Not in God's Name

by Jonathan Sacks

  What is Ishmael doing here, standing next to Isaac at their father’s grave? Until now, we have assumed that from early childhood they had lived separate lives. Isaac grew up with Abraham and Sarah, Ishmael with Hagar. There was, as far as we know, no contact between them. How then did they come together for Abraham’s funeral? What was their relationship? Did Ishmael bear a grudge at being sent away? These are questions bound to arise for anyone who has been attending carefully to the story. Yet the text offers no answers. It does not even seem to be aware of the questions.

  The second anomaly: throughout Abraham’s long journey, he has been accompanied by Sarah. The text emphasises their faithfulness to one another and to God. Sarah dies and Abraham buys a field with a cave in which to bury her – his first share in the Promised Land. In the next chapter, he sends his servant to find a wife for Isaac. The story seems to have reached closure. Abraham has seen, if not the fulfilment of the divine promises, at least a beginning. He has a son, his son is married, and he has a fragment of the land. We expect, in the next scene, to see him die in peace. At this point, however, the text takes a digression that seems to make no sense at all:

  Abraham took another wife, named Keturah. She bore to him Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak and Shuah. Jokshan was the father of Sheba and Dedan; the descendants of Dedan were the Asshurites, the Letushites and the Leummites. The sons of Midian were Ephah, Epher, Hanoch, Abida and Eldaah. All these were descendants of Keturah. (Gen. 25:1–4)

  What is happening here? Why, after the protracted drama of Abraham’s wait for a child, do we suddenly read that, in old age, Abraham has six more sons by a new wife? Who is Keturah, of whom we have heard nothing until now and of whom we will hear nothing again?

  Genesis is a highly purposeful narrative. It tells us nothing merely because it happened. It is not ‘history’ in the conventional sense. It is covenantal history, the working out of truth through time. It discloses a pattern, and nothing extraneous to that pattern is allowed to divert our attention. It may be that the story of Abraham’s other children is there to supply the background to certain nations who will later play a part in Israel’s story – Midian, for example, or Asshur (Assyria). Alternatively it may be telling us that this is how Abraham became, as God said he would, ‘the father of many nations’. Neither, though, seems likely. No weight is later placed by the Bible on the fact that the Midianites and Assyrians were children of Abraham. Nor does it emphasise, as it does in the case of Ishmael, that they were to become ‘great nations’. Who was Keturah, and why does this episode appear just before the end of Abraham’s story?

  The third oddity is location. After the binding of Isaac, Abraham returned to Beersheba. The death and burial of Sarah take place at Hebron. We would expect to find Isaac at one or other of these two places. However, two episodes locate him elsewhere. When Abraham’s servant returns, bringing Rebekah to become Isaac’s wife, we read: ‘Isaac had just come from Beer Lahai Roi, for he was living in the Negev’ (24:62). After Abraham’s funeral we read again: ‘After the death of Abraham, God blessed his son Isaac. At that time, Isaac was living near Beer Lahai Roi’ (25:11).What is this place and what was Isaac doing there?

  It was this that gave the rabbis the key to unlock all three mysteries. Looking back, we discover that Beer Lahai Roi appears in Genesis 16 when Hagar first fled into the desert. Having been met and blessed by an angel, she gave the place a name:

  So she called the name of the Lord who spoke to her: ‘You are the God of seeing’, for she said, ‘Did I not have a vision after He saw me?’ That is why the well was called Beer Lahai Roi [‘the well of the living One who sees me’]; it is still there, between Kadesh and Bered. (Gen. 16:13–14)

  Beer Lahai Roi is the place of Hagar. Teasing out the implications of this unexpected turn in the plot, the sages said: ‘On seeing that his father had sent to fetch him a wife, Isaac said, Can I live with her while my father lives alone? I will go and return Hagar to him.’10 Isaac had been on a mission of reconciliation to reunite Hagar and Abraham.

  The rabbis made a further interpretive leap. One device of Midrash is to identify unknown with known biblical characters.11 Who then was Keturah? Said the rabbis: Hagar herself! Why then was she called Keturah? Because, said the sages, ‘her acts were as fragrant as incense [ketoret]’.12

  A complete counter-narrative is taking shape. Whether of his own accord or at the prompting of Isaac, Abraham took Hagar back and gave her a place of honour in his household. What does this Midrash tell us about how the rabbis read the text?13 It tells us that they felt there was something morally amiss about the story as it stood. Hagar, obedient to her mistress’s wishes, was sent away. So too was Ishmael, the child born at Sarah’s request.

  The story beneath the story, hinted at by these three discrepant details, is that neither Abraham nor Isaac made their peace with the banishment of handmaid and child. As long as Sarah was alive, they could do nothing about it, respecting her feelings as God had commanded Abraham to do. But once Sarah was no longer alive, they could engage in an act of reconciliation. That is how Isaac and Ishmael came to be together when Abraham died.

  Only against this background can we understand a rabbinic tradition remarkable both for its psychological insight and for its astonishing interfaith implications:

  He [Ishmael] lived in the desert of Paran (Genesis 21:21). Ishmael sent for and married a woman named Ayesha from the plains of Moab. Three years later Abraham went to see his son Ishmael. He arrived at midday and found his wife at home. ‘Where is Ishmael?’ he asked. ‘He has gone to fetch dates from the desert’, she replied. ‘Give me a little bread and water’, he asked. ‘I have none’, she replied. He said to her, ‘When Ishmael comes, tell him that an old man from the land of Canaan came to see him and said, “The threshold of the house is not good.” ’ When Ishmael returned his wife told him this, and he divorced her.

  His mother then sent to her father’s house and took for him a wife named Fatimah. Three years later, Abraham again went to see his son. He arrived at midday and found Ishmael’s wife at home. ‘Give me a little bread and a little water, for my soul is weary from the road’, he asked. She took out [bread and water] and gave them to him. Abraham stood and prayed before the Holy One, blessed be He, and Ishmael’s house became filled with all good things.

  When Ishmael came, his wife told him about it, and Ishmael then knew that his father still loved him.14

  What an extraordinary rewriting of the story! Now it transpires that Abraham, despite the fact that he had sent Ishmael away, did not cease to love or care for him. He made a visit to see him. Discovering that he had married an ungracious wife, he left a coded message. ‘Tell him that an old man from Canaan came to see him’ was his way of announcing his identity. ‘The threshold of the house is not good’ was a way of hinting, ‘This is not the woman you should have married.’ He pays a further visit three years later and finds that Ishmael has remarried, this time to a woman who gives hospitality to strangers. He blesses their home.

  The passage ends on a marvellous note: ‘Ishmael then knew that his father still loved him.’ When he had been sent away, Ishmael was too young to understand what had happened. He must have thought that his father had disowned him. Now he knew this was not so. Whatever the reason for his exile, he had forfeited neither his father’s love nor his blessing that his home be ‘filled with all good things’.

  What gives the Midrash its unique significance is the names it ascribes to Ishmael’s wives. Both are references to the Qur’an and Islam. Ishmael’s first wife, Ayesha, bears the name of the prophet Mohammed’s child-bride. Fatimah is the name of the prophet’s daughter. Neither are Hebrew names. This dates the passage to an early period in the history of Islam, probably the era of the Umayyads. It is astonishing in what it implies. Yes, Ishmael is the central figure in Islam. He is a beloved and blessed child of Abraham. Fatimah is a figure of grace and kindness. Nor is this mere apologetics. The proof is that long
before the birth of Islam, many rabbis in the Mishnaic and Talmudic periods, from the first century CE onwards, were called Ishmael, hardly likely – indeed impossible – if Ishmael were a rejected figure in Judaism. The force of the Midrash is greater still in light of one striking fact: that in the Bible, Abraham does not bless Isaac. God does, after Abraham’s death, but he himself does not. One ancient Jewish tradition states explicitly: ‘Abraham did not bless Isaac because he did not want Ishmael to feel resentment against him [Isaac].’15

  Less important to the story of Ishmael but central to the theme of this book is the test by which Abraham judges the worthiness of Ishmael’s wives, namely, did they show kindness to strangers? – the criterion by which, in the Bible, Abraham’s servant chooses a wife for Isaac. At the core of the Bible’s value system is that cultures, like individuals, are judged by their willingness to extend care beyond the boundary of family, tribe, ethnicity and nation.

  —

  On the surface, the story of Isaac and Ishmael is about sibling rivalry and the displacement of the elder by the younger. Beneath the surface, however, the sages heard a counter-narrative telling the opposite story: the birth of Isaac does not displace Ishmael. To be sure, he will have a different destiny. But he too is a beloved son of Abraham, blessed by his father and by God. He becomes a great nation. God is ‘with him’ as he grows up. God stays with him to ensure that his children flourish and become ‘twelve rulers’. Abraham and Isaac both make a journey of reconciliation. The two half-brothers stand together at their father’s grave. There is no hostility between them. Their futures diverge, but there is no conflict between them, nor do they compete for God’s affection, which encompasses them both. This reading becomes all the more powerful when, in the Midrash, it is extended to the relationship between Judaism and Islam.

  This is the first indication of what will, in the next few chapters, emerge as a systemic feature of the biblical text. In each narrative of apparent choice-and-rejection, there is a counter-narrative that subverts the surface story and presents a more nuanced, generous picture of divine (and, by implication, human) sympathy. It is never blatant. It never unequivocally announces itself. But it is unmistakably there in the text. The counter-narrative is not an interpretation imposed by a modern or postmodern sensibility. The proof is that early rabbinic Midrash heard the nuances and drew attention to them, despite the fact that they preclude any clear, black-and-white, good-versus-bad reading of the text.

  The surface narrative is itself revolutionary. It asserts that the hierarchy of the ancient world – where the elder is destined to rule, the younger to serve – was about to be overthrown. The counter-narrative is more radical still, because it hints at the most radical of monotheism’s truths: that God may choose, but God does not reject. The logic of scarcity – of alpha males and chosen sons – has no place in a world made by a God whose ‘tender mercies are on all his works’ (Ps. 145:9). Perhaps it needed the twenty-first century, with its ethnic and religious conflicts, to sensitise our ear to the texts’ inflections and innuendoes.

  Brothers can live together in peace, so the counter-narrative implies. But if this is true of Isaac and Ishmael, can it really be true of the supreme instance of displacement: the story of Jacob and Esau?

  7

  Wrestling with the Angel

  Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

  Featur’d like him, like him with friends possessed,

  Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,

  With what I most enjoy, contented least…

  Shakespeare, Sonnet 29

  Nowhere are narrative and counter-narrative more subtly interwoven than in the story of Jacob and Esau. It is a work of awesome brilliance, so surprising in its effect that we cannot doubt, once we have understood its hidden message, that it is intended as the refutation of sibling rivalry in the Bible. Its significance, set at the very centre of Genesis, is unmistakable. Once we have decoded the mystery of Jacob, our understanding of covenant and identity will be changed for ever.

  The surface narrative is a paradigm – almost a caricature – of displacement. The first time we see the twins, at their birth, the younger Jacob is already clinging to the heels of the firstborn Esau. They are different types, Esau a hunter, Jacob ‘a plain man staying with the tents’ (Gen. 25:27). The tension is heightened by parental attachment. Isaac loves Esau, Rebekah favours Jacob. In the first dramatic scene between the two brothers, Esau comes in exhausted from the hunt, smells the stew Jacob is making and asks for some. Jacob drives a hard bargain: my stew for your birthright. Esau agrees and in a staccato succession of five consecutive verbs – ‘he ate, drank, rose, left, and despised his birthright’ – reveals his character: mercurial, impetuous, no match for the subtle Jacob.

  The story rises to a crescendo in the great scene of the deception. Isaac, by now old and blind, asks Esau to hunt him some venison and prepare a meal so that ‘my soul may bless you before I die’ (27:2–4). Rebekah, overhearing, decides that Jacob must take the blessing. Jacob has his doubts. What if Isaac feels him to check his identity? Esau is hairy, Jacob smooth-skinned. Rebekah, ever resourceful, has an answer. She takes Esau’s goatskin clothes and puts them on Jacob, covering his hands and neck. The disguise works, despite Isaac’s repeatedly expressed doubts and misgivings. The blessing is bestowed. Isaac says to Jacob:

  May God give you

  Of the dew of the heavens,

  And the richness of the earth,

  And abundant grain and wine.

  May nations serve you

  And peoples bow down to you.

  Rule over your brothers,

  And may your mother’s sons bow down to you. (Gen. 27:28–29)

  Jacob leaves. Soon after, Esau arrives with the food he has prepared. Father and son slowly realise what has happened. Isaac trembles. Esau lets out ‘a long and bitter cry’, adding, ‘Is he not rightly called Jacob seeing that he has supplanted me these two times’ (27:36). Here, displacement is explicit. The younger has usurped the place of the elder. Conflict has yielded tragedy – a blind man misled, a son robbed of his blessing, a trust betrayed, a family divided, and violence waiting in the wings: ‘Esau said in his heart: The days of mourning for my father are approaching. Then I will kill my brother Jacob’ (27:41).

  Nor is this unexpected. In a unique scene, the theme of sibling rivalry is announced even before the children are born. Rebekah, hitherto infertile, becomes pregnant but suffers agonising pain. She goes ‘to enquire of the Lord’, who tells her that she is carrying twins already contending for dominance:

  Two nations are in your womb,

  And two peoples will separate from within you;

  One people will be mightier than the other,

  And the elder will serve the younger. (Gen. 25:23)

  The brothers’ fate is to clash, their destiny to conflict. Nowhere else does the Bible come so close to Greek tragedy. The scene reminds us of the Delphic oracle in Oedipus Rex who tells Laius that he will be killed by his son. The story begins with the end, and the tension lies in waiting to see how it comes to pass. Fate and tragedy belong together, which is what makes this passage so unexpected, so unbiblical. The Hebrew Bible rejects the idea of inescapable fate, a pre-ordained future. Yet the verse sets up an expectation, shaping the way we interpret all that follows. The story begins with the words, ‘The elder will serve the younger’, and ends with Isaac’s blessing to Jacob, ‘Rule over your brothers, and may your mother’s sons bow down to you.’ The prediction has come true. Jacob has been granted dominance, his apparently predestined fate. A simple tale.

  Yet something is amiss. Reading the passage in which Jacob takes the blessing, it is impossible not to notice how often Isaac doubts that the son in front of him is really Esau:

  He went to his father and said, ‘My father.’

  ‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘Who are you, my son?’

  Jacob said to his father, ‘I am Esau, your firstborn. I have done
as you asked. Please sit up and eat some of my venison so that you may give me your blessing.’

  …Then Isaac said to Jacob, ‘Come near so that I can touch you, my son. Are you really my son Esau or not?’

  Jacob went close to his father Isaac, who touched him and said, ‘The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau.’ He did not recognise him, for his hands were hairy like those of his brother Esau; so he blessed him.

  ‘Are you really my son Esau?’ he asked.

  ‘I am,’ he replied. (Gen. 27:18–24)

  Three times, Isaac expresses doubts – giving Jacob three opportunities to admit the truth. He does not. Far from glossing over the morally ambiguous nature of Jacob’s conduct, the text goes out of its way to emphasise it.

  Jacob leaves. Esau enters. The power in this scene is not just what happens, but how the Bible describes it:

  After Isaac finished blessing him, and Jacob had just left his father’s presence, his brother Esau came in from his hunt. He too had prepared some tasty food and brought it to his father. Then he said to him, ‘My father, sit up and eat some of my game, so that you may give me your blessing.’

  His father Isaac asked him, ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I am your son,’ he answered, ‘your firstborn, Esau.’

  Isaac trembled violently and said, ‘Who was it, then, that hunted game and brought it to me? I ate it just before you came and I blessed him – and indeed he will be blessed!’

  When Esau heard his father’s words, he burst out with a loud and bitter cry and said to his father, ‘Bless me – me too, my father!’

  But he said, ‘Your brother came deceitfully and took your blessing.’