Who Was (and Is) Abraham? - Princeton University

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I ntroduction

Who Was (and Is) Abraham?

On the day when Our Father Abraham passed away from the world, all the great people of the nations of the world stood in a line and said, "Alas for the world that has lost its leader, and alas for the ship that has lost its pilot!"

--Talmud1

The oldest source for the story of Abraham is in the biblical book of Genesis, where it occupies about fourteen chapters, or roughly twenty pages. Readers who are unfamiliar with the story would be well advised to read it now, and in a modern, accessible translation.2 When they do, they will see that it is the deceptively simple tale of a person to whom God, suddenly and without preparation, makes some rather extravagant promises. This childless man (whose wife is infertile) is to be the father of a great nation; he will become famous and blessed, in fact a source or byword of blessing for many; and his descendants will be given the land of Canaan, to which he is commanded to journey, leaving his homeland in Mesopotamia (today, Iraq) and his family of origin behind. Much of the drama in these early chapters of the story derives from the question, how will this man whose wife has never been able to conceive a child and is now advancing in years ever beget the great nation that is at the center of the promise? The wealth associated with that promise comes quickly, but the son who will be Abraham's heir and continuator does not, and this casts into doubt both the reliability of the promise and the God who made it.

When at long last Abraham does gain a son, it is not through his primary wife, but, at her suggestion, through an Egyptian slave who serves as a surrogate mother for her mistress. The resolution is short-lived. For no sooner is Abraham's ostensible heir (Ishmael) born than God makes the astounding promise that the infertile wife,

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2 ? Introduction

Sarah, now eighty-nine years old, will give birth to the promised son after all, and that this son will inherit not only the promises of blessing and great nationhood, as does Ishmael, but, unlike Ishmael, the covenant as well. Much of the second half of the story of Abraham focuses on the relationship of these two sons (and that of their mothers as well), until finally Ishmael and his mother Hagar are removed from the household and Hagar procures an Egyptian wife for her son, confirming, as it were, the divine prediction that his would not be Abraham's prime lineage. That status has been reserved for Sarah's son Isaac, who is born not through the course of nature but through nothing less than a miracle. But this time, too, the happy resolution is short-lived, for soon after it is established that Sarah's son Isaac is the promised offspring, God again, suddenly and without warning, commands Abraham to sacrifice this child, the son he loves and on whom he has staked his life, as a burnt offering on an as-yet-u nspecified mountain in a distant land.

And yet, once again, Abraham obeys God's inscrutable will. At the last minute, God interrupts the sacrifice, having determined that Abraham obeys even when that means acting against his own self- interest and paternal love. Isaac survives. Abraham, before he dies, succeeds in buying a gravesite for Sarah, his only acquisition of real estate in the land promised his descendants. He also arranges a marriage for Isaac within his extended family back in Mesopotamia, ensuring that the promise will not die in his generation but extend into the next, as Isaac and Rebekah succeed Abraham and Sarah as the progenitors of the special nation. The promise secured--a nd to some extent realized--Abraham passes away at a ripe old age, contented.

So much for Abraham in the Jewish Bible, the subject of our first two chapters and part of the third (and to be treated at greater length later in this introduction). What is too easily missed is that in the Jewish tradition, the Bible comes bundled with a rich body of interpretation that has grown over many centuries. This makes it inadequate to restrict a discussion of Abraham in Judaism to the figure who appears in Genesis. Rather, the story continued to grow even after the biblical texts became fixed, and expanded versions of the story in Genesis--along with some that seem to have no or only slight rooting there--became plentiful among Jews living under various forms

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Who Was (and Is) Abraham? ? 3

of Greek or Roman domination. In fact, as Judaism changed under the impact of fresh challenges and resources, the conception of Abraham changed as well. Much richer and more variegated portraits of him emerge, along with new conceptions of his significance and his legacy. The evolution of the figure of Abraham in Jewish sources reflects the evolution of Judaism itself over the centuries.

In the Jewish tradition, Abraham is known as 'Avraham 'Avinu, "Our Father Abraham." As the father of the Jewish people, he is not simply their biological progenitor (and, as the tradition would have it, the father of all who have converted to Judaism as well); he is also the founder of Judaism itself--the first Jew, as it were--and the man whose life in some mysterious ways pre-enacts the experience of the Jewish people, who are his descendants and who are to walk in trails he blazed. The major way in which they are to do so is by serving and worshipping the God whom, according to those postbiblical but still authoritative traditions, Abraham rediscovered. To this day, the Jewish liturgy speaks of God as "the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob," referring in the last two phrases to the special son and grandson through whom, according to the biblical narrative, the Jewish people came into existence.

That Abraham should have assumed such prominence is more than a little surprising, and for at least two reasons. The first is that so little of what the tradition instructs Jews to practice can be found in the biblical narratives about Abraham. Neither he nor anyone else in Genesis, for example, observes the Sabbath (Shabbat), a central focus of Jewish life from antiquity till the present. True, God "ceases" (Hebrew, shavat) from his labors on the seventh day of creation, but, as the Torah's story has it, he does not disclose Shabbat itself or command any human beings to keep it until the time of Moses, long after the death of Abraham. The same can be said about the great bulk of the commandments of the Torah. The opposition to idolatry and the insistence on the one God who has created the world, the characteristic ethical and legal norms, the laws governing sacrificial worship, the dietary laws, the festivals--Abraham is involved with none of these, the single, glaring exception being circumcision. But in time all this changes, as Abraham the father becomes Abraham the founder as well--the man who heroically stands up for the one

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4 ? Introduction

invisible and transcendent God, who created the world, guides and governs it through his providence, and gave the Torah and its commandments to the Jewish people.

To historians, this postbiblical reconception of Abraham as the founder of Judaism is, of course, problematic, and not simply because it fails to reflect the earliest surviving sources about him. To the modern historian, the whole concept of a single person founding a great religion is too simplistic to account for the complex cultural and social dynamics by which any religious tradition comes into being. There is ample room to reject the notions, for example, that the tradition Westerners call "Confucianism" was founded by Confucius and that Christianity was founded by the man its adherents called "Jesus Christ" (who was, in fact, an observant Jew). In both those cases, however, the putative founder is revered and viewed as a paradigm for the adherents to follow, and no later figure in the tradition even begins to equal him. The same can be said for the Buddha and Muhammad. Abraham as he appears in the Torah is arguably (but not indisputably) presented as worthy of reverence, but little of what he is reported to have done is directly amenable to imitation. On the basis of the biblical traditions, if the problematic title of "founder" must be invoked at all, Moses would seem to have a much better claim to it than Abraham.

This brings us to the second reason that the reconception of Abraham in Jewish tradition is surprising. It is not simply that in Genesis, Abraham does not teach what Moses is said to have taught; it is that he does not teach anything at all. In this, too, he distinguishes himself radically from other putative founder-figures, like the Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, and Muhammad. Genesis, like the entire Jewish Bible, is extraordinarily reticent about providing editorial evaluations of Abraham. The same reticence also partly accounts for the occasional willingness of the Jewish tradition to find serious fault with Abraham.3 In this, too, Judaism seems radically different from the way most religious traditions treat their founders, who are regarded as models for emulation and, in the case of orthodox Christianity, as the very incarnation of God himself.

In the later part of the Second Temple period (roughly 200 B.C.E.? 70 C.E.), when the latest compositions in the Hebrew Bible were

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Who Was (and Is) Abraham? ? 5

being finished, Judaism faced one of those challenges to its conception of Abraham alluded to above and found the resources to deal with it. The challenge lay in the advance of scientific thinking in the Greco-Roman world and the philosophical claims on behalf of naturalism with which it was associated. In particular, the discovery of mathematically predictable regularities inscribed in the motion of the heavenly bodies posed a formidable challenge to the traditional Jewish belief in a personal God who created the world (including the planets and stars) and actively governs it through his providence. As we shall see in chapter 4, one way in which Judaism sought to meet the new challenge was by finding in Abraham the man who had seen through astrology/astronomy (the two were not yet distinguished) and discovered the God who is above nature and not wholly immanent in it or constrained by it. The traditional absence of an icon of the Deity in Jewish worship lent itself to making a similar point. Whereas in the Abraham narratives of Genesis, there is no notion at all of idolatry or of false gods, late Second Temple Jewish literature exhibits an Abraham who, strikingly, not only intuits the noncorporeal nature of God but also sets himself courageously against the regnant idolatry. In the manner of biblical prophets like Elijah and Jeremiah, or of Jewish martyrs of the late Second Temple period itself, this Abraham is willing to witness to the highest truth with, if need be, his very life. This idea of Abraham's uncompromising opposition to idolatry carries over into rabbinic and later Jewish sources; it is familiar to many Jews today, some of whom are surprised to learn that there is not a word to that effect in Genesis. Appearing prominently in the Qur'an as well, it becomes an important part of the common heritage of Judaism and Islam.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are often described as the monotheistic religions, meaning those that insist there is but one God (though the one God of Christian tradition is believed to exist in three equally divine "persons"). Although in the Middle Ages the oneness of God becomes a focus of important philosophical reflection, monotheism among the Jews of biblical, Second Temple, and rabbinic times (the last period runs roughly from about 70 C.E. to 500 C.E.) was not focused primarily on the number of deities but on the transcendence of the true God over nature and humankind,

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