Abraham on Trial

by Carol Delaney

Abraham on Trial questions the foundations of faith that have made a virtue out of the willingness to sacrifice a child. Through his desire to obey God at all costs, even if it meant sacrificing his son, Abraham became the definitive model of faith for the major world religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In this bold look at the legacy of this biblical and qur'anic story, Carol Delaney explores how the sacrifice rather than the protection of children became the focus of faith, to the point where the abuse and betrayal of children has today become widespread and sometimes institutionalized. Her strikingly original analysis also offers a new perspective on what unites and divides the peoples of the sibling religions derived from Abraham and, implicitly, a way to overcome the increasing violence among them.


Delaney critically examines evidence from Jewish, Christian, and Muslim interpretations, from archaeology and Freudian theory, as well as a recent trial in which a father sacrificed his child in obedience to God's voice, and shows how the meaning of Abraham's story is bound up with a specific notion of fatherhood. The preeminence of the father (which is part of the meaning of the name Abraham) comes from the still operative theory of procreation in which men transmit life by means of their "seed," an image that encapsulates the generative, creative power that symbolically allies men with God. The communities of faith argue interminably about who is the true seed of Abraham, who can claim the patrimony, but until now, no one has asked what is this seed.


Kinship and origin myths, the cultural construction of fatherhood and motherhood, suspicions of actual child sacrifices in ancient times, and a revisiting of Freud's Oedipus complex all contribute to Delaney's remarkably rich discussion. She shows how the story of Abraham legitimates a hierarchical structure of authority, a specific form of family, definitions of gender, and the value of obedience that have become the bedrock of society. The question she leaves us with is whether we should perpetuate this story and the lessons it teaches.

Genres: Religion, Old Testament

334 pages, Paperback

First published September 28, 1998

About the author

Carol Lowery Delaney earned an A.B. in philosophy at Boston University, 1962.
After a ten year hiatus, she entered Harvard Divinity School and received an
M.T.S. 1976, and went on to the University of Chicago for a Ph.D. in cultural
anthropology, 1984.

Her anthropological fieldwork was conducted in Turkey, 1979-82, two years
of which were spent in a relatively remote mountain village. She won the
Galler prize for the most distinguished dissertation in the Division of the Social
Sciences at the University of Chicago. That dissertation was transformed into
a book, The Seed and the Soil: Gender and Cosmology in Turkish Village Society.

After spending a year in Belgium on a Fulbright Fellowship conducting
research among immigrant Turks, she returned to Harvard where she became
Assistant Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions, 1985-87, and
taught several courses at the Divinity School.

She taught at Stanford University in the Department of Cultural and Social
Anthropology from 1987-2006, now emerita. One popular course,
Investigating Culture, became the basis for an innovative textbook,
Investigating Culture: An Experiential Introduction to Anthropology,
third edition forthcoming, early 2017.

While at Stanford she wrote Abraham on Trial: The Social Legacy of Biblical Myth, which was finalist for the National Jewish Book Award (category scholarship) and special mention for the Victor Turner Prize of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. It was also the inspiration for an opera of the same title, composed by Andrew Lovett, and had its world premier in England, 2005.

Her latest book is Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem. She writes that she had not thought much about Columbus until the fall of 1999 when she was teaching a course called "Millennial Fever" intended to observe the frenzy gripping the United States over the turn of the millennium and to study the history of apocalyptic, millennial thinking. In one of the readings, she came across a reference to Columbus's apocalyptic, millennial beliefs. Neither she nor any of her colleagues had ever heard of them. This drew her to the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University where she spent the summer of 2003 and then returned with an NEH fellowship in 2004-05. Her research was so compelling that she decided to retire from Stanford in order to work on her book about Columbus. For two years, she also taught half time in the Religious Studies Department at Brown.

In addition to numerous articles and invited lectures she has also had, as of this date, 48 letters published in the New York Times, and others in the San Francisco Chronicle, Wall Street Journal, Providence Journal, Harvard Magazine, and Harper’s.

In the spring of 2014 she walked more than 500 miles on the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain and walked 280 miles in the spring of 2015. She walked the Coast to Coast path across England with her brother in May 2016. Carol volunteered at a hostel on the Camino de Santiago and then walked with her brother from Leon to Santiago in Sept-Oct, 2017.

Reviews

[Sally · Rating 4 out of 5]

An insighful feminist analysis of the biblical story about Abraham being willing to sacrifice his most beloved son, resting on two questions: why does Abraham have the unilateral right to sacrifice his son? and why are obedience and authority considered higher values than protection and love? Her treatment centers on the concepts of seed and procreation as part of a particular patriarchal construction of fatherhood. We are apt to think of fatherhood and motherhood as purely biological, but they are not merely natural categories. They reflect ways of viewing human and family relationships that differ in different cultures. The Hebrew patriarchal understanding was that the child was the product of the male seed that germinated and was nourished in the female womb as in a field. The male has the divine creative role and the female takes the role of nature or a part of creation. As the author sums up her argument: "Abraham is both the father of faith and, symbolically, the first father. His story begins the patriarchal narratives but also dramatically presents the establishment of patriarchy. It is not accidental that the story revolves around a male-imaged god, a father, and a son, rather than female characters, for it involves a new understanding of masculinity, which emerges from a theory of procreation. The story symbolizes the incorporation of the assumption that the male is the generative agent in the procreative process - that by means of his seed he transmits the divine spark of life. The concept of God as creator and male as pro-creator are two aspects of the same system; indeed, I have suggested that the concept of God is a denaturalized or reified paternity, and that of the father, a naturalized divinity. These represent the two poles of an intricately intertwined system that is at once natural and divinely ordained. ... We have failed to see that notions of procreation (coming-into-being) are bound up with a cosmological-religious system. You cannot change one without changing the other,..." This ancient understanding, still present in the institutions in societies that were built upon it, remains despite the recent scientific realization that both parents equally contribute to the child, each giving equivalent halves of the genetic material (rather than the male giving all and the female merely nourishing that seed). The book looks at Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Freudian, and post-Freudian interpretations of the story, as well as a trial in the mid-1990s of a man who killed his child because he believed God ordered him to do so, and the social consequences of putting obedience to authority above protection of our children.

Having gone to several Abrahamic interfaith events where Abraham is lionized by speakers from all three faiths precisely for his willingness to kill his child, I am always seeking to understand more about this strange and horrifying biblical story.

[Taymaz Azimi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic. All you need to know about the story of the Binding. It's not just a retelling of the biblical version. The author analyses Biblical, Talmudic, Qur'anic and Hadithite versions and then she focuses on secular interpretations of the story and spirit of the act of sacrificing the beloved son.

[Steven Volk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well developed feminist argument on the "Akedah," or the binding of Isaac.