by Bruce Feiler
Then he turned back to me. “So the question is not whether God can bring peace into the world. The question is: Can we?”
1
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BIRTH
* * *
HE IS OLD. He occupies little space. He hardly seems capable of riposte. Yet when he rouses a twinkle in his eye, he can still give life to the lifeless—and bring youth to the dead. He can also crush icons.
“So, Professor, what do we know about Abraham?” I ask.
“All we know about Abraham is in the Bible,” he says. “In the ground, there’s nothing.”
Avraham Biran is sitting in his office overlooking the Old City, the same office he’s occupied for thirty years, since he retired from his job as a diplomat and became the unofficial dean of biblical archaeologists. He wears a green pullover and a tobacco-stained grin. At ninety-three, he’s near the age of the man he’s spent his life pursuing when that man first appears in history, in Genesis 11.
“So does that mean he doesn’t exist?” I first came to see Professor Biran years earlier at the start of my biblical wanderings, and now I’m back at the beginning of another journey. I’m here to try to bring the dim early life of Abraham into some focus and to attempt to answer the question that gnaws at the core of my search: Was Abraham born at all? If so, when? And where?
“Oh, he exists,” Professor Biran said. “Just look around you. But remember, archaeology cannot prove or disprove the Bible. I follow Albright, the founder of our field, in that the Bible as a book of divine inspiration needs no proof. At the same time, you can neither do archaeology in biblical lands nor study the Bible without being aware of the discoveries.”
“So where do I look?”
“You look at the evidence, you look at the culture he came from, you look at the text.”
“And what will I find?”
“Look, to me, these figures are real. I have no reason to doubt it. Whether all the details are correct, I don’t know, and I don’t really care. If you’re looking for history, you’ll be disappointed. If you’re looking for Abraham, you won’t be.”
HE HAS NO MOTHER. He has no past. He has no personality. The man who will redefine the world appears suddenly, almost as an afterthought, with no trumpet fanfare, no fluttering doves, in Genesis 11, verse 26: “When Terah had lived seventy years, he became the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran.” From this a-heroic start, Abram (the name in Hebrew means “the father is exalted” or “mighty father”) goes on to abandon his father at age seventy-five, leave his homeland, move to Canaan, travel to Egypt, father two sons, change his name, cut off part of his penis, do the same for his teenager and newborn, exile his first son, attempt to kill his second, fight a world war, buy some land, bury his wife, father another family, and die at one hundred seventy-five.
Or did he? For most of the last four thousand years, the story of Abraham was almost universally believed—as the word of tradition, the word of scripture, the word of God, or all three. Beginning about two hundred years ago, many demanded proof. A wave of Jewish and Christian scholars scoured the Bible and concluded that the story had little basis in fact and, instead of being dictated by God, was cobbled together by competing scribes. “We attain no historical knowledge of the patriarchs,” wrote Julius Wellhausen, the German scholar of the Bible and the Koran. Abraham, in particular, was “difficult to interpret.”
Archaeologists responded to this affront by grabbing picks and heading for the hills. They dug in modern-day Iraq, where Genesis suggests Abraham was born. They excavated in southern Turkey, where he lived before departing to Canaan. They dug in Shechem, Bethel, and Beer-sheba, where he camped in the Promised Land. And while archaeologists didn’t find a sign that said ABRAHAM SLEPT HERE, they found enough evidence connecting Abraham to the early second millennium B.C.E. that in 1949 William Albright declared: “There can be little doubt about the substantial historicity of the patriarchal narratives.”
Such conviction was short-lived. A new generation of scholars rejected their elders’ evidence as insufficient and their claims as romantic. Abraham was a product not of the time the story took place but of the time the Bible was written down, fifteen hundred years later, in the first millennium B.C.E. “The quest for the historical Abraham is basically a fruitless occupation,” T. L. Thompson wrote in 1974. The story is little more than a collection of literary traditions, “best compared to other tales, like Hamlet or King Lear.” From dust he had come, to dust he had returned.
But Abraham fought back. Tablets found in Nuzi, in northern Iraq, and elsewhere suggested that a variety of customs in the story, like having a child with a handmaid, were legal and well known at the time. Mass migrations from Mesopotamia to Canaan were noted around 1800 B.C.E. Slowly, a new consensus emerged that while precise evidence of Abraham is lacking, the story has countless examples suggesting deep oral roots that ground Abraham in his native soil.
These days, most scholars agree that Abraham—whether an actual figure or a composite—emerged from the world of Semitic tribes on the upper arm of the Fertile Crescent. Though the Bible, the most detailed account of his upbringing, does not mention Abraham’s birthplace, the text says his brother Haran is born in Ur of the Chaldeans. Jewish and Christian scholars associate this place with Ur, the capital of ancient Sumer; Muslims associate it with Sanliurfa, in southern Turkey. The actual place is unknown.
Haran dies; Abraham and his surviving brother take wives; then Terah assembles the entire clan and decamps for Canaan. They arrive in the ancient crossroads of Harran, near Syria, where they settle. Far from random, this travel pattern is consistent with the lives of pastoral nomads, who traversed the region with herds, passed time near settled lands, then migrated to other places. Ancient documents describe an interactive society, in which wandering tribes were never far from urban areas, where they bought and sold goods. The Bible alludes to this lifestyle, calling Abraham a Hebrew and an Aramean. These and other variants, Aramu and Arabu, were common terms for “seminomad,” until they were replaced with the catchall Arab.
But in telling the story of Abraham, the Bible is interested in much more than history. It takes elements of history, mixes them with elements of myth, and begins to mold them into a theme. Abraham is not a settled man, or a wandering man. He’s a combination, who embodies in his upbringing a message he will come to represent: the perpetual stranger in a strange land, the outsider who longs to be the insider, the landless who longs for land, the pious who finds a palliative in God for his endlessly painful life.
The fact that Abraham is such a shadowy figure actually makes this point even more compelling. We must accept his story on faith rather than science. We must see him not as something we can prove but as something we must believe, just as we see God.
HE’S CHILDLESS. He’s aging. He’s stuck in Harran. Abraham has lived nearly half of his life, and he’s yet to do anything that arrests our attention. Why should we care?
If confronting the lack of history was the first step I needed to make to understand Abraham, considering his lack of childhood was the second. Most of the major characters in the historical line of the Bible are introduced as children, infants, or even prenatal predicaments. Large swaths of Genesis discuss Ishmael and Isaac before they’re born. Jacob and Esau wrestle in their mother’s womb. Joseph struggles as a teenager with the many-colored coat. The infant Moses is hidden in the bulrushes. The boy David fights Goliath. The newborn Jesus is wrapped in swaddling cloths.
Abraham is seventy-five years old before anything happens to him. The only thing we’re told is that he comes from a long family line (the text traces his father back to Noah) and can’t father children of his own. For Genesis, a narrative consumed with men, lineage, and power, the diminishing effect of this debility on Abraham is staggering. Our chief reaction upon meeting him is not admiration; it’s indifference or pity. He’s the ultimate blank slate: childless and childhood-less.
Since everything else in the Bible
is purposeful, it seems safe to say that this lack of childhood must be purposeful, too. So what is the purpose?
God is looking for someone. He’s searching for someone special. At the start of Genesis, in a state of agitated, fertile invention, God creates the world. He creates light and darkness; the earth and the seas; the sun and the moon; creatures of every kind. And after each one he declares his creation to be “good.” Then he creates humankind, enjoins them to be fruitful and multiply, gives them dominion over other creatures, and, for the first time, declares his creation to be “very good.” Humans are clearly central to God’s world. He needs them. He wants them to be his representatives on earth.
But humans disappoint. Adam, in tasting the fruit, indicates that he prefers Eve to God, so God banishes them. Ten generations pass, during which God finds the earth to be corrupt and filled with violence. He is sorry he created humankind and decides to start over. This time he chooses Noah, a righteous man. But Noah, by getting drunk after sailing the ark, indicates that he prefers the bottle to God. Once again, God recedes. Ten more generations pass, during which God becomes outraged by humans’ desire to unite and build a tower to the heavens. God does not want to be threatened. He wants to be imitated. He wants to be loved.
After so many failed experiments, God needs a new kind of human. He needs someone faithful, who won’t disobey him and who will appreciate the blessings that he has to offer. Above all, God needs someone who needs him and who will rise to his lofty standards.
He needs Abraham.
Abraham inaugurates the twentieth generation of humans. Yet, from the beginning, he is different from the preceding ones: he is not righteous, he is not special. He’s not godly in any way. Plus, he’s restless. Along with his birth family and his wife, Sarai (like her husband, she will change her name later), he leaves one place for another but stops before he arrives and settles in a new place. He seems unsure. His life is suspended—and, worse, ruptured. He has no heir, no way to create the next ten generations, or even the next generation. As the text says, in its only biographical detail about these years, “Now Sarai was barren, she had no child.”
The need for a son will dominate Abraham’s life. Most heroic stories begin with a birth, a hopeful coming. The story of the father of Western civilization begins with the absence of birth, a listless despair. Abraham commands our attention by the sheer lack of command he exerts over his own life. In a story about creation, he cannot create. He is the anti-God.
Which may be the point.
In stories of heroic youth, the hero sets out to perform feats of bravery to win the hand of his beloved. The hero of a midlife quest has a different challenge. His is a darker, more inward-looking adventure that borders on madness as it reaches for the sublime. Think of Don Quixote, Oedipus. In midlife, a young man begins to grow old, to realize the inevitability of his death. As Jung observed, midlife is a tension between generativity, the feeling of being part of an ongoing process of creation, and stagnation, the sense of being stuck. Genesis is fundamentally the story of generativity. And Abraham, as he appears in chapter 11, risks disrupting that story. He has no life in him.
This crisis allows for the chief difference between Abraham and his ancestors: Unlike Adam and Noah, Abraham needs God. Specifically, Abraham needs the ability to create, and to get it he must turn to the Creator. Nelly Sachs, the German poet who won the Nobel Prize in 1966, viewed Abraham as a representative human, looking out at a decimated landscape, peering beyond the flames, aching for the divine.
You have called me, Abram.
And I long so much for you.
Abraham is not an individual man, or a historical man. He’s the ur man, the man who reminds us that even though God may have cut the umbilical cord with humans, humans still need nourishment from God. This is precisely what makes Abraham so appealing to God. He’s not God; he’s human. The lesson of Abraham’s early life is that being human is not being safe, or comfortable. Being human is being uncertain, being on the way to an unknown place. Being on the way to God. The emptiness of Abraham’s invisible youth is the triumph of recognizing this necessity. His early years are a questioning, a yearning, a growing desperation, and finally a humble plea.
Help.
LATE IN MY CONVERSATION with Avraham Biran, he told me a story. The first time he came to Jerusalem, as a young man, he visited many of the holy sites he had read about as a boy. His eyes twinkled brighter than ever. “And I felt nothing,” he said. “The places themselves didn’t touch me as much. What touched me was the stories.”
And there are hundreds of stories.
The desperation at the heart of Abraham’s early years—as appealing as it might make him to God—proved frustrating to his descendants and contributed to one of the more complex realities of Abraham’s life: his unending evolution. Most historical figures leave behind a large body of knowledge—letters, journals, memories of associates—which gradually dissipates until people who invoke their names centuries later have only faint traces. Abraham is the opposite: The body of knowledge about his life swells over time, exponentially.
Probably less than 1 percent of the stories told about Abraham appear in the Bible. The vast majority did not even come into circulation until hundreds, even thousands of years after he would have lived. If you graphed all the stories about Abraham according to the date they entered the world, the resulting shape would look like a megaphone, with an invisible mouthpiece planted sometime in the second millennium B.C.E. that has expanded to a wide-open bell today.
For me this abundance presented a challenge. Looking for Abraham meant not just looking at the time he was born; it meant looking at any time anyone retold his story. Still, this was the only way to see Abraham. As a result, before I headed out onto the road and certainly before I sat down with any extremists, I had to venture in and out of various libraries. I had to turn pages covered in lore, legend, and sometimes hate. I had to begin to unravel the Abraham who had been constructed, from the ground up, by each tradition.
All three religions joined in this interpretive process, though Jews necessarily came first, probably beginning around the third century B.C.E. Every aspect of Abraham’s life was open to retelling. First among these: his childhood. Denied a childhood in Genesis, he gets one in death; in fact, he gets more than one. In an elaborate, historical psychoanalysis, the children of Abraham slowly re-create the story of their forefather’s early life in an effort to better understand their own. Abraham is like Jesus in this regard—the stories told about him after his death are as important as, if not more important than, the stories told about him during his life. This process initiates a rich paradox: God may have made humans in his image; we humans made Abraham in ours.
While the stories told about Abraham venture so far afield that they often appear made up, most interpreters were careful to anchor their tales in the text. With no clues about Abraham’s boyhood, for example, interpreters turned to the Book of Joshua, in which God tells the Israelites, “Long ago your ancestors—Terah and his sons Abraham and Nahor—lived beyond the Euphrates and served other gods. Then I took your father Abraham from beyond the River and led him through all the land of Canaan.”
“Aha!” the interpreters said. Abraham must have been different from his relatives because he alone was taken from beyond the Euphrates. He somehow knew that worshiping idols was wrong. From this simple hook, volumes were spun. In the Book of Jubilees, a noncanonical Jewish text from the second century B.C.E., the boy Abraham is presented as asking his father, a priest, what advantage idols serve, considering that they are mute. “I also know that, my son,” Terah replies, “but what shall I do to the people who have ordered me to serve before them?”
In the Apocalypse of Abraham, from the first century C.E., the boy comes upon a stone god fallen over in his father’s idol shop. When they lift the idol, it falls again, severing its head. No problem: the father promptly chisels a new body and attaches the old head to it. “What are thes
e useless things that my father is doing?” Abraham muses. “Is he not rather a god to his gods? It would be more fitting for them to bow down to him.”
While these stories show a brilliance of invention, their true gift lies in the way they appear to grow ineffably out of the text. Genesis suggests that Abraham’s family lived in Ur of the Chaldeans. Archaeologists took this suggestion literally and went looking for Ur, but early interpreters took it etymologically and noted that ur, in Hebrew, means “fire” or “flame.” Suddenly the line “I am the Lord who brought you out from [the fire] of the Chaldeans” took on new meaning.
Interpreters went to work. After Abraham confronts his father about the idols, Terah informs King Nimrod of Babylon, who orders the boy burnt in a furnace. A million people come to watch. Stripped to his underclothes and bound with linen, Abraham is cast into the furnace. For three days and nights he walks amid the fire, before finally emerging. “Why weren’t you burnt?” Nimrod asks. “The God of heaven and earth delivered me,” Abraham replies.
Ur was not the only word to inspire biographers. Chaldea, in lower Mesopotamia, was known in antiquity as the home of astronomy and astrology. For interpreters, this fact could mean only one thing: Abraham must have been an astronomer! As Jubilees reports, “Abram sat up during the night of the seventh month, so that he might observe the stars from evening until daybreak so that he might see what the nature of the year would be with respect to rain.”
Other traditions have Abraham moving to Phoenicia to teach astronomy. Many have him teaching arithmetic and other sciences to Egyptians, who pass them on to the Greeks. Abraham, age seventy-five, a pastoral nomad, suddenly becomes the Albert Einstein of his day, going on the international lecture circuit, spreading knowledge, and earning the equivalents of Nobel Prizes in astronomy, mathematics, meteorology, as well as—just for his stamina—peace.