Questioning God
I’m going to take a highly speculative look at a Biblical story that puzzles me, in part because I see so little scholarly interest in it despite its obvious (to me, at least) importance: Abraham’s pleading to God on behalf of Sodom and Gomorrah in the name of the hypothetical innocent residents that might be found there. Other than Moses, I think Abraham is the only biblical figure who argues with God and, unlike Moses, who appeals to God’s mercy and uses moral blackmail (if you blot the Israelites out of your book I don’t want to be in it either), Abraham we can see getting the better of a reasonable argument—he wins his argument with God insofar as God tacitly concedes that He should not utterly destroy the sinful cities if there are people in them free of sin. This seems to be an origin story of moral progress, from collective to individual punishment, from the honor system or routine genocide in the course of war to the juridical. And, more specifically, in terms of the biblical narrative, it helps us to see why God has chosen Abraham to receive the covenant, blessing and land. Part of my puzzlement involved the question of when and how such a story became possible—if mass culture is taking the side of the perpetrator and high culture the side of the victim, this story is about as high cultural as you can get, as the story is completely set up to lead us to agree that the cities have it coming and yet we are expected to adopt Abraham’s perspective.
I’m going to approach this so as to test and “flex” the mode of Biblical interpretation I’ve been working out—trying to identify the ways post-exilic scribes reworked the traditions they both inherited and repudiated so as to create a national identity predicated on the rejection of human sacrifice and human godhood, with the consequent direct line of communication between God and each individual, who has been made to be like God. This story certainly strikes me as post-exilic, and so the destroyed cities our scribes would have had most present to their minds would have been those of Judah, especially Jerusalem. But they’re working with ancient narrative material as well, so there was some reality to the Sodom and Gomorrah story which is now being used as a “screen memory” to work out the implications of the harsh judgment recently levied by God on the Judeans themselves. We know how cities were destroyed in that world, and it wasn’t by nukes dropped by God—we are looking at cities destroyed in a war, and it is a war that “Abraham” (whatever referent this legendary figure ultimately had) was either on the winning or losing side of. I’m going to say “winning,” because otherwise why would the material have been retained? (Indeed, just prior to this narrative, there is a story of Abraham’s involvement in a was with several neighboring kings, including Sodom and Gomorrah—the details are not all that clear to me, but Abraham clearly comes out of it well and with an interest in removing any basis for obligations to his former allies.) So, I’m going to assume that the scribes are working with narrative material that had Abraham, along with allies, participating in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah—if the war, according to this material, was carried out on the command or with the sanction of some deity, the frame for introducing the dialogue between Abraham and God is already there. The fact that Lot, Abraham’s nephew, along with his family, are the sole survivors of the destruction further indicates that we might have been dealing with a hostage situation, or the mistreating of guests, a fairly common cause for conflict.
Let’s also assume that Abraham represents a figure within an older ancestral sacrificial cult, a figure who petitioners would sacrifice to in order to solicit his own intercession on their behalf with God (or their god). In that case, Abraham would be doing here for Sodom and Gomorrah what he traditionally did for the Judeans and/or Israelites themselves. He can’t be seen to be interceding on their behalf regarding the more present situation of their exile, homelessness and powerlessness because that would precisely the kind of mythology the Bible rejects, but his role in this earlier story could be reversed so as to turn Abraham into a model of the kind prophetic intercessor Israel is currently in need of. And retrojecting this intercession to pre-history and the initial formation of the Israelite people themselves provides a justification and precedent for such prophetic pleas. We can see a very complicated moral reasoning here: if God used His instruments (the surrounding emperors) to destroy Israel and then Judea, they must have deserved it collectively but, unlike Sodom and Gomorrah, some have survived (a remnant) and they must have therefore done so due to their own at least relative freedom from sin; or, perhaps, having survived they must retroactively justify having done so by being the people free from sin God did not find in Sodom and Gomorrah. The direct relationship between the individual and God we have inherited through layers of translation and interpretation from the Bible is in this case revealed to be the relationship between a surviving remnant who must stand in for the whole people and the God who is in a sense holding them hostage as a warranty for the future of that people. As my earlier reference to Moses’s own intercession with God on behalf of the Hebrews (also no doubt post-exilic) indicates, this a scenario repeated in the Bible and therefore an especially formative one.
This kind of remnant held hostage by God for the people is exactly how its scribal authors (who, let’s remember, were not just scribes but priests, administrators, diplomats, educators, etc.) had to have seen themselves –how else could you summon up such audacity? There’s one more thing to consider here—the difference between the fate of the doomed cities and the prospective redemption of Israel makes it possible to differentiate the fate of countless cities and civilizations destroyed due, ultimately, to their sins, and the people of Israel. This, indeed, is to be the fate of those very people that have destroyed Israel, along with any that will do so or attempt to do so in the future. So, a thorough immersion in likeness is concluded with the re-establishment of an iterable Same/Other distinction. Precisely because we had Abraham who interceded for the undeserving we will be deserving even when we’re not because we’re just like all those other undeserving peoples. As I’ve pointed out in early discussions of scripture, this can easily seem hypocritical and self-serving, but I will repeat that this is the only way in which such intellectual and moral modes of presence can be acquired and preserved. There is now the obligation to be worthy of having descended from Abraham, or at least preserving the textual traditions that will indict you along with everyone else for failing to be so. Preserving and transmitting the “contractual” evidence that you have offered yourself as a hostage to God to guarantee the good behavior of your people (whoever they may be—just as the Hebrew scribes transferred the relation between God and emperors to one between God and each individual Israelite that new relationship is itself transferable) is a far more powerful moral model than that offered by commonplaces about loving your neighbor as yourself (which is itself scriptural, of course, but an exoteric version of the more demanding model representing by Abraham’s argument with God).
As a final note, I am uncertain whether this mode of reading and reasoning, which draws upon Girardian and Gansian myth analysis along with Biblical scholarship that neither takes scripture at its word nor denies its crucial differences from myth, might be more broadly applicable. The Bible might be sui generis, and the value of studying it may lie in the unique view it provides on some constitutive moral, juridical, literary and sacral vocabularies still active. The broader implications may lie in the reading of Bible as a product of scribal training, qualification, self-assertion and power. There’s something more difficult in the kind of reading of an order against itself so as to offer a startling new identity that is presented, audaciously, as a retrieval of what was already there at the origin than in Strauss’s “writing between the lines” aimed at prospective philosophers. The best example from my own writing I can think of is in my reading (in Anthropomorphics, most accessibly) of the US Constitution in terms of the awareness of its composers that George Washington would be the first president—in which case, we could wrench the Constitution away from its reflection on the human equality announced in the Declaration of Independence (as first Lincoln, and then neo-conservative thinkers like Henry Jaffa tried to frame it, not without reason) and towards another telos: Washington as a model of type of man such an order would need at the center. Instead of John Adams’s assertion that the American Constitution would only suit a moral people, I would say that it could only suit a people that could produce figures like Washington, recognize their value, and place them at the center. Even though the hermeneutics of my proposal might be weak (but perhaps no less so than what the Biblical authors did with much of their material), it’s a reading that would work on the condition that Americans wanted to firmly reject liberalism but needed some anchoring in the old order—in such a case, my reading might become canonical and obvious (as turned out to be the case for the scribes who composed the Bible). So, a scribal pedagogy, among other things, might teach students to learn how to identify such unlikely “hinges,” realizing that their likeliness ultimately depends upon non-textual matters that will nevertheless require corresponding inscriptions.