Does God have politics? In the way we nowadays use the term-as a description of political partisanship-surely not. Yet the first five books of the Bible-known as the Pentateuch in English and the Torah in Hebrew-do present God as a statesman. He is involved in the noblest of political activities: the founding of a new political community, the nation of Israel. Four-fifths of the Torah is concerned with this nation and its law, specifically the last four-fifths. But the first fifth, the book of Genesis?

By contrast with the remaining four books of the Torah the book of Genesis is relatively unpolitical. Political communities are not mentioned with any frequency until the eleventh chapter. More importantly, throughout Genesis God undertakes little political activity. The most political aspect of His activities is His promise to Abraham to engage in such activities on behalf of his descendants at some future time. In the event, it takes God several hundred years to fulfill this promise and it is not presented until the beginning of Exodus, the second book of the Bible.

The difference just indicated between Genesis and the rest of the Torah presents a serious perplexity: Why should a book as political as the Torah be introduced in such an unpolitical fashion? What implications does it bear for the kind of politics the rest of the Torah presents?

These and related questions have been the focus of attention throughout the long history of the study of the Bible. This attention has produced a variety of answers which have had great consequences for the history and experience of Western man. This is as true of us today as it was of our forefathers, since our liberal democracy is in no small measure the product of one such answer offered some 300 years ago by Benedict Spinoza.

Lately, however, these questions have not received much serious attention. It would therefore be worthwhile to take them up once again-to go back to the beginning and consider what Genesis has to say about God's politics.

In considering the book of Genesis and its understanding of political activity, it is convenient to divide it into two parts. The first consists of the first ten chapters; the second contains the remaining forty. The first part contains only a single reference to political life-the indication that Cain was its founder by building the first city. It contains no mention of divine political activity. In the second part, references to political communities become very much more frequent and God lays the foundation of His future political involvement with the Israelites through His association with their ancestors: the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

But this division appears to be natural as well as convenient. The first ten chapters are chiefly concerned with a singular drama, the drama of God's creation of the universe, its corruption by human beings, and its subsequent recreation by God after the great flood. At the end of this drama, God indicates that it will never be repeated and the second part of Genesis mainly describes a very different story, the story of the Patriarchs.

The first part of Genesis presents two kinds of narratives. The first is the description of several events; the second is the enumeration of various genealogies. There are four principal series of events: 1) God's creation of the heavens and the earth, including the creation of man [Gen 1-2]. 2) The account of Adam and Eve's rebellion against God's command and its aftermath [Gen 3]. 3) The story of Adam and Eve's first-born children, Cain and Abel, including Cain's murder of Abel [Gen 4]. 4) The account of the events connected with God's destruction of the world through the flood and His reconstitution of the world through Noah [Gen 5-10]. Interspersed among the narration of these events are three genealogies which enumerate and provide occasional information about the descendants of Cain, of Seth (the third son of Adam and Eve, who was born after Abel's murder and took his dead brother's place), and the descendants of Noah and his three sons.

Taken together, these two kinds of material provide an outline of the early history of the world and mankind. They do not, however, properly speaking, constitute a chronicle of these early years, since the focus of the narrative is the drama of God's creation. The keynote of this drama is the original perfection of God's creation. Its perfection is indicated by two things. First, when the world had reached its seventh day of existence. God was definitely finished and ceased from His labors. Second, God expressed His judgment that the world was now "very good." The bulk of part one is, however, devoted to an account of the corruption of creation by man, a corruption so extensive, it led God to destroy His own creation. Taken as a whole the first part of Genesis gives clear and forceful expression to the primary teaching of the Bible: the existence, power, and above all the perfection of God. It enunciates this teaching not merely by describing the original act and perfection of creation but by enunciating and elaborating the necessary corollary of this view-the present and all too manifest imperfection of the world is the responsibility and fault of man, a consequence of his evil and rebellious character.

Part one's elaboration of this corollary through the events which illustrate it amounts to the Bible's initial analysis of the nature of human life. As such it describes the immediate framework within which one must understand God's dealings with human beings, including His political dealings.

Like the rest of creation, Adam and Eve, the first two human beings, were perfect when they came from God's hand. Adam and Eve enjoyed a particularly exalted position within creation insofar as they were created in the image of God and enjoyed dominion over all other living creatures. Their likeness to God as well as their dominion over the animals apparently consisted in two things: their possession and exercise of the capacity to speak and the understanding it implies, and the capacity to choose their actions. In addition to these essential and constitutive perfections they enjoyed perfect material conditions- They lived extremely simple lives, requiring only food, and performed no labor except the gathering of fruit to eat. They did not even require clothing, not only because no natural necessity required it, but because they lacked "knowledge of good and evil" or moral self-consciousness, and were thus unashamed of their nakedness.

Adam and Eve, however, destroyed both their own perfection and that of their circumstances. Disobeying God's command, they ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Through this crime they lost their original simplicity, both by acquiring the sentiments of fear and shame, and through the adoption of a form of labor, the making of clothes, which was also the first example of human art. God removed them still further from the case of their former circumstances by expelling them from the Garden of Eden and condemning them to labor not only in the production of clothing but of food and children as well.

According to Genesis. God reacted in this fashion not merely to punish them for their crime but because he thought that by virtue of their acquisition of self-consciousness they had become similar to gods and hence dangerous. This danger would have been increased if man had become immortal, a possibility offered by another tree to be found in the Garden of Eden, so God expelled them from it.

God's fears about the dangerous side of man were borne out and illustrated powerfully by the very next generation, the generation of Cain and Abel, which produced the first murder in human history. This crime occurred within the context of the first recorded act of human worship. Cain and Abel brought offerings to God drawn from the occupations they pursued, farming and shepherding respectively. Of these two gifts God preferred that of Abel to that of Cain. God's preference for Abel's gift embarrassed Cain and deeply wounded his pride. God tried to console Cain by reminding him that as first-bom he did enjoy preeminence and would continue to do so if he did what was right. But Cain was unmoved and murdered Abel. After this crime he compounded his guilt by denying any responsibility for his brother with the famous question "Am I my brother's keeper?" To punish Cain, God condemned him to exile and wandering, but Cain apparently disobeyed this command long enough to build a city.

In the course of subsequent generations, the violence and injustice inaugurated by Cain became widespread and filled all the earth. One of Cain's descendants, Lamech, who belonged to the next to last generation of Cain's offspring, boasted of his murders declaring, "If Cain shall be avenged seven-fold, truly Lamech [shall be avenged] seventy and sevenfold" [Gen 4:24]. God eventually concluded "that the inclination of the thoughts of man's heart [was] evil all day long" [Gen 6:5] and decided to destroy the whole of creation by bringing the flood. He did, however, qualify this decision by sparing Noah, the most righteous man of his generation, his children, and a certain number of animals. From these he repopulated the world after the flood had receded.

As this summary indicates, Genesis' account of human life places great emphasis on its original simplicity. In light of this starting point it is fairly easy to understand why the first part has so little to say about political life. Political life is relatively late and slow to emerge, inasmuch as it is the most complicated form of human life, requiring not only the aggregation of relatively large numbers of people but the discovery and development of human arts, particularly those of farming and building. The Bible indicates and underscores an appreciation of these connections by attributing all three-farming, building, and politics-to Cain.

But man's original simplicity is not merely the Bible's starting point but its original standard. In its light it is still less surprising that during this period God undertook no political activities. In fact God's avoidance of such activities down to the flood testifies to the endurance of the standard during this period.

These substantive aspects add to the impression that the first ten chapters constitute a literary whole. At the same time, however, they appear to sharpen the disjunction between this and the second part of Genesis by suggesting that God's avoidance of political life before the flood was not accidental, but a matter of principle. These characteristics of the first part thus raise the following question: If God found political activity repugnant before the flood, why then after it does legislation become the highest expression of God's relationship to man? Why is Moses, the man who serves as the bringer of God's law, afforded the clearest and highest vision of God? [Num. 12:6-8].

To determine the true force and depth of this problem, not to mention to seek for a solution, it would be helpful if the first part of Genesis offered a full and clear exposition of God's initial objections to political life. But precisely because of the silent manner through which this passage expresses God's hostility, it does not offer such an account. What it does offer is an opportunity to investigate a related problem created by the fact that God did not originally intend man to possess any knowledge of good and evil. In the light of the second part of Genesis and the rest of the Torah, this aspect of the narrative is also problematic both because the law itself is and aims to be a presentation of such knowledge and because the greatest heroes of the Bible, men like Abraham and Moses, appear to be superior to other men precisely because they are righteous, and possess knowledge of good and evil.

This problem can be approached through a reconsideration of the events which inaugurated human self-consciousness and the attendant human corruption, the crimes of Adam and Cain. The most immediately puzzling feature of these stories is the severity of God's reaction to Adam and Eve's disobedience as compared with the results of this crime: the emergence of shame and their attempts to clothe themselves. In considering God's severe judgment, one must of course keep in mind that they flouted His direct command. Still neither the sentiment they acquired nor the actions they took seem at first glance, especially vicious or dangerous. Indeed, in the light of the rest of the Torah they appear not only relatively harmless but beneficial. To judge by the example of both Abraham and Moses, one of the greatest moral virtues is humility [Gen 16:27 & Num 12:3] to which shame appears similar. This is supported by the fact that the two most prominent villains of the Bible's narrative are Cain and Pharaoh, both of whom are characterized by the vice of pride [Ex 5:2]. Moreover the rest of the Torah is, to put it mildly, hardly supportive of immodest dress. Nevertheless God reacted to this "crime" by imposing, among other things, the penalty of death-mortality for all mankind. Moreover, He did so not only because they disobeyed His command but because in His view they had become dangerous.

God's reaction to this crime appears still more puzzling in the light of Cain's crime, in which the operative passion was pride and the result murder. Both the sentiment and the action appear much more vicious and dangerous than those of Adam and Eve, and thus to warrant much more severe punishment. Yet God appears to have punished Cain scarcely more severely than Adam, sentencing him to a life of wandering. In imposing this punishment, God expressly forbade anyone to kill Cain and thus indicated that the only sentence of death to which Cain was subject was the one to which all men are condemned through Adam.

In considering the relative leniency of God's reaction, it is fair to point out that unlike Adam's crime, Cain's was most immediately a crime against a man. Nevertheless, Cain's crime was not only against man in that Abel, like all men, was created in God's image, and because God had urged Cain to control his pride and anger. Moreover, God indicated on the occasion of Adam's crime that He objected to any moral consciousness, even shame, because it made men dangerous. Thus we would expect God to react most severely once that danger appeared in full bloom and to indicate the greater viciousness of Cain's passions and crime with a harsher punishment. God's apparent failure to do so appears to imply that Adam's and Cain's crimes are similar or even equal. God's judgment then, may almost seem to partake of the moral innocence, not to say obtuseness, with which He first endowed Adam and Eve!

Such a conclusion is so surprising, not to mention repugnant, that it requires more than a little pause. For this reason, as well as the demands of certainty and accuracy, we must consider the possibility that Adam and Cain are indeed similar. And when one does so the details of the Bible's account do in fact reveal and illustrate a profound spiritual kinship between Adam and Cain as well as a very precise, if unusual, moral perspective.

The most obvious similarity, and the one which provides most immediate access to this perspective, is the fact that both men practiced arts: Adam, tailoring; Cain, farming and building. It is true that by comparison with Cain, Adam was only an artistic beginner, and to draw such comparisons in ordinary circumstances would appear ludicrous. But these were not, as we must remind ourselves, ordinary circumstances, but ones denned by the recent creation of a perfect universe and perfect human conditions. It is this premise which makes intelligible and necessary God's implicit comparison of Adam and Cain. At the same time this comparison makes clear how seriously and consistently the Bible regards the original perfection of creation. However humble Adam's artistic activities may have been, they constituted the discovery of art as such and thus constitute the first momentous step in the destruction of the original simplicity of man's condition. In this they were the forerunners and prototype of the activities of Cain. But the prototypical character of Adam's art appears still greater if one considers more closely the effects of the arts pursued by Cain. As was just mentioned, the general effect of all arts is to complicate human life and hence remove man from his original simplicity. The arts which Cain pursued have an additional, more specific and far-reaching influence. Both farming and building alter the appearance of the surface of the earth. They thus not only alter human life but alter, or, as one might say. destroy one of God's greatest creations. These arts, then, constitute an affront and challenge to God. It is not surprising that their first practitioner was a proud and selfish man. If at first sight, Adam's art appears vastly more insignificant, the deceptive character of this judgment appears once one observes that Adam's art also altered the surface of one of God's creations: man. Since man was created in the very image of God, Adam's apparently humble act of providing himself with clothes not only prefigured Cain's endeavours but might even be regarded as more reprehensible.

In light then of the original perfection of the universe, Adam stands revealed as Cain's model if not "teacher in crime." It is also in this light that one must consider the sentiments which move Adam and Cain, since this perspective helps to reveal another important connection between the two of them.

To begin with, Adam's shame is the first human experience of self-consciousness or the first occasion in which man undertook to consider and judge himself in terms of inferiority and superiority. The disposition to make such judgments is of course necessarily shared by or expressed through both shame and pride, even if it might appear that they share little else But in fact the Bible indicates that there is a wider connection between these two sentiments.

It first of all points to this similarity by informing us that Cain, like his father, underwent an experience of shame. For when God preferred Abel’s offering, Cain was embarrassed or as the Bible puts it "his face fell [Gen 4-5] The manner in which God responded to Cain's evident disappointment reveals the Bible's view that there is an important relation between shame and pride. Attempting to console Cain, God reminded him that as the elder of the two brothers he enjoyed customary precedence over his brother. He thus expressed the view that Cain's shame was in essence wounded pride. This view of the relationship between shame and pride makes intelligible God's reaction to Adam's shame. Seen in this light, the Bible's view may be stated as follows: Though shame may bear a superficial resemblance to humility it may also and more properly be understood to be related to pride, to be, one may say, incipient pride. Indeed it is reasonable to suppose that once Adam had in fact clothed himself he experienced pride in its more direct form having removed the condition of his shame through his own skill. In this respect, too, then Adam's crime prefigured the character and activities of Cain.

While these considerations suffice to explain God's treatment of Adam, a few further remarks are required to understand God's treatment of Cain. both before and after his crime. As will be recalled, the occasion for Cain's crime was provided by the first act of human worship. Cain and Abel brought offerings to God drawn from the products of their respective professions, farming and shepherding, but God preferred Abel's offering. The narrative offers no explicit justification for God's preference, other than God's subsequent and somewhat obscure statement to Cain implying that he had not done well and therefore "sin croucheth at the door" [Gen 4:7]. The apparent arbitrariness of God's preference and the relative leniency of God's punishment of Cain constitute the puzzle of this story.

If, however, this passage offers no explicit justification for God's behaviour, the circumstances themselves do, provided one views them in the light of man's original condition. To begin with, the lives of Cain and Abel reveal that, despite the corruption of human life, early human life still permitted some choice among occupations, in particular farming and shepherding. In light of God's original aspirations, the choice between these alternatives was not neutral. Shepherding is superior to farming, since by comparison with the latter shepherding is a relatively inartistic way of life. Not only is it not dependent upon as many arts as farming, but it is actually incompatible with some-such as building-insofar as it is a wandering way of life. Moreover, it does not alter the appearance of the earth. (This is perhaps one of the roots of the hostility between farmers and shepherds to which the Bible refers at Gen 46:34.) Hence in choosing to be a fanner, Cain had indeed not "done well," and had already incurred God's displeasure. God's preference for Abel's offering was then a natural, even necessary, expression of His moral and practical perspective. Similarly God's punishment of Cain may also be seen to conform to this standard as, short of death, a life of wandering would represent the most severe punishment for a man committed to a life of artistic development. Cain's punishment, then, just as Adam's, did fit his crime.

It now appears that God's dealings with and treatment of Adam and Cain were informed by extremely precise and consistent principles which flow from the original character of God's creation and the standard it provides. But these principles also serve to explain that standard, or God's desire to leave men in a state of innocence. They show, to repeat, how seriously and precisely the Bible means its account of creation to be taken.

If, as the Bible indicates, shame is the primary form in which human self-consciousness expresses itself, man's primary knowledge of good and evil is itself evil rather than good. Man's most natural self-concern is at root selfish and prideful, and the source of the greatest injustices against God and man. This analysis of human character is at least as important as the spectacle of corrupt action to the conclusion God expressed on the eve of the flood, that the "inclinations of the human heart are evil all day long" [Gen 6:5].

The full horror and danger of the development of self-consciousness is best revealed by its relationship to art. It also serves to justify God's apprehensions on the occasion of Adam's rebellion and explain the form of his punishment. It appears from the Bible's account of Adam and Cain that the movement from shame to full-blown pride is hastened by the development of human art. The latter enlarges man's power and therewith his self-esteem. Thus once man has become self-conscious, the pursuit of artistic endeavour exercises a very great attraction. This pursuit, and the power it provides, takes the form of the transformation of God's creation and makes man like "unto the Gods" not only in knowledge but power. But for the fact that man is or has become limited through death, his power might increase indefinitely with monstrous results. In view of this analysis of human life, it is not surprising that God attempted to forestall this development by leaving men innocent, and made them mortal when they had lost their innocence.

The precision of part one's moral principles safely permit one to draw at least some definite, if perplexing, conclusions about God's initial view of politics. It had earlier appeared that political life was repugnant to God insofar as it represented a departure from man's original simplicity. On the basis of part one's account of early human development, this impression is substantiated and the character of God's repugnance may be rendered more precise. The first mention of non-familial communal life is the indication that Cain built the first city. Apart from the disrepute that Cain's simple involvement lends to political life, the immediate association of political life with the art of building characterizes it as an important expression of the vicious development of human art and pride. Moreover, the Bible seems to underscore the connection between politics and pride by mentioning in addition that Cain named the city after his son Hanoch [Enoch] thereby giving his son, if not himself, a greater reputation. While it is true that the Bible's first mention of political life is so brief as to leave these suggestions subject to some doubt, they are supported by the Bible's next reference to a city, the city of Babel, presented at the beginning of the second part of Genesis [Gen 11:1-9]. According to that account, when, after the flood, men became numerous again they resolved to build a city and tower whose top would reach into heaven. With this undertaking they aimed at making themselves a "name" so as not to become scattered and presumably weakened. God then took the view that if they completed this project they would be completely unrestrained and free "to do everything which they might intend" and hence frustrated their efforts. Taken in conjunction with the first part of Genesis, this story supports the suggestion that in the initial view of the Bible, political life represents the most complete and dangerous expression of the development of human art and pride. Through political activity men may complete their destruction of God's creation with an assault on the only unsullied remnant, the heavens, and perhaps fully realize God's initial fears about man's capacity to compete for divine honors.

However much this conclusion may conform in spirit with the perspective of part one. it is obvious that it also means that one must turn to part two with renewed and deepened puzzlement at its "political" character. If political life is so vicious why does God undertake to found a political community of His own? Since this question may at least partially answer itself by indicating that the viciousness of human political life clearly requires God's intervention and reform, one may formulate the question somewhat differently. Given the inherently and essentially vicious character of political life how can God expect to reform it?

The questions posed by part one might be answered in several possible ways, and indeed part two offers an opportunity to consider all of them. In light of the precision we have encountered in part one, this is not altogether surprising, and the beautiful manner in which the narrative presents and comments upon these prospective solutions in part two is no less impressive.

Given the event with which part one ends, the universal flood, the first possibility the narrative presents-and rejects-is that God started all over and reestablished the perfection which existed at the origin of the universe, in particular man's original perfection. The manner in which the world reemerges from the waters of the flood reveals that this event entails not only the destruction of the world but its recreation-in a manner similar to the original, which also emerged out of the water. In accord with this analogy Noah appears to enjoy the status and rank of Adam, insofar as all human beings are descended from him. In light of these similarities and the problems part one revealed with human life, one would not be overwhelmingly surprised if God had endowed Noah and his descendants with all of Adam's original attributes and in particular his innocent goodness.

Yet God explicitly rejects this understanding of the flood and its significance for human life by repeating, after the flood, His view that man is evil. God even apparently deepens this condemnation by observing that man's thoughts are evil not only all day long [Gen 6:5] but from his very youth [Gen 8:21]. This pronouncement is in itself sufficient to indicate that God's solution to the evil of human life was not a return to its original perfection, but the Bible goes out of its way to emphasize this fact and illustrate what it means by telling one story about Noah's life after the flood, the story of Noah's drunkenness [Gen 8:20-27]. This story apparently explains why Noah cursed one of his three sons. Ham, but it also, and more importantly, explains why Noah is not simply a new Adam.

As the circumstances of the story itself help one to notice, if Noah were a new Adam he should have been naked and unashamed, lacking the moral self-consciousness which is the well-spring of man's evil and corruption. And so indeed we find Noah after the flood. But as the story reveals, Noah's shamelessness was the result of drunkenness, a condition made possible by the fact that after the flood Noah became a man of the field, a farmer, and cultivated vineyards. Thus Noah's closest approach to Adam's .original perfection rested on the evil arts of Cain.

The second potential answer the Bible takes up-and also rejects-is the possibility that the nature of human politics, if not human beings, was altered for the better after the flood. It considers this solution in the very next chapter [Gen 11] with the story of the city and tower of Babel.

After the flood, men attempted to build a city whose tower would reach into heaven. God, fearing that human power would become as unlimited as human desire, confounded their intention by dividing men into many nations. God's action on this occasion is most clearly a rejection of a particular kind of politics, the politics of universal empire, and does make Him the founder of national polities. Nevertheless God's institution of national communities in these circumstances is not especially auspicious and cannot be assumed to be a whole-hearted endorsement of ordinary political life.

To clarify the Bible's position on the character of post-diluvian politics, it is only necessary to turn to the next discrete narrative of part two, the story of Abraham, which begins in the very same chapter and concludes with Chapter 25 of Genesis.

For our present purpose, the most immediately important passage in this narrative is its account of the city of Sodom. This city stands within part two of Genesis, and within the Bible as a whole, as the exemplar of human injustice. As such it helps us understand the Bible's analysis and judgment of ordinary human politics.

Although the Bible refers repeatedly and emphatically to Sodom and its injustice, its description of this city is limited to but one chapter [Gen 17] and its account of its injustice is limited to a single action. It reports that on the eve of Sodom's destruction, two messengers of God arrived in Sodom and found refuge in the house of Lot, Abraham's nephew. Upon learning of their arrival, the men of Sodom came to Lot's house and demanded that he produce them for their sexual enjoyment. When Lot tried to deflect them by offering his own daughters in place of his guests, this offer was rejected and he himself was threatened with the reminder that he too was a sojourner in their midst.

Taken by itself, the story of Sodom is relatively unclear about the character of this city's injustice. It seems to consist of two things: sodomy, the vice to which the city gave its name, and more generally, hostility to and abuse of strangers. But the Bible presents this story within a specific context which helps clarify the injustice of Sodom. This context is provided by the preceding chapter which reports the events in the life of Abraham which immediately precede and are linked to the destruction of Sodom. Like the story of Sodom, this story begins with the arrival of strangers, indeed the very same messengers who will later go on to Sodom. Unlike the Sodomites, Abraham welcomes these strangers, running to meet them and then preparing them a meal and other comforts. These messengers then report that Sarah will bear a child, a promise which Sarah greets with laughter since both she and Abraham are now well beyond child-bearing years. The messengers then rebuke her. asking if there is anything too hard for God. After reiterating their prophecy, they go on their way towards Sodom and the nasty reception just described. Before they reach Sodom, however, the Bible reports one more event. God decided to inform Abraham of His decision to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. In one of the most famous scenes of the Bible, Abraham displayed his extraordinary devotion to and confidence in God's justice by securing God's promise to spare Sodom if ten righteous men were to be found there.

The Bible then does not limit itself to a description of the viciousness of the Sodomites but presents a contrast between the greatest human justice and injustice which helps one to appreciate its operative understanding of both. The most salient difference this contrast brings to light is Abraham's kindness to strangers and the Sodomites' hostility to them. Thus the characteristic expression of the Sodomites injustice and the operative definition of injustice as such would appear to be unqualified hatred of strangers or, conversely, unqualified and unrestrained love of one's own. This latter formulation is underscored by the conditions God laid down for the rescue of Lot and his family from the destruction of Sodom. They were instructed not to look back at the city of Sodom. Lot's wife, who was apparently unable to restrain her love for the home she was leaving behind, was punished for her infraction by being turned into stone.

The definition of justice and injustice which the Bible presents in this con- text is perhaps somewhat more concrete than is common in discussions of ethics. It is nonetheless readily intelligible. The most characteristic difficulty justice faces is in getting men to acknowledge the interests of other men, of men who are in some way or other strangers to them. Moreover this characterization of the Sodomites' injustice reveals that their viciousness, although extreme, was not simply idiosyncratic but an expression of the collective selfishness natural to communal life. (See Plato, Republic, Book I, 332d.) It thus also indicates that notwithstanding the considerations that caused God to lay the groundwork for particular polities, ordinary political life remains an extremely potent expression of human pride and selfishness; indeed the most potent in the absence of a universal state.

If the story of Sodom serves to rule out the second potential solution to the riddle of God's post-diluvian activities-that the flood had improved human politics-it does, however, suggest another: the existence of certain rare individuals so virtuous as to amount to perfect human beings and who might provide a foundation for the redemption of all humankind. Abraham, through his discussion with God concerning the fate of Sodom, appears to be such a man. Another, and still more famous event, the binding and sacrifice of Isaac, reenforces this impression. In response to God's command, Abraham showed himself ready to sacrifice Isaac, his heir and the fulfillment of his lifelong hopes [Gen 22:1-12]. With this act he came to symbolize, for all time, yet another and still higher aspect of human virtue, total faith in and humble submission to God.

There is no doubt that through these two acts of extraordinary justice and humility, Abraham embodies a very great degree of human perfection and that his example provides both the grounds and foundation for God's post-diluvian projects. Still, taken as a whole, Abraham's life cannot be described as one of simple, undiluted, and hence natural virtue. The most important though not most obvious indication of the complications of Abraham's virtue is the manner in which the Bible describes the beginning of God's association with Abraham.

Like the binding of Isaac, the last great event in this association, its beginning was inaugurated with a divine command. God ordered Abraham to leave his "country,... birthplace...and father's house and go to a land which [He] would show [him]" [Gen 12:1-4]. Abraham obeyed this command and his behavior appears to testify to a continuity of faith and trust in God, from the beginning to the end of their association. Such, however, is not precisely the case as appears when one studies these events more closely.

To begin with, whereas God's final command stands alone. God's first command to Abraham was accompanied by a promise, the promise to make Abraham a great nation, to bless him, to make his name great, and through him to bless all the families of the earth. One reason for this difference derives from the circumstances in which these commands were given. On the first occasion, Abraham was childless. God promised to provide him with a son. On the second occasion, Abraham was asked to sacrifice the very son whose birth had fulfilled that promise. The differences in both the form and content of the respective commands immediately indicate that Abraham's obedience to God's last command was vastly more difficult and required much greater virtue than his obedience to the first.

But there is a still more important difference between these two periods in Abraham's life than an increase in the strength of Abraham's heart. God's initial promise to Abraham was tantamount to an appeal to the longings of human pride. It thus reveals that Abraham, so far from being a paragon of virtue, was a man at least partially moved by that passion which, as we have seen, the Bible regards as the chief characteristic and source of human corruption. By contrast, Abraham's obedience to God's final command reveals him to be a man of the most extraordinary humility.

The Abraham, then, who would describe himself as a being of dust and ashes, and who would humbly submit to the most painful demand God could have placed upon him was a markedly different man from the Abraham whom God first ordered to leave his family. He was a man who had acquired those virtues of justice and humility which are typically associated with him. The two commands with which the story of Abraham is framed, beautifully indicate the extent and purpose of that transformation. In light of the Bible's treatment of other potential solutions to the riddle of God's post-diluvian activities, it appears that this transformation is the Bible's own answer to this problem, an answer we must elaborate.

Since, of course, Abraham's transformation presupposes that at the outset of his life he was not fully or even moderately virtuous, the change he underwent must have been due to God's .exertions. It was, one might say, the result of God's instruction, guidance, or education. To use the equivalent Hebrew term, it was the result of God's torah, that Hebrew word which is the most common Jewish name for the Bible. Abraham's life, then, was not merely an account of virtuous deeds but the record of the first example of God's mode of education, and as such the first indication of the foundation upon which God's post-diluvian reform rests.

Like the definition of Abraham's virtues, the principles and conditions of his education are embedded in and expressed through the narrative details, beginning with the origins of God's association with him. As will be recalled, God's first act was to ask Abraham to leave his family and birthplace, a request which Abraham fulfilled. As the subsequent narrative reveals, the most immediate effect of this request was to make Abraham a wandering shepherd. The desirability and usefulness of this condition is immediately intelligible in the light of part one, which indicated that this is that form of human life least conducive to pride. But the story of Abraham itself elaborates the virtues of such a life even more fully.

As shown by several episodes in Abraham's life, such as his sojourn in Egypt and Philistia, to be a wanderer is also often to be a stranger as well (Gen 12:11-20 & 20:1-13]. As these occasions also show, not to mention the story of Sodom, the plight of a stranger is often extremely dangerous. On each of these two occasions, Abraham expressed his appreciation of the danger by claiming, untruthfully, that Sarah was his sister rather than his wife. As he indicates in his speech to Abimelech, king of Gerar, he did so since Sarah was extraordinarily beautiful and he feared that Abimelech, and earlier Pharaoh, might kill him to take her for his own wife [Gen 29:9-13]. He also indicates that he foresaw this situation from the very outset of his wanderings and had established this as their standing policy.

Although the most immediate effect of Abraham's wandering may have been to make him a liar, it could and did have another, much more virtuous effect. As has already been noted, the justice of Abraham and the injustice of Sodom were specifically linked to their treatment of strangers. Abraham was both kind to strangers and understood the principle of justice, the principle which obliges and enables men to look beyond ordinary human attachments. Being a stranger himself he could appreciate with special clarity the desirability of justice. By encouraging Abraham to be a stranger, God provided Abraham with an education in justice.

While the specific aim of God's first request has naturally claimed first attention, it is also necessary and important to consider the circumstances of that request or the reasons which induced Abraham to obey God's command and undergo this education. This is especially the case inasmuch as that education depended upon danger to produce its effects, a fact Abraham appreciated. Why after all did Abraham expose himself to these dangers? Why did he not behave like Cain, who offers the only Biblical precedent, and ignore God's command to wander?

It is tempting to suppose that his obedience was the result of his faith that God would protect him, but his behaviour as a stranger-and especially his lies-rule out such an assumption. The only available explanation is that Abraham lacked something which only God could give him and which he valued more than life itself-a son. It was then Abraham's childless condition which made him willing to accept God's dangerous proposal and made him open to divine education.

In considering this condition (or prerequisite, as college catalogs might put it) and evaluating its significance, it might appear that, however useful. Abraham's need of a. son was an essentially accidental factor in his education. Several aspects of the Bible, however, force one to reconsider this judgment. Perhaps the most striking is the fact that Abraham is not the only Biblical hero who was married to a barren woman, and his wife Sarah was not the only woman whose barrenness was eventually remedied by God so as to produce a Biblical hero. The same or very similar circumstances surround the births of Jacob, Joseph, and Samuel. God, then, appears to have had the habit of making use of such people. Moreover, the narrative of Abraham reveals that God did not move immediately to fulfill His promise but maintained Sarah's barrenness. These factors elicit a different understanding of the role of Abraham's childlessness in his education.

To reach this understanding it is necessary to consider the Bible's view of the significance of children. It provides some insight into its view by reporting a conversation between God and Abraham concerning this subject. After Abraham's victorious participation in a local war, he turned down his fair share of the booty. As if to compensate him for his restraint, God told him: "Fear not Abram, I am thy shield and thy exceeding great reward." Abraham's reply was not exactly enthusiastic. "Lord God, what wilt Thou give me, seeing I go childless and the steward of my house is this Eliezer of Damascus? . . . Behold to me thou hast given no seed and no one born in my house is mine heir" [Gen 15:1-3].

Abraham's response asserts that he lacks ambition and links his restraint to the lack of an heir. Put somewhat differently, one may say that Abraham, mindful of his mortality and that of other men, takes the view that the most fundamental spur to human ambition is children. As bearers of one's name and perhaps one's physical image, children provide the only natural, albeit partial, escape from death and the most natural reason for continuing to extend one's activities and possessions. They are, then, also the most natural condition, spur and focus of the development of human pride.

This Biblical analysis has an obvious bearing upon the meaning of Abraham's life and education. Despite God's initial appeal to Abraham's pride, Abraham's analysis implies that at the beginning of his association with God his lack of a child had prevented this passion from flourishing. This restraint had been maintained, and even perhaps deepened, by the persistence of Sarah's barrenness. Abraham was thus more naturally humble than other men at the outset of his education, and God maintained his childlessness to further his education in this virtue.

In understanding this principle of God's pedagogy one problem immediately presents itself. In order to make use of Abraham's childless condition, God was obliged to promise to remedy it. Since God is just. he was also obliged to fulfill that promise, though by fulfilling it He ran a considerable risk. In providing Abraham with a child, God was exposed to the danger of reawakening Abraham's pride and undoing the benefits of this education. Not surprisingly, God found a solution for this difficulty which not only succeeded in preventing this from happening but-in conjunction with Abraham's great intelligence-proved to be the final element in Abraham's education. He delayed the fulfillment of this promise for a very long time-until such time as neither Abraham nor Sarah could possibly produce children without God's assistance [Gen 18:11]. As a result, Abraham could not and did not regard this child, Isaac, as his own product and a projection of himself but as the child and possession of God. In other words, the circumstances surrounding the birth of Isaac enabled Abraham to see with special clarity something which, given God's creation of the world, is, in a way, always true: children are not in the decisive respect man's own products or creations but God's, and that the pride men take in their children is really a form of vanity and self-delusion. Abraham's appreciation of these facts formed the completion of his education in humility, and made possible his extraordinary obedience to God's final command to sacrifice Isaac. It is also the foundation of the honor that tradition has accorded Abraham as the father of monotheism. Abraham's submissiveness in these circumstances expressed the full meaning of the Biblical demand for humility, an understanding of the status and dignity of God, the creator of heaven and earth.

In addition to the utility of Abraham's childlessness, there is another respect in which it is not accidental, and this also bears some reflection. Despite first appearances, Abraham's lack of a child was not strictly speaking involuntary. This has a bearing upon God's selection of Abraham as well as one's evaluation of his accomplishments. As is shown by Abraham's liaison with Hagar, Sarah's hand-maiden, Abraham's lack of an heir was not the result of his incapacity but Sarah's. When Sarah suggested that Abraham take Hagar as his concubine, they produced a son. Ishmael. Thus one cannot understand his incapacity as the cause of his childlessness. Its cause is rather better understood as Abraham's love for and fidelity to Sarah. Despite his great longing for a child, he was not willing to seek the relatively easy remedy of taking another wife until Sarah herself instructed him to do so. Moreover, since the Bible tells us that Sarah was extraordinarily beautiful, it suggests that one source of Abraham's devotion was an erotic and passionate nature. In light of the Bible's consistently hardheaded analysis of human character, as well as its remarkably unsentimental portrait of Abraham and its other heroes, this apparent endorsement of romantic passion might appear out of place and indeed an implausible understanding of Abraham's life. Nevertheless, it is precisely the Bible's hardheaded analysis which renders the importance of Abraham's passion intelligible and meaningful. To repeat and summarize the conclusions of that analysis: The Bible regards pride or love of one's self as an essential and for most people the primary constituent of human character. It is also the chief source of human viciousness and evil whether that expresses itself individually or collectively through the family and political life. Erotic love can, however, temper these inclinations. Of all common and natural human sentiments it is the one that most unambiguously causes men to direct their passion towards something other than themselves. Even the love of children is not its equal since that form of love may rightly be understood as an extension of one's love for oneself.

Abraham's suitability as a subject for God's education was then not only the result of merely negative factors, his disabilities both given and induced It rested as well on a positive foundation partially expressed through his love for Sarah. An appreciation of this distinction, important in itself, is also useful for remedying any misimpression concerning Abraham's stature that this discussion might have occasioned. Abraham is a man of heroic character. This is no doubt first revealed by his devotion to Sarah but it is of course also and most completely revealed by his great accomplishments which required-in addition to God's instruction-great resources of fortitude patience, and intelligence.

Still it is, of course, the wisdom and greatness of God which the achievements of Abraham's life ultimately and most justly proclaim and demonstrate. These are most prominently expressed through the perfection of God's choice of a man who by nature and circumstances was the one human being most open to moral education and the perfect application of an education rooted in and designed to nurture these advantages.

Does Abraham's life point to and help to explicate the rest of the Bible's narrative? Such at least is the Bible's claim, since according to God's initial command to Abraham, his life would lead to the birth of a great nation as well as secure a blessing for all the families of the earth. It asserts, thereby that Abraham s life is not only the account of the redemption of a single extraordinary individual, but the foundation of the redemption of a whole nation and ultimately of the entire human race.

Unfortunately an adequate investigation of this claim is well beyond the scope of this essay. It would require at the very least a thorough and detailed study of the rest of Torah and its account of Abraham's successors: first the other patriarchs and then that great nation, composed of Abraham's descendants and founded by Moses.

But while such an inquiry must await another occasion it is possible to draw some encouragement and further instruction from the life of Abraham by posing the single greatest objection to the hope that Abraham's life might serve as a prescription for general human reform. This may be stated as follows: To assert that Abraham's life marks the path of general human reform is to propose that a nation might be composed of childless strangers and educated by this experience. But to propose this is to propose an absurdity. Individuals can be strangers, but for obvious reasons members of a community cannot. Moreover, a nation could not survive without the continuity of procreation. Thus to make such a proposal to human ears is to invite laughter.

Yet it is precisely through this formulation that we can see how encouraging and instructive Abraham's life may prove. As the story of Isaac's birth reveals. God is neither beyond making nor incapable of fulfilling proposals human beings may find laughable since nothing is too hard for God [Gen 18:12-15]. And such is the case here as well. with the larger proposal Abraham's life suggests. As the Torah reports, God did indeed found a nation of childless strangers, or rather its equivalent. He took a people who through collective enslavement in Egypt underwent collectively the experience of being strangers, as the Torah and its law reminds the Israelites no less than thirty times. The Law also reminds the Israelites that like Abraham they too were threatened with the lack of first-born sons or rightful heirs through the plague of the first-born. They owe the lives of these children to God's miraculous intervention and are thus obliged by the law to redeem them from God [Num 3:11-13, 40-51]. There is then good reason to suppose that the Bible takes seriously the claim that Abraham secured a great blessing for people other than himself. That is to say, it takes seriously the "humanly laughable" proposal which Abraham's whole life no less than the birth of Isaac represents.

These observations are not meant to replace larger inquiry and there are, of course, several very important questions almost completely unaddressed. Among them is the question of whether and how the founding of the nation of Israel, extraordinary as it and its model may be, contribute to the necessary and promised goal of universal reform. Above all, they do not make clear the status of this moral reform first effected through Abraham and in particular its relationship to man's original perfection. Is the perfection of Abraham or rather the perfection of that apparently still greater man, Moses, equivalent to Adam's original perfection? Or since this cannot be the case due to the roots of Moses' perfection in human self-consciousness, is it to be regarded as only the second best human condition, or does it represent a progress beyond Adam's perfection? This, however, is one of the most profound mysteries of the Bible's mysterious God.