Welcome to the "Not in God's Name" Blog!

I've been reading the book Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence, by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. This is a book I wish everybody would read. It looks at the ancient scripture of the foundational Abrahamic faith, Judaism, as providing ample reason for Jews, Christians, and Muslims — members of the three religions that hark back to the original monotheistic patriarch, Abraham — never to kill one another in the name of God.

That ancient scripture, which Christians call the Old Testament, is of course the Hebrew Bible. Muslims revere that scripture as well, not just their own Qur'an. According to Wikipedia, "The Qur'an mentions the names of numerous figures considered prophets in Islam, including Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus, among others." The stories of Adam, Noah, and Abraham are told in the first book of the Hebrew Bible, Genesis. Moses's story is told in the second book, Exodus.

In this book, Rabbi Sacks shows how the stories told in Genesis that occur after Noah's flood — those of Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, and Joseph and his many brothers — reveal to us a distinctive pattern.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

The pattern is one of sibling rivalry and the displacement of the elder brother by the younger. Abraham's first son Ishmael is cast out as a child — along with his mother Hagar, who had served as a maternal surrogate because Sarah was seemingly barren — with the second son, Isaac, carrying forth God's covenant with Abraham. Ishmael, who grows up to become prosperous, is today thought of as the progenitor of Muslim peoples. From the point of view of Hebrew scripture, however, Isaac is seemingly the one blessed by God.

Yet Rabbi Sacks points out a counter-narrative. First of all, the name Ishmael means "God had heard," i.e., "God has heard of Hagar's misery" upon being cast out with her son. "It turns out that what we have here," Sacks writes, "is not a simple drama of choice and rejection at all. Isaac has been chosen for a specific destiny, but Ishmael has not been rejected — at least not by God."

Reading the story, we feel for Hagar and Ishmael in a way that we do not for Isaac and his mother Sarah (who by the grace of God had turned out to be able to conceive a child after all). Moreover, says Sacks, the text of the story goes to an "extraordinary length ... to insist that Ishmael will be blessed by God" (Sacks's italics):

At the end of the story — surprise, surprise! — the "rejected" son Ishmael stands side by side with the "chosen" Isaac at their father's grave. And according to the ancient Jewish sages, Isaac even had gone to some trouble to reunite Hagar, Ishmael's mother, with Abraham as an old man. According to Sacks, "The story beneath the story ... is that neither Abraham nor Isaac made their peace with the banishment of handmaid and child."

In fact, "... long before the birth of Islam, many rabbis in the Mishnaic and Talmudic periods, from the first century CE onwards, were called Ishmael, hardly likely – indeed impossible – if Ishmael were a rejected figure in Judaism."

Already, even without going on to examine the story of Jacob and Esau, we begin to see what Rabbi Sacks is talking about. Right there in sacred scripture is ample reason for Jews, Christians, and Muslims not to take sibling rivalry as a rationale for killing one another. Beneath every story of sibling rivalry in the Book of Genesis is a counter-narrative which defuses such a twisted reading.

I'll talk more about how Sacks works all that out in future posts to this blog ...