Abrahamic Covenant Research Articles

Abraham, Israel and the Church

This article discusses the relationship between the divine promises in the Abraham narrative and the use made by this Old Testament material in the New Testament. It is argued that the New Testament's reinterpretation of the Abrahamic Covenant (e.g. relating the promise of blessing to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and applying the promise of multitudinous descendants to the Christian Church) is fully congruous with an exegetical interpretation of the core promissory aspects and their development within the Old Testament.

HAGAR IN CHRISTIAN BRITAIN: GRACE AGUILAR’S “THE WANDERERS”

But he who was of the bondwoman was born after the flesh; but he of the free woman was by promise. Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants; the one from the mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage, which is Hagar. For this Hagar is mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children. But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all. . . . Now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are the children of promise.— St. Paul, Epistle to the GalatiansThese Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind . . .— Longfellow, “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport,” 1852GIVEN PAUL’S TORTUOUS, divisive rhetoric, the Jew is always the proto-Christian, deprived of actual historical identity and development. For Christianity, founding itself on usurpation, cannot dispense with the Abrahamic covenant or the sacrifice of Isaac (to Jews, the akedah, binding) that prefigures the martyrdom of Jesus. Because Christianity begins by absorbing Hebraic characters as patterns, it must represent real Jews by a second displacement, as non-Jews: “These Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind.” In Christian eyes, the Jew is twice dispossessed — once by metamorphosis into the potentially free Christian, and again by disguise as a creature of bondage.

The Theology of Deuteronomy 27

The problems of unity in Deuteronomy 27 are usually treated diachronically resulting in an impoverished theological appreciation of the chapter. Rather than offering two equally possible options, blessing and curse, the ceremony on Mt Ebal as instructed here is biased towards curse. No blessings are recited, despite their announcement; the stones are set up on the mountain of curse and the theme of curse brackets the Pentateuch. Nonetheless there is an optimism about the chapter. However this is a result of Yahweh’s grace, not Israel’s obedience. The provision of an altar and sacrifices and the allusions to the Abrahamic covenant in particular show that Israel stands under Yahweh’s grace

The Holocaust, the Uncanny, and the Jewish Sense of History

This paper explores the 1933-1945 Holocaust as a cataclysmic episode in Jewish history within the context of persecution as a recurrent theme throughout Jewish history. It is argued that the function of Jewish historical memory and commemoration of the Holocaust is to preserve the sense of imminent (not merely past) danger and to instill the conviction that the Holocaust is as much a reality now as it was then. The tribal memory of wrongs becomes a collective basis for the survival of the Jewish people: hence the paradox of persistence through (not despite) persecution. The doctrine of historic exceptionalism, theologized as Chosenness, brings expiatory suffering to the center of the Jewish sense of history. Persecution as sacred martyrdom is experienced by Jews as simultaneously timeless, dreaded, and expected. What happen in history conforms to what unconsciously should happen in history. Outer events confirm inner meanings and participate in the psychohistorical process whereby those terrifying outer events are continuously reexperienced. Any social role theory that purports to account for Jewish history is incomplete if it does not subsume the dynamics of projection and externalization in that accounting. The Holocaust possesses the quality of the uncanny as discussed by Freud: familiar, familial, secret, frightening, alien. Jews focus upon their historic role of suffering and victimization in order to defend (by projection and intellectualization) against looking at the relationship between victims and their own victimization. The passive role is in fact a subtly active one. The equation, victim = sacrifice, is analyzed from within Jewish ethnopsychology and theology (e.g., the Abrahamic covenant), and is shown to predispose Jews to seek the role of historic partner in sadomasochistic social systems governed by reciprocal projective identifica