The Gifts of the Jews

by Thomas Cahill

  “Here I am.”

  He said:

  “Do not stretch out your hand against the lad,

  do not do anything to him!

  For now I know

  that you are in awe of God—

  you have not withheld your son, your only-one, from me.”

  Avraham lifted up his eyes and saw:

  there, a ram caught in the thicket by its horns!

  Avraham went, he took the ram

  and offered it up as an offering-up in the place of his son.

  Avraham called the name of that place: [God] Sees.

  As the saying is today: On [God’s] mountain (it) is seen.

  Now [God’s] messenger called to Avraham a second time from heaven

  and said:

  “By myself I swear”

  —[God’s] utterance—

  “indeed, because you have done this thing, have not withheld your son, your only-one,

  indeed, I will bless you, bless you,

  I will make your seed many, yes, many,

  like the stars of the heavens and like the sand that is on the shore of the sea;

  your seed shall inherit the gate of their enemies,

  all the nations of the earth shall enjoy blessing through your seed,

  in consequence of your hearkening to my voice.”

  I doubt anyone has ever read this story, either in the original or in any of its many translations, without being transfixed. Many who heard the story as children and know perfectly well how it will end (with tragedy averted at the very last minute) cannot bring themselves to look at it again or consider seriously “the monster god of the Old Testament,” as one woman called him with a shudder. And Fox’s plain translation, so close to the bald rhythm of the original Hebrew, is stunning in its cumulative effect, like repeated blows or wounds.

  Is this God? What are we to make of such a God? Does the primitive period in which the story takes place somehow explain or excuse the torment that God inflicts on the man and the boy? Isn’t the boy, like Sara in the Egyptian story and Lot’s wife in the destruction of Sodom, just another pawn in God’s game?

  Yitzhak is a pawn, surely, even though with swift strokes the narrator gives us a real child who asks a real question. As E. A. Spieser remarks, “The father’s answer is tender but evasive, and the boy must by now have sensed the truth. The short and simple sentence, ‘And the two of them walked on together’ [“Thus the two of them went together” in the Fox translation] covers what is perhaps the most poignant and eloquent silence in all literature.” Yes, the narrator’s skill is great, leaving the reader speechless at the impending horror.

  Interpreters of an anthropological bent have tended to see this story as a symbolic renunciation, the dramatization of some unrecoverable moment in prehistory when the proto-Jews gave up the practice of human sacrifice that their neighbors continued to engage in. Thus it was enshrined in their tradition as a reminder of what they must not do. Christians see in Avraham a type of God, willing to give his “only son” Jesus as sacrifice for our sins. Without meaning to imply that these interpretations have no basis, I hasten to point out that both serve as frames, giving us categories to stuff this episode into: they are excuses to distance ourselves from the central brutality, so that we may eventually tuck it away out of sight. But we must stay with this thing: it is the climax of Avraham’s story—the Mountain Experience.

  It is tempting to hate Avraham for what he does here. We have already seen him as a wily conniver, blithely willing to sacrifice his own wife to prosper himself. And though we can say to ourselves that the standards of the time were different from our own, it is so difficult to let it go at that—just as difficult as when we try to absolve Thomas Jefferson, prophet of human equality and slaveholder. Still, we must compare Avraham not to ourselves but to Gilgamesh and Hammurabi. When we do this, Avraham begins to stand out from his time in bold relief. However we may loathe Avraham’s attitude toward Sara, we cannot doubt that he loves Yitzhak. Indeed, the first time the Bible uses the word love is in this very episode:

  Pray take your son,

  your only-one,

  whom you love,

  Yitzhak …

  It is precisely Avraham’s love that makes the episode so unbearable.

  The key to this awesome puzzle must lie not in Avraham’s relationship to Yitzhak but in his relationship to God. Avraham was a man of Sumer. Initially, “the god” was for Avram little more than Lugalbanda’s statue was for Gilgamesh, almost a good luck charm—though from the first there is no statue, no visual manifestation. Even in the earliest stages, then, this relationship is different from the relationships of other Sumerians to their patronal gods. But if the relationship is to last, Avraham requires education; and this he receives in a series of manifestations in which “the god” gradually reveals himself as God—not just a divinity but the only God that counts. We can be certain that Avraham began, like all Sumerians, like all human beings before him (and virtually all after him), as a polytheist, a believer in many (and conflicting) gods and godlets—bad-tempered forces of nature and the cosmos who could be temporarily appeased by just the right rites and rigmarole. It is highly unlikely that Avraham became during the course of his life a strict monotheist, but what we can say is that Avraham’s relationship to God became the matrix of his life, the great shaping experience. From voice to vision to august potentate, Avraham’s understanding of God grew ever larger; but given the society out of which he came, this understanding remained—by our standards—a very earthbound one. Something must, after all these years of preparation, jolt him into a recognition of Just-Who-Is-Speaking-to-Him. For the God who calls Avraham to the Mountain Experience must no longer be seen merely as the “Mountain God.” He is the opposite of the Sumerian gods with their patently human motivations. He is the God beyond the mountain, even beyond the sky, the unknowable God, whose purposes are hidden from human intelligence, who cannot be manipulated.

  And who are we? We are the contingent ones, dependent utterly on this God. And who is Avraham? He is the contingent one who must understand that he is utterly dependent, who must cling consciously to his God, who gives and takes beyond all understanding. For, as the sage Job will say in later times, “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away: Blessed be the Name of the Lord!”

  At the outset of this harrowing episode, the narrator, knowing that poor human readers could never bear the suspense, tells us that this will be a “test,” so we know that Yitzhak will not actually be sacrificed, however difficult it is to keep that in mind during the ensuing action. It is a test for us as well. Can we open ourselves to the God who cannot be understood, who is beyond all our amulets and scheming, the God who rains on picnics, the God who allows human beings to be inhuman, who has sentenced us all to death? All the other gods are figments, sorry projections of human desires. Only this God is worth my life (and yours and Yitzhak’s). For “there is no other.” Avraham must come to believe in a God as awesomely powerful—as Other—as the One whose terrifying presence William Blake, one of Avraham’s many inheritors, would one day attempt to invoke:

  Tiger, Tiger, burning bright

  In the forests of the night,

  What immortal hand or eye

  Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

  Avraham passes the test. His faith—his belief in God—is stronger than his fear. But now he knows he is dealing with the Unthinkable, beyond all expectation. The God who called him out into the wilderness and made impossible promises has begun to bring those promises to fulfillment. But this must not mean that, through this God, I can see the future and control what has not yet come to be. I control nothing. My task is to be as open to God as I am to my own child; to both I must say, “Here I am!”

  “Be not afraid,” counsels God to Avraham. Be not afraid of his presence in your life. But, paradoxically, be afraid of God’s inexplicable omnipotence. For fear of this God, as the Psalmist will one day sing, “is the beginning of wisd
om.” And this unnamed mountain in the land of Seeing is for Avraham the beginning of fear.

  Following this resolution, Avraham’s story draws quickly to its close. Sara dies in Hebron and Avraham sets about “to lament for Sara and to weep over her.” We might interpret his mourning as merely formal, were it not for what happens next. To bury Sara with all the respect that is due her, Avraham buys his first property in Canaan, but only after waging a nerve-shattering negotiation. Avraham is determined to have “the cave of Makhpela” as Sara’s burial chamber. But “a sojourner,” even if he were a nomadic chieftain, could not easily buy property in ancient Canaan, and even if he were to convince some stubborn farmer to sell a part of his holdings, the transaction would still be illegal without the consent of the local board of selectmen—in this case the “Sons of Het.” The owner of the cave says, with feigned generosity, that since Avraham is so highly respected—“one exalted by God in our midst”—he wouldn’t dream of charging him, he can have “the choicest” site free of charge, even the cave of Makhpela, even though it is worth four hundred shekels. Avraham hears this and understands what is really being offered: a temporary burial site (with no assurances for the future) for free or a permanent burial site for an outrageous sum. Through all the subsequent bargaining (interminable, full of ritualistic bowing, scraping, and protestations of sincerity, as is still typical of the Middle East), he keeps offering four hundred shekels until it is accepted by all. The amount, probably ten times the cave’s actual value, is worth it to Avraham, for it gives him clear and irrevocable title to his wife’s final resting place. One feels Avraham would have paid anything for this peace; and thus does he show belatedly, pathetically, his reverence for the matriarch.

  It is not long before Avraham joins Sara in the Hebron cave, still contentiously, sometimes tragically, sacred to Arabs and Jews, the grave of the progenitor of both Yishmael and Yitzhak and all their descendants. Avraham does not die before setting in motion an arranged marriage for Yitzhak, a colorless figure of whom we never hear much on his own account—but then think of the poor man’s childhood trauma! The stories that follow take us through the lives of the subsequent patriarchs—and matriarchs, since Rivka (or Rebecca), Yitzhak’s lively and opinionated wife (who’s also a terrific cook and a conniver worthy of her father-in-law), looms especially large in these stories. To Yitzhak, who “loved her” and whom she “comforted after his mother,” she bears twin boys, Esav and Yaakov (the traditional Esau and Jacob). When her sons are grown, she conspires with wily Yaakov, her favorite and second-born, to rob loyal Esav of his birthright, by having smooth-skinned Yaakov disguise himself as hairy Esav and present the now-blind Yitzhak with his favorite dish (which she has prepared). The confused old Yitzhak confers on Yaakov the blessing of the firstborn, so that Yaakov succeeds to the line of Avraham and the promises made to him. Despite the pain that this reversal causes Yitzhak, Rivka’s plan, as it turns out, is also God’s; and throughout Yaakov’s life God speaks to him at crucial junctures, not least in the unsettling episode in which a mysterious stranger appears at Yaakov’s encampment and wrestles with him all through the night, only to reveal himself in the morning as God and rename Yaakov Yisrael (or Israel), whose children will bear the Promise. Yaakov himself gives God a new name, calling him, for good reason, “the Terror of Yitzhak.”

  Yaakov/Israel is not the last of the patriarchal figures, but he is the last one to whom God speaks, indeed so intimately that he wrestles: “For I have seen God,” exclaims Israel, “face to face—and my life has been saved.” To see the face of God and live: this will be for the Children of Israel in all their subsequent generations the unreachable acme of holiness. The first stage of the Promise has been fulfilled, and both Avraham and Israel have “walked with God.” The religious center is no longer what it had been for the Sumerians and all other ancient cultures—impersonal manipulation by means of ritual prescriptions—but a face-to-face friendship with God. The new religion has been given shape through three generations of nomadic men and women who have ceased to bow down before idols or kings or any earthly image. They have learned, with many fits and starts, to depend on God—and no one else—this inscrutable, terrifying wilderness God.

  But no one could maintain such pitch of feeling forever. Now that their consciousness has been altered, there must be a return to the business of ordinary life. No one will walk with God again. No one will see his face or even hear his voice for hundreds of years.

  1 “Avram” is the Abram of most English translations, who will eventually become “Avraham”—Abraham in most translations. I am using the brilliant new translation of Genesis made by Everett Fox, which is much closer to the Hebrew text, including its spelling, than are most translations. I normally employ the spelling of the translator I am quoting, though I sometimes revert to the traditional King James spelling in summary sections. The phrase “of the Chaldeans” in this passage is an anachronism, supplied by a scribe to situate Ur for readers of a later day when the Euphrates valley had come to be dominated by Chaldean Semites (who much later gave their name to the Chaldean Christian minority of Iraq). Many such anachronisms can be found in Genesis.

  2 Most scholars find the biblical references to domesticated camels in the time of Avram to be anachronistic because there is no extra-biblical evidence that camels were used regularly as beasts of burden till about 1000 B.C.; for other scholars the lack of extra-biblical evidence is inconclusive.

  3 In the Gilgamesh material, brackets indicated missing or damaged portions of the text. Here they are simply my own interpolations. Parentheses indicate the translator’s attempt to make the implicit explicit. Hyphens between words indicate that the Hebrew is more concise, usually one word.

  4 At this early period, angels, another borrowing from the Sumerians, are seen as manifestations of God, often hardly distinguishable from him. This scene of the three heavenly visitors breaking bread before Avraham’s tent is the subject of Andrei Rublev’s painting, the greatest of all Russian icons.

  THREE

  EGYPT

  From Slavery to Freedom

  Despite the radical break, there is much continuity between the old world of the Wheel and Avraham’s new world of the Journey. Avraham does not turn overnight into a wide-eyed desert mystic, seeking only the Lord. He seeks the things all sane men seek—pleasure and security—though he hopes for something more, something New. And the only immortality sensible Avraham hopes for is heirs of his body. But this is a great deal more than the generalized fertility of Sumer, where sacred prostitutes of both sexes haunted the temple precincts and dead bodies floated along the Euphrates, just as they still do along the Ganges. From now on, the heirs of Avraham will look not to sacred copulation rites but to their God to assure their line and their land.

  This God is the initiator: he encounters them; they do not encounter him. He begins the dialogue, and he will see it through. This God is profoundly different from them, not their projection or their pet, not the usual mythological creature whose intentions can be read in auguries or who can be controlled by human rituals. This God gives and takes beyond human reasoning or justification. Because his motives are not interpretable and his thoughts and actions are not foreseeable, anything—and everything—is possible. Many new things have already come into being as a result of this relationship, but faith most of all, which prior to Avraham had no place in religious feeling and imagination. Because all is possible, faith is possible, even necessary.

  Despite the fact that Avraham, on reaching Canaan, built an altar at Shekhem, it is true to say that at a deeper level all the sacred places of the world and all its sacred symbols have been cast away. Now everything is sacred, everything profane. Avraham and his children do not anoint special statues or follow the stars from their glistening temples but listen to the Voice and journey on. Faith supplants the generalized predictability of the ancient world with the possibility of both real success and real failure, real happiness and real tragedy—t
hat is, a real journey whose outcome is not yet. Avraham’s story is real history and irreversible, not the earthly dramatization of a heavenly exemplar. “Avram went”—really went. Cyclical religion goes nowhere because, within its comprehension, there is no future as we have come to understand it, only the next revolution of the Wheel.

  Since time is no longer cyclical but one-way and irreversible, personal history is now possible and an individual life can have value. This new value is at first hardly understood; but already in the earliest accounts of Avraham and his family we come upon the carefully composed genealogies of ordinary people, something it would never have occurred to Sumerians to write down, because they accorded no importance to individual memories. For them only impersonal survival, like the kingship, like the harvest, mattered; the individual, the unusual, the singular, the bizarre—persons or events that did not conform to an archetype—could have no meaning. And without the individual, neither time nor history is possible. But the God of Avraham, Yitzhak, and Yaakov—no longer your typical ancient divinity, no longer the archetypal gesturer—is a real personality who has intervened in real history, changing its course and robbing it of predictability.

  He will continue to intervene. And these interventions will gradually bring about in Avraham’s descendants enormous changes of mind and heart, some of which are only hinted at in the patriarchal narratives. To give but one example: Yaakov, whose anxious guilt in regard to his brother Esav impels him to expect to be slaughtered at Esav’s hands should they ever meet again, at last reconciles with his brother; and in this moment of happy resolution, Yaakov, who has seen the face of God and lived, speaks the uncanny words “Just to see your face is like seeing the face of God, now that you have received me so kindly.” The narrator, as is his custom, gives us no help in interpreting this gnomic expression. But we know that in this ancient world to “see the face” of someone was to know him, to understand his character, to grasp his identity. Because Yaakov has seen the face of God—has been allowed, however partially, to know God as he really is, to see into the face of ultimate truth—he can also see an individual human being for who he is; and somehow this experience is like the experience of God. What this will mean for the future is yet to be spelled out, but the human being as pawn (Sara, Lot’s daughters, Lot’s wife, Yitzhak) is quietly and subtly giving way to a more exalted vision of what a human being is. At this point in the narrative, we have only the faintest hint of such a development. But as we follow the wanderings of Avraham’s children down the centuries, we will witness many such developments. We will be witnesses, in fact, to the slow evolution of our entire system of values.