lots of young men and women were drawn to her and to her temple. She taught what you might call, “the old way,” the path of the Great Mother, and the young people who were drawn to that path were Luddite hippies from over three thousand years ago.
For Abraham, who believed in a modern new religion with its androgynous and main, male god, that was the last straw! Drugs he could deal with, but he’d waited too long to have a son with his sister-wife to see Isaac enter a community like that. A typical Jewish father in a world that was becoming increasingly male-focused and patriarchal, Abraham expected Isaac to take over the family business, and then pass it on to his own sons. Isaac’s castrating himself would rob Abraham of his grandchildren, so you can sympathize with his fury. Now you might think that from circumcision to castration isn’t such a long journey, but in those days the whole foreskin of a baby wasn’t removed, only a ring at the end, something I’ll talk about later, when I get to the story of Moses. But given what happened with Abraham’s expectations, since that time our people have been uncomfortable with anyone who isn’t married with children, and have been particularly uncomfortable with eunuchs, although they were popular in China, Ottoman Turkey, and were singers in the Catholic Church until not so very long ago. One of my best friends in the Middle Ages in Europe was a man named Fratello Solli, a short shy eunuch with a glorious voice! But let me go back to the old story.
And his wrath was kindled against his son Isaac, the son of his loins, the son of his wife Innati the princess. And Abraham took his chief steward and five of his servants, and they set out for Luz to the temple. When they arrived they saw Isaac and the head priestess offering a sacrifice to the goddess. And they hid behind the oracle tree till the sacrifice was complete. And while Isaac and the priestess were eating their portion of the offering, Abraham and his servants sprang out and grabbed and bound the boy.
Not only had Abraham gotten angry at Isaac, but he’d also had a huge fight with Sarah. She understood why he was upset, but felt two things. First, she understood why Isaac was doing what he was doing. She was the devout one and had long felt a calling in her only son. And getting castrated was a part of their world. Men did it all the time. (Although I didn’t understand it then and I don’t understand it now.) And second, as the product of a matriarchal lineage and the mother of four daughters, Sarah had her own heirs and she didn’t feel the distress her beloved husband did. In fact, she tried to talk Abraham out of going, but he was adamant. His argument was rather like one you may have heard. “The boy’s too young. He has no idea what he’s doing. I’m not going to sit back and do nothing, and let him ruin his entire life by entering this ridiculous cult.”
The priestess of Asherah of Luz raised up the knife of sacrifice, still bloody, and tried to cut Isaac’s bindings, but she was subdued. “You cannot have this son of mine,” Abraham bellowed. “His is not yet of age. He is still a son of my tent.” For Isaac had lied to the priestess about his age. “I will kill him myself before I see him become a priest in your house,” he shouted. The priestess was dismayed, however she had acted honorably, having believed the boy when he said he was of age. But she knew that she could not take in and initiate the youth against his father’s wishes, and she told Isaac that he must go home with him and obey him. She told him that he could come back in a year, when he had finally come of age, if he still felt a calling to the goddess Asherah, to be Her sacred priest in Luz.
Without the support of the priestess there was nothing that Isaac could do. He had to go home with Abraham. But what made it even worse for Isaac was that many of the Canaanite boys in the area had come to see him assist with the sacrifice for the first time. They were his new friends and he’d bragged to all of them about it, so he felt deeply shamed to be dragged off in front of them, jeering and laughing at him. And here you can see very clearly how a single remembered line, “I will kill him myself,” gradually over time turned into the marvelous story that you all know from the Torah.
As I said, over three hundred years passed before the stories about the matriarchs and patriarchs were first written down. And the story that you know wasn’t authored and edited for another two hundred years after that. The world had changed a great deal in that time. The faith of Sarah and Abraham was largely forgotten. All goddesses and especially Asherah were considered false, if not evil, and Shaddai had fused with Yahweh and several other male gods to become God the Father. The first writer of the story about Isaac’s sacrifice was living at the time of King Saul, our first king, the first to unify all the tribes. Saul wanted his chief scribe to craft a saga that would inspire a new nation and fill it with stories that would set it apart from its neighbors.
In some ways people then were no different than people are now. We praise our allies by exaggerating their good deeds, and we condemn our enemies by accusing them of actions that they did not commit. The false statements of several world leaders who went to war to destroy banks of weapons of mass destruction that they knew did not exist is a case in point. In the first spoken tales of the life of Isaac, his whole life was told as he lived it, but as time when on, and stories became garbled, and then written down, Isaac’s real life vanished just as his real name did. And later editors of the story used his life as a polemic against Israel’s idolatrous enemies. The implication of the story was that Abraham was exempted by God from committing the kind of sacrifice of his children that Israel’s neighbors were said to commit, offering up their daughters and sons to the fire on altars of Moloch and other gods. And it’s true that human sacrifice was done in various cultures, the Aztecs and Carthaginians, but the Canaanites did not practice it. The story is subtle—and defames them, which I say as the Hebrew daughter of a woman of Canaan.
It’s true that animal sacrifice was a part of our lives. But having been a vegetarian for most of my three thousand years, I was never a fan of it. The smell of burning flesh on our altars always made me sick to my stomach. But that’s another matter, so let me get back to my story, the many versions of which—if you are wondering—I memorized three millennia ago and have not yet forgotten. (I’ve spent many the night sitting around a campfire telling others—or just myself—these stories.)
Isaac and his father were not speaking to each other when they returned. Sarah and her daughters did their best to reconcile the two, without success. Father and son could scarcely tolerate each other. Mealtime was a nightmare and as soon as he came of age Isaac took off from his father’s camp and lived for some time in Hagar’s village. You can see this yourself if you read the Torah. Hagar called her village Lahai-roi, and that’s where Isaac was living before he was married. Eventually the family reconciled, thanks to Hagar, who let Isaac know how much his father and mother loved him and missed him. And as with many of us, especially when we’re younger, rage in Isaac turned into guilt at the way he’d treated his parents, and from that guilt and the obedience he imposed upon himself, the next chapter of his life unfolded, after he moved back to live with them.
It was Sarah who suggested to Abraham that they all go up to Haran for a visit. Their eldest daughter Atirat had already returned and gotten married there and she and Isaac had always been close. Sarah knew that her husband and son always got along best when they were traveling. It took a while for her to get the two of them to agree, but in the end they went. The trip was tense, and you have to remember that on camel, donkey, and by foot, it was a very long trip, a trip of many months. (A nomadic band can travel anywhere between ten and twenty-five miles a day.) When they finally got back to Haran they stayed with Sarah’s family, which made life even more difficult. Isaac sulked and spent as much time as he could alone, which only gave Sarah’s sisters more ammunition for their criticism of her.
About two weeks after they arrived Sarah finally persuaded Isaac to join the rest of the family when they went to visit Abraham’s nephew Bethuel and his family. Bethuel and his wife Kahinah had a son Laban, and a daughter Rebecca, plus an older daughter named Ezob, who has fallen out of the story. Rebecca and Isaac were close in age and they had a lot in common. She too was that day’s version of a hippie, a rebellious child who was also interested in the old ways, although from all I’ve heard the spiritual content of the goddess revival groups back then was as new as that disseminated by most of the ones that are popular today.
Isaac and Rebecca hit it off. (Does it bother you that I’m using colloquial expressions? I enjoy them. English is my twenty-seventh language, and there is much to be said for it, some