Taking Issue with Bloom - Abraham and Justice

According to Bloom, Abraham’s finest moment occurs on the road to Sodom, in the episode where Abraham negotiates with God for the lives of the innocent souls of Sodom, and urges God not to destroy the entire city if there are first fifty, and then eventually ten, blameless persons in the city. “Would you still stamp it out rather than spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in the midst of the city?” (Gen. 18:24.) I have used this passage previously to help explain the genius of Abraham, who seemingly teaches God about justice.

In the Book of J, Bloom cites to Martin Buber, who finds this passage the boldest speech of any person in all of Scripture. According to Buber, or perhaps it’s just Bloom explaining Buber, the purpose of Abraham’s intercession is to remind God just exactly who God is, or is supposed to be. God seems to have forgotten his promise to Noah after the flood, and has also forgotten just how fragile his creation, i.e., life, really is. Abraham, on the other hand, is looking for justice, “demanding that [God] be accurate in seeing the difference between the innocent and the contemptuous.” (Bloom 302) Of course, in a sense, the same God who wants to destroy Sodom, is the same God who created Abraham, chose him for his covenant, and thus allowed him to argue for justice on behalf of the Sodomites.

This discussion leads Bloom to compare J’s God with Freud’s superego; both are the source of our guilt, and both demand that we, or our egos, surrender our aggressivity, or to some extent our freedom. Both act as some limiting or inhibiting force, restraining the creativity, or the vitality, or perhaps the originality of man. I know this will sound completely presumptuous, but I think Bloom has got it backwards.

Bloom sees J as a writer of surpassing depth and originality, unmatched in depicting the human condition until the birth of Shakespeare, some twenty five hundred years later. According to Bloom, J’s real hero is King David, and her book ( the original text from which the Torah evolved), is really an attempt to look back on the history of David’s people, and trace the origins of, and the reasons for, God’s blessing, which David apparently received in greater measure than any other figure in our history. Here is how Bloom explains the Book of J:

It is a series of extraordinary stories, the stories of how the people of David became a people…[how God] created the Blessing of life and then extended it to many…and thus prepared for the Blessing given to David and Solomon. (Bloom 284)

Bloom then traces the origin of this people back, not to Moses, but to Abraham.

I won’t presume to second-guess Bloom about the literary genius of J. But by the time she sat down to pay homage to King David, and his people, and to explain why it was they enjoyed God’s blessing, this people had existed for a thousand years. And they must have carried with them some set of beliefs and principles that formed the seed of J’s extraordinary stories. And my thesis has been, since I have been laboring over Genesis, that these ideas originated with Abraham, the first genius of recorded history. In earlier posts, I suggested that what the Akeidah tells us is that Abraham ended human sacrifice. And what the story of Sodom, and Abraham’s negotiation with God tells us, is that Abraham changed the nature of justice in the ancient world.

So then where Bloom seems to have misunderstood things, is not that God or superego or whatever, is the source of guilt, holding human accomplishment in check, but just the opposite. Abraham sought to tame the savage and indiscriminate elements of the human condition, which in the ancient world seemed to wreak vengeance on anyone and everyone, for any reason, or for no reason at all. (Who does that sound like?) Human history is the story of the journey from savagery to civilization. Once we all lived in caves, or on the grasslands, killed our neighbors, stole their women, and murdered their children; later on, once the beginnings of civilization had developed, even if we had gathered in cities, or even nations, we still acted in savage ways, imposing collective punishment on those we conquered, and probably still stealing their women and murdering their children. But someone in history saw that there was a different way of life. Someone understood that, for humankind to move forward, there needed to be an ethical dimension to life. In our ancient text, now codified as the Tanach, but originating with the Book of J, Abraham is the original source of that idea. And while it may have taken J a millennium to write it down, and perhaps she was a writer of transcendent originality; still, it was Abraham who first came to apprehend the concepts that gave rise to our people, and the our chronicle.