History of the Jews Read Online Free PDF

dialogue between Abraham and God, suggests that Abraham’s grasp and acceptance of the momentous implications of his bargain were gradual, an example of the way in which the will of God is sometimes revealed in progressive stages. The truth was finally brought home to Abraham, as described in Genesis 22, when God tests him by commanding him to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. 38 This passage is an important milestone in the Bible, as well as being one of the most dramatic and puzzling in the entire history of religion, because it first raises the problem of theodicy, God’s sense of justice. Many Jews and Christians have found the passage unconscionable, in that Abraham is commanded to do something not only cruel in itself but contrary to the repudiation of human sacrifice which is part of the bedrock of Hebrew ethics and all subsequent forms of Judaeo-Christian worship. Great Jewish philosophers have struggled to make the story conform to Jewish ethics. Philo argued that it testified to Abraham’s detachment from custom or any other ruling passion except the love of God, his recognition that we must give God what we value most, confident that, God being just, we will not lose it. Maimonides agreed that this was a test case of the extreme limits of the love and fear God rightfully demands. Nahmanides saw it as the first instance of the compatibility of divine foreknowledge and human free will. 39 In 1843 Sören Kierkegaard published his philosophical study of this episode, Fear and Trembling , in which he portrays Abraham as a ‘knight of faith’, who has to renounce for God’s sake not only his son but his ethical ideals. 40 Most Jewish and Christian moral theologians reject this view, implying an unacceptable conflict between God’s will and ethical ideals, though others would agree that the episode is a warning that religion does not necessarily reflect naturalistic ethics. 41
    From the viewpoint of a historian, the tale makes perfect sense because Abraham, as we know from contemporary archives, came from a legal background where it was mandatory to seal a contract or covenant with an animal sacrifice. The covenant with God was of such transcendent enormity that it demanded something more: a sacrifice of the best-loved in the fullest sense, though as the subject of the sacrifice was a human being, it was made abortive, thereby remaining valid but formal and ritualistic rather than actual. Isaac was chosen as the offering not only because he was Abraham’s most precious possession but because he was a special gift of God’s, under the covenant, and remained God’s like all the rest of his gifts to man. This underlines the whole purpose of sacrifice, a symbolic reminder that everything man possesses comes from God and is returnable to him. That is why Abraham called the place of his act of supreme obedience and abortive sacrifice, the Mount of the Lord, an adumbration of Sinai and a greater contract. 42 It is significant of the importance of the event that, for the first time, the Bible narratives introduce the note of universalism into God’s promises. He not only undertakes to multiply Abraham’s offspring but now also adds: ‘And in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.’ 43
    We are now close to the notion of an elect nation. The Old Testament, it is important to grasp, is not primarily about justice as an abstract concept. It is about God’s justice, which manifests itself by God’s acts of choice. In Genesis we have various examples of the ‘just man’, even the only just man: in the story of Noah and the Flood, in the story of the destruction of Sodom, for example. Abraham is a just man too, but there is no suggestion that God chose him because he was the only one, or in any sense because of his merits. The Bible is not a work of reason, it is a work of history, dealing with what are to us mysterious and even inexplicable events. It is concerned with the momentous choices which it