Abraham’s Silence: The Binding of Isaac, the Suffering of Job, and How to Talk Back to God by J. Richard Middleton

Abstract

Reviewed by: Abraham’s Silence: The Binding of Isaac, the Suffering of Job, and How to Talk Back to God by J. Richard Middleton Paul K.-K. Cho j. richard middleton, Abraham’s Silence: The Binding of Isaac, the Suffering of Job, and How to Talk Back to God (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021). Pp. xv + 272. Paper $26.99. J. Richard Middleton wrote Abraham’s Silence “to help people of faith recover the value of lament prayer as a way to process our pain (and the pain of the world) with the God of heaven and earth” (p. 9). M. does more. At the topical level, he maps lament prayer onto “the very pattern of biblical story” (p. 36) and “the paradigm of Moses’s intercession” (p. 42) to argue that lament is “the hinge—even the fulcrum—between bondage and deliverance” (p. 36). That is, M. emphasizes the value of lament as a response to suffering and as a means of overcoming it. At the hermeneutical level, M. commits to “an intrinsic reading” of the biblical text in arguing for the bold thesis that Abraham fails God’s test in Genesis 22 (p. 191). Middleton frames the book with two chapters on lament (chap. 1 and conclusion). In these chapters, M. argues that engaging in lament can reawaken and deepen one’s own faith (p. 4), lead “to a fresh discernment of the character of God” (pp. 237–38), and “be the beginning of a journey of ethical transformation” that steers us clear of both the Scylla of ethical paralysis and despair and the Charybdis of anger and violence (p. 239). The much-appreciated claim is that lament in itself has psychological, theological, and ethical value. In addition to underlining the importance of lament in itself, M. connects lament— which he loosely understands as honest speech in the face of suffering, such as “complaint,” “protests,” and “honest, abrasive prayers” (p. 28)—to other genres and patterns of speech: [End Page 138] supplication (p. 35), lament psalms (p. 28), “the very pattern of the biblical story” (p. 36), and the paradigm of “prophetic intercession” (p. 42). The interweaving of these speech types makes clear that M. is interested in the general question of “how to talk back to God” and not only in lament. Accordingly, M. celebrates Moses, who intercedes for Israel against God’s judgment in the aftermath of the golden calf incident, and Job, who protests and complains to God about his innocent suffering, on the one hand, and, on the other, critiques Abraham, who does neither when God commands him to sacrifice Isaac. Framing the larger discussion about “how to talk back to God” within a discourse about lament, however, results in a confusing conflation of categories that unfortunately leads to the narrativization of lament as “the hinge—even the fulcrum” in a plot that moves from bondage to deliverance, suffering to healing. Clearer distinctions would have been helpful. In chap. 2, M. praises Moses for interceding for Israel and argues that his example establishes a pattern in which God’s love both makes possible and invites a “bold challenge [against God] rooted in faithfulness.” Middleton helpfully discusses reflections of this pattern in biblical and postbiblical Jewish traditions. In two chapters on Job (chaps. 3 and 4), M. argues that the Book of Job explores several ways of talking about and to God in light of innocent suffering, that Job honestly complains about his suffering and audaciously protests to God, and that, in the divine speeches, God praises Job for “his honest, abrasive, unsubdued speech” (p. 128) and seeks to make of Job “a worthy conversation partner” (p. 121). According to M., Job demonstrates that, “between the extremes of blessing God explicitly and cursing God, there is the viable option of honest, forthright challenge to God in prayer, which God (as Creator) both wants and expects of those made in the divine image” (p. 128). Middleton’s flat position that God praises Job is an overstatement of one among several possible readings of a dynamic relation requiring more nuance. In three chapters on the Aqedah (Genesis 22) (chaps. 5–7), M. argues that the close reading...