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It is enough to make a grown man cry, which Feiler nearly does. "They took a biblical figure open to all," he writes, "tossed out what they wanted to ignore, ginned up what they wanted to stress and ended up with a symbol of their own uniqueness that looked far more like a mirror image of their fantasies than a reflection of the original story." To his horror, he realized that Abraham "is as much a model for fanaticism as he is for moderation."
The Tomb of the Patriarchs, a massive stone structure built by King Herod 2,000 years ago, is the grim living metaphor for dueling Abrahamisms. Despite God's promise that this land would be his people's one day, Abraham in Genesis makes a point of paying Ephron the Hittite 400 silver shekels for a cave in Hebron to serve as a burial plot. He and Sarah were laid there, and later, Scripture adds, so were Isaac and his wife Rebecca, his grandson Jacob and his first wife Leah. Herod erected a grandiose monument at what hethought was the site. For most of the past few hundred years, its Muslim owners, who called it the Mosque of Abraham, allowed Jews to pray near the entrance. When the Israelis took control in 1967, believers of both faiths worshipped side by side. Then in 1994 a radical Israeli settler, Dr. Baruch Goldstein, mowed down 29 Muslims at prayer in thetomb. Custody shifted to a complex scheme granting each side access to parts or all of the tomb on different days but avoiding their meeting. Since the latest intifadeh, the arrangement continues, but the site, hedged about with checkpoints and razor wire in a neighborhood under strict military curfew, presents a message of piety inextricable from violence and mistrust.
There is an eerie effortlessness to the way in which fights picked by scriptural revisionists hundreds of years ago feed today's psychology of mutual victimhood. The Jewish Theological Seminary's Magid describes a 1st century tradition in which Ishmael is a bully and Isaac "becomes the persecuted younger brother." That belief has persisted. "The Muslims are very aggressive, like Ishmael," an Israeli settler tells Feiler. "And the Jews are very passive, like Isaac, who nearly allows himself to be killed without talking back. That's why they are killing us, because we don't fight back." Arafat's religious liaison Sheik Tamimi snaps that any Jewish claims based in Genesis are "pure lies, aimed at achieving political gains, at imposing the sovereignty of Israeli occupation on the holy places."
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