Abraham and his tribe had started out as barely more than a collection of strangers, a blink in the mind of God. Each of them had been cast away from one of the larger tribes, who were in the habit of inventing reasons to push out their excess adolescents once resources got too scarce. At the age of 13, and after Esau’s tribe had lost half its livestock to disease, the elder’s had suddenly discovered that Esau had an attitude problem and he was buried up to his chin to watch his tribe pick up camp and leave him behind. Rebecca had three older sisters whose dowries had cleaned out her family, and so early on her mother had found fault with everything she did. By the time Rebecca was old enough to be married, her mother was dragging her off to a lone well in the middle of the desert, to leave her twisting, begging and tearful in the sand, screaming at the back of her mother’s head as it trotted away on their family’s only camel. They were all like that. Runts, rascals, problem children and just plain unlucky people, who found themselves marked by forces beyond their control for a lonesome life of thirsty wandering.
They had globbed together that way, at the wells, rustling animals in the plains, trapping meals on the mountains, writing the name of a new tribe in the mind of God. But still they were suspicious. Their own people had cast them out. Struggling by themselves against the creatures of the earth for their meals had left the struggle in their bones and they just couldn’t bring themselves to put the struggle aside for these happenstance companions when their own flesh and blood had cast them aside for nothing. They pilfered one another’s supplies in the middle of the night. They raised their fists at each other during the day. The petty squabbling was bound to starve the lot of them or worse, return them to the godless doom of exile.
Abraham knew they wouldn’t make it very far if they didn’t find a way to stick together. But he didn’t just know it. The fact was all around him, in the bleakness of the sand, the heat of the sun, the truth of it swallowing his soul like the belly of some giant whale. The knowledge consumed him, wrapped around his being. He was overtaken by prayer, by the naked language in the mind of God. When Rebecca’s daughter had gotten sick, Methuselah had killed his youngest, fattest calf and given her the blood to drink, in the hopes that a healthy life could cure her ailing. The child’s health had turned around, and even more than that, the phantom of suspicion had vanished around Methuselah. Look at what he had given, only so that another in their tribe might live. If anyone could be trusted, if anyone should not be stolen from, it was this man, who would cut out the heart of his life’s work if only it would save another. God had come rushing into their tribe, he was speaking to them. Sacrifice. Sacrifice would save their lives.
People began to decimate their herds. Anything to rid themselves of the lurking daemon that stared at them in their neighbor’s eyes. They’d hold their prize possessions by the neck and as the blood guzzled out of those marked creatures, they could feel the doubt about their dedication to the tribe vanishing. The last light of life drained out of the creature and when they had nothing left to gain, God’s love came rushing in. It was an intoxicating experience. And in the long term, sacrifice turned out to be a sound investment. Who could be trusted to give fair prices and quality products? Not someone who is only in the tribe for their own personal gain. Someone with stake in the game, someone who had gotten their hands dirty, someone who had pulled out a piece of themselves to keep this little group on the planet.
Things escalated quickly. If you wanted to be taken seriously in this tribe, you had to prove your loyalty to it. Want to conduct a trade? Bring us your fattest calf. The fatter the calf, the more you can be trusted. Esteem quickly became the most valuable commodity in the tribe, with members struggling to out sacrifice each other. Then there was the question of who should lead. Who could make a sacrifice so severe that it put their dedication beyond question? Want to settle our disputes? How can we know you’ll put the tribe’s interests before those of your own family? Pray on that.
Abraham stood silently over the sleeping Isaac, the knife cold in his hand. The prayer had jumped out of Abraham’s mind like a roaring fire in the middle of the night. He knew what his people needed, the flames of that knowledge whipped above him as he stood above his sleeping first born son. The fire was God’s messenger, an angel pointing the way.
Isaac woke up in a dark panic. His father was holding a knife. He said they had to go to the top of Mount Sinai, where he’d watched his father butcher goats to please God.
The flames of knowledge shot from Abraham’s chest, a holy spirit pulled from deep inside him by God’s holy hand. Isaac had been marked, Abraham knew. There was nothing he could do. And as he walked he remembered his brothers and sisters throwing stones at him as he’d run to catch up with his tribe at the age of ten. He had sworn he would never abandon the tribe that he would build, that there was nothing he wouldn’t give up to hold them together. That vow had defined him, it had cobbled together a thriving cauldron of humanity from a desert full of starving, aimless thieves. Every time he killed an animal, some pang of regret came into his mind for the pleasures he’d burned away and when it did, the vow had stabbed itself into his mind, a heated blade of divine resolve, cutting off everything but the holy spirit of sacrifice and dedication that had brought them together.
Now that stabbing was jolting into Abraham’s brain, as the trauma of his own childhood abandonment kept crawling to the front of his mind. Abraham’s fist tightened around the knife as Isaac stole a pitiful backward glance. The boy was horrified, his son. Abraham’s hand began to quake around the knife as he fought the urge to loosen his grip. He tightened the scowl on his face. God was testing him. He would do anything for these people. Anything not to be the people that threw him away.
Abraham was sweating, his vows ripping each other apart in the center of his chest, the split running from the pit of his soul through the mind of God as it changed before his eyes. With all his strength, Abraham lifted the knife over his head. Isaac was crying, loyal son that he was, he didn’t struggle. He stuck out his neck, looking up at Abraham with trust, with love. If it was God’s will, he would do anything. Just like his father. The vow stabbed into Abraham’s mind again and again. He was blacking out, the tears streaming down his face. He had to do it. He was this vow, this promise to God.
Abraham screamed, and all the goats he’d slaughtered in that spot came gargling back to life, their spirits galloping out of him in some howling, wretched screech. He tried with every ounce of strength he had to send the dagger crashing down through Isaac’s neck. But his arm would not move. It just hung there in the sky, the vow stabbing through his brain, the moment that he would become everything he’d vowed against waiting like some satanic portal just above his beloved son. And as he stood, stretched into furious stillness by the opposite ends of holiness, he saw his knifed hand held in an angel’s palm.
“You have nothing left to prove.” The angel told him. “Stand up with your son and be better than what came before you.” And he did. And a new tribe was born.
God is the moment you walk away from becoming what you hated.
I Am Who Am (That’s what “Yaweh” means. The bush said it, not me.)
Most groups of people have some set of contradictions splitting through the center of them, contradictions that sooner or later are going to have to be dealt with. The classic American illustration is the civil war. All men are created equal, well except the slaves, and the women and you know, the people too poor to own houses. And from day one we knew it was bullshit, but Jesus Christ, can we just deal with it later? I mean we just got these bucktoothed English geeks off our backs. But of course the answer is of course that no we can’t deal with it later, because social contradictions are little places where our grip is slipping on what we’re actually trying to do as a people. We’re dealing with it now whether we like it or not, we’re just doing a crappy job of dealing with it, we very much don’t like it and we’ll like it even less if we start trying to fix it.
Almost every group has one of these. Universities are about the spread of knowledge but they’re incoginably elitist, a problem that keeps getting worse as tuition continues to absurdly skyrocket, because we’d just rather not deal with what this problem means about what we’re trying to accomplish as a people. Charities often end up working like excuses for the people doing the most damage to society. People like to tell us what they’ve given back to the community, but the other end of the balance sheet where we get to see what they took out of it in the first place is a conspicuously much less trumped set of facts and figures. Through the limited windows of our individual lives, we like to tell ourselves that that’s just the way of the world, as though the presence of these contradictions is some stable set of social facts that would appear in the same concentration in any time period. From this perspective, if we should happen to find some time machine that allowed us to hop around to different historical periods, there’d be almost no point in using it. All states of society would appear equally sane to us. We’d never find ourselves saying anything like: “What are you even talking about? Think about what you’re saying you nitwit.” when we went to vote or speak our minds or wear a bathing suit or marry who we wanted to. But as soon as we put one foot in this hypothetical time machine, it becomes clear that the contradictions in our groups are very much not stable facts of life. They might be constant facts, in the same sense that there’ll always be some level of bacteria in our bodies, and some small amount is probably healthy just as an opportunity to exercise the practical business of sorting the bad from the good. But it doesn’t follow from the fact that something is a constant presence, that all amounts of it are equally acceptable at all times. We can get sick. In fact we will get sick if we don’t have a well oiled and vigilant set of systems to deal with the constant, but very much not stable set of problems that bacteria create for us. The contradictions in our groups are very much the same way. We have to be able to tell the difference between the truth and not the truth, or we’ll just end up licking light sockets and drinking paint until we cancel ourselves out. So every contradiction we see is a kind of violence to the mind, a little microbe of nonsense that eats away at our ability to have a healthy body of truth that we can live by. Like bacteria, contradictions tend to multiply themselves. Our groups will say things to us like: “All murder is wrong, well except when this one guy does it, he’s my friend.” And automatically we say: “Well if it’s true for him, then it multiplies into something that’s true for people like him.” And since none of us are terribly unique when it comes to life and death, if we try to multiply this exception across everyone who sees themselves in it, pretty soon we’ll have a bloodbath on our hands.
In a modern world full of tremendous nation states, it’s fairly easy to see social contradictions as distant things. When they’re not actively beating us over the head, we tend to treat them the way we treat any other set of dramas. We read about them, we wear the shirt of the team we want to win them, but that’s about it. We want the right thing to happen but everyone is full of shit and the world keeps spinning round. What are you gonna do? But if we take a moment to put our other foot in the hypothetical time machine we start to find ourselves in places like those in the story above here, where the contradictions splitting across our groups aren’t stable facts at all, but blood curdling realities that are rapidly slipping out of control, into the darkest possible moments available to mankind. In that way, you don’t have to be especially religious to see how the story of Abraham fits as a vivid center for the soul of western civilization. The moment the knife hangs in the air is a state of self contradictory madness, a soul splitting crisis of existential truth, one that our many hypocritical social practices are steadily slipping towards no matter what historical era we find ourselves in.
We see the moral triumph that happens in this story as a miraculous event, and even with all theological questions put aside, that’s probably still an accurate way to read it. Because that’s what miracles are, physically contradictory things that have to be looked at and ignored at the same time. We tend to read miracles in a hyper literal way, but there’s almost always an opportunity to see them as public confrontations with social contradiction that work to radically reorient the priorities of a group into a more stable form. Like how did Jesuse turn water into wine? Well either the story is trying to tell us that a bunch of molecules of one kind became a bunch of molecules of some other kind in a one time exception to the laws of nature, or it’s trying to tell us that the water became wine because at least half of getting drunk is just deciding it’s okay to have a good time, and mostly the alcohol is just a prop because you don’t know what to do with your hands or how to start conversations with people. But we can actually just realize that we’re giving each other that holy feeling, that we have the power to do that. Water, wine, it doesn’t matter, the power is in the holy spirit of kicking it with people just to make a nice thing happen.
And they’re all like that. Abraham sees God in a burning bush. Imagine being by yourself in the desert in the middle of nowhere and for some weird reason a bush is on fire. That would probably blow my mind. If I had a bunch of social stress I was trying to figure out, the epic singularity of an illustration like that would probably speak to me too. Can’t you feel the whole thing surround you? You just wake up and there’s no one in a hundred miles anywhere and the one bush by itself in the sand is just on fire. And it cracks and rages and it’s getting dark and you just sit there looking at it while it burns all night long. And when it’s over, you’re like:, “I don’t want to hear some probably made up story about guys with goat bodies or whatever these bammas are out here trying to sell for religion. I know what God is.”
And what does the bush say to him? I am who am. In other words, being is weird. Like hey, look at this one bush in the middle of nowhere catching on fire. What are the odds? They seem impossibly small right? But then look at you, little raging fire that you are in the middle of nowhere. What are the odds of that? Some ember of a thing floated off and started you. That’s what this is. You are the possibility of holiness. It didn’t have to happen. But it did, and now look at it burn.
The point here is that there’s a duality associated with the miraculous and there’s more than one way to use that duality. We can use it to lie to ourselves about the facts of life, but we can also use it to step outside of a broken set of rules. Which way does the breakage of the truth point? Is it that the rules should be there and we just need a story about certain people getting special exceptions, or is it that the rules are describing something that’s not actually there, something that we all privately know isn’t actually there, and the miracle is a special kind of push that helps us bring that more substantial private knowledge out into the open? Did the bush talk to him? Well if you’re some narrow asshole, then yeah he was on a drive through window speaker with God that just happened to be a bush that was on fire, but it could have been a frozen bicycle or a luke warm basket of puppets. But if you’re not then does idea of one tiny ember of a thing erupting into a beautiful natural epiphany with no reason outside itself sound like a basic language of holiness to you? Or are you gonna knock on the bush until your order of fries comes through? It sounds like it’s an interpretive problem, but the interpretation is a symptom of something else.
This need to obtusely insist on the most literal possible thing the story could mean is basically the same thing we’re doing when we say something like: porn is responsible for perversion, or guns are responsible for murder, drugs are responsible for people being amoral shitbags and so on, where every time we’ve just kind of got our fingers in our ears, and because we can’t avoid some set of problems, we just pick some object up out of the middle of them and start throwing it around as a solution. In situations like these, we just refuse to look at the actual landscape of social contradiction that produces the problems they involve. Actually contextualizing these situations with the stories we like to tell ourselves about the way life is would produce something impossibly contradictory, so instead of focusing on the contexts we focus on some object which can’t be removed from the world anymore than the laws if nature themselves can and let the whole problem just teeter there, hopefully not tipping all the way out of control until we’ve managed to retire into self righteousness.
Every group that’s a powerful presence in people’s lives has to get some special license from them to be powerful. So what does that special license mean? Is it the specialness of the license that’s important, or the exceptional things we want to create by granting it? And the literalness of a miracle reading is always turning on the way that question is answered. The more we live in a world where we need to excuse the behavior of some people for no good reason, the more we need to see only the most literal physical dimensions of miracle. But the more we live in a world that’s actually trying to come to terms with its contradictions and achieve some feat of public catharsis where we radically reorient our priorities, the more the contextual reading of miracle stories becomes a valid interpretive program. It seems like a subtle thing, but people get their heads cut off because that’s not clear to everybody. Non-religious people like to think that’s some primitive problem, like anyone who’s willing to cut anyone else’s head off over a matter of canonical interpretation is someone who doesn’t understand simple mechanical facts about the world. But it’s very much not a primitive problem. Anyone trying to make a powerful group can get lost in the contradictions involved in getting lots of people to cooperate, as anyone familiar with the totally secular atrocities of communism in the twentieth century can easily attest to. The question we see screaming across the mind of Abraham is the same question that was in front of leaders like Stalin and Mao, when they purged and starved tens of millions of their own people to death out of an inability to confront the contradictions in their ways of life. That question is: once you get lost in that place, how do you find your way back out? It takes a miracle to stop a madman with power, to freeze their hand in the air and return them to the soul of life on earth.
Together the interpretations of the Isaac story and the burning bush story provide a stable interpretive method for looking at Abraham as a character and they make him seem like a pretty interesting guy. That interpretative method is the missing contextual piece of his place in history that’s much less problematic with other biblical characters. Like with Jesus, the dude is all charisma. You don’t have to be into it, but in the stories about him, you can see everyone around him buying it. There are groupie disciples, player hating Pharisees. Pontious Pilate hands him over to an ignorant mob. We’d know this story in any time. The man has got him down, but he’s in our corner. He’s the god of misunderstood nobodies a lot like the rest of us nobodies, with our little crews of friends and our homespun wisdom, he might not look like much on a first pass, but we have the heart to throw empires over burning in our chests and so does our god. It’s a personality thing. Jesus is a neighborhood guy, a blue collar hero.
But with Abraham it always seems a little more like God was pulling names out of a hat or something. Like Abraham left his business card in a jar in God’s office and now he’s won the father of a new religion sweepstakes. The jews were the chosen people…why exactly? We don’t really get to know. But once we look at these stories more contextually, it starts to seem a little more like Abraham was probably a fucking intense guy who really was thinking forward about how to preserve his tribe of people within the intellectual container of consciousness in that era. What does it mean for someone from this time to say: “I talked to God.” when there was no such thing as medicine or psychology or chemistry or political justice? Not because we have no way of assessing how they handled those things from here, but because in that time they had no separate concepts of these things. For them talking about things like common decency, moral truth, familial love, these were all ways of talking about the same living truths between them. The movements in any one of these things were the flickering attitudes of that living truth as its passions changed with the vitality of their shared existence. And in this blended world, the collective genius we currently pour into all kinds of expertise would’ve had to realize itself as a blended set of passions for the endurance of a people, a kind of attunement to the shared problem of existence that hovered over those especially paternal people who found themselves uniquely concerned with it.
We’ve all met the person who’s acted like a parent since they were a kid, the person who’s always wanted you to take a sweater, the person who, when they finally have kids, we’ll be able to say: “Yeah, they were actually always like that. I can’t imagine your grandpa and/or grandma having sex either, it seems like they would’ve been knitting through the whole experience, but here you are.” This is a quaint, almost cartoonish little fact of life that endears us to the many kinds that make the world go round. But in a time when there were much fewer kinds, this person would have had to do a few more jobs. They would’ve had to make medical decisions about the dietary habits of a tribe, no small call to make in a supermarket free world. They would’ve had to be a judge and jury, a psychologist and a general. Not out of some instinct towards megalomania, but out of the sheer tribal, paternal necessity of it. It would of course still have been megalomania, and a lot of the calls it made, say about cutting the skin off of genitals, certainly don’t bear the imprint of medical expertise from a modern point of view. But with the benefit of hindsight left as a moot point, we can use these stories see the reverence for Abraham as something that an intense guy probably earned in a single lifetime, by being especially attuned to the direction his culture was headed in, and making decisions of tremendous emotional gravity that are still decisions we struggle with to this day.
The story of Isaac is the story of a society gone mad with need for a scapegoat, an illustration that’s alive and kicking in modernity in everything from Mccarthyism to the Holocaust. Similarly, every god in the ancient world belonged to someone. They weren’t just abstract spiritual Pokemon that people could collect or not collect. They were symbols of ownership, early attempts to handle the problems of specialization which we currently have a wide range of medical and scientific solutions to. In that way the illustration of Abraham’s encounter with a single god in the flaming bush, can be read as an early attempt at establishing human equality. When there’s one god for everybody, then nobody gets to have any special claim to him. We all have the same direct relationship to the awe inspiring flash of being that crackles its way out through us, using our souls to speak in tongues, letting our civilizations rage into the silent wilderness of history.
Between the Isaax story and this burning bush thing, in Abraham we start to see a guy who had a pretty intense relationship to reality, one that when he told other people about it, they saw themselves talking to a wise man. This wasn’t a guy talking about divinity. This was a guy talking to divinity. Do you love your children? Think about loving them to the brink of insanity like this and then arriving at the right choice so completely it redefined the core mission of the human world you came from. Think you can tell real news from fake news? Imagine a world where you have no idea whether or not it’s actually possible for some people to be half goat or to fly or how to explain things like a sea getting split in half by a strong wind or the sun disappearing into eclipses at random times. Would you be able to distill the existential core of human holiness from a world like that in a way that didn’t need to take anyone else’s word about what the real limits of life and death are? This guy could, and the stories about him are an argument for monotheism in the sense that they’re saying; “I don’t give a shit where you’re from. We are all abandoned wildfires raging in the center of nothing. Don’t ever lose your soul. Put your love of that bizarre, beautiful, innocent fire before anything else. For the love of God. Drop the knife and be in awe.”
It kind of speaks for itself doesn’t it?
Princess Fantastic 