Abraham and Paul -- Whither and Why?

Have you ever felt called to go forth?  I have. 

There are times when something stirs inside me, and I am moved to strike out into a wilderness, across which there are no trails, the other side of which I cannot see.  For example, this happened when I—and then my wife Channa after me—when we were moved to strike out from Judaism, which we had loved during the past twenty-five years, into a desert of spiritual dryness.  For what purpose were we going?  What should we find? 

Biblically, I turn my attention to another striking-out, described in Genesis 12:1-2a.  This is the incident known as “The Call of Abraham,” although Abraham was still known only as Abram when the call arrived for him.

Here are the circumstances.  Abram’s father, Terah, had three sons, the other two being Nahor and Haran.  The whole family dwelt in Ur of the Chaldeans, which was a rich and sophisticated center of pagan worship near the headwaters of the Euphrates River, where a famous ziggurat had been erected.  When Terah’s sons grew to be men, all three took wives.  Abram married Sarai (later to be called Sarah).  Sarai bore no sons for Abram because she was barren.  Nahor married his brother Haran’s daughter, his own niece, who was named Milcah.  We do not learn the name of Haran’s wife—the mother of Milcah—but she bore Haran two children, Milcah and also Lot. 

            In time, Terah decided to migrate with parts of his family to the land of Canaan, which was a strenuous 1,500 mile journey, first traveling westward, to skirt the northern edge of the desert, and then following easier terrain southward—with more water for the sheep.  Scripture provides us with no explanation for this decision on Terah’s part, other than the simple statement that Terah decided to enter Canaan.  As regards Terah’s decision, there is no hint that the Lord instructed him to go forth. Terah took Abram and Sarai along, as well as his grandson Lot, and, presumably, their households and herds as well. 

            The first part of the journey was short.  There was a settling place for the extended Terah family, called Haran—in this case, Haran was a place name.  The family settled in Haran for a time, perhaps because Terah was infirm.  Terah died at Haran, having reached the venerable age of two hundred five years.  At that time, Abram was seventy-five. 

            Then comes the Scripture passage about which I am curious, referenced above.  Settled at Haran, after his father’s death, Abram may have been perplexed what to do.  His father had initiated this journey.  Now that his father was no longer there, what was Abram’s responsibility?  Here’s how Scripture reads.

 

                        Now the Lord said to Abram,

                        Go forth from your country,

                        And from your relatives and from your father’s house

                        To the land which I will show you;

                        And I will make you a great nation,

                        And I will bless you, and make your name great.

 

            In Hebrew, the words I bolded above—Go forth—are the two words Lekh Lekha.  Even if you do not read Hebrew, you can still intuit that these two words are very similar to one another.  Lekh, that word by itself, provides us with the entire sense of the passage—go—and it would have sufficed by itself.  My Jewish friend Steve, a Hebrew scholar, introduced me to this linguistic conundrum.  Why does Scripture use the double form, when the single form would have been enough to convey the meaning?  Lekh Lekha literally means either “go to you” or “go for you.”

            Many readers will know that this passage, after all, is a key passage in Judaism.  It is one of the clear statements legitimizing the People Israel’s patrimony and promising its destiny.  Given the centrality of the passage, textual subtleties are important for us to study so we may determine, if we are able, what they have to tell us.  

What did the Lord mean?  Perhaps He was saying to Abram, “GO TO YOU.”  Perhaps He was saying, “GO FOR YOU.”

Scripture does not give us assurance that, before the Lord spoke to Abram in this manner, Abram had any particular relationship with the Lord.  This call may have been Abram’s initial experience of the peremptory voice of the Lord.  There seems, though, to have been great knowledge on the part of the Lord regarding Abram’s character, even if the knowledge was one-sided at the time He called to Abram.     

“Go to you.”  “Go for you.”  What is meant by “you?” 

After Genesis is done, and after Abraham—as then called—is dead, we can look back and see that Abraham is the sole patriarch who is identified as a “friend of God” in the Old Testament.  For example, we see Ezra identify him that way in 2 Chronicles 20:7 and the voice of the Lord Himself speak of Abraham that way in Isaiah 41:8.  So…the Lord knew Abram’s nature and his future before Abram knew much—or anything—of the Lord.  The “you” toward whom the Lord instructs Abram to proceed is not his own personal “you.”  It is the corporate “you,” who will come to embody all of the People Israel and their backstory of religious and cultural justification, along with their righteousness in following the Lord’s will and covenant.  The Lord is calling Abram to become what the Lord already knows Abram will become…the man who may therefore be named “friend.” 

Abram did not have a conversion experience.  Simply, Abram did what he was instructed to do.  He did not know why, except that the Lord promised he would make of Abram a great nation, which must have seemed unlikely on the face of it, since Sarai was barren. 

Abram did not change from being something beforehand to being something else afterwards.  He was who he was to become all along. 

I am thinking about this because of the “go forth” which Channa and I experienced in our migration from Judaism to evangelical Christianity.  We were called to begin a spiritual journey with no knowledge of our belief destination.  Many have spoken of our event as a conversion; I have done so, too.  However, the truth is not that we changed from a settled beforehand to a new afterwards.  The truth is that we were called to become who we already were, but who we had not yet known we were. 

The great conversion model of Christianity has always been the experience of Saul, when he became Paul…even his name changed!  (Saul’s/Paul’s experience is described in Acts 9.) Christians ever afterwards have studied this event and concluded that the man was one thing before his Damascus Road vision, and another thing after it.  He was a Jew, then he was a Christian. 

At least for Channa and for me, the model does not hold up; nor—in my opinion—does it hold up for Paul either.  Our experience was a little like Paul’s (though by no means as important).  Paul was a Roman citizen who was raised and was educated as a Jew, and he fought against the new “Way,” the local term for Jews who believed Jesus was the promised Messiah. Shortly, though, Paul experienced Jesus appearing before him and striking him blind.  Paul changed his mind about the Way, but…he was still a Jew.  There was not anything else he could have been.  The term “Christian” had not yet been coined, nor, more importantly, was there any theology, any creed, any piety, or any orthodoxy of sanctified governance established to support doctrinal dogmatics and corporate identity.  It was too early. 

Paul was a Jew who believed in the Way.  That is, Paul believed that Jesus—a Jew—was the Messiah, and that Jesus would save Paul and other Jews from sin, against which they all struggled incessantly, if they would only believe in Him. Gentiles could get in on the salvation, too; all that was required was belief.  Paul preached mostly to gentiles when he was on his journeys because he infuriated his fellow Jews, who were content, for the most part, with their present way.  During his journeys, Paul continued to live and to act as a Jew (albeit as a Jew of the Way), but also as a Jew who had become whom he personally was supposed to become…called forth to become so by a theophanic event, rather as Abram, centuries before, had been called forth to become Abraham.  Paul was supposed to become a Jew who believed in the Way and who preached it.  So, that’s who he became.

Some people are puzzled when Channa and I state that we are Jews and Christians.  The accepted conversion model for change negates this as a possibility.  However, as one who has experienced the event, I negate the conversion model.  Being called forth is more subtle than the model allows.  The Lord knows Channa and me, as who He knows us to be, for His purposes.

We did not change; we became more so. 


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Reach me directly, if you like, at dikkon@dikkoneberhart.com

Loving...Hating

Dad and I sat on the afterdeck of his cruiser at anchor off  Pond Island, several miles seaward from our summer cottage, Undercliff.  Everyone else was ashore—the women, the dogs, the children—enjoying the picnic.  At fourteen, I was a man, so I had stayed aboard while Dad smoked a pipe, and I had coiled down all the lines in the hope that he might notice.  Dad wore his long-billed fisherman’s cap, a discouraged sweater, ratty khakis rolled to his knees, and sneakers with no socks.  His WWII German binoculars hung around his neck.  Lt. Cmdr. (ret.) Richard Eberhart, Poet Laureate of the United States, serving at the pleasure of President Eisenhower, himself a former military man, gazed out over the placidities of Penobscot Bay, Maine, and growled. 

 

            “It took us a long time to learn how to hate.”

 

            He was speaking about the war, a rare event.  I was profoundly still, not to break the spell.  I was hungry; I was famished for truth.  “We are not the hating kind.  Yes, we were angry.  That was easy.  It was easy to be angry.  The Germans,” he said, “they were better than we were, better soldiers.  We respected the Germans…after all, Goethe, Beethoven.  The Japanese were just a horde.  We hated them first.  It took us longer to hate the Germans, but we did it, finally.”  He looked elsewhere.  “You don’t go to war over anger.  You go to war over hate.”

 

            He knocked the ash of his pipe overboard against the gunwale.  “We are not the hating kind,” he repeated.   

 

            By that time in my life, I knew my father’s war poems more deeply than by heart…by soul perhaps.  I was beginning to understand their passionate plea that God explain and not hide His ineffableness behind an indifferent and especially not an ironical cloud.  I was beginning to understand their anguish at the snuffing of the young machine gunners my father tutored.  I was beginning to understand their horror at the seduction to beauty of tracer shells—designed otherwise to kill—as they arched elegantly and silently at a distance and under a slender moon. 

 

            Calm now, when it was just Dad and me, and on the sea where I was masterful and at home, Dad was for me at that moment an adored and a supreme amalgam.  He was a poet of Blakean fire; an aggressive and razor-edged intellect; a ruminator who burrowed down into the muck and found there a jewel and tossed it—with fanciful élan—into heaven. And he was also a naval man who knew the despair of seeing names on a list whose faces he could not recall, but they had gone to early death, who defended their nation with the .50 caliber tail- and turret-mounted machine guns on the navy bombers, whose marksmanship was my father’s responsibility.      

 

            From Dad’s revelations, I was beginning to comprehend, if not yet fully to understand, something else as well.  Historian John Keegan has mused about this regarding World War One.  The hates, yes, we can eventually understand the hatreds of war.  But it is the loves…that’s where we are baffled.  The loves of one’s mates; the loves, even, of the martial circumstance, albeit horrifying, in which one is placed; the loves of acts of absoluteness that are performed selflessly and with a passion as high as artistic inspiration or religious ecstasy…these loves we turn away from—when swaddled round by sleepy and peaceful pleasure later—for our attraction to then frightens us and, we worry, it brings us shame.

 

            I had not been a warrior at age fourteen, but there was a schoolyard bully I had hated.  My anger at this young man had grown as his outrages against me compounded.  I, being a civil follow, and moreover the son of a poet, had tried at first to reason with him…his name was Carl.  But as is customary with bullies, Carl disdained sweet reason.  It took numerous evils before my anger boiled over into hatred.

 

            Now, one day I had taken enough.  Catapulted by a passionate ecstasy of violence into no more than forty-five seconds of shock and awe, I arranged it that the bloodied and frightened Carl would never again come within twenty yards of me…and he never did.  I had hated that Carl, and I had loved that moment, and my muscles still feel the ecstasy of my battle today. 

 

            My father stood.  “Enough about hate.  Let’s join the ladies ashore.”

 

            “But what happened then?”

 

            “Then we won.”  


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Contact me directly, if you like, at dikkon@dikkoneberhart.com.