Reviewed by: Abraham on Trial: The Social Legacy of Biblical Myth Gerald T. Sheppard Abraham on Trial: The Social Legacy of Biblical Myth, by Carol Delaney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. 333 pp. $29.95. In this multifaceted book, an anthropologist denounces the ethical vacuity of Jews, Christians, and Muslims over the centuries who treat Gen. 22:1–24 (Abraham is asked by God to sacrifice Isaac) as “the foundational story,” “the model of faith,” and a central “myth” of faith. In moral indignation, Delaney asks why these three religions did not choose “the passionate protection of the child, at the foundation of faith?” (p. 252). She concedes that holding this one story “responsible for ... contemporary sacrifices” of children over the centuries, such as we see today in “physical and sexual abuse, poverty, and the welfare system” is “ridiculous.” Nonetheless, Delaney does claim this story has been “an influence, which, though subtle, is relevant” to these crimes against children over the ages (p. 233). While the Bible begins with Genesis, the stories of a primeval history allow Delaney to conclude that “the narrative of Western culture begins with Abraham” (p. 21). In her second chapter, entitled “Abraham as Alibi? A Trial in California,” she attends a trial of a man who on January 6, 1990, killed his youngest daughter because he thought God had told him to do so. Despite the man’s history of hearing voices, Delaney assures us he is not “a crazy man,” and cites as proof a quote from a minister elsewhere who once said we should do whatever God tells us even if we do not know why. This leads her to speculate that the killer’s evangelical Baptist minister must have said “similar things” (p. 39). She cites no evidence that any minister suggested the sacrifice of a child was a logical possibility. Still, she declares confidently, “I felt that there was something very similar between the structure of the trial [End Page 142] and the structure of the biblical story” (p. 53). In the Preface, she thanks her daughter for constantly reminding her of “the insanity of a system [in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam] that has made a virtue out of the willingness to sacrifice a child” (p. xv). In spite of Jesus’ cry on the cross against God, his father (cf. Matt. 27:46), “theologians, and more recently, psychoanalysts have tried to drown out that cry, as over and over children are sacrificed to the will of the father(s)” (p. 229). In sum, “The story of Abraham is not causative in any direct sense.... But ... it exemplifies and legitimates a hierarchical structure of authority” (p. 14). On this opening level of her study, I would have expected much more careful reflection by someone who is an anthropologist. At her best, Delaney surveys much of the evidence of how the story has been interpreted within each of the three religions. She also reasonably questions archaeological evidence that children were ritually “sacrificed” in ancient Israel. Alternatively, she suggests that the ritual burial of children probably represented an ancient effort to sacralize the common premature death of children up to the age of five. The more compelling statements in support of child sacrifice come from Carthage in later centuries. These later reports should not be uncritically read back into the circumstances of ancient Israel. While Ugaritic texts depict gods who kill their offspring, these accounts do not imply the same activity would be tolerated as normal in human society. Likewise, she impressively criticizes the opposite notion in Freud’s psychoanalytical theories: his reliance on the Oedipus story and his view of Moses as an elevated “father” whose laws are glorified due to repressed guilt of escaped slaves after they killed him, and Freud’s consequent assumption that the “discovery” of “paternity” entailed a “spiritual” advance over a prior “maternal” hierarchy in primitive societies (pp. 226ff.). Less compellingly, Delaney claims to be the first to explain why Abraham presumed he had the right to offer his son without consulting Sarah, his wife. The antique, patriarchalist notion that the “seed” derives solely from the man led, in her view, to a one-sided construction of the...