The Worst Interpretation of the Worst Bible Story
Wherein a crossword clue triggers an awful memory
I think that the phenomenology and deconstruction class I took in college probably broke me. I just Googled “phenomenology and deconstruction” to see if I could find a short definition for you that made sense, but it’s all gobbledegook. I’ll provide my own: take a piece of writing and concoct an explanation of all the things it could possibly mean except for what it says.
I’m sure there are kinder descriptions and don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, but the point I wanted to get across was that I spent an entire semester in a bad parody of a philosophy class where nonsense was all just a matter of opinion.
The height (or the depth, I guess) was a lecture wherein we looked at the story of Abraham and his son, Issac, from the Bible. It instilled in me a dark outrage that I’d forgotten until I was working on a crossword puzzle and noticed my trigger words: Go Up embedded as side-by-side answers.
If you don’t know the story, once upon a time Abraham was minding his own business and God showed up. He told Abraham that if he really loved and believed in God that he would drag Issac up to the top of a mountain and slaughter him.
So Abraham grabs his kid to leave. His wife Sarah asks where he’s going and he tells her it’s none of her beeswax. Then he takes his child to the mountain and ties him to a rock. The kid is in tears (quick sidenote - tears like crying and tears like rips are spelled the same. We spent an entire 20 minutes discussing this during another class that semester).
Anyway, there’s this terrified baby on this rock and his father picks up the knife to slaughter him to death. At the last moment, God sends an angel to pop in and say, “Just kidding. God only wanted to see if you’d really do it.”
Abraham is so happy he slaughters a goat (or a lamb or something) out of sheer relief, takes his son by the hand, and wanders back down to the house to resume his normal life.
This is a very popular Bible story. I can recall the children’s book illustration of Abraham holding a dagger over his child, like Gregory Peck in the Omen, with the little apple-cheeked boy laying bound to a slab.
There are so many things that make this a terrible story. I don’t know where to begin. I do want to say that, as a parent, if you are in any way willing to murder your child if God tells you to, you are for sure going to eventually murder your child.
There’s no point in pulling the story apart (again) but the professor mentioned it because he had just seen a paper by a Jewish scholar who claimed that Abraham misunderstood God. I refuse to look up the details on this (because they don’t matter) but the upshot was that God told Abraham to take his son and “Go Up” to the murder place, but the sense of “Go Up” was to visit, not use the murder place.
Don’t bother sussing it out, it’s stupid. It’s one of the very few instances in my life where I remember the exact moment I lost respect for someone. This was supposed to be an example of how deconstruction and phenomenology could be useful. For me, it was a grotesque caricature, a painful reminder of what people imagine when they think about philosophy as a discipline.
Let’s pretend for a second that it is a reasonable interpretation, that God (THE God) was simply misunderstood because he wasn’t a native speaker of Ancient Hebrew, or whatever. Why did he wait so long to stay Abraham’s hand?
The answer is even worse than you might think. As I recall, the point of the whole exercise was to prove loyalty through brinksmanship. Abraham knew God would stop him and God knew he would have to, but Issac was never in any real danger. It was supposed to be a sign to the people of Abraham (Jews and eventually Christians and Muslims) that the days of human sacrifice were over.
What’s offensive is the attempt to pass off a story about a bloodthirsty, capricious deity as a lesson about trust and a condemnation of human sacrifice. More than that, there’s this underlying cynicism that stories only ever mean what you want them to. With enough interpretive backspin, we can keep the world in black and white, which is how we like it.
Watching people debate about which stories we should tell and how we should tell them, I was reminded of how ingrained this notion of interpretation has become. Human history is full of awful deeds and willful evil committed by admirable people. People who should be lauded for their genius or vision or dedication to a cause greater than themselves. People who should be equally vilified for their sins.
Unfortunately, we’ve been content to explain away evil perpetrated by our cultural heroes as good in disguise since the time of Abraham. To extend the metaphor, now that we’re getting more and more accounts from the Issacs and Sarahs of the world it’s a harder self-deceit to pull off.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t scads of us who are willing to try. We don’t want that kind of complexity in our stories or that kind of responsibility on our shoulders. It’s as if we all want the past to have been different, but can’t agree upon in which ways.
Keep the faith,
Tony
Personal update
I am so happy to announce that the audio version of Dragged Into the Light: Truthers, Reptilians, Super Soldiers, and Death Inside an Online Cult audiobook should be available very shortly. I got the finished audio off to my publisher yesterday. I’ll be getting some free downloads to share and I’d like to share them with you if you’re interested and willing to write a review.
Just shoot me an email and I’ll put you on the list.
I’m going to be more active on Facebook than I’ve been in years. If you’re on Facebook, consider following my page. I’ve got a kooky project in my head that I’ll be sharing there in the next week or so, but I’ll also be sharing more snippets from side research that I’m doing.
I missed this week’s Bagel Manifesto podcast so that I could finish recording and editing my book. I promise to have one out next week for sure. If you haven’t listened, though, please consider trying it out and subscribing. It’s short, which makes it a safe bet.