Abraham

by Bruce Feiler

  What’s important about this process is that as early as a few hundred years after the Bible was written, Abraham begins to develop dimensions he doesn’t have in the text. What’s complicated about this process is that each writer tries to make Abraham speak to his generation, or to his particular target audience. One writer is a philosopher, so he wants to emphasize Abraham’s reason. Another is a rabbi, so he wants to stress Abraham’s piety. While these traditions may have made Abraham more appealing to their readers, they also risk making him less appealing to others. Astrology, for instance, is widely mocked today; saying Abraham was an astrologer actually undermines his credibility for our generation.

  This situation leaves us in a challenging position—trying to glean more about Abraham while accepting that we’re doing so through a prism that may tell us more about the author than the subject. I found this dilemma fascinating on one level but also daunting. Wait, you’re telling me that if I want to understand Abraham I have to understand a different Abraham every generation for four thousand years? Even at a generous calculation of two generations every one hundred years, that’s eighty different Abrahams I have to consider. How exhausting. How maddening.

  HOW WISHFUL. The real story is worse.

  The eighty different Abrahams—stretched from antiquity to today—are only the ones created by Jews. Christians and Muslims have their own Abrahams. Eighty quickly becomes two hundred and forty. And Abraham quickly becomes unviewable. To put it in terms that a Chaldean could understand: Abraham is a Milky Way, not a North Star.

  Again, I had no choice but to confront the thicket. It was off to another set of libraries and another assortment of scholars. In many ways, the geek in me—and eventually even the adventurer in me—found this process thrilling. It was like participating in a giant, three-dimensional scavenger hunt, where every clue in Judaism led to some desert hideaway in Christianity, led to some palm tree in Islam, under which was some spring—yes!—that suddenly cleared up some tangle described on the front page of that morning’s newspaper.

  The reason this pursuit proved so exciting is that to examine those hundreds of Abrahams—to understand how he evolved over time—is to understand what each religion values. And while many of those Abrahams would turn out to be incompatible with one another, every one agreed on one thing: Abraham believed in one God. And most agreed that he came to that view while still a boy. This biographical detail became so widely believed that it actually made it into scripture.

  Christian interpreters, including ones gathered in the New Testament, like Paul and John, were interested less in Abraham’s childhood than in subsequent events in his life. Islam, by contrast, was fascinated with Abraham’s boyhood. The Koran was dictated to Muhammad ibn Abdullah, an Arab trader from the prestigious Qurysh tribe, over a period of twenty-two years, beginning in 610 C.E. The revelations came directly from Allah and were deeply painful for the prophet, who was caught unawares by his mission. “Never once did I receive a revelation,” he said, “without thinking that my soul had been torn away from me.” Muhammad believed not that he was founding a new religion but that he was restoring the primordial faith in one God. He also explained that he was bringing this true faith to Arabs, who, unlike their neighbors in the fertile regions of the Middle East, had yet to receive a prophet.

  “I see Islam as a reformation in the context of monotheism,” said Bill Graham, the chairman of the Department of Near Eastern Languages at Harvard and a leading historian of Islam. A trim, boyish man who arrived and departed from our meeting helmeted and on bicycle, Graham has an infectious North Carolina accent that makes every comment sound as avuncular and commanding as that of a grand southern judge. “The clear message is that Muhammad has come back with the Koran to revive and straighten the world, starting with the Arabs.”

  Because the Koran was simply reviving truths people already knew, its stories tend to evoke events rather than retell them in any sequential way. Stories about Abraham, for example, whom the Koran calls Ibrahim, are sprinkled throughout the text rather than grouped in the order Abraham may have lived them.

  “The Koran is written in a referential style,” Graham said. “It doesn’t retell events, it refers to them. It uses the common rhetorical device ‘Remember when . . . ,’ as in ‘Remember when Abraham did this. . . .’ And you have to supply the when.” Because of the lack of a straight narrative, the experience of encountering the stories in the Koran is different from that of encountering them in Genesis. But the effect is the same: Abraham is less of a historical figure and more of a living person who makes points about human history.

  “The Koran is more didactics than storytelling,” Graham explained. “Everything is in service to the notion that we’re all servants of God. Therefore, everything told about Abraham shows that in the midst of a pagan world he was an exemplar in his faith.”

  Even as a boy.

  Abraham’s childhood, ignored by the Bible, untouched by the New Testament, now makes its first appearance as scripture. And that childhood is remarkably similar to the legends that had been coalescing over the preceding millennium. In the sixth chapter, or sura, Abraham asks his father why he takes idols as gods. Outside, Abraham looks at the stars and concludes they are gods, until they disappear. The same follows for the moon and sun. Finally he realizes that one God must be behind them all. “I disown your idols. I will turn my face to him who has created the heavens and the earth, and will live a righteous life. I am no idolater.”

  The boy Abraham’s next appearance is even more familiar. In one of the more famous Jewish legends, Abraham smashes the idols with a stick and attempts to blame the destruction on one of the idols. “Why are you mocking me?” his father asks. “Do these idols know anything?” The story in sura 21 is almost identical, with Abraham smashing the idols and blaming the destruction on the supreme idol. “Ask them, if they are able to speak,” Abraham says. “You know they cannot speak,” comes the reply.

  The stunning similarity of these accounts presents two options. One, the story is true. Judaism, for one, holds that the oral tradition about Abraham and other figures was actually given by God on Mount Sinai along with the written text in the middle of the second millennium B.C.E. Islam also maintains that the Koran was dictated by God. The story of Abraham smashing the idols is therefore the word of God, and is sacrosanct. The other option is that the legends of Abraham were composed not by God but by God-intoxicated people. These legends then developed such currency in the Middle East that Muhammad picked them up from Jewish and Christian traders in Arabia. This situation would corroborate the scholarly view that Islam drew from existing elements in the region and made them accessible to a new and wider audience.

  In either case, the significance of the shared heritage is clear: All three religions view Abraham’s childhood in a powerfully similar way. At the root of Abraham’s biography, there is harmony among all his descendants. The advantage of this universality cannot be underestimated. Abraham, across all religions and time, is devout, dedicated, capable of deductive reasoning, willing to struggle for his faith, and deft at using wit and logic to spread the divine message he alone understands. He is prophetic, heroic, charismatic. He is worthy of God.

  The potential problem with this universality should also not be overlooked. One unintended lesson of Abraham’s childhood is that individuals should feel free to liberate themselves from false religions, even in the face of resistance from their families, their nations, or their political leaders. This moral validates a tension that has existed until this day, with young people rejecting their parents’ God in favor of their own. Abraham becomes a model not just for shared origins but also for fundamentalism, for the notion that ye who hear God most clearly, hear most correctly. Abraham, while still a boy, is denounced for his beliefs, even burned for his faith. Abraham, in other words, is not just the first monotheist. He’s also the first martyr.

  2

  * * *

  CALL

 
* * *

  ON A CRISP SATURDAY MORNING in late October 1977, I stepped, never-shaven, to the pulpit of Mickve Israel Synagogue in Savannah, Georgia. I was dressed in a brand-new navy pin-striped suit, a white shirt, and a large-knotted tie with diagonal red, blue, and white stripes. My wavy blond hair was brushed twice over my ears. I was nervous.

  As a clear light shined through the stained-glass windows, I carried a Torah from the open ark to the front of the small stage. I removed the silver pointer from the handles, then the crowns and breastplate, and finally the cloth mantle. Each gesture, done meticulously, took slightly longer than it should have. I unbuckled the clasp and unfurled the scroll on the podium. After reciting a brief prayer, I clasped the silver pointer in my palm, followed the direction of the rabbi, and began to recite in halting, uncertain Hebrew, “Vayomer hashem el-Avram lech-lecha . . .”

  I was thirteen years old.

  The words I was reading were the opening verses of Genesis 12, “The Lord said to Abram, ‘Go forth . . .’ ”

  In my family, a Bar Mitzvah was, to use the parlance of the boy I was at the time, a “big deal.” I had started studying Hebrew years before. I practiced my portion at camp over the summer. Family and friends gathered from all over the country. The traditional coming-of-age ceremony for Jewish teenagers had even more meaning for me because the portion I was reading—in which God calls Abraham to leave his father’s house and set off for the Promised Land—was the same one my brother had read at his Bar Mitzvah three years earlier. This story, which effectively begins the biological line of Abraham, also had resonance with my mother’s family name, Abeshouse, or “House of Abraham.”

  I mentioned both of these connections in what was, for me, the most important part of the ceremony. After the prayers and the reading, the blessing and recitations, the rabbi sat down and I approached the podium alone to recite a short prayer of thanks I had composed. Silence filled the sanctuary as I stood by myself, before three hundred people, in a room my family had prayed in for nearly a century. The anticipation in the air, dense with sun and streaks of dust, the sheen of walnut pews and childhood memories, was palpable, but also warm and welcoming, the buttery embrace of tradition.

  And suddenly I wasn’t nervous. As I stood looking slightly over people’s heads, the way my mother had taught me, reading from pages torn from a yellow legal pad, words written in green felt ink, my new suit suddenly didn’t exist, my hair was no longer neatly trimmed, indeed my body effectively evaporated as I opened my mouth and became, in that instant, my voice.

  IF WE CAN LEARN anything from the early life of Abraham it is this: God is listening when humans cry. He hears Abraham’s plea in Harran, and responds with a call of his own. God’s words in the beginning of Genesis 12 are among the most arresting in the Hebrew Bible, a transforming fracture in the history of humankind. All of Abraham’s children, whatever their orientation, agree on one thing: God speaks not just to Abraham with these words, he speaks to every person who yearns.

  But what exactly is he saying? This question has puzzled theologians, clerics, and Bar Mitzvah candidates for generations. The Call is a code, an encrypted blueprint for humanity. Decipher these words and we live with God’s blessing; ignore them and we crumble like Babel.

  The words themselves are simple and direct. “The Lord said to Abram, ‘Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you.

  I will make of you a great nation,

  And I will bless you;

  I will make your name great,

  And you shall be a blessing.

  I will bless those who bless you

  And curse him that curses you;

  And all the families of the earth

  Shall bless themselves by you.

  With these words, God asserts his decision to create the world anew. As before, with Creation, he uses only words to call the world into existence, to conjure firm ground out of the chaos. Only this time, Abraham is the navel of the world, the sacred starting point. The Rock.

  Despite their plainness, many things about these words stun: first, what they ask of Abraham; even more, what they promise in return. Covenants were well known in the Ancient Near East as formal contracts between two parties, usually involving mutual obligations sealed under oath. In the rigid forms such contracts followed, if duties were carried out, certain blessings ensued; if they were not, curses followed.

  Though often referred to as a covenant, God’s call to Abraham appears at first glance to include no tangible obligations on the part of the recipient. Unlike the covenant handed down at Mount Sinai, for example, this agreement comes with no commandments or laws that Abraham must follow in order to receive God’s blessing. It would seem to be an expression of pure generosity on God’s part, a one-way contract.

  On closer inspection, Abraham is asked to do two things to fulfill his side of the contract. First, he must leave his native land and his father’s house. This is an extraordinary request at any level, but it’s made even more profound by the fact that he’s aging, that his wife is barren, and that he doesn’t even know where he’s going. His destination is described merely as “the land that I will show you.” Though later God will specifically promise Abraham that his descendants will be as numerous as the stars and that he will inherit all the land between the Euphrates and the Nile, at the moment God is being much more mysterious—and much more demanding.

  This elusiveness leads to the second thing Abraham must do to fulfill the agreement: He must accept the legitimacy of the party offering the deal. This is no minor challenge and would seem much harder for Abraham than for, say, the Israelites at Mount Sinai. There, God has already sent the plagues, split the sea, rained down manna, and generally succored the former slaves in the desert. He then appears as thunder and lightning on the mountain itself, yet still the Israelites forge the golden calf and resist entering into a covenant with him.

  Abraham, by contrast, witnesses no physical manifestation of God’s existence—no burning bush, no dead frogs, no tablets, no water sprouting from a rock. Worse, the voice doesn’t even introduce itself. Subsequent biblical figures learn that this disembodied eloquence belongs to the “God of Abraham” and usually hear a brief curriculum vitae. Abraham receives no such credentials.

  So who does he think is making this promise? Later generations conclude that Abraham understood that the voice belonged to God, specifically the one and only God. All three religions are clear on this point. But the Bible, in fact, is not. If anything, it suggests otherwise. The voice that calls Abraham to Canaan belongs to Yahweh, often translated as “the Lord.” Later, Abraham performs circumcision at the request of El Shaddai, or “Almighty God.” He plants a tamarisk at the behest of El Olam, or “Everlasting God.” Abraham, in other words, appears to serve several gods. Even Yahweh confirms this polymorphy, telling Moses that he appeared to Abraham as El Shaddai.

  The suggestion in such passages is that Abraham, far from the complete monotheist of Moses, still retains echoes of the polytheism of his ancestors. He is a transitional figure, with a foot in both worlds. If anything, this position makes his trusting Yahweh even more remarkable. Abraham, rooted in a polytheistic society—a world where gods had form and physicality and were identified with tangible facets of daily life, like rocks and trees—is prepared to put his trust in an a-physical, indiscernible, unprovable god. Abraham is a visionary.

  Which may be the most important point of all. However he understood the voice, the Call is still a monumental test for Abraham. With no knowledge of its supernatural source, no childhood spent studying its history, no attachment to it in any way, Abraham is forced to express superhuman devotion to this abstract request. Like the young man in the prototypical hero narrative, Abraham, in order to win the hand of his beloved, first has to declare his love, in deeds.

  BUT WHAT INCENTIVE! If God is asking the world from Abraham, he is offering the world back—and then some. God, who has already sh
own himself to be a butcher of genocidal fury, now reveals himself to be a suitor of formidable charms. He clearly wants Abraham to accept his proposal. Indeed, the breadth of his offer suggests he needs Abraham as much as Abraham needs him.

  As a sign of his commitment, God promises Abraham that four things will happen to him: He will give birth to a great nation, he will be blessed, his name will be great, and his name will be a blessing to others. For good measure, God also vows to bless those who bless Abraham and curse those who curse him.

  What’s striking about this list is how it moves from the specific to the universal. It starts with what Abraham wants most: fertility. “I will make of you a great nation,” God says. He promises, in effect, to give Abraham a son. The Creator—God—will make Abraham a creator, too, and, in so doing, transfer some of his glory to earth.

  God’s election of Abraham, as sacred as it is, also raises enormous risks. With Creation, God devised a world in which humans had dominion over other creatures but not over one another. Now he’s introduced the notion of hierarchy. “I will bless those who bless you / And curse him that curses you.” One group of humans receives God’s blessing; another does not. There’s still one God but now there are two groups of humans. Even before any tension arises between Abraham’s offspring, a potentially bigger problem exists between all of his offspring and everyone else.

  God seems to be aware of this possible fiasco, for having introduced it, he immediately attempts to ameliorate it. After promising to fulfill Abraham’s individual need for biological fertility, God blows open the tent and offers Abraham the opportunity to provide surrogate, spiritual fertility to the entire world. It is in these words—“And all the families of the earth / Shall bless themselves by you”—that God elevates Abraham to the lofty status he will occupy for eternity.