Abraham

by Bruce Feiler

  In a measure of this dark commonality, all three religions share a legend surrounding the offering. Immediately after the boy is saved, he lies on the altar, clutching the knife, the emotion of the ordeal flooding from his body. God tells him he will grant him any prayer. “O God, I pray that you grant me this,” the boys says. “When any person in any era meets you at the gates of Heaven—whether they believe in you or not—I ask that you allow them to enter Paradise.”

  Faced with the phantom of his own elimination, Abraham’s son responds with a Call of his own. He asks God to bless those who bless God and bless those who curse him. The comprehensive blessing God granted to Abraham is now returned as an even greater request from Abraham’s son. Violence, in other words, can turn to virtue in an instant.

  The last thing I asked Binyomin Cohen before I left was what was his favorite object in his store.

  “I like customers,” he said.

  “I guess the situation is pretty bad,” I said.

  “It’s very not good,” he said. “I don’t say bad. You cannot say bad.”

  “Why can you not say bad?”

  “Never say bad,” he said. “If you get up in the morning and can open your eyes, it’s good.” He told me the story of how God, in Genesis 32, repeats to Jacob a promise made to Abraham to make his offspring “too numerous to count.” “And the word good is written twice,” Binyomin Cohen said. “This means if you say something is good, it will get better. And if you say something is bad, oh, you’ll see what bad is.”

  Under the circumstances, these seemed like words of unrivaled beauty. In the midst of a war zone, just minutes after showing me the passage in Genesis that said Ishmael would hold a sword against Isaac forever, and just seconds after saying he would kill his child for God, he felt compelled to tell me that I should continue to be grateful. “If we say good things about Abraham,” he said, “maybe the good will get better.”

  This is a holy place, I thought, where bad can be good, death can be sacred, and where no pain is enough to abandon God.

  No wonder the story of the binding is so central to Jews, Christians, and Muslims, I thought. It’s the part of Abraham’s life that cuts closest to our veins and poses the question we hope never to face: Would I kill for God?

  For many of Abraham’s descendants, of course, the answer throughout history has been yes.

  5

  * * *

  JEWS

  * * *

  MY EARS START popping just outside the city. I get a mild headache soon after that. Within minutes of heading east from Jerusalem, the road starts dropping precipitously, through a flicker of rapidly changing climates: first cold and rain near the city, then clouds and a brushing of green grass on the mountains, then muggy air and blue sky at cliff’s edge, and finally the hellish terrarium at the bottom of the world.

  The Dead Sea, known in antiquity as the Salt Sea, serves as the backdrop for a number of pivotal events in the Hebrew Bible, including Sodom and Gomorrah, Mount Nebo, and Jericho. At the end of the first millennium B.C.E., it also served as the setting for a transformative moment in the history of the Bible—as well as the history of Abraham.

  About thirteen hundred feet below sea level, on a ridge overlooking the northwestern shore of the sea, the remains of a small ancient community lie uncovered in the sun. The warren of rooms, large enough for a few hundred to eat, study, and cleanse themselves, is connected to the limestone bluff by a long aqueduct used to ferry purifying water. The redwood-colored hills where the aqueduct begins are so crumbly that they’re pocked with dozens of alcoves, grottoes, and caves.

  In the spring of 1947, a bedouin boy name Mohamed Adh-Dhib lost a goat along this ridge and, while looking for it, stumbled onto the mouth of a cave. He threw a pebble into the darkness and, instead of hearing the hoped-for bleat, heard the tinkling of breaking pottery. He was too scared to enter but returned the next day with a friend. The two squeezed through the opening and discovered nearly a dozen clay pots, several feet high, and the remains of many more.

  They lifted the lids and found dark, oblong lumps coated in black pitch. The smell was putrid. Taking the lumps outside, they removed the pitch and linen wrapping and uncovered leather manuscripts, inscribed in parallel columns and occasionally crumbled. The characters were not Arabic, so they figured the most valuable part of the find was the leather: new sandals! Back at home they promptly carved out new straps for their sandals, then carried the largest scroll to a shoemaker in Bethlehem, who quickly realized he had something more precious than foot fodder.

  What he had was a manuscript of the Book of Isaiah, a thousand years older than any known copy. Quickly the word began to spread: There’s gold in them thar hills!

  And God, too.

  The Dead Sea Scrolls, which eventually totaled eight hundred once all the caves were scoured, revolutionized understanding of the Bible and the volatile political and religious climate that gave birth to Scripture. Penned by an extreme Jewish sect called the Essenes, who fled to the hills in the late centuries of the first millennium B.C.E. to live in extreme ritual purity, the manuscripts reveal an isolated community deeply devoted to studying the text of the Bible—and to understanding how that text affected their daily lives. This is the essence of the Abrahamic religions—taking ancient texts and making them timely and timeless, a process that is more vividly apparent in this community than anyplace else.

  “What Qumran showed us,” said Hanan Eschel, one of the leading archaeologists of that era, “is that as late as the third century B.C.E. different texts of the Bible were still circulating. Scribes were still taking bits of oral legends and combining them into one narrative.” Eschel is a gentle, upstanding man who is deeply religious—he wears a kippah—yet fiercely committed to the evidence. Black-haired and a bit loping, with gesticulating hands, he reminded me of my elementary school science teacher in his ability to make, say, battery science, deeply matter now.

  “So what happened in the third century to change that?” I asked. We were standing in the remains of a two-thousand-year-old library. The second floor had collapsed, revealing long desks where the scrolls were copied, even holes for inkwells. I had come to Qumran to try to understand this moment— when the text of the Bible finally became sacrosanct and believers began to reinterpret the story—because it represents a junction in the history of monotheism. It’s what allowed Abraham, for example, to go from being a shadowy ancient figure to one who’s perpetually alive, to go from one Abraham to two hundred and forty.

  “What happened was that people finally felt they got it right,” Eschel said. “The Bible became something spiritual that no one was allowed to change.”

  “And then?”

  “Well, if people wanted to understand the text—understand how it related to their lives—they had to rejuvenate it. They had to retell the stories. The art of reinterpretation is the great innovation of this era, but, as we know, it’s also what created a lot of problems for us.”

  CONSIDERING THAT I set out in search of what I thought was one Abraham at the heart of all three faiths, I was amazed by how much time I spent trying to figure out when one religion’s Abraham ended and another began: Did the Real Abraham begin with the birth of Moses or the death of Jesus? Did the True Abraham begin with the death of Muhammad or the fall of Constantinople? And what about the Rise of the Bourgeoisie, that standby from college? Trying to track so many different Abrahams was like trying to track elevators in a skyscraper: dozens were in operation at any one time, some were rising, others were falling, each one stopped only at certain floors, and every carful had only one goal: Get me to heaven as fast as possible.

  Eventually I concluded that, for all its chaotics, the history of Abraham as a cultural figure over the last four thousand years actually revolves around a number of critical moments that helped guarantee his enduring importance. The defining hour in his life—real or imagined—will always be when God chooses Abraham, plucking him from utter obscurity a
nd allowing him to redefine the world.

  The second phase in his story begins in the late first millennium B.C.E., when Jews start forging a religion out of their desert yore. In a critical moment often overlooked, early Jews also chose Abraham, summoning him out of the ethers of their past and promoting him to the status of founding father. As strange as it might seem today, when Abraham is known to many as the Father of the Jews, this status was never guaranteed. It was a choice.

  The same goes for subsequent phases. Early Christians also chose Abraham. Early Muslims chose Abraham, too. Neither had to do this. History is cluttered with spiritual visionaries who completely reject the belief systems of their forebears. Abraham himself was one of these, after all. His heirs, by contrast, elected to emphasize their past. At every transitional moment in the evolution of religion, each subsequent incarnation of monotheism chose to link itself back to the same man.

  The question of why the religions did this—then what each one did with Abraham once it claimed him—would dominate Abraham’s story for the subsequent two thousand years. As a result, if the first step I needed to make to understand Abraham was a close reading of his story, the next step was a close reading of how each religion reinterpreted that story.

  I BEGAN, naturally, with Judaism. Long before Christians and Muslims set about reinterpreting Abraham, early Jews were the first to perform reconstructive surgery on their purported father.

  The main reason Jews in places like Qumran were able to choose Abraham as their founder is that for much of Israelite history the patriarch was lost to his descendants. As arresting as the stories of Abraham, Ishmael, and Isaac are today, they were almost assuredly unknown to the Israelites who wandered for forty years in the desert, then conquered the Promised Land around 1200 B.C.E. By the time David overtook Jerusalem in 1000 B.C.E. and became king of a united Israel, Abraham was probably familiar to only a few leaders through oral wisps passed down through the generations.

  “Do I think that the historical David knew about Abraham?” asked Jon Levenson, a professor of comparative religion at Harvard and a leading authority on the history of Judaism. “I don’t know. But I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t.”

  Yet David didn’t need Abraham, because God makes a fresh covenant with him. “I will make the nations your her itage,” God informs the Israelite king, “and the ends of the earth your possession.” All the Israelites had to do was build a Temple to house God on earth and perform ritual sacrifices there, and God would ensure their well-being. No weekly Torah readings were required, no laws of kosher were observed. Judaism, as we know it, did not yet exist.

  And it worked! David’s son Solomon built a grand Temple in Jerusalem and paraded the Israelites to their strongest point in history. The Kingdom of Israel quickly became an empire to rival the ones in Egypt and Mesopotamia. But Mesopotamia soon fought back, and by the sixth century B.C.E. the Israelite kingdom was wiped from the Fertile Crescent. The bulk of Israelites were plucked from their homeland and shipped off to refugee camps in Babylon. The nations of the world were not Israel’s heritage; the ends of the earth were not its possession. A crisis was at hand: God appeared to have broken his covenant.

  Enter the Bible. During the exile, the spiritual leaders of Israel started to redefine their identity. They threw out the failed covenant of David and began looking for a new constitution. For that, they turned to their oral past. One figure they hit on was Moses. God promised him the land, helped him liberate the people, and gave him the laws. On Sinai, Moses received six hundred thirteen laws that govern everything from upholding the Sabbath to celebrating Passover. These suddenly became vital to a people thrust into turmoil.

  But Moses wasn’t enough. The leaders of the young faith needed not just a constitution but also a deep-rooted national mythology. They needed someone close to God yet not so wedded to the land, someone who embodied the noble history of the Israelites but who also typified their trials.

  They needed Abraham.

  Abraham was central to this newfound bond with the past because he stood at the beginning of the Israelite people. Also, God made a covenant with Abraham that predated the land. Abraham helped people cope with the crisis of exile because he himself had been exiled.

  But who knew about Abraham? Certainly not most Israelites, who had few opportunities to hear their oral history. So elite scribes began to write down the story in a comprehensive way, a process that ultimately resulted in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. In the middle of the fifth century B.C.E., Ezra, an Israelite priest, returned to Jerusalem from exile carrying this new written history. Repatriated Israelites had been living for nearly a century in the capital, where they rebuilt the Temple and tried to resume their former glory. Their efforts came up short. The Second Temple paled in comparison to the first, and the population numbered a meager twenty thousand, down from a quarter of a million.

  Ezra was devastated to discover that the fledgling community was not practicing the piety now being observed in Babylon. At a New Year’s festival, he publicly read aloud from the Torah. The initial response was grief—How come no one told us this?—followed by a rallying and a commitment to study the text. Many consider this the beginning of Judaism: God’s will was now embodied by a text. The People of the Book was born.

  Over the next few hundred years, the Israelites set about codifying their Book, gathering and recording all the oral stories, and making them available to the population. The invention in the third century B.C.E. of parchment—cheap, processed animal skins used in place of papyrus—helped. “The difference,” said Hanan Eschel, “was a simple material that could be found anywhere and not this rare plant found only in Egypt.” The impact of parchment on the Bible—as well as on the history of ideas in general—is as great as that of the printing press nearly eighteen hundred years later.

  But once the text reached final form—what scholars call fixity—the real work began. Suddenly the Israelites had Scripture that described the lives of their ancestors thousands of years earlier, but what difference did that make? They still needed to make that text relevant to their lives. They needed to build a causeway to the past. To do that they needed midrash.

  Midrash, from the biblical root meaning “to search, inquire, or interpret,” was invented by Jews in places like Qumran, then picked up by Christians and Muslims. “Qumran is a window where we can look at the process,” Eschel said. “The people who lived here start reading Genesis, for example, and they feel, ‘Well, it’s hard to accept that Abraham is telling Sarah to say she’s his sister.’ They’re clearly uncomfortable with the lesson this sends, so they change it. They rewrite the story.”

  In Judaism, midrash takes two forms. The first, halakah, involves interpreting the text to legislate conduct, such as what time to light Sabbath candles or how to make matzoh. “Without oral law, biblical law is so skeletal,” said Jon Levenson, a soft-spoken West Virginian whose writings about Abraham are among the most astute I read. “We have no idea how to do a wedding. We have no idea how to do a funeral.” Oral law is considered as binding as written law, and the rabbis held that it was dictated to Moses on Mount Sinai along with the Torah. At Qumran, sect members spent two-thirds of every night studying law.

  The second form of midrash, hagadah, involves reinterpreting the narrative parts of the Bible to draw life lessons. Just as Abraham welcomed the messengers of God on their way to Sodom and Gomorrah, for example, so all Jews should welcome visitors to their homes. “It’s very hard to know how to live the Abrahamic life,” said Levenson. “What would you do? Get up and walk to Canaan? Tie your son to an altar? So they begin to take a figure who functions at the level of legend and turn him into a model for how Joe Six-Pack can live his life.”

  In short, early interpreters began to create a series of new-and-improved Abrahams. These late-model Abrahams, revised and updated, with a fresh coat of paint and a new set of tires, had the virtue of being immediate. They were relevant. But they we
re also different in significant ways from the previous Abraham, the one memorialized in Genesis. For the rabbis, these disparities posed a challenge.

  THE CLIFFS ABOVE Qumran are hardly impressive. The limestone is soft and easily eroded. The face is sheer, having been cleft abruptly when the Syrian-African Rift was forged by an earthquake 200 million years ago. The only vegetation is an occasional tuft of sage. The annual rainfall of the Dead Sea is two inches a year, compared with twenty-two in Jerusalem, only thirteen miles to the west.

  After a short walk, Hanan Eschel led me into Cave Four, where fifteen hundred fragments from more than five hundred scrolls were found. I tossed a stone into the narrow opening and instead of a clinking sound, a flock of pigeons and Tristram’s grackles fluttered into the air. The cave was dark, and cramped, at ten feet deep much smaller than I expected, able to keep a few eight-year-old boys occupied for not more than a few hours I would think.

  “So why did they bring the manuscripts here?” I asked.

  “They knew that the Romans would destroy everything, and they wanted to save them.”

  “It worked, I guess.”

  “It worked!”

  The tension that drove the Essenes to go into the desert in the first place—and then to hide their scrolls in caves—is the same pressure that continues to haunt many Jews today: How should I relate to the larger world, especially when it’s hostile to my religion? As an earnest, post­Bar Mitzvah teenager growing up in the American South, I participated in endless conversations about whether I was an American Jew or a Jewish American. Like many, I constantly pondered the question, Which identity do I put first? Do I join the prevailing culture and emphasize my similarities? Do I stand apart from the dominant culture and stress my particularities?