Many are those who, since Antiquity, have never ceased to question our three patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The answers they bring us make no claim to originality, but assert themselves vigorously as conforming to their lives, their conduct, their belief, and their singularity; of course, they too questioned their heroes, or at least appeared to put questions to them. They meant constantly to raise the level of the debate and, going back to the sources, never ceased to let the flood of their commentaries flow in the generous bed of tradition.
Born in a period already breathless with modernism, I sought to refine. It no longer sufficed me to question through thought in order to answer through commentaries: it was the spoken word that I sought, in the simplicity of its authenticity. I wished that the question should precede the answer, thus forcing the latter to an exactness and a precision that commentary only rarely encourages.
My approach — which I believe more effective — nonetheless runs up against delicate procedures, as well as a swiftness of execution and, of course, calls for the consent of the patriarch being questioned. Isaac, of the three patriarchs, is the most affable. His parents, before his birth, kept repeating to themselves, in their anxious waiting — “he will laugh.” Even before the umbilical cord was cut, he was already named Yitzhak (in Hebrew, “he will laugh”).
Abraham is too imposing, Jacob too complex. It is therefore through Isaac that I shall pass in order to know Abraham better and, perhaps tomorrow, Jacob.
- “May peace be upon you, dear Yitzhak.”
- “Peace be upon you,” Isaac answers me.
Hebrew has no formal “you,” so that, in the remainder of this account, our Hebrew “thou”s will be rendered as French “vous,” save error or omission on my part.
- “This time, I would like you to tell me about your father Abraham, that luminous figure who arises ten generations after Noah, your industrious ancestor who had invented an unsinkable contraption in which to preserve all the species of the human, animal, and vegetable kingdoms during an irreversible rising of the waters.”
- “Yes, ten generations, you have noticed it, and yet, in our family, we counted the generations starting from Shem, one of Noah’s three sons.”
- “We count ten generations between Noah and your father, then ten generations between him and Moses, the famous bearer of the Tables of the Law.”
I hear a small laugh, always spontaneous, then silent. I was wrong, certainly. In interviews, one must avoid anticipating too much…
- “My father left the southeast of Mesopotamia, beyond the Euphrates, and found himself north of the Tigris with his father, a brother, and the orphaned children of his brother Haran: a boy and two girls.
Perhaps it would be fitting to be a little more precise. Indeed, this move from east to west was not entirely spontaneous: the tragic circumstances of Haran’s death made this departure necessary and urgent.”
- “Can you give us a few details?”
- “No, neither my father Abraham nor Lot, son of Haran, spoke of it willingly, and it was my big brother Ishmael who, one day, evoked before me a sort of hunter-king who killed men as one kills game.”
- “Your father is going to leave his family and, notably, his still-living father. He is going to set out with his nephew Lot and the latter’s sister, whom he called ‘my little princess.’ ‘Go forth unto yourself,’ a supreme voice is said to have told him…”
- “This voice, did you yourself hear it, having no doubt sought it out?”
A brief silence, and Isaac resumes: - “We lived in nature in all its forms; what was not spontaneously at our disposal was the result of our own labor, of the care we had taken to understand and grasp what surrounded us: to satisfy our natural needs and, beyond that, to improve or even sometimes embellish our life and that of all those around us, kin, allies, or servants. In this management of the everyday, we did not feel alone. Our questions did not go unanswered. We could question one another. But sometimes the answer was slow in coming and, then, alone before ourselves, it was indeed within ourselves that we had to seek the answer. And it happened that the answer, we heard it, in the gentle form of suggestion, sometimes, more harshly, the order given, seeming to us to come from beyond all that we could see, grasp, and understand. A voice rang out within us, ordering us to do or not to do, but, most often, illuminating the answer that we then found within ourselves. This voice, we called it ‘El’1 since it came toward us. Later, and not only in our family, people spoke of ‘El Shaddai,’ which I could not translate.”
- “If I may permit myself to come to your rescue, I should like, dear Isaac, to point out to you that in his excellent Hebrew-French dictionary, my venerated Master Marcus Cohn translates ‘El Shaddai’ as ‘the Almighty.’”
- “We were not the only ones,” Isaac resumes. “Many others seemed, like us, to be seeking a meaning to their lives and a direction for their acts, and referred to this ‘Shaddai.’ My very birth, I was told, had been announced to my mother and my father through its intercession. We shall come back to this, if you wish…”
- “No! I wish to speak of it at once. I have formed an idea quite my own of the conditions under which my father and my mother, who had lived for so long side by side in their old configuration of uncle and niece — or, before third parties, of big brother and little sister — finally severed that bond in order to be joined, at last, for my sake. It is, you know, I have already told you, my mother who proposed to cut in two the value of the letter ‘yod’ (10), the last letter of her name ‘Sarai,’ into two letters ‘hey’ (5), one of which transformed Abram into Abraham and the other Sarai into Sarah. You will understand that I lay claim to this rather exceptional birth in its very conception, and that I will not let it slip away into commentaries in which other factors or other speculations might possibly intervene.”
And I hear Isaac add in a voice still fainter: - “My mother, beside whom I lived for a long time, taught me the dignity of self and respect for others, the efforts to be deployed as well as the renunciations to be consented to.”
- “Dear Isaac, we should return to Abraham. When he arrives in the land of Canaan, is it indeed to conquer territories and settle his family, his faithful, and his servants there?”
- “Yes, of course. My father had understood that around the Tigris and the Euphrates, strong powers were organizing themselves, little by little. You have doubtless heard of the Code of Hammurabi. To the south, there was Egypt and already Pharaohs. By contrast, between the sea and the Jordan, in Canaan, the populations were few and unorganized. For my father it was not a matter of conquering, but of occupying. It was not a matter of driving out those who were already in place, but of living alongside them.”
- “It seems to me that Abraham, if he did not have the will to conquer, had at least that of dominating.”
- “Doubtless, but certainly not by constraint. By adherence. To succeed, he had to make sure of the benevolent neutrality of the neighboring authorities and, notably, those of Egypt, as well as of the royal authority that reigned over the shores of the Mediterranean — the one that your Bible curiously and by anticipation calls the ‘Philistines.’ Yes, it was with an extraordinary sense of opportunity that my father went almost immediately to Egypt, the great neighbor to the south, always anxious about what might arise on its northern frontier beyond the Sinai. To gain access to Pharaoh was no easy thing. It is there that my mother, so beautiful and audacious, opened the doors of Pharaoh to her uncle — not yet her spouse, and who presented himself as her brother.”
- “But it was not enough to have access to Pharaoh; one also had to convince him.”
- “Yes, of course. But it must be believed that my father succeeded, since he set off again with an Egyptian escort all the way to the frontier, enriched with everything that could still reinforce his group and its capacities for action.”
- “You speak of your father’s effectiveness, that is, doubtless, of his power to convince his interlocutors. Many people have this power, but the problem is always to gain access to the interlocutor.”
- “Of course; without Sarai, there is no Abram before Pharaoh.”
- “Excuse me for having interrupted you.”
- “Yes, I wanted to follow on immediately with the fact that my father had had the desire, rather quickly after his return from Egypt, to bring the Egyptians proof of his effectiveness. Fortunately, a few months later, while his nephew Lot had already settled there, my father learned that a gathering of petty kings from the north was descending the valley of the Jordan. It was, beyond doubt, in order to reach the Egyptian frontier. Not to attack Egypt, of course, for they were too weak, but to defy it. Seizing the occasion to demonstrate to the Egyptians his capacity for intervention, he gathered around himself and his troops those of the Amorite and his brothers Eshcol and Aner, whose friendship he had already won. Together, they organized counterattacks by cutting the various royal forces off from one another, destroying their supply lines and fostering the discord always natural among conquerors allied in victory and vindictive in the sharing of the spoils. It was thus that my father carried off the victorious counterattack that led him to the very gates of Damascus. Pharaoh could be reassured. By this victory, my father restored to the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah their authority and thus reinforced the influence and authority of Lot over the river region and its innumerable riches.”
- “Your father took advantage of it to pay homage as well to Melchizedek, king of Salem and an important moral authority whose influence extended over many scattered populations of the region.”
- “Yes, my father had already met Melchizedek. He had found in him a strength of character and a moral tranquility. They had got along all the better in that this good-natured king sought, beyond control of his city, only to foster a sense of justice that Abraham shared.”
- “Was it not to this king, so disinterested, that your father abandoned the spoils that the allied kings of the north had left behind after their defeat?”
- “My father did not lack cunning. He thus associated the king of Salem with his conquest of authority.”
- “He thus reinforced the validity of the reciprocal commitments made with Pharaoh. There remained the king of the pseudo-Philistines. The Abimelech operation does not seem to me to have succeeded quite as well.”
- “You are right. The tactic was the same: one presents oneself at the gates of the city; my mother, always as beautiful and alluring, makes King Abimelech quiver with the desire to know her; she is brought into the royal palace, and then begin various troubles such as she knew how to provoke. The revelation of the connection with Abraham, thanks no doubt to the secret services directed by General Phicol, Abimelech’s chief of staff. Contact is established but, this time, the charm does not take: Abimelech informs them that they may remain on his lands to sojourn there, but certainly not to settle there.”
- “A failure?”
- “No. You confuse conquest and domination. For Abraham, it was not a matter of conquering territories that were under a strong authority, but of establishing solid relations of neighborliness with their rulers. It seemed to him that he thereby reinforced his own authority over the territories that had passed under his control.”
- “Your father, in a way, knew how to distinguish between internal politics and external relations.”
- “Of course, but Abraham went further. Taking advantage of an incident in the course of which Abimelech’s shepherds had sought to seize one of our wells, Abraham obtained from Abimelech and from his commander-in-chief Phicol the recognition of his full ownership of the seven wells of Beer Sheva where, what is more, he planted a cluster of trees, the customary and absolute sign of the Abrahamic presence. It was thus that he meant to trace the limits of his zone of influence and suzerainty.”
In a way, Abraham, as a priority, had sought to trace the impassable lines within which he was going to establish the franchise of his brand. In this case, circumcision.
- “I could not affirm it, but it does indeed seem to me that the idea of circumcision as a sign of identity and of rallying was born in my father’s mind after he had traced the limits of his possible zone of influence. My father’s faithful and servants were already spread between Shechem to the north and Beer Sheva to the south. Was it the voice of the Shaddai, or a few cases of phimosis for which it had been necessary urgently to operate on some companions, but the idea of the unveiling of the foreskin as a sign of covenant appeared suddenly to my father as the sign and foundation of an adherence to a common project.”
And I add: — “Perhaps also of an adherence to a collective and personal discipline.”
After a brief silence, Isaac resumes: — “A discipline, certainly, but extremely hard for those men subjected to the pain of a late circumcision. The child no longer even remembers having cried out when, eight days after his birth, he was circumcised. But my brother Ishmael long remembered having had to lift the front of his garment to avoid rubbing against his sore exuberance.” - “Circumcision seems to me to have been the first attempt to bind men to a common cause. Doubtless it was a first commitment, certainly, but an irreversible one.” - “My father was thinking of the bond, of a sort of consented fraternal collectivity, rather than of an imposed discipline. What he sought was a spontaneous cohesion. The most evident sign, for me, of the natural authority that my father exercised over those who approached him.” - “There must have been not only adherence but enthusiasm in this consent to circumcision. Doubtless also in that of their wives. It is to be noted that among the supposed descendants of your father, this adherence has been regularly renewed at their own risk and peril.” - “Doubtless, doubtless,” Isaac throws at me ironically; then, abruptly, in a more appeased and slow voice: — “Yes, doubtless.” - “Thanks to you, dear Isaac, we have seen take shape the frontiers of Abrahamic authority, the collective adherence to this authority, but how is the activity of these men organized within this territory?” - “I would be tempted to answer: freely and spontaneously. My mother said to me one day: ‘your father creates the framework and sends men into it so that they may settle there freely; but he also has a concern for order and security.’ At that time, there was more free land than men to cultivate it, and the cattle followed the man who knew how to dig the well and give it to drink. Gradually, each one had settled; some farther north, others farther south, some even on the summits overlooking the river valley, others on those from which one could perceive the tranquil immensity of the maritime waters.” - “But that is generally not done without trouble, without rivalry, without confrontations at times.” - “The most evident mark of the attraction and influence emanating from Abraham is that, at the same time, he presented, explained, taught, and spread the founding idea of mishpat and tzedaka, that is, the idea of legality and justice.” - “Can one speak of a first project of society?” - “I hardly know what this expression means. Doubtless it has a meaning for you, but that meaning escapes me. What I myself understood — and I knew it very young — is that the freedom of each one must be protected by known and common rules, and that the individual as well as the group suffers when these rules are not applied and respected under a just arbitration. It may well be that these ideas were floating in the air of the time, but for my part, when I understood them, around the age of thirteen, it was not only because my mother reminded me of them daily, but also because, confronted with adults, I felt how often it was easy and attractive to circumvent or pervert them.
For my father, what was valid for the individual had to become so for all; whether a man be alone or with his companions, personal discipline as well as that of the collectivity constituted a bond and a shared and necessary good. From the covenant of the circumcised, everything could be built, but nothing was to be imposed upon others. He urged us to conquer lands still free, to make them fruitful, but without ever encumbering those, near or far, who were already settled in the land of Canaan. After my mother’s death, he insisted that I come with him to the gates of Hebron. There, I received a magnificent lesson in good manners. Of course, a place was needed to bury my mother, and it was evident that the cave of Machpelah was the place most worthy to receive my mother’s mortal remains, as well as those, inevitably to come, of my father and of the members of our family. This was the occasion to respect the strict family line that Terah, my grandfather, and my great-grandfather had bequeathed to us. But my father aimed further: by placing his dead one, as he said, in the midst of and under the protection of the children of Heth. He wished to be present among them without imposing his presence or that of his living kin. For my father, one must never build against, but always with — and not only for oneself, but in respect of others. My father had never ceased to love his little princess, the purest and most beautiful image, and even if the price asked for the cave was insolent, I thought, like my father, that my mother’s body would rest there in peace.”
- “Did the Hittites know, while they were discussing at the gates of Hebron, that it was a question of the great Sarah?”
- “No, of course not. My father spoke only of his dead one, for he feared that, knowing that it was Sarah, the ‘princes’ of the place might each want to have the privilege of receiving her remains.”
- “Was it her beauty that defied death?”
- “No, she had traced, in the memory of the people who had crossed her path, the luminous stroke of her presence.”
Was this really the moment to speak to Isaac of his father’s liaison with Hagar, who later became Keturah? In my previous conversations with Isaac, I had felt on his part no hostility toward the one whom, in our everyday language of today, we would call the — “mistress of his father.”
- “After your mother’s death, you went to live near the well called ‘of-the-living-one-who-does-not-see’: was it the well where Hagar had found water to give her son Ishmael to drink after your mother had sent her away somewhat brutally?”
- “My mother, who had just borne me, no longer had toward Hagar the complacent neutrality of Abraham’s little princess. From the moment she was his wife, the mother of his child, she judged it more fitting and more dignified to see her husband’s mistress, as you say, take up a separate residence. My father, moreover, willingly consented to it. For me, Hagar was the mother of my half-brother Ishmael and, later, that of the six other boys she gave to Abraham, whom the latter hastened to place at a good distance from the two sons he wished to favor: Ishmael of course, and I, the great heir. Keturah was doubtless the sweet name that my father, willingly a charmer, had given to his companion Hagar; for it was with her that he spent most of his nights.”
- “Did that not shock you at all?”
- “I did not know that I could have been shocked! My mother called forth respect and admiration; Hagar was smiles and complacency.”
- “And you, Isaac, the eternal bachelor?”
- “As long as I could live beside my mother, in her halo of serenity and beauty, lulled by the charm of her voice and the elegant spontaneity of her gestures, I sought no other company. I did not have — and have never had — the amorous spontaneity of my father. He bequeathed it rather to his first son, Ishmael, and perhaps also to the other sons of Hagar-Keturah.”
- “Was it after your mother’s death that your father himself grew concerned about your situation as a hardened bachelor?”
- “Yes. It was then that my father remembered the family rule received, or perhaps decreed, by his father Terah — a rule to which I have already alluded.”
- “But Terah was only a clever merchant who had made some fortune in the sale of idols of stone, of wood, or of other materials.”
- “Never mind the man, it is the rule that counts, and it was respected. This rule was that of absolute preference: from the moment that, in one of the branches issuing from Terah, an available male could correspond to a female who was likewise available, their marriage was obligatory. Any infraction entailed rejection from the family. I do not know whether my father was very attached to this rule, but in any case he wished to respect it. That is the reason why he sent his right-hand man, Eliezer, to fetch me a wife. In this case, the female counterpart existed among the descendants of Milcah, the sister of my mother and of my uncle Lot, the niece of my father, and the granddaughter of Haran, the brother of Abraham.”
- “Eliezer — how is it that we have not mentioned his name until now?”
- “Yes, Eliezer is a mystery: always and everywhere present, but rarely mentioned. Was he my father’s son? For my part, I never doubted it. Officially, he was reputed to have been born in Damascus; but nothing more was known. As for me, I always considered him as my eldest brother. He had the art of being present everywhere, always useful, but like an image that effaced itself the moment the figure of father Abraham appeared. He was his reflection, but also his active arm, his vigilant eye, his attentive ear: he bore his name well, Eliezer (in Hebrew: ‘toward me a help’). Ishmael and I called him our big brother. He lived under a discreet tent, surrounded by his wife and children, but always near Abraham’s tent, always discreet, always useful, always efficient.”
- “No text records his death…”
- “Oh! The texts — we would have had to be able to write them ourselves…”
- “It was therefore Eliezer who went to fetch the granddaughter of Milcah, my mother’s sister and wife of Nahor, my father’s brother. She was the only daughter of Bethuel, their son, just as I was the only son of Abraham and Sarah. Neither of us could escape this union. Such was the rule of Terah, both in the mounts and valleys of Canaan and in Aram between the Tigris and the Euphrates. I do not complain of it, for I have faithfully loved my wife.”
- “But was it not dangerous to condemn your sons to be the grandnephews and second cousins of their father or their mother?”
- “In my time, it was simpler: we were all of Terah’s family.”
- “How did your first meeting with Milcah’s granddaughter go?”
- “An enchantment. I was taking the fresh air when I suddenly saw a little girl tumble down from her camel and leap onto my neck, crying out to me ‘Yitzhak, Yitzhak!’ I was captivated, and I have remained so. She was named Rebecca. But I had had enough of the ‘a’s of the family: the two ’a’s of Abraham, the two ’a’s of Sarah, my own personal ’a,’ and here was yet another ‘a’ lacking in sweetness: I called her ‘Rivkeleh.’ She proved charming, but scheming and desirous above all of respecting the rule of Terah and of bringing into the world the children necessary to wed the future grandchildren of her grandmother and her grandfather.”
I did not think I should insist further on the subject, which far exceeded the frame of this conversation.
It was about to end when, suddenly, Yitzhak, bursting out once more with his spontaneous and doubtless smiling laugh, remarks to me with a touch of humor: - “And my sacrifice?!”
In truth, it seemed to me more discreet not to evoke the incredible adventure of the silent march of Abraham, surrounded by Eliezer, Ishmael, and Isaac, accompanied by a donkey bearing the wood, the fire, and the knife. Toward where, and why?
- “I am astonished,” Isaac tells me, “that you did not spontaneously question me about that incredible day. It was during the ascent along the paths of Mount Moriah that I grasped the tragic nature of the discipline that my father had imposed upon himself. Mount Moriah was that hill, so pure, that rose above Salem, the city of Melchizedek, whom my father had so strongly impressed after the victorious battle of Damascus. Abraham, my father, had spent hours with this king. They had spoken of that voice that came toward them, this ‘El Shaddai’ that brought the answers but also posed the questions. In the night, my father had dreamed: the mysterious voice had risen, piercing in a shrill tone through the clouds of sleep; it had hailed him: ‘Would you be capable of sacrificing your son Isaac if I asked it of you?’ And the answer had been: ‘yes.’ I was no longer a tender adolescent; I had reached and passed the age of thirty. I was walking beside my father and, distractedly, I said to him: ‘Father, I carry the wood and you carry the fire and the knife. But where is the lamb, the goat, or the kid, and for whom is this sacrifice, if that is what it is about?’ My father had stopped, looked at me, and said: ‘The Voice has spoken to me.’ I answered him: ‘But I still do not have the solution.’ We reached the summit; I arranged the wood and prepared the fire. We remained there standing, silent; my father had the knife in his hand. Abruptly, the sound of a rustling bush. ‘There is the sacrifice!’ cried my father. It was a cry of joy, suddenly tearing the veil of sadness and disgrace that was stifling him. ‘One must never stifle hope,’ my father told me. Since then, the smile of Abraham at Moriah has never again left me.”
A silence had settled between us. He alone could answer the strong emotion of a son discovering, at last, paternal love.
It was Isaac himself who broke this silence. I do not know whether he was smiling, but the tone of his voice resounded with a recovered serenity.
- “All that I have told you of my father, it is through my mother that I discovered and understood it. My tent was rarely far from hers, and I loved, of course, to come and savor her delicious cakes. My father loved meat, which calls for the sacrifice of beasts: his favorite dish was veal in cream, as everyone knows…; my mother loved animals too much to sacrifice them to her appetite.”
- “Was your mother as beautiful and impressive in her old age?”
- “Impressive, I do not know. I would say rather luminous. Her presence alone illuminated those who surrounded her. Her voice was gentle, but each word stood out and burst with meaning even for the most forbidding ears. I loved to hear her and above all to listen to her. She told me that each one finds his place in this world if he knows how to adapt it to his capacities, that my father was a hero, a conqueror, dominated by impatience and anxiety. — ‘Never seek to imitate him, for you are reflection and benevolence,’ she told me; — ‘except that in you, this benevolence can be ironic or manipulative.’ I did not always grasp the meaning or the virtue of my mother’s words, but when they rise again in my memory, as now, at the moment when I speak to you, they smile upon me.”
- “Did your mother Sarah believe in the voice, this God…?”
At the moment I pronounced this last word, the communication abruptly broke off…
I hope to be able to make contact again, but I shall have to watch my vocabulary more attentively.
Notes
In Hebrew: “toward.”↩︎