Genesis XVII. 8–14—Abraham is promised for his seed in general, for ever, all the Land of Canaan; on condition that they worship God alone and practice circumcision. Circumcision will constitute their title-deeds to the land.
Genesis XXVI. 3–4—This promise is renewed to Isaac, Abraham’s second son.
Genesis XXVIII. 13–15—The same promise is repeated by God to Jacob, Isaac’s younger son, just before he leaves Canaan to go to Mesopotamia.
Genesis XXXV. 11–12—Upon Jacob’s return to Canaan, God again repeats His promise at Bethel.
Exodus XXIII. 31–33—The Israelites descended from Isaac through Jacob are promised the same large territory; on condition that they eventually expel its original inhabitants, and make no treaty with them.
Numbers XXXIII. 50–56; XXXIV. 1–15—The Israelites are ordered to occupy Canaan, including Philistia and part of Transjordan.
Deuteronomy I. 7–8—The boundaries of the Promised Land are stated to extend from the wilderness to Lebanon, and from the Mediterranean Sea to the Euphrates River. In Deuteronomy XI. 22 a further condition attaches to the promise: that Israel should keep the Mosaic Law.
Dan, the northernmost point of Palestine occupied by the Hebrew tribes, was originally called Laish (‘Lion’, Judges XVIII. 7, 29, etc.), and later Paneas. It was not only the place where Jeroboam raised a golden calf (1 Kings XII. 28–29), but famous for a grotto sacred to Pan and the Nymphs, from which the River Jordan springs; and for a temple raised in honour of Augustus by Herod the Wicked (Josephus: Antiquities XV. 10). It afterwards became Caesarea Philippi, a heathen city studiously avoided by Jesus (Matthew XVI. 13; Mark VIII. 27). The mound over the grotto is called to this day Tell el-Qādī (‘Mound of the Judge’), Qādī being the Arabic translation of Dan, ‘judge’.
5. The Melchizedek myth provides a charter for Jerusalem’s peculiar sanctity and the institution of a priestly tithe; but, according to Exodus XXV. 30; XXIX. 40, etc., the rules governing shew-bread, wine-libations and sacrifices were first revealed by God to Moses in the Wilderness. The tithe laws were also Mosaic (Leviticus XXVII. 30 ff; Numbers XXVIII. 26 ff, etc.).
6. Though Melchizedek, a name resembling Adoni-Zedek, King of Jerusalem (Joshua X. 1 ff), means ‘The God Zedek is my King’, it was later understood as ‘Lord of Righteousness’. Zedek will have been the city-god of Salem, not the God of the Hebrews, and not monotheistically worshipped. The Ammonites called him ‘Zaduk’. Zedek, moreover, was the Hebrew name for the planet Jupiter, which enabled the Midrash to develop from this encounter between Melchizedek and Abram a myth that the planet helped Abram against his enemies. A ‘royal vale’ occurs in the story of Absalom (2 Samuel XVIII. 18) and, according to Josephus, lay a quarter of a mile from Jerusalem; this may be ‘the royal vale of Shaveh’ later accursed as the Valley of Hinnom (‘Gehenna’ or ‘Tophet’), the scene of King Ahaz’s human sacrifices (2 Chronicles XXVIII. 3). A tradition quoted in Hebrews VII. 3, that Melchizedek had ‘neither father nor mother’ may be based on a similar phrase found repeatedly in letters sent by the Jebusite King Abdu-Heba (slave of [the Goddess] Heba), to Pharaoh Amenhotep III in the fourteenth century B.C., which meant that he depended for his position not on birth but on Pharaoh’s grace.
7. Lotan occurs in Genesis XXXVI. 21–22 and 1 Chronicles I. 38–39 as the eldest son of Seir the Horite; and in Egyptian records as a geographical area of Southern Palestine, which included Mount Seir. Since Horites, or Hurrians, had lived on Mount Seir before the Hyksos hordes arrived, Abraham’s nephew Lot of Harran may well be another fictional character. But perhaps Abraham’s Hebrews, after dislodging the Hurrians from their Lotan pastures, assisted them against Eastern raiders from the direction of Elam.
8. The Canaanite giants conquered by Chedorlaomer were known as Emim (‘Terrors’) by the Moabites, Zamzummim or Zuzim (‘Busy Ones’) by the Ammonites, and Rephaim (‘Weakeners’) by the Gileadites. The Book of Jubilees makes them anything from ten to fifteen feet tall. They appear in Ugaritic mythology as spectres. Other names were Anakim (‘Giants’), Awwim (‘Devastators’), Gibborim (‘Heroes’), Nefilim (‘Fallen Ones’)—(see 18. i. 11–13). An Egyptian execration text of the early second millennium B.C. mentions several rulers of Jy’aneq (‘Land of the Anakim’?), one of whom is named Abi-imamu, perhaps ‘Father of the Emim’.
9. The midrash makes them tall as cedars, and explains that every Hebrew of that generation was equally gigantic. Abraham himself was seventy times the height of an ordinary man, and each of his steps measured three or four miles; so was his servant Eliezer, who alone passed the test of holiness which Abraham set his three hundred and eighteen retainers, and who had as much strength as all of them together. It should be observed that the numerical equivalents of the letters in Eliezer add up to 318. Jacob, his son Simeon, and his grandson Manasseh were reputedly giants. So were Samson and Saul’s general Abner, who said: ‘If I could but seize the earth with my feet set elsewhere, I should be able to shake it!’; also Absalom, David’s son, whose hair when shorn weighed two hundred shekels.
10. Aner, Eshcol and Mamre, Abraham’s allies, are thought by some scholars to represent three residential districts of the city of Hebron. Mamre is stated in Genesis XXXV. 27 to have been a section of the city of ‘Kiriath-Arba, the same is Hebron, where Abraham and Isaac sojourned,’ and in Genesis XXIII. 18 is identified with Hebron. Eshcol was the name of a valley or wadi near Hebron (Numbers XIII. 22–24); while Aner seems to have survived in Ne’ir, the name of a neighbouring hill.
11. For the Vale of Siddim see 32. 2.
28
THE SEVERED CARCASES
(a) As Abram lay asleep in his tent, God appeared to him, saying: ‘Fear not, for I am your shield, and your reward shall be great!’ He asked, ‘O Lord, what reward can console me if I die childless, and my slave Eliezer inherits all that is mine?’ God answered: ‘Not he, but your own son shall inherit. Arise, go out into the night!’ Abram obeyed, and heard Him say: ‘I am your God, who brought you from Ur of the Chaldees to make this inheritance yours. Look at the stars of Heaven, and try to count them; for your posterity shall be no less numerous.’ Abram pleaded: ‘O Lord, how can I be assured of this blessing?’ God replied: ‘Offer Me a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old she-goat, and a three-year-old ram; also a turtle dove and a wild pigeon.’
(b) When morning came, Abram cut a heifer, a she-goat and a ram into halves with his sword; laying one half of each beast on the left side of a narrow lane, and the other half opposite it on the right. Then he killed a turtle dove and a pigeon; laying one on the left side of the lane, and the other opposite it on the right. As Abram worked, vultures flew down to feast on the carcases; but he drove them off.
(c) That night, as the sun set, Abram fell into a trance, and dread of the darkness overcame him. Again, he heard God’s voice: ‘When you have died at a ripe age, your children shall be strangers in an alien land, and slaves to its rulers. After four hundred years I will punish that land, and lead your people out, greatly enriched. Yet not until the fourth generation of their wanderings, when the Amorites have at last fully deserved My punishment, will your people return to possess what is their own!’ The thick darkness was then dispelled by a smoky flame, like that of a torch, which passed along the lane between the severed carcases. God declared: ‘I have given this land to your posterity: from the Torrent of Egypt to the Euphrates. The Kenite, the Kenizzite, the Kadmonite, the Hittite, the Perizzite and the Rephaim; also the Amorite, the Canaanite, the Girgashite and the Jebusite shall be their subjects!’252
(d) Some say that God lifted Abram above the dome of Heaven, and said: ‘Look at the stars, and try to count them,’ adding: ‘Whoever stands beneath a star, fears it; but you, seeing one shine below you, may now lift up your head and consider yourself the greater!’253
(e) Others hold that Abram’s severed carcases foreshadowed the Empires destined to oppress Israel: the heifer, Babylon with its three Kings Nebuchadrezzar, Evil Mero
dach and Belshazzar; the she-goat, Media with its three Kings Cyrus, Darius and Ahasuerus; the ram, Greece with its three Kings Alexander, Caligula and Antoninus. Moreover, the turtle dove signified the Ishmaelites; and the pigeon, Israel. Had Abram not severed the beasts with his sword, these Empires would have grown too powerful; but thus they were weakened.254
(f) Azazel, the fallen angel who seduces mankind, came disguised as a vulture to feast on the carcases. He addressed Abram: ‘What do you here, on these holy heights, where no mortal may eat or drink? Fly off, lest heavenly powers burn you!’ But Abram’s guardian angel rebuked Azazel: ‘His lot lies on the heights, as yours lies in the depths. Depart, for you can never lead him astray!’255
(g) God then showed Abram a vision of Hell, the oppressive Empires, the Torah and the Sanctuary, saying: ‘While your children honour these last two, they will escape the first two. Choose now whether they are to be punished by damnation or by servitude!’ All day long, Abram sorrowfully weighed one evil against the other. At last, having been granted another vision of a Fourth oppressive Empire, namely Edom—though it would fall, as the three earlier ones were fated to fall and never rise again—he left God to make the choice. God chose servitude.256
***
1. The savage deity here described has more in common with the one who attacked Jacob (Genesis XXXII. 25–33) and tried to kill Moses (Exodus IV. 24), than with the friendly guests entertained by Abraham and Sarah in bright sunshine (Genesis XVIII. 1–15). His presence was later attested by a pillar of fire in the Wilderness (Exodus XIII. 21, etc.), and by the fire that consumed Elijah’s sacrifices on Mount Carmel (1 Kings XVIII. 38).
2. This myth of a covenant between severed carcases authorizes a solemn Hebrew rite still performed at Jerusalem in the sixth century B.C. During Nebuchadrezzar’s siege, King Zedekiah and his courtiers swore they would free their Hebrew bondmen in accordance with the Law; but failed to do so when the siege was temporarily lifted. Jeremiah then reminded them of their ancestors’ oath: to release every Hebrew bondman after six years of service (Exodus XXI. 2). This covenant, neglected for generations, had recently been renewed in the Temple by priests, leaders and freemen of Judah who passed between the severed quarters of a calf. Jeremiah therefore prophesied that their latest breach of faith—which profaned God’s name—would be punished in some by slavery, in others by carrion birds and beasts sent to mangle their corpses (Jeremiah XXXIV. 1–22).
3. In Biblical Hebrew, covenants were not ‘made’, but ‘cut’ (karath b’rith—Genesis XV. 18; XXV. 27, etc.); or ‘passed through’ (’abhar bibh’rith—Deuteronomy XXIX. 11); or ‘come into’ (Ezekiel XVI. 8); or ‘stood in’ (2 Kings XXVIII. 3). This proves the antiquity of the rite, which is still practised by the Male and Baka tribes of south-western Ethiopia: the man who ‘cuts’ the covenant smears himself with blood from the severed carcases. In late Hebrew practice, oath-takers were sprinkled with blood of animals sacrificed on the altar—the ‘blood of the covenant’ (Exodus XXIV. 5–8).
4. Since the carrion birds mentioned in both Genesis and Jeremiah signify divine punishment of transgressors, the rite amounts to a declaration: ‘Unless I tread faithfully along a narrow lane of truth, let my body be cut in two like these carcases; and let carrion birds and beasts mangle it!’ Thus King Saul cut a yoke of oxen in pieces, which he sent through Israel with the message: ‘Either come to fight behind Saul and Samuel, or be treated like these oxen!’ (1 Samuel XI. 7). In Greek myth, the covenant sworn by Helen’s suitors for common action against whoever wronged the man she chose to marry, was taken, according to Pausanias, on the severed pieces of a horse, Poseidon’s sacred animal. The animals here chosen by Abraham were sacred, it will be observed, to three deities other than the Bull-god El: heifer, to the Canaanite Moon-goddess; she-goat to the Philistine goddess, mother of Cretan Zeus, whom the Greeks knew as Amaltheia; ram to the Sumerian Sky-god, or to the ram-headed Ammon of Egypt.
5. In the midrashic list of empires, ‘Media’ means Persia; and Greece and Rome have been conflated by the listing of Alexander, Gaius Caligula (if the emendation of GSQLGS into ‘Gaius Caligula’ is correct) and Antoninus Pius as Greek kings. If two more animals had been available, Alexander and the two main Seleucid oppressors of Israel, Antiochus Ephiphanes and Antiochus Sidetes, would have represented the Greek; Pompey, Caligula and Antoninus Pius (138–161 A.D.), the Romans. Rome is called ‘Edom’ because King Herod ‘the Wicked’, whose seizure of the Jewish throne had been confirmed by the Emperor Augustus, was an Edomite; this usage avoided direct offence to the Roman authorities.
6. In Abraham’s time, according to Genesis, the Promised Land contained not only such early peoples as the Amorites, Canaanites, Kenites and Rephaim, but the Kadmonites (bene Kedem, or ‘Men of the East’), invaders from the Syrian Desert; the Kenizzites, an Edomite clan (Genesis XXXVI. 11); the Perizzites (‘Pheresites’ in 1 Esdras VIII. 69), whose identity is still a riddle; the Hittites; the Girgashites (perhaps the QRQShA, allies of the Hittites in their war against Rameses II); and the Jebusites, whose origin is unknown, but whose King Abdu-Khipa (‘Slave to [the Goddess] Khipa’—see 10. 10) acknowledged Egyptian sovereignty in the fourteenth century B.C. (see 27. 6)
7. Israel’s emblem, a pigeon (Hosea VII. 11; XI. 11), was the non-migratory columba livia, which frequented rocks and caves (Jeremiah XLVIII. 28 and Canticles II. 14), whereas the migratory turtle dove (turtur communis) represented the nomadic Ishmaelites and their kinsmen the Edomites.
29
ISHMAEL
(a) After ten years of marriage Sarai, Abram’s wife, believing herself barren, offered him her Egyptian bond-woman Hagar as his concubine. Abram, now eighty-five years old, accepted the gift. When Hagar conceived, and Sarai complained to Abram of being held in scorn by her, he answered: ‘Do as you will with Hagar; is she not your bond-woman?’ Sarai took him at his word and tormented Hagar so cruelly that she ran away. God, disguised as an angel, found her at a desert spring between Kadesh and Bered, on the way from Shur, and asked why she had come there. When Hagar answered, ‘I have run away from my unkind mistress,’ God told her to return and suffer in silence, promising that she would mother a race of warriors. He continued: ‘Your son shall be named Ishmael, for God has heard your cry of suffering. Ishmael shall live in the wilderness, like a wild ass, and maintain himself by force of arms.’
Hagar cried: ‘The Living One has seen me!’, and named the well Lahai-Roi. She then returned to her mistress and bore Abram a son, duly called Ishmael.257
(b) Many years later, when Sarai had borne Isaac, the child of her old age, she saw Ishmael playfully dandling him, and said to Abram: ‘Cast out this bond-woman and her son; Isaac is your heir, not Ishmael!’ Abram grieved at these words, but God comforted him: ‘Grieve neither for Hagar, nor yet for Ishmael! Do as Sarai says; because the children of Isaac shall be My chosen people. Nevertheless, since Ishmael also is your son, his children shall become a great nation.’
(c) Abram arose early and, giving Hagar a loaf of bread and a skin of water, sent her away with Ishmael in her arms to the desert of Beersheba. When the skin was dry, she laid Ishmael under a bush and sat down a bowshot from him, saying: ‘Let me not see my son perish!’ As she wept, an angel heard Ishmael calling on God’s name, and said: ‘Weep no more, Hagar! God has heard your son’s voice. Take him up again and hold him fast, for Ishmael shall become a great nation.’ Then Hagar’s eyes were opened and, seeing a spring of water, she refilled the skin and gave the child to drink. God guarded Ishmael, who lived thereafter in the Wilderness of Paran. Hagar married him to an Egyptian woman named Meribah, because she was given to quarrelling; though others call her Isa, a Moabitess.258
(d) Some say that vexed by Hagar’s presumption, Sarai turned her out of Abram’s bed, threw shoes in her face, and cast the evil eye on her, so that Hagar’s first-born, a girl, died at birth. She also made Hagar follow behind her, with pails and towels, to the bath house. Sarai then cast the evil eye on Ishmae
l, who grew so feeble and wizened that he could no longer walk. Therefore, when Abram sent Hagar away, she had to carry Ishmael on her back—though already seventeen years, or even twenty-five, of age; and suffering from such a burning thirst that the water-skin was soon dry.259
(e) Some absolve Sarai of blame, saying that Ishmael, as a child, shot an arrow at Isaac but missed him; and later he raised an altar to a false god, worshipped idols, caught locusts, lay with harlots, forced virgins. Ishmael also mocked those who told him that Isaac would receive the first-born’s double portion after Abram’s death, asking: ‘Am I not the first-born?’260
(f) Others say that when God let the spring flow in the wilderness to save Ishmael’s life, His ministering angels protested: ‘Lord of the Universe, why spare one who will leave Your own chosen children to die of thirst?’ God asked: ‘Does he honour me now?’ They answered: ‘He still lives in righteousness.’ God said: ‘I judge every man as he is now, not as he will be!’261
(g) Others, again, deny Ishmael’s idolatry and evil living. They say that Abram, many years after Hagar’s expulsion, told Sarai: ‘I yearn to visit my son Ishmael.’ Sarai cried: ‘Stay, my lord, I beseech you!’ However, seeing Abram determined on the journey, she made him swear not to alight from his camel when he reached Ishmael’s tent, lest his heart should be turned against Isaac.
Abram rode out into the Wilderness of Paran and, about noon, found Ishmael’s tent, but neither he nor Hagar were at home; only Meribah, his wife, and some young sons. Abram inquired: ‘Where is Ishmael?’ Meribah answered: ‘He has gone hunting.’ Abram, keeping his promise to Sarai, did not alight. ‘Give me refreshment, daughter,’ he said, ‘for travel has made me faint.’ Meribah told him: ‘We have neither water nor bread.’ She would not leave the tent, nor look at Abram, nor ask his name, but beat her young sons and reviled the absent Ishmael. Abram, greatly displeased, ordered Meribah to approach him; and then, still mounted on his camel, said: ‘When your husband returns, tell him: “An aged man of such and such appearance came here from the Land of the Philistines, in search of you. I did not ask his name, but reported your absence. Thereupon he said: ‘Advise your husband to cast away this tent-peg and cut himself another!”” Then Abram rode off. Upon Ishmael’s return, Meribah delivered the message, from which he understood that she had denied his father hospitality. He obeyed Abram by divorcing Meribah and marrying another wife, his mother’s kinswoman Patuma.