Dark History of the Bible

by Michael Kerrigan

  That left the Hamitic nations – the sons of Ham, condemned to slavery by God, on the authority of the Bible. The suggestion that these were Africans, their skins blackened as a mark of guilt for their ancestor’s offence, was debunked as long ago as medieval times, and never advanced even by the more serious proponents of racial ‘science’ in modern times. As a popular belief, however, and a rationalization of white ownership of African-American slaves, it enjoyed wide acceptance into recent times.

  A map of 1760 shows where Japhet’s family settled after the nations were ‘divided in the earth’ (10, 32). It seemed self-evident that the white European nations then enslaving ‘Hamitic’ Africa could claim descent from the most favoured of Noah’s sons.

  God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

  The apparent disproportionality of this punishment has prompted some scholars to speculate that Ham must have perpetrated some more obviously serious act of sexual dishonour on his father – maybe even rape. Yet, the ‘mere’ disrespect of seeing Noah’s nakedness clearly struck his other two sons as sufficiently serious for them to approach him with their eyes averted (‘their faces backward’, 9, 23). Either way, it hardly matters: in the ancient subconscious the powers of sight and of sexual possession seem to have been regarded as analogous at some deep level. Hence, in Sophocles’ Greek tragedy, King Oedipus gouges out his eyes in symbolic self-castration when he learns that he has unwittingly committed incest with his own mother.

  Building frantically – and for what purpose? Human endeavour is intrinsically laudable, but there’s a satirical edge to the Babel story: we see the urge to transcend human limitations attended by an overweening ambition to rival God.

  Towering Arrogance

  The sons of Noah set out with their wives and families; their children begat more children and within a few generations ‘of them was the whole earth overspread’ – just as God had wished (9, 19). All were the descendants of a common ancestor, all formed one single culture, ‘And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech’ (11, 1). Some settled in the land of Shinar, in the plains of Mesopotamia: as their numbers grew, so did their wealth and confidence – and at last their pride. So, they said to one another (11, 3):

  ‘Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language’.

  GENESIS 11, 3

  Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth; and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth; and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

  Hendrick van Cleve’s treatment of the Tower of Babel (1550) seems to have influenced Bruegel’s (c. 1563). It’s no accident that the Babel story appealed to Renaissance artists, working in an age whose achievements seemed to surpass just about anything that had gone before.

  Jacob, sleeping out one night, saw a ladder reaching to the sky, with angels ‘ascending and descending on it’ (Genesis 28, 12). ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ may represent the ups and downs of his descendants – and the possibility of salvation in the end.

  II

  THE BIBLE

  INCEST, INTRIGUE AND INHERITANCE: THE PATRIARCHS

  Abraham has traditionally been regarded as the founding father of the Jewish nation, but his was to be a lineage of jealousy, strife and fear.

  ——♦——

  ‘I will make of thee a great nation.’ GENESIS 12, 2.

  Expelled from Eden, Adam and Eve had been forced to step out into an infinitely wider world, full of danger, toil and suffering but also alive with possibilities. God’s creation had come full-circle with the Flood: now, from an ark marooned atop a mountain, Noah’s descendants had dispersed across the earth. But if humanity’s horizons were widening fast, the focus of the Bible was closing in on the ‘generations of Shem’ – the Semites, or the Jewish people.

  Generation succeeded generation, but God did not directly intervene again until Terah had a son named Abram. He took as his wife his half-sister Sarai. This is the first appearance in the Bible of Abraham, the future father of the Jews, although as yet there’s no obvious likelihood of his having any sons at all, let alone a nation’s worth. ‘Sarai was barren,’ it seems (Genesis 11, 30): ‘she had no child’. Terah took Abram and Sarai, and his other son Haran, and his son Lot, and they set out from his home city of Ur. They went ‘into the land of Canaan’ and settled there.

  ‘And Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran his son’s son, and Sarai his daughter in law, his son Abram’s wife, and they went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees’ (11, 31).

  ‘The Canaanite was then in the land,’ we’re told, but notwithstanding this the country was given by God to Abram and his descendants:

  The Lord appeared to Abram, and said, Unto thy seed will I give this land: and there builded he an altar unto the Lord, who appeared unto him.

  ‘He removed from thence unto a mountain on the east of Bethel,’ and there, the Bible tells us, ‘he pitched his tent’ (12, 8).

  The Egyptian nobility coveted Sarai’s beauty, but she had been warned by her husband to say she was his sister. If this deception saved Abram’s life, it did so at some cost, leaving him no excuse to refuse his wife to the lustful Pharaoh.

  Honest Abe?

  Even so, Abram’s stay in Canaan was to be short: there was ‘a famine in the land’, so he pressed on towards the south. ‘Abram went down into Egypt to sojourn there’ (12, 10). Before they arrived, however, he gave his wife a warning:

  Behold now, I know that thou art a fair woman to look upon: Therefore it shall come to pass, when the Egyptians shall see thee, that they shall say, This is his wife: and they will kill me, but they will save thee alive. Say, I pray thee, thou art my sister: that it may be well with me for thy sake; and my soul shall live because of thee.

  The patriarch’s overriding concern, ungallantly yet understandably, seems to have been for his own safety: this way, should some powerful Egyptian decide to take Sarai for his own wife, he would at least have no motive to murder Abram to make her a widow. The Bible does not report any misgivings – or, for that matter, any reactions at all – on Sarai’s part. She kept up the pretence in Egypt as her husband had required.

  THE MAN FROM MESOPOTAMIA

  IF STORIES LIKE those of the Garden of Eden and Noah’s Flood offer intriguing overlaps between the Bible and the myths of other ancient cultures, Abraham’s origins in Ur (Genesis 11, 28) represent a fascinating cross-over of the scriptural and archaeological records.

  Literally, the land ‘in the middle of the rivers’, Mesopotamia is the country bordered (roughly) by the Tigris to the east and the Euphrates to the west: this fertile floodplain was the ‘cradle of civilization’ in the southern part of what is now Iraq. Ur, very much a real city, was an important state in the twenty-first century BCE, a centre of Sumerian power and culture. Extensive excavation at the site since the end of the nineteenth century has uncovered the remains of a big and bustling place, its mud-brick foundations surprisingly well preserved thanks to the aridity of the Iraqi climate.

  In the grander scheme of human development, it might be said, Mesopotamia represents the mainstream: here it was that agriculture was developed, cities built and civilization shaped, complete with art an
d writing. Seen from this perspective, the story of the Jews is a curious sub-plot at best, Abraham’s brush with Mesopotamian history his people’s proudest moment. Of course, the Jews didn’t see it that way – and neither, thanks to the Bible, do we: modernity wouldn’t be the same without either story.

  Written in the distinctive ‘cuneiform’ script of successive Mesopotamian civilizations, this tablet records aspects of the administrative life of Ur. The Sumerian city was an important economic, political and cultural centre.

  When they arrived in Egypt, it was just as Abram had feared: the Egyptians saw Sarai – and saw that she was ‘very fair’.

  The princes also of Pharaoh saw her, and commended her before Pharaoh: and the woman was taken into Pharaoh’s house. And he entreated Abram well for her sake: and he had sheep, and oxen, and he asses, and menservants, and maidservants, and she asses, and camels. (12, 16).

  Abram, in other words, effectively pimped out his wife to Egypt’s ruler, although it was the innocent Pharaoh himself who suffered punishment:

  And the Lord plagued Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai Abram’s wife.

  The Pharaoh was shocked to discover that Sarai was actually the wife of the foreign visitor: ‘What is this that thou hast done unto me?’, he asked (12, 18): ‘Why didst thou not tell me that she was thy wife? Why saidst thou, She is my sister, so I might have taken her to me to wife?’

  Good questions, to which centuries of sympathetic scholarship have struggled to come up with adequate answers. The best that can be said for Abram’s lie is that, since Sarai was his half-sister, it was perhaps half-true.

  Land and People

  No matter. Thanks to his wife’s attractions, Abram was ‘very rich in cattle, in silver, and in gold’ (13, 3) when he and Lot left Egypt for Bethel, back where they’d started. Things weren’t quite so easy now. Lot had done well too (we’re never told just how), with ‘flocks, and herds, and tents’ (13, 6):

  And the land was not able to bear them, that they might dwell together: for their substance was great … And there was a strife between the herdmen of Abram’s cattle and the herdmen of Lot’s cattle.

  Sarai slinks away from the Pharaoh’s palace in disgrace, her true identity and marital status revealed. Successive generations of scholars have been as shocked as the Pharaoh was at Abram’s actions, whose logic has never been very clear.

  Hence Abram’s suggestion that they separate. Lot agreed, and took his family and followers out on to the fertile plains to the east, while Abram remained in the grasslands of Canaan. This was to be his home – and that of his descendants – in perpetuity, the Lord said (13, 15):

  Lift up now thine eyes, and look from the place where thou art northward, and southward, and eastward, and westward: For all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever. And I will make thy seed as the dust of the earth, so that if a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall thy seed also be numbered. Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it; for I will give it unto thee.

  All this land, and no one to populate it: Sarai’s barrenness continued. She did, however, have a handmaid, whose name was Hagar. Egyptian-born, she was, some sources suggest, a princess of the Pharaoh’s kingdom. Suffice it to say that she was young and beautiful – a fitting wife for Sarai’s husband, it seems she thought (16, 2):

  Behold now, the Lord hath restrained me from bearing: I pray thee, go in to my maid; it may be that I may obtain children by her. And Abram hearkened to the voice of Sarai. And Sarai Abram’s wife took Hagar her maid … and gave her to her husband Abram to be his wife.

  Driven out into the desert by an angry Sarai, Hagar receives comfort from an angel sent by God. He tells her to return, put up with her mistress’ jealousy, and bear Abram a son: his name will be Ishmael.

  Trouble and Strife

  While it makes no moral judgment on the Patriarch’s polygamy, scripture does suggest that the path of bigamous love may not run smooth (16, 4). The stratagem worked, as far as it went: Hagar soon found herself pregnant. Here, however, the trio’s trouble started:

  When she saw that she had conceived, her mistress was despised in her eyes. And Sarai said unto Abram, My wrong be upon thee: I have given my maid into thy bosom; and when she saw that she had conceived, I was despised in her eyes: the Lord judge between me and thee. But Abram said unto Sarai, Behold, thy maid is in thy hand; do to her as it pleaseth thee.

  Not needing to be told a second time, Sarai ‘dealt hardly’ with her servant and rival, who ‘fled from her face’. An angel came upon her cowering by a ‘fountain in the wilderness’ (16, 7). He told her to go back to her mistress and submit to her authority: she would have a son, and she should name him Ishmael. However difficult the domestic fall-out, Ishmael’s birth was gratifying to God, who established a new agreement with Abram (17, 11):

  Ye shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin; and it shall be a token of the covenant betwixt me and you. And he that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you, every man child in your generations.

  Not just an agreement, but a new name: ‘Neither shall thy name any more be Abram,’ the Lord commanded, ‘but thy name shall be Abraham, for a father of many nations have I made thee’ (17, 5). Sarai too was to be no more: she now took the name of ‘Sarah’ (17, 15), by which she has been remembered by posterity.

  A stained-glass window at Klosterneuburg, Austria, shows Abram and Sarah with the infant Isaac. It brings us up with a jolt to think that a few years later, grieved but resolute, the loving father would be preparing to sacrifice his son.

  Far from allaying Sarah’s jealousy, the birth of her son Isaac only inflamed it. She had her husband send his mistress Hagar and son Ishmael off into the wilderness. Jean Charles Cazin painted this picture of the pair in 1880.

  Though 90 years old by now, she was to be ‘a mother of nations’ (17, 16). ‘Kings of people shall be of her,’ God said. Indeed, he told the astonished Abraham:

  ‘Sarah thy wife shall bear thee a son indeed; and thou shalt call his name Isaac’.

  GENESIS 17, 19

  Sarah thy wife shall bear thee a son indeed; and thou shalt call his name Isaac: and I will establish my covenant with him for an everlasting covenant, and with his seed after him (17, 19).

  To Abraham’s plea for God’s blessing on the son he already had, God’s answer was more ambiguous:

  As for Ishmael, I have heard thee: Behold, I have blessed him, and will make him fruitful, and will multiply him exceedingly; twelve princes shall he beget, and I will make him a great nation. But my covenant will I establish with Isaac, which Sarah shall bear unto thee at this set time in the next year (17, 20).

  And, far from being assuaged by the birth of an infant of her own, Sarah’s jealously only grew. She was angry when one day she saw Ishmael ‘mocking’ the young Isaac:

  She said unto Abraham, Cast out this bondwoman and her son; for the son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with my son, even with Isaac.

  Sarah’s attitude upset Abraham, but God said ‘Let it not be grievous in thy sight … for in Isaac shall thy seed be called’ (21, 12). Abraham, accordingly, put aside his misgivings and, having provided Hagar and her son with some bread and water, sent them off into the wilderness to fend for themselves.

  Sacrificial Son

  Scarcely had he lost Ishmael than Abraham had to accept that he was to lose his second son, Isaac, too – and by his own hand, for ‘God did tempt him’ (22, 1) in a test of loyalty:

  And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.

  ‘A WILD MAN’

  ‘AND HE WILL be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him.’ The angel’s prophecy to Hagar at the well of Beerlahairoi (16, 12) was not auspicious. Even so, Ishmael’s birth seems
in some way to have moved on the narrative of the Jewish people – in some way to have prompted Sarah’s pregnancy.

  Although not chosen as father for the Chosen People, Ishmael did found a nation, just as God had promised: by tradition, the Ishmaelites were the ancestors of the Arabs. In some scholarly traditions, indeed, Ishmael – an important prophet of Islam – is seen as having been a direct ancestor of Muhammad.

  Heartbroken but unflinching, Abraham rose up, ‘saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering … and went unto the place of which God had told him.’ Reaching his destination, he told his helpers to wait while he took the wood, ready to make a fire, then led Isaac to the altar and laid him upon it, his knife at the ready.

  SODOM AND GOMORRAH

  WHILE HE WAS waiting for Sarah to bear his son, Abraham went down to the plains eastward, where his nephew Lot had settled with his people not long before. He’d had his share of difficulties, coming into conflict with a number of local rulers, but emerging victorious in the Battle of the Vale of Siddim (14, 8). Among his enemies there had been the rulers of Sodom and Gomorrah, although this doesn’t seem to have been the cause of God’s later wrath. Rather, we are told, it was ‘because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is grievous’ (18, 20: ‘cry’ here seems to mean something like ‘gossip, rumour or report’). Despite his anger, God agreed to Abraham’s plea that he would show mercy on the cities if as few as 50 just men could be found – and even let himself be haggled down to promising clemency if he could find ten.