4/11/20 I have been reading through Genesis, writing notes to myself. Here is a note on this point in the Abraham story.
- [Genesis 24:2-9] Then Abraham said to his servant, the oldest of his household who managed everything that belonged to him, “Now put your hand under my thigh, so that I may make you take an oath by Adonai, the God of heaven and the God of earth, that you will not take a wife for my son from among the daughters of the Canaanites among whom I am dwelling. On the contrary, to my land and to my relatives you must go and get a wife for my son Isaac. But the servant said to him, “Suppose the woman were unwilling to follow after me to this land? Should I then have your son go back to the land you came from? Abraham said to him, “See to it that you don’t return my son there. Adonai, the God of heaven, who took me from my father’s house and from my native land and who spoke to me and made a pledge to me saying, ‘To your seed I will give this land’—He will send His angel before you and you will take a wife for my son from there. If the woman is not willing to follow after you, then you will be free from this oath of mine. Nevertheless, you must not return my son there.” So the servant put his hand under the thigh of Abraham his master, and he made a pledge to him concerning this matter.
Abraham’s directive to his servant exposes his sense of himself and his situation. He doesn’t want his son to leave Canaan – the passage says so twice. Abraham is a visitor in Canaan at this time. But what informs the assignment he gives his servant is a cherished a promise: Adoni [The Lord] has told him that someday he and his heirs will possess this land. This statement informs this moment; it shapes Abraham’s perception of the moment and so informs the directive to his servant.
When Abraham left his homeland many years earlier his knowledge of God was nothing like what it was now. He had lived through many episodes in which he had felt God had been with him, to protect him, honor him, enrich him. For him, this God, whom he had argued with, plead with, feared, tremulously obeyed, who had given him a marvelous gift of a son in his old age, was now to him a more palpable deity than he had been in his youthful days in Aram-Naharaim.
Informed by the promises of this God, the old man exacts a promise from his servant: he cannot — ever? – take his son back to Abraham’s own homeland. This place, Canaan, where Isaac had been born, where the promises had been given, this would be Isaac’s homeland, the only land he would ever know — even though at that moment it belonged to others. This was because in Abraham’s perception the promise would be fulfilled; it would be objectified through unknown means, at an unspecified time, but it would take place. To Abraham the promise was as much a part of his situation as the grass on which his livestock grazed every day.
We all frame our experiences with visions of many sorts, including a supposed future. The problem we have, however, is how strongly to privilege one aspect of our imagined frames of reference when interpreting each particular moment. We struggle to place the moments we encounter with meaning so as to see in them more than they can empirically be in themselves. Every situation must seem worth it according to a surmised scheme of “real” obligations, debts, regrets, disappointments, hopes that have been acquired through life. At lease we humans seem unable to survive without meaningful frames of reference of this sort.
Scholars ponder what it is that makes us, we human beings, distinct from every other creature. I submit that this quality, our need to situate our worlds within enduring moral contexts, is it. And Abraham, by his directions to his servant demonstrated it.