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Meanwhile, the Torah portrays Abraham's domestic life as a soap opera. Convinced she will have no children, Sarah offers him her young Egyptian slave Hagar to produce an heir. It works. The 86-year-old fathers a boy, Ishmael. Yet God insists that Sarah will conceive, and in a wonder confirming Abraham's faith, she bears his second son, Isaac. Jealous of Hagar's and Ishmael's competing claims on her husband and his legacy, Sarah persuades Abraham to send them out into the desert. God saves the duo and promises Hagar that Ishmael will sire a great nation through 12 sons (assumed by tradition to be 12 Arab tribes). But he stipulates that the Covenant will flow only through Isaac's line.
Then, in one last spectacular test of his faith, God directs Abraham to offer up "your son, your only one, whom you love, your Isaac" as a human sacrifice. With an obedience that has troubled modern thinkers from Kierkegaard ("Though Abraham arouses my admiration, he at the same time appalls me") to Bob Dylan ("Abe says, 'Where do you want this killin' done?' God says, 'Out on Highway 61'")--but which seems transcendentally right to traditionalists--the father commences to comply on a mountain called Moriah. Only at the last instant does God stay the father's hand and renew his pledge regarding Abraham's descendants.
At age 175, Abraham dies and is laid out next to Sarah, who preceded him, in a plot he has bought in a town later called Hebron. Both sons attend his funeral.
That is the story. What is its importance? Despite every effort and argument, there is no way to know what century Abraham lived in, or even whether he actually existed as a person. (If he did live, it would have been between 2100 B.C. and 1500 B.C., hundreds of years before the date most historians assign to the actual birth of the religion called Judaism.) But Abraham represents a revolution in thought. While he is not a pure monotheist (he never suggests that other gods do not exist), he is the Ur-monotheist, the first man in the Bible to abandon all he knows in order to choose the Lord and consciously move ever deeper into that choice, until the point of no return on Moriah.
The implications of his breakthrough arealmost infinite. To have "one God that counts" instead of a constellation of gods who require occasional ritual appeasement, as Cahill notes in The Gifts of the Jews, means that Abraham's relationship to God "became the matrix of his life," as it would be for millions who followed. A universal God made it easier to imagine a universal code of ethics. Positing a deity intimately involved in the fate of one's children overturned the prevalent image of time as an ever cycling wheel, effectively inventing the idea of a future. Says Eugene Fisher, director of Catholic-Jewish relations for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops: "Whether you call it submission in Muslim terms, conversion in Christian terms or t'shuva [turning toward God] for the Jews, monotheism is a radically new understanding, the underlying concept of Western civilization." So linked is Abraham's name with this new path that each of the subsequent two monotheistic religions reached back hungrily to enfold him--and belittle the others' claims on him.
ABRAHAM THE CHRISTIAN