Why Are Things Bad in the Mideast? Read Genesis. By Edward Platt.

Sarah Presenting Hagar to Abraham. By Adriaen van der Werff, 1699. Wikimedia.

The God of Genesis Loved a Family Saga. By Edward Platt. Aeon Magazine, December 2, 2013.

Platt:

One reason the Abrahamic stories have transcended time and place so successfully is that they were not intended to reflect contemporary realities. Recent scholarly analysis suggests that the descriptions of Abraham’s life are more suggestive of conditions during the first millennium BCE when the stories were written down, than those of the 18th century BCE, when Abraham is supposed to have lived. In other words, they were not folk tales handed down from generation to generation, but contemporary inventions, or folk tales infused with contemporary observations. There might have been similarities between Abraham’s life and the lives of his earliest audiences in ancient Judea — and also his audience in the Arabian peninsula, introduced to his deeds 1,000 years later by the visionary who founded a new faith by reasserting the principles of the old one. Yet the stories were always intended to evoke memories of an ancestral past, an older, purer time, when a man such as Abraham could be on intimate terms with God.
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That the matriarchs and patriarchs of old often fail to live up to His expectations only deepens the feeling that we are watching real people, who are frequently blind to their true interests. Indeed, such a turbulent background might explain why today’s Jews and Muslims, in places such as Hebron, do not treat their shared heritage as a source of commonality: in maintaining the family feud, they are preserving the spirit of the stories of Genesis — stories, moreover, in which the image of their God is found.

 

Communal relations in Hebron have not always been as bad as they are today. The two communities lived together peaceably for 400 years during Ottoman rule. Co‑existence came to an end only in 1929, when tensions caused by Jewish immigration resulted in riots throughout Palestine. The worst violence was in Hebron: on the night of 23 August, an Arab mob killed 67 members of its Jewish community, and soon after the British authorities evacuated the rest.

 

A small group of settlers returned to the city after Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan in the Six-Day war of 1967, and ever since the conflict has centred on the city’s religious sites and shrines. On 25 February 1994, a settler walked into the Tomb of the Patriarchs during morning prayers and shot dead 29 Muslims. Three years later, Hebron was partitioned. Today, settlers may enter the parts of the city controlled by the Palestinian Authorities only to visit a shrine, and it is not unusual to see Jewish worshippers walking through the streets escorted by soldiers, in a strange fusion of piety and militarism.

 

The Palestinians understand how settlers can co-opt the sacred to expand their presence in the city: one day, I set off with a Palestinian guide to find a well, mentioned in the Bible, where Abraham was supposed to have watched Sarah bathing. We couldn’t find it, and it transpired that the man who owned the house behind it had built a garage over it. He wanted somewhere to park his car, but that wasn’t the only motive: he was concerned that the settlers would add the well to the list of places to which they had visiting rights, and he wanted to pre-empt the possibility of them turning up at his front door.

 

Still, the legend of Isaac and Ishmael offers some grounds for hope. Genesis relates that Isaac met the exiled Ishmael only once, when they buried Abraham in Hebron; but Jewish tradition maintains he never forgot him. Isaac lived in the Negev beside the ‘fountain in the wilderness’ where the angel rescued Hagar for the first time. One evening, he had gone out to meditate in the field when he saw the camel train approaching, bearing Rebekah to Canaan. Tradition maintains that it was Ishmael who was on Isaac’s mind — that, thinking of his brother, he was rewarded with his wife — and yet the filial reconciliation he dreamed of never came. Perhaps it will be enacted symbolically by their heirs. If so, they will have overcome not only the entrenched political problems apparent in Hebron, but the enduring human weaknesses so graphically portrayed in the very stories in which Isaac and Ishmael were created.