Inheriting Abraham

The Legacy of the Patriarch in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

Jon D. Levenson

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781400844616
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia ebraica

How Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have reimagined Abraham in their own images Jews, Christians, and Muslims supposedly share a common religious heritage in the patriarch Abraham, and the idea that he should serve only as a source of unity among the three traditions has become widespread in both scholarly and popular circles. But in Inheriting Abraham, Jon Levenson reveals how the increasingly conventional notion of the three equally "Abrahamic" religions derives from a dangerous misunderstanding of key biblical and Qur'anic texts, fails to do full justice to any of the traditions, and is often biased against Judaism in subtle and pernicious ways.

CHAPTER ONE

Call and Commission

For it is hard for a person to leave the land in which he dwells and in which his friends and companions are found. All the more so if it is the land in which he was born, and all the more so if his whole family is there. That is why it was necessary to tell him to leave everything for the sake of his love for the Holy One (blessed be He!).

—Nachmanides¹

WITH THE INTRODUCTION of Abraham (called “Abram” until Genesis 17), the narrative of the Torah subtly yet momentously changes direction. The first eleven chapters of Genesis are marked by a pattern of human rebellion followed by divine punishment, which is then tempered by divine forbearance. By the end of chapter 11, the high hopes that God had held for the human race seem dashed. He had created them in his image and charged them with worldwide dominion under his sovereignty, yet they had repeatedly disobeyed him—in the Garden of Eden, with Cain’s murder of Abel, with the evil that had brought on the great flood, and now with the Tower of Babel, with which they arrogantly hoped to reach the heavens and “make a name for [themselves]”—but with the result that the various nations were instead deprived of the ability to understand one another and were scattered “over the face of the whole earth” (Gen 11:4, 9). In the cases of Adam, Eve, and Cain, however, grace tempers the divine judgment, as the miscreants are sentenced to exile but not to the immediate death that had been expected. And in the case of the flood, God lowers his expectations of humanity, promising not to destroy it—though the human inclination to evil remains intact—and solemnizing his gracious promise in a covenant with all mankind and even with the animals as well (Gen 8:21–9:17). Humanity shall endure in spite of itself.

With the Tower of Babel, the last narrative before the introduction of Abram, the pattern breaks. Here, there is no note of grace to leaven the dire sentence of international incomprehension and universal exile with which the story of the tower concludes.² What follows, rather, is a new beginning, focused on a man whose promised destiny turns out to be not simply a tempering of the note of judgment but a reversal of it:

¹ The LORD said to Abram, “Go forth from your native land, from your kin-group, and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you.

² I will make of you a great nation,

And I will bless you;

I will make your name great,

And you shall be a blessing.

³ I will bless those who bless you

And curse him that curses you;

And all the families of the earth

Shall bless themselves by you.” (Gen 12:1–3)³

The command to separate himself from his country and kinfolk suggests that Abram, too, is going into exile, and yet only a few verses later, when he has dutifully obeyed the mysterious command to journey to the unnamed land, God tells him that he will grant that land (which turns out to be Canaan) to his offspring (v. 7).

In context, the gift of the land to the descendants of Abram forms a counterpoint to the universal exile that concludes the previous narrative. Similarly, the theme of blessing, underscored fourfold in the little poem above, reverses the theme of punishment and curse that dominates from the story of Adam and Eve through that of the Tower of Babel. What is more, God promises to do for Abram what the builders of that tower catastrophically failed to do for themselves—to grant him a great name (compare 11:4). Moving farther back in the narrative, we can also see the conjoining of blessing to the promise of land as a reversal of the cursing of the ground that was the punishment for Adam’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden (3:17–19). And the promise to make of Abram “a great nation,” that is, a man with a multitude of descendants, is quite possibly a reversal of Eve’s punishment, which involved intense pain in childbirth (v. 16).⁴ As I have observed elsewhere, “Abram, the tenth generation from Noah, who, in turn, is tenth in descent from Adam, is, no less and, in fact, more than Noah himself, the realization of the hoped-for reversal of the curses on Adam. The man without a country will inherit a whole land; the man with a barren wife will have plenteous offspring; and the man who has cut himself off from kith and kin will be pronounced blessed by all the families of the earth.”⁵

In sum, a close reading of the initial call of Abram drives us to but one conclusion: with this act, God is no longer engaging in damage control, as he was in the first eleven chapters of the Torah. He is making a new beginning. Abram, and the as-yet-unnamed people promised to derive from him, represent a fundamentally different relationship between God and human beings from that which characterized primordial humanity. This new beginning, this new relationship, is found in the “great nation” that will, according to God’s remarkable promise, descend from Abram through (as Genesis later is at pains to point out) his son Isaac and grandson Jacob, whose very name becomes that of the promised people, “Israel.”

Why did God single out the people Israel and their ancestor Abram? Our first impulse is to answer by reference to the mission with which they were charged. And indeed, as we shall see, the Jewish tradition not infrequently attributes a lofty mission to Abram and his descendants. The Torah itself, by contrast, offers little by way of explanation for God’s great act of choosing Israel. One text in which it does, in fact, cites no mission but only God’s inexplicable love:

⁶ For you are a people consecrated to the LORD your God: of all the peoples on earth the LORD your God chose you to be His treasured people. ⁷ It is not because you are the most numerous of peoples that the LORD took a passion for you (chashaq) and chose you—indeed, you are the smallest of peoples; ⁸ but it was because the LORD loved you and kept the oath He made to your fathers that the LORD freed you with a mighty hand and rescued you from the house of bondage, from the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt. (Deut 7:6–8)⁶

According to this theology, the chosenness of Israel derives from an act of passion, God’s passion for them or for their forefathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to whom he swore an inviolable oath. That oath, and nothing that Israel had done or would do, accounts for the exodus from Egypt.

Not surprisingly, Jewish sources generally suggest that God’s singling out of the Jews, foreshadowed in the call of Abram, is, in fact, irrevocable. Nor do the Jews’ specialness and uniqueness in the eyes of God depend on their fulfilling any mission. Nevertheless, many of the sources insist they do have a mission to fulfill: to share the universal and transcendent truth to which they have graciously been made privy. In this thinking, the blessing of Abram and the blessing of all the peoples of the earth are not at odds with each other. They are related parts of the same divine initiative.

The man whom God summons with the lofty call of Genesis 12:1–3 is an exceedingly unlikely candidate to father the “great nation” therein promised. For Abram’s wife, Sarai (not yet called “Sarah”), is barren and childless, as the narrator explicitly notes (11:27). It is striking that Abram nonetheless obeys the directive to leave homeland and kinfolk and does so without questioning the extravagant promise with which it is bound. His obedience foreshadows a key fact about the “great nation” that will emerge from him: namely, that in this and other biblical texts, its existence is due to the special providence of God rather than the natural processes of human reproduction and population growth. The barrenness of the other two generations of matriarchs (Rebecca, Rachel and Leah) underscores this key theological point, one that will be echoed throughout the history of Judaism. An ancient Hebrew couplet, ascribed to the Gentile seer Balaam, puts it best: “There is a people that dwells apart / Not reckoned among the nations” (Num 23:9). And closely associated with this special identity is Israel’s status as a blessed nation, very much as in the call of Abram. “How can I damn whom God has not damned?” asks Balaam, who has been hired specifically to curse this unique people, “How doom when the LORD has not doomed?” (v. 8).

Another factor, already mentioned in passing, speaks to the same point but from a different angle. Just before the story of the Tower of Babel, we find a table listing the seventy peoples who emerged from Noah’s three sons.⁷ That Israel, which emerges only afterward, is not one of these early nations is a matter of the highest significance, underlining the fundamentally different character of the new nation, not only born later but emerging as a result of a highly unlikely promise. As Genesis would have it, Israel is not a nation like any other. There is no genus of which God’s chosen people is a species. Rather, the new people comes into existence only through God’s promise to Abram, a childless man with a barren wife. Israel was never secular, so to speak; it never had an identity unconnected to the God who called it into existence in the beginning and who has graciously sustained it ever after. As the philosopher Saadya (Egypt and Iraq, 892–942) put it, “Our people is not a people except by virtue of its Torahs” (that is, the two Torahs of rabbinic Judaism, the Written and the Oral Torah).⁸

It might be argued that this particular expression of Jewish uniqueness does not reflect the course of historical events; that this theology of divine election is, rather, itself a later phenomenon, appearing only after the nation had long been in existence. Historically, this is quite plausible, and, given the likely date of the patriarchal narratives, it may even be probable. Even in the Hebrew Bible, indeed, there are other models of Israel’s origin. For example, the prophet Ezekiel (early sixth century B.C.E.) presents an allegory of the history of Jerusalem, in which this capital city of the kingdom of Judah results from the mixed marriage of an Amorite and a Hittite (Ezek 16). The God of Israel adopts the newborn baby, abandoned by her parents, and, when she has reached puberty, marries her: “I entered into a covenant with you by oath—declares the Lord GOD; thus you became Mine” (v. 8). If we may extrapolate from Jerusalem, in Ezekiel’s time the capital of the sole remaining Israelite commonwealth, to the whole people Israel, the prophet is here suggesting that the chosen people emerged not from a prior promise to a childless ancestor but from the adoption of an existing child of undistinguished, even shameful origins.

Still, whether speaking of an antecedent promise or of the adoption of an existing child, the Hebrew Bible consistently assumes a unique dependence of the special people upon God. In each case, moreover, it speaks of a radical discontinuity starting with the biological ancestor—Abram leaving his “father’s house” in Genesis, the Amorite father and the Hittite mother abandoning their newborn daughter in Ezekiel. And in each case, it is God who takes the place of the lost parent.⁹ No wonder converts to Judaism to this day take “Abraham” as the name of their father. The man who left his “father’s house” to obey the command of God becomes the father of all who make the same journey.

The variant tradition in Ezekiel is illuminating for another reason as well. It draws attention to the fact that the difference between the chosen people and the rest of humanity is not genetic (a concept itself unknown in biblical times). In Ezekiel, the child who probably represents the whole chosen people, and who certainly represents their capital city, site of God’s very palace, has emerged from two idolatrous peoples whom Israel supplanted long ago—and, according to the dominant biblical narrative, justly so. In Genesis, analogously, the childless man from whom the promised nation will emerge is one of three brothers; like them and every other human being, he is descended not from the gods or from a master race or the like (“race” being another modern concept unattested in the Hebrew Bible) but from Noah and his wife and from Adam and Eve before them. As the Mishnah famously observes, God created humanity from one man so that no one would say to his fellow, “My father is greater than your father!” (m. Sanhedrin [Sanh.] 4:5). Given this fundamental belief in the equality of all human beings, the doctrine of the chosen people cannot be equated with racism. Abram was not chosen because he was in any biological way superior to his contemporaries, and neither is the difference between Abram and his descendants, on the one hand, and the rest of humanity, on the other, a biological one.

The subtle concept of peoplehood underlying the call and commission of Abram is thus not easily accommodated by any of the models that come most readily to the modern mind, emphatically including the biological one. Rather, it rests on a seeming paradox. That Abram is commanded to break with his father at the beginning of his story—and to give up his son at the end of it, as we shall see in chapter 3—tells us that the “great nation” of which he is the promised progenitor is not simply another ethnic group, to be added to the seventy nations cataloged in Genesis 10.¹⁰ Instead, it is something more like a religious community, a collectivity founded on shared faith rather than on descent. Yet the fact that the promised heir, from whom this nation is to descend, comes into being not from Abram’s preaching—for he preaches nothing in Genesis—but from his own loins suggests something very different.¹¹ It suggests that the “great nation” is not a community founded upon a creed or a religious experience. Rather, it is a natural family.

So conceived, the people Israel is neither a nationality in the conventional sense nor a churchlike body composed of like-minded believers or practitioners of a common set of norms. Having something in common with both of these more familiar identities, it reduces to neither of them. Rather, as the call and commission of Abram already indicate, it is a natural family with a supernatural mandate.

Probably the most controversial clause in the call and commission of Abram is Genesis 12:3b, rendered in the King James Version, “And in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.” What, precisely, does it mean?

Here is the comment of the best-known medieval Jewish commentator, Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitschaqi, northern France, 1040−1105):

There are many freer interpretive traditions, but according to its contextual sense, it means this: A man says to his son, “May you be like Abraham!” And this is so in every case of those words, “shall bless themselves by you” [emphasis added] in the Bible, and here is the proof: “By you shall Israel invoke blessings, saying, ‘May God make you like Ephraim and Manasseh.’ ” (Gen 48:20)

Rashi, in short, thinks the Hebrew preposition in question here does not mean “in” or “through,” as the King James Version and many other translations render it, but rather “by.” This traditional Jewish reading can be seen in the New Jewish Publication Society translation: “And all the families of the earth / Shall bless themselves by you.” Christian translations, by contrast, often read something more on the order of the King James Version. Underlying the translation that we have been using (and Rashi’s interpretation) is also the notion that the form of the verb indicates reciprocity or reflexivity: the families of the earth shall bless themselves...