Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . INTERVIEW . Bruce Feiler . October 4, 2002

Read more of RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY's interview with author Bruce Feiler on the story of Abraham:

Photo of Bruce Feiler

On why he wrote about Abraham:
I was actually working on another project, a biblical project that was going to take me to the Middle East. I had spent a number of years traveling all around. I had been to Turkey, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, all that time talking to Jews and Christians and Muslims about geography and politics and faith. I was working on that project when I got a call from my brother on the morning of September 11. He said, "Look outside your window." I was in New York, and I watched the towers fall from the home of neighbors I hardly knew. It was this clear, beautiful day. You could see forever.

Like everybody else, I was mute for a couple of weeks. We began to hear these questions: Who are they? Why do they hate us? Can the religions get along? We had been told for years that the next century would be a clash of civilizations -- the Islamic world versus the Judeo-Christian world. Was this that moment? What this the start of the end of the world?

If you listened closely behind those conversations, one name echoed behind the questions. One man stood at the heart of these three religions that suddenly seemed to be at war: Abraham. Abraham. Abraham.

The great patriarch of the Hebrew Bible is also the spiritual forefather of the New Testament and the grand, holy architect of the Qur'an. Abraham is the father, in many cases the biological father, of 12 million Jews, two billion Christians, and one billion Muslims around the world. That's half the people alive today. And yet he's virtually unknown. I wanted to know him. I wanted to understand his legacy and his appeal.

Two weeks after September 11th, I got up off my couch and decided I was going to go on this search. I went back to the Middle East in the middle of the war, back to the text, and basically deep inside myself as I tried to answer the question: Is Abraham a font of war, or can he be a possible vessel for reconciliation?

On who Abraham is:
He is an idea, he is a savior, but he is a man. That is the essence of why Abraham is important. If you go back to the basic story, God creates the world. God is looking from the very beginning for a human to be a partner and to pass his blessing on to humankind. God starts with Adam, and Adam disappoints. For ten generations, nothing happens. Then God goes to Noah, and Noah disappoints him. God withdraws again. Ten generations pass. Finally, God looks for a new kind of person and ends up with Abraham. Why does he choose Abraham? Because Abraham needs God, unlike Noah and unlike Adam.

All we know about Abraham is that he was born in Mesopotamia, in Chaldea. He's 75 years old, he's married, and his wife can't have a child -- that's the way we meet him. Moses we meet when he's an infant. Jesus we meet when he's an infant. David we meet when he's a boy. Abraham we meet when he's an old man. The point is that Abraham needs something. He needs a child, and therefore he needs God. That is the reason this partnership works -- because God needs Abraham, and Abraham needs God.

On the father of three religions:
God chooses Abraham. Abraham is that human who stands between all humans and God. All the religions want control of that moment. The message in the Bible that all three religions agree with is that that is a universal blessing. God says, "Go forth from your father's house to a land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless all the world through you." Everybody agrees that there is unity and a universal message behind that moment.

The problem is that over time, each of the religions has tried to reinterpret Abraham and essentially appropriate Abraham for itself. While that message [of unity] is 1,500 years before Judaism, 2,000 years before Christianity, and 2,500 years before Islam, over time, once the religions started fighting with each other, everybody wanted control of that moment.

Jews made Abraham into a Jew, Christians made Abraham into a Christian, and Muslims made him into a Muslim. In a way, it's harder for people to argue over God. It's easier to argue over Abraham, and whoever controls Abraham controls God. That's the reason for the contention.

The whole drama, the pathos, and one of the things that is so appealing about Abraham is that he is vulnerable. He needs a child. He can't have a child. He decides to leave his family's house and go down to the Promised Land. His wife still can't give him a child. She gives him Hagar, her handmaiden. Hagar gives birth to Ishmael. Abraham has a son. His great nation has its first citizen.

Abraham is clearly very happy -- no doubt about that in the Bible. But then, no sooner is Ishmael born than Sarah, the first wife, gets pregnant and gives birth to Isaac. Now we've got two sons -- rivals for their father, rivals for God. That cannot work -- two children fighting over the same blessing, it would appear. Abraham kicks out Ishmael because Sarah says, "I don't want him in my house."

That's the split right there between Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Jews and Christians say they descend from Isaac, Muslims say they descend from Ishmael. But although Abraham kicks Ishmael out, he does not kick him out of his sphere of love and paternity. God blesses Ishmael even as he goes out, and God blesses Isaac. God is trying to bless everyone, but the humans can't seem to make it work.

It's definitely a 5,000-year-old rivalry, an internal family rivalry, a rivalry over Abraham's attention. Think about it. Abraham kicks Ishmael out into the desert. That's tantamount to killing him. Then he tries to kill Isaac. This is remarkable. Abraham has essentially tried to kill both of his children. Why? Because God says it's okay. God has asked him to do it. Abraham is so busy looking to God for attention and affection that he doesn't even realize his children are looking to him for affection. Everybody wants Abraham. The children want Abraham, but God wants him too, and it's all a fight over him.

The key moment in the story is when God chooses Abraham to pass his blessing on to humankind. God will bless Isaac, and Isaac will get the land. God will also bless Ishmael. God is trying to bless all humans. He does it through both children. The children may not be able to get along with each other, but they both get along with God.

On the sacrifice of Isaac:
The story of Abraham attempting to kill his son is central to all three religions. It's read at the holiest week of the Jewish year -- at the New Year. It's read at the holiest week of the Christian year -- at Easter. It's read at the holiest week of the Muslim year -- at the pilgrimage. But what's interesting is that the children can't agree on which son Abraham tried to kill.

The Bible says in Genesis 22: "God said to Abraham, take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go sacrifice him." This is the Bible now; the Qur'an is not even in the picture. Four times God has to identify which son, as if Abraham isn't sure which son is his only son, or once he hears it is Isaac, whether what he feels toward Isaac is love.

The popular interpretation is that Abraham was being tested by God for how much he loved God. But there's another way of looking at the story. I'm partial to the idea that Abraham was testing God at that moment, because God said, "You will have a son, and I will bless him." And if God allows Abraham to kill Isaac, then God is failing the test. God becomes a liar; therefore God is not worthy of Abraham's trust.

What's interesting is that a father attempting to kill a son is at the heart of both Judaism and Christianity. Christians interpret [the sacrifice of Isaac] as prefiguring the crucifixion of Jesus. But it's about a father attempting to kill a son; it's a violent act. Abraham is the legacy not just for peace and blessing but also for violence. That is one of the sad but real lessons for today.

The Qur'an comes along and repeats the story, alludes to the story. The Qur'an does not mention who the son is. In the early years of Islam, there was a tension because some interpreters said it was Isaac, and some interpreters said it was Ishmael. Over time, as Islam grew in confidence and the split between Judaism and Christianity became real, [Muslims] said the son was Ishmael. Today, if you stop a hundred Muslims on the street or go to the pilgrimage at Mecca every year and ask who did Abraham sacrifice, everybody would say it's Ishmael. But the Qur'an is not so clear. The important thing is that all three religions revere this moment.

On Abraham and religious violence:
If we heard [a story like the sacrifice of Isaac] today, we would arrest the person. We would put the person in prison: You are going to kill your child because some unnamed God has spoken to you? It is a really powerful legacy of Abraham that people are prepared to kill for God, and if we miss that point, we miss the underside of Abraham, which is that violence in the service of faith is an acceptable idea in monotheism.

That violence in the name of faith is an acceptable course of human behavior begins with Abraham. You can fight wars over God, you can run crusades, you can fly planes into buildings, and you can kill yourself in the service of killing other people -- everything that is on the front page of the paper today. Violence in the service of faith begins with Abraham. Even as we look to Abraham to bring us hope in this time of trying to find out whether religions can get along, we also have to understand that the story of Abraham also contains the seeds of our fighting.

On Abraham and reconciliation:
God chose Abraham, one of the defining moments in the history of the world. There are a lot of biblical figures who receded into history -- David, Solomon, Joseph. But Abraham didn't. At every turning point in human history, people have chosen Abraham to be their father.

Jews chose Abraham out of their past and made him a big figure at the start of Judaism. Christians chose Abraham out of all the Old Testament figures; he is so important that his name is in the first sentence of the New Testament. And Islam came 600 years later and elevated Abraham's status. At all times in human history, people have chosen Abraham as their common ancestor, because that is a powerful message of unity. We have to go back to that initial moment before the rupture between the children to realize that God wanted Abraham to pass his blessing on to all. That is an extraordinary foundation [on which] to reconstruct this family that has splintered over time.

For 2,000 years, the way the children of Abraham [have] related to one another has been by trying to extinguish the others and by saying, "I'm the true heir to Abraham." To do that, they basically had to make Abraham into their own creature. Jews had to make him into a Jew, Christians had to make him into a Christian, Muslims had to make him into a Muslim.

The idea that one of the religions is going to extinguish the others is deader now than it has ever been in 2,000 years of history. A number of wars in the 20th century, the Holocaust, Vatican II -- a whole series of things have happened so that the religions began to realize they cannot meld into one � but must accept each other and live side by side. That's the message of Abraham, because that's what happened to the two sons. They ultimately stand side by side at their father's grave and bury him, and thereby give us the message of reconciliation. It's right there in the story itself.

On Abraham and the promise of the land:
It's an amazing moment, one of the defining moments in the history of mankind. God, unannounced, unintroduced, says to Abraham, "Go forth. Leave your father's house and go to the land that I will show you." He's 75 years old, still living with his family, and he has to leave his father's house. He has to go to some place he doesn't know, and he doesn't even know who the messenger is. What incentive! God says to him, "I will give you a son. But better than that, I will give you a blessing over all humankind forever." But still Abraham had to make the choice.

And that is what it means today even for us, each of us, to be a descendent of Abraham. It's to stand in the spot we know, looking back at our past, looking at the future, and we've got some promise, but we don't really know where we're going. We really don't know who's [doing the] promising, we don't really know what's going to happen. We have to wonder, do I have the courage to make the leap?

Abraham makes the leap and secures his reputation for all time. What's powerful is that all three religions define that moment to know that faith in God requires a leap. It requires sacrifice, leaving your father's house, leaving everything that is secure. It also requires a vision of what could be a better future. All three religions agree on that. At the heart of the story is commonality. That's one of the ways we can find commonality today -- to know that we have to leave our own house, our own tradition, our own rigid ways that have come down [to] us, through all of the religions that we believe in. We have to leave that structure and go to this other place, which is the place our family may not want, maybe we don't even want, but God wants it.

The story of Abraham is about the relationship of God, the people, and the land. The entire story of Abraham, like the entire story of the five books [of the Torah] takes place on the Fertile Crescent. The upper arm is Mesopotamia, where Abraham is born; the lower arm is Egypt; and in the middle is the Promised Land in Canaan, present-day Israel and the Palestinian territories. Abraham's first wife, Sarah, is from Mesopotamia; Hagar is from Egypt. In some ways the struggle is the same struggle they've been fighting for years over this land.

Abraham is a complicated messenger here. He does in fact show faith, trust, and belief in God before he knows what the land is. There is really no way of reading the five books without realizing that essentially it's a Jewish foundation story. The five books are interested in the land. Isaac gets the land; he is the winner in the struggle between Isaac and Ishmael. But think about the Bible. People who lose struggles are not treated very well. Abel is murdered; Lot's wife turns into a pillar of salt. If you lose a struggle, like Adam and Eve, you're out of the Garden of Eden. But despite that, God blesses Ishmael. Abraham kicks him out into the desert, but with God's blessing and with a specific blessing to Ishmael's mother. Photo of Bruce Feiler's book Abraham

It's one that Sarah never gets. Even this Jewish foundation story, which is all about the land, is bending over backwards to show that God's blessing is not restricted exclusively to those who occupy the land. "I will bless all the families of the earth through you" -- not just your family, God says in Genesis 12. God is trying to give his blessing to people on the land and people who are on different land.

Today the fight over land is a fight over the only remaining portion of the Fertile Crescent that's got water, enough in order to survive. � The theology of the ancient Near East was about the connection between individuals and divinities and agrarian economics. In Mesopotamia, all the gods were about agrarian economics -- the water was a god, the sun was a god, plants were gods. Gods were physical things. The great contribution of the Hebrew Bible to the history of the world is that it introduces an abstract, universal God. That is a huge break, a rupture in the history of mankind that makes unity and morality suddenly a notion that the world will subscribe to. But it can't be such a break that you forget the fact that people still needed economics to live. You cannot understand the theology of the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qur'an without understanding agrarian economics.

On religious coexistence in Jerusalem:
I started off this journey for Abraham by going back to Jerusalem. When I got there it was the last Friday of Ramadan, the last Friday of Hanukkah, the last Friday before Christmas. I climbed to a perch in the Old City overlooking the Temple Mount, the Harm al Sharif. On the far side is the Mount of Olives, where Jesus waited the night before he was killed, and there are about a dozen different churches. In the front valley is the Western Wall, the holiest wall to Jews, and there were hundreds of worshippers down there. In the middle is the Temple Mount, where the Jews built their Temple, where Jesus walked, and where Muslims came along in the seventh century and built Al Aqsa, the third holiest mosque in Islam.

The defining fact of Jerusalem is this: every camera angle, every view, every prayer necessarily includes two or three of these objects. You cannot just bow to one of these stones without getting the other stones in the middle of your prayer.

Violence always occurs on holy days in Israel. There were Israeli soldiers with walkie talkies and uzis up on this perch. You've got thousands and thousands of Muslim worshippers coming for the last Friday of Ramadan. The noon hour approaches, and you've got 200,000 people kneeling, participating in noonday prayers. Kneel. Touch the head to the ground. Kneel. Stand. Do it again. At that holiest moment, a dozen churches burst into Christmas carols, and all of the worshippers down at the Jewish wall are saying their prayers. It was an incredible cacophony. What is harmony, after all, but controlled dissonance? You can hear violence in this, or you can hear beautiful music. Then the prayers end, the bells go silent, the worshippers stand up, and everybody holds their breath, because the violence is then expected to return.

On Abraham and the Muslim hajj:
Muhammad comes along in the sixth century and basically changes the locus of the story of Abraham -- moves it away from the Promised Land to Mecca and says that it goes with Ishmael. Ishmael goes out into the desert, and Abraham visits him a number of times, according to the Qur'an. They begin to make a home for Ishmael in Arabia and rebuild the initial home for God -- this giant, black stone called the ka'aba. Then Abraham called all believers to make a pilgrimage, a hajj. All able-bodied Muslims are called if they can do it in their lives -- to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, to walk seven times around the stone that Abraham is believed to have built.

I asked the imam of the Al Aqsa mosque, who had made the hajj five times, "What do you want from Abraham at that moment when you make the hajj?" He said that you don't want anything from Abraham; you want something from God. He said, "You feel close to God because Abraham was close to God." I said, "Do you cry?" He said some people cry because they are in pain, and some people cry out of joy. I asked, "Did you cry?" He said yes, and I asked, "What kind of tears?" He said, "Tears of worship."

Once a year Muslims make this pilgrimage and walk around the stone. That is a direct, physical connection to Abraham. This is not an abstraction; this is not some man who lives in a book. It's part of the holiest act of the Muslim year to make connection with Abraham and, like Abraham, make a connection to God. I can't emphasize enough that Abraham is still living and breathing in these places, and everybody is still making this connection.

You'd think that the lack of evidence [about Abraham] would be a problem for the religions, but in fact the lack of physical evidence creates the situation where each of the religions has created its own story and, in a sense, provided its own evidence. That's what's so remarkable. There's no "presidential library" where we can go to check the facts. As a result, everyone could have their own Abraham.

On the Christian Abraham:
When Christians wanted to make the connection between Jesus and Abraham, they said God didn't call Abraham, Jesus called Abraham; God didn't promise the land to descendents of Abraham, God promised the land to descendents of Jesus. This is what Christian interpreters did in the first several centuries after Christ. It's part of this process of saying, "Well, guess what? We can tell you what really happened, because there's no evidence." The entire crux of the problem, which is everybody re-creating Abraham, exists because there is no evidence, no childhood, no detail. For every detail in the Bible, there are twelve details that are left out. Because the Bible may fail as history is exactly the reason it succeeds as scripture; everybody could interpret it the way they want.

The first sentence of the New Testament says that this is the story of Jesus, who is a descendent of David, who's a descendent of Abraham, instantly trying to connect Jesus all the way back to Abraham. We know why David is there, because it was from the House of David that the Messiah was going to come, and then we go further back. The reason Abraham is there is because God chose Abraham. That's the start of the people who were blessed by God, and the writers of the New Testament want to link Jesus back to that moment.

Over time, the early Christians did something very smart. Paul said that Abraham believed God, had faith in God at that moment when he went forth from his father's house, and he did that before circumcision, before the laws of Moses, before kosher and all the Jewish holidays. Paul said that God's blessing is passed on through Abraham to Jews, but also through Abraham to gentiles. Anybody who shows faith can be a descendent of Abraham.

The initial connection between Abraham and Jesus is the idea that you can be descended from God and not have to follow the laws of Moses and not have to be circumcised. Paul was trying to be inclusive and include as many people as possible. This connection between Jesus and Abraham occurs at a moment when Christianity is very young and oppressed, and Christians were trying to make the message that the blessing of God is open to all.

Over time, after the Second Temple was destroyed and not long after the death of Jesus, Judaism goes into a somewhat difficult period, Christianity gains in confidence, and the idea of having the blessing of Abraham open to Jews is no longer as important to Christians, so Christians slowly say, "You know what? It turns out that the blessing of Abraham goes only to people who believe in Jesus and not to Jews." They essentially use Abraham to exclude Jews.

What you have is a story over time throughout all the religions. When they are vulnerable they want Abraham to be open to all, and when they are more confident they want Abraham to be only open to them.

On submitting to God and arguing with God:
There is enough detail in the story of Abraham to appeal to a wide variety of different people and belief systems. But it's elliptical enough so that you can't quite control it. For example, Jews emphasize the story where Abraham argues with God before he destroys Sodom and Gomorrah, because for Judaism arguing with God is important. For Islam, submission to God is important. Muslim commentaries about Abraham ignore Sodom and Gomorrah and emphasize the part where Abraham goes forth from his father's house to the land that God will show him, because he submits himself to God. A Muslim is one who submits, and Abraham, as an exemplar of one who submits, becomes one of the most important prophets to Islam. The point here is that Abraham is such a universal figure that you can find in him the model for one who submits and find in him the model for one who argues, depending on what you want to emphasize. It makes Abraham such a great figure. Shakespeare couldn't have made him any better.

On whether the children of Abraham can get along:
The last thing I did on my journey was to try to answer that question, and I went to the bloodiest epicenter of the battle -- Hebron, where people are killed on a daily basis. There have been riots there since the 1920s. That's where Abraham is buried, in an enormous building that looks like a cross between a high school gymnasium and a castle, built by Herod. It was entirely empty, and I had to be escorted into the tomb by four soldiers with machine guns. I went into a tiny, dusty space between the tombs of Sarah and Abraham. I got the Bible out and read the story in Genesis 25 where, at Abraham's death at age 175 (it's just tucked in there; most people forget about it), Isaac and Ishmael come together. They stand together at their father's tomb. They've been rivals since before they were born. They are scions of different great nations. They come together to bury their father, and then they go their separate ways. That is the image -- Isaac and Ishmael standing side by side. And Abraham is able to achieve in death what he could never achieve in life -- a tiny moment of reconciliation as they stand there, mourners looking at their father's tomb, knowing all the violence that has been wrought in their names and wondering: What do we do now? What do you want from us, father?

It is in asking that question today that we begin to find the answer to what Abraham means. Go back to the original text: "I will make of you a great nation, and your name will be great. I will bless the entire world through you." That is the message that God wanted Abraham to carry, and that is the message that has been buried under 2,000 years of rivalry and hatred among the religions. And the only way that these religions can get along is to stop listening to themselves and listen to God. Only if we understand what God wanted in choosing Abraham can we hear that message, can we find the way ourselves.

It's not that Abraham is a way to bring peace. Abraham is the only way.

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