by Bruce Feiler
“I usually bring my family to spend a night by this riverbed when it rains the first time,” Rami said. “If you put your head on the ground, you can hear the water coming for about two kilometers.” He made the sound of a hurricane. “It can roll stones and move cars, and if you’re sleeping too deeply, you can find yourself in the Mediterranean—or not find yourself at all.
“But when the water comes, it just keeps going. All you want is to catch it, to hold it. Wait, we need you! And here comes the point.” He walks me around the riverbed, where small puddles linger in limestone basins, and patches of pebbles show no water at all. Much of the ground splinters with the web of drought. “The animals drink the water in the puddles, so it never lasts. The real water is underneath the pebbles. If you want to survive here, you have to know the rules of the ground.”
He places one hand flat in the air. “This is the desert.” He places his other hand on top. “These are the people living here. Between the desert and the people there must be water. The story of Abraham is the story of water. He does two things here: He plants a tree and digs a well. That shows that he understood water, that he became water. He gave life to us all.”
IF FINDING WATER in the desert is difficult, then finding Abraham in the desert is even harder. His headwaters have disappeared, his tributaries overflow. But in the inundation of material about him, one truth is apparent. All three religions rely largely on the same root tradition and, in many cases, the same source text.
The prophets of the late Hebrew Bible refer to the Abraham of Genesis, the Gospels refer to the Abraham of Genesis, even the Koran refers to the Abraham of “the Book.” Indeed, Genesis is the only place that explores the narrative of Abraham’s life in any comprehensive way. The other books assume the reader already knows the basic story.
This assumption gives the biblical version a certain primacy in the story of Abraham but also raises a problem. The Bible is not attempting to be comprehensive. For every detail the story includes, even a casual reader craves the dozen details left out. “Wait!” the reader wants to cry. “Can I ask just a few questions before you move on?” The Bible would fail as history; it disappoints as reportage. But this may be exactly why it succeeds as narrative—and scripture.
The biblical story of Abraham is a triumph of literary ellipsis: the text gives us just enough details to deliver its myriad of messages, and not one syllable more. As a result, if I wanted to understand Abraham, even the Abraham that emerges in Christian and Islamic tradition, I quickly realized that I must begin with a careful reading of the story as it appears in Genesis.
And that story begins in earnest with the Call.
Once Abraham leaves Harran, the story shifts from the theoretical—“the land that I will show you”—to the practical—where am I going? The text reflects this change instantly. Abraham takes his wife, his nephew Lot, and all their possessions, and sets out “for the land of Canaan.” In the next verse, they arrive in Shechem, in the Promised Land, and the Lord appears, saying, “I will give this land to your offspring.” This is the second iteration of the promise, and the first that ties Abraham to a specific territory. This version also introduces a new dimension to the story: the geopolitical.
Abraham’s ability to find himself in the center of world politics is not new; it began in antiquity. The entire scope of Ancient Near Eastern history played out on a narrow ribbon of water-fed land called the Fertile Crescent. The upper arm of the Fertile Crescent was Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates, which included the empires of Sumer, Babylon, and Assyria. The lower arm was Egypt and the Nile-basted civilization of the pharaohs. In between was the rain-dappled Mediterranean coast, more fragile land, with no great rivers to flood and, as a result, no great empires to terrorize their neighbors. If anything, the central strip of the Fertile Crescent—today’s Lebanon, Syria, Israel, and the Palestinian Territories—was the strategic heart of the region, and both arms ached to control it. Neither did for terribly long, which only stoked the rivalry.
The story of Abraham as it appears in Genesis is a near-perfect personification of that battle. It’s a story about the struggle for control of the Promised Land, a fertility battle in the cradle of fertility. Abraham is born in Mesopotamia. Bereft of land and seed, he travels to the Promised Land, where he immediately stakes claim to the territory. A drought strikes, and Abraham seeks refuge in Egypt.
The remainder of the story is an epic fight over Abraham’s offspring, waged between two women, one from Mesopotamia, Sarah; the other from Egypt, Sarah’s servant Hagar. Removed from enriched land, Abraham must summon the power to fertilize. To do this, he turns his life over to God. As Rami put it, “Abraham’s innovation is to leave the land of rivers, to go someplace new, where he has to create a new world.”
Arriving in Egypt, Abraham fears the pharaoh will kill him for Sarah, who is “beautiful to behold,” so he asks his wife to say she’s his sister. She does, and is promptly seduced by the pharaoh, who rewards Abraham with riches and cattle. God then rewards Sarah for her suffering by afflicting the pharaoh with plagues. The pharaoh responds by banishing the family.
Back in Canaan, Abraham’s entourage is becoming so big that he and Lot must separate. Abraham gives Lot the nicer land, alongside Sodom and Gomorrah. When Lot is taken captive in a war pitting four kings against five, Abraham leads the coalition to rescue him. Our pitiful, impotent geriatric suddenly becomes a war hero!
And the world takes note. He begins to negotiate treaties with local leaders. The king of a Canaanite town, Melchizedek, blesses him and praises his Creator, “Blessed be Abram of God Most High, / Creator of heaven and earth.” Abraham responds by giving Melchizedek a tenth of everything he has. One wants to cheer, rooting for Abraham’s growth, the power he accumulates, his dignity. Abraham is not merely a man of faith, he’s a man of strength and tolerance, too. He’s not Machiavellian, Draconian, Napoleonic. He’s Abrahamic—measured, moral, middle of the road.
But he’s still not satisfied, and he takes out his frustration on God. When God appears after the military campaign and blithely reiterates his promise—“Your reward will be great”—Abraham talks back. “O Lord God, what can you give me, seeing that I shall die childless.” He adds, forlornly, “Since you have granted me no offspring; my steward will be my heir.” The silent one finally speaks, and his first words to God are words of desperation, even doubt.
God reacts immediately, dramatically escalating the promise he has been making for years. Your offspring shall be enslaved in a land not theirs, he tells Abraham. “But I will execute judgment on the nation they shall serve; and in the end they shall go free with great wealth.” He adds, “To your offspring I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates.”
At last Abraham has his prize—the most coveted land in the world is now his family’s. And he earns this reward not in response to his prior silence but in answer to his newfound voice. By talking back to God, expressing his wavering faith, Abraham becomes even more human, and even more appealing. He has flesh, character; he’s sympathetic. He strides atop the world, yet what he craves most is a son.
And so he begins to doubt. Abraham’s wavering initiates a new phase in the story. Even before he fathers a great nation, Abraham fathers a great tradition, an interactive relationship with God, a struggle. Having given his down payment, Abraham now demands the same in return. Trust, but verify. Give me a son, he signals to God, or I can no longer trust you.
IN MY CONVERSATION with Rami, I asked him why he thought the story of Abraham was so concerned with children. “In the desert you have nothing,” he said. “You are moving all the time. You have no house, no land. The only relationship you have is with your son, his son, and his son—a chain. You must connect with something, so you connect to your family.”
Abraham has no family. The text reminds us bluntly at the start of Genesis 16: “Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children.” But now
Sarah takes matters into her own hands. “Look,” she tells Abraham, “the Lord has kept me from bearing. Consort with my maid; perhaps I shall have a son through her.” Though legally Sarah’s action is consistent with the ancient practice of surrogate motherhood, morally her act is troubling. The language suggests this. Sarah does not mention the maid’s name, nor does she acknowledge that the resulting child might belong to the other woman. “Perhaps I shall have a son,” she says.
Moreover, Sarah takes her maid and gives her to Abraham in an echo of the way Eve takes the fruit and gives it to Adam. Again the implication is unavoidable: Sarah is trying to wrest control of creation, which Abraham and God are already struggling over. Abraham may be wavering in his faith, but Sarah seems to have abandoned hers. Her act may be selfless, but it’s also faithless.
Even more troubling is how passive Abraham becomes. The man who has just boldly stood up to God now meekly heeds Sarah’s request—without speaking. The gallant war hero abroad is a wimp at home. “The thing that has always struck me about this story,” said Carol Newsom, a professor at Emory’s Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, “is that the moral sympathy of the story seems to be with Hagar and Ishmael, even though the author knows that our primary identifi cation has to be with Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac.” Newsom, a petite, fair-haired Alabaman with a Harvard Ph.D. is known as one of the leading interpreters of women in the Bible and a fiercely close reader of family relations in the text. “Yet the story constantly shows up their ignorance, flaws, and petty jealousies. It’s astonishing. Rather than having simple identification, we’re asked, in a sense, to identify doubly.”
Sarah’s gesture sets up a tension that will occupy history forever. Abraham’s troubled paternity has now been compounded with even more deeply troubled maternity. “In literary narrative terms, you have two characters trying to occupy the same slot,” said Newsom. “Sarah says, ‘Let’s move Hagar into my slot.’ But you can’t have such a writing over, a palimpsest. As soon as it doesn’t work, you can see why.”
Once Hagar becomes pregnant, Sarah grows jealous. Predictably, she lashes out at Abraham. “The wrong done me is your fault! I myself put my maid in your bosom; now that she sees that she is pregnant, I am lowered in her esteem.” Abraham once again ducks responsibility. “Your maid is in your hands,” he says. “Deal with her as you think right.”
Sarah “afflicts” Hagar, the text says, using the same words later invoked to describe how the Israelites are treated by the pharaohs in Egypt, and Hagar responds the same way, by fleeing into the desert. The place Hagar goes—the wilderness of Shur—is the exact same place the Israelites go immediately after crossing the Red Sea. Again the Bible is sending a subtle message. All God’s children are afflicted in some way. And when they are, God looks after them.
As if to confirm this point, the very next line has an angel of the Lord appearing to Hagar. Only this time God sends her back into the arms of affliction. “Go back to your mistress, and submit to her harsh treatment.” The protection given to Hagar stops far short of that given to the Israelites. Still, God clearly cares for her: the maidservant is the first person in Scripture to receive such a messenger, and God’s messenger is the first to use her name. Indeed, God goes on to proclaim a blessing that rivals Abraham’s in its scope and complexity.
The first thing he promises Hagar is innumerable children. “I will greatly increase your offspring.” But God is specific with Hagar. She will bear a son and call him Ishmael, or “God hears.” Ishmael, God says, shall be a “wild ass of a man; / his hand against everyone, / And everyone’s hand against him.”
Scholars dispute the meaning of these words, though most agree the term wild ass, instead of being a pejorative, refers to the character of the bedouin, specifically the wild desert ass that roams in herds. The subsequent line, “his hand against everyone,” does suggest Ishmael’s wilderness lifestyle will bring him into conflict with the world.
Still, the message here is nuanced. Hagar learns that her son will live in the desert (and not the watered land of Isaac), but she learns this directly from God. Hagar is the only woman to receive personally the divine blessing of descendants, making her, in effect, a female patriarch. As Carol Newsom put it, “Hagar, who earlier occupies the same place as Sarah, now occupies the same place as Abraham.”
As if to celebrate her status, Hagar then speaks to God directly, “You are El-roi,” or “God of my vision.” Hagar is the only person in the Bible—male or female—ever to call God by name. Sarah may still not be able to create anyone in her image, but Hagar creates God in hers.
ALL OF THE DRAMA surrounding Sarah and Hagar obscures the important point: Abraham now has his heir! The exalted father is eighty-six when Ishmael is born, eleven years older than when he first heard God’s promise. His great nation finally has its first citizen.
And make no mistake: first was definitely best in the Ancient Near East. According to the laws God dictated to Moses on Sinai, the firstborn son receives a double inheritance and succeeds his father as head of the family. This is true, Deuteronomy says, even if the mother of the first son is unloved. In Exodus, God goes even further: “The first issue of every womb among the Israelites is mine.”
Given God’s apparent preference for firstborns, why is it that Genesis seems to afford them such second-rate treatment? Cain murders his younger brother, Abel, and is cursed to be a fugitive wanderer. Esau, cheated of his birthright by his younger twin, Jacob, is banished to live outside the Promised Land. Jacob’s firstborn, Reuben, commits incest, joins in selling Joseph into slavery, and is later toppled by his father. The fate of these firstborns is remarkably similar to the fate of Abraham’s first issue, Ishmael, who is also exiled into the desert.
This consistency suggests an answer. For all its interest in rivers and the empires that emerge from them, the Bible distrusts such settled places. The text, in fact, seems ambivalent toward watered land in general. By contrast, the Bible is constantly sending people into the desert for redemption, because it’s there, away from the ease of settled life, far removed from ready water, that they turn to God for sustenance.
The God of Genesis wants to be the water of life for his people. He wants his nation on earth to be protected but also to need him—to have the land but also to struggle. This desire requires complex maneuvering. Firstborns, the natural top dogs, achieve this balance by being plucked from their comfort and permanently dislocated. Secondborns, the natural underdogs, achieve this balance by inheriting the land but forever feeling alien. Both children, sons of man, thus become sons of God, living their lives in a state of perpetual agitation, comforted neither by their surroundings nor by their lineage, constantly longing for divine vindication.
But even such eternal craving is not enough for God. He wants human flesh as well. God appears thirteen years later and commands that Abraham circumcise the foreskin of his penis. Further, every male throughout the generations shall also be circumcised at the age of eight days. The struggle over fertility has now reached the level of flesh and blood. God demands a piece of human creation for himself; he leaves a sign of himself on every male. God thus becomes integral to every act of creation.
But he can’t do it alone, so God asks Abraham to perform the first cuts. The Creator needs help from his human partner, who, now that he’s a father, has proven that he’s a creator.
And Abraham does as he’s asked—immediately. He circumcises himself at ninety-nine, Ishmael at thirteen, then every male in his household, including slaves. The significance of this order is often overlooked. Abraham is the first to receive the new compact, but Ishmael is the second. Isaac is not yet a gleam. Further, Abraham engraves this marker on everyone in his orbit, regardless of lineage. God’s blessing is not limited to those among Abraham’s descendants who will inherit the land; it goes to anyone associated with his household. Circumcision, later one of the most contentious features of Abraham’s life, shows Abraham at his most inclusive.
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bsp; As proof of this new expansive stature, it is circumcision that earns Abraham his new name. “And you shall no longer be called Abram,” God announces, “but your name shall be Abraham, for I make you the father of a multitude of nations.” (The word Abraham actually means “father of many nations.”) Abram, the son of Terah, has now been re-created as the son of God. Now that he has God in his life (as well as on his body), he is ready to fulfill God’s promise and become father of the world.
ONE PUZZLING ASPECT of Abraham’s life is how little celebrated most of it is. Abraham has hardly been a towering figure in the history of art and entertainment. There is no Michelangelo statue that everyone can envision, as there is of David; no indelibly outstretched fingers on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, as there are for Adam. Joseph earned both a Thomas Mann trilogy and an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical (as well as a home video starring Donny Osmond).
Hollywood has been particularly neglectful of Abraham. Moses merits a Cecil B. DeMille epic and a DreamWorks animated blockbuster. Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford spent an entire film looking for the lost ark of the covenant. And Jesus, well . . .
But no Abraham.
Yet Abraham’s life would seem to fit the three-act model that Hollywood demands. Act one is his early life, climaxing in his call from God. Act two is his picaresque adventures on the road to Egypt and back, his growing frustration with God, the arrival of his son, and his dramatic sexual self-mutilation, which marks the culmination of his manhood but casts his potency in doubt. This sets up act three—the most action-packed of all—in which Abraham is trapped in a deadly love triangle, confronts a life-or-death decision with his first son, then must make a similar gruesome choice with his second.
