Abraham

by Bruce Feiler

  The dilemma, for Hollywood, is that for all the action involving Abraham, his women, and their sons, the real story of Abraham is actually closer to an old-fashioned buddy picture involving him and God. Two figures with nothing in common get pushed together under extreme circumstances and are forced to figure out a way, against their natural instincts, to cooperate in order to save the world. What drama! What Oscar potential! But since one of these characters is invisible, filming this story becomes tricky.

  In Genesis, the gentle back-and-forth between Abraham and his invisible interlocutor is precisely what gives the story its impact. And that struggle has just begun. After circumcision, the Lord appears to Abraham in the form of three men. Abraham immediately throws open his tent flaps, slaughters a calf, and asks Sarah to prepare a meal. As a reward, the men promise that Sarah shall soon have a son.

  But she laughs. “I am withered, am I to have enjoyment—with my husband so old?” God is clearly miffed. “Is anything too wondrous for the Lord?” In response, Sarah actually lies to God—“I did not laugh”—but God has none of it. “You did laugh.” Finally the men depart.

  While Sarah has now been degraded by God, Abraham has been upgraded. As the Lord is leaving, he decides to tell Abraham a secret: He is considering destroying Sodom and Gomorrah for their sins. Abraham does something that would have been unthinkable a few years earlier: he begins to upbraid God. “Will you sweep away the innocent along with the guilty?” Abraham asks. “What if there should be fifty innocent within the city?” He ends in open outrage: “Far be it from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?”

  Even more surprising, God begins to negotiate with him. If he finds fifty innocent people, God says, he won’t do anything. What about forty-five? Abraham retorts. Okay, forty-five. And on they go in a dazzling downward spiral: forty, thirty, twenty! Until they finally agree on ten.

  This reverse auction of human life is the most stunning passage of dialogue in the entire Abraham story, and possibly the whole Book of Genesis. Abraham, the warrior, has suddenly become the most daring and adept diplomat of antiquity: he in effect creates life that the Creator is about to destroy. Abraham, the once infertile man, is now nearly as fertile as God. The un-father now fathers people he doesn’t even know, just because they might be moral. As a result, humans have a second protector on earth: If God forsakes them, humans can now turn to Abraham. Creation is no longer the sole dominion of rivers, or of God.

  Abraham can create, too.

  Sure enough, Abraham’s newfound stature soon leads to more fertility. For a second time Abraham asks Sarah to lie and say she’s his sister, this time to the king of Gerar. Once again God rewards her. “Sarah conceived and bore a son to Abraham in his old age.” (The proximity of these two events has led some commentators to question Isaac’s paternity.) Still, Abraham names the boy Isaac—“he laughs”—and circumcises him at eight days. But that’s all the text cares to mention. Twenty-five years we have waited for this moment, and the Bible almost skips over it. Sarah is clearly happy. “God has brought me laughter,” she says. But Abraham can’t wait to take his son away from his mother, even throwing a feast on the day Isaac is weaned.

  But Sarah is not to be elbowed out. If she’s willing to stand up to God, she’s certainly willing to do that—and more—to Abraham. One day she catches Ishmael and Isaac playing. Some interpreters have suggested that playing refers to sexual molestation since Ishmael is at least a teenager by now. But the word metzachek is a derivation of Isaac’s name, Yishaq, which suggests boyish laughing.

  Either way, Sarah acts swiftly and lethally. “Cast out that slave-woman and her son,” she tells Abraham, “for the son of that slave shall not share in the inheritance with my son Isaac.”

  Abraham, however, does not share Sarah’s preference for Isaac. Ishmael is still his firstborn. “The matter distressed Abraham greatly,” the text says. But God comforts Abraham with a startling announcement. “Do not be distressed over the boy or your slave; whatever Sarah tells you, do as she says, for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be continued for you. As for the son of the slave-woman, I will make a nation of him, too, for he is your seed.”

  Once again, God sends a mixed message. On the one hand, he sides with the oppressor, and encourages Abraham to disinherit his firstborn son. God actually calls Isaac by name, and says that it’s through him that Abraham’s offspring shall be counted. The land, in other words, goes to the secondborn.

  Ishmael, by contrast, goes unnamed, though God vows to make him a nation, the exact promise he initially made to Abraham. Isaac gets no equivalent grant. Also Ishmael carries Abraham’s seed. The net effect of these intricacies is an uncomfortable but still purposeful balance: Isaac receives the land, but he does so in part through the malice of his mother. Ishmael goes into exile, but he does so with God’s most exalted blessing and Abraham’s deepest remorse.

  In fact, Abraham does everything he can to resist sending his son to the desert. Unlike performing circumcision, which he does the “very day” God asks, this time Abraham stalls. The next morning he takes bread and a skin of water and gives them to Hagar, then he places them over her shoulder, then he does the same with the child.

  Hagar leaves and wanders around the wilderness of Beer-sheba until she runs out of water, at which point she places Ishmael under a bush. The text plays their pain for maximum pathos. “Let me not look on as the child dies,” Hagar wails. Then she bursts into tears.

  And once again God hears. “Fear not,” an angel cries to Hagar. “Lift up the boy and hold him by the hand.” God then reveals a well of water. Ishmael has faced death directly, has done so at the hand of his father, but has been rescued at the last minute by God. This is his version of the Call: Cast out from his father’s house, he survives only because of God’s munificence. Created by Abraham, he is re-created by God. God refuses to give up the power of creation entirely.

  This situation suggests an important lesson, one that will be echoed in the coming episode when Abraham nearly kills Isaac as well. Isaac and Ishmael, the driving force in the story of Abraham for a quarter of a century before they are born, become much less significant after they arrive. Having craved God’s affection for decades when he wasn’t a father, Abraham is unwilling to jeopardize that approval by choosing his sons over God.

  Again, his behavior has lasting consequences. Abraham’s children will spend the rest of their lives trying to claim the love of their father. Yet Abraham is too busy looking to God for affection to realize that his sons are looking for the same affection from him.

  PERHAPS THE MOST STRIKING feature of the story of Ishmael and Isaac is its balance: Neither son is a pure victor, or a pure loser. This literary masterstroke, however, has caused endless problems for their descendants.

  Jewish interpreters were flummoxed by Ishmael. They agreed that, early in his life, Ishmael is deeply important to his father. When Abraham circumcises Ishmael and his household, for example, “he set up a hillock of foreskins, the sun shone upon them and they putrefied, and their odor ascended to the Lord like sweet incense.” God announces, “When my children lapse into sinful ways, I will remember that odor in their favor and be filled with compassion for them.”

  But once Isaac is born, Jewish interpreters turn on Ishmael. Genesis says that after being rescued Ishmael marries an Egyptian and fathers twelve tribes. In the late first millennium B.C.E., these descendants came to be associated with bedouin tribes around the Middle East, first in the Negev, later in Arabia. Long before Christians or Muslims even considered this connection, Jewish writers identified Ishmael as the progenitor of the Arabs. Josephus, the Jewish historian from the first century C.E. who lived in Rome, wrote that the twelve tribes of Ishmael inhabited all the land from the Euphrates to the Red Sea. “They are an Arabian nation and name their tribes from these, both because of their own virtue and because of the dignity of Abraham their father.”

  Since these tribes were considered
enemies of the Israelites, Jewish interpreters attributed all sorts of venal traits to them and, by extension, to their progenitor. As the commentary Midrash Esther Rabbah notes, “Of ten portions of stupidity in the world, nine were given to the Ishmaelites and one to the rest of the world. In the same manner, nine portions of robustness were allotted to the Ishmaelites and one to the rest of the world.”

  It was into this already malevolent interpretive tradition that Muhammad was born. While Jewish interpreters had linked Ishmael with the Arabs, Arab ones had not. Nothing about bedouins descending from Abraham appears in pre-Islamic Arabian sources. Early biographers of Muhammad, however, traced the lineage of the prophet’s tribe back to Ishmael, through him to Abraham, and then back to Adam. Muhammad wanted to unite all Arabs under his tribe, the Qurysh, and to do so he needed to tie their heritage to a sacred source.

  Ishmael was an important link in this chain, though he’s hardly a major character in the Koran. Ishmael is mentioned only twelve times in the Koran’s one hundred fourteen suras, and only one gives any indication of his character. Sura 19 says Ishmael was “a man of his word, an apostle, and a prophet. He enjoined prayer and almsgiving on his people, and his Lord was pleased with him.”

  Still, Muslim interpreters, in an effort to elevate Muhammad, set about elevating Ishmael. They began by resuscitating Hagar. Ibn Sa’d, a prominent scholar from the ninth century, said Hagar was the most trusted servant of the Tyrant, a shadowy figure corresponding to the pharaoh. Al-Kisa’i, a more inventive interpreter, says Hagar is actually the Tyrant’s daughter. Either way, Hagar now has royal connections.

  This imperial pedigree rubs off on Ishmael. Al-Kisa’i relates that as Abraham and Hagar finished the sexual act in which Ishmael was conceived, a heavenly voice proclaimed, “There is no god but God alone who has no partner.” These are the same words, al-Kisa’i says, that Abraham uttered at the moment of his own birth.

  The biggest contribution the Koran and its interpreters make to the life of Ishmael involves relocating him to Mecca. Instead of banishing Hagar and Ishmael to the Negev, Abraham actually takes them to Mecca, settles them there, then returns home. Left alone in the desert, Hagar runs seven times between two rocks looking for water before an angel appears and saves her. A vital shift is under way, moving the locus of the story away from the Fertile Crescent to Arabia, where Ishmael grows up to become a prominent Arab. Abraham even visits Ishmael in his new home. Sarah permits him to go, provided he doesn’t dismount his steed.

  On Abraham’s first visit, Ishmael is out hunting, so Abra ham talks with his wife, who is shrewish and inhospitable. She’s also uncurious, not even asking his name. Abraham leaves a message for his son to “change the threshold of your house.” Ishmael returns, smells his father, and interprets the message as disapproval of his wife. He immediately divorces and remarries.

  Abraham returns, meets the new wife, and finds her charming and hospitable (though she also doesn’t ask his name). She even goes so far as to wash and anoint his head with oil while he remains mounted. He leaves a message: “The threshold of your house is sound.” Ishmael returns, smells his father, hears the message, and informs his wife, “My father approves of you.”

  ON THE SURFACE, the Muslim traditions about Ishmael might seem to contradict the Jewish ones. But Jews have not seen it that way. In fact, in the centuries after Islam developed, many Muslim traditions began to appear in Jewish texts. In the eighth-century Midrash Pirqe Rabbi Eliezer, Ishmael takes a wife from the desert. Abraham visits his son, and the same routine transpires with the first and second wives, leading Ishmael to conclude that his father still loves him.

  The similarity suggests that either this tradition originated in Jewish sources and traveled from there to Muslim ones or the other way around. Either way, the story’s origin matters less than the towering fact that both traditions feel comfortable embracing it. While the details of Ishmael’s life may differ slightly from one faith to another, from one generation to another, the essential message remains the same. Abraham expels Ishmael from the land, but he does not expel him from his sphere of love and paternity.

  As is apparent beginning with the Call, the God of the Bible is interested in creating a great nation, on a specific piece of land, beginning with Abraham. Isaac is definitely the inheritor of that tradition. He is the winner of the struggle, so to speak, and Ishmael the displaced rival. As Carol Newsom said, “I think it would be disingenuous to say that this is anything other than a Jewish foundation story.”

  But given that clear literary function, the care and attention devoted to articulating Ishmael’s future nobility become even more arresting. The Bible does not have a history of treating apostates or other ousted figures well. Adam and Eve are cursed. Abel is murdered. Lot’s wife is turned into a pillar of salt. Ishmael, by contrast, is personally salvaged by God, fathers a dozen princes, and becomes the leader of a great nation. The crystalline moral here is that while God’s land may go to one of Abraham’s sons, God’s blessing goes to both.

  “Despite the story’s interest in Abraham’s heir,” Carol Newsom said, “it still locates other relatives and indicates both the affection and the rivalry that exist among them. In that sense there’s an honest description of social complexities. The story may not be entirely inclusivist, but it’s close. Any attempt to claim Abraham uniquely runs afoul of the story.”

  LATE IN THE MORNING I spent with Rami, I put a small rock in the middle of the riverbed. “This is Abraham,” I said. Then I put two rocks underneath the first one in the shape of a family tree. “Here are Ishmael and Isaac. The question the world has been trying to answer for centuries is, Which direction does Abraham’s lineage go?”

  This is the kind of challenge that Rami loves. “If you are looking at the land,” he said, “at buildings and stones, you might choose between this way and that.” He then grabbed a handful of rocks and turned my family tree into concentric circles. “But if you’re looking at the realm of ideas . . . it doesn’t matter.”

  “And do you think stories have as much power as stones?”

  “Much more. Much more. The story is the atmosphere of this place. It’s around you all the time. You can move it. You can take it with you. You can do everything with it except carve it in stone.”

  He took his hand and swiped away his rocks, leaving only the rock of Abraham. “Abraham changed the world because he brought one idea to the world.”

  “So what’s the idea?”

  “The idea is that what’s important is the power of ideas—human ideas. Not rivers. Not idols. Not stones. Not land. Abraham went into the desert, a place of nothing, and created something entirely new. And that something new was based on something invisible. He collected technology and know- how from all the places he visited. He mixed them with this big, unknowable, untouchable God, and he passed that down to both of his sons. And that’s what changed the world. If we’re fighting over stones, we’re missing the point. Abraham was about a single idea, and that idea he gave to us all.”

  4

  * * *

  ISAAC

  * * *

  KING DAVID STREET begins a few blocks from the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem’s Old City and extends south toward Bethlehem. The area, now home to luxurious hotels, banks, and a towering Armenian-style YMCA, was the first neighborhood settled outside the medieval walls.

  About halfway down the street, a small Judaica shop sits at the end of a short plaza paved with Jerusalem stone. Inside, shelves lined with kiddush cups and Hanukkah menorahs mingle with dangling blue-and-white prayer shawls, and hundreds of knit, stitched, and gold-embroidered kippot. In the back of the store, a cardboard box about three feet wide spills onto the floor. A tangle of polished rams’ horns claw out of the top like some snarl of petrified squid.

  “Here’s a good one,” says the seventy-nine-year-old proprietor of B. Cohen & Sons. Dressed in black with gray curls tucked behind his ears, Binyomin Cohen is stooped, soft-spoken, with a wizar
dlike beard that drips down his chest and ends in a point. “The perfect shofar is about as long as two hands,” he says. “This one is good because it curves to the right.”

  “The right?”

  “Ever since they created the world there’s been a big argument about right and left. Right is better because it’s closer to God.”

  I have come to look at shofroth, the squiggling horns that were blown in the Bible at Mount Sinai and the Temple and that are now sounded annually on the Jewish New Year. The sound—raw, stuttering, bellowing—is made with the lips and lungs, for the horns have no amenities to improve their tonality. Jewish tradition suggests many reasons for blowing the shofar: The horn is reminiscent of God’s revelation on Sinai, it reminds of the destruction of the Temple, it stirs the consciousness at the start of the days of penitence. But one reason resonates loudest. When I asked Mr. Cohen what he thought of when he heard the shofar, he answered, “The akedah,” the binding of Isaac.

  “If you want to go to court,” he said, “you take a good lawyer. The shofar is like a good lawyer. It reminds God of Abraham’s obedience in being willing to sacrifice that which was more dear to him than life itself. As Rabbi Abbahu said, ‘When you hear the shofar, recall the akedah and account it to your credit as if you bound yourself to the altar before me.’ ”

  Though Binyomin Cohen has been selling shofroth for thirty years, he’s been making them for twice that. When he was six, living by the Sea of Galilee, he and his friends were jealous of the men who blew the horns in synagogue. They went to the local butcher, procured a sheep’s horn, and, following a practice unchanged for centuries, soaked it in hot water for several hours, then scraped out the interior. Left with a hollow, pointed shell, they heated a nail and hammered out a small mouthpiece. Then they polished the horn with pumice. The entire process took a month and a half. “We had to go to school during the day,” he explained.