Monk

The big promise to Abraham is fulfilled. A son is born to Abraham and Sarah. The son is named Isaac, which in Hebrew means “he who laughs”, which in turn has been an inside play on words throughout the story of this promise, but we will not go into it here.

Suffice it to say that it is not all light and laughter. Sarah's rivalry with her Egyptian slavegirl, which we saw in chapter 16, is brought back to life, and again Hagar is made to leave, this time for good, with her son. Sarah does not want there to be any question about Ishmael, Hagar’s and Abraham’s son, being able to inherit what she believes belongs to her own rightful son, Isaac.

As I said, Genesis gets rather soap opera-ish in the unfolding of the patriarchal story, the story of Abraham’s clan. The most poignant part of this chapter is when Hagar and Ishmael are cast out.

_ _ _

And Abraham rose early in the morning and took bread and a skin of water and gave them to Hagar, placing them on her shoulder, and he gave her the child, and sent her away, and she went wandering through the wilderness of Beersheba. And when the water in the skin was gone, she flung the child under one of the bushes and went off and sat down at a distance, a bowshot away, for she thought, “Let me not see when the child dies.” And she sat at a distance and raised her voice and wept.

-- Genesis 21: 14-16 (Alter)

_ _ _

But don’t worry! As happened in chapter 16, an angel comes to Hagar and assures her all is well and that even a great nation shall me made of Ishmael.

Abraham and Sarah move to the Negev, perhaps wanting to distance themselves from the devastation of Sodom, settling at a place called Gerar, which is led by King Abimelech. Despite the fact that Sarah is so old that bearing a child would be miraculous, she is still such a beauty that no doubt the king would want to bed her, so Abraham and Sarah do the same routine they pulled in Chapter 12 when they sojourned to Egypt, posing as brother and sister, so that he will not be killed in order that the king can take her. And it works again: the king takes Sarah without having to harm Abraham. Again, the Lord intervenes to protect Sarah from unwanted sex, cursing Abimelech in a dream, threatening him with death if he touches Sarah, and also rendering Abimelech and his men impotent, hence making it clear that this is not just a dream.

_ _ _

Abimelech got up early the next morning and hastily called a meeting of all his servants. When he told them what had happened, great fear swept through the crowd. Then Abimelech called for Abraham. “What is this you have done to us?” he demanded. “What have I done to you that deserves treatment like this, making me and my kingdom guilty of this great sin? This kind of thing should not be done! Why have you done this to us?”

“Well,” Abraham said, “I figured this to be a godless place. I thought, ‘They will want my wife and will kill me to get her.’ Besides, she is my sister - we both have the same father, though different mothers - and I married her. When God sent me to travel far from my father’s home, I told her, ‘Wherever we go, have the kindness to say that you are my sister.’”

-- Genesis 20: 8-13 (NLT)

_ _ _

This is a strategem, if I recall correctly, that will also be picked up by Abraham’s son or one of his grandsons, giving us another repetition of this story. It is a cute story, but I feel like I must be missing something, that it must convey something deeper to get this much play.

Does it dramatize how wary Jews must be when going into foreign lands and dealing with gentiles? Does it show the stress of being a person of faith, a person of God, in a faithless and selfish world? Or is it just a charming story that was deemed to be worth repeating again and again?

Recall that the two angels, in the form of men, left the Lord and Abraham and went ahead to Sodom to check the moral temperature of the city. We have also mentioned that, in the biblical universe, it is never a good thing to be living in the city, and Lot is learning this the hard way. Lot, like Abraham, recognizes the men and pays what hospitality he can, but things take a nasty turn:

After the meal, as they were preparing to retire for the night, all the men of Sodom, young and old, came from all over the city and surrounded the house. They shouted to Lot, “Where are the men who came to spend the night with you? Bring them out so we can have sex with them.”

Lot stepped outside to talk to them, shutting the door behind him. “Please, my brothers,” he begged, “don’t do such a wicked thing. Look - I have two virgin daughters. Do with them as you wish, but leave these men alone, for they are under my protection.”

This doesn’t work. The men of Sodom are only all the more disdainful that Lot, a newcomer to the city, should be trying to dictate terms to them. The angels take matters into their own hands, and have decided that it is indeed time to put an end to this sink of iniquity, after they get Lot and his family out.

As for the striking offer of his virgin daughters, I suppose I was content to take that as a pious sacrifice for the Lord, rather similar to the way that Abraham would willingly slay his own son on the Lord’s command. Biblical logic can be rough like that.

However, Robert Alter gives us a better interpretation, one that explains the closing segment of the chapter, in which Lot and his daughters are hiding out in a cave and his daughters get him drunk to have sex with him, so that they can carry on the family line, as they are isolated in the mountains now and cannot meet other men, which is one of the top biblical stories that can squick you out. Alter argues that this concluding segment “suggests measure-for-measure justice meted out for [Lot’s] rash offer.” The offspring of this incest will be enemy peoples of Israel. Lot may have been spared from the annihilation of Sodom and Gomorrah, but he is hardly the righteous man of god that his uncle Abraham is.

Three men come to visit Abraham, and it is good that Abraham is as hospitable as you please, since they are not regular guys. One is the Lord and the other two are apparently angelic figures, all cast in the form and figure of men. Abraham may have understood this right away.

As the visitors are getting ready to leave, the Lord confides to Abraham, “I have heard that the people of Sodom and Gomorrah are extremely evil, and that everything they do is wicked. I am going down to see whether or not these reports are true. Then I will know.”

Then Abraham makes so bold as to engage the Lord in moral philosophy and justice, “Will you destroy both innocent and guilty alike? Suppose you find fifty innocent people there within the city - will you destroy it, and not spare it for their sakes? Surely you wouldn’t do such a thing, destroying the innocent with the guilty. Why, you would be treating the innocent and the guilty exactly the same! Surely you wouldn’t do that! Should not the Judge of all the earth do what is right?”

The Lord says that he would spare the city if he finds fifty innocent people, and Abraham proceeds while the iron is hot, “Since I have begun, let me go on and speak further to my Lord, even though I am but dust and ashes. Suppose there are only forty-five? Will you destroy the city for lack of five?”

The Lord says that he would not, and this cycle goes on until Abraham reaches ten innocent people, for which number the Lord will still spare the city. Robert Alter makes the interesting note, “Abraham realizes he dare not go any lower than ten, the minimal administrative unit for communal organization in later Israelite life.”

For myself, in thinking about why the Lord should need to make a personal survey of a city, I am inclined to think that this is just an exercise for Abraham, to get him to develop his moral acumen, thus exposing Abraham to some of His doings and enticing him to engage Him in questions of morality and justice, for here is the first of the Chosen People, both Jews and, later, Christians, and the Lord might want to sharpen Abraham’s sense of righteousness, to get things going with a good start.

When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to him and said, “I am God Almighty; serve me faithfully and live a blameless life. I will make a covenant with you, by which I will guarantee to make you into a mighty nation.” At this, Abram fell face down in the dust. Then God said to him, “This is my covenant with you: I will make you the father of not just one nation, but a multitude of nations!”

-- Genesis 17: 1-4

It feels like we have been through this a number of times already, does it not? For very dull-minded readers, I guess, this shows how key this covenant between God and Abraham is. More seriously, this time we can see it is official, more like a genuine contract, because God makes it clear that something is expected of Abraham, besides serving God faithfully and leading a blameless life:

“Your part of the agreement,” God told Abraham, “is to obey the terms of the covenant. You and all your descendants have this continual responsibility. This is the covenant that you and your descendants must keep: Each male among you must be circumcised; the flesh of the foreskin must be cut off.”

Quite the way to seal the deal! Couldn’t we just shake on it? In law, I suppose this is what they call consideration. We now have a binding contract between God and Abraham, and through Abraham, between God and us.

When God says that Abraham will be the father of not just one nation but many nations, I take it that this is read to foreshadow the Christian era when God’s covenant will be extended beyond the Jews reaching even unto the gentiles. Happily, I also take it that Christians will not have to seal the deal with their severed foreskin, but, as they say, with a circumcision of the heart, that is, by your belief and faith, but this is really getting ahead of the story.

Sarah’s plan to give her servant Hagar to Abraham so that he can have a son of his own flesh and blood (a plan to which the record does not seem to indicate any serious objections on the part of Abraham - not a lot of strenuous arm-twisting) works. It worked too well as far as Sarah is concerned:

When Hagar knew she was pregnant, she began to treat her mistress Sarai with contempt. Then Sarai said to Abram, “It’s all your fault!... The Lord will make you pay for doing this to me!” [NLT 16: 4-5]

Abraham sidesteps this nicely, “Since she is your servant, you may deal with her as you see fit.” And she does, making Hagar run away to escape her scorn and abuse.

Then an angel catches up to her and says, “Return to your mistress and submit to her authority. I will give you more descendants than you can count.” More ambiguously, the angel tells her that she is bearing a son, and she is to name him Ishmael, that this son will be “untamed as a wild donkey! He will be against everyone and everyone will be against him.” Hagar is simply awed that she should receive such direct divine guidance, though one would think there is a lot of hard news in this. I suppose a servant does not expect a lot, but one could point out that Hagar was apparently being bitchy to Sarah.

_ _ _

This is the first occurrence of an “angel” in Genesis, though “the sons of God,” the members of the divine entourage, are mentioned in chapter 6. “Messenger” or one who carries out a designated task, is the primary meaning of the Hebrew term, and there are abundant biblical instances of mal akhim [Hebrew for ‘messengers’] who are strictly human emissaries. One assumes that the divine messenger in these stories is supposed to look just like a human being, and all postbiblical associations with wings, halos, and glorious raiment must be firmly excluded. One should note that the divine speaker here begins as an angel but ends up being referred to as though he were God Himself. Gerhard von Rad and others have proposed that the angel as intermediary was superimposed on the earliest biblical tradition in order to mitigate what may have seemed an excessively anthropomorphic representation of the deity. But it is anyone’s guess how the Hebrew imagination conceived agents of the Lord three thousand years ago, and it is certainly possible that the original traditions had a blurry notion of differentiation between God’s own interventions in human life and those of His emissaries. Richard Elliott Friedman has actually proposed that the angels are entities split off, or emanated, from God, and that no clear-cut distinction between God and angel is intended.

-- Robert Alter, “The Five Books of Moses”

But Sarai, Abram’s wife, had no children. So Sarai took her servant, an Egyptian woman named Hagar, and gave her to Abram so she could bear his children. “The Lord has kept me from having any children,” Sarai said to Abram. “Go and sleep with my servant. Perhaps I can have children through her.” And Abram agreed. So Sarai, Abram’s wife, took Hagar the Egyptian servant and gave her to Abram as wife. (This happened ten years after Abram first arrived in the land of Canaan.)

-- Genesis 16: 1-3 (NLT)

I imagine that the closing parenthetical is key to understanding why this awkward sexual combination comes about. I take it that the ten years is the time since God reaffirmed his promise to Abraham as covered in the last chapter. God promised that Abraham would have his own son, but that was ten long years ago and Sarah and Abraham are not getting younger. One can appreciate the pressure to be more creative, and as Alter relates, “The institution of surrogate maternity to which she resorts is by no means her invention, being well attested in ancient Near Eastern legal documents.”

However, this arrangement can create its own domestic problems, but we will save that for the next post, in which we will also get to see some interesting stuff about angels. So, don’t say I never gave you anything!

Afterward the Lord spoke to Abram in a vision and said to him, “Do not be afraid, Abram, for I will protect you, and your reward will be great.”

But Abram replied, “O Sovereign Lord, what good are all your blessings when I don’t even have a son? Since I don’t have a son, Eliezer of Damascus, a servant in my household, will inherit all my wealth. You have given me no children, so one of my servants will have to be my heir.”

Then the Lord said to him, “No, your servant will not be your heir, for you will have a son of your own to inherit everything I am giving you.” Then the Lord brought Abram outside beneath the night sky and told him, “Look up into the heavens and count the stars if you can. Your descendants will be like that - too many to count!” And Abram believed the Lord, and the Lord declared him righteous because of his faith.

-- Genesis 15: 1-6 (NLT)

It seems as though, after the last chapter where Abraham achieves martial glory over the Mesopotamia while remaining a lowly shepherd, we are being reoriented into the main storyline. In this chapter, God’s two promises to Abraham are reasserted and reinforced, namely, the promised land from the river of Egypt to the great Euphrates river as well as the promise of a plenitude of descendants.

I have somewhat lamented how, as a secular (vulgar?) matter of basic reading pleasure, the foundational sacred text of our culture is not exactly a fast page-turner, and it is not as fun as, say, the Iliad, and that this is certainly true with respect to the key story of Abraham, a plainly told tale of nomadic shepherds.

That criticism makes Genesis 14 that much more of a notable chapter, for in this chapter we find Abraham taking on some martial coloring, realizing glory on the battlefield - getting on his Rambo, so to speak.

Nevertheless, if you are hoping to find great swashbuckling adventures and pulse-racing tales of derring-do with heartwarming scenes of camaraderie that can only be truly found among a hearty band of brothers who have faced together the hell of war, you would do better to stick to your Iliad. We only get a dry, sparse recording of the bare facts.

Even more briefly, an alliance of kings took on another alliance of kings, and Lot, Abraham’s nephew, got caught up in this war and was captured. In order to save Lot, Abraham gathers up his men and rides into battle. Like I said, we do not get to live any parts of those battles, but are simply told that he won. As Alter reinforces the point, it is still a striking and surprising chapter, even suspicious:

Scholarship is virtually unanimous in identifying this chapter as the product of a different literary source from the three principal strands out of which Genesis is woven.... Abram, having been promised national tenure in the land in the immediately preceding episode, is now placed at the center of a different kind of narrative that makes him a figure in the international historical scene, doing battle with monarchs from the far-flung corners of Mesopotamia and treating with the king of Jerusalem (Salem), one of the principal cities of Canaan.

It looks like the tale is stuck into the book, perhaps to address readers like our Monk, to build up Abraham’s manhood with some requisite martial glory, validating his role as the primary patriarch of God’s chosen people.

In doing this, however, we see elements that consistently build on the Abrahamic theme of being a true God-fearer, a man of absolute faith. Having saved Lot and returned from victory, and thus restoring the fortunes of the defeated kings, he is offered rich rewards, but Abraham responds quite unconventionally:

Abram said to the king of Sodom, “I raised my hand in oath to the Lord, the Most High God, possessor of heaven and earth, that I will take not a single thread or sandal strap of all that is yours, lest you say, ‘I have made Abram rich.’ Nothing for me but what the lads have consumed. And as for the share of the men who came with me, Aner, Eshkol, and Mamre, let them take their share.” (Genesis 14: 22-24)

Thus we see that Abraham, now great in the eyes of worldly men, a leader and conqueror of men, he still conducts himself as a humble follower of God with undivided loyalty. He understands that the victory is God’s, and that he was merely blessed to be the mortal instrument of God’s glory.

And the Lord had said to Abram after Lot parted from him, “Raise your eyes and look out from the place where you are to the north and the south and the east and the west, for all the land you see, to you I will give it and to your seed forever. And I will make your seed like the dust of the earth, so too, your seed might be counted. Rise, walk about the land through its length and its breadth, for to you I will give it.”

-- Genesis 13: 14-17

Such is the legend of Greater Israel, I suppose.

Abraham has returned from Egypt with Lot to the promised land. They are prosperous, and they decide it would be better to split up. Abraham gave Lot first choice, and he chose the more urban area, which as Alter points out, is always a bad move in the biblical world, and we shall see just how bad before long.

I will close with Alter’s note on the dust simile:

The great Yiddish poet Yakov Glatstein wrote a bitter poem after the Nazi genocide which proposes that indeed the seed of Abraham has become like the dust of the earth.

Dust is a more ambiguous comparison than the usual ones, such as the stars of the sky or the grains of sand on the beach, just as the Jewish destiny has looked like a mixed bag.