ACBM: Part 2 Chapter 3

Chapter 3 — Abraham from Mesopotamia

If you don’t understand Abraham the man, you cannot understand the Bible.

The Genesis account makes no pretense at dating anything; it simply offers pivotal points along the path of revelation. The lack of time structure reflects the broad disregard for precision in things generally, and dating in particular, among the ANE peoples. As noted previously, the earliest samples of writing were inventory records, so it’s not as if they didn’t know how to do it, but that such things were just the routine business of life. Things that actually mattered to humanity were more a matter of ripeness of time, when matters had reached a critical stage. Such things are not planned or scheduled from the human side of the equation. There is reason to believe some portion of statements about how long this or that took in years may be more symbolism than numeric facts, because that’s how folks looked at things. It’s not deception if everyone talks that way and nobody cares about precision.

They didn’t pretend to control all the factors. Life was a matter of internal preparation for things thrown at you. They would have said Westerners believe falsely that they can make big things happen, because just a short time later, it was gone and forgotten. The focus on daily thinking always carried an element of much longer time scales, sometimes even timeless. Oddly, this freed them to seize the moment when unexpected events came along. There was no consciousness of being or doing as separate issues; life was a matter of your commitments and consistent character. The highest value was knowing what role you played in the bigger scheme of things. You didn’t try to understand the world so as to eliminate and control the variables; you needed only be in command of your reactions in the sense of who you are. Measurable accomplishments had little value.

Only in Western societies do we see questions about the nature of a thing (being) and its function or behavior (doing). There is an ongoing debate about whether your identity is a matter of being or doing, and where either question takes precedence in any analytical process. In the ANE, your identity was not a fixed absolute. Aside from pedigree, biographical data might not matter much. Unless your birth name was particularly prophetic, you might well be the only person who remembers it outside your immediate family. Any person with significant authority over you could change your name according to their sense of who you were in their domain, not anything inherent in your being. If all they know is what you do, you were a slave with a functional label. Your sense of identity was contextual to the role you played at the time. A great many ancient names for people were actually titles in that sense; the question in the Western mind of who it was in absolute terms is not considered and cannot be answered in many cases.

Despite appearances, we really don’t know all that much about Sumer during the Early Bronze Age. There’s only so much you can guess from what you can dig out of the sand, never mind stumbling over any Western biases. If we take the narrative in Genesis seriously, attempting as much as possible to read it from the mindset of ancient peoples, and we attempt to collate events and descriptions with our strongest suppositions about the world in his time, we can make some intelligent guesses about Abraham. Certain things become painfully obvious, such as his high degree of education. We can’t know if he knew all the various languages he encountered or whether he worked through translators, because ancient writing would never mention such things. In fact, a man could be said to have done a great many things when it was actually all the physical labor of servants and slaves and the man was never even there. We should assume such to be the case unless something in the narrative specifically says otherwise. Still, people don’t even do the things Abraham did without some broad experience and education that matches noble status in the ANE world.

A good guess places Abraham in Sumer near 2200 BC. This is simply a matter of matching events and conditions of his life in the narrative with best-guess dates from archeology. Sumer was a mixture of Sumerians and Akkadians; since later characterizations peg Abraham as Semitic, that precludes him being Sumerian. In the tribal social structure of his times, being still attached to his father’s household past age 60 was the norm. With what scant evidence we have, the most likely occupation of his father was related to the temples and worship of the pagan god Sin (pronounced “seen”), the moon god. That’s the best explanation for his decision to jump from Sumer to Haran, since the primary connection between those two cities was the presence of major shrines dedicated to Sin. The move would have taken months of travel and was very expensive. They could easily have been in the entourage of some greater person, but they apparently had property and stature enough of their own.

Meanwhile, we know from other sources that the entire Mesopotamian Valley placed a very high value on the lore and literature of previous civilizations. This would have included a great deal of oral mythology and much that we would call Black Magic. At any given time, regardless which empire stood in that area, one could have found a very large number of scholars who would have been experts in religions of all sorts. It would have been the primary area of scholarship. Keep in mind, the ancient version of astrology was the dominant controlling factor of life, and correlations of observations and events formed a substantial portion of any library. Monarchs required administrators to have what amounts to a masters degree in this mixed religious background under the assumption that you can’t make big decisions without the necessary broad perspective of all that men had done in the past, which included a lot legend. They were conscious of the importance of mythology in forming a view of reality. Regardless of your personal beliefs, you had better understand how the rest of the world sees things.

Abraham could hardly avoid such an education. We don’t know what his religious inclinations were before the call of God, nor how routine in his mind was any supposed communication from any deity. However, we know from contextual meaning that this call was a claim on Abraham — “I am now your God; serve Me only.” We should suppose the intellectual concept of monotheism was unimaginable, even ludicrous, in those times. It was hardly different from a lesser noble being told he was beholden to a new liege lord; the call was cast in terms of ANE feudal obligations. Such feudalism would have been about the ownership of personnel. Western feudalism is all about land, and the people belonged to the turf. ANE feudalism was all about people, and turf was a matter of projecting your control through your people in subtle degrees of effective occupation and official recognition. A servant of some lord was still under that lord’s laws regardless of physical jurisdiction, as it were. This God, whom Abraham knew as El (pronounced “ale”), claimed jurisdiction over all Creation. We cannot estimate much more about how this registered in Abraham’s mind in part because we have no idea what means were used to give Abraham this message.

We can safely assume it was part of the lore of his people, so it was in some sense part of the routine traffic between gods and men. We get a hint of all this in the tale of Balaam, hired by Balak of Moab some centuries later, and what seems Balaam’s standard employment as a scholar of religions. He had an accurate knowledge of the rituals and means of communication for a known deity that he apparently didn’t regard as his own. References to Balaam in the New Testament indicates he knew even more than the Old Testament narrative tells us, because he was eventually able to get Israel in trouble with Jehovah in other ways than direct cursing. The point is this: The people in Mesopotamia knew the God of the Bible on some level with a high degree of accuracy from sources we cannot guess. He would have been one of many recognized deities. The Bible narrative, in context of what would have been common knowledge to the readers, attempts to tell us that God decided to end the long period of lesser involvement in human affairs. The time was ripe and the right man for the job was available. It needed some serious shaping to create the proper character in this man so that what he passed onto his heirs was the best setting for God’s further revelation.

If we give ourselves over to Western biases and fantasize about what we want his background to be, we cannot hope to understand anything in the Bible narrative after the Call of Abraham. Our job is to soberly seek what was likely to have been Abraham’s worldview and some estimate of what was in his mind. He was the foundation of the Nation of Israel, not simply as a DNA donor, but as a man with a particular driving vision based on a fairly well understood view of reality. If we take seriously any sense of serving the God of the Bible, Abraham’s view of reality is part of what God requires of mankind in order to please Him.

While the high degree of education and the peculiar Mesopotamian worldview were essential, the urban wallow with its peculiar prejudices was all wrong. One of the most shocking things God required of Abraham was to engage a lifestyle his people detested. For the highly civilized valley residents, those tent dwelling traders were nasty, barbaric thieves. They called them Amorites, which is only vaguely an ethnic label. In the ANE mind, race and blood were not so critical as one’s identity by lifestyle. The mention of tents and the ritual of circumcision were mere symbols of the much larger image of someone uncouth, uncivilized and untrustworthy. It was a symbolic death for Abraham to become part of this culture. Given the extensive disparaging in the Bible of those who trust in their city walls and urban lifestyle, we see how that arises from Abraham’s conscious embrace nomadic living.

The whole idea was to force him to rely on God alone as his lord and defender and not on much of anything in this world. It helped to create a type and level of mysticism not inherent in the ANE. The foundation for mysticism was there in the Mesopotamian scholarly culture, but nothing much built on it — it was not fully developed. They did appear to have a good use of symbolic logic, where the symbols were not confined to concrete notions. Nowhere else do we have such a high degree of sophistication and self-consciousness matched to a very otherworldly focus. God led Abraham through circumstances which forced him to stop caring about worldly possessions as anything more than mere tools.

The next step in the development of revelation was pulling in a much sharper focus on what that otherworld meant against this world.

Recommended readings: Encyclopedic articles on The Patriarchal Period; the Genesis text from 12-38 and the Balaam account in Numbers 22-25, noting that the last chapter reflects the advice of Balaam.