Abraham

I’ve been threatening this post for a couple weeks now – my thesis that the patriarch Abraham was the first genius in recorded history. There were earlier geniuses, about whom we know very little. For example, there was the guy who decided that rather than wander all over the grasslands to gather food, he would plant seeds in his back yard and raise crops. Certainly, our clan would recognize the first guy to have placed a cut of meat over an open fire as a genius. But I believe that a critical reading of Genesis reveals that Abraham was indeed a genius, someone who changed the world in which he lived. My interpretation of these events is informed by the perspective I’ve gained from reading Harold Bloom. In other words, Genesis is a text, written by someone, and Abraham and Isaac are characters in that text. The tricky part is whether God too is a character in the text, but I think that insofar as the Akeidah story is concerned, God is exactly that – a character in this text. So then, if you believe the Torah to be the word of God, revealed to Moses on Sinai, and not a text written in Solomon’s temple, don’t read any more.

The conventional interpretation of the Akeidah is that Abraham proved his faith in God by agreeing to sacrifice his son, Isaac. After Abraham took Isaac out into the wilderness, with the wood, with the knife, and bound Isaac on the altar, an angel called out to him, restraining Abraham and giving him a ram to sacrifice instead of Isaac. Thus, say the sages, Abraham proved himself a God-fearing man. That’s the conventional interpretation of the story. But I submit, that’s not what happened.

What actually happened is that Abraham lived in a time when human sacrifice was an accepted practice. Neither Abraham nor anyone else had to agree to sacrifice his child to prove his faith in any deity. This was, if not an everyday event, at least a regular practice of what then passed for religion. The Akeidah is really about Abraham’s realization that human sacrifice was wrong, and that henceforth no one should practice this abomination. When he sacrificed the ram instead of his son, his only son, the son he loved, Abraham changed human history. Of course, when he came back from Mount Moriah, he couldn’t tell his neighbors that he, Abraham, had decided that no one should practice human sacrifice any more. For who was he to tell them what to do? So the story became that God had instructed him to substitute animal sacrifice for human sacrifice. And if one had sufficient faith in God, one could accept this wisdom as the word of God, a divine proscription that demanded obedience.

And how do we know that it was Abraham, and not God, who had come to this realization? Is it not presumptuous to assume that a mere mortal, a human being, was the one to come to this realization? Think about the debate between God and Abraham about the punishment for Sodom. Let’s accept that the Sodomites were wicked, and that they deserved some form of punishment. God proposes to wipe them all out, to kill every one of them. In a dialogue that is nothing short of remarkable, Abraham gradually persuades God that he should not administer collective punishment on the innocent citizens of this city. What if there are fifty righteous people in Sodom, what then? God agrees he will spare Sodom. And what if there are only forty righteous people in Sodom? God agrees to restrain himself if there are only forty. And the same for thirty, twenty and ten. The sages teach us that Abraham, by pleading for the Sodomites, is proving his worth as the father of a multitude of nations, and not just the Jews. The encounter with the Sodomites supposedly teaches Abraham that judgment must be tempered with mercy. But in the literal text, it’s Abraham, and not God, who wants to change the nature of justice. It’s Abraham who argues against collective guilt; it’s Abraham who understands that the innocent should be spared.

So when Abraham later is confronted with the expectation of sacrificing his son, it makes sense that it’s Abraham who comes to realize the immorality of this practice and the need for a change.

Earlier in Genesis, Abraham is called an Ivri, which is the root word for Hebrew. That termed is derived from another ancient word meaning ‘the other side’. And the understanding is that Abraham stood on one side of a spiritual divide, apart from the rest of the world. The conventional interpretation is that Abraham rejected the prevailing practices of the day, recognized the sovereignty of the one true God, and accepted God’s charge to lead the Jewish nation. More likely, Abraham came to understand that the morality of his day was unacceptable, and that practices like human sacrifice needed to stop. The sages later credited this change to God, but the text tells us that it was Abraham, and not God, who actually changed the course of history.