Customer Reviews

The Discovery of God: Abraham and the Birth of Monotheism

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Klinghoffer has written a brilliant book: a combination detective story -- who was this patriarch with the half-sister marriage and the bombshell concubine and the funny relationship with his kid? -- and meditation. (If the book were an album, its title would be "Abraham Comes Alive.")

To write a biography of a pre-modern figure -- a man who stands somehow at the back of much of the modern world, the way D.W. Griffith hangs at the back of every movie theater, mildly grinning -- Klinghoffer has performed an immense amount of digging. By definition, there are no photos, letters, phone records, eyewitness accounts, no talkative siblings or rivalrous contemporaries; to begin with, there are just the stones and weather of the Bible. Klinghoffer excavates his story's bones from that source, pressing also into Midrash and a shamingly wide range of archaeological and critical sources. What he comes up with is an intensely readable story about one of history's great, pivotal figures; a lone man in an dusty region of the world who gave birth to the three of the world's major religions. (Birth, and also the roiling within families, is one of Klinghoffer's consistent interests in the book.)

The book is about founding a tradition, but it's also a story. Abraham rejected his own father's idolatry, found the first modern path to God, fought armies, dealt with the problems of love, marriage, fatherhood, kinship, family; one of the surprises encountered again and again in Klinghoffer's story is how much of our modern turbulence - essentially, doubt versus fidelity, and the many avenues that conflict seeks for expression -- Abraham's own life anticipates. The approach to whether miracles in the bible are "literally" true is a great feat of perception: they're "true" because they were necessary to our own understanding and acceptance of God. The author's passages on the love between Sarah and Abraham read as a kind of sweet, best-case marriage: as he sees them, the two are halves of a whole, Abraham the accepting, understanding heart, Sarah the stern, unbending head; as in any relationship, partners will fill out the available role. Klinghoffer takes the reader through the story we half-know, giving it blood and muscle along the way. It's a daring, dramatic thing to have pulled off; at a time when those three religions (in the way children in the Bible so often do) have come into conflict, it feels almost necessary.

There is a wide range of ratings for this book - the next few give very poor ratings (1 star), while the latter reviews give 5. I've just finished reading it and can concur with most of what both groups of reviewers have said.

On the up side, the book paints vivid and dramatic pictures of Abraham's life, his journeys, his relationships and his God. Klinghoffer argues strongly and well for Abraham's role in being an evangelist for monotheism.

On the down side, Klinghoffer does treat the Oral Torah as almost more inspired than the Torah itself. His arguements about Isaac are incomprehensible. He introduces various bits of information that I found bizarre.

But, put together I, for one, found the book deeply thought provoking. He helped me get a real sense of Abraham the man, and the societies in which he moved. Many bits of Oral Torah trivia were really interesting and I am grateful to have them.

I am a theology student, in training to become a pastor in a conservative demonination. I found the book well worth reading.

In this exceedingly frustrating book I found some fascinating insights into the Biblical patriarch Abraham, yet the author's style was so off-putting I often found myself wondering why I persisted in reading. Author David Klinghoffer writes from within the Orthodox Jewish approach that views the oral tradition (Midrash), codified by ancient rabbis and interpreted by medieval sages, as revealed truth on a par with the Torah. In fact, he argues, you can't understand the Torah unless you read it in conjunction with the oral law. His arguments in favor of his approach are arrogantly overstated yet unlikely to appeal to anyone but a true believer, which was part of what made the book so maddening. Furthermore, he asserts the factual nature of his account with no regard for the extent to which it is the product of his own selection and interpretation of the traditional texts. If he had acknowledged that his approach was one among many, and then demonstrated its usefulness, he would have been more likely to win me over.

The author structures the book as a biography of Abraham, interleaving Biblical and Midrashic tales along with selected historical/archaeological evidence (while remaining contemptuously dismissive of those who take a primarily historical approach to the Bible). Jewish oral tradition provides a wealth of instructive anecdotes with which to flesh out the terse Biblical tale, and the author demonstrates an encyclopedic knowledge of the literature. At times the dense, discursive, and often bizarre stories overwhelmed the narrative flow and made it difficult to discern the author's main points. Given the often troubled relations among the three religions that trace their heritage to Abraham, it was surprising that the author reached an ultimately optimistic conclusion, yet he made a thought-provoking case for hope.

What I didn't like: Klinghoffer treats almost every Midrashic legend about Abraham as literal truth (rather than as parables created to make a broader theological or ethical point). But as Klinghoffer himself occasionally admits, these stories (a) were not necessarily meant to be taken literally and (b) occasionally contradict each other.

What I liked: although I occasionally found this book loopy, I give it credit for being learned. Klinghoffer seems to have a pretty sure command of these stories, and has at least some awareness of modern archaeology (not that I know enough to intelligently judge).

I love this book. It has facts, humor, side stories and thoughts as the author really did his homework for this book, including traveling and looking up the sites he was talking about in Abraham's history. He really makes it come to life yet gives contradictive thoughts that can be really discussed about from one side or another. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to know more on Abraham's story from the Jewish(particularly), Christian side as well as from the Archeological side as well. The author is just a great writer.

I met David Klinghoffer at a ...author's party and bought his book, the discovery of God. I could not stop reading his biography of Abraham. David weaves in some of his trip to Israel, the Midrash and the oral tradition with the Bible. Not only does he save me the trouble of doing all the research but his writing style is fresh and kept me on the edge of my seat wanting to know more about stories that I have heard a hundred times. What a treat!
I have since purchased his spiritual journey The Lord Will Gather Me In and would liken it to a Jewish Seven Storey Mountain. David has become one of my favorite writers and his refreshingly honesty about his faults and his willingness to keep on his spiritual journey gives me hope about my own.

This is a horribly written book. It vascillates between the Abraham story of the Torah and that of Midrash. I couldn't determine a timeline of Abraham's life as compiled in each of these sources. The result was confusing and incomprehensible.

Don't waste your money.

Having read Mr. Klinghoffer's wonderful memoir "The Lord Will Gather Me In," I had high hopes for this new book. Even so, "The Discovery of God" exceeded my expectations.

Using Jewish tradition (oral and written) to flesh out the account of Abraham's life in Genesis, Klinghoffer paints an incredibly vibrant picture of the the patriarch. As he tells this story, he also provides fascinating discussions of the cannons of Biblical exegesis, rabbinical scholarly traditions, and the sources of conflict between traditional and modernist scholars. This is weighty stuff, but Klinghoffer writes so beautifully, and has such an eye for the interesting detail, that the book never sags--rather, it soars.

All in all, "The Discovery of God" is a fascinating journey through the life of the man who Jews, Christians, and Muslims all can rightfully call "Father Abraham." Highly recommended.

This is an incoherent melange of scholarship and superstition, mostly the latter, further blighted by being written in braindamaged prose.

Klinghoffer argues that "on every page" of the Torah "one finds an apparent blunder: solecisms of grammar and diction, weird spelling variations, needless repetitions, missing words,... self-contradictions, pointless obscurities,... blatant anachronisms...." Why is the text of the Bible a mess? It's not a mess, and the mistakes aren't there by accident, they are a "code." And the code can be decoded only by the Magic Decoder Ring of Jewish Tradition, the Talmudic and medieval commentaries.

The problem is that, if the Bible occasionally contains incoherencies and contradictions, the Tradition, consisting of dialogical argumentation from all sides by dozens of sharp-minded rabbis, is nothing but contradictions. Students of the Talmud, who would never mistake Klinghoffer for one of themselves, understand the oppositions of Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael, of the school of Shammai and the school of Hillel.

But for Klinghoffer, there are no contradictions; all is harmony: "Oral Torah, as it understands itself, doesn't present theories, it presents truth, only truth. Sometimes that truth is too complex to be conveyed by simple declarative sentences like 'Isaac survived' or 'Isaac was sacrificed.'" Everything can be harmonized, if you work hard enough at it. If Rashi says that two times two is four, and Ramban says that two times two is five, Klinghoffer will explain why they are both right. Study along with Klinghoffer and you will learn how, to the mystical view of faith, all things are true.

Klinghoffer is wrong about the Tradition: the sages argued fiercely with each other, just as real scholars do who have a commitment to a scripture that makes sense rather than mystical mush. As Talmudic rabbis frustrated by recondite nonsense say from time to time, "dibrah Torah ke-lashon b'nei adam" -- "The Torah speaks in human language." The Torah does. I wish that David Klinghoffer did.

Although I am only about half-way through this gloriously interesting, entertaining and informative book, I must stop long enough to let you all know ---- do not miss this book. It is just excellent and mainly because it confirms my view that the Puritans of Massachusetts and CT were right all along. The New Israel is to be found right here in the U.S.A. and we are right in unfailingly supporting the present day State of Israel. More later---