Abraham: The First Historical Biography [Hardcover]

David Rosenberg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 20, 2006

The world's major religions-Judaism, Christianity, and Islam-find a common root in one man: Abraham. Yet Abraham looms so large in the realm of world religions that he has remained a ward of the Divine rather than a flesh-and-blood citizen of Humanity. In his monumental new book, David Rosenberg provides a long-overdue history of the patriarch; while revealing that the original story embedded in the Bible is actually our oldest historical biography. We also discover that the wandering ascetic of tradition cannot explain our deep-seated feelings for Abraham and his God. The road that Abraham traveled was marked by signs of civilization that we still recognize: libraries, museums, hotels, and houses of worship. He is a sophisticated, educated Sumerian; an artisan who became the first Jew. Moreover, through Rosenberg's audacious translation of the Abraham story from Genesis, we learn that many of the core tenets of the monotheistic tradition-the idea of God's covenant and the soul-are Sumerian in origin. Rosenberg first finds Abraham at his father's workshop in the cosmopolitan city of ancient Ur and follows his journey through what is today the Middle East. What kind of baggage-emotional, material, and spiritual-would Abraham have taken with him on his migration to a new land? Abraham does more than present a founding spiritual figure and his dynamic relationships with father, wife, and son. We witness this man as he transforms his heritage into an anxious embrace of religion with secular culture-the human condition in which we are still enfolded today.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Despite the subtitle, much of Rosenberg's fascinating and sometimes frustrating presentation of the biblical Abraham's life, while based on archeological evidence, is highly speculative. What Rosenberg does establish is a cultural context for Judaism's founder. Abraham, he says, would have been steeped in the sophisticated culture of his native Sumer, with its emphasis on history and continuity. The earliest of the biblical authors, called J (who was a woman, as Rosenberg postulated, with Harold Bloom, in The Book of J) would have known that culture, and Rosenberg analyzes how it informs her narrative. Abraham's new God, Yahweh, according to Rosenberg, was a blend of his old Sumerian household god and the creator god he found in Canaan; with Yahweh, Abraham created a new "cosmic theater" to replace the one Sumerians had enacted with their idols. Rosenberg's discussion can be dense and confusing as he switches over to considering the artistic and historical motives of J and two other biblical authors, known as E and P. But the book opens up into a compelling and moving interpretation that ponders the significance, for Abraham and his descendants, of his journey from Ur to Canaan, fraught with uncertainty for a man—expatriate, aging, childless—hanging between a lost past and a still unmapped future. (Apr. 3)
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From Booklist

The ancient patriarch Abraham lives here as a vibrant historical presence. Rosenberg warns, however, that readers will not see this remarkable man of antiquity if they persist in looking for him over the shoulders of Christian or Islamic guardians of orthodoxy. Instead, Rosenberg invites readers to see Abraham against the cultural background of ancient Jerusalem in the tenth century BCE. Hardly the unlettered nomad of Christian imagination, the historical Abraham, Rosenberg argues, studied Sumerian and Akkadian texts intensely before embarking on his epoch-making journey to Canaan. It was these archival sources, melded with oral tradition, that produced the biographical narrative that enshrined Abraham in scripture. Rosenberg's explanations of how the God of Scripture and first Hebrew appeared together on the stage of history draw on both immense research and shrewd speculation. Many devout Bible readers will resist those speculations as incompatible with traditional religious faith, but lively controversy--such as that surrounding The Book of J, which Rosenberg coauthored with Harold Bloom in 1990--always attracts readers. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; 1st edition (March 20, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465070949
• ISBN-13: 978-0465070947
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,252,634 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Poet-scholar David Rosenberg is co-author of the New York Times bestseller, The Book of J (with Harold Bloom), and the former editor-in-chief of the Jewish Publication Society. A poet of Toronto Coach House, New York School, and Jerusalem Cricket lineage, he has published several volumes of poetry. A Literary Bible presents thirty years of his original translation from ancient Hebrew.

Rosenberg is a survivor of the writing programs at The New School (with Kenneth Koch and Robert Lowell), University of Michigan (with Donald Hall), Syracuse University (with Delmore Schwartz), and University of Essex, England, where he pursued doctoral studies. He taught for several years at York University (Toronto), the City University of New York, and as a Master Poet for the New York State and Connecticut Arts Councils.

At the age of thirty, Rosenberg retired from teaching. For two decades, while working as a literary editor and translator, he studied the origins of ancient Hebrew literature and the Bible, in New York and Israel (with Robert Gordis, Harry Orlinsky, and Chaim Rabin), while his work appeared prominently in Harper's, The New Republic, Hudson Review, Paris Review and elsewhere around the globe (most recently in Chicago Review, Jacket in Australia, and Open Letter in Canada). A Poet's Bible (1991) won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize, the first major literary award given to a biblical translation in the U.S.

Rosenberg is the author and editor of more than twenty books, including volumes of contemporary writers on the Bible that first raised the question of how Judeo-Christian culture can be newly reinterpreted. During the past decade he has studied the context for ancient biography, leading to a diptych: Abraham: The First Historical Biography (2006) and An Educated Man: A Dual Biography of Moses and Jesus (2010). He continues to publish critical essays on poetry, as well as his long poem, The Lost Book of Paradise (1993) and a literary version of Kabbalah, Dreams of Being Eaten Alive (2000).

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Biography or Fantasy?, May 24, 2006

By 

Smallchief - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Abraham: The First Historical Biography (Hardcover)

Rosenberg has written an artful biography of Abraham, the spiritual father of three religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. To do so, he made his own translations of the accounts of Abraham appearing in the Bible, giving them a slightly different spin than in a standard translation.

I found this book irritating, however, because the author did not identify what was factual -- to the extent we know the facts -- and what was speculation. The greatest example of this is his identification of Abraham as a Sumerian, the people who invented civilization. By Abraham's day, about 1,800 BC (or BCE if you prefer), the Sumerian kingdoms had been toppled by Semitic-speaking peoples and their culture was in decline. Rosenberg asserts that Abraham's flight from Ur of the Chaldees (one of the oldest Sumerian cities) was to escape the vulgarities of the Semitic cultures and preserve Sumerian culture and religion. In the process of fleeing the new to preserve the old Abraham had a personal experience with a new deity that would make him the patriarch of three world religions. (The Sumerians, incidentially, became extinct -- although perhaps their relatives still living today are the Dravidians of Southern India.)

It is an attractive theory to link present day religions with the oldest known civilization, the Sumerian, but is it true? Was Abraham a cultured urbanite and a Sumerian in culture if not in race? I have always imagined him as the head of a simple sheep-herding clan that departed from Ur because of oppression or a simple wanderlust. Instead, the author imagines Terah, the father of Abraham, as a statue-maker and Abraham as a man comfortable in the most refined society. Does he have a source other than his own imagination? He cites as a source the scholar "J" who wrote about Abraham one thousand years later and interprets what "she" (also unproven) did not tell us as well as what she did. That's too tenuous, a bit like claiming that a writer of today can recount the Robin Hood legends of a thousand years ago with total confidence in their accuracy.

The book is worth reading as an interpretation of who Abraham was, what he did, and why he did it. It would have been more credible had the author filled in the blanks with argument and reasoning rather than imagination. It's a bit of a stretch to call this book history, but as a learned work of the imagination it is enlightening.

Smallchief

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars I've been had, June 21, 2006

By 

F. Presson "Freeman" (Birmingham, AL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Abraham: The First Historical Biography (Hardcover)

Author David Rosenberg describes himself as a poet-scholar. I find that a fair enough description, much better than the description of this book provided by its title.

Rosenberg makes many interesting claims, but provides for the reader (whether well-versed in the history and literature of the Ancient Near East or not), no specific evidence for any of them. This book contains a grand total of zero footnotes. The bibliography at the back is sketchy, consisting of a selection of eighteen books (including _The Book of J_, of which Rosenberg is co-author). Each of these is annotated, some with a précis and some with a full review. Many of these reviews contain quite vitriolic attacks and strong judgments against scholars (e.g., Bottero, Finkelstein, Silberman) whose work is far more valuable than Rosenberg's own. I found this practice offensive, even though I agreed with a few of his points.

His casual assumption of competence in studies of history and religion in the Ancient Near East rankles as well. The claim, for example, that the Sumerian religion consisted entirely of "theater" performed by priests using the statues of the various Dingirrene as if they were so many puppets, is "not even wrong" (to use an assessment from a rather different field), and not consistent with other statements made in the book. When an author goes this far off track in an area I know something about, I then have a lot of trouble taking his statements about other areas seriously.

In summary, any of Rosenberg's conjectures _could_ be true, but this book won't help the reader decide. As far as I can tell, its sole value is to open up interesting questions for competent scholars to pursue, if they don't turn out to be inherently unanswerable.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars a little genuine insight amidst a lot of confusing speculation, January 8, 2007

By 

Michael Lewyn (Forest Hills, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Abraham: The First Historical Biography (Hardcover)

Rosenberg's goal is to speculate about both the historical Abraham and about a variety of ancient individuals who Rosenberg believes wrote the Torah. (Rosenberg assumes the validity of the Documentary Hypothesis, i.e. that the Torah weaves together histories written by several ancient scholars). He goes back and forth between Jewish history, Sumerian tales, and his own guesses about both without supplying footnotes to show which was which. As a result, I had a great deal of difficulty figuring out which parts of this book were from ancient documents and which were Rosenberg's own speculations. In addition, Rosenberg's jargon about "cosmic theater" created more confusion than assistance.

Rosenberg does have an interesting insight here and there, most notably an interesting theory about how Abraham might have thought about God. The Torah states that Abraham had roots in Ur, a city which may have been the ancient Sumerian city of Ur. Sumerians worshipped both intimate personal gods and distant creator gods. So it may be that (as Rosenberg suggests) Abraham discovered the existence of one God by merging the two concepts, somehow deducing that the personal idol of his family was in fact the same as the creator of all existence.

Rosenberg also suggests that Abraham's obsession with offspring (and with marrying Isaac off to a relative) arose not just from a desire to conserve monotheism, but also his origin in a declining Sumerian civilization and his fear that not only his family, but this broader culture, was in danger of collective extinction.