Chapter 17
A Strange Man with a Strange Idea

Into just such a world-ancient Mesopotamia at the end of nineteenth century BCE to be specific-was born an individual whose strange idea would alter history forever. We have come to know this strange man as Abraham, and his idea as monotheism.

What we know about Abraham is confined to a few chapters in the Book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, and to the Jewish oral tradition. It is not within the scope of this book to take up various issues of Biblical criticism; suffice it to say that there is much debate on this subject among Biblical scholars. Nevertheless, some three billion Christians, Muslims and Jews accept as part of their theology that monotheism arose at this juncture in history, was confined for a long time to the followers of Abraham who later came to be called Jews, and then finally, over the course of the last two thousand years, was disseminated widely throughout the world.

At the time of Abraham's birth in the city of Ur (which has now been excavated in Iraq), the Mesopotamian civilization was highly sophisticated with its own art and literature, even boasting libraries of clay tablets. Ur was a religious center and home to a number of magnificent ziggurats dedicated to the various Mesopotamian gods.

According to the Midrash, which is part of the Jewish oral tTradition, Abraham's father, Terach, was an idol maker by profession, and so Abraham (then called Abram) grew up in an environment steeped in polytheistic beliefs. Yet, already as a boy, Abraham came to the conclusion that the statues his father manufactured and sold had no supernatural power. The Midrash relates that young Abraham smashed the idols in his father's shop and then blamed the act on one statue, which he left standing with an ax in its hand. When his furious father shouted that he was a liar because the idol was incapable of any movement or action, young Abraham retorted: "Should not your ears listen to what your mouth is saying?"

Abraham went on to conclude that polytheism was an illusion. Another Midrashic tale illustrates his search for the real thing. First Abraham reasoned that if the Earth was god, it was not the most powerful because it could not make things grow without rain. But if the rain was god, surely the sun, which chased rain clouds away, was more powerful. But then the sun had to move over from the sky for the moon, so the moon was more powerful than the sun. But the moon shone only by night. And so on and on, he tried to deduce which was the supreme power. Finally, by observing the regular rhythm of day and night, of the seasons, and of all natural laws, he concluded that there was a single higher intelligence that was directing the whole show.

But his was not merely a discovery of one God versus many gods. The God of Abraham was radically different from any idea of a god then existing in the ancient world: He was all-powerful, all-knowing, benevolent, infinite and invisible. Since he was infinite, everything was contained within him; there was nothing that he didn't have already. This infinite God was complete and perfect; He did not eat, drink or sleep-in fact, he had no needs whatsoever.

Abraham's conclusions and worship of only one god responsible for all of creation led him to a dialogue with the divine. And thus Abraham came to learn that, unlike the assumptions of his polytheistic neighbors, the Infinite Being he had discovered required nothing and could not be manipulated by mere mortals. But the One God clearly communicated to Abraham that he desired a relationship with all of his creation and was actively involved in overseeing the affairs of humanity.
Abraham's revelation did not earn him a standing ovation in his day and age.

The average person in the twentieth century would not have any trouble comprehending Abraham's description of one, invisible, benevolent God; today, some three billion people worldwide ascribe to a belief in one God as the basic tenet of their faith. But back then, Abraham was fighting against a culture that gave rise to a "creation epic" which read in part:

Marduk summoned the great gods to Assembly . . .
Who was it that contrived the uprising?
The Igigi, the great gods, replied to him:
"It was Kingu who contrived the uprising . . .
They bound him, holding him before Ea.
They imposed on him his guilt,
and severed his blood vessels.
Out of his body they fashioned mankind."

To the Mesopotamians, the God of Abraham must have seemed like a totally insane idea. One invisible God who existed alone, supreme, infinite; the un-created Creator of the universe was an alien concept which had no parallel in any other belief system in the world.

So it is no wonder that monotheism encountered significant hostility in ancient times. In addition to being entirely different and incomprehensible, monotheism was also a totally exclusive belief system. Other polytheistic cultures were magnanimously pluralistic- "you worship my god, I'll worship yours." Indeed, it was considered common courtesy for foreigners and heads of state to worship the gods of the countries they visited. Some invaders even made it a practice to "steal" the gods of conquered nations to be held as "hostages" and to be worshipped as well. And, as we saw earlier, blending of gods was also common-for example, the Egyptian Amon was merged with Ra, then was identified with Greek Zeus who, in turn, was identified with Roman Jupiter.

In stark contrast to these practices, Abraham flatly asserted that the worship of any god save the one God was prohibited. In Abraham's eyes, it would be nothing less than the negation of reality.

To be totally different was bad enough, but to try to tell the rest of the world that it was wrong must have seemed outrageous.

And yet that is what Abraham set out to do.

The uniqueness and true greatness of Abraham was not that he was the first person on Earth to believe in One God. Indeed, he was not the first. If we take the opening chapters of Genesis literally, then Adam knew only one God and so did his early descendants. We are also told that Noah was a monotheist and Jewish oral tradition maintains that Noah's son Shem (the father of the Semites) carried on his father's tradition. But by the time of the Tower of Babel, that tradition was lost, and Abraham had to rediscover it for himself. This was certainly a testament to the clarity and independence of his thinking, but Abraham went further. He committed himself to spreading the idea of monotheism in order to build a world whose moral and ethical foundation would spring from the belief in an all-powerful, just and loving God.

Along with his commitment came a vision, a mission-which he passed on to his son Isaac, who passed it on to his son Jacob, who passed it on to his twelve sons, the twelve tribes of Israel. The mission of Abraham's descendants was to bring the concept of one God into the consciousness of all humanity and along with it a universal, absolute, divinely given standard of morality, a standard which we have come to call "ethical monotheism."

This ethical monotheism that started out as the mission of one lone individual almost four thousand years ago was destined to become one of the most influential and powerful ideas in human history.

As Ronald Green concludes in Religion and Moral Reason:

When all prescriptions for human life are traced to God's will, morality obtains enormous authority . . . When the moral law is objectified as expressing God's will, the law ceases to be subject to any of the reasoned criticism provoked by regarding it as an instrument of human reason alone.

¬2002. All rights reserved. Reprinted from WorldPerfect by Ken Spiro. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the written permission of the publisher. Publisher: Health Communications, Inc., 3201 SW 15th Street, Deerfield Beach, FL 33442.