by Paul Johnson
All this Genesis material dealing with the problems of immigration, of water-wells and contracts and birthrights, is fascinating because it places the patriarchs so firmly in their historical setting, and testifies to the Bible’s great antiquity and authenticity. But it is mingled with two other types of material which constitute the real purpose of the Bible narratives: the depiction of individuals, the ancestors of the people, in a moral context and, still more important, the origin and development of their collective relationship with God. The vividness and realism with which the patriarchs and their families are depicted in these ancient tales is perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the work and is without parallel in the literature of deep antiquity. There are archetypes of humanity, like Ishmael—‘And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him’31—but no stereotypes: each character leaps vibrantly from the text.
Still more remarkable is the attention devoted to women, the leading role they often play, their vivacity and emotional power. Abraham’s wife, Sarah, is the first person in history recorded as laughing. When, as an old woman, she is told she will bear the much wanted son, she did not believe it but ‘laughed within herself, saying, After I am waxed old shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also?’ (Genesis 18:12): her laughter is bitter-sweet, sad, ironic, even cynical, a foretaste of so much Jewish laughter through the ages. When the son, Isaac, was born, however, ‘Sarah said, God hath made me to laugh, so that all who hear will laugh with me’—and her laughter is joyful and triumphant, communicating her delight to us over the distance of four millennia. Then there is the story of how Isaac, a gentle and meditative man, who loved his mother Sarah deeply, secured a wife to take her place—the shy but kind-hearted and loving Rebecca; and this is the first tale in the Bible to move us. Still more stirring, though not strictly from the time of the patriarchs, is the Book of Ruth, describing the affection and devotion between two sorrowing and solitary women, Naomi and her daughter-in-law Ruth. Their emotions are so tenderly and faithfully conveyed that one instinctively believes that a woman set them down. Certainly, the Song of Deborah, which constitutes Chapter 5 of the Book of Judges, with its multitude of feminine images and its triumphant vindication of female strength and courage, must be the lyrical work of a woman. Yet it is clear from internal evidence that this was one of the earliest sections of the Bible to be written down and it seems to have attained more or less its present form not later than 1200 BC.32 These early Bible records testify to the creative role played by women in the shaping of Hebrew society, to their intellectual and emotional strength, and to their high seriousness.
Yet the early Bible is above all a statement of theology: an account of the direct, often intimate, relationship between the leaders of the people and God. Here the role played by Abraham is determinant. The Bible presents him as the immediate ancestor of the Hebrew people and founder of the nation. He is also the supreme example of the good and just man. He is peace-loving (Genesis 13:8-9), though also willing to fight for his principles and magnanimous in victory (14:22), devoted to his family and hospitable to strangers (18:1), concerned for the welfare of his fellow men (18:23), and above all God-fearing and obedient to divine command (22:12; 26:5). But he is not a paragon. He is a deeply human and realistic personality, sometimes afraid, doubtful, even sceptical, though ultimately always faithful and carrying out God’s instructions.
If Abraham was the founder of the Hebrew nation, was he also the founder of the Hebrew religion? In Genesis he appears to inaugurate the special Hebrew relationship with a God who is sole and omnipotent. It is not clear whether he can accurately be called the first monotheist. We can dismiss Wellhausen’s Hegelian notions of the Jews, symbolized by Abraham, moving out of their primitive desert background. Abraham was a man familiar with cities, complex legal concepts, and religious ideas which, for their day, were sophisticated. The great Jewish historian Salo Baron sees him as a proto-monotheist, coming from a centre whose flourishing moon-cult was becoming a crude form of monotheism. The names of many of his family, Sarah, Micah, Terah, Laban, for instance, were associated with the moon-cult.33 There is in the Book of Joshua a cryptic reference to Abraham’s idolatrous ancestry: ‘even Terah, the father of Abraham…served other gods’.34 The Book of Isaiah, reproducing an ancient tradition otherwise unrecorded in the Bible, says that God ‘redeemed Abraham’.35 The movements of the Semitic peoples westwards, along the arc of the fertile crescent, is usually presented as a drift under the pressure of economic forces. But it is important to grasp that Abraham’s compulsion was religious: he responded to an urge he believed came from a great and all-powerful, ubiquitous God. It is possible to argue that, though the monotheistic concept was not fully developed in his mind, he was a man striving towards it, who left Mesopotamian society precisely because it had reached a spiritual impasse.36
Abraham may perhaps be most accurately described as a henotheist: a believer in a sole God, attached to a particular people, who none the less recognized the attachment of other races to their own gods. With this qualification, he is the founder of the Hebrew religious culture, since he inaugurates its two salient characteristics: the covenant with God and the donation of The Land. The notion of the covenant is an extraordinary idea, with no parallel in the ancient Near East. It is true that Abraham’s covenant with God, being personal, has not reached the sophistication of Moses’ covenant on behalf of an entire people. But the essentials are already there: a contract of obedience in return for special favour, implying for the first time in history the existence of an ethical God who acts as a kind of benign constitutional monarch bound by his own righteous agreements.37
The Genesis account, with its intermittent dialogue between Abraham and God, suggests that Abraham’s grasp and acceptance of the momentous implications of his bargain were gradual, an example of the way in which the will of God is sometimes revealed in progressive stages. The truth was finally brought home to Abraham, as described in Genesis 22, when God tests him by commanding him to sacrifice his only son, Isaac.38 This passage is an important milestone in the Bible, as well as being one of the most dramatic and puzzling in the entire history of religion, because it first raises the problem of theodicy, God’s sense of justice. Many Jews and Christians have found the passage unconscionable, in that Abraham is commanded to do something not only cruel in itself but contrary to the repudiation of human sacrifice which is part of the bedrock of Hebrew ethics and all subsequent forms of Judaeo-Christian worship. Great Jewish philosophers have struggled to make the story conform to Jewish ethics. Philo argued that it testified to Abraham’s detachment from custom or any other ruling passion except the love of God, his recognition that we must give God what we value most, confident that, God being just, we will not lose it. Maimonides agreed that this was a test case of the extreme limits of the love and fear God rightfully demands. Nahmanides saw it as the first instance of the compatibility of divine foreknowledge and human free will.39 In 1843 Sören Kierkegaard published his philosophical study of this episode, Fear and Trembling, in which he portrays Abraham as a ‘knight of faith’, who has to renounce for God’s sake not only his son but his ethical ideals.40 Most Jewish and Christian moral theologians reject this view, implying an unacceptable conflict between God’s will and ethical ideals, though others would agree that the episode is a warning that religion does not necessarily reflect naturalistic ethics.41
From the viewpoint of a historian, the tale makes perfect sense because Abraham, as we know from contemporary archives, came from a legal background where it was mandatory to seal a contract or covenant with an animal sacrifice. The covenant with God was of such transcendent enormity that it demanded something more: a sacrifice of the best-loved in the fullest sense, though as the subject of the sacrifice was a human being, it was made abortive, thereby remaining valid but formal and ritualistic rather than actual. Isaac was chosen as the offering not only because he was Abraham’s most precious possession
but because he was a special gift of God’s, under the covenant, and remained God’s like all the rest of his gifts to man. This underlines the whole purpose of sacrifice, a symbolic reminder that everything man possesses comes from God and is returnable to him. That is why Abraham called the place of his act of supreme obedience and abortive sacrifice, the Mount of the Lord, an adumbration of Sinai and a greater contract.42 It is significant of the importance of the event that, for the first time, the Bible narratives introduce the note of universalism into God’s promises. He not only undertakes to multiply Abraham’s offspring but now also adds: ‘And in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.’43
We are now close to the notion of an elect nation. The Old Testament, it is important to grasp, is not primarily about justice as an abstract concept. It is about God’s justice, which manifests itself by God’s acts of choice. In Genesis we have various examples of the ‘just man’, even the only just man: in the story of Noah and the Flood, in the story of the destruction of Sodom, for example. Abraham is a just man too, but there is no suggestion that God chose him because he was the only one, or in any sense because of his merits. The Bible is not a work of reason, it is a work of history, dealing with what are to us mysterious and even inexplicable events. It is concerned with the momentous choices which it pleased God to make.44 It is essential to the understanding of Jewish history to grasp the importance the Jews have always attached to God’s unrestricted ownership of creation. Many Jewish beliefs are designed to dramatize this central fact. The notion of an elect people was part of God’s purpose to stress his possession of all created things. Abraham was a crucial figure in this demonstration. The Jewish sages taught: ‘Five possessions has the Holy One, blessed be He, made especially his own. These are: the Torah, Heaven and earth, Abraham, Israel and the Holy Sanctuary.’45 The sages believed that God gave generously of his creation, but retained (as it were) the freehold of everything and a special, possessive relationship with selected elements. Thus we find:
The Holy One, blessed be He, created days, and took to Himself the Sabbath; He created the months, and took to Himself the festivals; He created the years, and chose for Himself the Sabbatical Year; He created the Sabbatical years, and chose for Himself the Jubilee Year; He created the nations, and chose for Himself Israel…. He created the lands, and took to Himself the Land of Israel as a heave-offering from all the other lands, as it is written: ‘The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof.’46
The election of Abraham and his descendants for a special role in God’s providence, and the donation of the land, are inseparable in the Biblical presentation of history. Moreover, both gifts are leasehold, not freehold: the Jews are chosen, the land is theirs, by grace and favour, always revocable. Abraham is both a real example and a perpetual symbol of a certain fragility and anxiety in Jewish possession. He is a ‘stranger and sojourner’ and remains one even after God’s election, even after he has elaborately purchased the Cave of Machpelah. This uncertainty of ownership is transferred to all his descendants: as the Bible repeatedly reminds us. Thus God tells the Israelites: ‘And the land is not to be sold in perpetuity, for all land is Mine, because you are strangers and sojourners before me’; or again, the people confess: ‘For we are strangers before you, and sojourners like all our forefathers’; and the Psalms have David the King say: ‘I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were.’47
All the same, the promise of the land to Abraham is very specific and it comes in the oldest stratum of the Bible: ‘To your descendants I give this land from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites and the Jebusites.’48 There is some confusion about the frontiers, since in a later passage God promises only a portion of the larger gift: ‘And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan.’49 On the other hand, this latter gift is to be ‘a perpetual possession’. The implication, here and in later passages, is that the election of Israel can never be revoked, though it can be suspended by human disobedience. As the Lord’s promise is irrevocable, the land will ultimately revert to Israel even if she loses it for a time.50 The notion of the Promised Land is peculiar to Israelite religion and, for the Israelites and the Jews later, it was the most important single element in it. It is significant that the Jews made the five early books of the Bible, the Pentateuch, into the core of their Torah or belief, because they dealt with the Law, the promise of the land, and its fulfilment. The later books, despite all their brilliance and comprehensibility, never acquired the same central significance. They are not so much revelation as a commentary upon it, dominated by the theme of the promise fulfilled.51 It is the land that matters most.
If Abraham established these fundamentals, it was left to his grandson, Jacob, to bring into existence a distinct people, Israel, his name, and the race, being inextricably linked.52 There has always been a problem of what to term the ancestors of the Jews. ‘Hebrews’ is unsatisfactory, though it is often necessary to use it, for the term Habiru, from which it presumably derives, described more a way of life than a specific racial group. Moreover, it was pejorative. ‘Hebrew’ does indeed occur in the Pentateuch, meaning ‘the children of Israel’, but only when used by the Egyptians or by the Israelites themselves in the presence of Egyptians. From about the second century BC, when it was so used by Ben Sira, ‘Hebrew’ was applied to the language of the Bible, and to all subsequent works written in this language. As such it gradually lost its pejorative overtone, so that both to Jews themselves and to sympathetic gentiles, it sometimes seemed preferable to ‘Jew’ as a racial term. In the nineteenth century, for example, it was much used by the Reform movement in the United States, so that we get such institutions as the Hebrew Union College and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. But the ancestors of the Jews never by choice called themselves Hebrews. When they became conscious of a national identity, the term they used, normative in the Bible, is Israelites or children of Israel, and it is this which gives Jacob his main significance.
Yet it is curious, and characteristic of the difficulties which have always surrounded Jewish identity and nomenclature, that the first mention of the term, when Jacob was divinely renamed Israel—the moment when the nation was born, as it were—occurs in what is perhaps the most mysterious and obscure passage in the entire Bible, Jacob’s night-long struggle with the angel. The term ‘Israel’ may mean he who fights Gods, he who fights for God, he whom God fights, or whom God rules, the upright one of God, or God is upright. There is no agreement. Nor has anyone yet provided a satisfactory account of what the incident means. It is evident that the earliest editors and transcribers of the Bible did not understand it either. But they recognized it as an important moment in their history and, far from adapting it to suit their religious understanding, reproduced it verbatim because it was Torah, and sacred. The career of Jacob is described at great length in Genesis, and was indeed remarkable. He was quite unlike his grandfather Abraham: a dissimulator, a machiavellian, a strategist rather than a fighter, a politician, an operator, as well as a dreamer and visionary. Jacob prospered mightily and became a much more substantial man than Abraham or his father Isaac. He eventually had himself laid to rest beside the tombs of his forebears, but in the meantime he set up columns or built altars over a wide range of territory. He is described as still a ‘stranger’ in Canaan like his father.53 Indeed, all his sons, except the last, Benjamin, seem to have been born in Mesopotamia or Syria. But it is during his lifetime that these links with the east and north were finally severed, and his followers began to think of themselves as linked in some permanent way to Canaan, so that even if they go to Egypt in time of famine, the divine dispensation is that they will return, inexorably.
As the eponymous national leader, Jacob-Israel was also the father of the twe
lve tribes which in theory composed it. These tribes, Reuben, Simeon (Levi), Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, Benjamin, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Ephraim and Manasseh, were all descended from Jacob and his sons, according to Biblical tradition.54 But in the Song of Deborah, which as we have noted is very ancient, only ten tribes are listed—Ephraim, Benjamin, Machir, Zebulun, Issachar, Reuben, Gilead, Dan, Asher and Naphtali. The context is bellicose, and it may be that Simeon, Levi, Judah and Gad were not listed by Deborah because they were not due to take part in the fight. The number twelve may be a convention: the same number is used for the sons of Ishmael, Nahor, Joktan and Esau.55 Groupings of twelve tribes (sometimes six) were common in the eastern Mediterranean and Asia Minor in the later Bronze Age. The Greeks called them amphictyons, from a term meaning ‘to dwell about’. The unifying factor might not be common ancestry but common devotion to a particular shrine. Many text scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries dismissed the notion of common descent from Jacob and preferred to see the tribal groups of distant and disparate origins organizing themselves as an amphictyony around the Israelite shrines which were being established about this time.56 But all these West Semitic groups moving into Canaan had common origins and were interrelated; they shared memories, traditions and revered ancestors. Working out the specific tribal histories of all the groups mentioned in the Bible would be impossibly complicated, even if the materials existed.57 The salient point is that Jacob-Israel is associated with the time at which the Israelites first became conscious of their common identity but within the structure of a tribal system which was already ancient and dear to them. Religious and family links were equally strong, and inextricable in practice, as they were to be throughout Jewish history. In Jacob’s day, men still carried their household gods about with them, but it was already becoming possible to think in terms of a national God too. Abraham had his own religious beliefs, but he courteously paid tribute, being ‘a stranger and sojourner’, to local deities, known generically as ‘El’. Thus he paid tithe to El Elyon at Jerusalem, and he acknowledged El Shaddai at Hebron and El Olan at Beersheba.58 Jacob’s adoption of the name Israel (or Isra-el) marks the point at which Abraham’s God becomes located in the soil of Canaan, is identified with Jacob’s progeny, the Israelites, and is soon to become the almighty Yahweh, the god of monotheism.
