by EDWARD PLATT
Sarah Presenting Hagar to Abraham (detail) by Adriaen van der Werff, 1699. Staatsgalerie, Schleissheim. PHOTO/Wikimedia
The question is particularly acute in Hebron, for it is the wellspring of the three great Abrahamic faiths — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Genesis tells us that Abraham settled in Hebron after God commanded him to leave his home in Mesopotamia and travel to the promised land, and he and his family are believed to be interred in the Tomb of the Patriarchs — the city’s holiest shrine. Hebron is holy to Jews, who regard it as their birthplace, and to Muslims, who call it Al-Khalil, the ‘friend’, in honour of the very same Abraham, whom they revere as ‘a friend’ of God. Though Christianity is also an Abrahamic faith — the first verse of the New Testament claims Jesus Christ as ‘the son of Abraham’ — Judaism and Islam place much greater emphasis on this line of descent.
…
Ishmael ‘dwelt in the wilderness’ (after Abraham banishes him and his mother once again), and never set foot in Canaan again. He married a woman from Egypt, like his mother, and had 12 sons — ‘princes according to their nations’. When he died, aged 137, he was gathered ‘unto his people’ who ‘dwelt from Havilah unto Shur’ — an area that is sometimes said to correspond to the Arabian peninsula.
The same themes — infertility, sibling rivalry, female jealousy — are endlessly reconfigured throughout successive stages of Genesis’s family saga. Abraham’s son Isaac also takes a barren wife, Rebekah, and again they rely upon a divinely-aided conception. Their twin sons Jacob and Esau relive the fraternal discord that marked relations between Isaac and Ishmael, and Cain and Abel. And in the next generation, Jacob’s wife Rachel, another barren woman, relies on a surrogate handmaid, just as Sarah had done.
Aeon for more