But there's this one other thing that I feel iffy about Abraham and Sarah ... I'm having a hard time tolerating their action. How should I read it? Any insights you can give me on this? Anyone?
Well the first thing I would say is be careful not to read history from a contemporary sensibility, the events were discussing occurred about 4,000 years ago.
This is an archetypical story: a king, two queens, two contenders for the throne. From the perspective of the times, the solution is easy. Machiavelli would have laughed at Abraham sending Hagar and Ishmael away. As soon as Isaac came along, Abraham should have killed them both. Leaving them alive is a recipe for disaster!
The history of the royal dynasties of Europe plays out this story, and variations of it, over and over again with tiresome regularity. In England we have the great houses: Wessex, Norman, Angevin, Plantagenet, Lancaster, York, Tudor ... the names change, but the story stays the same.
What I would say is don't expect too much of the people – the Jewish scribes were certainly not inclined to whitewash their history – but keep your focus on how they see God and how God deals with them.
It seems to me that even if we assume an agnostic position, if one reads the History of the Jews with a open to ideas, then the Jewish idea of God is in a completely different, and dare I say transcendent, league compared to contemporary ideas of the peoples of that region in that era of history.
Look at the Greek myths. There you have this world, and another world – Olympus. Set Abraham, Sarai and Agar, Ismael and Isaac in a Greek myth, and the gods would have be pulling the strings, using them to play out their own petty squabbles, we poor mortals are pawns in their game. In fact, the odds are that the gods would have bedded Sarai as they seemed to do so often with mortal women!
(Having said that, I read the genius of Greek myth is in its psychodrama. The gods on Olympus are, as Plato pointed out, very much people like us, with the same virtues, the same vices ... and often a lot worse! But a psychodrama, as the Olympian gods are really anthropomorphic projections.)
There were many philosophers who believed that Plato must have read Moses (the Pentateuch) and that many of his ideas of a transcendent and all-encompassing monotheistic deity derived from his exposure to the Jewish religion when he travelled in Egypt.
I'm not saying he did, but what I am pointing out is two 'ways' of interpreting the world, a 'philosophical' way and a 'mythopoeic' way – the Hellenic and the Hebrew, and that there are significant correspondences between the two once you get passed Hellenic polytheism and certain contemporary notions about 'literalism'. The distinction then is dualism, Hellenic thinking tends to dualism, and still largely 'infects' Christian thinking. Hebrew thinking tends to holism.
We can certainly discuss the 'spiritual' reading of Genesis if you like, but I'm only equipped to do so from a Christian position. I'm still reading the Jewish ...
