Abraham - Voltaire

In his Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire continues to use his piercing logic in a sarcastic manner to provoke thought. In the article entitled Abraham about the patriarch of the Hebrews he questions why we as modern human beings believe the Jews and their "history and ancient fables" are historical records.

First, he questions the age of Abraham. This ties into one of 21 burning questions for August-September. What are we to make of the ages of human beings being recorded in the Biblical text. Abraham was 135 when he left Mesopotamia for Shechem (Israel). Then he was 140 when he traveled from Israel to Egypt. He was 160 when he was promised that Isaac would be born within a year. He lived until he was 205. Surely this alone would be enough to invite skepticism.

Second, he questions why Abraham would make some of these journeys. Why would a man leave Mesopotamia, a culturally rich area for the relative backwater Shechem? Why would he think to travel from Shechem to Egypt when there was a famine in his new promised land? Besides the incredible distances that he would have to travel there is what Voltaire astutely points out, the obvious language barrier.

Third, he touches on one of the odder parts of the Abrahamic story - when he travels to Egypt to escape the famine and then again to a desert kingdom he beseeches his wife Sarah to claim that she is Abraham's sister, not his wife. In doing so Abraham becomes vastly wealthy.

Where Voltaire then goes is a bit of a stretch, but an intriguing look at the commonality of religions or at least the perceived similarities of religions and how they relate to identifying features of existence. He finds it silly that the Jews, descendants of Abraham who came from an ancient and sophisticated society (Mesopotamia - Chaldea) visited an ancient and sophisticated society (Egypt) and would have passed through an ancient and sophisticated society (Assyria) could have taught the world anything new. Instead he reasons that the Jews took more from the surrounding societies and appropriated the myths for their own bent. He reasons that the name Israel is Chaldaean, the Hebrew names for God: Eloi, Adonai, Jehovah and Hiao are of Phoenician origin, the name of Abraham himself being derived from an ancient religion along the Euphrates called Kish-Ibrahim, Milat-Ibrahim. He notes, "It is hard to penetrate the shadows of antiquity; but it is evident that all the kingodms of Asia had been flourishing mightily, long before the vagabond horde of Arabs, called Jews, had a small spot of earth that was their own, before they had a town, laws, or a settled religion" (pp 61-62).

Now, I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. Voltaire seems awfully intent in every passage to bash Hebraic sensibilities, but he does raise excellent skeptical points. While we are not yet to the Abraham section of Genesis in our glacial pace through the Old Testament it foreshadows difficulties for the faithful that we will be encountering in our journey. If one is going to be a believer then how does one reconcile such things? I feel as though we are seeing an existential moment in the distance where we must look into the abyss. Shall we turn back? No. Will we calmly stare down the void and embrace the emptiness in some sort of homage to Camus? Or will we leap in Kierkegaardian fashion into the safety trembling in fear all the way? Or will we discover that there is no real existential pitfall and simple faith can put to rest such skepticism. After all Voltaire, great and powerful as he may be in his own (and my mind) he is but one voice of skepticism. There may be many more but there are an equal number of those who embrace these "fables" as gospel.

My continuing fascination with things like this though is the religious comparisons. We do not know very much of the Kish-Ibrahim, Milat-Ibrahim religion of the Euphrates or of other Ancient Near Eastern compared to latter ones like Judaism, Christianity and Islam. But, Islam's borrowing of Christianity and Judaism and Christianity's borrowing of Judaism and possibly Zoroastrianism and Judaism's borrowing of other, more ancient Near Ancient religions that were not quite settled yet does not demand that the religion doing the borrowing is incorrect. It could just as well easily say that the religion doing the borrowing has collected the right portions of the true religion (if there is such a thing). It could have removed the wheat from the chaff and begun to bake a delicious bread. Voltaire's observations are piercing in the sense that he recognizes the inter-connectivity of the religions of the Ancient Near East at the time of Abraham and immediately following. However, his jump that the Jews have merely borrowed from more ancient religions to form some sort of crafty hodgepodge that is void of truth and merely fable reflects a personal rejection of faith more than a statement of fact.