Legend tells us that Moses wrote the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures, which would make them the oldest texts in our Judeo-Christian tradition. There are a few problems with this, the most obvious being that Moses, forbidden by God from entering the Promised Land, dies alone on a mountain and is buried in a secret location by God. Great. Who wrote that part?
In truth, some portions of the psalms appear to be the earliest surviving texts, dated at least two centuries after the Exodus event. The Torah itself is a product of a later age, mostly the years between the destruction of the “Northern” Kingdom of Israel in 720 B.C.E. and the destruction of the “Southern” Kingdom of Judah a hundred and thirty eight years later. A big portion of the Torah, including the entire Book of Deuteronomy, dates to a major religious reform under King Hezekiah.
The Book of Genesis is the most striking of these five books when it comes to textual history, for we can see very clearly how two very different traditions have been cobbled together, giving us parallel accounts of Creation and the Great Flood, two traditions, one from the lost Northern Kingdom and one from the South. It is not clear if the great patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, represent a single shared tradition, or if they too are the result of blending, a conscious effort to create a single shared story that takes in both traditions, that respects both.
We see a repeated pattern in Genesis, brothers are pitted against one another, including the two oldest sons of Abraham, Ishmael and Isaac, from different mothers, and the twin sons of Isaac, Esau and Jacob. In both cases, the younger son usurps the rightful place of the elder.
Muhammed, in creating Islam, would appropriate the Ishmael tradition, claiming descent and therefore a shared Abrahamic heritage. But there is more that is going on with these texts than what later religious leaders would make of them. There is the central question of why. Why did the authors and redactors of a later time create these tales of brothers becoming tribes that would end up in competition with one another?
And the reason is stunningly simple. These tales of competing brothers are myths in a category scholars refer to as aetiological, a fancy word that means myths that explain why something is the way it is. In one sense, all myths serve that purpose, but some are exaggerated retellings of historic events, like the Exodus, and others are psychological in nature. Aetiological myths seek to explain something immediate and observable.
So what is it Isaac vs. Ishmael and Jacob vs. Esau seek to explain?
Why are those humans over there so much like us, and yet we hate them? Why are we in competition with the Edomites, our neighbors to the south we claim are descendants of Esau? Why are we continually in competition with the people even further south of Edom, people we today call Arabs, who claim descent from Ishmael? In fact, a close read of the text will show other sons of Abraham who are sent away so as not to compete with the chosen heir, Isaac.
These stories are all about justifying why they are them and we are us. They are all about othering. Because they look like us. Their language sounds like our language. They borrow things from our culture and we borrow things from theirs. So we have to make up a story about why we are competing over that well, that wadi, why we think our wealth, our security, our lives, are more valuable than their.
This is what humans do. We operate out of fear and a scarcity that we ourselves have often created, then we create stories so we don’t feel guilty about what we have done. We make up lies we can tell ourselves so we can sleep at night. Welfare mothers. Palestinian terrorists. Drug runners from Honduras. People smugglers. If he’d just done what the officers said…
Lies. Every single one.
And here in this text that is supposed to justify all the ways we divide, this little subversive message. God will make sure Ishmael is okay, and is successful by the measure of his time, that God will make of Ishmael a great people. And it is by no means the only subversive message left in the text. For as hard as humans work to justify our sins of fear, scarcity, division, God is always saying, “Yeah, no, I’m not having that.”
Chuck out Ishmael. Fine, I’ll make a nation out of him. Abandon Tamar. That woman is smarter than you think. She’s going to have the last laugh, and I’m going to weave her into the story of Jesus. Think you are this great pure people? Go back and re-read your own stories. There are plenty of foreigners in there, Rahab and Ruth among them. Welcome the immigrant. That Samaritan you hate, who, by the way, is also descended from the house of Joseph, he’s better than all of your supposed high and holy people.
Any good theology contains the seed of its own destruction, and the narrative that says God chooses only one people out of all of the earth’s peoples undoes itself. Even Jesus, who understands himself at the very least as a Hebrew prophet seeking to reform the religious life of Judea, is called out for his racism by the lowly Syro-Phoenecian woman, and his own teachings open the door for the notion that being part of the Kingdom of God is not about blood but is instead about choice. God isn’t choosing only some people. It is people that choose. We can choose God.
And here we are. And they are not like us. It isn’t our fault. I mean, come one, black-on-black crime, right?
Except. Except most crime occurs within a single race, but you never hear the expression white-on-white crime. When Bernie Madoff stole $18 billion, no one talked about Jew-on-Jew crime, though Madoff specifically targeted other Jews with his Ponzi scheme.
We make up stories every bit as aetiological as those found in scripture. I was raised with one of those, the Lost Cause myth forged at the start of the 20th century to justify the continuing racism in the South, the idolatry of a bold evil and the traitors who led it, cloaked in the guise of gentility and state’s rights, for there never was a truth and reconciliation process, an idea of accountability and reconciliation not yet conceived. No, there was only crushing victory and lingering resentment and the great harvest of poison fruit, of strange fruit, that still afflicts us to this day.
They tell stories about us and we tell stories about them and we say things like “anyone who works hard has the same opportunity” even though we know fully well that is not true, that some inherit millions while others receive a second rate education, poor healthcare, and inadequate nutrition, forever diminishing their supposedly equal opportunity. Not much to boot straps when you can barely afford shoes.
And none of this is of God. God is on the side of Ishmael, of Tamar, of the Syro-Phoenecian woman, no matter how many times we try to convince ourselves otherwise.
This is the problem with God. For God to be God, at least as we have defined God, God cannot be under our control, cannot be contained, and yet we want to control God to justify our desires. But the God we create in our own image is not a god at all.
We still tell stories to justify the fruit of our fear, our entitlement, our privilege. We still celebrate this myth of the self-made person, when no human being ever is self-made, never has been, all the way back to that story, two myths shoved together by ancient authors in Judah, of Adam, the human, made from adamah, earth, by a mystery we name as God.
Ishmael was there for his father’s funeral. This othering is not of God.
When we hear the news, when we read the paper, when we drown in the tsunami of social media, stop. Breathe. Remember Ishmael and his mother in the desert. Does this story divide or unite? Where is the subversive loose thread that, gently tugged, will show it for what it is, will open the space for this truth:
All things come from God, God who is creative love. All things. All people. Our job is to be like God, to love, to contribute to the thriving of our people, for our people are all people. To contribute to the thriving of this living complex churning and beautiful chaos which is creation, this day and always.
May we make it so, in our lives, in our church, and in our communities.
Amen.