Renaming Abraham's Children: Election, Ethnicity, and the Interpretation of Scripture in Romans 9 by Robert B. Foster

Abstract

Reviewed by: Renaming Abraham's Children: Election, Ethnicity, and the Interpretation of Scripture in Romans 9 by Robert B. Foster Carol Bakhos robert b. foster, Renaming Abraham's Children: Election, Ethnicity, and the Interpretation of Scripture in Romans 9 (WUNT 2/421; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016). Pp. xvii + 327. Paper €89. A revision of his doctoral dissertation (Marquette University, 2011, supervised by Carol Stockhausen and Julian Hills), Foster's monograph opens with an intriguing reference to the musical Fiddler on the Roof. Tevye the milkman kvetches to God, "I know, I know [End Page 729] . . . we are your chosen people—but once in a while, can't you choose someone else?" Anyone elected to office, whether high school class president or president of a home owners' association knows all too well that the blessing of election is a burden if not an outright curse. Over the course of eight chapters, F. attempts to demonstrate the ways in which Paul's Romans 9 is a reconfiguration of Abraham's family along the lines established in Genesis whereby the younger son supplants his older brother. F. is first and foremost interested in Paul's pre-epistolary exegesis of Genesis in order to explain Paul's argument that Jews and gentiles are both equal yet distinct children of Abraham. Before getting to the crux of his argument in chaps. 6 and 7, F. sets the stage by exploring why the story of Abraham is important to Paul (chap. 2), why Paul writes a letter to Christ-followers in Rome (chap. 3), and how he uses scriptural quotations (chaps. 4 and 5). It is interesting to note that, in his introduction, F. spends little time outlining chap. 3 about the reasons Paul wrote Romans, which is his most compelling and lucid chapter. That is to say, while the book is primarily about the exegetical substructure of Romans, F.'s speculation about the letter's raison d'être is most intriguing. His argument against the consensus view of the sociohistorical context of Romans is provocative and clearly presented. To be sure, Genesis is shot through with the reversal of the law of primogeniture. First encountered in the narration of primordial history, in the story of Cain and Abel, the motif of the chosenness of the younger over the older comes to the fore in the narratives of the patriarchs and matriarchs. Ishmael and Isaac, Esau and Jacob, Leah and Rachel, Ephraim and Manasseh are part and parcel of this motif. As F. explains, "A younger brother is repeatedly assigned the status of firstborn, but he receives his inheritance only after suffering the rejection his elevation imposed on the elder son. It is this dialectic of election, displacement, and reversal that gives Rom 9 its much sought-after exegetical foundation" (pp. 1-2). Put another way, in Genesis the firstborn son is cast away; he not only suffers a loss of status, but his exile is synonymous with death. He suffers "so that the elect son shares the fate of his oppositional Other" (p. 260). Genesis is permeated with a pattern of irony and reversals such that, as F. and others before him have noted, election comes at a cost—exclusion and exile, displacement and near death before a metaphorical resurrection and restoration. F. writes, "Paul sees Israel's destiny in the messianic age as a capitulation of its etiology in the patriarchal age: the chosen and elect son Israel loses to his once displaced brother the privileged status he received by grace, only to receive it back again in the far side of his own exclusion" (p. 3). Foster should be commended for attempting to situate Paul's exegesis in light of Jewish exegetical principles and practices. In exploring the substructure underpinning Romans 9, F. detects Paul's use of strategies akin to the rabbinic gezerah shavah (comparison of verses based on a common word or phrase) and heqesh (analogy). Paul's atomistic use of biblical verses in Malachi, Hosea, and Isaiah, for example, demonstrates an approach to Scripture that is common in rabbinic works. The work is replete with long, detailed footnotes that often take the reader through a dense forest of bibliographic...