Not in God's Name (12 page)

And much of it is religious. There is nothing intrinsically religious about dualism. It existed in Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. However, for several centuries it surfaced in Christianity in the Middle Ages, and it has made its appearance in some forms of Islam today. We have seen in this chapter why. Built into their self-definitions are a series of sibling rivalries drawn from the early narratives of the Hebrew Bible. According to Freud and Girard, sibling rivalry is a primal source of violence, and what makes Judaism, Christianity and Islam unusual is that their narratives of identity are stories of sibling rivalry that assign a secondary, subordinate role to the
others. This means that however rare violence between them is, it is always waiting in the wings.

But this has brought us to an astonishing conclusion. Theologians have usually assumed that this tension arose with the birth of Christianity. After all, until then, there was only one Abrahamic monotheism, Judaism, and its battle was not with siblings, faiths that were part of the family, but with idolatry. Only with the birth first of Christianity, then of Islam, was the tension born out of the competition for ‘most favoured faith in the eyes of Abraham’s God’.

It turns out, however, that the tension was there from the very beginning, long before there was a Christianity or Islam. The key narratives are in the book of Genesis. It is there that the drama of choice began: Isaac but not Ishmael, Jacob but not Esau. It was not some late development, two thousand years ago. It existed before then within Judaism itself. It must therefore be a problem in Jewish, not just Christian and Islamic, theology. This is quite unexpected.

What is more, as soon as we state the problem, we begin to discern, hazily in the distance, the glimmerings of a solution. For can it really be true that the God who created the world in love and forgiveness, setting his image on every human being, loves me but not you? Or you but not me? Sibling rivalry exists in nature because food is in short supply. It exists in human society because material goods – wealth and power – are, at any given moment, zero-sum games. It exists within the family because we are human, and sometimes parents have favourites. But can the same possibly be said about God’s love or forgiveness or grace? Are these in short supply, such that if he gives them to you he must take them from me? There is something odd, discordant, about such an idea.

Yet the Hebrew Bible does talk about sibling rivalry. It is the dominant theme of the book of Genesis. The point could not
be made more forcefully.
The first religious act, Cain and Abel’s offerings to God, leads directly to the first murder
. God does seem to have favourites. There does seem to be a zero-sumness about the stories. It is no accident that Jews, Christians and Muslims read these stories the way they did.

But what if they do not mean what people have thought them to mean? What if there is another way of reading them? What if this alternative reading turned out, on close analysis, to be how they were written to be read? What if the narratives of Genesis are deliberately constructed to seem to mean one thing on the surface, but then, in the light of cues or clues within the text, reveal a second level of meaning beneath?

What if the Hebrew Bible understood, as did Freud and Girard, as did Greek and Roman myth, that sibling rivalry is the most primal form of violence? And what if, rather than endorsing it, it set out to undermine it, subvert it, challenge it, and eventually replace it with another, quite different way of understanding our relationship with God and with the human Other? What if Genesis is a more profound, multi-levelled, transformative text than we have taken it to be? What if it turned out to be God’s way of saying to us what he said to Cain: that violence in a sacred cause is not holy but an act of desecration? What if God were saying:
Not in My Name
?

Such a suggestion sounds absurd. Jews, Christians and Muslims have been reading these stories for centuries. Is it conceivable that they do not mean what they have always been taken to mean? Yet perhaps this is not as absurd as it sounds, because until now each tradition has been reading them from its own perspective. But the twenty-first century is summoning us to a new reading by asking us to take seriously not only our own perspective but also that of the others. The world has changed. Relationships have gone global. Our destinies are interlinked. Christianity and Islam no longer rule over empires. The existence of the State of Israel means Jews are no longer homeless as they were in the age of the myth of the Wandering Jew. For the first time in history we can
relate to one another as dignified equals. Now therefore is a time to listen, in the attentive silence of the troubled soul, to hear in the word of God for all time, the word of God for our time.

Part I has offered an explanation of the fraught, often violent relationship between the three Abrahamic faiths, and it has found, at its tormented heart, a series of stories about sibling rivalry and mimetic desire. Part II offers a radically different reading of these narratives, seeing in them signposts to a world in which brothers, with all their differences and dissonances, can at last dwell together in peace.

Though my father and mother might forsake me,

The Lord will hold me close.

Psalm 27:10

It is the first story of sibling rivalry in Abraham’s family, and it begins with heartache. Abraham, still known at this time as Abram, had been promised countless children. He would, said God, become a great nation. His descendants would be as many as the stars. Yet the years pass and still he and Sarah have no child. In despair, Sarah proposes an arrangement. Let Abram sleep with her handmaid Hagar. Perhaps she will bear him a child. She is proposing that Hagar become a surrogate mother. Then as now it is a procedure fraught with potential conflict.

Hagar does conceive, and this alters the relationship between the two women. Hagar ‘no longer respected her mistress’ (Gen. 16:4). As the bearer of Abraham’s child, she is no longer content to be treated as a servant. Sarah notices the change and reacts angrily. She says to Abraham, ‘You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my servant in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, I have lost her respect. Let the Lord judge between you and me’ (16:5).

Uncharacteristically, Abraham shrugs off the dilemma. ‘Your servant is in your hands. Do with her as you please’ (16:6). Sarah ill-treats Hagar, who flees into the desert. There she is met by an angel who tells her to go back. He adds that she will give birth to a son, whom she should call Ishmael. She returns and Ishmael is born.

In the next chapter, God appears to Abraham and reaffirms his
covenant with him, adding for the first time a command: circumcision. Abraham is to undergo this operation. So is Ishmael. It will become the sign of the covenantal family.

The revelation, however, contains a twist. Despite the fact that Abraham now has a son, God tells him he will have another, born to him by Sarah. At this, Abraham ‘fell on his face and laughed, saying in his heart, Will a son be born to a man a hundred years old? Will Sarah bear a child at the age of ninety?’ (17:17). Nonetheless, God insists that it will be so. They will have a son whom they will name Isaac, and he rather than Ishmael will be the bearer of the covenant into the future. There is an ominous sound to this. It is a situation fraught with the possibility of conflict.

A year later, Isaac is born. Sarah is overjoyed, but again there is a note of discord. Sarah is troubled by the presence of Ishmael. The tension rises to a height at the celebration the couple make on the day Isaac is weaned:

Sarah saw that the son whom Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Abraham was mocking, and she said to Abraham, ‘Send this slave woman away with her son, for his slave woman’s son shall not be an heir with my son Isaac.’ (Gen. 21:9–10)

Abraham is ‘greatly distressed’, but God tells him to listen to Sarah and do as she says. The next morning he sends Hagar and Ishmael away with food and water for the journey. They go, the water runs out, and Hagar realises that, dehydrated in the blazing desert sun, Ishmael will die. She places him under a bush for shade, and weeps. Again an angel appears and reassures her. The child will live. She opens her eyes and sees a well. She gives Ishmael a drink. They continue their journey. Ishmael grows to become an archer. Hagar finds an Egyptian wife for him and the story closes, or so we think.

This is a key narrative, the first of several we are about to analyse. Identity is based on narrative, the stories we tell about who we are, where we came from, and what is our relationship
to others. The real theological work of this book lies here, in close reading of biblical texts, especially those whose theme is sibling rivalry. This is what led to the strife between Jews, Christians and Muslims and it is here, if anywhere, that we will find the solution.

We have just read the story of Abraham’s two sons, and the message seems clear. Just as Abraham was chosen out of all humankind, so is Isaac. But this is not a straightforward story. Isaac is not the firstborn. Ishmael is. What we seem to have here is a
displacement narrative
. In almost all societies where birth order has a bearing on rank, the oldest (usually male) child succeeds to the role occupied by the father. Here the order is reversed. The older Ishmael is displaced by his younger half-brother. The result, happy for Sarah and Isaac, is tragic for Hagar and Ishmael. We can sense the incipient tension. This sounds like the beginning of a story that will end in resentment and revenge.

Historically, as we saw in
chapter 5
, it had a fateful afterlife. Paul, in the epistle to the Romans, performs a second reversal, arguing that it is the younger religion, Christianity, that has replaced the elder, Judaism, as heir to the covenant. In Islam the story was turned around yet again, in a different way, saying that it was Ishmael who was chosen, not Isaac. He, after all, was the first of Abraham’s children to be circumcised and carry the sign of the covenant. Muslims accused Jews of falsifying the biblical text, rewriting it to make Isaac the hero. Once these faiths had taken the decision to see themselves as heirs of the Abrahamic covenant, re-reading was inevitable. One might call it
the revenge of the rejected
.

But all this is on the surface. If we now peel away the layers of this complex and subtle text, we will discover another story altogether. We will discover how the rabbis heard discordant notes in the narrative, and realised that it is conveying a different and surprising message. Only a superficial reading yields the conclusion: Isaac chosen, Ishmael rejected. In fact, at this strategic point, the first generational succession in the Abrahamic
covenant, the Hebrew Bible contains not only a narrative but also a counter-narrative.

The first thing to note is the extraordinary length to which the text goes to insist that
Ishmael will be blessed by God
. This is stated four times, the first and last to Hagar, the second and third to Abraham himself.
¹
The first occurs when Hagar, still pregnant, flees into the desert:

Then the angel of the Lord said to her, ‘Return to your mistress and submit to her authority.’ The angel added, ‘I will so increase your descendants that they will be
too numerous to count
.’ (Gen. 16:9–10)

This
repeats to Hagar the promise God made to Abraham
, that his children would be too numerous to count (Gen. 15:5). The handmaid will be blessed just as Abraham, the ‘knight of faith’, will be.

On the second occasion God speaks to Abraham:

‘As for Ishmael, I have heard you. I have blessed him and will make him fruitful and will multiply him exceedingly. He will be the father of twelve rulers, and
I will make him into a great nation
.’ (Gen. 17:20)

Again the language is suggestive. The promise of ‘twelve rulers’ reminds us of Jacob’s twelve sons, each of whom becomes a tribe. The phrase ‘a great nation’ echoes God’s promise to Abraham (12:2), as does the doubled ‘greatly, greatly’ (17:2, 6). Abraham is being promised by God that, although Isaac will continue the covenant, Ishmael will, in worldly terms, be no less great, perhaps greater. Certainly he will have a share in Abraham’s blessing.

The third occurs when Sarah proposes sending Hagar and Ishmael away. God says to Abraham:

‘Listen to whatever Sarah tells you, because it is through Isaac that descendants will bear your name. I will make the son of the maidservant into a nation also, because
he is your offspring
.’ (Gen. 21:12–13)

God recognises that Ishmael
remains Abraham’s son and will be blessed accordingly
. The text makes a fine distinction between biological and ascribed identity. Ishmael, says God to Abraham, ‘is your offspring’, while Isaac will be ‘
called
your offspring’. The former promises worldly greatness, the latter covenantal
responsibility
.

The final scene recapitulates the setting of the first. Once again we are in the desert, with Hagar running out of water. Her son Ishmael is about to die:

God heard the boy crying, and the angel of God called to Hagar and said to her, ‘What troubles you, Hagar? Fear not, for God has heard the cry of the boy where he is. Help the boy up and take him by the hand, for I will make him into a great nation’…God was with the boy as he grew up. He lived in the desert and became an archer. (Gen. 21:17–20)
²

Note first that God does not reject Hagar. He hears and heeds her distress. He saves her and Ishmael from death. Next, he repeats to Hagar what he had already said to Abraham, that Ishmael will become ‘a great nation’. Third, note the name the child bears. Ishmael means ‘God has heard’, the name the angel had commanded Hagar to give him, ‘for
God has heard
of your misery’ (16:11). It turns out that what we have here is not a simple drama of choice and rejection at all. Isaac has been chosen for a specific destiny, but
Ishmael has not been rejected –
at least not by God.

Next, we note the characterisation of the key figures, especially Abraham and Sarah. No reader can fail to sense the harsh light in which Sarah is portrayed in her relationship with Hagar and Ishmael. Having proposed the idea of Hagar sleeping with Abraham, she later blames Abraham: ‘
You
are responsible for the wrong I am suffering’ (16:5). There is nothing in the narrative to suggest this was in fact the case. To the contrary, Abraham seems caught helplessly in the tension between the two women.

The Hebrew text uses a significant word to describe Sarah’s treatment of Hagar. She ‘afflicted’ her. The Hebrew verb is the same as will later be used to describe the Egyptians: they ‘afflicted’ the Israelites (Exod. 1:11–12). It also appears in Deuteronomy in the text of remembrance to be recited by the Israelites on bringing firstfruits to the Temple (‘The Egyptians ill-treated and
afflicted
us…and God saw our
affliction
, toil and oppression’, Deut. 26:6–7). Hagar was herself an Egyptian (Gen. 16:3). There is a subtle hint here that to some degree the experience of the Israelites at the hands of the Egyptians will mirror the Egyptian Hagar’s experience at the hands of Sarah. This too is surprising, and qualifies the simple stereotype: Israelites good, Egyptians bad.

Later, when Sarah insists that Abraham sends Hagar and Ishmael away, she becomes dismissive: ‘Send this
slave woman
away with her son, for this slave woman’s son shall not be an heir with my son Isaac’ (Gen. 21:10). Not only does she not dignify either mother or child by calling them by name; her language has changed since the earlier scene. Then she called Hagar a ‘maid’ (
shifchah
). Now she has become ‘a slave’ (
amah
).

The most enigmatic feature of the text is what exactly provoked Sarah’s anger at the feast for Isaac’s weaning. The text states that she saw Ishmael
metzachek
, translated above as ‘mocking’, but which literally means ‘laughing’. The verb
z-ch-k
is a recurring motif in the story of Abraham and Sarah. It appears seven times in the narrative,
³
and in the Pentateuch the sevenfold repetition of a word is always significant. It signals a keyword around which the text is thematised.
⁴
Abraham ‘laughs’ when he hears the news
that he and Sarah will have a son (17:17). So does Sarah (18:12), for which she is rebuked by God. The name Isaac itself means ‘he will laugh’. When he is born, Sarah says, ‘God has given me laughter, and everyone who hears this will laugh for me’ (21:6). It has a whole range of senses, from
joy
to
disbelief
to
disdain
. In a later chapter it even has sexual undertones, ‘acting familiarly’ (26:8). At this point the text is deliberately ambiguous, leaving it to us, the readers, to decide whether Sarah is right to take offence (Ishmael is mocking) or wrong (he is sharing in the general celebration).

The portrait of Sarah in these scenes is so unsympathetic that the thirteenth-century Spanish commentator Nahmanides writes about the first episode in which Sarah mistreats Hagar, causing her to flee:

Our mother [Sarah] transgressed by this affliction, and Abraham did likewise by permitting her to do so. And so God heard her [Hagar’s] affliction and gave her a son who would be ‘a wild donkey of a man’, to afflict the seed of Abraham and Sarah with all kinds of affliction.
⁵

This is a most unusual comment in two respects. First, the medieval Jewish commentators – Nahmanides among them – were loath to criticise the patriarchs and matriarchs, and almost always interpreted the text to cast them in the best possible light. This criticism is therefore exceptional. Even more so is the implication he draws from it. He is saying that Sarah’s mistreatment of Hagar was a reason why Sarah’s children would one day be persecuted by the descendants of Hagar, that is, by the people of Islam.

Spanish Jewry had suffered from Islamic persecution, especially after the rise of the Almohads in the twelfth century. This had forced the family of Nahmanides’ great predecessor, Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) to flee from Cordoba in 1148, wandering for several years before settling in Fostat, Egypt. Jews, like Muslims themselves, identified Ishmael as the precursor of
Islam. Nahmanides’ comment is thus pointedly self-critical. Do not believe, he is telling his Jewish readers, that we are entirely without blame.

The portrayal of Abraham is more complex. It was not he but Sarah who proposed having a child by Hagar. Yet once Ishmael is born, he is attached to him. He is acutely distressed when God first tells him that his mission will be continued by Isaac, not Ishmael: ‘Abraham said to God, If only Ishmael might live in Your presence!’ (Gen. 17:18). Later, when Sarah insists that he send the boy away, we read, ‘The matter distressed Abraham greatly because of his son’ (21:11). Abraham accedes to Sarah’s request, the first time of his own accord, the second at God’s insistence: ‘In all that Sarah says to you, listen to her voice’ (21:12). Yet the love between father and son is unmistakable. As we will soon see, this theme was taken much further by rabbinic Midrash.