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On Wed, 10 Aug 2005 14:25:21 EDT [log in to unmask] wrote: > I am not sure if this is exactly the kind of example you are asking about, > but Sarah laughed at the prophecy of her having a child with Abraham at >their > late stage in life. I recall that one of the Old Testament kings didn't >believe > God would save Jerusalem until the prophet removed the "veil" so the king > could see the angelic host standing by (apologies--I need to re-read the >OT > history books and have not recalled which king/prophet). And Gideon took >a lot of > convincing from his senses--one test wasn't enough to overcome his doubts. > Arthur Upham, Madison Lengthily, tediously, and only for the brave, further on the nature of Abraham's "faith" in the promises and in his future nationhood and reproduction genetically (cf. Sarah's being "reproved" [AV] in Gen. 20:16, for, obliquely and ultimately, lack of credulity as to God's word "And unto Sarah he [Abimelech] said, Behold, I have given thy brother [Abraham] a thousand peices of silver: behold, he is to thee a covering of the eyes, unto all that are with thee, and with all other: thus she was reproved."). For I think there is a sense in which the knight errant Redcrosse is not altogether unlike the sojourning Abraham as a "knight of faith," especially in the interval in which he generates and defeats Sansfoy. How does Abraham himself pay his respects to a blessing for which his own name might one day come to stand? The answers to the question all come down to the intersection of the blessing of Abraham with Abraham's faith. For Abraham's is a faith that can become no less proverbial than the blessing itself. The favorable verdict of the Letter to the Hebrews on the faithfulness of Abraham seems to be present there, in that New Testament text, so that it can be questioned by the more wary readers of the story itself: the devil's advocate who opposes the case that the tradition might seem to have made for the Patriarch's sainthood. For the blessing of Abraham, and the complicity of the characters' utterances in a sort of recoupment of Abraham's happy future as the father of the many peoples who call Abraham their father, should not blind us to Abraham's questionable desert, and to the imputedness of some of his merits. His justness towards others is rarely in question. But despite his characterizing action of lifting up his eyes, Abraham regularly exhibits a short-sightedness regarding the fulfillment of God's promises. Yet the story does not wholly censure Abraham's earlier skepticism and subsequent misconstructions; it accepts them, even as it also accepts the Abraham who brings this doubtfulness with him as part of his human person. First let us list the more unalloyed and less dubious instances of Abraham's faith in the promises. Even before the promise has been made Abraham is in want of a fertile wife; Sarah is announced as barren from the start. Therefore Abraham's long marriage to Sarah is to be counted as exceptional faith in God's promise of progeny -- it was to be a large progeny at that. After Sarah has died, Abraham purchases land in the promised land to bury her. If he pays an exorbitant price (and it seems that he does), then his purchase may be counted as the expression of an exceptional faith in God's promise of a right over the land of Canaan. We may see Abraham's investment, like one made in a government savings bond, as a long-term one, less the making of an irrefutable claim on the land (as burying one's dead there could be), than a buying of stock in the nation's future. At the time of the imminent Babylonian invasion of Israel, and in just such a spirit, Jeremiah buys the deed to a portion in a post-exilic Israel. Abraham thus honors the promises as possibilities, by taking a stake in their fulfillment: by betting on his marriage and his real estate. But a purchase like that of the grave might also make Abraham feel that God is only going to honor His promises figuratively, while breaching them literally: that is, unless He gets some human help in keeping them, or at least keeping them fulfillable. For Abraham does not trust God to protect him, the future father, or his marriage, the source of progeny; thus he pretends not to be married and so makes Sarah available for the harems of others. And he does not trust God to protect Lot from the fate of Sodom. Lot would be a source of Nahorite relatives (for Lot has two daughters), and so Abraham tries to get God to spare Sodom for the sake of a few righteous persons in it, persons whose righteousness might be tested by their hospitality. Thus in trying to protect his nephew, Abraham has instead exposed him to a test, and Lot does not really come off that well. For to protect his guests Lot offers to sacrifice his daughters -- to the Sodomites. It thus appears that he hardly cares to protect the only genetic vehicle for any Nahorite future (in this case "Haran") in the West. Nor does Abraham trust God to give his barren wife children, insofar as he accedes in her proposal to create offspring through the maternal surrogacy of her maid Hagar. But in protecting his seed, he divides his household and alienates his wife. And finally he does not trust God to make a people of Ishmael, in that he speaks out for Ishmael when God is promising him the birth of Isaac, and promising Isaac the Abrahamic peoplehood in question. Thus God's faith in Abraham must be a somewhat generous one. Yet that is why it might inspire the faith of others -- other such as Melchizedeck -- in the Patriarch and his god. The bet that God has Himself chosen to make surely cannot have been a bad one, nor His investment a short-sighted one. For it is a bet that God not only makes, but, being omnipotent, cannot help but also make good on. Yet the narrative will not have made the analogous investment in Abraham, unless it also shows Abraham himself making the God's bet on his own future. Furthermore, Abraham must be brought to bet on God Himself: even if this should involve trusting in a Promiser whose only promise is, No Promises. Once Abraham has been actually blessed with Isaac, we can see Abraham's new willingness to bet on God's faithfulness without much qualification or limit. God will provide the sacrifice, and Isaac himself will provide the stakes: the means to make such a bet, should it be offered. For surely the sacrifice of Isaac shows Abraham's readiness to risk the whole farm, when God is his partner. Thus the father's subsequent arranging of his son's marriage does not seem like Abraham's earlier meddlesome attempts to help God help Abraham. It is more like a bet on Abraham's own, Nahorite future in and through Isaac. He bets on his ambassador finding a wife, and finding a wife in the East (for if no Nahorite wife is found, the ambassador is discharged of all further obligation to his ward's marriage). It is thus the Abraham of faith, and not the Abraham of doubt, who makes his final bet on Isaac's marriage. His faith in God is thus extended to his faith in the ambassador. If God can provide the sacrifice, he can surely also provide the wife. Rebekah may be a needle in a haystack, but God is both compass and magnet. Thus the blessing of Abraham emerges for the first time in the narrative, as a concept in the mind of another, in the speech of the ambassador himself. The ambassador has faith in the blessing of Abraham as the future of Isaac. That is why he might legitimately jump the gun in declaring Isaac Abraham's heir. This "faithful" character might indeed have this kind of faith: because he needs it. For at this juncture the promise of peoplehood can only be realized through marriages: and marriage-brokerage is surely an act of faith. -- "The Blessing of Abraham" (ca. 1991, unpublished) --Jim N. And as a footnote to the above: The scorn the parents [of Isaac] conceive for the chance of parenthood provides the etymology of their son's name. Rachel weeps over her children who were not, Sarah laughs, but it is the same dissent against a barrenness that would deny them their 'toledot' [generations/story]. But Sarah is warned that anything is possible with God--it is nothing that is impossible with him. Thus the descent from Abraham is also traced back to the creation itself: because anything is possible with God, and nothing is not. Typically, the "generations" are produced from a human progenitor. This is not the case in the first instance, "These are the generations of the heavens and earth." For the creation is anything but a spontaneous natural generation, a 'genesis'. The Bible takes huge exception to the pagan creation myth of genesis, where the congress of heaven and earth generates the gods, where the gods generate monsters, and where the big bangs of rape, castration, and ejaculation play such a role in the primeval events. In the Bible, on the other hand, the miscegenous sons of God who come into the daughters of men do not precipitate Nature, but the Flood. The waters above and the waters below not only merge two texts, but two levels of being that the creation in fact distinguished. God did not originally breed the heavens and earth, he segregated them. Thus the pagan or ontogenetic creation myth is fossilized in the single expression here in question. The heavens and the earth are actually the virtual antithesis of the unity of the darkness on face of the deep facing it--this last is an image not of coitus, but of barrenness. Thus God's intervention in the barrenness of Sarah has the most awesome precedent in God's original mercy to non-entity. -- "The Keeping of Nahor," in R. Schwartz, ed., The Book and the Text (1990). [log in to unmask] James Nohrnberg Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219 Univ. of Virginia P.O Box 400121 Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121