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The Sacrifice of
Abraham by Rembrandt van Rijn
(1635), in the Hermitage, St. Petersburg,
Russia
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In the beginning of the last decade of the twentieth
century,
in the most modern of places—the United States of America—a
tragedy
of biblical proportions unfolded with the morning newspaper:
"Father Sacrificed Child. God Told Him To."
| | So accustomed are we to horrendous tales of domestic violence that
this headline might seem only a bizarre twist on the ordinary. People
who read about the incident over their morning coffee noted it,
registered a reaction, and turned the page, muttering, "The man must
be crazy." In this way, the man was defined, the deed was labeled,
and the whole thing could be put out of mind. A year later, when he
came to trial, only one of the jurors remembered the newspaper
story.
| | Yet once upon a time, God asked another father to sacrifice his
child. For his willingness to obey God's command, Abraham became the
model of faith at the foundation of the three monotheistic
(Abrahamic) religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. His story
has been inscribed on the hearts and minds of billions of people for
millennia. Even today, Abraham's devotion is revered and his example
extolled in countless sermons and in the secular media. With that
cultural model readily available, it is not so surprising that a
father in our time felt he must obey God's command. Yet for his
willingness to comply with what he took to be God's request, he was
brought to trial.
| | Perhaps, then, we should put the Abraham story on trial as well.
Because, while the contemporary case helps bring the Abraham story
emotionally closer and raises several issues, it cannot raise the
most important question: why is the willingness to sacrifice one's
child the quintessential model of faith; why not the passionate
protection of the child? What would be the shape of our society had
that been the supreme model of faith and commitment? By critically
examining the Abraham story, I think we can catch a glimpse.
| | If it is true, as author Shalom Spiegel suggests, that the "story
of Abraham renews itself in every time of crisis," then the time has
come to take another look. The crisis of society today is about
values, about the very values that, I think, are epitomized by the
Abraham story—not just faith and sacrifice but also the nature of
authority; the basis and structure of the family, its gender
definitions and roles; and which children, under what circumstances,
shall be deemed acceptable and be provided for. My purpose is not to
reinvigorate these values but to challenge them at their
foundation.
| | The story of Abraham, some will say, is just a story about
something that happened (or might have happened) long ago. They feel
it has little to do with their lives or their faith, and thus they do
not usually imagine that it has any bearing on contemporary life.
What they forget is that the story of Abraham, like that of Jesus,
was powerful enough to change the course of human history. It is
clear that the story of Abraham is not just one story among others;
it is, as Judah Goldin writes, "central to the nervous system of
Judaism and Christianity." It is also central to Islam. Insofar as it
has shaped the three religious traditions, their ethical values, and
their views of social relations, it has shaped the realities we live
by. Even if we are not believers, any of us raised in a culture
influenced by Judaism, Christianity, or Islam has been affected by
the values, attitudes, and structures exemplified by the story.
| | It is therefore important to uncover the set of assumptions that
make the story possible, to get behind the story. Traditional
exegeses proceed out from the story and move quickly to conventional
contexts for interpretation—namely, sacrifice and faith—contexts
that predetermine possible lines of interpretation. For example, if
the story is viewed in the context of the theories and meanings of
sacrifice, then the questions put to it will be how and in what ways
does it conform to, deviate from, or shed light on known sacrificial
practices? Related, surely, is whether the story represents the end
of the supposed practice of child sacrifice and the institution of
animal sacrifice. But even if child sacrifice was practiced in the
ancient Near East, such interpretations fail to recognize that
Abraham is revered not for putting an end to the practice but for his
willingness to go through with it. That is what establishes him as
the father of faith. That is what I find so terrifying. The story is
not about substitution, symbolic or otherwise, but about a new
morality; it represents not the end of the practice of child
sacrifice but the beginning of a new order.
| | Interpretations that focus on Abraham's faith argue that to
demonstrate his absolute, unswerving faith he had to be willing to
sacrifice the thing he loved most in the world: the son he waited so
long to have, the very child his God had promised. The paradoxical
aspect reveals, to some, the mystery of God and the power of faith;
one must simply make a leap of faith and believe. I am suspicious of
these types of interpretations and think there is another, less
mysterious question that, perhaps because it is so simple, has been
overlooked.
| | Religious commentators have failed to ask the question that has
nagged me from the time I first became a mother: what allowed Abraham
to assume the child was his to sacrifice? At first blush, the
question seems meaningless. God asked him. But could or would the
all-knowing God ask only one parent for the child, knowing that a
child belongs to both mother and father or, perhaps, to neither? The
story, however, conveys the impression that the child belonged to
Abraham in a way he did not belong to Sarah.
| | The focus on fatherhood pervades Genesis; one need only think of
all the begats and the emphasis on the patrilineage to realize that
this is the case. But if so, on what basis were children attributed
to their fathers? To say that the child belongs to the father because
of patriarchy, a usual response, explains nothing because patriarchy
means the power of fathers; such an answer is circular and only
defers the question. What we need to ask is: what is it about fathers
or fatherhood that conveys such power?
| | The answer turns on the meaning of paternity and shows how the
definition and assumptions about paternity made it possible for
Abraham to think that the child was his to sacrifice. The meanings
are integral to the story; it doesn't make sense without them.
Moreover, the same meanings have been carried over and reinforced by
ancient as well as modern, religious as well as secular,
interpretations; the meanings have been assumed, not examined. From
anthropological studies of kinship and gender, it is possible to
argue that neither the role nor the power of the father is a given in
nature and the order of things but, rather, that both are intimately
connected to a particular theory of procreation—a theory that is, in
turn, connected to a cosmological/metaphysical system.
| | Paternity has not meant just the recognition of a biological
relationship between a man and a specific child, nor the social role
built on that recognition; paternity has meant the primary, creative,
engendering role. In the Bible (and in the popular imagination) it is
symbolized by the word seed. Identity—whether of plant or of
person—is imagined as a matter of seed; in human terms it is
bequeathed by the father. The soul, also, was imagined as transmitted
via seed. The child belongs to the father because it is his seed.
Women, in contrast, have been imagined as the nurturing medium in
which the seed is planted rather than as co-creators; they foster its
growth and bring it forth but do not provide its essential identity.
The very notion of paternity, therefore, already embodies authority
and power and provides the rationale for a particular constellation
of the family and the structure of relations within it. This notion
of paternity is integral to the story of Abraham, for it is all about
his "seed."
| | The seemingly simple word seed is anything but simple or neutral.
By evoking associations with agriculture and the natural world, the
image naturalizes a structure of power relations as it also conceals
it. Represented as seed and soil, male and female roles have been
differentially valued and hierarchically ordered. This theory of
procreation, common to both the ancient Hebrews and the ancient
Greeks, has been the dominant folk theory in the West for millennia,
shaping popular images and sentiments of gender.
| | From today's perspective, this theory of procreation is obviously
erroneous. Today we believe that both male and female contribute the
same kind of thing to the identity of a child—namely, genes—and
that each contributes half the genetic endowment, or half the seed,
so to speak. Women, of course, contribute much more—by way of
nurture to the fetus in utero, by giving birth, and often by
providing additional nurture and care during its early life—yet are
still popularly associated only with the nurturing, not the creative
aspects. The modern, biogenetic understanding of reproduction is
relatively recent, known only to certain of the world's peoples, and
it tends to be confined explicitly to biomedical discourses. Yet
notions of paternity and maternity were culturally constructed long
before the development of biology and genetics, and these older
notions are still being perpetuated by popular images and sentiments
about gender and by the social arrangements, especially the family,
that continue to affect the way men and women are thought about.
| | The meanings of paternity and maternity were not originally based
on biological theory, and they do not simply change in response to
changes in biological theory. They are rooted far deeper and their
extent is far wider than the discourse and domain of reproduction;
ultimately they are rooted in a cosmological system—in this case,
the monotheistic world view that is elaborated somewhat differently
in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The foundational story of
Abraham is central to these belief systems as well as to the
societies influenced and the social arrangements legitimated by
them.
| | or believers, the story has a central place both theologically and
ritually in each of the religions.
| | Jews recite Genesis 22 annually at the new year service Rosh
Hashanah; it is also included as part of the daily morning prayers of
the devout. Christians think the story prefigures the crucifixion,
when "God the Father sacrificed his only begotten son"; a recitation
of Genesis 22 is traditionally part of the services during Easter
week. Muhammad's mission was to recall the people to the one true
religion given in the beginning to Abraham. Each year Muslims
dramatically reenact the event on the most sacred day of the Muslim
calendar—the Feast of the Sacrifice—that occurs at the end of the
rituals of the Hajj. On that day, whether in Mecca or in the home,
each male head of household sacrifices a ram (or substitute) in place
of the intended child. And every male child can imagine that, but for
the grace of God, there might he be. Told year after year, generation
after generation, the story has continued to make an impact on the
minds and emotions of people who are, as promised, countless "as the
stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore"
(Genesis 22:17).
| | The Abraham story overflows the boundaries of religious
communities. As one of the most common religious themes depicted in
painting and also well represented in literature, sculpture, and
music, it has become part of the cultural mainstream. In the space of
two weeks in November 1992, just as I began work on my book on this
topic, the story was the subject of an art exhibit in Berkeley,
California; a sermon delivered by a minister in Little Rock,
Arkansas, and directed at Bill Clinton, who was sitting in the first
pew the Sunday after his election to the presidency; and a Peanuts
cartoon just before Thanksgiving.
| | As a way of protesting the Vietnam War, Bob Dylan wrote a
song—"Highway 61 Revisited"—that imagined Abraham questioning God's
order. Perhaps he was aware of the practice of using the story of
Abraham to legitimate war, as was Wilfred Owen in his famous poem
against the "fathers" sending the "sons" off to World War I. Leonard
Cohen wrote a song called "The Sacrifice of Isaac." When George Segal
was commissioned to make a sculpture commemorating the deaths of the
students at Kent State, he chose the theme of Abraham and Isaac. And
when Kent State rejected it on the grounds that it was too
inflammatory, Princeton University bought it and placed it near the
chapel on campus.
| | The story was the subtext of President Jimmy Carter's book about
the Middle East, The Blood of Abraham; more re-cently of a novel, The
Sacrifice of Isaac, by Neil Gordon, about the ambivalent legacy of
the Holocaust; as well as of Woody Allen's film Crimes and
Misdemeanors. On Easter Sunday and Monday 1994, in the midst of my
writing, a miniseries entitled Abraham was shown on television. I
mention each of these uses of the story—and there are many
more—primarily to make the point that the story is very much alive
in contemporary American culture.
| | I approach the story of Abraham as an anthropologist, viewing it
not purely as a religious text but also as a cultural text; for no
matter how divinely inspired it may have been, it is an artifact of
human culture. My goal, however, is not to recover the particular
time and place of Abraham. The story was transmitted orally and
edited repeatedly for hundreds of years before it ever reached its
canonical form. Therefore, as R. W. L. Moberly points out in Vestum
Testamentum, "Any interpretation which substantively depends on
relating the text to a historical context must itself be forever
tentative and hypothetical." At the same time, I do not mean to imply
that it can be totally taken out of its context, for the opposite
hermeneutical tendency often assumes that it is, therefore, timeless
and represents "the human condition" or universal human psychology.
That approach is equally misleading.
| | Regardless of its provenance, the story does not merely reflect a
particular culture and society; it also incorporates a vision of
society—indeed, a vision of the cosmos—that has animated numerous
cultures over considerable time. To connect it only to a particular
time and locale would be to lose sight of that fact. Too often we
forget the way that events themselves are transformed in relation to
mythic structures of interpretation. People continue to derive their
identity, orient their lives, and interpret the meaning of life from
the patterns first charted by the story. Judah Goldin says:
| | Scriptures are not only a record of the past but a prophecy, a
foreshadowing and foretelling of what will come to pass. And if that
is the case, text and personal experience are not two autonomous
domains. On the contrary, they are reciprocally enlightening; even as
the immediate event helps to make the age-old sacred text
intelligible, so in turn the text reveals the fundamental
significance of the recent event or experience.
| | Religious myth has social implications; conversely, social events
are made to speak to religious themes. In this way is woven the moral
fabric that helps people make sense of their lives. We can never
recapture the living quality of the culture of the biblical writers,
but we can investigate their vision of the world and its legacy. We
can ask about the role of the Abraham story in that vision. And we
can ask if this vision is one we wish to perpetuate.
| | The story of Abraham has bequeathed a moral legacy in which we
have been taught not to question the authority of "fathers," even
though, in the process, we betray children. Contemporary realities
illustrate the ways in which the sacrifice and betrayal of children
has been institutionalized. One can point to the dreadful conditions
in which most children in the world are living. Children are abused
at the hands of their
| | parents, most frequently fathers or their surrogates, and by
priests—the very "fathers" who stand in for God and whose mission it
is to protect children. One can also include war and point out that
"children" are sent off to fight old men's battles and that the U.S.
military budget vastly exceeds that of welfare. The recent welfare
debate itself shows how the "fathers" (of state) exercised their
power to determine the fate of a whole generation of children.
| | The story of Abraham is not causative in any direct sense. But
because it exemplifies and legitimates a hierarchical structure of
authority, a specific form of family, definitions of gender, and the
value of obedience that are simultaneously the fountainhead of faith
and the bedrock of society, it has created an environment that has
made it seem sacrilegious to question these issues.
| In Genesis 22:16&endash;18, as Abraham takes the knife to slay his
son, God through his angel calls out:
Because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld
thy son, thine only son: . . . I will bless thee, and . . . I will
multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand . .
. upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his
enemies; And in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be
blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice.
| | Like that knife eternally poised in mid-air, several questions
should be held in our minds. Why is the willingness to sacrifice the
child the model of faith? What is the function of obedience? Why so
little attention to the betrayal of the child? Whose voice counts?
Like another sacrificed by his father, did Abraham's son cry out at
the critical moment: "Father, father, why hast thou forsaken me?" Why
have we eulogized their submission?
| In order to stem the tide of sacrifice—of the hopes, trust,
health, and lives of children—we need a revolution in values. We
need a new moral vision, a new myth to live by—one that will change
the course of history as profoundly as did the Abraham story. I
cannot provide such a myth; no one person can do that. Myths are
collective enterprises; they emerge from people's experiences of the
discrepancies between their personal lives and the myths with which
they try to make sense of those lives. Yet myths, like scientific
theory, do not emerge de novo; they are always constructed out of old
ones. My task is a critical one, but criticism is not my only goal.
By illuminating the assumptions built into the Abraham myth, we can
better go about the task of reconstruction.
| | Carol Delaney is associate professor of anthropology at Stanford
University. She has a master's degree in theological studies from
Harvard Divinity School and a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the
University of Chicago and is the author of The Seed and the Soil:
Gender and Cosmology in Turkish Village Society. This article is
adapted from her latest book, Abraham on Trial: The Social Legacy
of Biblical Myth (Princeton University Press, 1998).
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