Napier
Chapter 2: Legend. Covenant with the Fathers (Genesis 12-50)
A. Abraham (Gen. 12-23)
3. The Climax and Resolution of Tension
the covenant, the Yahweh covenant, into her own hands, to force, by her own means, in her own way, in trust in her own devices, the fulfillment of the divine promise. Most tellingly, Abraham responds in bald distrust when, before Isaac is born, he laughs with derisive denial in -- as it were -- the very face of God!
And God said to Abraham. . . "I will bless her [Sarah], and . . . she shall be a mother of nations; kings of peoples shall come from her." Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed, and said to himself, "Shall a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Shall Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?" [17:15-17]
The stories of Abraham take their pattern from the experience of Israel, but they also speak instructively back to that same experience,
illustrating not only the way of faith -- but the way also of unfaith. The tension that Israel knew throughout her life as a nation between faith in an electing, acting, covenanting God on the one hand, and on the other the rational improbability, if not absurdity, of the divine promises
implicit in her faith; the conflict between the divine demand to trust and the human doubt; the incongruity between divine promise for the nation and the incredible historical odds against fulfillment -- all of this Israel is mindful of in the shaping of the stories, and in the reading and
cherishing of the stories. Yet the final thrust of the Abraham cycle of stories is in substantiation of faith: the incredible happened to Abraham, the impossible occurred; and it occurred -- how reassuring to rebellious Israel -- in spite of the patriarch’s acts of unfaith! It is God who initiates.
It is he who has spoken. He has committed himself to the covenant.
at all, no single word, descriptive of the emotions of father or son, but rather in dialogue and in chaste narration. In the call of Abraham (12:1) , the magnitude of the demand appears in the simple enumeration of what Abraham must voluntarily surrender:
Go from
your country and your kindred and your father’s house [where?]
to the land that I will show you [!]
Here, in 22:1 f., the absolute totality of what faith is asked to surrender is similarly expressed:
After these things God tested Abraham, and said to him
"Abraham!" And he said, "Here am I."
He [God] said, "Take your son,
your only son Isaac [the name!]
whom you love
. . and offer him there [in the land of Moriah] as a burnt offering
[where?]
upon one of the mountains of which I shall tell you. [vv.
6b-8] . . . .So they went both of them together. And Isaac said to his father Abraham, "My father!" And he said,
"Here am I, my son." He said, "Behold, the fire and the wood; but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?"
Abraham said, "God will provide himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son." So they went both of them together.
This is a story that maintains its literary power under the eyes of any reader, in any interpretation. But we suspect that the content of the narrative breaks down into absurdity except when it is read with the
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eyes of Israel’s faith, as an expression of what Israel understands to be the necessary totality of the response of faith. Like Abraham, Israel made a partial response of faith in breaking with the past and setting forth from Egypt for a land "that I will show you. Like Abraham, she had known immediate doubt and had sought to take matters into her own hands. Like Abraham, she believed that the enterprise was divinely initiated, divinely covenanted; and like him, she accepted and
symbolized her own commitment to the covenant. But in every crisis of her history she suffered what she inevitably read into the story of the near-sacrifice of Isaac: the only tangible means of the fulfillment of the promise, preposterously achieved (to be sure, only by the mighty acts of God) , the only visible hope for ultimate fulfillment -- in the case of Abraham, Isaac; in the case of Israel, her very historical existence -- this she is asked to be willing to sacrifice. Destroy in faith the only concrete evidence that faith can be fulfilled!
Israel here comes very close to affirming precisely what is affirmed in the New Testament community of faith:
For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. [Matt 16:25; see Mark 8:35 and Luke 9:24]
This brings to a climax the tension between faith and unfaith. It points to, and illustrates, the only resolution of the tension -- the complete and unqualified response of faith. We do not find the resolution historically enacted in and by Israel. The tension between faith and unfaith
continued: the commitment of faith remained only partial. Israel’s prophets understood the nation’s destruction and exile as the result of unfaith, the taking of matters of the covenant into her own hands, the failure to make the total commitment of faith. The prophet Isaiah, in the latter part of the eighth century B.C., put it this way:
If you. will not believe,
surely you shall not be established.
[7:9b]
For thus said the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel,
"In returning and rest you shall be saved;
in quietness and in trust shall be your strength." And you would not. . . . [30:15]
Israel understands the story of the near-sacrifice of Isaac to say: Except
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we be willing to lose our life for Yahweh’s sake, we shall neither find nor save our life. The demand of faith is total. The response of faith must be unqualified, complete.
This is the climax of the Abraham cycle of stories. The narrative moves quickly now through the death of Sarah and the purchase of the cave of Machpelah (chapter 23) to the altogether charming story of Isaac’s successful quest for a wife (24) , the last days and death of Abraham (25: in ff.) and the introduction of Jacob, the central figure in the next significant cycle of stories in Genesis (25:19 ff.)