A Library of Questions

Timothy Beal, a Bible scholar and professor at Case Western Reserve University, has written a fine article in the Huffington Post on the extraordinary complexity of the Bible, as well as the problem of those who insist on a literal reading of the text yet seem to have little comprehension of its inconsistencies and multiple points of view.

To provide an example, Beal focuses on the creation, two versions of which are familiar stories to most of us: Chapter 1 of Genesis, in which God generates the universe through speech, and Chapter 2, in which he is a hands-on craftsman, planting a garden and fashioning animal life, including Adam and Eve, with his hands. Beal points out a number of other brief creation stories, in Job and in at least two Psalms.

Acknowledging and exploring these contradictions, he argues, is at the heart of a real understanding of the Bible and its importance:

"The Bible canonizes contradiction. It holds together a tense diversity of perspectives and voices, difference and argument -- even and especially when it comes to the profoundest questions of faith, questions that inevitably outlive all their answers.
"The Bible is not a book of answers but a library of questions. As such it opens up space for us to explore different voices and perspectives, to discuss, to disagree and, above all, to think. Too often, however, that's not what happens."

Most of us were introduced to the Bible as young children. We were told stories that match the general outline of biblical narrative, but which often leave out "adult" details that make the stories compelling, and relevant to our lives today. We learned about Jacob sleeping on a stone pillow and having the vision of the ladder to heaven, and about Joseph and his coat of many colors, and about Moses leading the Hebrews across the Red Sea to freedom, but not until much later in our lives -- if ever -- did we know about the psychologically complex characters who populate these stories, their motivations, fears, jealousies, mistakes and triumphs over, in most cases, their own weaknesses of character.

For many people, it seems, a child's version of the Bible suffices. And if this provides them sustenance and hope, I'm somewhat okay with that. But to limit one's vision in this way is to deny oneself the richness and challenge of the complete story. And I fear that failing to understand -- or at least acknowledge -- the complexity and contradiction in the Bible is one of those things that leads to intolerance and a general misunderstanding of what the Bible tells us about our relationship with God and with each other.

Power Plays and Pity Parties

Although Exodus begins in the fertile Nile Delta, where the land has been made rich by flowing water, we sense immediately a drought of sorts. It’s a spiritual drought, marked by the absence of God, who has been off the scene since the Israelites Egyptian adventure began back in Genesis. God, who was directly present up through his wrestling match with Jacob, has kept quiet throughout the Joseph story and now, through the Egyptian captivity. In the final chapters of Genesis and the first two chapters of Exodus, we get a sparse reference here and there to God, but no intervention by God.

Finally, at the end of Exodus 2 we learn that, “The children of Israel groaned because of their labors and cried out; and their cry came up to God because of the labors. So God heard their groaning, and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Then God looked down upon the children of Israel and was made known to them.”

Really? It’s as if God’s attention had been diverted elsewhere for the past several hundred years. What was He doing? Maybe trying out that creation thing on another, far away planet to see if He could get it right? We’re not told, but all in all, it’s a rather strange passage, suggesting that the covenant had somehow slipped God’s mind all these years.

That changes in a spectacular way in chapter 3, when God makes a physical reappearance, not to the enslaved Israelites but to Moses, who is off in Midian working as a shepherd for his father-in-law, Jethro (who was briefly introduced as Reuel before being renamed). Although in previous appearances – walking in the garden where the evening breeze cooled his skin, visiting Abraham in his tent, wrestling with Jacob over a long, troubled night – God seemed to take a human form, this time he appears in the famous burning bush. Actually, we are told (at least in translation) that an angel of God appeared, but then it is God’s voice that speaks to Moses.

It is interesting that in a story dominated by the element of water, God takes a form that may in some ways be considered the opposite of water. And since fire can be quenched by water, it’s not necessarily a superior element. In some ways that sets the tone for the subsequent chapters, where God seems to be impressive but not all-powerful in the eyes of those who witness his appearances and his actions. What we see is a God struggling to assert his authority.

Moses is afraid to look at the sight – all in all, a sensible reaction when confronted with a fiery, talking plant – but not afraid to argue with the instructions that emanate from the vision. Moses repeatedly questions God’s order that he return to Egypt to rescue His people, reiterating that He became aware of their suffering when He heard their cries. Famously, Moses argues that he is “weak in speech and slow of tongue,” leading many generations of biblical scholars to speculate that he had a speech impediment. If so, that handicap doesn’t stop him from spending the rest of his career delivering long speeches.

Moreover, Moses says, why should either the Israelites or the Pharaoh listen to Moses? It’s a reasonable question, compounded by the fact that at this point in the story, we haven’t even been told that Moses knew his own heritage. As readers, we know that Moses was the child of a slave from the tribe of Levi, but does Moses know this? He was nursed by his birth mother, but later raised in Pharaoh’s court by his adoptive mother. God tells him that Aaron the Levite, his brother, will speak for him, and it’s said in a way that suggests Moses knows Aaron, but when and how did he learn that Aaron is his brother?

Omissions like this have inspired scholars – the rabbis of the Midrash,as well as Josephus, Philo and many others – to attempt to fill in the gaps. Perhaps the most famous of the retellers, Cecil B. DeMille, acknowledges these sources in the opening credits of his film, The Ten Commandments, which, among other things, includes an elaborate episode in which Moses’ true parentage is revealed to him on the night of the first Passover when both his birth mother and his adoptive mother show up. In fact, the first couple hours of the film are based almost entirely on elaborations external to the Bible, including Moses’ return from a military campaign in Ethiopia (in one ancient story, Moses actually reigns as king of Ethiopia after fleeing Egypt and before heading off to Midian) and the sinister plotting of his rival Dathan, who in the Bible itself only appears in Numbers 16 when he leads a rebellion against Moses and is swallowed up by the ground, but who in DeMille’s version, as well as some Midrashic writings, is the witness to Moses’ murder of the Egyptian. DeMille also portrays Dathan, in the form of Edward G. Robinson, fixated on the nubile girlfriend (Debra Paget) of young Joshua, nubile girlfriends of biblical figures being an important fixture in DeMille’s oeuvre.

It takes a couple of miracles – transforming Moses’ shepherd’s staff into a snake and back, turning Moses’ hand white with disease – as well as the promise of Aaron as a mouthpiece before Moses is convinced to take on God’s mission, but then he travels back to Egypt with his wife and sons. Along the way comes another strange, mystifying encounter with God, in which He appears, presumably in human form, to try to kill Moses, the man he has just appointed as his messenger. He is stopped from his deadly mission only when Mrs. Moses, Zipporah, performs an impromptu circumcision of one of her sons – with a sharp stone! -- and flings the bloody foreskin at God’s feet (many interpreters suggest that “feet” is used here, as elsewhere in the Bible, as a euphemism for the genitals). That episode, ignored by DeMille and by most retellers of the Moses story, has been argued over for three millennia, with no consensus on what prompted God’s murderous impulse.

Back in Egypt, Moses connects with Aaron and the two proceed to meet with a very accessible Pharaoh. Was Pharaoh so available to Moses because they were raised together? It seems likely, but is never addressed directly, and anyway, Pharaoh seems also to be directly accessible to the slave overseers when they come to complain about their hardships.

Thus we enter into the story of the ten plagues, where God’s spectacular series of natural disasters is met not with awe and submission, but with resistance and prevarication. When Aaron repeats the miracle God first taught Moses, of turning a rod into a snake, Pharaoh’s magicians easily replicate the transformation with their own sticks. They do the same with the first two plagues, turning water to blood and causing frogs to spring from the water, only getting stumped by the third plague, variously called an infestation of lice or mosquitoes.

The Israelites, for their part, are just as resistant to Moses as Moses had predicted they would be. And Pharaoh’s hard-headedness is epic. I love his reaction to Moses’ first exhortation to “Let my people go.” The Egyptian god-king is defiant, and seems to be insulted that Moses would suggest there is a power greater than his own: “Who is He, that I should obey His voice to let Israel go? I do not know the lord, nor will I let the people go.” The words are spoken with peerless arrogance by Yul Brynner in DeMille’s film, and they resonate because they seem such an appropriate reaction from a figure who has been raised to believe he is the supreme power. I never ceased to be amazed at the Bible’s spot-on depictions of human attitudes and reactions: These stories, set thousands of years ago, show us people whose behavior we might encounter on any given day. Hosni Mubarak’s reaction to the protests of the Egyptian people is, after all, not that far removed from Pharaoh’s reactions to Moses and to God’s plagues.

The entire episode of the plagues is presented as a power play between God and Pharaoh, a clash of the titans. Each time God ups the ante with a new horror, Pharaoh suggests he will comply with God’s wishes, but then either tries to negotiate terms or simply changes his mind before the Israelites can make their way out out of Egypt. Even after the final plague, when all of the Egyptian first-born, including Pharaoh’s son, are killed, Pharaoh’s submission is only temporary. He allows the Israelites to leave, but then sends an army after them, leading to the astonishing parting of the sea to provide safe passage for the Israelites and sudden death to the pursuing troops.

If Pharaoh’s arrogance becomes predictable and tiresome after a while, so does the complaining of the Israelites. Despite their delivery from servitude, it’s seemingly a matter of only hours before they start asking what God has done for them lately. Over and over again, God provides sustenance – water from a rock, manna from heaven, multitudes of birds for roasting – and over and over again, the Israelites keep up their complaints and rebellions. Their self-pity and ingratitude are, again, recognizably human traits that help to connect us three millennia later to the story. Gratitude is a notoriously short-lived feeling for many of us, something we have to work at sustaining beyond the immediate circumstances that inspire it.

I’ve been reading a lot lately about the efforts of archaeologists to unearth evidence of the Egyptian captivity and the Exodus. There is precious little to suggest that either occurred in anything like the form described in the Bible. That’s fine with me. It doesn’t detract from the importance of the Moses story, which lies not in history or in the recounting of miracles, but in the very human ways that the characters respond to their circumstances, questioning and challenging even the most persuasive evidence, changing their minds with lightning speed, forgetting the goodness that has been visited upon them, focusing their thoughts not on the events surrounding them but on their own delusions of power and entitlement. It’s not the magic of an unearthly God that connects us to Exodus, it’s the fact that God’s creations haven’t changed at all in the ensuing time.

Water, Water Everywhere

When did God create water?

That’s kind of a trick question. If you read the creation story in Genesis 1, it seems water was already in existence when God began his six days of work: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”

Water appears to be a precursor to the creation of life, a necessary condition, just as the scientists tell us.

In the second creation narrative, the one attributed to the author J, in Genesis 2, water also appears to be sort of already there – at least it’s not made clear that water was ever “created”. We are told that “the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground. But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.” In other translations, it’s called a spring or a fountain, but in any case we see water bubbling up from the ground to sustain life.

We are told that a river runs through the garden, branching into four as it leaves – the well-known Tigris and Euphrates of Central Asia, and two others, the Pishon and Gihon, about which scholars have puzzled and argued for millennia.

The power of water to both sustain and to destroy life flows as a theme throughout the Bible, most dramatically in the stories of the Flood and the Exodus.

Both the Flood narrative and the Exodus narrative begin with portraits of fertility. In the former we are told that God’s original creatures have propogated according to instructions. Chapter 6 of Genesis begins, “Now it came to pass that men began to exist in great numbers on the earth, and daughters were born to them.” How daughters were born to men is not elaborated upon, but we are immediately plunged into an even stranger narrative stream: “So when the sons of God saw the daughters of men were beautiful, they took wives for themselves of all they chose.” Sons of God? Hmmm. Did John the Evangelist not know about this passage when he called Jesus the “only begotten” son of God? Who were these other sons? Who were their mothers?

It gets stranger. God reacts to all of the breeding by limiting the life of the offspring to 120 years. But the Bible goes on to tell us: “There were giants [Nephilim is the Hebrew word, and it may not translate exactly to “giants” but that’s how the King James translators saw it] on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men of old, men of renown.” Damn. I didn’t learn about those giants in Sunday school, nor was I taught about these sons of Gods jumping human girls.

People have been puzzling about this little episode for millennia, and I’m not going to be able to solve the mystery now, but I note it as one of those inconvenient passages in the Bible that can throw conventional notions of its narrative way off course.

At any rate, we are told that God saw that these humans were wicked: “every intent of the thoughts within his [man’s] heart was only evil continually.” And, as we know, he decided to destroy His creatures, with the exception of Noah, who “found grace in the presence of the Lord God.” We had been introduced to Noah in the genealogy of Chapter 5; he is a tenth-generation descendant of Adam.

The story of Noah, the ark, and the great flood follow this odd prelude.

Last year, when I taught my church class about Genesis, I skipped over the story of the Flood, not because I didn’t think it was interesting – in fact, I find the story of God’s regret to be one of the most fascinating episodes of the Bible -- but because I was eager to get on to the patriarchs, especially Jacob, whose wrestling match with God I saw as an overarching image of the Biblical narrative as a whole.

For now, let’s note that God’s chosen vehicle for destruction is water, that primal substance that, according to the narrative, was already there when He began the work of creation.

I want to compare that tale of mad procreation in Genesis to the opening of Exodus, where we read about the progeny of Jacob in Egypt. We read in Exodus 1 that, after Joseph’s death, “Then the children of Israel [the new name God had given Jacob after the wrestling match came to a draw] increased and multiplied, and became numerous, and grew exceedingly mighty; and the land was filled with them.”

These fertile humans came to the attention not of God, but of the Egyptian god-king whose land they were evidently overrunning. Now this was not the pharaoh who took such good care of Joseph, but evidently his son – at least it’s a “new king over Egypt.”

Like God in Genesis 6, the god-king of Exodus 1 decides he can’t tolerate the situation. He first enslaves the Israelites, then decides to kill off their male children. Failing to secure the cooperation of the Hebrew midwives (we are told there are only two to service the astonishingly fertile Israelite population – no wonder they didn’t have time to pay attention to Pharaohs’ command! Actually, we are told the midwives refused to obey the god-king’s command because they feared God, and that God took care of them – “dealt well” with them, the Bible says – as a result. It’s the only time God is mentioned in the first few chapters of Exodus, until he makes his spectacular return in the burning bush.), so the king enlists the entire Egyptian population in the task of throwing male babies into the river.

For the second time, water becomes the means of destruction. This time it’s more selective, but the power of water as both life-giver and life-taker continues its strong presence in Exodus. As we all know, the Hebrew baby Moses is put into an ark (in another echo of the Noah story, the same word is used to describe both vessels, despite an enormous difference in scale) and set into the water by his mother. And as Noah was saved by his refuge in the ark, so is Moses saved when he is rescued by the maids of Pharaoh’s daughter. By extension, the entire Israelite population is saved by this second ark, since Moses’ survival ensures their own.

Through a clever subterfuge engineered by Moses’ sister, the baby’s birth mother becomes his wet nurse and the child survives to be raised as the adopted son of Pharaoh’s daughter. The Bible tells us that it is his Egyptian adoptive mother who gives him the name Moses, for an oddly Hebrew reason: “Because I drew him out of the water.” Scholars tell us that an etymological link between the name Moses and the act of drawing someone from the water would indicate that Pharaoh’s daughter was familiar with the Hebrew verb “mashah”, which means just that. Are we to understand that this young woman was fluent in Hebrew? Since Moses is a well-known Egyptian name meaning “birth”, isn’t it more likely that she gave him his name for purely Egyptian reasons? Many scholars have pondered this, but the Bible says what it says. Just another one of those mysteries that keeps the academic world busy.

The astonishing economy of Biblical narrative allows Moses to grow up in the Egyptian court; murder an Egyptian whom he sees abusing a Hebrew slave; flee the country; take refuge with a Midianite priest; marry the priest’s daughter; and father a child all by the end of Chapter 2.

That narrative economy leaves so many gaps that an entire industry of Biblical scholars and commentators – not to mention Cecil B. DeMille – have spent millennia filling in fanciful details. In The Ten Commandments, everybody’s favorite Bible movie, DeMille acknowledges drawing not only on the Bible but on the Midrash, and the writings of Philo and Josephus to flesh out his story. Even so, I’m pretty sure the romance with Anne Baxter – which features my very favorite piece of Hollywood Biblical dialog, when Baxter, as the princess Nefretiri, confronts Moses with the line, “Oh Moses, you stubborn, splendid, adorable fool!” – was made up by screenwriters in Southern California.

Various stories over the millennia have posited that Moses led a successful military campaign against the Ethiopians as a service to Pharaoh; that he wandered southward to Ethiopia in his early exile and for a time became that country’s king (in Numbers he is said to have a Kushite wife, while in Exodus the only wife mentioned is the Midianite Zipporah); that he was a renegade Egyptian priest who raised an army of lepers to battle the Egyptians; even that he was schooled in magical arts by his father-in-law, Jethro, hence his ability to turn his rod into a snake and transform the Nile into a river of blood. Jonathan Kirsch in his Moses: A Life provides a good survey of the extra-biblical Moses legends from various sources.

One of the most interesting Moses speculations comes from Sigmund Freud, in his book Moses and Monotheism. This work, published in the last year of Freud’s life, posits that Moses was not an Israelite at all, but a follower of the monotheistic religion briefly imposed on Egypt by the Pharaoh Akhnaton. Further, Freud argues, this original Moses was murdered by his followers in the Egyptian desert and replaced by a second Moses, a Midianite priest and follower of the god Jahve.

Freud speculates on the similarity between the Egyptian god’s name, Aton, and the Hebrew word Adonai, translated as “My Lord”, one of many terms for God, as well as the Phoenician or Syrian god Adonis, although he quickly drops the topic saying he has no scholarly way to make a connection.
Freud also connects the Moses narrative to other classical stories dealing with the exposure of infants to the elements in an effort to kill them, and their miraculous salvation (Romulus, Cyrus, etc.) In particular, he cites the purported autobiography of the Babylonian King Sargon, who reigned in the 28th century BC and whose story is a startling parallel to that of Moses:

The most remote of the historical personages to whom this myth attaches is Sargon of Agade,
the founder of Babylon about 2800 B.C. From the point of view of what interests us here it would perhaps be worth while to reproduce the account ascribed to himself:

" I am Sargon, the mighty king, King of Agade. My mother was a Vestal; my father I knew not; while my father's brother dwelt in the mountains. In my town Azupirani it lies on the banks of Euphrates my mother, the Vestal, conceived me. Secretly she bore me. She laid me in a basket of sedge, closed the opening with pitch and lowered me into the river. The stream did not drown me, but carried me to Akki, the drawer of water. Akki, the drawer of water, in the goodness of his heart lifted me out of the water. Akki, the drawer of water, as his own son he brought me up. Akki, the drawer of water, made me his gardener. When I was a gardener Istar fell in love with me. I became king and for forty- five years I ruled as king.'

Similarly, he links the Moses story to other well-known stories of royal children hidden away from danger and raised in obscurity by commoners, although in the case of Moses, the story is actually a reversal of the pattern.

Back to the main topic. The power of water continues to be an overarching topic in the story of Moses. That his story begins in the fertile Nile delta, a place like no other in the Near East, sets the stage. Water was the reason for Egypt’s rise, and yet the periodic flooding of the Nile also held great danger. Water gives, water takes away.

In the land of Midian, he meets his future wife, Zipporah, at a well, in a manner similar to the way that Abraham’s servant encountered Rebekkah, and Jacob first laid eyes on Rachel (and Jesus later had that intriguing encounter with the Samaritan woman). Wells were evidently the meet-cute spot of the ancients, which makes sense since they were one of the few places women could appear in public.

Sent back to Egypt by God (who then tries to murder him in one of the Bible’s most mysterious episodes), Moses turns the Nile into a river of blood in his first attempt to convince the king to release the Hebrews.
The parting of the sea to provide safe passage for the Hebrews and death to the Egyptians pursuing them probably needs no further introduction.

 
During the 40 years of travel in the wilderness, Moses twice brings forth water from rocks – on the second occasion, his hubris in striking the rock with his rod results in God’s banishment of Moses from the land of milk and honey that has been his lifelong goal. Moses dies in exile, and his burial spot is unknown.

Drawn from the water that is a pre-condition of life, the events of the Moses story are bound up in water as creator and destroyer. Freud saw the image of flowing water in these stories as a metaphor for the passage through the birth canal (fertile delta, anyone?). Through these stories birth was given to a great religion, and an endless stream of creative interpretation.

Addendum: Another Fascinating Female in the Line of David and Jesus

In my discussion of the genealogies of David and Jesus, I neglected to mention an intriguing twist set forth in the New Testament. Matthew – the evangelist most concerned with Jesus’ ties to historic Judaism – says that Boaz’ mother was one Rahab. Matthew also mentions Ruth and Tamar, as well as David’s wife Bathsheba, although the last is not named but described as “her who had been the wife of Uriah.”

Although it is not made explicit, Rahab would seem to be the same woman whose story is told in the book of Joshua, a “harlot” living in Jericho who becomes a heroine after she hides two Israelite spies from town soldiers who are looking for them.

Ruth, Tamar and Bathsheba, the only other women named in Matthew’s genealogy, are all famous old Testament figures, so it makes sense that the Rahab mentioned here would also be the subject of an Old Testament story. While some theologians have argued that this is not the case – and have constructed imaginative alternate narratives – I think the Jericho connection is most likely. (None of the women are named in Luke’s reverse genealogy, which also varies significantly in other ways from Matthew’s – it posits, for example, that Jesus was descended from David’s son Nathan, rather than from Solomon as related in Matthew).

It’s interesting that these four women, all subjects of stories that present them in provocative sexual situations, should be the only members of their gender named explicitly as ancestors of Jesus. The matriarchs Sarah, Rebecca and Leah are in there, of course, given that their husbands are all ancestors of Jesus, but are not mentioned by name.

Jesus’ encounters with women of dubious reputation are well known – the Samaritan woman and the woman about to be stoned are both adulteresses, and there’s the enigmatic Mary Magdalene, who is difficult to pin down but who is said to have been possessed by seven demons and who was later made by church fathers into an uber-prostitute figure – so it is perhaps not surprising that he counts among his ancestors a group of women who are no strangers to sexual controversy.

I don’t know what to make of it, I just think it’s interesting and worth noting.

We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us

The Book of Ruth begins, like many a legend, on a “once upon a time long ago” note: “In the days of the judges there was a famine in the land. And a man went from Bethlehem of Judah to sojourn in the land of Moab, and his wife and his sons.”

What follows is a brief tale – just a vignette really – about a pair of women from different nations who form a bond of love and respect. Naomi, the wife mentioned in the opening lines, survives her husband and both her sons, along with the sons’ wives, Orpah and Ruth. Ruth, against her mother-in-law’s advice, travels with Naomi back to Bethlehem and takes a job as a farm worker to support them.

The work that Ruth does, gleaning, is the lowest task in the farming hierarchy. Basically, she follows the threshers and collects what is left over at the edges of the field or dropped along the way. It’s a task set aside for society’s lowest members, the illegal alien migrant farm workers of their day. It’s a task appropriate for Ruth, a member of a hated enemy tribe despite her marriage to a Bethlehem Jew.

Despite her low status, Ruth attracts the attention of the field owner, a relative of Naomi’s late husband, and ultimately marries this wealthy man, cementing her relationship to the Jewish people.

Although the narrative of Ruth can be read satisfyingly as a one-off, a standalone short story, the genealogical connections within the story link it to both the genesis of the Jewish people and to the birth of Christianity. Importantly, I think, these connections involve some of the Bible’s most disturbing stories.

Ruth herself is a Moabite, a descendant of the nation founded through the incestuous union of Lot and his elder daughter, who (along with her sister) seduced her father in desperation because she believed that her family was all that was left of humanity after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. I’ve written previously that naming the Moabites as descendants of this incestuous union (in Genesis 19) seems to me a gratuitous ethnic slur. That Ruth, one of the most famous heroines of the Bible, is identified as a Moabite is particularly striking.

Ruth’s second husband, Boaz, with whom she has a child, is descended from the illicit relationship between Judah and his daughter-in-law, Tamar, who posed as a prostitute in order to deceive him. Tamar had first been married to Judah’s eldest son, Er, who was killed by God because “he was evil in the sight of the Lord.” Judah then married Tamar off to his second son, Onan, who in short order was also put to death by God, evidently for the sin of masturbation. By this time, Tamar seems to have acquired a black widow reputation; although Judah has a third son, Shelah, he does not marry this one off to Tamar, “Lest he also die like his brothers”. Instead, Judah tells Tamar to remain a widow in her father’s house until Shelah is grown. The frustrated Tamar then disguises herself as a prostitute and sells her services to the widowed Judah. She becomes pregnant, and Judah orders her to be burned to death for adultery. Before that happens, she reveals her act of deception and is allowed to live because Judah recognizes his error in not giving her to his third son.

Tamar is carrying twins, and when it’s time to give birth we are treated to one of the strangest images in all of Genesis. A hand of one of the babies emerges and the midwife ties a scarlet string around it. But then the hand is withdrawn and the other twin emerges, followed by his brother whose hand was the first to appear. The twin who “broke through” and was born after the emergence and withdrawal of his brother’s hand is Perez, great-great-great-great-grandfather of Boaz, as we are told at the end of the Book of Ruth.

The son born to Ruth and Boaz is Obed, the grandfather of David, Israel’s greatest king and, as described in the gospels of both Matthew and Luke, the most significant ancestor of Jesus. These two towering figures, arguably the most significant in Biblical history, are thus descendants of illicit relationships and intermarriage of the chosen people with a despised adversary.

So much for ethnic purity.

In this episode, the Bible makes the point that we are all mongrels, impure mixtures -- even the most exalted among us. Furthermore, those we most revile are a part of us. We can’t view ourselves as separate or better because those “others” both sprang from us and have been reabsorbed back into us.

Given the history of ethnic strife over the past several millennia, one has to wonder whether these cultural implications of the Book of Ruth have been much studied. How do today’s anti-immigrant activists, who seem to generally think of themselves as serious Christians, square their views about illegal aliens with the lessons of Ruth? Had the Bethlehemites dealt with Ruth the way modern xenophobes would like to deal with the undocumented, we might not have either David or Jesus.

Ruth’s low standing in Bethlehem is indicated by the episode in which Boaz negotiates with a relative over a field that had belonged to Naomi’s husband, Elimelech. Boaz suggests that the man, who is evidently Elimelech’s closest living male relation, purchase the field; and says that if this man will not purchase it, Boaz himself, who is next in line, will do so. The unnamed relative intends to make the purchase until Boaz tells him he must take Ruth as well, “so as to raise up the name of the dead through his inheritance.” At this point, the man demurs, saying, “I cannot redeem it for myself, lest I ruin my own inheritance. You redeem my right of redemption for yourself, for I cannot redeem it.” The man takes off his sandal, in what is described as an ancient custom, and gives it to Boaz to seal the agreement.

He would be ruined if he took the Moabite woman. Boaz, not concerned about this, buys the land, gets Ruth as a wife in the bargain, and the rest is history. Boaz makes a public proclamation to which the witnesses respond, “May the Lord make the woman who is coming to your house like Rachel and Leah, who together built the house of Israel and wrought mightily in Ephrathah. She will have a name in Bethlehem. And out of the seed which the Lord will give you from this young woman, may your house be like the house of Perez, whom Tamar bore to Judah.”

The Bible is full of accounts of ethnic wars among the Seminitic tribes – the Jews, Canaanities, Philistines, Edomites, Moabites, Midianites, etc. Ruth offers a counterpoint, a call for understanding and acceptance as well as acknowledgement that when we meet our enemy, the enemy is us.

By the time of Ruth’s descendant Jesus, the Jewish people’s chief enemy was the hated occupier, Rome, but there was still room for discord between closely related tribes. One of the most famous New Testament stories involving two antagonistic groups is Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman, at the well of Jacob.
Christians generally focus on the Samaritan woman’s realization that Jesus is the Messiah, but there’s a lot more to this story, as Jack Miles brilliantly explains in Christ: A Crisis In the Life of God. Miles focuses on the troubled relationship between the Jews, descendants of the tribe of Judah, and the Samaritans, descendants of Joseph who believe themselves to be the true chosen people. The schism between the Samaritans, a small community of whom survive today, turns on several issues, including the proper site for animal sacrifice. Samaritans hold that they are descended from Hebrews who were left behind when the majority of the population was transported to Assyria and enslaved.

Galileans, Miles writes, were an “in between” group, not recognized as fully Jewish but not set apart like the Samaritans. Some Galileans were true Jews, worshiping in Jerusalem, while others evidently held with the Samaritans, who held (and continue to hold) that the northern town of Shechem, site of much of the patriarchal narrative and the final resting place of Joshua and Joseph, should be the site of worship. It is in Shechem, in fact, where the encounter with the Samaritan woman occurs.

Although Matthew and Luke take great pains to place Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, the city of David (and of Ruth), he was raised in Nazareth, a Galilean town, a fact that made him suspect among Jews, even though he clearly . Note the famous quote from Nathaniel in John 1:46: “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?”
The conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman in chapter 4 of the gospel of John is the longest dialog that Jesus has with any woman in the gospels. And, Miles argues, it is a teasing, almost flirtatious banter about the discord between the Jews, the Samaritans and the Galileans. It results in the woman’s acceptance of Jesus as Messiah, but Miles makes it clear that with a few minor turns of phrase it might have moved in another, more carnal, direction.

Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman occurs at a well, one of the few places in which women of the time could appear in public unaccompanied by a man. The fact that he speaks to her privately is potentially scandalous; his disciples “marvel” at the fact that he talked with a woman even though, John says, they chose not to mention it to him.

Ruth and the Samaritan woman are two prime examples of the status of women in biblical times, both made more striking in that the women are also members of unpopular ethnic groups.

It’s worth noting that Ruth’s message of acceptance has been taken up by another group often unpopular in religious circles: While researching Ruth for a church lesson, I came across several internet posts indicating that the book is a favorite in the gay and lesbian community. Evidently the Hebrew words used to describe the relationship between Ruth and Naomi are those used to describe the relationships between heterosexual married partners. In particular, the Hebrew word “dabaq”, translated in the King James Version as “cleave”, used in Ruth 1:14 when Ruth chooses to stay with Naomi while her sister-in-law Orpah returns to her birth family, is the same as that used in the famous passage of Genesis (2:24) often quoted in wedding ceremonies: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall be one flesh.”

Ruth’s words to Naomi in 1:16 are seen in this view as more like those a lover would speak than what one would expect from a daughter-in-law: “Do not ask me to leave you, or turn back from following you; for wherever you go I will go, and wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God, my God. And wherever you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord cause this to happen to me, and more also, if anything but death parts you and me.”

Til death do us part, indeed.

One essay I read notes that while Leviticus forbids a man to lay down with another man as with a woman, it says nothing to forbid same-sex relationships between women.

If Naomi and Ruth were lovers, why would Naomi promote the relationship between Ruth and Boaz? Naomi goes so far as to send Ruth to the threshing floor -- a place notorious for the prostitutes who came there to service the agricultural workers (see the book of Hosea)—to spend the night with Boaz. Naomi’s actions are explained in these alternative readings by the status of women in ancient society; without a man in their lives, Naomi and Ruth had no protection, no hope of a decent life.

Let’s finish with a puzzler -- How do we square the acceptance of Ruth into the Jewish community with this dictate from Deuteronomy 23: “An Ammonite or a Moabite shall not enter the assembly of the Lord; even to the tenth generation none of his descendants shall enter the the assembly of the Lord forever, because they did not meet you with bread and water when you came out of Egypt, and because they hired against you Balaam son of Beor from Mesopotamia to curse you.”

I don’t know, other than to say that clearly the Deuteronomist and the author of Ruth weren’t on speaking terms. Given the differing messages, I’ll take Ruth's.

The Charms of Tobit

The various books of the Bible can be described in many ways – powerful, thought-provoking, inspiring, even frightening – but there are few that I would describe as charming. Tobit is an exception. This book – canonical in the Catholic and Orthodox Christian churches, considered apocryphal in most others – is a stand-alone short story that is full of charm. By that I mean that it is gentle, sometimes humorous, and captivating, a tale of faith, good behavior, reward for patience and a love story to boot.

Biblical scholars tell us that Tobit was probably written in what is called the Intertestamental period, the centuries between the compilation of the Tanakh by the Men of the Great Assembly (perhaps around 450 BC) and the writings of the new Testament.

Although not part of the Tanakh, the book of Tobit was included in the Greek translation of the Jewish Bible, called the Septuagint, that was the primary text used by diaspora Jews throughout the Roman Empire for several hundred years (Greek was a commonly spoken language for these Jews, whereas many of them were evidently not fluent in Hebrew), and a fragment of Tobit in Hebrew has been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls in Qumran.

The Septuagint (roughly, the book of the 70) is named for the process by which it was supposedly created. Seventy-two scribes were said to have been housed separately in 72 cells, and in 72 days produced translations of the Bible in Greek that were word-for-word identical.

According to the Talmud:

"King Ptolemy once gathered 72 Elders. He placed them in 72 chambers, each of them in a separate one, without revealing to them why they were summoned. He entered each one's room and said: 'Write for me the Torah of Moshe, your teacher.' God put it in the heart of each one to translate identically as all the others did."

The resulting text included 10 books that are not part of the Tanakh, plus additions to the books of Daniel and Esther.

When Jerome translated the Bible into Latin in the 5th century, he included Tobit along with six other books of the Septuagint that are not part of the Hebrew text. Thus, Tobit became part of the Roman Catholic canon (the Orthodox churches use the Greek Septuagint as their Old Testament biblical source).

When Martin Luther came in for his cleansing of the church, he threw out those extra books, including Tobit, because they were not part of the Tanakh. And when the great King James translation into English was done, the extra seven books of the Catholic Bible were separated out into a middle section called the Apocrypha (the King James Bible, beautiful and powerful as its language is, was a child of politics – an attempt to create a translation that all English-speaking faithful could use, regardless of their particular brand of faith. Its creation is detailed in Adam Nicolson’s wonderful account, God’s Secretaries.

So today, Tobit is canonical for roughly two-thirds of the world’s Christians, while for most Protestant churches it is considered extra-canonical, and sometimes even heretical.

When Tobit was removed from the Protestant canon, church leaders had to justify its exclusion, and I suspect that arguing that the Jews didn’t consider it canonical didn’t hold much water, given the regard in which Jews were held. So the argument was made that Tobit was full of devilish magic. The argument had to be made strongly, because Tobit was a much-beloved book, for reasons that I will try to make clear (it continues to be beloved in the churches that consider it canonical, and its text is often used in Catholic wedding ceremonies).

Tobit tells the story of a Jewish family in exile from the Holy Land, part of the Assyrian captivity. The character who gives the book its title is a faithful Jew who, even before the captivity, rebelled against his neighbors in the tribe of Napthali who had turned to worship of Ba’al. Unlike them, Tobit continued to travel regularly to Jerusalem, to tithe at the temple. A man of faith and goodness, he also notes that he shopped in Jerusalem, supporting the local economy by spending another tenth of his income there, and gave a third tenth to charity.

The first two chapters of Tobit are narrated in the first person. Tobit tells of being taken captive to the city of Nineveh, on the Tigris, where he remained observant to Jewish dietary law while other Jews turned to the local fare; rose to the rank of purchasing agent in the government of King Shalmaneser; married a kinswoman, Anna, and sired a son, Tobias; and then became a fugitive when he rebelled against the cruel policies of Shalmaneser’s son and successor, King Sennacherib. Sennacherib was a murderous sort, who killed his enemies and cast their bodies to rot outside the city walls. Tobit made it his mission to give those bodies a proper burial, and when the king found out, Tobit had to go into hiding, leaving his wife and son behind.

Fortunately for Tobit, Sennacherib’s reign was short-lived. Within 50 days of Tobit’s flight, Sennacherib was m,urdered by two of his sons, and replaced by one of those sons, Esarhaddon. Esarhaddon, evidently a kindlier sort, appointed Tobit’s nephew as a sort of chief of staff – a sort of analog to Joseph in Egypt – paving the way for Tobit’s return.

But as Tobit and his family are preparing to celebrate the feast of the Pentecost, another crisis occurs. Tobit has sent his son, Tobias, out to find some local poverty-stricken Jews and invite them to the table. But Tobias returns, saying that a Jew has been strangled and dumped in the marketplace. Tobit rushes out to find and bury him, resulting in ridicule from his neighbors. Weeping over this, Tobit goes to the courtyard of his home and falls asleep. Some sparrows poop on his face and into his eyes, causing cataracts that blind him. Oy!

With Tobit out of commission, Anna has to go to work, evidently doing some sort of piecework – perhaps as a seamstress – for the local rich folk.

In chapter 3, we cut to an another scene, in a city called Ectabana of Media (Media being another district of the kingdom). There we learn of a relative of Tobit, Sarah, the daughter of Raguel, who has married seven men, all of whom died on their wedding night, before consummating the marriages.

Sarah is being mocked by her maids in a scene that recalls an earlier Sarah, Abraham’s barren sister-wife, being mocked by the pregnant slave girl Hagar. The maids suggest that Sarah of Raguel has strangled her husbands, and hope that she never is able to bear children.

In cross-cutting that strikes me as very cinematic, we return to Nineveh and Tobit, who suddenly remembers that years ago he left some money for safe-keeping with a friend in another Median city, Rages. This money could now be useful, since Tobit can’t work and he has argued with Anna over her income (he suggests that she stole a goat that she was given in payment, and she calls him a “know-it-all”).

So Tobit enlists his son, Tobias, to travel to Rages to collect the cash.

Enter Raphael, an archangel. Raphael has been sent to help the family out, both the Tobits in Nineveh and the Raguels in Rages. Tobias goes searching for a traveling companion and finds Raphael, who presents himself to the family as a distant relative (the angel’s deception is another basis for early Protestants arguments against the canonicity of Tobit – angels don’t lie!) and is given Tobit’s blessing to accompany his son on the journey.

The archangel Raphael is mentioned by name only in the book of Tobit. In Daniel, we have two other named archangels, Michael and Gabriel (Gabriel shows up again in the gospel of Luke, to speak to Zacharias about the unexpected late-in-life pregnancy of Elizabeth). A fourth named archangel, Uriel, shows up in several deuterocanonical books (Enoch, 2 Esdras) and some Gnostic texts. These angels act as messengers and guides – the word angel comes from the Hebrew for messenger – and only marginally act in supernatural ways. Thus Raphael gives Tobias what one might call unconventional medical advice (it may have been conventional at the time, for all I know), but doesn’t really provide anything in the way of supernatural assistance, at least in my reading of the book.

The boy and the angel set out, with – wait for it – Tobias’ little dog in tow. This is the first time in the Bible we hear about a pet. The dog doesn’t play any sort of pivotal role, and is only mentioned twice – on the journey to Rages and the journey home – but still. A pet. Another reason to love the story. (that dog has captured the imagination of many writers, including Swift, Voltaire and Smollett--- all of whom refer to him in their works – as well as that of painters, who inevitably include the dog in their depictions of Tobias and Raphael).

On the road, the trio stop to fish for dinner, and Tobias catches a big one. Raphael tells him to save the liver, the heart and the gall, because they make useful medicine (this is the source of the charges that the story is magical in nature. I don’t know, sounds like folk medicine to me).

So on they go to Rages, where they stop in at their relative Raguel’s house and Tobias falls in love with Sarah. The pair marry as the family and the maids look on in fear, but Raphael has told Tobias that if anyone is troubled by a demon (Sarah’s woes are ascribed to the demon Asmodeus), burning the heart and liver and surrounding the afflicted person with the smoke will drive the demon away. Tobias does as he has been told, lives through the wedding night, and emerges in the morning to the delight of all involved.

Tobias asks Raphael to go to Rages and collect his Dad’s money (they have the receipt), which Raphael does, allowing Tobias and Sarah to spend some time with Sarah’s folks before they move back to Nineveh. On their arrival in Nineveh, Tobias rubs the fish gall in Tobit’s eyes (yuk, but I can see why the caustic gall might have been tried as a remedy for cataracts), curing him.

And, essentially, they all live happily ever after.

Woven through the story are testament’s to Tobit’s faith and kindness. He not only buries the dead, he tithes, gives to the poor and loves his family deeply. I want to quote extensively from Chapter 4, where Tobit gives fatherly advice to Tobias before sending him off on his journey.

“My son, if I die, bury me, but do not disregard your mother. Honor her all the days of your life. Do what is pleasing to her; but do not grieve her. Remember, my son, that she experienced many dangers for you while you were in the womb … My son, remember the Lord our God all your days, and do not desire to sin or to disobey His commandments. Do righteousness all the days of your life, and do not walk in the ways of wrongdoing. For if you walk in the truth, you will be successful in your works. Do almsgiving from your possessions to all who do righteousness. When you do almsgiving, do not let your eye be envious. Do not turn your face away from any poor man, so the face of God will not be turned away from you. Do almsgiving based on the quantity of your possessions. If you possess only a few, do not be afraid to give according to the little you have … So now, my son, love your brothers and do not be arrogant in your heart against your brothers, the sons and daughters of your people. Take a wife for yourself from them, for arrogance brings destruction and great disorder, and in such worthlessness there is loss and great defect … Do not keep overnight the wages of any man who works for you, but pay him immediately. If you serve God, He will pay you. Give heed to yourself, my son, in all your works, and be disciplined in all your conduct. What you yourself hate, do not do to anyone … From your bread, give to him who is hungry and from your clothing, give to the naked … Seek counsel from every sensible man, and do not treat any useful advice with contempt. At every opportunity bless the Lord God, but more than this ask that your ways may become straight, and that all your paths and purposes may prosper.”

Beautiful, wonderful advice for living. I’ll say no more, because there is no way I could say it as well.

Fear and Loathing in the Holy Land

God is love. Fear God. The two antithetical sentiments are pervasive in Judeo-Christian culture. How do we reconcile them?

Growing up, I was often told that the key difference between the portrayal of God in the New Testament vs. the Old Testament centered on this issue: That the New Testament we see God as loving, while in the Old Testament we see Him as angry and vengeful.

Certainly, the Bible gives us ground for such an interpretation, but, as is usual with such extreme distillations, the truth is somewhat less simple. And, I would add, a hell of a lot more interesting. It shouldn’t be surprising that a work as rich and complex as the Bible can’t be boiled down to a black and white statement, but, depending on the way we live our lives, we may be tempted to categorize God in one way or the other.

I’d like to personally thank God for not being so easily compartmentalized. Because if things were so black-and-white, we might be missing a few of the legacies the Bible has handed down to us: Literature, art, music, drama, just to name a few examples. And I don’t think our lives would be better for it.

It is a fact that in the New Testament, we read that God is love. We see this expressed directly in documents like 1 John (“He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love” 4:8) and Paul’s brilliant and moving 1 Corinthians: 13, but also through the entire ministry of Jesus.

And, in the Old Testament, we have the famous stories of God’s anger and vengeance: The Flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the tribulations of Job and many more (Personally, a story that has always gobsmacked me is that of Uzzah, struck dead when he touched the Ark of the Covenant to steady it during transport. It just seems so unfair, so outsized a punishment for a mistake that was intended to be helpful).

On the other hand, we can find plenty to be fearful about in the New Testament (many careers have been built on scaring people about the visions in Revelation), while evidence of God’s mercy and compassion abound in the Old. And often, the two poles are brought together in ways that illuminate our own mixed-up natures.

Nowhere is this more true than in the patriarchal stories that comprise the mid-section of Genesis (roughly, chapters 11-36).

Because I tend to let my thoughts about the Bible guide and inspire my other reading, I often find Biblical significance in works of other authors. I began reading Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom last winter, because I had read a reference to his interpretation of the Fall, and I’ve progressed slowly through Fromm’s famous analysis of the appeal of fascism as a  political movement, putting it down and picking it up as the mood strikes me.

On a recent morning I read the following in Escape from Freedom:

“The fact of human individuation, of the destruction of all ‘primary bonds,’ cannot be reversed … We have seen that man cannot endure this negative freedom, that he tries to escape into new bondage which is to be a substitute for the primary bonds which he has given up. But these new bonds do not constitute real union with the world. He pays for the new security by giving up the integrity of his self.”

My thoughts went immediately to Jacob, oscillating between the poles of danger and servitude, fleeing first from the wrath of his angry twin and finding solace in a life of servitude with Laban, and then, 20 years later making the journey in reverse, escaping the security of his life in Laban’s service by heading to the long-deferred confrontation with Esau. In each case, Jacob is destroying primary bonds with family members; ultimately he comes into self-actualization by, in rapid succession, striking a pact with Laban and making peace with his estranged brother.

I thought about Esau as a self-actualized man, someone who overcomes rejection by his family to build a successful life, one that allows him to forgive his brother’s hurtful deception and embrace him. Esau has moved naturally to the state that Jacob comes to through slow and painful evolution of his thinking.
And my thoughts returned to the story that has occupied my attention for a couple of weeks now, that of Jacob and Esau’s grandfather, Abraham, who is honored as the founding figure of the world’s three great monotheistic religions.

Abraham is a traveling man. When we first read of him, he is traveling from Ur, an ancient city on the Persian Gulf, toward Canaan, with his wife Sarai, his father Terah, and his nephew Lot. The family settles first in Haran (usually equated with the Turkish city of Harran). God urges Abram (as he is called at that time) on southward to Canaan. We are told that he goes on to Egypt – where he first presents Sarai as his sister out of misguided fear for his life -- and then back to Canaan, which God has promised to him and his heirs.

Fear is a driver for Abram/Abraham, as we see in several places.

We aren’t told in the Bible why his father Terah chooses to uproot the family from Ur and head westward; Thomas Mann muses in Joseph and His Brothers that political oppression is the catalyst. But Abram/Abraham’s parallel actions in the court of the Pharoah and the court of Abimelech – each time he presents Sarah as his sister out of fear for his own life if his hosts lust after his beautiful wife – demonstrate his willingness to sacrifice his integrity in the face of fear. And the stunning story of his attempt to sacrifice his beloved son, Issac, shines a harsh light on his fearful behavior.

I grew up being told that the sacrifice of Isaac was meant to show us the rewards we earn for obedience to God. But when I read the episode at this stage in my life, I see it differently.

We all know the outline of this story, related in Genesis 22. God decides to test Abraham, ordering him to take his son to a mountain in the land of Moriah and to sacrifice him as a burnt offering. Abraham, who has been happy to question and negotiate with God on previous occasions (see Genesis 18, where he bargains with God on the conditions for destroying Sodom and Gomorrah), for some untold reason blindly follows the horrifying instructions this time. He leads his son to the mountain, ties him up and places him on the woodpile and is about to slice him open with a cleaver when a messenger of God stops him.

Here’s what the angel says to Abraham (in Robert Alter’s translation): “Do not reach out your hand against the lad, and do nothing to him, for now I know that you fear God, and you have not held back your son, your only one, from Me.”

This is what I hear in those words: “Hold on there, fool! Do you have any idea what the hell you are about to do? This is what fear drives you to, and you’re damn lucky I’m here to stop you before you do something you will regret for the rest of your life.”

Now I know I am taking a leap here, but I think it’s a reasonable interpretation of the story.

I want to cite the following passage from Escape from Freedom:

“In watching the phenomenon of human decisions, one is struck by the extent to which people are mistaken in taking as ‘their’ decision what in effect is submission to convention, duty, or simple pressure.”

Abraham’s behavior in Genesis 22 is, I think, perilously close to what Fromm describes as “automaton” behavior, the kind of blind obedience that can lead to the rise of fascism (a word I want to use sparingly, because of its overuse in what passes for contemporary political discourse). Fromm contrasts this automaton behavior with “positive freedom,” which he describes as “… the realization of the self [which] implies the full affirmation of the uniqueness of the individual."

I think that’s what the patriarchal stories are all about: The development of the individual, of individual consciousness and, ultimately, self-consciousness.

The strange little story of the Tower of Babel, which serves, in literary terms, as a prelude to the Abrahamic stories, abstracts the theme of individuation, which is then explored in haunting detail through the three generations of the patriarchy and the culmination in the story of Joseph and his brothers.

From Fromm again:

“Men are born equal but they are also born different. The basis of this difference is the inherited equipment, physiological and mental, with which they start life, to which is added the peculiar constellation of circumstances and experiences that they meet with. This individual basis of personality is as little identical with any other as two organisms are ever identical physically.”

I’m drawn here to the promise that God makes twice to Abraham and once to his grandson Jacob. I want to quote all three passages:

Genesis 13:16: “And I will make your seed like the dust of the earth – could a man count the dust of the earth, so too, your seed might be counted.”

Genesis 22:17: “I will greatly bless you and will greatly multiply your seed, as the stars in the heavens and as the sand on the shore of the sea, and your seed shall take hold of its enemies’ gate.”

Genesis 28:14: “And your seed shall be like the dust of the earth and you shall burst forth to the west and the east and the north and the south, and all the clans of the earth shall be blessed through you and through your seed.”

It’s a promise of great fertility, of course. But there’s also a suggestion that with those great numbers comes a certain anonymity, a lack of differentiation, at least from a certain distance. Looking at the dust of the earth, the stars in the sky and the sand on the shore, we may see them at one scale as a solid mass, at another scale as a collection of indistinct particles. Upon very close examination, we may begin to see that each particle is unique.

That’s what we do in the patriarchal stories: At a broad scale, we read about the birth of many nations (and while Israel is in some sense chosen, it is not strictly privileged – these other nations are powerful and prosperous, worthy adversaries on the earthly playing field), then we move in for the extreme close-up, and see, for the first time in the Bible, the complexities of character in each individual. And fear -- fear of bodily harm, fear of retribution, fear of isolation, fear of abandonment, fear of God – plays an important role in those characters.

As a dedicated 12-stepper, I’ve learned – and come to believe – that fear is a dangerous driver, that it leads us to make bad decisions. And that’s what I see happening here. But, in good 12-step fashion, I don’t think the point is simply that Abraham must ignore his fear. It’s that he needs to stop and look at the consequences of fear, and examine his decision to follow it to its grisly climax.

In one of those strange coincidences that I can only attribute to spiritual guidance, I picked up the other day a book that I had purchased several months ago and had set aside: Mark C. Taylor’s Altarity. I had purchased this book while I was rapidly reading through several other works by Taylor (well, as rapidly as you can read Taylor, whose prose, while clear and lucid, is rather dense with meaning). But at the time, I felt the need to spend time with some other sources – chiefly Freud and Fromm. Picking up Altarity, and opening to the spot where I had inserted a bookmark, I was struck dumb by the image on the page: a Rembrandt sketch (it later became a painting) depicting the sacrifice of Isaac.

Taylor uses this illustration as the jumping-off point for an explication of Hegelian philosophy, and in particular of Hegel’s characterization of the three stages in the development of consciousness: Primal unity, separation, reconciliation. Hegel matches these three developmental stages to three cultures: Greek, Jew, Christian. And while I will steer clear of challenging Hegel on his characterization of these cultures – I don’t think I’m ready to argue with Hegel – I do want to say that I see the three stages playing out in the narrative of the patriarchy, both in its overall arch -- beginning with the disruption of originary unity at the Tower of Babel, then personalized in the story of Abraham’s departure from Ur and completed in the reconciliation of Joseph with his brothers and father in Egypt – and in the individual stories of Abraham and of Jacob (Joseph is not considered a patriarch, although his story is continuous with that of his ancestors).

These stories are all about identity and difference, and their reconciliation in the recognition of identity in difference and of difference in identity. By this I mean (as Hegel meant) that the two notions are inextricably bound to each other. Neither means anything except in relation to the other. And the recognition of that relationship is necessary to the development of the self-conscious individual and the emergency of the philosopher.

Taylor writes:

“For Hegel, spirit is ‘pure self-recognition in absolute otherness’ … Within Hegel’s panoptical system, difference always returns to identity.”

Taylor further cites Hegel’s reference to a moment of “fear and trembling” that is a necessary precursor to the emergence of self consciousness, an instant where these paradoxical notions seem utterly irreconcilable. To get to the other side, we need to work through that moment. That’s the function of art, of writing, of creativity which, as I have written before, allows us to criss-cross the boundary between earth and heaven and to behave as the image of God in whose spirit we were created.

There’s a certain parallel between the Hebrew story of the sacrifice of Isaac and the Christian story of the crucifixion of Jesus. In the first, an earthly father prepares to sacrifice his son out of fear, and is stopped before he takes the fatal action; in the second, the heavenly father completes the sacrifice of his Son out of love (see John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.”)

Why the difference in outcomes? The difference between acting out of fear and acting out of love is part of it. So is the stage of consciousness. The father Abraham is at this point not fully self-conscious; although his son is part of him, Abraham sees him as other, as an object suitable for sacrifice – at least he does until God wakes him out of his stupor. In the New Testament, especially in John, father and son are different manifestations of one, universal spirit, which God of course recognizes because, well, He’s God.

In Hegelian terms, love privileges identity over difference, while fear privileges difference over identity. There are a number of ways we can process this. We can, for instance, accept the contradiction that God is love AND God is fear. We can look at fear as a necessary way-station on the path to true love. We can focus on one and ignore the other. We each make our own choices, and our choices may evolve over time.

I don’t have a conclusive statement on this, because I’m still working through the complex of paradox and contradiction myself. Instead, I want to close this rumination with another couple of quotes from Altarity:

“Identity, in itself difference, and difference, in itself identity, join in contradiction, which Hegel defines as the identity of identity and difference. Inasmuch as identity and difference necessarily include their opposites within themselves, they are inherently self-contradictory … In Hegel’s System, such contradiction is the root of all movement and vitality; it is the pulse of life universal.”

“Since every living being is a concrete embodiment of universal life force, nothing can be fully comprehended until it is conceived as an integral member of an intricate totality. Inasmuch as life is all-encompassing, its divisions are internal differentiations, which, in the final analysis, must be taken up within the whole of which they are necessarily parts.”