Sarah, the Priestess
by: Nancy Vedder-Shults on September 30th, 2009 | 2 Comments »
As I told you a few weeks back, the “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven” curriculum empowers women in remarkable ways. During last night’s class I discovered that it sometimes empowers in different ways at the same time.
Our reading for the evening was a compelling story — the attempted sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham (Genesis 22). As told in the Bible, this tale contains no mention of Isaac’s mother Sarah. Instead YHVH tells Abraham to demonstrate his loyalty by making a ritual offering of his one-and-only child. So Abraham dutifully takes fire-making tools, a load of wood, a knife, and his son Isaac to a nearby mountaintop to be slain. Of course, at the last minute an angel stays Abraham’s hand and provides a ram instead. What our class focussed on was the conspicuous lack of information about Sarah in this story.
Sarah is not easily overlooked. More girls have been named for Sarah than for any other woman in the Bible. There are good reasons for this. Sarah was a Chaldean princess and, because royalty and ritual leadership were inextricably tied together in those days, a priestess as well. She’s the only woman whose age is given in the Bible. She was the matriarch of the Jewish people. And Abraham owed his flocks, herds, and status to her.
Before we started to create modern-day midrashim — reinterpreting and commenting on this Biblical tale — we looked at several theories that questioned how this story was told in the Bible. Dancer and liturgist Fanchon Shur deduces from her absence that Sarah was the “hand of God” that stopped the sacrifice. Carol Ochs in Behind the Sex of God concludes that
the sacrifice of Isaac marked the death of the matriarchal tradition personified by Sarah. The meaning of Abraham’s test becomes clear when viewed in the light of the conflict between patriarchy and matriarchy. The first allegiance in matrirarchy is to one’s offspring…In patriarchy, the first obligation is to an abstract moral principle…obedience to God.
And Savina Teubal suggests that this story represents the beginning of patriarchy (not the end of matrifocality), since the matriarchs struggled for generations to preserve non-patriarchal customs, including matrilineal descent, nature worship, and the well-being of the community.
The rest of our class time involved imagining how Sarah felt during this episode and what she might have done or said. We split up into two groups, each with the task of creating a poem, play, dance, song, or narrative to tell the story from Sarah’s perspective. One of the groups moved very quickly to negate the Biblical tale and write our own. We created a play in which Sarah and her fellow priestesses inhabited the “red tent” while Abraham went about his nefarious business. Despite their distance, these priestesses collectively stopped Abraham by calling on the power of their Goddess Asherarh. The second group, however, spent a great deal of time experiencing Sarah’s feelings of anger, betrayal, and grief at learning of her husband’s actions. It reminded me of another year when a “Cakes” class wrote a one-act opera about Sarah entitled “Nobody Messes with My Kid!”
Last night’s second group, despite their emotional response to Sarah’s story — or maybe because of it — wrote a wonderful playlet in about five minutes. I would like to share with you. Interestingly, it dealt with the aftermath of Abraham’s attempted filicide, exactly what the first group discussed after we created our drama:
Sarah: Hi, guys. How was your weekend in the hills?
Isaac: Some weekend! Dad tied me up on the altar!
Sarah: What! This was supposed to a bonding time, not a binding time.
Isaac: Dad said God told him to sacrifice his first-born son.
Sarah: His first-born? That would be Ishmael (aside: and who knows, there could be others). Your father’s new God and his tests….Hmph!
Isaac: Yeah. I think I like your Goddesses better. Can we just forget about Dad’s mean God?
Sarah: Yes, Isaac. I would like nothing better…Let’s go bake a cake for the Queen of Heaven.
Isaac: Do we have to save some for Dad?
Sarah: No. He doesn’t get ANY!! All he’s going to get is my foot in his behind!
I guess humor helps us to deal with even the darkest emotions!
I really liked the interpretation of Sarah as the Hand of God. And also the statement that this incident marks the beginning of patriarchy. Both suggestions are illuminating. And new for me.
I interpreted the binding of Isaac differently. I assumed that when Abraham heard G-d’s word, he misunderstood it. Abraham came from the land of idols where children were sacrificed to false gods. So, when G-d said “Sacrifice your son,” he tried to slaughter Isaac as if he were a goat.
We also read the story of Hannah on Yom Kippur (or is it Rosh Hashonah?) and of Hagar. Hagar places Ishmael under a Bush because she cannot stand to hear the child’s cries. G-d tells her to return to Ishmael because he will be a great nation. Hannah “sacrifices” her child by caring for him until he is weaned and then placing him in the service of G-d.
Both women understand that children are not to be slaughtered. But only Hannah understands that by “sacrifice,” G-d means for her to give up her personal attachment to and possessiveness of the child. This is really the task of every mother. We have to give up our dreams for our children and allow them to live the lives G-d gave them. Abraham doesn’t understand. He can’t comprehend an Isaac that exists apart from his own dreams.
The Torah says that G-d will visit the sins of the parents upon their children to the third and fourth generations of those that hate him/her but will show infinite love to those that love her/him. G-d allows the generations that succeed Abraham to redeem his mistake because it was the best he could do.
We all need eventually to forgive our parents and to redeem their mistakes. For most, even heinous parents, it was the best they could do.
Lauren — I agree with you that we all need to forgive our parents and redeem their mistakes. I did the Hoffman Quadrinity Process about ten years ago and that was the main agenda for this week-long intensive.
I think the stories of Hannah and Hagar are interesting in light of the term sacrifice. Reframing that term is probably a good way to go. But I’ve also been doing some research again about “child sacrifice” and “human sacrifice” in ancient Israel and Canaan. When it comes to Mesopotamia, there is no evidence that human sacrifice occured, at least none to Gods or Goddesses. There was retainer sacrifice when the king died. From what I can find out the only references to human sacrifice in ancient Israel and Canaan are Biblical, and we know that the winners always write history. The Biblical writers talk about these types of sacrifice in Canaan, but there is no archaeological evidence to show that it happened. In the Bible the only sacrifice portrayed is always to either El or Yah. There is the almost sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis. There is the actual sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter in Judges 11:34 ff., and there is the “sacrifice” of the priests by Josiah in 2 Kings 23:20, “He slaughtered on the altars all the priests of the high places who were there, and burned human bones on them.” This was predicted earlier in 1 Kings 13:2, where the slaughter is referred to as a sacrifice.
The only archaeological record we have for “child sacrifice” comes from Carthage (at a later period). My friend Johanna Stuckey wrote an article about the Goddess Tanit, to whom such sacrifices were supposedly offered. It’s in the latest Matrifocus (www.matrifocus.com). She’s actually very even-handed about what she reports, leaving open the question of whether what was found in the “tophet” in Carthage was a children’s cemetery or a place where children were sacrificed. There’s a big controversy about what was found. The Romans (Carthage’s biggest enemies) wrote that the Carthaginians performed child sacrifice, but once again can we trust their words. The Carthaginians wrote nothing about it (that we’ve found). Most people are beginning to believe that the “tophet” was actually a children’s cemetery since it contains the bones of fetuses as well as newborns, and you can’t sacrifice a fetus. In those days, fetal bones would only have occured through miscarriage.