Abraham's Originality

I’m back to Abraham, and I want to discuss his originality, which must be distinguished from his otherness. I’ve referred on many occasions to his otherness; to the fact that he was Ivrit; to his physical separation from family, from country, from culture. But equally important, and perhaps even more central to the whole consideration of Abraham is the originality of his thought.

I’ve recently finished only the second book which held any real interest for me in this exploration of Genesis : Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard Elliott Friedman. The book is on the dry side; I don’t really recommend it unless one is actively interested in this particular topic. But it manages to explore this difficult topic without stepping over the line in either direction. Friedman is not wedded to traditional beliefs about the origin of scripture; but at the same time, he feels no compulsion to write a feel-good book about how we all should get along. Rather, he looks back in time to the era when the Tanach was written, and tries to figure out who wrote what, and why.

I’ll save the detailed explanation for some other time; suffice it to say that, according to Friedman, J and E wrote the original texts (no one really has any idea who they were); Jeremiah (or his scribe) wrote Deuteronomy; one of the priests wrote most of the ‘law’; and then Ezra compiled (redacted) the whole thing into a single volume, so as to allow for inclusiveness among the competing Jewish interests.

But the departure point for this posting is the Jews’ return to Israel after Cyrus had conquered Babylon. It was around fifty years after the destruction of the first Temple, and the exile was ended. People streamed back to Zion. Friedman points out that, even at that time, the Jewish religion differed from all other religions in the region. Everyone else worshiped a multitude of gods. Think of Olympus. No one else had a god like our God; and our God was unlike any of the pagan gods.

But this was fifteen hundred years after Abraham had first heard the call. Fifteen hundred years after he had left his home and wandered to Canaan; Fifteen hundred years after the Akeidah; Fifteen hundred hears after he argued with God in defense of the innocent Sodomites. And still, despite the passage of those fifteen hundred years, other than his followers, who else on the planet had caught up to Abraham’s consciousness, and reached the level of his thought? And so think back to that time fifteen hundred years earlier, and try to imagine the gulf between Abraham and his neighbors. It’s no wonder he had to leave home and family, and settle in a new and distant region. At that time he was far too original, far too strange I’m sure, for any acceptance among those who had known him previously.

I can’t really think of anyone else who stepped so far ahead of his time. The closest I can come is Archimedes, whose understanding of math and geometry was not surpassed until the Renaissance. Even so, Archimedes didn’t reconfigure the entire universe; he just took his mathematics so far along, and so far ahead of his times that, particularly with the destruction of the classical world, it took a long while for everyone else to catch up. I think that what Abraham did was more remarkable. Before Abraham, the world was a very different place; and after him, it was never again the same.