On ‘Abraham-The First Historical Biography’ by David Rosenberg

Reading this fine book published in 2006 is a kind of journey through mind and of space and time as Rod Serling might have said. One returns to a kind of aboriginal dream time of the foundation of civilization catching glimpses of the people of Ur in the year 3300 B.C.E., then learns more about the life and history of that civilization and its people unto the time of Abraham in 1800 B.C.. A crucible driving Abraham to a break with his cultural past bringing him to make that momentous journey out of Sumer to the land of Canaan is brought to life with Rosenberg’s word portraits of the Patriarch’s world.

The author points out that after leaving Ur, Abraham was ‘houseless until his death’; not such bad company for today’s homeless to be in. The meek it is said, shall inherit the Earth.

God is a creative being, one whom makes things exist. Sin on the contrary is nihilistic activity, making things not exist and abnegating individual integrity for-self and for-others. Sin is destruction of creation-the production of broken forms.

A logic of sustaining beings that allow things to exist in the universe or in any possible form of universe, rather than to not exist, is plain enough, and good. The meek are more compatible with creative eternal life than are those reinforcing continua of nihilism and eternal death.

Abraham we learn was obedient to God. Abraham’s conformal behavior was compatible to the principle of life and existence over death and non-being. The founding patriarch of three faiths was simultaneously bold yet meek. Abraham was of course faithful to The One (who is three).

There are not too many biographically descriptive references to Abraham in the Bible that one might easily get much data describing the life at Ur of the founder of what today is thought of as the Jewish religion. Rosenberg-who provides his own translations from Hebrew carefully considers Biblical material and tries to create a reconstruction of the culture and time of Sumer and the home town of Abraham-the city of Ur, drawing upon ancient material and sources such as large numbers of cuneiform clay tablets of the Sumerian civilization that were excavated in the 20th century and now.

Rosenberg mentions a Sumerian epic story-history called ‘The World Order’ that probably was known a thousand years later at the late 11th century B.C.E. court of King Solomon. It is apropos that President G.H.W. Bush’s term ‘The New World Order’ was coined in the era of the first U.S. war with Iraq. Not so much changes after 5000 years in politics-at least where fossil fuels are concerned.

Scholarly translations and compilations of that ancient data from Sumerian libraries and elsewhere have increasingly shed light on the culture of ancient Sumer unto Abraham’s day.

David Rosenberg is a poet and biblical scholar. He is also a co-author of ‘The J Book’. That interesting work is an exposition of the J (Jehovah?) writer of the earliest parts of the book of Genesis. Scriptural criticism supposes that there were four primary scribes, writers and or redactors of the first five books of the Bible that have reached us today beginning with the J writer most likely of Solomon’s court; and surprising to some, possibly a female writer. The treatment of Sarah’s response to news of her planned pregnancy (planned by God) seems to have a more feminine touch than a male writer of the time might have had-yet if it was originally a scribbled note by Abraham himself-who can say? His relationship with Sarah and other highlights of the journey could have been saved as an outline-diary of meaningful events. Such jottings of one of the best writers of Sumer making his own exodus out of decay may have made it down through history and much retelling to J at King Solomon’s court.

-note Abraham is said to have wandered with his father Terah toward the CIty of Haran up the rivers toward Damascus or Megiddo on his way to Shalem (Jerusalem) where lived King Melchisedek and his Jebusites. It makes more sense that an ancient traveller would follow along the water way for drinking refreshment than that he would have turned southwest toward the Arabian deserts. I have elesewhere in this article mentioned Abraham as wandering around the Arabian Pennisnusla that after reading Rosenberg's book I would tend to agree that it would be an improbable route of travel.

Shimon Gibson in writing about his excavation of the cave of John the Baptist a couple of miles from his home town also made the point that early Christians were much less sexist than later ecclesiastical structures and traditions that developed in reflecting perhaps the pervasively male hierarchical social establishment of the era. The early Christian ideas of social priorities have themselves been eclipsed a little by the secular social hegemony over Christian organizations.

Abraham may have trained his own scribe to keep the cuneiform writing alive on his journey out of Ur. John Smith brought his own scribe to write down his actions exploring Chesapeake Bay. Perhaps the ‘disciple Jesus loved’ was a reference by one of John’s school of writers at Ephesus to their founder. Some of the more important writers of history had others complete their works under supervision-Julius Caesar for instance in his history of ‘The Civil War’ and wars in Libya and Alexandria.

The additional possibility exists that Sarah too learned to write cuneiform, and became one of the world’s first secretaries, added personal points of view to her husband’s recollections.

The topic of Abraham writing cuneiform leads me to wonder if a synthesis of cuneiform and hieroglyphic literacy traditions by Moses upon leaving Egypt led him to create an alphabet to write down Jewish speech about 1500 B.C.E. during the Exodus. I believe the Hebrew symbol yod is from the cuneiform numbering system. It would be interesting to have a map of archaeological locations of cuneiform writing outside of Mesopotamia. An alphabet representing sounds may have been simpler for Moses to construct than a synthesis of two less phonetically based writing systems. Were the Ten Commandments the first alphabetically based legal code?

Rosenberg builds with scholarly learning, poetic inference and creative insight an exegesis of J’s construction of Genesis from earlier sources including a hypothetical X writer in King Melchizedek court. We discover that Abraham was likely to have been a Sumerian writer himself who left Sumer at a time when the New Babylonian rulers were repressing the religious and culture creative license of Sumer that had already existed more than a thousand years. Abraham was called to venture away and found a new religious civilization or culture, and his heir would be named Israel.

Rosenberg’s book on Abraham is fine reading. One learns philosophically new ideas-perhaps worth being called a religious ontology, that might be quite different from the usual assumptions about the religious culture of ancient Ur. For some, the idea of treating Abraham as a real man albeit in a reconstructed and good spirited, best effort historical scenario could be a little bit faith-shaking initially. How could Abraham emerge from an evolving cultural religious paradigm and quite reasonably have a personal God flowing rather naturally from the culture and history of the time? Shouldn’t Abraham have simply been thwacked on the head by a finger of God and provided with divine insights while he was just minding his own business even though secularists already would be developing hagiographical details about the saintly, deserving soul?

Philosophically speaking, the development of a history outline of the religious culture of Sumer is brilliantly informative. There are other approaches to interpreting ancient civilizations and the foundations of some religious practices obviously, and some things are left out perhaps from this books such as one might expect existed in ancient culture such as human sacrifice, yet the book accomplishes rather convincingly presenting the picture of Abraham & ancient Sumeria while explaining mankinds theoretical and practical relationship to the divine and unknown in the ancient context. One knows that much is left out and much is poeticly liberated from nothingness with creative speculation, yet that is the brilliance of the work in finding so much in the scant and occluded historical record.

Religious ontologies may exist simultaneously with mundane, familiar weltanschauung, Sartre’s existential personal world experience coheres within the phenomenality of social dialectical reason and the cultural environment. Mankind and his civilizations exist within an apparent universe emerged or selected from all-possible-universes put up in some way fine tuned to support life.

From an unknowable perturbative vacuum with quantum uncertainty perhaps a void and space-time plus energy emerge. No one knows if a quantum uncertainty field before all universes really exists or why even one virtual particular particle would ever become a temporarily real thing or where it could appear or why, before anything materially was. One would think that all things existing become the past, presenting a form of paradox for-itself even if one regards a temporal linerar series of events mechanically and as self-explanatory.

The Sumerians had their own way of examining the juxtaposition of the supernatural and unknown with the natural and known-the Babylonians repressed that artistic and intellectual liberty with the dogmatism of the cult of Marduk and Abraham with his sculptor father Terah set out over the Arabian Peninsula to change the future history of mankind.

Sodom and Gomorrah were said to be located near the confluence of the Dead Sea and the Jordan River. Perhaps the mud brick towns were new and located on opposite bank of the Jordan. Over historical time it might have occurred to someone to dam the Jordan and one such dam broke sending a raging wave to sweep the perverse townsmen and their bricks before a river wave down to return to the elements in the Dead Sea.

Looking back into ancient history is a good thing for scholars. Culturally though societies may stagnate in the past or forget its lessons dooming themselves to repeat its errors. When Abraham’s nephew Lot was ordered to flee the city of Sodom before its destruction he and his family were told not to look back.

Leaving a corrupt civilization is what Abraham did when departing Ur that had fallen into economic and spiritual stagnation. Lot’s wife had to stop and look back across salt collection and drying ponds outside Sodom and was perhaps splashed and covered over with quick drying salt-slurry when some kind of collection retaining wall collapsed or a splattering thing struck down the city.

There are several messages in the story-a true story that one may take concerning the need for social and cultural reformation, the need to not have contempt for God and/or about the phenomenality of existence in a phenomenal Universe.

Perhaps we should not have smug politicians ignoring global heating, ecospheric depletion and economic corruption because they own stock in Exxon-Mobil or have investments in China. When capitalism is corrupted such that it puts a price on people and what they are worth to delete the economic methods assaults democracy and becomes a tool of financial democide. Corrupt political parties ping-ponging an economic ball with hypocritical moral paddles over an oily atmospheric and biospheric decay have too much of the Sodomites about them to be reformers and escape the enveloping return unto inanimate being without free will in-itself.

I recommend reading Rosenberg’s book ‘Abraham’. It is a serious effort to reconstruct more about ancient writers and what they thought of life. Some people believed that God could have evolved the world if he choose, yet philosophically it’s easy to understand that God also would have complete foreknowledge of all quantum variables at any level so far as he like. People have free will yet God’s will entirely determines how things are-even quantum mechanics has similar paradoxes on the nature of matter and of getting information about it.

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is also a kind of quantum displacement principle as all things determined are yet grounded in the infinite and unfounded expect for the phenomenal-perhaps inclusive of the human mind and of human experience. Abraham might have emerged from a culture supporting the religious concepts that emerged and in part formed elements of the religious paradigm of Judaism, Islam and Christianity-yet so what, would God not human beings to develop a religious or spiritual capability bringing them to recognize His true self the Universe phenomenalized?

There are still Sumerian ethnic peoples-Amorites living in Iraq. Those we might regard today as Jews were just another Semitic people many of whom had moved to Sumer though some lived in Canaan. The ideas of Sumer continue with us including some of the religious paradigms in some regards. Abraham in leaving Sumer became the first Jew, it is said; a religious way of relating to the transcendent.

It is good for Christian faith that the principals in our own first century a.d. drama of reality were all real people, Jesus Christ was a real man too, for whom the witnessed experiences of the Apostles, disciples and countless others of the miracles of Jesus were given, transcending the foundations of experience and history to become a reliable ontology for-itself…the best a human being may have.