What the Hell, I'll Post it Anyway

The close literary reading of Genesis 22 in my post on Friday suggests that what we're given here is a skeletal narrative where, generally speaking, detail is stripped down to the bare bones. The narrator says nothing about the characters and the characters say barely anything to each other -- i.e., hardly any words are spoken between Abraham and Isaac or between Abraham and God. This suggests to me that silence is as important as speech, and the white spaces between the words are as important as the black marks on the page. The point about the silence of this narrative was first made by a German Jewish scholar, Erich Auerbach, in a famous article written when he was living in exile from the Nazis in Istanbul during World War II. Auerbach was not a biblical scholar, but a professor of what we would now call comparative literature, and the essay ‘Odysseus’s Scar’ is a comparison of the style of Homer’s Odyssey and the style of Genesis 22. Basically what he says is that Homer knows no background, that he cannot resist telling us everything, that with Homer there is ‘never a lacuna, never a gap, never a glimpse of unplumbed depths’. But Genesis 22, in contrast, is ‘fraught with background’: in Genesis everything is hidden, as though buried. Some of Auerbach's observations include:

The landscape, the serving men, the ass, ... do not even admit an adjective . . . they are there to serve the end which God has commanded; what in other respects there were, they are, or will be, remains in darkness.

Isaac is not characterised apart from his relation to his father and apart from the story; he may be handsome or ugly, intelligent or stupid, we are not told.

We are told nothing about the journey except that it took three days . . . [it’s as if] the journey took place through a vacuum; it is as if, while he travelled on, Abraham had looked neither to the right nor to the left . . .

The story does not seek to enchant us, to lure us in, like the narratives of Homer –- it is stark and uncompromising –- leaving us to accept it (or reject it).

Auerbach’s comments on Genesis 22 have been taken to describe the typical style of all biblical narrative (at least in the OT/Tanakh) but this is only true to an extent. Certainly it is true that biblical narratives are more terse than modern novels, that they tend to use very few adjectives or adverbs, to include only short conversations, and to give us very little glimpse of the character’s inner consciousness. But at the same time, since Hebrew literature spans 1,500 years we can hardly expect the authors to all conform to one typical virtual stylesheet and to use one typically biblical style. In fact there is a lot of difference between Genesis 22, and, say, the story of Esther, or the apocryphal stories of Tobit, Judith and Susanna, which are all much later and come from different (Persian and Hellenistic) cultural contexts. Even in Genesis, some narratives are far more longwinded than Genesis 22 -- eg., the 64 verse story of the meeting of Isaac and Rebekah at the well (Genesis 24).

The silences of Genesis 22 are not just an indication of typical biblical style, and in fact contribute to the specialness and the strangeness of this text. In fact I think it is the silence, together with the scandal of what Abraham is asked by God to do, that make this text so mesmerising and influential. Apart from the story of Eden this is the most famous story in the whole of the book of Genesis, not to mention a central story in the three monotheistic (or Abrahamic) religions –- Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Christianity, for instance, has traditionally read the story as anticipating the crucifixion; and in Judaism the story is read annually during the High Holy Days at the New Year festival of Rosh Hashanah. The story is known (after that part of the text where Abraham binds Isaac) as the binding -– the Akedah -– and is commemorated in the liturgy and the blowing of the ram’s horn, the shofar. In both religions, the meaning of the story is mercy, binding, obligation, and sacrificial love, and the mutual binding or love betwen God and his people; or, respectively, it is about a God who so loved the world that he gave his son and the father who so loved God that he gave his son to God.

Part of the power of the story is that it shows the absolute importance of God –- that a man is prepared to go to these lengths to obey his command, even to the extent that he is prepared to offer up the life of his son. If we actually think about this story, rather than receiving a children’s Bible version of it, it is both awful (frightening, perhaps even disgusting, in its implications) and awesome (the most striking testimony to belief in God that is possible). Arguing against what he saw as the lazy, easy interpretation of the story, the Danish Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard argued that it should make Christians shudder and make them ‘sleepless’, and that this was certainly not a story that they could read easily, while ‘puffing at their pipels and stretching out his legs’. In his famous book Fear and Trembling (first published in 1841, and all about the Abraham and Isaac story) he wrote:

We speak in Abraham’s honour, by making what he does a commonplace: his greatness was that he so loved God that he was willing to offer him the best that he had’. This is very true, but ‘best’ is a vague word . . . What is left out of the Abraham story is the anguish, yet anguish is a dangerous affair for the squeamish, and so we interchange the words Isaac and best’ (S. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling [trans. A Hannay; Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1985] p. 58).

Kierkegaard argues here that it is simply a cop-out to turn Isaac from a son into a ‘thing ‘and to reduce this story to the simple lesson that we should always give God our best. The reason that the story is so awful and awe-inspiring, the reason that it makes us fear and tremble, is that Abraham is asked to give up his son –- a command to make any human being and any parent tremble. (I'm reminded, as I write this, of the Violent Femmes' classic song, 'Country Death Song'.) Isaac may or may not be a child –- if you take Genesis literally, he could be up to forty years old -- but to reduce him to just a case of Abraham's 'best thing' is to deny the special, unique status that the text gives to him, not to mention Abraham’s love. (There is no evidence that I know of that ancient people felt any less strongly about sons and daughters than we do).

Kierkegaard’s message to Christian preachers is be careful how you interpret and preach this story and how easily you endorse it, because what if someone foolish in the congregation goes out and gives his ‘best’ in the form of a son? This is a dangerous story if you take it literally, and in fact you can only preach it by saying ‘Don’t actually do what Abraham did!' (I.e., don’t try this at home). The example of Abraham is open to terrible misinterpretation: Mohammed Atta, pilot of American Airlines flight 11 left a note in which he saw himself as an ‘Isaac’ figure, being sacrificed, while on 6 January (Epiphany) 1990 a man in California took one of his daughters to a park, made her pray the Lord’s prayer, and took the knife to her and killed her because God had told him; he was tried and found ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’.

Kierkegaard says, effectively ‘Let’s be honest, what preachers should really say is that if you follow the example of Abraham to the letter we will treat you as a criminal or lock you in a madhouse'. A modern society cannot tolerate the idea of a voice of God which goes against all other ethical demands. Immanuel Kant said –- and one would hope that all reasonable people would agree with him -– that the commands of God, as individuals understand them anyway, should always be tested against ethics. This means that if people hear God telling them to do something unethical, they should assume that they have misheard. The shocking, indeed downright revolting, thing about this story is that Abraham is told to do something, and agrees to do something, that goes against the one of the most fundamental ethical principles, namely that you must protect and not hurt your family and those you love.

What makes this story so disorienting and disturbing is that people usually expect religion and ethics to be the same, but here the command of God seems to contradict ethics. Strikingly, maybe even damningly, according to Kierkegaard, Abraham is doing an ethically terrible thing, but a religiously good thing: ‘The ethical expression for what Abraham did is that he was willing to murder Isaac; the religious expression is that he was willing to sacrifice Isaac, but in this contradiction lies the very anguish that can make one sleepless’. It is of course important that God stops the sacrifice at the very last moment, but Abraham is rewarded for being prepared to offer the sacrifice. The messenger tells him ‘Because you have done this, your descendants will be blessed.’ God doesn't say, as we might wish him to,’No Abraham, don’t be stupid, I got you to do this so that you could see that sacrifice is wrong’. Instead God says ‘Well done Abraham, I see from your offering of Isaac that you really love God’.

If all this makes you uncomfortable (as indeed Kierkegaard says it should), then maybe you'll take heart at some of the classic arguments that have been used to remove some of the text's sting.

1. Genesis 22 was written in the context of cultures that regularly offered children as sacrifice and was written to put and end to such abominable practices.

2. Abraham had faith that God would never let his son be killed and so did Isaac, and so they were insulated from anguish by faith.

I'd be one of the first who'd like these explanations to be right, and cannot but empathise with any attempt to close the gap between religion and ethics and make this text less dangerous. But the problem is that neither are all that convincing, for the following reasons:

a) There is no historical evidence for child-sacrifice in Israel or Canaan –- the existing evidence comes from Carthage in N. Africa, and from Phoenician deposits (the argument being that Israel and Canaan had trade and cultural contact with Phoenicia and may have been influenced by these practices). The biblical evidence itself is ambiguous -- sometimes clearly campaigning against child-sacrifice, sometimes seeming to endorse the idea that the firstborn should be given to God, sometimes suggesting that the sacrifice of the firstborn is effective.

There is also evidence that child sacrifice is not common practice in Genesis 22 itself. Why, if sacrifice is a common practice, does Abraham keeps the sacrifice from the two young men? And why does God reward the principle of sacrifice if it is his desire that sacrifice be eradicated. If this is anti-child sacrifice polemic, it is the worst anti-child sacrifice polemic that I have ever read. (Surely the angel should intervene and say something, with after-school special music playing in the background, along the lines of ‘No Abraham, don’t you see a loving God would never require such abominable practices’ . . .)

b) If Abraham knows that Isaac will not be killed and Isaac knows that Isaac will be not be killed then where is the test? If they know already that a loving and kind God could never allow something so terrible, then they must simply be going through the motions (imagine Abraham looking heavenwards and saying to God ‘I’m holding the knife now, I’m waiting for you to prevent this’ and you have a nicer, but very different story). I could be persuaded that Abraham believes that the command of God is right, and that God will do something to make it turn out in some way right –- that even if Isaac dies it will be in some way or sense made right again. But if you drain the text of its anguish it seems to become as meaningless as many non-religiously inclined people regard religion. Surely the whole point is that Abraham and Isaac suffer in offering up Isaac and this is crucial to the significance of the text.

Like many people I find that this text disturbing, but I can't help but return to it. As Kierkegaard says, there are more problems for biblical scholars than can be solved by ‘knowing Hebrew’, (would that the problems were linguistic or archaeological, and solvable!) and there is enough in (or maybe not in) this slim little narrative to keep preachers going ‘for several Sundays’. It is because the text is so ethically troubling –- and also so very silent –- that it has mesmerised readers, religious and irreligious alike, through the centuries.