The Gifts of the Jews

by Thomas Cahill

  they were Avram’s covenant-allies.

  When Avram heard that his brother [actually nephew]3 had been taken prisoner,

  he drew out his retainers, his house-born slaves, eighteen and three hundred, and went in pursuit as far as Dan.

  Ma-zot? Avram has 318 slaves, not to mention family members and other “retainers”? Avram has “covenant-allies,” like any great chieftain? Avram, the quixotic quester, the self-conscious nomad, can organize an army of pursuit that marches all the way from Mamre (modern Hebron) in the Canaanite south to Dan in the extreme north, a journey of some hundred miles? The clue to the correct interpretation of this text lies in its description of Avram as “the Hebrew,” a description found nowhere else. This story, though woven into the fabric of Genesis, comes not from the traditions of the Children of Abraham, who never called themselves “the Hebrews,” but from the oral lore of their neighbors. Here we see Avram not through the gentle idealization of subsequent generations of his heirs, but as he was seen by his contemporaries. Avram, as the Egyptian episode has already hinted, was neither rube nor flower child, seeking sweetness and light in the desert. He was a calculating clansman who for his own reasons had chosen to leave the great cities of Sumer for the unsettled life of Canaan, but who was otherwise taking no chances: he was a powerful chieftain with wealth and men at his disposal.

  He succeeds in freeing Lot and then, returning south, binds himself even more closely to the local kings by refusing to share in the spoils of their victory:

  “So that you should not say: I made Avram rich.

  Nothing for me!

  Only what the lads have consumed,

  and the share of the men who went with me—Aner, Eshcol, and Mamre,

  let them take their share.”

  Avram was no half-crazed, solipsistic idealist but a man among men. Even in his dealings with his god there is a note of the self-confident, calculating desert chieftain, who knows how to deal. When he hears the god’s voice speaking the great words “Be not afraid,” Avram complains, “What would you give me?—for I am going (to die) accursed,” and then goes on to say that he has decided to leave his estate to his chief servant, for “to me you have not given seed.” To this indirect accusation, the god replies:

  “This one shall not be heir to you,

  rather, the one that goes out from your own body …”

  He brought him outside and said:

  “Pray look toward the heavens and count the stars,

  can you count them?”

  And he said to him:

  “So shall your seed be.”

  Though the heavens continue to be mined for metaphor, they are no longer predictive of anything. It is only the god who can predict; the heavens are reduced to serving him as illustration. This is just fine with Avram: the narrator brings the incident to a close by remarking that Avram—the canny, worldly-wise chieftain that we now know him to be—“trusted in” this god and that the god deemed his trust “as righteous-merit on his part.” For this trust we are given no reason other than Avram’s insight: this self-reliant man relies on his own judgment to interpret correctly what is going on. Out of an age of tall tales of warriors and kings, all so like one another that they are hard to tell apart, comes this story of a skeptical, worldly patriarch’s trust in a disembodied voice. This is becoming, however incredibly, the story of an interpersonal relationship.

  Sarai the pawn, however, has not been let in on any of this and grumbles against a god “who has obstructed me from bearing,” even after ten years in Canaan. Faithful to the customs of her time, she presents Avram with her Egyptian maid as sexual surrogate, so that “perhaps I may be built-up-with-sons through her!” But once the maid, Hagar, becomes pregnant, she begins to treat her mistress dismissively, which is more than poor Sarai can take. When Avram gives Sarai leave to treat Hagar as she will, Sarai’s beatings drive Hagar out of the encampment into the wilderness, where an angel instructs her to return to Sarai, no matter the abuse, for Hagar too will have seed “too many to count.” Her son Yishmael (or Ishmael) shall be another Enkidu, “a wild-ass of a man, his hand against all, hand of all against him”—father of the Arabs. Distraught Hagar does as she is bid, but not before giving a new name to the god whose presence is signaled by the angelic messenger. She calls him “God of Seeing” and “the Living-One Who-Sees-Me,” and it is just this Seeing that will occupy the rest of the narrative.

  Avram is now a very old man—according to our text, ninety-nine. And though we may take this number as a faint echo of Sumerian exaggeration, there is no reason to doubt that Avram and Sarai are well beyond the hope of children of their bodies. But the god is becoming more than a voice: he is “seen” by Avram, who is told, “I am God Shaddai”—a name for which we may have lost the linguistic key, though many have thought it means “Mountain God” or “God of the High Place.” “Walk in my presence!” invites the god. “And be wholehearted!” Seeing the god in all his splendor and being invited to such intimacy causes Avram to fall “upon his face.” The relationship is becoming more intense; and as we witness its development, we must acknowledge something just below the surface of events: without Avram’s highly colored sense of himself—of his own individuality—there could hardly be any relationship, yet the relationship is also made possible by the exclusive intensity that this incipient monotheism requires, so much so that we may almost say that individuality (with its consequent possibility of an interpersonal relationship) is the flip side of monotheism.

  Once again, the god promises Avram the land of Canaan and progeny beyond all telling, even royal progeny (“yes, kings will go out from you”). And now the god wants to covenant with Avram, just as chieftains covenant with one another. In this covenant, Avram is to have a new name, Avraham (or Father-of-Many-Nations), as is Sarai, who will henceforth be Sara (or Princess). Avram and his god are to establish an unbreakable bond, which in this period was always contracted in blood, usually the blood of animal sacrifice. But the blood of this covenant is to be Avram’s own and that of “every male among you”:

  “At eight days old, every male among you shall be circumcised, throughout your generations,

  whether house-born or bought with money from any foreigner, who is not your seed.

  Circumcised, yes, circumcised shall be your house-born and your money-bought (slaves),

  so that my covenant may be in your flesh as a covenant for the ages.”

  It is impossible for any man to forget his penis, his own personal life force. By this covenant, the children of Avram will be virtually unable to forget the god who never forgets them and who in his growing splendor and exclusivity apless and less like a portable amulet to be rubbed for good luck. This god is losing the guardian-angel aspect of the Sumerian patronal gods and is turning into—God. To us this covenant may appear barbaric. But within the rigid simplicities of Canaan and Mesopotamia, this “covenant in your flesh,” this permanent reminder, makes perfect sense.

  The man who is now Avraham, still on his face, begins to laugh, thinking, “To a hundred-year-old-man shall there be (children) born? Or shall ninety-year-old Sara give birth?” Then aloud: “If only Yishmael might live in your presence!”—in other words, let the promise fall to Yishmael, who has the great virtue of already existing. Avraham is only trying to help God out, get him to be more realistic. But though God will make Yishmael bear fruit “exceedingly, exceedingly,” his covenant shall be with the child “whom Sara will bear you at this set-time, another year hence.” So Sara the pawn, who’s never gotten anything she wants out of life, is to become pregnant in three months. At last, something tangible.

  “When he had finished speaking with Avraham, God went up, from beside Avraham.” Interview over; circumcisions begin. And barely has Avraham finished circumcising himself and “all his household” than visitors arrive. Avraham, no doubt a little winded from his activity, is “sitting at the entrance to his tent at the heat of the day”—just as we can see Bedoui
n chieftains in the punishing sun of today’s Middle East, sitting under their tent flap, hoping to catch a breeze.

  He lifted up his eyes and saw:

  here, three men standing over against him.

  When he saw them, he ran to meet them from the entrance to his tent and bowed to the earth

  and said:

  “My lords,

  pray if I have found favor in your eyes,

  pray do not pass by your servant!

  Pray let a little water be fetched, then wash your feet and recline under the tree;

  let me fetch (you) a bit of bread, that you may refresh your hearts,

  then afterward you may pass on—

  for you have, after all, passed your servant’s way!”

  Avraham, however well established in his herds and retainers, thinks himself well below the mark of these “lords,” whoever they may be, and is eager to demonstrate to them his surpassing hospitality. What he has in mind is considerably more than “a bit of bread.” Running to Sara and shouting “make haste!” he commands her to bake three cakes from their best semolina. Then he’s off to the oxen to choose a calf, “tender and fine,” for a servant to prepare. When the meal is ready, Avraham himself serves it with solicitude. While the potentates eat, they ask after his wife, whose name they somehow know:

  “Where is Sara your wife?”

  “Here in the tent,” replies Avraham with mounting suspicion.

  The lord sitting in the middle of the three says:

  “I will return, yes, return to you when time revives [that is, a year from now] and Sara your wife will have a son.”

  Avraham knows now that he is entertaining God and two angels,4 but Sara, who knows nothing of the previous promises (why would a man share such things with a wife?), has overheard. Perhaps she is giddy from all her frantic baking, but she finds the conversation ludicrous and chuckles to herself, “After I have become worn, is there to be pleasure for me? And my lord is old!”

  “Now why does Sara laugh?” asks the figure in the middle, who now reveals himself as the God for whom no feat is impossible, and repeats the promise. Poor Sara, full of fear and confusion, insists she did not laugh. “No,” says God, “indeed you laughed.” Sara, who has been left out of the great relationship between her husband and God, laughs the laugh of the ancient world, of Sumer, Egypt, and Canaan, of Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Americas, the rightly cynical laugh of all those who know that a woman cannot bear children past menopause and a man cannot get it up in advanced old age. For all the tall tales of heroes and kings, the world of human experience is as predictable as the zodiac that turns in the heavens. We all know the final inevitability, how things must end.

  This episode blends effortlessly into the next. God debates within himself whether he will tell Avraham “what I am about to do” and decides to speak privately with Avraham because “I have known him”—while the two angels head for Sodom, where Lot lives. When God reveals his plan of destruction for Sodom and Gomorrah, Avraham attempts to reason with him: “Will you really sweep away the innocent along with the guilty?” By questioning God, who has been gradually revealing his awesome grandeur to Avraham, the patriarch exhibits striking courage, a courage that will reappear in his descendants throughout the ages to come. A verbal tug-of-war ensues, ending with God’s promise to stay his hand if as few as ten innocents are found within the walls of these cities.

  Fade-in: Sodom’s main square, where Lot, encountering the angels, invites them to stay at his house. (Though not as generous to his guests as Avraham, he’s undoubtedly a good guy.) But the men of the city surround the house like the ghouls in Night of the Living Dead and demand that Lot bring out the two handsome young men so they can, well, sodomize them. It becomes all too clear that there aren’t ten innocents here. There’s only Lot, who tries to buy time with a ploy that might not have occurred to most of us in his situation:

  Now pray, I have two daughters who have never known a man,

  pray let me bring them out to you, and you may deal with them however seems good in your eyes;

  only to these men do nothing,

  for they have, after all, come under the shadow of my roof beam!

  Of course, the Sodomites aren’t interested and roar that they will bugger Lot, too, once they have broken down the door. But no one gets buggered; and the Sodomites get theirs—fire and brimstone from heaven—once Lot and his family are out of the way, save, unfortunately, for Lot’s wife, who looks back on the raining destruction, even though she has been told not to, and gets turned into a pillar of salt—another wifely pawn.

  This unhappy episode, beloved of sexually repressed fundamentalists through the ages, may leave most of us with the same reaction Evelyn Waugh described one of his fellow officers as having. The young man, an empty-headed dilettante right out of the pages of Wodehouse, had never read anything, but during the longeurs between military engagements he decided to while away the hours by reading a book for the very first time, and the Bible was all that was available. Having read part of Genesis, he soon gave up the pursuit, exclaiming: “God, what a shit God is!”

  It is only somewhat mollifying to realize that the sin of Sodom was not homosexuality but inhospitality. You can’t tell from this episode whether God is against buggery, but you can be sure he takes a dim view of raping perfectly nice strangers who come to visit. Also, we know from widespread Mesopotamian evidence that Sumerians and other ancient peoples of the Middle East preferred rear entry, both vaginal and anal, for their sexual encounters. To the descendants of Avraham, who viewed such posture as subhuman (“like a dog”), the whole sexual repertoire of their neighbors may have come to seem suspect—bestial and unnatural.

  But now we go from the fire and brimstone to a real wonder:

  Sara became pregnant and bore Avraham a son in his old age,

  at the set-time of which God had spoken to him.

  And Avraham called the name of his son, who was born to him, whom Sara bore to him:

  Yitzhak (He Laughs) [Isaac in traditional English translation].

  And Avraham circumcised Yitzhak his son at eight days old, as God had commanded him.…

  Now Sara said:

  “God has made me laugh.”

  God had made her laugh before—by suggesting the impossible. Now Sara the pawn is given the only thing she ever wanted, the very thing she knew she could not have. She wanted this child much more than Avraham did—however keen his desire had been—for he could have children by other women. It is one of the hallmarks of the handiwork of Avraham’s God that his purpose for one human being spills over into the lives of others, creating bliss even for the story’s supernumeraries. The conversation between these two (who have barely conversed before, at least in our presence) is rich and poignant, and the speech of her who has hardly spoken has a pathos such as we would expect only from a great writer of dialogue:

  “God has made me laugh,

  all who hear of it will laugh for me.…

  Who would have declared to Avraham:

  ‘Sara will nurse sons?’

  Well, I have borne him a son in his old age!”

  God has made Avraham laugh, God has made Sara laugh, God makes Yitzhak laugh. And: “The child grew and was weaned, and Avraham made a great drinking-feast on the day that Yitzhak was weaned.” At this point, winter has been dispelled and everyone’s nightmares are over.

  Not quite.

  For one thing, Sara is determined that Hagar the Egyptian will not share in the laughter and drives out her and her son for good (though they remain under God’s protection). And then, in piercing staccato phrases, the narrator begins the Hebrew Bible’s most fearful and piteous story:

  Now after these events it was

  that God tested Avraham

  and said to him

  “Avraham!”

  He said:

  “Here I am.”

  He said:

  “Pray take your son,

  your on
ly-one,

  whom you love,

  Yitzhak,

  and go-you-forth to the land of Moriyya (Seeing),

  and offer him up there as an offering-up

  upon one of the mountains

  that I will tell you of.”

  Avraham started-early in the morning,

  he saddled his donkey,

  he took his two serving-lads with him and Yitzhak his son,

  he split wood for the offering-up

  and arose and went to the place that God had told him of.

  On the third day Avraham lifted up his eyes

  and saw the place from afar.

  Avraham said to his lads:

  “You stay here with the donkey,

  and I and the lad will go yonder,

  we will bow down and then return to you.”

  Avraham took the wood for the offering-up,

  he placed them upon Yitzhak his son,

  in his hand he took the fire and the knife.

  Thus the two of them went together.

  Yitzhak said to Avraham his father, he said:

  “Father!”

  He said:

  “Here I am, my son.”

  He said:

  “Here are the fire and the wood,

  but where is the lamb for the offering-up?”

  Avraham said:

  “God will see-for-himself to the lamb for the offering-up,

  my son.”

  Thus the two of them went together.

  They came to the place that God had told him of;

  there Avraham built the slaughter-site

  and arranged the wood

  and bound Yitzhak his son

  and placed him on the slaughter-site atop the wood.

  Avraham stretched out his hand,

  he took the knife to slay his son.

  But [God’s] messenger called to him from heaven

  and said:

  “Avraham! Avraham!”

  He said: