Abrahamic Pluralism: The "Patriarch"

"The history of the Jewish people begins with the ancient Hebrews, or Habiru, an unruly lot in the judgment of Bronze Age Egyptian officials, who seem to have been disquieted by these wanderers or semi-nomads, perhaps more social caste than an ethnic unity. Soon after the start of the second millennium B.C.E., the Habiru began a movement from Mesopotamia westward, until they approached the Mediterranean" (Harold Bloom, The Book of J, 193).

If, indeed, the Habiru are related to the Jewish people, they must have gradually infiltrated the settlements of the Palestinian hill dwellers (the Canaanites) in the early second millennium, and were peaceably absorbed by them, perhaps through tribal adoption and inter-marriage. Their original Syro-Mesopotamian culture (Syro-Mesopotamia being the land between the Habur and Euphrates rivers, around the city of Haran) was Amorite. Scholars have noted that Amorite culture was also tribal, "including urban, rural, and mobile pastoralist populations. The language was an early form of Northwest Semitic. [The fact that scholars have discerned] a number of cultural traits common to the Amorite tribes and the later Israelite tribes...including social forms and religious customs" would seem to confirm this Amoritic connection (see Ronald Hendel, Remembering Abraham, 52-54).

"One group among them was later headed by a troubled and charismatic seeker, Abram, who as Abraham became the father of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam" (Bloom, 193).

It is important to recognize that, whether we are speaking of Jews, Christians, or Muslims, as a matter of history, Abraham's "fatherhood" is a marker of symbolic genealogies, and "one's place in [any such] genealogy is a sign of cultural self-definition more than it is a sign of biological descent" (Hendel, 10).

This is myth, not genetics.

"It may have been eighteen centuries before the common era that Abram decided to leave Mesopotamia, for reasons that very likely were as spiritual as the Hebrew Bible asserts them to have been. Scholars agree that the lands ruled by the Old Babylonian Dynasty of Hammurabi and his successors were marvelously civilized, but Abram's discomfort with the religious culture drove him out" (Bloom, 193).

The search for the "historical Abraham" yields little more than scholarly dispute. What is important for the Abrahamic Pluralist are the stories that compose his legacy. He is a character of ancient legendry and, as such, he emerges from mythic memory with a peculiar (and inconsistent) "personality." Even that, as Bloom remarks, "is not as fully developed by the Yahwist [J-writer]...as are those of Jacob and Joseph...and yet his nature is intense and vivid, and permanently known to us. The center of his consciousness is a certain discontent, an impatience with things as they are" (Bloom, 195).

Abram, like the convinced Pluralists who invoke his name and exhibit his characteristic "impatience with things as they are," was a utopian. Utopians are, as the name suggests, wanderers by nature: civilization, in the form they have inherited it, causes them continual discomfort. It makes them perennially restless. Their mode of "spirituality" is forever articulated by St. Augustine's address to his God: "Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they find their repose in Thee" (Augustine, Confessions).

In other words, Abraham is "father" to all who share his discontent with the prevailing culture that is their birthright. Abrahamic Pluralist "spirituality" is a restless non-conformity. Only a marginal number of those who claim "descent" from Abraham today exhibit his spirit (or ruh).

"And think not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham" (preaching attributed to John the Baptizer, St. Matthew 3:9).

Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.