in the Bible. Like almost anybody, including you and me, Abraham was filled with contradictions that he reacted to and felt varying levels of motivation about things at several points in his life. It’s just like you and me: On Monday, we don’t believe in God. On Tuesday, we do. When we were teenagers, we were immortal and unassailable and didn’t really stress about God and prayers and fate. Older and frailer, we need to care. But we also need to think and sort out what works for us, what comforts us, as our friends and family die off and we are looking down the tunnel of mortality.
There is the well-known story of Abraham trying to convince God not to destroy the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Here was a double village of depravity and debauchery and our hero is actually bargaining with God not to destroy it. Abraham pleads, “What if there are fifty good people in the city? Will you spare it for fifty good souls?” Okay, God agrees; for fifty good and pure folks, it will be saved. Abraham pushes the envelope: What if there are forty good ones? All right, God agrees; forty. Abraham keeps up the bartering. It goes down to thirty and then to twenty. He and God finally settle at ten. If there were ten virtuous people to be found in Sodom and Gomorrah, the entire place remains standing. (A Jewish tradition asserts that this final numeral in the negotiation, ten, became the minimum number of people required to form a minyan—a group large enough to have a religious service.)
Unfortunately, there weren’t even ten upstanding individuals in that miserable community and it was wiped out. But the story, found right in the heart of the Bible, effectively indicates that if you see a possible injustice or you don’t understand what God (or God’s theologians) is disseminating, then you are supposed to speak out. God did not create us to simply fall in line. We were created to be God’s partners. Heaven is not tyranny; heaven is hope.
Yet later, Abraham strangely goes mute when God commands him to do something unthinkable: “Take your son Isaac (the only child Abraham produced with Sarah), your son that you love, go up to Mount Moriah, and offer him there for a burnt-offering upon the mountain.”
Really? Abraham is supposed to kill and sacrifice his teenage boy to God? Well, after the commotion Abraham put up to save a city of criminals, the man will surely argue with this crazy notion! Look in Genesis, chapter 22, and see Abraham’s response. Not a word. Not a single protest. Here’s the verse that follows immediately after God’s outlandish request:
And Abraham rose up early in the morning and saddled his ass and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and collected wood for the burnt-offering, and rose up, and went to the place of which God had told him.
Centuries of anguished scholarship, rationalization, and dispute have failed to mitigate or explain away how a preeminent seer of Western theology did not utter a syllable of protest when God instructs him to slaughter his own child.
Of course we know Abraham did not ultimately do that terrible thing. But not because he didn’t intend do. He had the fire blazing and the blade up in the air to slay the boy and was only stayed by the intervention of an “angel of God.” It was a test, a loyalty check to evaluate just how faithful Abraham really was to this deity: “Lay not thy hand upon the lad, neither do anything to him. For now I know that thou fearest God, seeing that thou has not withheld thy son.” A ram was substituted; God was going to get something out of this strange little trial of allegiance.
Anybody who knows this story and is honest with him- or herself has thought the same thing: I don’t know what to believe. The story begins to be comprehensible, fathomable, and even acceptable (as opposed to being repugnant) only when we start questioning it. It’s not enough that the Jewish doctrine on this claims that it teaches people not to sacrifice their children. People continue to sacrifice their kids all the time—to wars, abuse, addiction, trafficking, and neglect. The story has no moral possibilities if we just believe in it. It only has ethical value or spiritual merit if we argue with it, and that is what you can believe.
And then there was Noah.
It’s worth noting that Noah of the Bible was neither a Jew nor a Christian nor affiliated with any organized creed. I mention this because of the frequent co-opting of his story and that of the global flood (or total genocide, if you look at it for what it was) by clergy people in the name of their faiths. Noah was an unassuming man who, according to the writ, was selected by God to build an ark and save his family along with “two of every kind” from the animal kingdom. This is perhaps the most renowned tale of all time and the destruction of humanity by a cataclysmic deluge appears as a parable in other ancient literatures, including from Babylonia, Egypt, and Africa. Most all of these traditions also showcase a boat and feature returning, redemptive birds—like the dove in the Genesis account that returns with a green leaf and some hope.
What were Noah’s credentials for this assignment according to Genesis? He was not a seer, an oracle, or even a nautical expert. He wasn’t exactly Billy Graham or Nelson Mandela. All Genesis tells us is that Noah was “a righteous man in his time.”
A righteous man in his time? What was “his time”? In terms of human behavior, this was a period of history so desperately bleak and despicable that the Bible summarizes it in one succinct sentence: “The earth was corrupt before God and the earth was filled with violence.” In fact, the scripture intimates that God was thoroughly disgusted with the human beings he had created and that the entire demographic of the planet amounted to a bunch of hedonists, rakes, thieves, rapists, and degenerates. Against that standard, Noah was the best. This is not a ringing endorsement of Noah’s character or standards. He was all God had to work with.
You don’t have to believe the whole story; it’s a shared myth of many civilizations, and it does have a powerful and meaningful ethical message. What you can take away from this very drenched business is that greatness is relative to the period being examined. Noah happened not to be a total debaucher. So in his time he stood out. We could use some of this perspective in our current era of celebrity worship, narcissism, and sycophants. Better than deifying Noah—or any of the highly flawed human heroes of the biblical literature—we should remember their “greatness” is always to be defined against the reality of their circumstances, as well as their own human frailties.
When we beatify well-known people or even private individuals in our lives, from parents to popes to ballplayers to media icons, we will inevitably wind up hurt, disillusioned, and confused.
Here’s something you can believe when it comes to people, theology, miracles, and psaltery: The answer is always somewhere in between. There is somewhere you can alight in between atheism and evangelism and even that point of landing will—and must—fluctuate as you pass through the triumphs, setbacks, illnesses, recoveries, crises, and renewals of this thing called life.
When it comes to the flood phenomenon, for example, don’t get drowned in the torrent. In general, don’t get stuck on miracles. You and I are not angels, saints, or demigods. We are people. We get scared, hungry, sick, angry, unhappy, divorced, and we are mystified and threatened by life’s incongruities. We battle with our weight. We dread cancer. We fall out of love. We make mistakes and we damage other folks, unwittingly or not. We have nightmares and we suffer the effects of family dysfunction. We struggle with demons. We are dismayed and shaken as we notice our parents weakening, stumbling, and forgetting in old age. We drive by a cemetery in the afternoon and try to subdue the dark grip of mortality on our hearts. We bury our parents there, our brothers, sisters, and sometimes our children. Their open graves leave gaping holes in our hearts. Don’t we scream at God, dispute with God, and even condemn God at such moments of incredulity? So shouldn’t religion offer a valve for such inevitable apoplexies of the spirit?
We are usually doing the best we can in a world whose madness is broadcast and cyber-blasted into our heads twenty-four/seven and the last thing we need is an authoritarian lecture or a devotional booklet telling us that unless we act or think in this or that way, we are doomed, going to hell, or will generally suffer the disapproval of God Almighty. We get enough of that without even going to church.
Again, the text is not our homeland; life is.
Better you should stick to the measured human insight that a man’s or a woman’s “greatness” (and the assumed