How not to read the Bible.

Abraham on Trial
The Social Legacy
of Biblical Myth
Carol Delaney
Princeton University Press, $29.95, 296 pp.
The Curse of Cain
The Violent Legacy
of Monotheism
Regina M. Schwartz
University of Chicago Press, $14, 211 pp.

The authors of these books share a sense of high moral purpose. Delaney wants fathers to stop sacrificing their sons. Schwartz wants people to welcome rather than exclude one another. Each author also has hold of a truth. Delaney sees that patriarchy has its limitations. Schwartz perceives that monotheism can generate intolerance. Both writers connect their moral passion and social insight to a reading of a part of the Bible, regarded as the source of the "legacy" of carelessness and violence in contemporary culture. Delaney focuses on the story of Abraham. Schwartz deals with Torah and the Prophets.

However, high moral purpose does not necessarily translate into clear thinking. The grasp of a single truth seldom makes for a satisfying argument. And blaming the Bible for what's wrong in the world is an exercise both too easy and too simplistic to be convincing. These books are of interest less as resources for serious social and religious inquiry than as indicators of troubling tendencies in the academic study of religion today.

Delaney's title expresses the conceit structuring her essay, playing on the tradition that Abraham's offering of Isaac in Gen. 22:1-24 (known as the Akedah) was one of Abraham's "trials" (or "testings"), as well as on the coincidence of her happening to be an observer of a recent California trial in which a man who killed his daughter offered as justification the claim "God told me to do it." Convinced that this poor deluded man was a symbol for a massive cultural pattern of child abuse, Delaney turns from her earlier research on procreation and patriarchy in Turkey to the patriarch Abraham.

Part 1 prosecutes this small part of the Abraham story for its role in sponsoring all abuse of children through the ages, including sending them off to be killed in war. The logic of patriarchy, Delaney claims, is that the child should die so that the father might live. That a man killed his daughter and used Abraham as an excuse is not anomalous but the typical enactment of the cultural script created by the Akedah as "foundation story" for Western patriarchy. The story reflects and helps establish the false inference that fathers have absolute control over their children based on the false premise that the male seed is the only active agent in procreation. Where is the child's voice in the story, asks Delaney, where is the mother's voice? How can this, this patriarch, get away with slaughtering his son?

Critical to Delaney's argument is showing that the Akedah is a foundation story for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Part 2 is therefore devoted to archaeological and biblical evidence concerning child sacrifice in antiquity. Here she reaches conclusions opposite to those of Jon Levenson, whose Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son (Yale University Press, 1993) suggests that the Abraham story actually works against a pattern of child-sacrifice that was sporadically practiced even within Israel. It would seem that on prima facie evidence, Levenson would win the argument, since God stays Abraham's hand at the end and replaces Isaac with the ram for sacrifice. If the story functions etiologically, it would be most obviously read as foundational for animal rather than child sacrifice. But Delaney ends up insisting that even if Abraham did not actually kill Isaac he still was wrong for giving absolute obedience to a higher authority.

Delaney constructs her "defense" of Abraham by examining the uses made of the Akedah story by the respective religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The kindest comment to be made on this section is that as a student of religious literary traditions, Delaney proves she is mainly an anthropologist who has done field work in Turkey. She relies chiefly on secondary sources, which are of uneven quality. The main difficulty, though, is that the "cultural legacy" of the Abraham story never appears to be what Delaney has hypothesized. These traditions have done strange things, but invoking Abraham as the justification for abusing children has not been one of them. In the case of Christianity, Delaney's focus on Abraham causes her to miss the New Testament's interpretation of Jesus as the child who gives his life so that others might live, and the gospel's powerful testimony concerning the welcoming and care of children. In the case of Judaism, she disapproves of the way the Akedah functioned as the model for martyrdom for some medieval Jews and for Jews in the Holocaust, but she cannot make the case that such piety privileged parents-especially fathers-over their children. In Islam, she can find no link at all between the rich use of Abraham traditions and the social legacy of child abuse, so she must grumble in general about the privileging of males in Islamic cultures, based on the same misconceptions concerning conception that are found in the Abraham story. Plus, she dislikes monotheism in general: "Monotheism and monogenesis constitute an integrated and mutually reinforcing system. And in this system, the story of Abraham is central."

So what to do? Better biology enables us to write better stories that can support better social arrangements...and better gods, too. Just about at this point, the reader understands how everything serves the agenda announced by Delaney in her introduction, "But for those of us concerned with dismantling patriarchy, it is important to understand the power of this most patriarchal of stories." No matter that this is probably not the most patriarchal of stories (the Bible has plenty from which to choose), or that the effect of the story has not been what Delaney claims. The point is to dismantle a social system by deconstructing its supposed mythic foundations. That she has signally failed to establish either that the Akedah is anything like a "foundation story" in the three monotheistic traditions of the West or that the story functioned as warrant for the neglect and abuse of children, matters little; Delaney pushes forward.

Part 3 deals with "The Testimony of Psychoanalysis," although the reader is never told why the topic should be considered-beyond the fact that Freud is such a visible symbol of patriarchy. And as with her survey of religious traditions, Delaney is mostly disappointed. Freud never really deals with Abraham, even though Delaney thinks he should have. Her examination of Freud's "blind spot" seeks to explain why he based his monotheism on Moses and not Abraham, rather than why in the face of all the evidence to the contrary she thinks the Akedah is a "foundation story" for patriarchy. Worse, successors of Freud have amended his oversight by discussing Abraham in relation to fatherhood, but their failure is even more profound than Freud's because they either disagree with Delaney's reading of the story or they fail to criticize patriarchy.

Having failed to find either in religion or in psychoanalysis any real support for her thesis that the binding of Isaac is the root of all patriarchal evil, she resorts in her final section, "The Social Legacy," to straightforward unsubstantiated assertion: Her "purpose is not to show that religion is essentially or primarily about abuse. But it is about power and authority, the abuse of which is all too common." Delaney therefore works with the model that religiously faithful fathers ought to be willing to sacrifice their sons to God as the basis of the physical abuse of children: "the sacrifice and betrayal of children is...bound up with patriarchal authority, which in turn, is bound up with the foundation story of our culture." Not only physical abuse, of course, but also sexual abuse, poverty, and war, are to be blamed on this story. She concludes by proposing that we need a new myth in which the child is the model of faith rather than the father. She seems not to have realized that Christianity proposed precisely that with the faith of Jesus.

The Curse of Cain, Regina Schwartz's lament over biblical monotheism, is better written but not much better argued than Delaney's indictment of Abraham. As Delaney began with asking "Where was Sarah," Schwartz begins with a student's question concerning the conquest of the land by the Israelites: "What about the Canaanites?" A legitimate question, indeed, and one famously asked by James Gustafson some thirty years ago in his warning against the simplistic readings of Scripture found in some liberation theologies (see "The Place of Scripture in Christian Ethics: A Methodological Study," Interpretation 24 [1970]). Apparently unaware that anyone before her had considered that the biblical stories might contain some moral ambiguities, she pursues the troubling way in which monotheism within the Bible seems to establish identity by means of exclusion rather than by means of inclusion.

Schwartz considers in turn the invention of identity through covenants, establishing identity through possession of the land, making identity natural through kinship, dividing identity through nations, and inscribing identity through memory. In each discussion she picks out those elements in the biblical account that move in the direction of exclusion and passes over those elements that move in the direction of hospitality, peace, and mutual embrace, not to mention God's universal care for all humans. The resulting reading has a certain power, of course, as do all readings that eliminate complexity and ambiguity in service of a simple thesis. There is power as well in Schwartz's citation of the frightening ways in which just such exclusive claims continue to support the divisive and violent politics of identity. She has named something important, namely the virus of intolerance that attaches itself to some forms of monotheistic belief and that has been used to justify inhuman behavior by divine warrant.

Like Delaney, Schwartz takes a run at that famous reader of the Bible, Sigmund Freud. As Delaney thinks that a better grasp of the mechanics of reproduction could help reverse patriarchy, so Schwartz offers the insight that a premise of scarcity-in resources-underlies both monotheism and hatred, which could be turned around if humans could only develop an ethics of plenitude in its place. And as Delaney wants to scrap the Abraham story in favor of new foundation myths that are better for children, so Schwartz concludes that the Bible is simply too monotheistic for safety, and must be replaced. She ends her book this way: "When I began this project, I anticipated concluding with the injunction from Augustine to 'close the book.' For him, faith had superseded it; for me, its ancient agonistic values are far too dangerous to continue authorizing. But I have come to understand that urge in a new light. The old 'monotheistic' Book must be closed so that the new books might be fruitful and multiply. After all, that was the first commandment."

These books are written by well-placed academics: Delaney is an associate professor of anthropology at Stanford and has a divinity degree from Harvard; Schwartz is a professor of English at Northwestern and director of the Chicago Institute of Religion, Ethics, and Violence. They are published by respected university presses, and have the sort of approving comments from other academics on their covers that suggest appreciative readings. What can they tell us about the academic study of religion today?

They indicate first of all just how far from living religious traditions many academic students of religion have moved. The tone adopted by each book toward the texts studied is distant and even hostile. Neither the Bible nor the traditions deriving from the Bible appear to make any claim on the authors. They do not seek to reform elements within religious traditions that may be distorting or harmful. Rather, they seek to replace those traditions with new books and new stories. The implied readership of these books, furthermore, is also clearly not any faith community but fellow academics who already tend to share the authors' ideological predilections and social-scientific reductions.

For those familiar with the sad unwinding of the religious studies experiment in American universities over the past decade, none of this is particularly surprising. More disconcerting is the remarkable and unembarrassed ignorance of religious traditions revealed by these books. First, both authors work with a simplistic notion of how texts serve as cultural scripts within actual religious communities. They seem never to have considered the complex ways in which multiple texts work together-in combination with a variety of other practices-for identity formation, not in a linear but in a complex and dialectical way. They pose as students of religious texts yet show no awareness of how religious people actually use those texts.

Second, our authors do not find it necessary to play fair with the literary complexities of the Bible. I mean here not only theories of composition and cultural contextualization found in scholarly biblical research, but the ways in which voices within the canon are truly different. To put it simply, the "monotheism" of Isaiah is not the same as the "monotheism" of Joshua, and the "monotheism" of Paul is still something else. Schwartz objects to Northrop Frye's typological reading of the entire Bible, but she ends up being no less totalizing. She recognizes a diversity of voices, but ultimately recognizes only the one she detests; rather than enlivening those elements of the text that can generate a celebration of difference (and they are many, especially in the New Testament), she wants to start over with new stories. Delaney systematically suppresses the complexities of the Abraham story (including Sarah's sometimes ambiguous roles) in order to create her preferred cultural script.

Third, the authors show no depth of knowledge or appreciation for the astonishing history of biblical interpretation that has struggled before them with precisely the problems they have located in the text. The function of such interpretation within both Judaism and Christianity has not been to reinforce the violent tendencies of the stories, but to mitigate and transmute them. Midrash and allegory represent strategies of reading within religious traditions that seek to combine loyalty and criticism, that try to save those aspects of the text that give life while also challenging those elements that are morally questionable. Neither author shows any awareness that the theological projects of Irenaus and Origen alike were generated by the need to discover the truth God spoke within words that were all too human.

Our authors return us to the hyper-literalism of a Marcion, and for the same reason: to dismiss the morally unacceptable God thus revealed, and replace him with one better suited to their desires. What distinguishes them from Marcion is what makes them such perfect representatives of the contemporary world of academic discourse, namely their blithe assumption that religion is nothing more than a social construct and human projection, that God is a symbol infinitely malleable and manipulable, and that all religious discourse is a matter of mapping the play of human politics.

They do not appear to grasp that a scarcity of resources (Schwartz's complaint against the Bible's outlook on most things) is a brutal fact of too much human existence-both in antiquity and today-and not simply an ideological position. They do not seem to appreciate that cultures not influenced by the Bible-with "other stories" and sometimes with "many gods"-have shown themselves more patriarchal, exclusive, violent, and negligent of children than those shaped by the Bible. Most of all, their intellectual embrace is not sufficiently large to entertain the possibility that the Bible may be dealing with experiences of a reality inaccessible to social-scientific reduction, may be grappling with truths more elusive and compelling than "identity formation," may indeed be revealing a world both more capacious and gracious than that of academic utopias.

Luke Timothy Johnson's most recent book is Living Jesus: Learning the Heart of the Gospel (HarperSanFrancisco). He is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of New Testament at Emory University's Candler School of Theology.