DAY 7
Genesis 18 Abraham Bargains with God Hospitality to a chance guest is a pressing duty in a nomadic society. I have myself changed an interrogation at the wrong end of an Israeli gun-barrel into a friendly chat by invoking hospitality. So Abraham warmly welcomes his guest – or is it three guests? The numbers, shimmering between one and three, have led ancient commentators to see this as an intimation of the Trinity. And in these ancient stories it remains unclear whether the Angel of the Lord is God himself or not. In return Abraham is promised a son, despite Sarah’s inopportune laugh as she listens from behind the tent-flap. She does not improve the situation with her bare-faced denial of the truth. The splat is in fact a word-play on the name ‘Isaac’, which means ‘laugh’, ‘smile’ or ‘joke’; it recurs in 21:9, when Ishmael is joking with Isaac. Then after the ample meal of a calf – a lamb or a kid would surely have sufficed – the bargaining begins over Sodom and Abraham’s nephew, Lot. It is a typical oriental process of bargaining, conducted, like any good bargain, with exaggerated courtesy. It begins with Abraham coolly accusing God of injustice. Then as Abraham’s demands become more and more preposterous, so his flattery becomes more and more extreme. His mathematics, too, are outrageous: in reducing the stake from fifty to forty-five he even has the cheek to suggest that God is proposing to destroy the city ‘because of five’. Such bargaining is an art-form and one feels that God must have enjoyed the competition too, and even the daring familiarity! It is worth mentioning that the sin which eventually sparks the destruction of Sodom is not necessarily focused on the issue of homosexuality. It may also be the abuse of hospitality, which is certainly the sin in the closely similar story in Judges 19:22-25. Question: Is there any room for humour in God?
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b. Year with the Bible, A.indd 15
08/11/2019 16:13