The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels (9 page)

It is impossible for any man to forget his penis, his own personal life force. By this covenant, the children of Avram will be virtually unable to forget the god who never forgets them and who in his growing splendor and exclusivity apless
and less like a portable amulet to be rubbed for good luck. This god is losing the guardian-angel aspect of the
Sumerian patronal gods and is turning into—God. To us this covenant may appear barbaric. But within the rigid simplicities of Canaan and Mesopotamia, this “covenant in your flesh,” this permanent reminder, makes perfect sense.

The man who is now Avraham, still on his face, begins to laugh, thinking, “To a hundred-year-old-man shall there be (children) born? Or shall ninety-year-old Sara give birth?” Then aloud: “If only Yishmael might live in your presence!”—in other words, let the promise fall to Yishmael, who has the great virtue of already existing. Avraham is only trying to help God out, get him to be more realistic. But though God will make Yishmael bear fruit “exceedingly, exceedingly,” his covenant shall be with the child “whom Sara will bear you at this set-time, another year hence.” So Sara the pawn, who’s never gotten anything she wants out of life, is to become pregnant in three months. At last, something tangible.

“When he had finished speaking with Avraham, God went up, from beside Avraham.” Interview over; circumcisions begin. And barely has Avraham finished circumcising himself and “all his household” than visitors arrive. Avraham, no doubt a little winded from his activity, is “sitting at the entrance to his tent at the heat of the day”—just as we can see Bedouin chieftains in the punishing sun of today’s Middle East, sitting under their tent flap, hoping to catch a breeze.

Avraham, however well established in his herds and retainers, thinks himself well below the mark of these “lords,” whoever they may be, and is eager to demonstrate to them his surpassing hospitality. What he has in mind is considerably more than “a bit of bread.” Running to Sara and shouting “make haste!” he commands her to bake three cakes from their best semolina. Then he’s off to the oxen to choose a calf, “tender and fine,” for a servant to prepare. When the meal is ready, Avraham himself serves it with solicitude. While the potentates eat, they ask after his wife, whose name they somehow know:

“Where is Sara your wife?”

“Here in the tent,” replies Avraham with mounting suspicion.

The lord sitting in the middle of the three says:

“I will return, yes, return to you when time revives [that is, a year from now] and Sara your wife will have a son.”

Avraham knows now that he is entertaining God and two
angels,
⁴
but Sara, who knows nothing of the previous promises (why would a man share such things with a wife?), has overheard. Perhaps she is giddy from all her frantic baking, but she finds the conversation ludicrous and chuckles to herself, “After I have become worn, is there to be pleasure for me? And my lord is
old!”

“Now why does Sara laugh?” asks the figure in the middle, who now reveals himself as the God for whom no feat is impossible, and repeats the promise. Poor Sara, full of fear and confusion, insists she did not laugh. “No,” says God, “indeed you laughed.” Sara, who has been left out of the great relationship between her husband and God, laughs the laugh of the ancient world, of Sumer, Egypt, and Canaan, of Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Americas, the rightly cynical laugh of all those who know that a woman cannot bear children past menopause and a man cannot get it up in advanced old age. For all the tall tales of heroes and kings, the world of human experience is as predictable as the zodiac that turns in the heavens. We all know the final inevitability, how things must end.

This episode blends effortlessly into the next. God debates within himself whether he will tell Avraham “what I am about
to do” and decides to speak privately with Avraham because “I have known him”—while the two angels head for Sodom, where Lot lives. When God reveals his plan of destruction for Sodom and Gomorrah, Avraham attempts to reason with him: “Will you really sweep away the innocent along with the guilty?” By questioning God, who has been gradually revealing his awesome grandeur to Avraham, the patriarch exhibits striking courage, a courage that will reappear in his descendants throughout the ages to come. A verbal tug-of-war ensues, ending with God’s promise to stay his hand if as few as ten innocents are found within the walls of these cities.

Fade-in: Sodom’s main square, where Lot, encountering the angels, invites them to stay at his house. (Though not as generous to his guests as Avraham, he’s undoubtedly a good guy.) But the men of the city surround the house like the ghouls in
Night of the Living Dead
and demand that Lot bring out the two handsome young men so they can, well, sodomize them. It becomes all too clear that there aren’t ten innocents here. There’s only Lot, who tries to buy time with a ploy that might not have occurred to most of us in his situation:

Of course, the Sodomites aren’t interested and roar that they will bugger Lot, too, once they have broken down the door. But no one gets buggered; and the Sodomites get theirs—fire and brimstone from heaven—once Lot and his family are out of the way, save, unfortunately, for Lot’s wife, who looks back on the raining destruction, even though she has been told not to, and gets turned into a pillar of salt—another wifely pawn.

This unhappy episode, beloved of sexually repressed fundamentalists through the ages, may leave most of us with the same reaction
Evelyn Waugh described one of his fellow officers as having. The young man, an empty-headed dilettante right out of the pages of Wodehouse, had never read anything, but during the longeurs between military engagements he decided to while away the hours by reading a book for the very first time, and the Bible was all that was available. Having read part of Genesis, he soon gave up the pursuit, exclaiming: “God, what a shit God is!”

It is only somewhat mollifying to realize that the sin of Sodom was not homosexuality but inhospitality. You can’t tell from this episode whether God is against buggery, but you can be sure he takes a dim view of raping perfectly nice strangers who come to visit. Also, we know from widespread Mesopotamian evidence that Sumerians and other ancient peoples of the Middle East preferred rear entry, both vaginal
and anal, for their sexual encounters. To the descendants of Avraham, who viewed such posture as subhuman (“like a dog”), the whole sexual repertoire of their neighbors may have come to seem suspect—bestial and unnatural.

But now we go from the fire and brimstone to a real wonder:

God had made her laugh before—by suggesting the impossible. Now Sara the pawn is given the only thing she ever wanted, the very thing she knew she could not have. She wanted this child much more than Avraham did—however keen his desire had been—for he could have children by other women. It is one of the hallmarks of the handiwork of Avraham’s God that his purpose for one human being spills over into the lives of others, creating bliss even for the story’s supernumeraries. The conversation between these two (who have barely conversed before, at least in our presence) is rich and poignant, and the speech of her who has hardly spoken
has a pathos such as we would expect only from a great writer of dialogue:

God has made Avraham laugh, God has made Sara laugh, God makes Yitzhak laugh. And: “The child grew and was weaned, and Avraham made a great drinking-feast on the day that Yitzhak was weaned.” At this point, winter has been dispelled and everyone’s nightmares are over.

N
ot quite.

For one thing, Sara is determined that
Hagar the Egyptian will not share in the laughter and drives out her and her son for good (though they remain under God’s protection). And then, in piercing staccato phrases, the narrator begins the Hebrew Bible’s most fearful and piteous story: