Abraham by Bruce Feiler

Author:Bruce Feiler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They needed Abraham.

Abraham was central to this newfound bond with the past because he stood at the beginning of the Israelite people.

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