History, Originality, and Genesis

Abstract

In the twenty-second chapter of Genesis, God orders Abraham to take his son?his only son ?Isaac to a mountaintop in the land of Moriah and there offer him up as a burnt offering. This story, as brief and shattering as a hammerblow, contains the essence of biblical religion. In the reader's experience, faith and revulsion struggle irresolvably. The reader who fails to demand that God explain His appalling command in terms that satisfy our human moral sense shows not faith, but disbelief. Whoever accepts the story with cold and smug confidence, whoever refuses to plunge empathetically into the anguish of Abraham, shows that he lacks the jus tice and mercy God requires of every human being. Such a reader turns Abraham into a puppet and God into a monster. Those who teach Genesis encounter not only in their students, but in themselves, the deadening effect of 3,000 years of accumulated familiarity. An orthodox reading finds Abraham's faith unflinching and God's testing a mere charade in the midst of which Abraham and the reader are already confident of the final reward. Such a reading takes the story entirely too much on faith ?a false faith that prudently disarms any risk of being tested. An authentically religious reading of Scripture, on the contrary, is anything but accepting, even though what we call critical distance never emerges. For a believer the text is full of thorny challenges?Jacob wrestling God, Job's clear conscience in the face of punishment, Jesus's shocking conundrums: the first shall be last; I bring not peace but the sword?so that reading it is like crossing a desert toward a land whose promise is sure to the exact degree that that promise contradicts every human certainty. Those who wrestle with the text may be broken by it, but only they can win a blessing. The strength of Harold Bloom's commentary in The Book ofj is the strength of his wrestling with Scripture. Since he explicitly rejects reading in the traditional mode of belief, the term spiritual may seem misleading. He insists that to read J, you must peel away three stages of varnish, plastered on by the rabbis, the Christian prelates, and the