Variances and Versions of the Aqedah Story in Jewish Hymnography (Piyyut)

CHAPTER 10 Bound in Righteousness: Variances and Versions of the Aqedah Story in Jewish Hymnography (Piyyut)

Wout van Bekkum

10.1 The Transformation of Stories: Theoretical Background

The aim of this chapter is to examine how the timeless story of Genesis 22 was transformed and adapted within the hymnological traditions of both Judaism and Christianity. In his controversial book Der Mythos bei den Hebräern (Mythology Among the Hebrews), Ignác (Hebrew name: Isaac) Goldziher presented Abraham as “the forefather of the Hebrews who at the behest of God was about to offer his only son Isaac as a sacrifice, but is prevented by an angel of God, who shows him a ram entangled in the thicket, which he may offer as a sacrifice to God instead of his son.” His interpretation of Abraham and Isaac goes in the direction of considering them to be representatives of mythological figures in the sense of personifications of primary natural forc- es.1 The story of Abraham’s sacrifice was a literary creation, probably handed down to the Israelites in ancient times from the Egyptians: Av-ram means “high father,” which in Goldziher’s view implies a linguistic connection with Ethiopic rayam (heaven), a heavenly deity or sun-god. Goldziher was even inclined to believe that there was a link between this Hebrew name and the planet Uranus.2 Similarly, he was well aware of the idea that the name of the Brahmans was derived from Abraham who was transfigured from the god Brahma into the biblical patriarch, thereby showing that the story of Genesis

1 Ignác Goldziher, Der Mythos bei den Hebräern und seine geschichtliche Entwicklung. Untersuchungen zur Mythologie und Religionswissenschaft (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1876), 57–60. Translated into English by Russell Martineau: Mythology among the Hebrews and Its Historical Development (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1877, reprint New York: Marandell Book, 1967), 23. Cf. also David Ohana, “Power, Ritual, and Myth: A Comparative Methodological Proposal,” in Myths in Judaism: History, Thought, Literature, ed. Ithamar Gruenwald and Moshe Idel (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2004), 73–94. 2 On Uranus and Abraham: Carol Delaney, Abraham on Trial: The Social Legacy of Biblical Myth (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1998), 82–83.

22 has been approached in many different ways.3 We will leave aside the mythological and theological aspects of the biblical narrative itself and only briefly address the anthropological background of what has become known in Judaism as the aqedah, the “binding” of Isaac. No doubt the question of the transformation from ritual (of human sacrifice) to narrative is a very important aspect, but the subject of sacrificial ritualism in the history of world religions has been extensively discussed in the past, notably during a conference that took place in January 2011 at Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel. The ensu- ing lectures and essays have been published in a volume that provides a rich and varied basis for the understanding of ritual sacrifice in its practical and in its literary forms.4 Some contributors discussed human sacrifice, but the story of the aqedah was not their focus.5 The motif of the aqedah implies that people were aware of the possibility of infanticide as a basic act of faith or loyalty to the divine. The patriarch’s willingness to sacrifice his cherished and long- awaited son on the command of God entered Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions. And although Isaac the son was bound but not killed and sacrificed by his father, the intention was serious and sincere—Isaac was about to lose his life in a violent sacrificial act for the honor of God. For the theoretical background of our subject, one can hardly imagine a more suitable text corpus than the Arabian Nights.6 Modern scholarship has taught us that the narrative cycles of the Arabian Nights may be traced to diverse origins that are Indian, Persian, and Greek as well as Arabic-Islamic, and that a supposedly original or archetypal text took its current shape across a number of historical eras. Various scholars have raised useful questions about narrative transformation and “genre ideology,” as they call it, with regard to the original tales of the Arabian Nights and the European (pseudo-) transla- tions thereof, such as the French version of Antoine Galland (1646–1715) or the British versions of Edward William Lane (1801–1876) and Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890).7 One of the consequences of this in academic studies was

3 Goldziher, Der Mythos, 20. 4 Alberdina Houtman et al., eds., The Actuality of Sacrifice: Past and Present (Leiden: Brill, 2014). 5 Shulamit Laderman is closest to the subject discussing iconographical developments (343– 76). However, Marcel Poorthuis’s exploration of the Didascalian texts (170–91) and Alberdina Houtman’s study of the Targumic expression “surrendering one’s life to death” (192–205) can be compared and contrasted to the narrative dynamics of Isaac’s near-death. 6 Wen-chin Ouyang and Geert Jan Van Gelder, New Perspectives on Arabian Nights: Ideological Variations and Narrative Horizons (London: Routledge), 2005, ix–xv; in the same volume: Aboubakr Chraïbi, “Texts of the Arabian Nights and Ideological Variations,” 17–26. 7 See Thomas O. Beebee, The Ideology of Genre: A Comparative Study of Generic Instability (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004).