David Klinghoffer - The Discovery of God: Abraham and the Birth of Monotheism

This book made available by the Internet Archive.

FOR NIKA A EZRA

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In a typically cryptic verse in Genesis, Abraham is said to have planted an eshel at Beersheba (21:33). We would be at a loss to say what exactly an eshel isif its just a kind of tree, as many translators say, who cares that he planted one? But fortunately Jewish tradition steps in to interpret the word. According to one view, that of the Talmudic sage Shmuel, this eshel refers to an inn Abraham established in the wilderness, a hospice where he taught wayfarers to acknowledge God for His blessings. The patriarch would give them food then ask them to say grace.

Eliciting gratitude was central to his mission, and so how could the biographer who seeks to tell the story of his life neglect to thank a few of the people who made this book possible?

The idea for a biography of Abraham came out of conversations I had with Bruce Nichols. It was subsequently encouraged by my redoubtable agent and dear friend Mildred Marmur, and shepherded by my formidably intelligent and unfailingly decent editor, Adam Bellow. This is a much better book than it would have been without him. His able assistant, Miriam Abramowitz, made sure the project did not go off the rails.

Accessing the ancient Jewish primary source material that I have relied on here did not come easily to me. For assistance and inspiration in understanding the tradition, time and again I called upon the help of rabbis whose learning I can only stand back and appreciate, never hoping to match. Rabbi Daniel Lapin, as always, has been my friend and mentor. He has shaped my

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worldview in innumerable ways. Many of his insights appear in my book, and I hope I have properly attributed them all. Rabbi Elisha Paul selflessly labored with me over the text of Genesis Rabbah and reviewed my entire manuscript at an early stage. As an adviser and a reader, Rabbi Jacob Neusner shared his vast scholarship, including his outstanding translations, which I often used when stumped. The translators and elucidators of the Artscroll editions of the Talmud, Pentateuch, and Rashi, including my friend Rabbi Nesanel Kasnett, have performed an amazing service. I often checked my understanding of texts against their work and always came away enlightened. Conversations with other modern-day sages were also of great help to me, including Rabbis Jacob J. Schacter, Meir Soloveichik, David Sil-ber, and Yitzchok Adlerstein. Other scholars were generous with their time, including Professors Edward Alexander and Martin S. Jaffee. This is not to say any of these learned individuals will find himself in agreement with what I have written in this book. Any and all failures of learning are attributable to me alone.

As a reader of an initial version of this book, Bennett Schneir offered invaluable comments. Other friends, including Alex Abrams, Michael and Diane Medved, and Mark Miller, gave me different kinds of support and encouragement.

My father, Paul Kaye, provided moral and material aid without which this book certainly never could have been written. Nor, without his help, could I have accomplished half of whatever I have managed to do so far in life. Other parents and parental figuresArlene Kaye, Harriet Waring, Nina Erastovwere likewise crucially helpful.

My baby boy, Ezra, did not seem particularly interested in this project per se, but nevertheless always gave me his goofiest grin and said Dah! or Yah! at the appropriate time.

Finally, and above all, my sweet, loving, tireless, tolerant, brilliant, and beautiful wife Nika gave me the main reason I have had to keep working. I hope to make her proud.

Mercer Island, Washington October 3, 2002

PREFACE

Bus No. 1(jO

earing our plans to visit Hebron, on Israels violently disputed West Bank, a Jerusalem rabbi warned my wife and me, If you two are going to go through with this, youll have to call the police that morning. Tell them youre an American journalist and you want to take bus no. 160 from Jerusalem. Ask if that would be safe to do. They often know if theres going to be a terrorist attack on the roads that day. If they say, Its not a good day to travel, then youd better listen to them. If they say, The roads are open. Its a free country, then the odds are in your favor. Youll probably come back alive.

It was the winter of 2000, and we had come from Seattle to visit the sites in Israel and Turkey associated with the patriarch Abraham. Above all, it

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seemed imperative to see the place where he was buried, the tomb called Machpelah in Hebron.

To our surprise there were other passengers on the bus: soldiers and civilians, all silent for the forty-minute ride, peering out apprehensively through smudged, barred, reinforced windows at the brown hills, terraced with tumbledown stone walls like broken teeth. Over the dashboard of the bus somebody had pinned a button to the fabric with a little red heart in the middle, reading, I love the Pacific Northwest. My wife took my hand, which was cold. We were on our way to see Abraham.

Or were we? Who was buried in his tomb, after all, if anyone?

According to surveys, only 1 percent of Americans declare themselves to be atheists or agnostics. The rest of us have some part of our consciousness set aside for whatever faith we adhere to, however tentatively, about God.

There is a mystery here: Whether or not you yourself believe in Him, the fact that most everyone else you know does is one whose peculiarity we hardly register because, like water, oxygen, and light, it pervades our lives.

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Up until a certain point in history, everyone agreed that there must be many gods. By a later point, that view had been abandoned, at least in the West and Near East. Who or what brought about the change? Let me state forthrightly the conclusion I have reached.

There are grounds to believe that Abraham was a genuine historical figure, the strange and wonderful details of whose 175 years on earth are locked and encrypted in the Book of Genesis, to be unlocked by the key called the tradition. Half the world is filled with a powerful if sometimes fleeting awareness of God thanks to the efforts of this man, born around 1812 B.C. in a city named Cuthah near todays Baghdad.