Word: judaisms
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This week a look at the biblical Abraham traces the vital role he plays in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In 1998 TIME focused on the historic power of another Old Testament figure, MOSES...
...Judaism and Islam, for starters, cannot even agree on which son he almost sacrificed. Then there is Abraham's Covenant with God. Many Jews (and some conservative Christians) believe it granted the Jewish people alone the right to the Holy Land. That belief fuels much of the Israeli settler movement and plays an ever greater role in Israel's hostility toward Palestinian nationalist claims. "Our connection to the land goes back to our first ancestor. Arabs have no right to the land of Israel," says Rabbi Haim Druckman, a settler leader and a parliamentarian with the National Religious Party. This...
...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...
...inheritance. The God of the Hebrew Bible deemed Abraham to be "righteous" years before his circumcision, he wrote, which meant that his listeners didn't need to become circumcised Jews to be Abraham's inheritors. Baptism in faith would more than suffice. Paul waffled as to whether Christianity rendered Judaism's Abrahamic Covenant null and void. But his successors assumed so. The 2nd century church father Justin Martyr wrote that far from an indication of grace, circumcision marked Jews "so that your landmight become desolate, and your cities burned," something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Bereft of a divine warrant...
Given the diversity of Islamic culture and history, that question is deeply flawed. It might be posed equally fairly about Judaism, on the basis of the Hebrews' God-sanctioned rampages through the Book of Joshua, or Christianity, which inspired the Inquisition. But this is Islam's American moment, and its cause might be better served by citing the Koran's ban on killing civilians rather than totally ignoring the issue of killing...