Word: abrahamisms
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...Church, is playing Bette Midler's 1989 hit Wind Beneath My Wings to his Sunday school class--three 11-year-old boys and one girl. "Did I ever tell you you're my hero?" Midler sings. Fintel directs his four charges to chapter 12 of Genesis, where God tells Abraham, follow me and I will bless you and "make of you a great nation." Says Fintel: "To me, Abraham is the person, and God is the wind." It is a lovely image, and as Fintel teaches it, Genesis seems a lovely book. Since he has followed God's instruction, Fintel...
Conservative rabbi Burton Visotzky used to share that simple, exalted view of Abraham and his immediate descendants. "I had always thought of these guys as saints," he says. Not many people in the country are as familiar with the workings of the Bible's first book as Visotzky, an expert in Midrash, the authoritative early rabbinical parsings of Scripture, or Torah. Yet in the late 1980s, an impending divorce led to what the rabbi describes as "a bit of a religious crisis." Suddenly, when he read the Torah aloud in temple, the patriarchs of Genesis seemed all too familiar. Abraham...
...Abel, the Flood and the Tower of Babel and establishes the basic premise of a God who acts in the history of his most problematic creation. The last three-quarters of Genesis, by contrast, is the wild and woolly saga of one family more widely perceived as historical. Exhorting Abraham to leave his father's house and country, God offers him incalculable descendants and property. Abraham accepts, and the rest of Genesis describes his triumphs and travails and those of his son Isaac, grandson Jacob and great grandson Joseph; as they and their extended families are tested by hostile neighbors...
...obliterates most of the creation he had termed "very good" only pages earlier, because of a trespass on rules that skeptics contend he has not yet stated. In chapter 22, in a passage that stands with the Book of Job as Scripture's most wrenching enigma, he demands that Abraham sacrifice his favorite son and long-awaited heir, relenting only as the knife is poised to strike...
Then there is the behavior of the patriarchs. Writes one analyst, with some understatement: "There is often a disparity between these stories and the subsequent Judeo-Christian ethic that has been derived from them throughout the centuries." Genesis chapter 12, as Visotzky was disagreeably reminded, seems to find Abraham allowing his wife to be taken into Pharaoh's harem both to ensure the couple safe passage through Egypt and "so that all may go well with me." Sarah, barren, offers her slave, Hagar, to Abraham as a kind of surrogate mother but when Hagar gets pregnant, Sarah becomes jealous...