Abraham’s Obedience
The African slave in America lacked any power to protect their child from harm- from being sold, beaten, raped or killed. The master could do whatever he wished with the slave’s child because he held all the power. Government laws protected and guaranteed the master’s dominance over his human property. The slave was not recognized as a person and had no rights or recourse to object or dissent. The slave must submit to the master’s will or face severe punishment.
In no way can the workers of 21st century America be considered as exploited, debased and brutalized today as the African slaves in the first half of the 19th century. But in 2020, our government and corporate masters stripped us of our liberties, including the right to protect our children from trauma due to the suspension of school, family, community, and most all activities that are essential for healthy cognitive, social, emotional and physical development.
The super-rich live in their own privileged bubble and made their own rules. But for the rest of us, we had no recourse, no options. Schools were locked. Public/civil institutions, including houses of worship, performance and athletics, were shut down. Interstate and international borders were closed. We were essentially placed on house arrest. The trap was closed. The bars put into place. The chains fastened. We could only watch the accumulated trauma take its toll on young people who were isolated at home, staring at screens, hours of screen games and on-line porn. Meanwhile, parents were stripped of the power to restore what their children had lost. This occurred even as we knew that children and youth were least likely to be affected by the virus itself.
The Lesson of Abraham
Genesis Chapter 16: Ishmael, son of Hagar is conceived:
Sarah, Abraham's wife , had borne him no children. She had a Egyptian maidservant named Hagar. Sarah said to Abraham, "Look, the Lord has kept me from bearing. Consort with my maid; perhaps I shall have a son through her." And Abraham heeded Sarah's request. She took her maid, Hagar, and gave her to Abraham as concubine. He cohabited with Hagar and she conceived; and when she saw she had conceived, her mistress was lowered in esteem. And Sarah said to Abraham, "The wrong done me is your fault!I myself put my maid in your bosom; now that she sees that she is pregnant, I am lowered in her esteem. The Lord decide between you and me!" Abraham said to her, "Your maid is I your hands. Deal with her as you think right." Then Sarah treated her harshly, and Hagar ran away from her.
An angel of the Lord found her by a spring in the wilderness. Hagar told the angel, "I am running away from my mistress Sarah." The angel told her, "Go back to your mistress, and submit to her harsh treatment." The angel went on to tell Hagar: "I will greatly increase your offspring. And they shall be too many to count. Behold, you are with child and shall bear a son. You shall call him Ishmael, for the Lord has paid heed to your suffering. He shall be a wild ass of a man; His hand against everyone, and everyone's hand against him; He shall dwell alongside all of his kinsmen.
Abraham was 86 years old when Hagar bore Ishmael to him.
In chapter 17, God commanded Abraham that "every male among you shall be circumcised. This shall be a sign of the covenant between Me and you. As for the home born slave and the one bought from an outsider who is not of your offspring, they must be circumcised, home born, and purchased alike. Thus shall my covenant be marked in your flesh as an everlasting pact. And if any male who is uncircumcised fails to circumcise the flesh of his foreskin, that person shall be cut off from his kin; he has broken my covenant."
Abraham was 100 years old and Sarah age 90 when Isaac was born.
Genesis Chapter 22
God put Abraham to he test. He said to him, "Abraham", and he answered, "Here I am." And he said, "Take your son, your favored one, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him here as a burnt offering on one of the heights that I will point out to you." So early the next morning, Abraham saddled his ass and took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. He split the woo for the offering and set out. On the third day, he saw the place from afar. He told the servants to stay there with the ass. "The boy and I will go up there. We will worship and we will return to you."
Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and put it on his son Isaac. He himself took the Firestone and the knife and the two walked together. Then Isaac said to his father Abraham, "Father!" And he answered, "Yes, my son." And Isaac said, Here are the Firestone and the wood, but where is the sheep for the burnt offering?" Abraham said, God will see to the sheep for the burnt offering, my son."
They arrived at the place of which God had told him. Abraham built an altar there; he laid out the wood; he bound his son Isaac; he laid him on the altar on top of the wood. And Abraham picked up the knife to slay his son. Then an angel of the Lord called to him from heaven: "Abraham! Abraham!" And he answered, 'Here I am". And the angel said, "Do not raise your hand against the boy, or do anything to him. For now I know you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your favored one from Me."
When Abraham looked up, he saw a ram caught in a thicket. So he took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering in place of his son.
The angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time from heaven, and said, "By Myself I swear, the Lord declares: because you have done this, and withheld your son, your favored one,I will bestow My blessing upon you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars of heaven and the sands on the seashore; and your descendants will seize the gates of your foes. All the nations of the earth shall bless themselves by your descendants, because you have obeyed My command."
Abraham then returned to his servants, and they went home. (Aside, Sarah died at the age of 127. Abraham was even older. They were elderly already when Isaac was born, thus the miracle.)
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A brief retelling of the story
Abraham was upset that Sarah was barren and he had no heirs. So he started having sex with Sarah's maidservant who was a slave they had bought while visiting Egypt. The text implies that this was Sarah's idea, but her rage and jealousy afterwards suggests that Abraham, the slave master, initiated this own his own. The same dynamic occurred between master and slave in the US. Since Sarah became abusive towards Hagar, she ran away, which seems a reasonable course of action after your slave master forces himself on you and then, through no fault of yours, his wife, your mistress treats you with cruelty.
But the intended lesson here is that running away from slavery is a bad decision. The angel, representing the central authority, the higher power, instructs her to go back and submit to Sarah's harsh treatment, and most likely Abraham's unwanted sexual advances. Basically, she should choose obedience to her master, and grin and bear her abuse because her suffering and misery will be rewarded in the future. After she’s dead, she will be matriarch to multitudes of descendants. That doesn’t make her life any less miserable or reduce her suffering. Just because the authority promises deliverance in the afterlife, doesn’t mean it’s true. All that she can depend upon is that her life as a slave will continue to be miserable, and not her own.
It's unclear what it means that Ishmael will be a wild ass of a man. It sounds like he'll be a bit of a violent savage, anti-social, getting himself into fights all the time. Maybe we are meant to understand that this is the nature of slaves. They are of a different breed, not civilized like their superior masters.
It’s pretty clear what is intended by the order to circumcise all the men in the clan and all of the slaves that Abraham buys. It’s a form of branding, marking his property, in case there is a dispute or a slave runs away. Easy to identify which slave is yours. Circumcision is pretty permanent.
Which brings us to the sacrifice of Isaac. When Sarah is 90 and Abraham is 100 years old, about the age of the people who run the US government, God gives them a son, Isaac. Of course they were overwhelmed with joy at this miracle child and treasured him.
The text says that God called Abraham and, like a child in a classroom, he answered “I am here”. This models obedience and subservience to authority. When God tells him to slay Isaac as a burnt offering, Abraham doesn't question the order. The supreme authority has spoken. Early next morning, they are off. He even makes Isaac carry the wood to the hilltop. Abraham ties him up, lays him upon the pile of wood and is about to kill him, his arm poised above Isaac holding a (hopefully) sharp knife. I assume he intended to cut the jugular vein in his neck or stab him in the heart, then let him bleed to death.
At that moment before Abraham brought the knife down into his son, an Angel of God tells him to stop. The text indicates this was a test of Abraham’s devotion and obedience, to confirm whether Abraham and his descendants were worthy of God’s blessing, worthy to be God’s chosen people. The message/lesson, we are told, is first that being subjects of the absolute central authority is a good thing and something to be desired/sought. The second lesson is that blind, unquestioning obedience is a virtue to which we should all aspire. What greater test of obedience than to murder the beloved son who was born miraculously in your senior years?
Growing up with an angry, punitive and arbitrary authority figure, blind obedience is not one of my strengths. Therefore, I have a much different interpretation. I believe that this story was originally meant to teach that such blind obedience to supreme central authority is wrong, is not the ideal model of human behavior. The Universal Intelligence ( UI ), here given the name God, devised this test to assess where humans were at, with their understanding and practice/implementation of the concepts of morality, ethics, trust and love.
If the Bible is about the True Word, then the Bible has to be about love. Love is the spiritual glue that holds human societies together. Love is the basis for life on Earth- for healthy, dynamic and diverse ecosystems that sustain all life, including ours. Love is the balance between the four elements (earth, water, air, fire). It is the complex relationships between life forms, and between cellular life and the elements. Love/attraction is the force that holds atoms and molecules together and allows them to organize into more complex forms. Love lies within the gravitational forces, energy and momentum. Love is what binds the Universe together (organization) and allows it to fall apart (entropy).
In 2022, “love lies bleeding”.
So if the Bible tells truth, it must teach about the supremacy of love. Therefore the Universal Intelligence (UI) would never endorse murdering one’s own child, or anyone for that matter. God would never endorse or condone killing for sport, destroying for pleasure or greed, torturing and abusing any life, including elements like water and rock which are alive in a different way. They (God uses pronouns they and them) wished to test whether humans would recognize the supremacy of love over the power of central authority and obedience to it. Abraham (pronouns he and him) was the every-human, the stand-in, or avatar. He represents and exemplifies the human species in this accounting.
Testing Humanity
God wished to evaluate/test how far a human would go when given an order by what he was believed/considered was absolute authority. So they order Abraham to kill Isaac. He gives no reason. It’s basically a “because I said so” situation. It’s the most extreme test of obedience, subservience, submission you could imagine. And in his blind obedience, Abraham left immediately, taking Isaac to the appointed place. He did not even tell Sarah or any in the community what he was ordered to do. I’d like to think he felt distressed, guilty, or ashamed, but maybe he was just in a rush to follow orders and please his master. Or he worried that Sarah, as mother, would be weak of will and try to stop him. For Abraham, authority’s command over-ruled all natural love for child.
Abraham was already a morally flawed person. He bought and sold slaves. He treated Hagar as his property and had non-consensual sex with her. He showed callous disregard for Hagar and Ishmael by exiling them into the wilderness. The ultimate test of humanity's capacity for cruelty and complete absence of empathy would be to murder his beloved young son.
He was about to cut Isaac’s throat and watch him bleed to death when, at the last minute, the Angel intervened. The Angel, who goes by pronouns they and them, basically said, “STOP! What the hell are you doing? You were really going to murder your beloved son? What’s wrong with you? Do you have no sense?” Obviously humans, at least male humans, would choose obedience over compassion, love and a sense of ethical and moral behavior.
God waited until the very last second before Abraham plunged in the knife, to observe in those last moments, whether Abraham would drop the knife, fall to his knees and sob uncontrollably for the monstrous act he was about to commit. Would he actually proceed to murder his child just because he was ordered to do so?
Apparently Abraham would have done it if the Angel had not stopped him. Isaac’s blood would have spurted all over him as Abraham watched the life drain from his son. He apparently was not moved enough by the look of terror in Isaac’s eyes- the confusion, the tears, the sobs, the pleas for mercy. Abraham was willing to live with the memory of those last horrifying moments as he murdered Isaac, a helpless boy bound with ropes upon a pyre, a boy who loved and trusted and looked up to his father. He would endure it all to remain in authority’s good graces.
Abraham was willing to ignore, to put aside the unspoken contract of trust that every parent instinctively has with their child- to love and protect them. The whole affair is really too monstrous to think about. In the movie version, the scene would be terrifying and disturbing. Infanticide is horrific child abuse and Abraham was going to do it just because this almighty supreme authority ordered him to do so. Self-proclaimed authorities of organized religion, perhaps we should call it corporate religion, use this story to teach the lesson that blind obedience was Abraham's supreme virtue. They hold out the promise that such sacrifice will be rewarded with glory and fortune.
The rulers of empires employ this strategy to convince parents to send their sons to war, most likely to be traumatized, maimed or killed. In return for their obedience, power promises honor and glory, even in death. When the angel stops Abraham, they are also teaching not to be so willing and quick to sacrifice your sons to fight and die in the wars. Wars that are usually about authority's lust to extend and preserve their power. Glory and honor are poor recompense for a dead child.
THE TRUE LESSON
The true and genuine lesson is that blind obedience to authority is wrong, unethical, immoral, lacking in true humanity and goes against our natures as biological creatures. We are not meant to be sheep, controlled by the shepherd. We are not his flock or his servants. Societies that identify themselves as servants whose mandate is obedience to the supreme master often end up committing terrible atrocities, monstrous acts of cruelty. Rather, it is our moral imperative to think for ourselves, to question authority, to oppose unethical orders and laws, and to allow love, compassion, empathy, kindness, altruism to be our moral compass.
The lesson is that love and trust between a parent and child, between one human to another is more important and true than an order and a promise from any authority. God said: “What the F*#@ Abraham! You were really going to kill your own son in cold blood just because I told you to? Where’s your humanity? This is not what the Universe intended”. The Universe recognized and warns us that some characteristic, some flaw in human nature results in our capacity to perform monstrous atrocities.
The Universal Intelligence demonstrates how the cis-gender male of the species is more likely to commit an immoral and monstrous act than the females. Bad enough that Abraham was forcing himself on his slave, I believe behind Sarah’s back. But then he’s willing to murder his son to stay in good graces of authority for which he will be rewarded with wealth and power. He plans to kill Isaac without even consulting Sarah, anxious that she would try to stop him and then he’d fall from the good graces of his master. Classic story through the ages.
Abraham could/should have said “No, I won’t, I can’t do that. I’d rather kill myself than harm my son. If you insist on taking a life, take mine and let my son live. Nothing you say, no threat, no force, no coercion can make me do this monstrous deed that you ask of me. I know in my heart, in my soul, deep in my spirit, that this is wrong. Even if you say this is right and just, I know it is not. I will resist, or give up my own life. I will fight with every last breath to protect my son, my family, my friends, my neighbors, because I know this is wrong. I know that love is truth, and that hatred and violence are false. They are abominations.
That is the real message of this story. Not that Abraham was to be lauded and applauded, admired and exalted because of his obedience to his supreme authority. But rather that kindness, compassion, trust and love are the ideals to which we should aspire. That we should allow love to guide our moral compass and that love trumps/overrules blind obedience every time.
It is a cautionary tale. It teaches that, by our nature, humans are susceptible/ vulnerable to being misled/fooled/manipulated by unscrupulous peers/forces/authorities who are able to compel those humans to commit unethical and immoral deeds. This story warns us about the evils/hazards that can result/come from absolute allegiance to a powerful central authority; from a society that indoctrinates/brian washes its citizens to believe in the sanctity/ priority/ transcendence of authority.
Authority’s indoctrination can take the form of patriotism, tribalism, regionalism, nationalism, and racism. Authority often demands obedience and will impose it unilaterally, bullying the population to acquiesce/comply. Absolute obedience is also achieved through coercion within a formal/legal system of enslavement and oppression which is backed up/enforced by threats of punishment and death. Authority relies on obedient members of the population that are willing to use force and violence against a public who resists and protests what they see as unethical mandates. Obedient men who follow orders to police the population, using violence and intimidation to punish people for standing up against what they see as injustice, as going against the universe’s principles of love.
Abraham’s near murder of his son resulted from his unquestioning allegiance to authority and his lack of understanding/insight that he has choice about his beliefs and his actions- that his personal judgment, his own moral compass, may rightly over-ride the command of the authority in situations where he feels those commands are unjust, unfair and immoral.
Another important lesson is the role of peers and community. In this test, Abraham made his decision while socially isolated from his community. After hearing God’s command, he did not consult with family, friends, members of his community. He took Isaac and hurried away to the appointed spot to sacrifice/kill him. If he had conferred with his community, then the collective wisdom of his social network likely would have raised questions and doubts about God’s order. Abraham isolated himself, even from Isaac’s mother, Sarah. The only council he listened to was the absolute authority whose orders he did not question or doubt.
This chapter and its lesson should have gone further. Seeing that Abraham would have killed his son, the Angel then should have said to him: “Family and community are sacred. Without the bonds of love and trust, humanity will destroy itself. Take Isaac home now and love him. Find Hagar and Ishmael, your son, and accept them wholeheartedly into your family. Let Isaac and Ishmael both be your sons, and they be brothers to each other, regardless of their differences. Diversity among people is our strength and comes from a sense of universal love. Teach your community to love and protect its children. Keep them safe and teach them knowledge of each other and the world, for they are the future. Teach your neighbors to help one another and work together for the benefit of all. In this way, all of your lives will be richer, safer and fulfilled”.
Human nature has not changed significantly in the past few thousand years. Our technology has advanced exponentially as has our numbers, but otherwise we have not evolved much further since these lessons were first told. Contemporary humans are still susceptible/vulnerable to being manipulated by powerful and persuasive authority. Our empathy, compassion, altruism and sense of fairness can be overruled/subjugated by clever and devious propaganda/lies. We can still be induced to act in ways that are harmful to ourselves, our children, our families and communities; to strangers among us and in distant lands.
Starting in March 2020, we obeyed the pandemic mandates ordered by the supreme central authority, despite how it caused harm to young people and those most economically vulnerable among us. Why did we not object/protest when ordered to sacrifice our children, derail their lives and jeopardize their healthy development? Why did we allow/permit abrupt closing of schools in the middle of the spring semester? Why were we passive and complicit when they isolated children from friends and relatives; when they took away fun and play; when they destroyed their sense of safety and well-being. Authority told us to jump and we did so without question or protest. Like sheep. Because they scared us with warnings of danger and death. Because they threatened punishments such as losing one’s job.
“I will not sacrifice my children. Let the virus take me if necessary. I have lived a long and fruitful life. Allow my children the chance to live fully among family, friends and community- to grow and learn and become the best and truest versions of themselves that they are able”.
Rather, we essentially suspended their education for more than a year. Very young children sat home alone staring at computer screens instead of socializing in classrooms, lunchrooms and playgrounds. (Nets and swings were removed from public playgrounds or were cordoned off with caution tape.) Those infrequent times in public, they saw only eyes and masks. There were no more smiles. Adult brains will fill in what we think the rest of the face is doing under the mask. But for young children without years of experience with facial expressions, this loss of face caused a developmental delay in learning to understand/comprehend social cues and nuances of human expression/communication, body language .
The window for optimal development of brain pathways that code for many skills such as reading faces, can be a relatively short time in the young child’s life. Ideally, such basic/rudimentary skills are acquired in the first few years of life and further honed throughout childhood. Losing 2 years of such development is significant. The brain pathways grow according to the stimuli it receives. If kids don’t practice full facial recognition, then those skills may be permanently reduced for that person.
When learning a language, mastery comes almost automatically in the early years, whereas later in life, acquisition of language is a more difficult and often with less competency. People who learn a foreign language before puberty usually speak with a flawless accent, whereas later most people never lose their foreign accent.
We ascribe deficits in reading social expressions and cues to conditions such as Autism. We cannot predict the long term effects that will come after depriving young children of seeing people’s faces for two years. Everyone will be somewhere along the spectrum of social learning and anxiety.
When finally permitted back at school, they lived with ongoing masking that included the constant physical irritation of the mask that also impedes breathing and chafes the skin. Desks were often six feet apart, and sometimes enclosed behind plastic walls. Many were not permitted to play physical games and extracurricular activities were limited.
Even now, many children are still anxious and afraid to remove the masks. Many are still bewildered by events of the past two years. All have lost 2 years of normal child development, even teens and young adults.
We sacrificed our children ostensibly to save very old and very sick people from a viral infection that might result in death. The US census bureau estimates there are 21 million Americans over the age of 78. These are the people at highest risk for bad outcomes from any infectious disease. The media omitted these statistics when they frighten us with daily death counts.
Many of the very old, especially health compromised people in nursing homes, were already teetering on the edge. Modern medicine has already prolonged their lives way beyond what would have been natural. Passing away is inevitable when one is very old, frail and weakened by chronic illness. None of us lives forever. Super rich persons may desire to freeze themselves, hoping to be re-animated in the future, but we all die. That is the cycle of life on Earth. Better from old age than from violence, overdose or suicide.
Abraham himself was supposedly at least 90, already nearing the limits of the human lifespan, when Isaac was born. Yet nearing the end of his life, having lived a long and full life, he chose himself over Isaac, who represents the next generation, the future of humanity.
Like Abraham, many of our present day leaders are at or nearing 80. Most will be dead within 10-15 years. I don’t say this to be mean. That’s just life. They may wish to believe/think that they are immortal like the gods of Olympus. But the indisputable truth is that they are not. They too are creatures that are born and eventually die, just like all other life on this planet (that they are killing at an obscene rate).
They won’t live to see the outcome/consequences/ramifications/results of the monumentally important decisions they make now. Their actions will have serious consequences for the next generations. Global warming, climate chaos, ecosystem collapse, desertification, coastal flooding, polluted water and air, mass extinction of Earth’s life forms, drought, famine, and endless wars. It won’t affect them. They’ll be dead- buried in the ground, enshrined in their expensive tombs, with their checkbooks, stocks, bonds and piles of money that they can count forever in whatever afterlife they believe in.
The virus is not the villain here. A virus does what it does. It enters the body to reproduce and perpetuate its species. It’s not a cold-blooded killer seeking to take down the human species. We don’t need to declare war against it. We just have to take better care of ourselves so we are more healthy- avoiding exposure to toxins, eating healthy foods, having clean water and air, exercising, reducing stress levels and experiencing joy in family and community.
Sadly, some people are weak and frail. Many are obese, have diabetes, lung disease, weakened immune systems, heart disease and other chronic organ failures. The virus triggers a reaction/symptoms that overwhelms them and their organs shut down. It’s our own weakness that results in death, not the virus.
The actions of the world’s masters/rulers/super-rich titans and kings result in much more misery, disease and death worldwide, than any virus. The virus mainly endangers the very old, whereas pollution, exploitation, poverty, famine, misery and war harms many hundreds of millions every year. The masters’ strategy is always to deflect attention from their immoral/ unethical/evil deeds, directing it rather to some other target that cannot refute the accusations. That may be a virus, another nation or some villainized group of people at home or across the globe somewhere.
(Imagine the substantial psychological and neurological damage, the PTSD, that Isaac sustained from that terrifying day when his father almost murdered him. Isaac will carry those memories, those brain pathways that code for terror, with him his whole life. The memories may fade with time but the scars are permanent.)
It’s 2022. We cannot go back in time and change what happened. But we can stop hurting our children NOW. We can focus our efforts towards helping them heal from the trauma and lost experiences caused by the pandemic lockdown, restoring what has been lost, and creating new opportunities, new practices to promote healing and catching up with delayed developmental milestones.
Moving forward, we can refuse to obey authority blindly. We can question the risks and weigh the benefits of new mandates, especially those imposed on young people who have little to no power and are unable to give informed consent.
We can oust/remove from power those leaders/masters/dictators that ordered us to sacrifice millions of Isaacs. We can vote against those that choose war over peace, that choose profit over family/ love/ spirit/ and soul. We can reject those that manipulate us and lie to us, year after year. Those that make empty promises and consistently act in ways that hurts children but reaps huge profits and rewards for themselves and their friends. Those who worship money and power over love and humanity. Those whose main business is death- who destroy civilizations, ecosystems and the Earth itself.
For children everywhere, we can join together, in cooperation and community, to create a world that prioritizes and cherishes life, the human spirit, creativity and expression.
