Literary Archaeology at the Temple Mount: Recovering the Comic Version of the Sacrifice of Isaac

In what follows I will try to offer a literary alternative to the murderous, supersessionist versions of the story that animates the site. The textual and the physical sites that appear so recalcitrant and exclusive are actually interwoven, more elastic and artificially constructed than they appear in contemporary theological or political discourse. So if we can solve the textual conundrum, we may be able to resolve the conflict on the ground.

The site of revelation and sacrifice begins in the Hebrew Bible with the vague injunction to Abraham in Genesis 22.2 to “go forth to the land of Moriah and offer [Isaac] up as a burnt offering on one of the mountains which I shall say to you.”⁵ It then moves through a number of extemporaneous altars and dramatic encounters to a movable ark accompanying a people in the wilderness and, finally, to one fixed shrine in Jerusalem. But even after King David has consolidated his dominion over Jerusalem and established its status as sacred center by bringing the Ark of the Covenant to the city, and even as his son Solomon commences building a “house” for the Lord, there remains some ambivalence about confining the divine into one physical space. It emerges that the holiest place in Judaism is not the dwelling place of the deity but the site where the human voice can call to, can name, can invoke, the deity. God repeatedly refers to “this house, which is called by my name,” not the place where God dwells (1 Kings 8.15–19; Jer. 7.11, 13–14).⁶

That is, this bold monotheistic move, by which the presence of the divine is established, is one of appellation, a human speech act—undermined periodically, however, when people attempt to reify the desire to draw near to, to possess, or to merge with the divine.⁷ The seesaw between unmediated presence and forms of mediation—calling, naming, imagining—will continue to haunt and shape Judaism from its inception in ancient Hebrew impulses to the present.⁸ After the destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians in the sixth century BCE, before the dust had settled on its ruins, before physical reconstruction had commenced under the new Persian regime, it was rebuilt as a vision or figment of the imagination—in the prophecies of both Ezekiel and Zachariah.⁹

But the pendulum continues to swing. The Hebrew Bible, which opened in Genesis with a vague designation of “one of the mountains [in the land of Moriah],” concludes with a reference in 2 Chronicles to Solomon’s building the “house of the Lord” on “Mount Moriah, where the Lord appeared to David his father” (3.1). And thus the mountain has been known ever since: all the shrines and hills consolidated into one spot,¹⁰ all the holiness and all the squabbling stories and stones, like the squabbling brothers, concentrated in a few dozen acres.¹¹

My argument is that the symbolic status of the city—a wandering signifier—was born at the same time as the material edifices. And that the topocentric need for what Mircea Eliade would have called an axis mundi continues to compete with more spacious, inclusive, and self-conscious linguistic and ethical flexibilities hidden in plain view in the constitutive text.

I entitled my remarks “Literary Archaeology at the Temple Mount.” Archaeologists tend to find what they are looking for, and current archaeology of the area around the Temple Mount is governed by those who discard evidence in which they are not invested. Although physical remains of the reign of David are virtually nonexistent, Elad, the right-wing Israeli group in charge of much of the reconstruction of the so-called City of David, creates what is meant to be an authentic evocation of the past through visual and textual means; these architectural “reconstructions” and “archaic” landscapes succeed in eradicating or occluding almost all traces of Islam or Arabs, past or present.¹²

Literary archaeology has the advantage of keeping your hands clean, even while you are paging through a text that is thousands of years old. It can, like later appropriations in the midrash and in other monotheistic traditions, be twisted or squeezed to yield various versions and meanings, but the text itself is always there to be rediscovered. A literal reading of the story will highlight certain structural and narrative quirks that determine the genre and contain the secret of the akeda.

Genesis 22 begins very theatrically, like the Book of Job: “And it happened after these things that God tested Abraham.” This is a wink behind Abe’s back to the audience, who is given some assurance that the old man will pass the test. In what follows we may be forgiven if we forget the stage wink as we get caught up in the unfolding tragedy. J. William Whedbee, in his study The Bible and the Comic Vision, follows Northrop Frye in calling the U-shaped plot pattern the telltale curve of the comic. According to Frye, this pattern entails “action sinking into deep and often potentially tragic complications, and then suddenly turning upward into a happy ending” (qtd. in Whedbee 7).¹³ Disaster averted at the last minute through divine intervention is the Hebrew version of deus ex machina.

The structural seemingly needs no elaboration. We all know that Genesis 22 ends with Isaac’s release, yet we repeatedly repress that knowledge so that Isaac can continue to animate our tragic imagination. From the description of Isaac’s “death” and “resurrection” in the midrash¹⁴ through nearly every modern Israeli version—and through all its appropriations in Christian iconography—the akeda is apprehended as an accomplished sacrifice. In fact, the occlusion of the happy ending in Genesis 22 is fundamental to the evolution of the genre of tragedy as sacrifice; safeguarding the place of the sacrificed son, the pharmakos—Isaac or Jesus—is tantamount to safeguarding the very “idea of the tragic,” as Terry Eagleton argues in Sweet Violence. So unearthing the comic structure in the place of ultimate sacrifice becomes a subversive act.

The other element that signals the comic in this narrative cycle is rhetorical or linguistic: the repetitions and wordplays that create literary patterns in the Bible. Genesis 17.17 is the first time the word z-h-k (“to laugh”) is introduced in the six chapters that surround the story of the akeda, when God tells Abraham that his wife, Sarah, will bear a child: “And Abraham flung himself on his face and he laughed [va-yitzhak], saying to himself, ‘To a hundred-year-old will a child be born, will ninety-year-old Sarah give birth?’” In the commentary to his translation of Genesis, Robert Alter notes that “in the subsequent chapters, the narrative will ring the changes on this Hebrew verb, the meanings of which include joyous laughter, bitter laughter, mockery, and sexual dalliance” (83). In short, all the elements of the comic genre. Actually, some version of the word z-h-k appears twenty times in these chapters. Everyone laughs—Abraham, Sarah, Ishmael, and, as a capstone, laughter is embedded in Isaac’s very name, Yitzhak, which means “he will laugh.”

In this most serious of texts the comic muscle is flexed, then, in its every permutation.¹⁵ I will illustrate with only one more passage, which replicates Abraham’s response—this time as slapstick or shtick. When Sarah, who is listening at the tent entrance, hears the annunciation given again to her husband, she repeats Abraham’s response: “So Sarah laughed inwardly, saying, ‘After being shriveled, shall I have pleasure, and my husband is old?’ Then the Lord says to Abraham, ‘Why is it that Sarah laughed [lama ze tzahakah Sara], saying, ‘Shall I give birth, old as I am?’ Is anything beyond the LORD?’. . . And Sarah dissembled, saying, ‘I did not laugh [lo tzahakti],’ for she was afraid. And He said, ‘Yes, you did laugh [lo ki tzahakt]’” (Gen. 18.12–15).

Although one can really ham this passage up, in the manner of domestic farce,¹⁶ something very consequential is transpiring here. I see this as the beginning of the Jewish version of the Divine Comedy¹⁷ as it is passed down from the biblical narrative in Genesis to Philip Roth’s story “Conversion of the Jews.” The exchange manifested hilariously in Sarah’s incredulous laughter, and God’s put-down, actually points to a disparity that will remain fundamental to the Jewish conception of the comic: despite the miracles that are regularly performed throughout the five books of Moses, especially in Genesis and Exodus, there is a healthy Jewish suspicion about any supernatural intervention that disrupts the normal processes of nature. God may be all-powerful, but parturition on the part of a ninety-year-old woman raises the same skepticism as Immaculate Conception will over a thousand years later.

Nevertheless, the laughter intensifies, darkens, and then fades as the story proceeds. After the twenty wordplays on his name, Isaac’s laughter disappears altogether, as if his near-death experience effaced whatever good humor he had.¹⁸ Posttraumatic stress disorder is, after all, a far more powerful reflex than humor.

But one can conclude from the convoluted ways in which the biblical story plays out here, and in future histories,¹⁹ that the very essence of Yitzhak’s name is manifest in the test that Abraham, and his descendants, actually failed: what was at stake was belief in a God who would desire child sacrifice, or for that matter, any human sacrifice. No, the story states simply, God—the tarrying deus ex machina—would actually prefer the comic version of human history and human-divine relations. Der Mensch tracht, und Gott lacht (man proposes, God disposes [literally, man schemes, God laughs]).

In other words, like the messianic faith in Judaism that posits the inevitability of salvation but also its endless deferral, this constitutive story authorizes the Jewish comedy.²⁰ But today in the Holy Land, where hard-won lessons have again been superseded by sacred temptations and messianic impatience, we need something more radical. The comedy I am endorsing makes more room for human intervention. Grounded in faith but driven by human agency, it has been most powerfully articulated in the bloody twentieth century in the work of Franz Kafka and the ethics of Jacques Derrida. Here is a taste of Kafka’s Abraham:

I would conceive of another Abraham for myself—he certainly would have never gotten to be a patriarch or even an old-clothes dealer—who was prepared to satisfy the demand for a sacrifice immediately . . . but was unable to bring it off because he could not get away, being indispensable; the household needed him, there was perpetually something or other to put in order, the house was never ready. . . . (172)²¹

Kafka’s Abraham, humbly anti-Kierkegaardian, is the ultimate comic figure, one who cannot obey the call-from-without because he is too embedded and obligated in this world.

The problem is that the “event” of the akeda, enshrined as memory, is what leads us, again and again, to the suspension of ethical obligation and the comic point of view in favor of the tragic-sacrificial mind-set. “Memory serves tragedy,” writes Carey Perloff in the October 2014 issue of PMLA, devoted to tragedy: “In the Sophoclean universe, to hold the memory of an injustice in one’s ongoing consciousness is a heroic act. In today’s world, it can be a form of psychosis” (833).²²

The “sacrifice” of Isaac moves, then, from a remembered “event” to an existential posture. Psychotic memory abolishes the wedge that distance and deferral provided. “[The] secret of the sacrifice of Isaac,” Derrida tells us, is the “space separating or associating the fire of the family hearth and the fire of the sacrificial holocaust” (88). (The “whole-burnt offering” that Abraham was to offer in the form of his son is called olah in Hebrew—holocaustum in the Latin Vulgate.) Negotiating that space, between the family hearth—the Kafka/Derrida quotidian—and the fire of the sacrifice, is, then, the forgotten secret.

In modern Israel and Palestine, that secret has undergone different iterations and subversions. In the early prestate Jewish community referred to in Zionist memory as the Yishuv, the Temple Mount had more or less the same status in Jewish imagination as it had in the diaspora—although in Jerusalem much of the tension in the 1920s between Muslims and Jews centered on the Wailing Wall, or Al Buraq, and the Temple Mount, or Haram al Sharif.²³ The folk art of the period speaks volumes. Consider, for example, a Rosh Hashanah (New Year’s) greeting from 1925 by the craftsman Moshe Mizrahi (fig. 1).²⁴

The iconography is layered and eclectic, representing a popular concatenation of visions for the future. The flag on the top of a somewhat stylized Dome of the Rock says, “mekom ha-mikdash,” or “place of the Temple.” There are a number of biblical verses, including a reference to the akeda and the priestly blessing. There are doves of peace with greetings in their beaks. But the most interesting element is the barely decipherable writing on the mosque meant, presumably, to be the place holder for the Temple. The passage is from Isaiah’s eschatological projections—when God, the speaker, “will bring them to My holy mountain and make them joyful in My house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and their sacrifices shall be accepted on My altar; for My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the peoples” (Isa. 56.7). The reference is to “all the peoples” who accept God’s dominion in the end of days, but the phrase “all the peoples [or nations]” doesn’t appear in the inscription on this card. Naturally, the Hebrew reference to sacrifices and burnt offerings was not exactly pleasing to the Muslims whose Koranic inscriptions it supplants. Although in the ongoing conflict over the Temple Mount this image and others like it enraged the Muslim community—and, as Hillel Cohen shows in his recent study, this kind of supersessionist ambition actually contributed to the riots of 1929 (106–96)—one can also see such acts as at least on some level evoking an “end of days” scenario in which all competing religious visions will be reconciled.²⁵

Because this site was occluded from view and inaccessible to Israelis, because there really was space between the family hearth and the fire of the sacrifice, the Temple Mount was overshadowed by other physical shrines that constituted the “official” Israeli landscape after the establishment of the state in 1948: Yad Vashem and Mount Herzl as memorial sites, the Knesset as the site of modern Jewish sovereignty, and the Israel Museum as a shrine to ancient and modern art.²⁶ Since the Israeli victory of 1967, however, as messianic fervor has grown, all memorial and sacramental activity has converged on the Wailing Wall, with the Temple Mount as site of ultimate aspiration. Along with our loss of boundaries, that is, there has also been the loss of space between us and the sacred center—and, crucially, the loss of our sense of humor.

I suggest, then, an alternative that has always been there, that is consistent with a literal, even “fundamentalist” reading of Genesis 17–22 and of the memory site it animates: a spacious, comic negotiation between the material and the divine, with faith in, but without the hope of, final resolution.

In a speech before the United States Congress in 1994, Jordan’s King Hussein declared, “My religious faith demands that sovereignty over the holy places in Jerusalem reside with God and God alone . . .” (qtd. in Molinaro 17).²⁷ The smiles I imagine on congress members’ faces at the king’s appeal to divine intervention to pacify the squabbling sons of Abraham are the rare signs of our stubborn faith—tested regularly by events on the ground—that politics, like poetry, can be a site where memory yields to magic and comedy defeats tragedy.