Again Paul’s point is simple. Abraham was biologically the father of both Isaac and Ishmael. But it was Isaac, not Ishmael, who continued the covenant. It follows, argues Paul, that biological descent from Abraham is not enough to make you a child of the promise. For that, you need something else: in Paul’s view, faith in Jesus. Those who have it are the true children of Abraham, and those who do not, are not. He continues:
Not only that, but Rebekah’s children had one and the same father, our father Isaac. Yet, before the twins were born or had done anything good or bad – in order that God’s purpose in election might stand: not by works but by him who calls – she was told, ‘The older will serve the younger.’ Just as it is written: ‘Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.’ (NIV, Rom. 9:10–13)
Now the claim becomes stronger still. Esau and Jacob had the same parents. They were twins. Yet Jacob was heir to the covenant, while Esau was not. Indeed, as Paul reads the text, this fact was announced by God before they were born. It follows that it was nothing that Jacob or Esau did that determined their fate. They had done nothing as yet, not even emerged into the world. God causes to inherit or disinherit whom he chooses. Merely claiming Jewish parenthood, says Paul, is not enough. It is not even relevant. Those who follow Jesus are Jacob. Those who do not, even if they are Jews, are like Esau. What is more, says Paul, quoting Malachi (1:3), God hates Esau. Paul is suggesting that the Jews who remain true to their faith have been not just rejected, but hated, by God himself.12
The argument was taken further still by the Church Fathers. In the third century Cyprian developed a new contrast between Jacob’s two wives, Leah and Rachel: ‘Also Jacob received two wives: the elder Leah, with weak eyes, a type of the Synagogue; the younger, the beautiful Rachel, the type of the Church…’13
Rosemary Ruether notes the persisting afterlife of this contrast:
This image of the ‘weak-eyed Leah’ could be mingled with the Pauline image of the ‘veil’ that lies over the eyes of the Jews, blinding them to the truth, to provide an image of the ‘blindness’ of the Synagogue. Medieval cathedrals were commonly to use this image of two wives, the Church and the Synagogue, one beautiful and triumphant, the other dejected, with a blind over her eyes.14
Maximinus, Tertullian, John Chrysostom and Aphrahat made the final, devastating move: that the Jews are Cain who, having murdered their brother, are now condemned to permanent exile. As the fourth-century writer Prudentius put it: ‘From place to place the homeless Jew wanders in ever-shifting exile…This noble race [is]…scattered and enslaved…It is in captivity under the younger faith.’15 It was an analogy much taken up by Augustine, and it served eventually to justify the expulsions of Jews from one country after another in the Middle Ages, beginning in England in 1290 and culminating in Spain in 1492.
The historic irony is that two centuries later Islam did for Christianity something not dissimilar to what Paul had done for Judaism. It said that Abraham, Moses and Jesus were all prophets preparing the way for the final revelation whose expression was Islam itself. The Abrahamic succession passed through Ishmael, not Isaac. The Hebrew Bible says otherwise only because Jews had falsified it. Christians had misrepresented Jesus. He was merely a prophet like others, not the Son of God. Jews and Christians should therefore, in principle, convert, but if they did not do so, they were to be spared as ‘people of the Book’, and allowed to live as dhimmi, citizens with less than full civil rights under Islamic rule and protection.
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It is now clear why Judaism, Christianity and Islam have been locked in a violent, sometimes fatal embrace for so long. Their relationship is sibling rivalry, fraught with mimetic desire: the desire for the same thing, Abraham’s promise.
Judaism, Christianity and Islam are not just three different religions or civilisations. Had this been so, the devotees of each might still consider themselves a chosen people. More generously, each might have come to Niels Bohr’s conclusion that the opposite of a trivial truth is a falsehood, but the opposite of a profound truth may be another profound truth. There is more than one way of being-in-the-world under the sovereignty of God. More probably they would simply have ignored one another. Their differences would not have led to centuries of bloodshed and animosity.
When civilisations are merely different, each stands on its own ground. They are incommensurable. Pauline Christianity, however, claims that it is heir to the Abrahamic covenant. Islam is built on the incorporation of Judaism and Christianity into its own scheme of salvation. Despite their structural differences and internal complexities, all three Abrahamic faiths seek to build their home on the same territory of the mind – one reason why they have so often competed for the same territory on earth: the Holy Land and the sacred city of Jerusalem. They are competing brothers. Each must therefore see the other as a profound existential threat.
At the heart of all three faiths is the idea that within humanity there is one privileged position – favoured son, chosen people, guardian of the truth, gatekeeper of salvation – for which more than one candidate competes. The result is conflict of the most existential kind, for what is at stake is the most precious gift of all: God’s paternal love. One group’s victory means another’s defeat, and since this is a humiliation, a dethronement, it leads to revenge. So the strife is perpetuated. Its most famous biblical expression is the oracle granted to Rebekah while suffering pain in her pregnancy. She went ‘to seek the Lord’, and was told:
Two nations are in your womb,
And two peoples will separate from within you;
One people will be mightier than the other,
And the elder will serve the younger. (Gen. 25:23)
The message seems clear. Her children are not merely struggling in the womb. They are destined to do so for all time (I say ‘seems’ because my argument will depend on showing that this translation is fatefully misconstrued; I explain this in chapter 7). Their relationship is agonistic, conflictual. One can only prevail by subjugating the other. ‘The elder will serve the younger.’
Such has been the history of the relationship between Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The younger believes it has prevailed over the elder. Christianity did so to Judaism. Islam did so to both. Between them is not simply a conflict between different systems of thought and ways of life. It is, rather, an intense sibling rivalry. Each regards itself as the heir to the covenant with Abraham. Strife is written into the script. It may lie dormant for centuries, but its seeds lie intact, ready to spring to life once circumstances favour religious revival. Each defines and defends itself by negating the others.
This is the final piece of the puzzle. It explains why the three Abrahamic faiths have, from time to time, felt so threatened by one another. Recall the words Freud used to describe sibling rivalry: ‘impotent rage…elemental, unfathomably deep hostility…death wish…murderous intent…jealous hatred’. This is the language of violence. Remember, too, his judgement that ‘We rarely form a correct idea of the strength of these jealous impulses, of the tenacity with which they persist and of the magnitude of their influence on later development.’ Freud knew this from his own experience, and it haunted him for a lifetime.
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We can now sum up the argument. Violence exists because we are social animals. We live and find our identity in groups. And groups conflict. They fight over the same resources: food, territory, other scarce goods. That is our nature and it leads to all that is best and worst about us: our altruism towards other members of our group, and our suspicion and aggression towards members of other groups. Religion plays a part in this only because it is the most powerful source of group identity the world has yet known.
Every attempt to find a substitute for religion has resulted in even more violence. Nationalism led to two world wars. Political ideology led to Lenin and Stalin. Race led to Hitler and the Holocaust. The result was the bloodiest century in human history. The idea that we can abolish identity altogether by privileging the individual over
the group is the West’s current fantasy and it has led to the return of religion in its most belligerent form. So, four centuries have led us in a complete circle back to where we were in the last great era of religious war.
Group identity need not lead to violence, but there is a mutant form, pathological dualism, that divides the world into two – our side, the children of light, and the other side, the children of darkness. If there is evil in the world, it is because of Them, not Us. This mode of thinking leads to some of the worst crimes in history because it causes people to demonise their opponents, see themselves as victims and convince themselves that evil committed in a good or sacred cause is justifiable, even noble. If there are internal resistances to such murderous and suicidal simplifications, they can be overcome by the invention of the scapegoat. Paranoia will do the rest. This is the politics of hate, and large parts of the world in the twenty-first century are awash with it.
And much of it is religious. There is nothing intrinsically religious about dualism. It existed in Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. However, for several centuries it surfaced in Christianity in the Middle Ages, and it has made its appearance in some forms of Islam today. We have seen in this chapter why. Built into their self-definitions are a series of sibling rivalries drawn from the early narratives of the Hebrew Bible. According to Freud and Girard, sibling rivalry is a primal source of violence, and what makes Judaism, Christianity and Islam unusual is that their narratives of identity are stories of sibling rivalry that assign a secondary, subordinate role to the others. This means that however rare violence between them is, it is always waiting in the wings.
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But this has brought us to an astonishing conclusion. Theologians have usually assumed that this tension arose with the birth of Christianity. After all, until then, there was only one Abrahamic monotheism, Judaism, and its battle was not with siblings, faiths that were part of the family, but with idolatry. Only with the birth first of Christianity, then of Islam, was the tension born out of the competition for ‘most favoured faith in the eyes of Abraham’s God’.
It turns out, however, that the tension was there from the very beginning, long before there was a Christianity or Islam. The key narratives are in the book of Genesis. It is there that the drama of choice began: Isaac but not Ishmael, Jacob but not Esau. It was not some late development, two thousand years ago. It existed before then within Judaism itself. It must therefore be a problem in Jewish, not just Christian and Islamic, theology. This is quite unexpected.
What is more, as soon as we state the problem, we begin to discern, hazily in the distance, the glimmerings of a solution. For can it really be true that the God who created the world in love and forgiveness, setting his image on every human being, loves me but not you? Or you but not me? Sibling rivalry exists in nature because food is in short supply. It exists in human society because material goods – wealth and power – are, at any given moment, zero-sum games. It exists within the family because we are human, and sometimes parents have favourites. But can the same possibly be said about God’s love or forgiveness or grace? Are these in short supply, such that if he gives them to you he must take them from me? There is something odd, discordant, about such an idea.
Yet the Hebrew Bible does talk about sibling rivalry. It is the dominant theme of the book of Genesis. The point could not be made more forcefully. The first religious act, Cain and Abel’s offerings to God, leads directly to the first murder. God does seem to have favourites. There does seem to be a zero-sumness about the stories. It is no accident that Jews, Christians and Muslims read these stories the way they did.
But what if they do not mean what people have thought them to mean? What if there is another way of reading them? What if this alternative reading turned out, on close analysis, to be how they were written to be read? What if the narratives of Genesis are deliberately constructed to seem to mean one thing on the surface, but then, in the light of cues or clues within the text, reveal a second level of meaning beneath?
What if the Hebrew Bible understood, as did Freud and Girard, as did Greek and Roman myth, that sibling rivalry is the most primal form of violence? And what if, rather than endorsing it, it set out to undermine it, subvert it, challenge it, and eventually replace it with another, quite different way of understanding our relationship with God and with the human Other? What if Genesis is a more profound, multi-levelled, transformative text than we have taken it to be? What if it turned out to be God’s way of saying to us what he said to Cain: that violence in a sacred cause is not holy but an act of desecration? What if God were saying: Not in My Name?
Such a suggestion sounds absurd. Jews, Christians and Muslims have been reading these stories for centuries. Is it conceivable that they do not mean what they have always been taken to mean? Yet perhaps this is not as absurd as it sounds, because until now each tradition has been reading them from its own perspective. But the twenty-first century is summoning us to a new reading by asking us to take seriously not only our own perspective but also that of the others. The world has changed. Relationships have gone global. Our destinies are interlinked. Christianity and Islam no longer rule over empires. The existence of the State of Israel means Jews are no longer homeless as they were in the age of the myth of the Wandering Jew. For the first time in history we can relate to one another as dignified equals. Now therefore is a time to listen, in the attentive silence of the troubled soul, to hear in the word of God for all time, the word of God for our time.
Part I has offered an explanation of the fraught, often violent relationship between the three Abrahamic faiths, and it has found, at its tormented heart, a series of stories about sibling rivalry and mimetic desire. Part II offers a radically different reading of these narratives, seeing in them signposts to a world in which brothers, with all their differences and dissonances, can at last dwell together in peace.
PART TWO
Siblings
6
The Half-Brothers
Though my father and mother might forsake me,
The Lord will hold me close.
Psalm 27:10
It is the first story of sibling rivalry in Abraham’s family, and it begins with heartache. Abraham, still known at this time as Abram, had been promised countless children. He would, said God, become a great nation. His descendants would be as many as the stars. Yet the years pass and still he and Sarah have no child. In despair, Sarah proposes an arrangement. Let Abram sleep with her handmaid Hagar. Perhaps she will bear him a child. She is proposing that Hagar become a surrogate mother. Then as now it is a procedure fraught with potential conflict.
Hagar does conceive, and this alters the relationship between the two women. Hagar ‘no longer respected her mistress’ (Gen. 16:4). As the bearer of Abraham’s child, she is no longer content to be treated as a servant. Sarah notices the change and reacts angrily. She says to Abraham, ‘You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my servant in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, I have lost her respect. Let the Lord judge between you and me’ (16:5).
Uncharacteristically, Abraham shrugs off the dilemma. ‘Your servant is in your hands. Do with her as you please’ (16:6). Sarah ill-treats Hagar, who flees into the desert. There she is met by an angel who tells her to go back. He adds that she will give birth to a son, whom she should call Ishmael. She returns and Ishmael is born.
In the next chapter, God appears to Abraham and reaffirms his covenant with him, adding for the first time a command: circumcision. Abraham is to undergo this operation. So is Ishmael. It will become the sign of the covenantal family.
The revelation, however, contains a twist. Despite the fact that Abraham now has a son, God tells him he will have another, born to him by Sarah. At this, Abraham ‘fell on his face and laughed, saying in his heart, Will a son be born to a man a hundred years old? Will Sarah bear a child at the age of ninety?’ (17:17). Nonetheless, God insists that it wil
l be so. They will have a son whom they will name Isaac, and he rather than Ishmael will be the bearer of the covenant into the future. There is an ominous sound to this. It is a situation fraught with the possibility of conflict.
A year later, Isaac is born. Sarah is overjoyed, but again there is a note of discord. Sarah is troubled by the presence of Ishmael. The tension rises to a height at the celebration the couple make on the day Isaac is weaned:
Sarah saw that the son whom Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Abraham was mocking, and she said to Abraham, ‘Send this slave woman away with her son, for his slave woman’s son shall not be an heir with my son Isaac.’ (Gen. 21:9–10)
Abraham is ‘greatly distressed’, but God tells him to listen to Sarah and do as she says. The next morning he sends Hagar and Ishmael away with food and water for the journey. They go, the water runs out, and Hagar realises that, dehydrated in the blazing desert sun, Ishmael will die. She places him under a bush for shade, and weeps. Again an angel appears and reassures her. The child will live. She opens her eyes and sees a well. She gives Ishmael a drink. They continue their journey. Ishmael grows to become an archer. Hagar finds an Egyptian wife for him and the story closes, or so we think.
This is a key narrative, the first of several we are about to analyse. Identity is based on narrative, the stories we tell about who we are, where we came from, and what is our relationship to others. The real theological work of this book lies here, in close reading of biblical texts, especially those whose theme is sibling rivalry. This is what led to the strife between Jews, Christians and Muslims and it is here, if anywhere, that we will find the solution.
We have just read the story of Abraham’s two sons, and the message seems clear. Just as Abraham was chosen out of all humankind, so is Isaac. But this is not a straightforward story. Isaac is not the firstborn. Ishmael is. What we seem to have here is a displacement narrative. In almost all societies where birth order has a bearing on rank, the oldest (usually male) child succeeds to the role occupied by the father. Here the order is reversed. The older Ishmael is displaced by his younger half-brother. The result, happy for Sarah and Isaac, is tragic for Hagar and Ishmael. We can sense the incipient tension. This sounds like the beginning of a story that will end in resentment and revenge.
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