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    The Children of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, Islam
    The Children of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, Islam
    The Children of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, Islam
    Ebook359 pages7 hours

    The Children of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, Islam

    By F. E. Peters

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    About this ebook

    F.E. Peters, a scholar without peer in the comparative study of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, revisits his pioneering work. Peters has rethought and thoroughly rewritten his classic The Children of Abraham for a new generation of readers-at a time when the understanding of these three religious traditions has taken on a new and critical urgency.


    He began writing about all three faiths in the 1970s, long before it was fashionable to treat Islam in the context of Judaism and Christianity, or to align all three for a family portrait. In this updated edition, he lays out the similarities and differences of the three religious siblings with great clarity and succinctness and with that same remarkable objectivity that is the hallmark of all the author's work.


    Peters traces the three faiths from the sixth century B.C., when the Jews returned to Palestine from exile in Babylonia, to the time in the Middle Ages when they approached their present form. He points out that all three faith groups, whom the Muslims themselves refer to as "People of the Book," share much common ground. Most notably, each embraces the practice of worshipping a God who intervenes in history on behalf of His people.


    The book's text is direct and accessible with thorough and nuanced discussions of each of the three religions. Footnotes provide the reader with expert guidance into the highly complex issues that lie between every line of this stunning edition of The Children of Abraham. Complete with a new preface by the author, this Princeton Classics edition presents this landmark study to a new generation of readers.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateMay 22, 2018
    ISBN9781400889709
    The Children of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, Islam

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      Book preview

      The Children of Abraham - F. E. Peters

      The Children of Abraham

      The Children of Abraham

      Judaism, Christianity, Islam

      F. E. Peters

      With a new preface by the author

      PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

      PRINCETON AND OXFORD

      Copyright © 2004 by Princeton University Press

      Preface to the Princeton Classics edition, copyright © 2018

      by Princeton University Press

      Published by Princeton University Press,

      41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

      In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street,

      Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

      Cover design by Michael Boland for thebolanddesignco.com

      Cover images courtesy of iStock

      All Rights Reserved

      New Princeton Classics paperback edition,

      with a new preface by the author, 2018

      Paper ISBN 978-0-691-12769-9

      The Library of Congress has cataloged the previous edition of this book as follows:

      Peters, F. E. (Francis E.)

      The children of Abraham : Judaism, Christianity, Islam

      F. E. Peters.—New ed.

      p. cm.

      Includes index.

      ISBN 0-691-12041-2 (cl : alk. paper)

      1. Judaism—History—To 1500. 2. Christianity.

      3. Islam—History—To 1500. I. Title.

      BM157.P47 2004

      201'.4—dc22 2004040049

      This book has been composed in Janson

      Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

      press.princeton.edu

      Printed in the United States of America

      1  3  5  7  9  10  8  6  4  2

      For

      Edward Peter Fitzsimmons

      Contents

      Preface to the Princeton Classics Edition

      ix

      Preface

      xviii

      INTRODUCTION

      The Scriptures: Some Preliminary Notions

      1

      CHAPTER ONE

      The Promise and the Heirs

      7

      CHAPTER TWO

      A Contested Inheritance

      21

      CHAPTER THREE

      Community and Hierarchy

      41

      CHAPTER FOUR

      The Law

      67

      CHAPTER FIVE

      Scripture and Tradition

      85

      CHAPTER SIX

      The Worship of God

      103

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      Renunciation and Aspiration

      116

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      Thinking and Talking about God

      138

      EPILOGUE

      Sacred History

      167

      Notes

      173

      Glossary

      213

      Index

      227

      Preface to the Princeton Classics Edition

      George Santayana once famously warned that those who did not remember history would be condemned to repeat it, presumably with baleful consequences. What is, however, equally harmful, and far more dangerous, is to ignore history or to misunderstand it.

      To be sure, knowing the history of a religious community is not necessary to being saved; faith and observance are likely far better paths to the afterlife. But to ignore the history of religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is not merely to misunderstand or disrespect those communities; it also diminishes one’s capacity as a citizen on this earth and, as we are discovering, exposes us to civil liabilities of the first order.

      In secular societies, religion has been formally separated from the public sphere and restricted to the narrow domain of the private and the personal. It appears quite differently to Abraham’s heirs. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all worship a God, the same God, who has, through word and deed, intervened in the public space—that is, in history, often and effectively. He has addressed his worshippers as a people, and not as individuals, and those same believers have, persuant to his instruction, organized themselves as communities: a Jewish qahal, a Christian ekklesia, a Muslim umma.

      Whatever the intent of the separation of Church and State, it has had among its effects the banishment of religion and the history of its components from the curricula of public education, an institution dedicated to objective discussion and critical thinking. When there is an attempt, private or parochial at a religious education, it is often catechetical, offering instruction only in the rudiments of one’s own faith, or else multicultural, an equable glance at everybody’s faith.

      Neither was my intention in writing The Children of Abraham. This book, and my others in the same vein, grew out of a strong conviction that, since Judaism, Christianity and Islam all spring from the same matrix that unfolds in the Bible book of Genesis, they constitute a family and should be studied and understood in triplicate. Aristotle pointed out that there is no science of the individual, but by studying these three individuals of the species Abrahamic in parallel, I thought to expose their common, but often forgotten and more often dissembled DNA. More, I hoped that in such a comparative context, synagogue, church, and mosque might cast a reciprocal and newly revealing light, one upon the other

      If that is the biology of the three great monotheistic faiths, they also have an equally instructive, if somewhat less edifying, sociology. Christianity and Islam have been sibling rivals from their birth. Jews point to their unmistakable birthright as heirs to God’s promise to Abraham; Christians insist that they are Jacob to the Jewish Esau; and Muslims equally vigorously claim that Islam represents a New Abrahamic Covenant replacing the failed ventures of an earlier time.

      These two elements, the profound similarity in their origins and aspirations and the equally profound differences that separate Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, were the foundations upon which The Children of Abraham was conceived and upon which the finished book rests; and, as we are coming to realize, they are elements that we ignore at our civil and secular peril.

      This blindness to the religions’ similarities is in some ways understandable. Jews have not been eager to acknowledge their offspring, nor are Christians entirely forthright about their Jewish paternity even though their religion’s claims make no sense without it. The Quran is somewhat more willing to acknowledge the faith’s Judeo-Christian heritage, honoring Jesus as a prophet and granting toleration to fellow People of the Book. Muhammad was, however, a statesman as well as a prophet, and asserting the primacy of his religion was politically necessary.

      The three religions’ theological attitudes toward and political and social treatment of one another were always fraught in an environment dominated by religiously committed societies, where heresy was a crime and apostasy a capital offense. Now, in a far more secular world that ignores, disowns, or misunderstands religious motives and aspirations, the prospect has grown darker. We are faced, personally and collectively, with ideological and political choices of great consequence.

      Can we make wise choices regarding Iran and Saudi Arabia without understanding the great Sunni-Shi’a divide? Can we think straight about the Jewish West Bank settlements without fully grasping the concept of Eretz Yisrael? The Children of Abraham attempted to fill these spaces in our understanding, an endeavor that is still needful. In the second half of the twentieth century, religious communities began to present bold new challenges to the society at large. Now, in the twenty-first, their more radical claims and aspirations threaten not merely globalism and the nation-state but Jews, Christians, and Muslims themselves, whether or not they promote or endorse those aspirations.

      The Children of Abraham was written to explain those and other concepts central to the three monotheistic religions, simply to lay open the past of ideologies that have determined the way we are, whether or not we are believers, and whether or not we are aware of it. I tried to make this book accessible without over-simplifying what are complex notions, to fashion a narrative that is intelligible to the general reader and acceptable, and perhaps even illuminating to the expert. I did my best to be engaged with the matter without being invested in it. And finally, I hoped that Jews, Christians, and Muslims might find themselves in the text, even though the eyes of faith see things invisible to the scholar and, of course, vice-versa.

      F. E. Peters

      Kingsway Manor

      Schenectady, N.Y.

      Preface

      Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all children born of the same Father and reared in the bosom of Abraham. They grew to adulthood in the rich spiritual climate of the Middle East, and though they have lived together all their lives, now in their maturity they stand apart and regard their family resemblances and conditioned differences with astonishment, disbelief, or disdain.

      Rich parallels of attitude and institution exist among the three religions that acknowledge, in varying degrees, their evolution one out of the other. They have all engaged at times in reciprocal polemic of great ferocity, and sometimes pursued a more ecumenical course, but neither is the intention here. My purpose is merely to underline both the parallels and the differences, and to connect them to common origins and to a common spiritual and intellectual environment.

      I have not attempted to write the history of the three religions; others have rendered that service to each. I have selected certain issues and institutions and laid them out in a manner that would invite comparison. The matter is sometimes complex, and so I have tried to be clear in the text and generous in the notes, where the reader is invited to pursue more deeply questions I have only touched on.

      Judaism is the eldest of this family of three, and its extraordinary career stretches thousands of years before the Christian and Muslim eras, when these latter two normally reckon that history begins. The present inquiry begins at the very outset of the history of monotheism, when his god made a treaty or covenant with a certain Abraham. The story of monotheism is, in fact, the history of that covenant and its claimants. Where to close is somewhat more arbitrary, since after the seventh century of the Christian era we are discussing not one but three religious communities, each at a somewhat different stage of its growth, and each of which is still in existence, and apparently thriving, even today. I have chosen to close at the somewhat imprecise point at which I judged that the three religions had reached their normative expression, that is, when the chief institutions, codes, practices, and spiritual attitudes that in some perceptible manner continue to characterize them today were in place.

      Thus this study ends in what we in the West commonly call the Middle Ages, and so ignores both the European responses to these religions and the great movements of reform and revival that have occurred in more modern times. I can offer in mild defense of this closing only my own competence, which extends no farther than I have written. It is perhaps far enough. All the issues of reform and all the wellsprings and mechanisms of revival are present in the place and period under consideration. Faith and reason, Scripture and tradition, understanding and enlightenment are all very old adversaries.

      I have tried to write a useful book. The matter and reading grows thick where I thought that common knowledge runs thinnest. My intent in the notes has been to provide guidance rather than proof on specific points. I have attempted to call the reader’s attention to accessible basic texts, useful introductions, or illuminating discussions at the point where the issue or topic arises rather than collecting them all at the end. I have also used many transcribed technical terms out of the conviction that the reader of these pages will certainly read further, and I would prefer he or she be introduced to this common vice by me rather than by other, less helpful hands. In any event, I have gathered all in a glossary at the end. Finally, I have reduced all dates to the Common Era (B.C.E/C.E.).

      A brief personal note. These reflections are quite literally the product of the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University, where the comparative questions and issues raised in the pages that follow were once regularly and routinely discussed by faculty colleagues and students alike, and in the same spirit that they are offered here. It is difficult for me to imagine putting them on paper in any other atmosphere. For that I thank those colleagues, students, and others, past and present, particularly Baruch Levine and Lawrence Schiffman for their patient pilpul; Linda Knezevich, Stuart Miller, Nadine Posner, and Peter Zirnis for their immediate and invaluable help and stimulation; the late and regretted Dan Urman of Beersheba University, my first Hebrew teacher, and Edward Peter Fitzsimmons, who first interested me in Torah and to whom this book is affectionately dedicated; Père Georges Anawati, O.P. of Cairo and now of the Kingdom of God; Rowland Mitchell and Anthony Manero for expanding my education; two, now alas one, Browne, one Green and one yclept Dean; Peter Paul and Mary.

      The Children of Abraham

      INTRODUCTION

      The Scriptures: Some Preliminary Notions

      The three great faiths called Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were born of an event that each remembers as a moment in history, when the One True God appeared to an Iron Age sheikh named Abram and bound him in a covenant forever. Abram is the later Abraham, the father of all believers and the linchpin of the faith, and indeed the theology, from which the three communities of that God’s worshipers emerged. The history of monotheism had begun.

      One God

      The monotheists not only worship one god; he is the same god for all. Whether called Yahweh or Elohim, God the Father or Allah, it is the selfsame deity who created the world out of nothing, who fashioned humankind in his own image, who made the covenant with Abraham and his progeny, and who subsequently intervened in human history to punish his enemies and chastise his friends, and to send instructions, warnings, and encouragement to those who would listen. The divergent names are occasionally troublesome, however, most notably the persistence of the untranslated Allah in Western languages, and some Jews and Christians, and even some Muslims, appear to think that they are worshiping different gods.

      There are even more profound dislocations. Though historically and ontologically the divinity worshiped by Jews, Christians, and Muslims is one and the same, his portrait, which is more often than not a self-portrait, is quite different in the various books they call Scripture. The biblical Yahweh is not only majestic; he is often homely, at times familiar and even regretful on occasion. His providence for his creation is universal but his interventions in the affairs of humankind are often specific and concrete. The Quran’s Allah is equally majestic, equally omnipotent and provident, but he is also supremely transcendent; he walks not among humankind. His ninety-nine quranic attributes—he is the compassionate, the merciful—are pronounced, rehearsed, listed in the Quran, but they are rarely experienced there. The Bible is dramatic, expository, and descriptive; the Quran is hortatory and assertive; and their portraits of God differ accordingly.¹ As for Christians, God the Father, though conceptually identical to his biblical prototype, has receded into the shadow of his celebrated and equally divine Son.

      People of the Book

      Jews, Christians, and Muslims are all People of the Book. God’s covenant with Abraham was recorded and collected in a book that contained not only the contract but also, in the book’s varying parts, the working out of the covenant in history. They call this record simply The Book or The Writing (Scripture), or, more descriptively, The Good News or The Recitation. These Scriptures, all purporting to be in some sense the words of the One True God, are by no means identical, nor are they thought to be such by the three communities. That there is a Book, all agree, but whether that Book is the present Bible, or the New Testament, or the Quran is precisely the point that separates Jews, Christians, and Muslims.²

      In the Jewish—and Muslim—view, God gave and Moses wrote down a distinct and discrete multipart book, the Law or Torah. But although the Torah holds pride of place in Jewish revelational history, God’s direct interventions were in one manner or another continuous between Moses and Ezra, and thus the Jewish Bible is a collective work that includes, under the three headings of Law, Prophets, and the miscellany called Writings, all of God’s revelation to his people.

      This was certainly the Jewish view in Jesus’ day, and there is no reason to think that Jesus regarded Scripture any differently. He in turn produced no new Writings or Book of his own, and so Christian Scripture is formally quite different from what the Jews thought of as such. The Gospels are accounts of Jesus’ words and deeds set down, in approximately a biographical framework, by his followers. In the eyes of Christians, Jesus did not bring a Scripture; he was himself, in his person and message, a revelation, the Good News. His life and sacrificial death sealed a New Covenant that God had promised—it is foreshadowed in the Old Testament—and so the Gospels and the accounts of the deeds and thoughts of the early Christian community recorded in the Acts of the Apostles and the letters of various Jesus followers came to be regarded by Christians as a New Covenant or Testament to be set down next to the Old, that recorded and commemorated in the Jewish Bible.

      Muhammad may have had only an imperfect understanding of this somewhat complex process. Though he commonly refers to the Jewish revelation as Tawrat, the Prophet of Islam was certainly aware that there were other Jewish prophets, and so possibly revelations, after Moses. But he never mentions a New Testament; his sole references are to the Gospel, in Arabic Injil, and he seems to have thought of it as a sacred book that Jesus had brought or written, much as Moses had the Torah.

      Muhammad had a strong sense of the prophetic calling and of the line of prophets who had created the Judeo-Christian tradition, and after some brief initial hesitation, he placed himself firmly within that line. He too was a prophet, and now in these latter times, when God’s earlier revelations had become distorted at the willful and perverse hands of the Jews and Christians, Allah had given to him, no less than to Moses and Jesus, a revealed Book. Or so it was in its final, codified version. What God himself had instructed Muhammad to call The Recitation, in Arabic al-Quran, was in fact a series of messages delivered to Muhammad by the angel Gabriel over a period of twenty-two years. Each part was already identified as Scripture during the Prophet’s lifetime, and the Book was finally closed only with Muhammad’s death.

      Three Sacred Books

      Thus there came into being three sacred books, each in some sense the Word of God; each regarded as a complete, final, and authoritative statement regulating the role and conduct of humankind vis-à-vis its Creator; and each a birthright and charter for a community that had not existed before. And each community lived in the conviction that God had spoken to it for the last time: the Jews, for the first and final time; the Christians, for the second and final time; the Muslims, for the third and final time.

      As already remarked, the Bible, New Testament, and Quran, though looked on as emanating from the same source, are very different works. The Bible is a composite and varied blend of religious myth, historical narrative, legal enactments, prophetic admonitions, cautionary tales, and poetry composed over a long period.³ The time span of the New Testament is considerably shorter, a halfcentury perhaps, but it too has a very mixed content of quasi biography, community history, letters, and an apocalyptic Book of Revelation. The Quran, as already noted, is absolutely contemporary to its revelation, twenty-two years in the lifetime of the Prophet.

      There is nothing but God’s own Word in the Quran, as Muhammad himself could assure the community of believers. In Jewish and Christian circles, however, there were assuredly circulating other writings that had some claim to being God’s Word but are not found in the Bible or the New Testament.⁴ Both these Scriptures represent, then, a deliberate decision by someone to designate certain works as authentic Scripture and to exclude others from the canon.⁵ That decision was essentially theological, and the exclusion of the noncanonical writings, generally called Apocrypha, from the Jewish or Christian Scriptures does not render them any less interesting or important from a historical point of view. The Books of Maccabees never made it into the Jewish canon, for example, nor the Gnostic gospels into the Christian, but each tells us something of the events and attitudes of the time that produced them.

      On Translation

      It is notable that where once sectarian differences among Jews, Catholics, and Protestants created marked discrepancies in their respective translations of Scripture, the differences have presently narrowed to so few words or passages that it is possible for Jewish and Christian scholars to collaborate in such translation projects.⁶ There is no need and no urgency toward collaborative translations of the Quran, however. On a few occasions in the past Shiite Muslims have accused Sunni Muslims of tampering with the text of the Quran, but the theme is muted in Islam and the overwhelming majority of Muslims are convinced that the present text of the Book is the uniquely authentic one.⁷

      Muslims, like many Jews, have a strong sense of Scripture as the ipsissima verba of God, enhanced, in the Muslim instance, by the absence of any intervening notion of author: Moses may have been the author of the Pentateuch, but Muhammad merely repeated the Quran verbatim. The Quran itself underlines this claim. Do you doubt the divine origins of this Book, it asks. Then you try to produce another like it (Quran 10:38, etc.). The doubters did not, of course, and, in the later Muslim view, could not. Islam has few dogmas, but one, surely, is the intrinsic inimitability of the Quran, a conviction that makes all translations of the Book problematic.

      The Quran has been translated, but those efforts have been relatively slow in coming—the earliest known translation was into Latin in twelfth-century Spain for Christian missionary purposes—and often by non-Muslims. But Islam no less than Christianity is a missionary faith, and belief in the Quran as the Word of God spreads far more quickly, and eventually more widely, than knowledge of its Arabic. There finally did appear, reluctantly and tentatively—sometimes transparently disguised as paraphrases—Muslim translations of God’s words for the benefit of Persian and Turkish speakers, and then for the growing number of converts in western Europe and the Americas.⁸

      The Bible, Old and New Testament, has long been available in English, and early on in a version that shaped the English language itself, the so-called King James version of 1611. But it is more than familiarity that makes both Bible and Gospels better served by their translations than is the Arabic Quran. God’s message to Muhammad was delivered in the highly charged, affective images of the sacred poet. It is allusive rather than explicit, a great body of warning, command, injunction, and instruction delivered against a background as barren to our eyes as the steppe itself. We feel Sinai and Canaan in the Bible; Palestine, its houses, mountains, rivers and lakes, its towns and cities and the people who inhabited them are all present in the Gospel narrative. In the Quran, however, we search without success for Mecca, for the profane but vividly commercial life of the Quraysh, for Muhammad’s family and companions. In its pages there is only a voice, the voice of God alone. When it was heard, it overwhelmed hearts, as it still does in its written form, but it leaves the historian attending vainly, and deafly, for context.

      CHAPTER ONE

      The Promise and the Heirs

      The Bible begins absolutely, In the beginning …, with the creation of the world. The Quran speaks of it as well—not by following in the biblical tracks, but allusively, touching the creation story here and there as suits its own highly moralizing purposes. The Bible’s opening book, Genesis, introduces the first of our kind, Adam and Eve, and their fall from the Creator’s grace; we read the same, again with somewhat different nuances, in the Quran. We learn of Noah and the catastrophic flood that nearly destroys humankind. It is not until the eleventh chapter of Genesis that Abraham rather abruptly enters the narrative and the history proper of monotheism begins. Abram, as he is still being called at this point, is the head of a small tribe, an extended family really, just one of many leading a marginal living along the fringes between the Middle Eastern desert and the sown. He had originated in what is today Iraq—Ur of the Chaldees—and wandered across the Fertile Crescent before coming to rest in the south of what would later come to be called Palestine. During his trek and on several occasions before his death and burial in Hebron, the god worshiped by Abraham appeared to him and promised the patriarch and his descendants plentiful offspring and a land of their own, the very land in which they were now living.¹

      It is from this simple but astonishing act, a deity making contact with a paltry sheepherder on the margins of the Fertile Crescent, that the entire history of monotheism flows. That same deity has been worshiped by millions beyond the counting as the One True God, and his devotees have dominated, as Jews, Christians, and Muslims, the most profound sensibilities of humankind for the length of recorded history. What was happening in these scenes recorded so simply and almost matter-of-factly in Genesis? It is not so much a command as an offered contract, whose simple terms were the exclusive worship of this god and the signal circumcision of all the males of the community—which was, in fact, Abraham’s extended family.² Abraham, it appears, was already a monotheist. He had earlier rejected the heavenly deities worshiped by his father and ancestors in Iraq, as the Quran’s account (6:74–83) makes clear.³ What his god was requesting here was a pledge of continued fidelity, for which he and his descendants would be rewarded.

      There is an extended and familiar dialogue between Abraham and his god through the subsequent chapters of Genesis. The issue, it appears, is the inheritance. Abraham and his wife Sarah had no children and they, or at least Sarah, was far beyond the age for bearing them. It was Sarah at any rate who suggested to Abraham that he might father a child with his Egyptian slave-concubine Hagar. The attempt was successful—there is no hint of a miraculous intervention—and Hagar bore him a son. Abraham named him Ishmael and in obedience to the Lord’s command, he circumcised him on the eighth day after his birth. Almost immediately Sarah regretted her suggestion and demanded that Abraham turn mother and child out of the camp, a sentence of almost certain death.

      Neither the child Ishmael nor his mother perished, however. God intervened to save them and further promised that Ishmael, though no longer the heir

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