The discovery of God : Abraham and the birth of monotheism by Klinghoffer David 1965-
Author:Klinghoffer, David, 1965-
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Abraham (Biblical patriarch), Bible, Monotheism, Judaism, Jews
Publisher: New York : Doubleday
Published: 2003-02-26T16:00:00+00:00
“Is it possible that these innards will bear offspring? That these breasts which have contracted will give milk ?” 40 And so she laughed, not as Abraham had done, a laugh of pure joy, but rather a laugh of disbelief. The angel was speaking for God—that was clear to everyone present, the disguise of wandering avarim was off now—but Sarah lacked faith. We laugh when the laws of custom or nature are broken. Abraham had laughed because he saw that God was about to void the law of nature that states that a ninety-nine-year-old man and his eighty-nine-year-old wife cannot have children. Sarah laughed because, as she saw it, the angel had broken the regulation of custom that says that one does not make statements that are clearly untrue.
In the midst of her laughter, she spoke again to herself. “After I have withered, shall I have clear, lustrous skin [ednah]? And my lord [Abraham] is old [as well ]!” 41 The notion struck her as deeply absurd. The obscure Hebrew word ednah, which, following Rashi, I have translated as “clear, lustrous skin,” shares a three-letter root with the word “Eden,” where the primordial Garden lay from which Adam and Eve were expelled . 42 The text hints at an idea that the story of the tomb of the first man and woman also alludes to. Abraham and Sarah were being granted the opportunity to reinvent Eden. For Sarah, the impossibility of this notion was crystallized by what she took to be the impossibility of her formerly perfect skin being rejuvenated. If she had a compact mirror handy, she would have seen that the
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impossible had already come to pass. She was already Eve.
Someone then spoke to Abraham and reprimanded him for Sarah’s impertinence, saying, “Why does this one, Sarah, laugh ?” 43 The text appears to state that the speaker was God, but it seems rather that Michael was speaking again in God’s voice . 44 (The scholar E. A. Speiser follows the view of some, who reject the oral tradition and thus says that one of the three “men” wasn’t an angel at all but rather God Himself in human form. Speiser doesn’t explain why the text then goes on to say that after the men had already passed onward in the direction of Sodom, Abraham was “still standing before the Lord .” 45 The Redactor didn’t notice he had left God in two places at once: on His way to Sodom, and back in Hebron with Abraham.)
Whoever had reprimanded him, Abraham didn’t reply. Sarah did. She was sufficiently frightened, having been challenged by God or His spokesman, as to choose to lie. “I did not laugh,” she said, to which He replied ominously, “No, but you did laugh.”
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