madan. The North Arabian tribe of Midian occupied the Gulf of Aqaba and the Sinai Peninsula. ‘Ishbak’ seems to be Iashbuqi, a small North Syrian kingdom mentioned in an eighth-century B.C. Assyrian inscription; and ‘Shuah’ (Soge or Soe in the Septuagint) its neighbouring kingdom of Shukhu. ‘Keturah’ will have meant a binding together of tribes for the common interest of trade under Abraham’s benevolent guidance.
2. ‘Jokshan’ seems to be identical with Yoqtan, father of Sheba (Genesis X. 27–28), who is called Qahtān in Arabic and regarded by Arab genealogists as the ancestor of all Southern Arab tribes. Sheba fathered the mercantile Sabaeans. Jokshan’s son Dedan—who also figures as a son of Raamah the Cushite in Genesis X. 7 and I Chronicles I. 9; and in Josephus’s Antiquities as a son of Shuah—was a North Arabian desert tribe from Tema and Buz (Jeremiah XXV. 23). According to Ezekiel XXVII. 15–20, they supplied Tyre with saddle-rugs until ‘Esau’ or ‘Edom’ harried their caravans (Isaiah XXI. 13–15; Jeremiah XLIX. 8; Ezekiel XXV. 13) and forced them to retreat south.
3. ‘Asshur’, here called a son of Dedan, was the god from whom the city of Asshur—later the Assyrian capital—took its name. The names Ashuru and Latashu (i.e. Asshur and Letush) occur in Nabataean inscriptions as personal names. ‘Leummites’ is probably a mistake for ‘and other nations’, from le’om, ‘a nation’ (as in Genesis XXV. 23).
4. The sons of Midian also moved to South Arabia. ‘Ephah’ (Gephar in the Septuagint), mentioned with Midian (Isaiah LX. 6) as a camel-owning tribe that brought gold and incense from Sheba, is Khayapa in inscriptions of Sargon of Assyria; today Ghwafa, east of the Gulf of Aqaba. ‘Epher’ (Opher or Gapher in the Septuagint, Eperu or Apuriu in Egyptian inscriptions), has been identified with the Banu Ghifar of the Hejaz. ‘Hanoch’ may represent the modern Hanakiya, a settlement north of Medina, visited by Doughty and Burckhardt. Abida could be Ibadidi, mentioned in inscriptions of Sargon II. Both Abida and Eldaah occur as proper names in Sabaean and Minaean inscriptions.
5. Josephus’s tribal genealogy is based on an alternative tradition; so is the Sepher Hayashar, which gives Dedan’s sons different names. Genesis itself embodies rival traditions of kinship, produced by constant political changes among nomadic tribes, from Hyksos times onward.
6. Josephus states that King Areus of Sparta, in a letter written about 183 B.C. to Onias III, High Priest of Jerusalem, claimed Abraham as his ancestor; this claim was acknowledged some twelve years later by the High Priest Jonathan (Maccabees XII) who admitted its conformity with Jewish sacred books, but did not cite them. At all events, Menelaus the Spartan had spent ten yean in Egypto-Palestinian waters, according to various passages in the Odyssey; and the early Achaean Greeks had founded colonies in Palestine (see 30. 3). Xanthus the Lydian records that Ascalon was built by Ascalus, an ancestor of the Spartans.
7. Hebrew mythographers tend to credit tribal ancestors with twelve sons. Thus, although Genesis allows Abraham only six, the midrash elevates him above his brother Nahor who had twelve, by giving him twelve in addition to Ishmael and Isaac. Ishmael begot twelve sons (see 29. i); and so did Jacob (see 45); so, according to the Sepher Hayashar, did Abraham’s nephew Aram, son of Zoba, Terah’s youngest child, who founded Aram-Zoba (2 Samuel X. 6–8), a city north of Damascus.
36
ISAAC’S MARRIAGE
Abraham called his chief steward Eliezer, and said: ‘Put your hand under my thigh, and swear by the Living God that you will obey me! Since I cannot let Isaac marry among the Canaanites, a bride must be found for him at Harran. I am too old to settle this matter in person; therefore go, make your choice on my behalf, and bring the woman back to Hebron.’
Eliezer asked: ‘What if she hesitates to accompany me? Must Isaac then marry her in Harran?’
Abraham replied: ‘Isaac shall never leave the land which God has given us! If she declines, you are free of this oath. Nevertheless, have no fear: God’s angel will prepare your way.’
Eliezer took the oath, chose ten fine camels from Abraham’s herds, filled their saddle-bags with rich gifts, and rode off at the head of a large retinue. Many days later, at dusk, he made his camels kneel at the well outside Padan-Aram in Harran, and saw the city women trooping up to draw water, as was their custom. He prayed: ‘God of my master Abraham, prosper me today and grant me a sign: that when I say to one of these women “Let down your pitcher, and give me drink!”, and she answers “Drink, and I shall also water your camels,” that same woman will be Isaac’s appointed bride.’