The Call

I’m still searching. I thought I might find some answers to the origins of Abraham’s thought in a recent book by the co-author of The Book of J, David Rosenberg. Rosenberg’s contribution to that work, which by the way has been the only enlightening book I’ve read over the past year, was the translation of the edited J text, understood by many biblical scholars to be the original text in what later became the Torah.

Rosenberg’s new book is entitled, Abraham, the First Historical Biography, and attempts to place Abraham in the continuum of civilization which began with the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, and ended up, a couple thousand years later in Solomon’s time, when the J text was composed, when the first authors wrote the history of our people that later was added to, edited, redacted, and then compiled into what became the Tanach, the Bible. This scholarship is at odds, of course, with traditional Jewish teaching. If the Torah was the word of God, given to Moses on Sinai, verbatim, it could never have been composed in this manner – by successive unnamed authors, whose work was later compiled and redacted. So obviously, Rosenberg comes to us not through the traditional Jewish teaching, but through the intellectual wing of religious studies.

Unfortunately, what Rosenberg does is fall victim to a popular intellectual assumption of today – one that rejects in general the idea of genius, and tries instead to place all ideas in their historical and cultural context. Shakespeare was a product of his time, as I suppose was Isaac Newton. So here we have Rosenberg’s Abraham, or actually Abram, a product of Sumerian culture – educated in Sumerian schools, literate, observant of Sumerian religious practice, familiar with all their art and customs. He then leaves all that, not to mention his family, and its lovely two-story house with courtyard, and moves to Canaan, where he will spend the rest of his days, in tents, without art, without culture, and without the religious and dramatic festivals of the Sumerians. It turns out that this book is less about Abraham and more about the ancient Mesopotamian world.

As a result, the historical Abraham posited by Rosenberg has become less a person, and more a reflection of his times. “By referring to [Abraham’s] mind, we invoke his education, his personal and cultural history in Ur and Harran.” (Rosenberg 69) These are the seeds he carries to begin a new history in Canaan. ”History is now more than a reporting; it is a journey….” (Id.) Rosenberg’s more general reflections on who Abram was are really just platitudes, so it’s not yet clear whether Rosenberg’s thesis makes much sense. Not until we get down to the details. After explaining that the Sumerians had personal household gods, and recall that Abram’s father, Terah, was a craftsman who fabricated these personal gods, little statues kept in everyone’s home, Rosenberg suggests that when God called to Abram, it was understood that his personal god made that call, and not the God who later made the covenant with Abraham. Listen to this: “it was Abraham’s personal Sumerian god who advised him to leave Harran; only later would Abraham be made aware of Yahweh’s Canaanite identity.” (Rosenberg 102) “Abraham would have heard the voice of Kulla (the Sumerian family god) advising him to “come out of your father’s house”.” (Id. 103) Rosenberg does note that somehow, by the time Abram arrived in Canaan, he had left Kulla behind. And that, for some unexplained psychological reason, Abram never returned to his father’s house, despite the importance of family in Sumerian culture. Needless to say, this is all nonsense. And it makes far less sense than the traditional explanation of Abraham’s call, all described verbatim in God’s own words. At least the Orthodox have a coherent, and internally consistent story. Rosenberg has written what’s really an incoherent version of Abraham’s call.

I’m digressing, and it’s not helping me get to any answers, but it seems to me that the problem with this enlightened look at Abraham’s life is that it’s infected by a discomfort over the idea of the Jews as chosen people. Rosenberg doesn’t want us to be different; he wants us to fit into the continuum of middle eastern history. Perhaps what he, and other writers, like Bruce Feiler, hope is that once everyone reads their books, they’ll stop hating Jews, and we can all be one big happy family. That would be nice, but it’s not an excuse for distorting what occurred. Jews are the chosen people, not because God chose the Jews, but because we chose God. And we are different from everyone who preceded us. Abram is described as Ivrit – the other. Abraham was by definition different from his neighbors.

So back to Abraham’s call, the defining moment of Judaism, in my opinion. Abram did not receive that call from Kulla, or anyone else in the Sumerian tradition. When he left Ur, or Harran, or Mesopotamia, or Babylonia, he not only left physically, he left there spiritually and intellectually. Yes, the journey to Canaan was a physical journey, to find a new land; but more importantly, it was a metaphorical journey, which signified to everyone that Abraham had left the old world behind. That’s why he never returned to his father’s home; why he never journeyed back to Ur. Abram rejected all of the Sumerian culture and practices, not just the idol worship and the multiplicity of gods. And so by definition, Abraham’s call had to have come from God, or what Abraham understood to be God.

The real story here, the one that’s still untold by Rosenberg, and by anyone else, at least insofar as I have been able to determine, is the examination of the originality of Abraham’s thought. Genesis wasn’t written for almost another thousand years. And I will concede that there could have been a literary tradition that informed the first authors, including J. But J did not make up the story of the Jews, from Abraham, through Joseph and slavery, through Moses and the Exodus, through Sinai, Joshua and the conquest of Canaan. Those events had happened, and J looked back at them when she sat down to chronicle our story. But the ideas in J’s story, and in the Torah at large, had originated somewhere. And contrary to Rosenberg, I don’t believe for one second that those ideas were just some reflection of Sumerian and Babylonian thought, perhaps modified by Abraham and his descendants. They were not just a step on the intellectual path through the ancient middle east. They were new ideas. The observant would tell us they were communicated directly from the mouth of God. I would suggest that they represent the original thought of our patriarch, and I will leave open whether that thought was divinely inspired. Either way, they represented a break with the past, a past which has by now disappeared over time, worn away by the sands, and known to us only through historical artifacts. In contrast to that lost world, Abraham’s ideas still inform most of western thought, whether the rest of the world wants to admit it or not.