Joseph and His Brothers, page 46
did not know which it might be. Abraham knew, and taught: It was always only He who was the Last and Most High, who alone could be the true God of all men and who would not fail to hear their cries of distress and hymns of praise.
Young as he was, Joseph understood quite well the boldness and strength of soul expressed in the first father's conclusions about God, before which many of those to whom he suggested them had pulled back in horror. Truly, whether Abram had been tall and beautiful in his old age like Eliezer or, perhaps, small, skinny, and bent, he had in any case had courage, the fullness of courage required to reduce divinity's manifold abundance to his God, to trace all sorrow and all grace directly back to Him, to rely solely upon Him and make himself exclusively dependent upon the Most High.
Even Lot had turned ashen pale as he said to him, "But if your God forsakes you, then you are utterly forsaken."
To which Abram had responded, "True enough, so you have said. And then there will be no forsakenness in heaven or on earth to compare in magnitude—it will be absolute. But keep in mind that if I appease Him and He is my shield, I can lack for nothing and will possess the gates of my enemies."
And Lot took heart and said to him, "Then will I be your brother."
Yes, Abram had knowingly shared his high optimism with his family. He was called Abiram, which may have meant "my father is exalted," or, quite rightly and probably, "father of the Exalted." For in some measure Abraham was God's father. He had discovered Him and thought Him into being. Those mighty attributes that he ascribed to Him were surely God's original property, Abram was not their originator. But by recognizing them, teaching them, and realizing them in his own thought, was he not His father in a certain sense? God's powerful attributes were, to be sure, a given reality outside of Abraham, but at the same time they were also in him and from him; at certain moments the power of his own soul—deliberately shrinking and melting into one with them—was scarcely to be differentiated from them. Here lay the origin of the covenant that the Lord made with Abraham and that was merely the explicit confirmation of an inner reality; this was also, however, the origin of the peculiar quality of Abram's fear of God. For since God's greatness was indeed something terrible and real outside him and yet at the
same time coincided in some sense with his own soul and was indeed its product, Abram's fear of God was not fear alone in the true sense of the word—it was not only trembling and quaking, but also attachment, intimacy, and friendship, all in one. And at times the first father did indeed have a way of dealing with God that, if one did not take into consideration the interlocking peculiarity of their relationship, must have aroused amazement in heaven and earth. For example, given God's terrible power and greatness, Abram's friendly rebuke of the Lord during the destruction of Sodom and Amorrah had verged on being offensive. But, to be sure, whom should it offend if not God? And He had taken it well enough. "Hear me, Lord," Abram had said on that occasion, "yes or no, one way or the other! If You want to have a world. You cannot demand justice; but if You care only for justice, then the world is done for. You grasp the cord by both ends, wanting both a world and justice in it. But if You are not more lenient, the world cannot stand." He had even accused the Lord of deception and reproached Him for having once sworn never to flood the world again, and yet here He came with a flood of fire. But God, who surely could not have dealt any differently with these cities after what had happened, or almost happened, to His messengers, had received it all, if not with good, at least not with ill will; to all of it He had wrapped Himself in benevolent silence.
This silence was the expression of a monstrous fact that belonged both to God's external presence and at the same time to the largeness of Abram's soul, which was perhaps its most proper source: the fact that the contradiction of a living world that was also supposed to be just resided within God's greatness itself. For He, the living God, was not good or merely good among other things, but was evil besides. His living presence embraced evil and was at the same time holy, was holiness in and of itself, holiness that demanded holiness.
The vastness of it! It was He who had dashed Tiamat in pieces, had cloven the dragon of chaos in two; the cries of jubilation with which the gods had greeted Mardug at creation and that Abram's countrymen repeated each New Year's Day belonged by rights to Him, the God of Abraham. Order and wholesome dependability originated in Him. That the early rains and late rains fell in their season was His handiwork. He had banned the hideous sea—once left behind by the Flood and now the abode of Leviathan—within limits
that even its fiercest blows could not exceed. He made the engendering sun to rise, climb to its zenith, and retreat each evening for its journey through hell; made the moon to measure time by the constant shifting of its phases. He arrayed the stars, uniting them in sturdy constellations, and disposed the life of animals and men by nourishing them according to the seasons. In places where no one had ever been, snow melted to moisten the earth, whose disk He had set upon the great waters, so that it never, or only very seldom, shook or faltered. What a wealth of blessing, of benefit and goodness!
Except that just as when a man slays an enemy, he is likely to take on his foe's qualities in victory, it appeared that in cleaving the monster of chaos in two, God had incorporated its nature. Perhaps only then had He become complete and perfect, only then had He grown into the full majesty of His living presence. The battle between light and darkness, between good and evil, horror and mercy, was not, as Nimrod's people believed, the continuation of Mardug's battle with Tiamat. Even darkness, evil, and unpredictable horror, even earthquake, a crackling bolt of lightning, a swarm of locusts darkening the sun, the seven evil winds, the Abubu of dust, the hornet, and the serpent were from God; and if He was called Lord of Pestilence, then that was because He was both its sender and its healer. He was not what is good, but what is all. And He was holy! Holy not out of goodness, but out of being the living God, and more than living, holy in His majesty and terribleness—uncanny, dangerous, deadly—so that one oversight, one mistake, one small slip in one's conduct toward Him could have horrible consequences. He was holy; but He also demanded holiness, and that He did so merely by existing gave the Holy One a meaning beyond that of the danger of holiness. The caution that He enjoined became piety itself and God's living majesty became the measuring rod of life—the source of guilt and of that fear of God that meant walking in purity before God's great grandeur.
God was there, and Abraham walked before Him, his soul made holy by God's nearness outside it. They were two, an I and a Thou, each of whom said "I," and to the other "Thou." It is quite correct to say that Abram discerned God's qualities with the help of his own largeness of soul—^without it he would not have discerned them or known how to name them, they would have remained in darkness.
That, however, is also why God remained a powerful Thou who said "F' apart from Abraham and apart from the world. He was in the fire, but not the fire—which is why it would have been a very serious blunder to worship the fire. God created the world, in which there were things of powerful immensity, like the whirlwind or the Leviathan. One had to consider these things in order to have some picture, or if not a picture, some conception of His external greatness. He was of necessity much greater than all His works, and it was equally necessary that He be outside His works. He was called makom, space, because He was the space of the world, but the world was not His space. He was also in Abraham, who knew Him thanks to His power in him. But this very fact strengthened and fulfilled the first father's sense of saying "I," for in no way was this God-filled and courageous "I" incHned to vanish into God, to be one with Him and no longer be Abraham. Instead he very alertly and clearly held himself erect opposite Him—at a vast distance, to be sure, for Abraham was only a man, a clod of earth, but bound to Him by that knowledge and made holy by God's sublime there-ness and Thou-ness. It was on such foundations that God established an everlasting covenant with Abram, a contract that held such promise for both parties and of which the Lord was so jealous that He wished to be worshiped exclusively by His people, with never a sidelong glance toward other gods, of which the world was full. That was remarkable. Through Abraham and his covenant something had come into the world that had never been there before and of which the nations knew nothing: the damnable possibility that the covenant could be broken, that one could fall away from God.
The first father had many other things he could teach about God, but he did not know how to tell about God—not in the way others knew to tell stories about their gods. There were no stories about God. This was perhaps the most remarkable thing of all: the courage with which Abram posited God's existence as a given, without any attendant circumstances or stories, but simply by saying "God." God had not arisen, had not been born, of any female. Nor was there a female beside His throne, no Ishtar, no Baalat and mother of God. How could that be? Simple reason led one to realize that such a thing was inconceivable in view of God's entire nature. He had planted the Tree of Knowledge and of Death in Eden, and man had eaten from it. It was for man to give birth and die, but not
for God, and He beheld no divine female at His side because He did not need to know one, and instead was Himself both Baal and Baalat in one. He likewise had no children. For neither the angels nor the zebaoth who served Him were His offspring, nor had those giants been—rather, they had been born of the daughters of men by a few angels seduced by the sight of female wantonness. He was alone, and that was a hallmark of His greatness. And to whatever extent God's solitary state without wife or child might serve to explain His great jealousy in regard to His covenant with man, it was in any case tied up with the lack of stories about Him, the fact that there was nothing to tell about Him.
And yet again, even this was to be understood only conditionally, for it was true only in terms of the past, but not as regarded the future—always presuming that the word "tell" can be applied to the future and that one can tell the story of the future, even if it must be in the form of the past. Nevertheless, God did indeed have a story, but it concerned the future, a future so glorious for God that His present, glorious as it was, could not match it; and that it did not match it lent God's grandeur and holy power a quality of expectation and of unfulfilled promise—a sorrowful quality, to put it bluntly, that was not to be ignored if one were fully to understand God's covenant with man and His jealousy of it.
There came a day, the last and final day, and only it brought the fulfillment of God. This day was both end and beginning, destruction and new birth. The world, this first or maybe not even first world, vanished amidst enveloping catastrophe, and chaos, the primal silence, returned. But then God would begin His work anew and more marvelous still—Lord of Destruction, Lord of Calling into Being. Out of formlessness and the void, tohu and hohu, mire and darkness. His Word called forth a new cosmos, and the jubilation of the watching angels sounded more overwhelmed than it had once before, for the newborn world surpassed the old in every respect, and in it God would triumph over all His enemies.
That was how it was: At the end of days God would be King, King of Kings, King over men and gods. But was He not that already now? To be sure, in the stillness and in Abram's perception. But not as a recognized and appreciated reality, and thus not in fully realized terms. The realization of God's absolute kingship was left to the last
and first day, that day of destruction and of calling into being, when before all eyes His unconditional splendor would rise up out of bonds in which it still lay. No Nimrod would rebel against Him with shameless terraced towers, no human knee would bow but before Him, no human mouth give glory to any but Him. But that meant that God would finally and truly be—just as He had in truth always been—Lord and King over all gods. To the blaring of ten thousand trumpets tilted toward the heavens, amid a chorus of thundering flames, in a hailstorm of lightning bolts, He would stride past a prostrate and adoring world and, clothed in sovereignty and dread, ascend His throne, assuming possession—for all to behold and for all eternity—of a reality that was His truth.
Oh day of God's apotheosis, day of promise, expectation, and fulfillment! It would, let it be noted, also include the apotheosis of Abraham, whose name would henceforth be a word of blessing, a greeting to be shared among the races of men. That was the promise. That this thundering day was not yet the present, but only the ultimate future to be awaited until then—this was what lent a quality of suffering to God's countenance at present, a quality of not-yet and of expectation. God lay in bonds, God suffered. God was held prisoner. This softened His grandeur, making it an object of comforting devotion for all who suffered and waited, who were not great, but small in this world, and it put scorn in their hearts against anything that was like Nimrod and against all things shameless in their greatness. No, God had no stories like Osiris, the martyr of Egypt, who had been dismembered and buried, but rose again, or like Adon-Tammuz, over whom the flute mourned in the ravines, the lord of the sheepfold whose side was ripped open by Ninib the boar and who descended into captivity only to rise again. Therefore, let it be a remote, a forbidden idea that God ever had some tie to the stories of nature—withering in sorrow, freezing in suffering, only to be renewed by law and promise into laughter and a profusion of flowers—to grain rotting in the darkness of earth's prison, so that it might sprout and rise again; to dying and to sex; to the corrupted holiness of Melech-Baal and his worship at Tyre, where with eyes rolling in folly and with the shamelessness of death itself, men offered their semen to that hideous god. God forbid that He should ever have had anything to do with stories of that sort! All the same.
He lay in bonds and was a God awaiting the future—and this established a certain similarity between Him and these suffering divinities; and it was for this reason that Abram held long conversations at Shechem with Malkizedek, who was an attendant priest at the temple of the Baal of the Covenant and El-Elyon, concerning whether and, if so, to what extent there might be some similarity in the natures of his Adon and Abraham's own Lord.
God, however, had kissed His fingertips and—much to the secret vexation of the angels—cried out: "Unbelievable, how well this clod of earth understands Me! Have I not begun to make a name for Myself through him? Truly, I will anoint him!"
The Messenger's Master
Such a man, pure and simple—that was the portrait of Abraham that Eliezer's tongue painted for his pupil. But even as he spoke his tongue might suddenly fork, and he would speak differently about him, in other terms. It was still Abram, the man from Uru (or actually, Haran), about which that venerable serpent's tongue spoke— calling him Joseph's great-grandfather. But both the old man and the lad knew that by the light of day this had not been Abram—not the Abraham of whom the other tongue had just spoken, the restless subject of Amraphel of Shinar—just as they knew that no man's great-grandfather could have lived twenty generations before him. But they shared a wink over more than just this imprecision; for the Abraham of whom this tongue now spoke, alternating on occasion, moving back and forth in its forked fashion, was likewise not the one who had lived back then and had shaken the dust of Shinar from his feet, but rather a figure who came into view far behind him and for whom he grew transparent, so that as the lad's eyes fell on him they floated in a vista of personality just as they had in a vista named "Eliezer"—which, as nature demands, grew ever brighter, for transparency is light shining through.
What came to Ught, then, were all the stories that belonged to that half of the sphere in which master and servant had driven the foe beyond Damashki not with three hundred eighteen men but with
the assistance of spirits from on high; the story of the earth's "leaping up to meet" EHezer, the messenger; or of the prophecy of Abraham's birth, of babes slaughtered on his account, of his childhood in a cave, and of how the angel suckled him while his mother wandered about in search of him. It had the stamp of truth—somewhere and somehow it was true. Mothers have always wandered and searched; they have many names, but they roam the fields looking for the poor child who has been abducted to the underworld, murdered, dismembered. This time she was named Amathla, or probably Emtelai, names that Eliezer perhaps let be rendered in free form and dreamy combination; for they were less suitable for the mother than for the nursing angel, who—or so, for the sake of more colorful verisimilitude, the forked tongue said—had probably taken the form of a goat. Hearing the mother of the Chaldean called Emtelai put Joseph in a very dreamy state of mind as well and contributed to the look in his eye as he listened; for without doubt the name meant "mother of my exalted one," or in plain terms "mother of God."
Should the venerable Eliezer have been censured for speaking this way? No. Stories come down from above—just as a god becomes a man—become earthly and bourgeois, as it were, without ceasing to take place on high and be narratable in their higher form. And so the old man would sometimes claim that the sons of Ketu-rah, the woman Abram took as a concubine in his old age—that is, Medan, Midian, and Jokshan, plus Zimran, Ishbak, and whoever— these sons had "flashed like lightning," and Abram had built them and their mother a city of iron, so high that the sun never shone into it and it was illumined only by gemstones. His listener would have had to be an awfully dull lad not to have realized that this referred to the dimly glimmering city of the underworld, whose queen, in this version, was named Keturah. An unassailable version! For Keturah was in fact simply a Canaanite woman, whom Abraham in his old age had honored with his bed; but she was also the mother of a long series of Arabian tribal fathers and lords of the desert, just as Hagar the Egyptian had been the mother of such a lord. When Eliezer said of her sons that they had flashed like lightning, that only meant that one had to view them with both eyes, and not with just one, to regard them under the sign of simultaneity and the unity of what is twofold—that is, both as Bedu chieftains roaming homeless and as
