Returning to the Akeidah

I began my postings about Abraham with the Akeidah, and the idea that this was a story about the end of human sacrifice. Rosenberg ends his ‘biography’ of Abraham with the Akeidah, which is not surprising because not only is this chapter told late in Genesis, Isaac already having grown, but also because for many, the Akeidah is the ultimate test of Abraham’s faith. The sages teach that the Akeidah was the last of Abraham’s ten trials, the most demanding, and the one that proved Abraham’s merit to God. Rosenberg looks at the Akeidah from the opposite perspective; it was Abraham testing God, making sure that God would not upset the natural order by having Isaac killed. Neither one of these perspectives appeals to me, for the Akeidah comes too late in Abraham’s life for any of this. By this point in his life, Abraham had left Terah and all his old family; he had renounced idol worship for monotheism; he had answered God’s call and journeyed away from his old world, both geographically and spiritually; he had entered into the covenant; he had changed everyone’s sense of justice; yet both the sages and Rosenberg would have us believe, that at the end of Abraham's life, either God or Abraham felt compelled to impose one more test, one that demanded an unspeakable sacrifice, just to be reassured of the other’s loyalty and righteousness.

Rosenberg, in his incessant quest to place Judaism in the mainstream of Middle Eastern thought, as if by doing so he will convince everyone to stop hating Jews, claims that the Akeidah is really a dream, and that the dream metaphor would have been understood by contemporary readers of Genesis because dreams play a major role in Sumerian literature. I guess the point being that the Sumerians invented storytelling through dreams; thus the Akeidah (which incidentally never says, or even suggests, that its events are occurring in a dream) would have been familiar to its audience because they knew of the literary device of dreams, as having been passed down from the Sumerians. The problem with this absurd notion is that dreams were not invented by the Sumerians, but are part of human experience. This is like saying that the Bible’s use of dialogue in various passages has come from the Sumerians, because the characters in Sumerian legends spoke to one another. Of course they spoke; and of course they dreamed; and honestly, this is just a bunch of hogwash.

And while we’re at it, the same can be said for Rosenberg’s claim that the covenant is of Sumerian origin, because the Sumerians used written and sealed contracts to memorialize their transactions. Once again, the concept of contracts or covenants is part of the human social experience. Once people banded together, lived in villages or cities, and didn’t kill each other for sport or food or material possessions, contracts of some kind were inherent in the social structure. The idea of living alongside another, in harmony, or for mutual benefit is, by definition a covenant. So when Abraham and God entered into the covenant, that indicated that Abraham was human, not Sumerian. And by the way, if the covenant had been Sumerian, why didn’t Abraham make some record of it, and affix his seal, in the tradition of the times?

Rosenberg also distorts the Akeidah by claiming that human sacrifice was an anachronism by the 700s BCE, when he dates the original text of the Akeidah. (Rosenberg 268) (Apparently, the scholars agree that J did not compose the Akeidah story, but that it was written a couple hundred years later by the E author, the one who names God “Elohim”.) What Rosenberg is forgetting is that the Akeidah occurred not then, but twelve hundred years earlier, when Abraham came to Canaan. And at that time, human sacrifice was not uncommon. I know I’m mixing traditions here, but all of Agamemnon’s troubles supposedly resulted from his having sacrificed his daughter, Iphigenia, so that the Greek fleet could sail to Troy, some several centuries after the time of Abraham. In other words, long after Abraham had declared human sacrifice to be an abomination, the forefathers of the Greeks were still practicing this ritual, albeit with disastrous consequences for their behavior.

I think that many of Rosenberg’s problems can be traced to a perspective revealed by the following passage: “Abraham’s life and death represent the first time that religion, governed by the creator…informed secular culture in stories of truth and justice.” (Rosenberg 293) The impersonal, almost passive nature of this explanation fails to account for the fact that someone, a person, first articulated the ideas that came to inform society or culture – the same ideas that were later set down in Genesis. If the sages are correct, that person was Abraham, but was only speaking as God’s prophet; the words were God’s; and Abraham was chosen as the messenger. If I’m correct, then Abraham was a genius, an original thinker who first articulated the ideas that form part of the foundation of western thought. But these ideas were not the norm; they were not Sumerian; and they represented a dramatic break with the world that had existed prior to Abraham’s time. He was not Ivrit for nothing.

One last point, and then we’ll close the book on Rosenberg. He claims that one of the major themes of the Akeidah is anxiety about inheritance. Will Abraham’s line survive? Will his descendants be as numerous as the stars, as God had promised? Or will the people face extinction? Now by the time the Akeidah was put on paper, everyone knew that Abraham’s line had survived until then. Bloom says that when J wrote, a couple centuries before E and the Akeidah story, she sought to explain how David had come to enjoy God’s blessing. What was it about David’s history, and the history of his people, that justified this blessing? Obviously, the line from Abraham to David had been unbroken, so it’s unlikely that, from J’s perspective, there was much anxiety about inheritance. However, a couple centuries later, when the Babylonians were threatening to conquer Jerusalem, perhaps E and his contemporaries were more anxious about their own chances for survival. Why this particular story, the Akeidah, would be used as a metaphor for that anxiety, however, is unclear to me.

I’ll stick by my original hypothesis. Nothing I have read in the past year, since these musings began, has convinced me otherwise. Abraham was a genius, who changed the world in which he lived. The Akeidah is a story that depicts his realization that human sacrifice was unacceptable, and should no longer be practiced.