The Will of the Fathers

Jenny Diski

• Abraham on Trial: The Social Legacy of the Biblical Myth by Carol Delaney
  Princeton, 333 pp, £19.95, December 1998, ISBN 0 691 05985 3

To accuse the book of Genesis of being patriarchal is like complaining that cats throw up fur-balls, or dogs sniff each other’s bottoms. It’s not pleasant, but that’s cats and dogs for you. On the other hand, you can choose not to have a cat or dog, whereas, says Carol Delaney, Genesis we’re lumbered with, deep in our psyche and social structure. Therefore we need ‘a new moral vision, a new myth to live by’. (This is to accept that we are helpless victims rather than interpreters of myth, and that our consciousness is entirely conditioned by it, which is a bleak view of humanity’s capacity for analytical thought, and an even bleaker view of the consequences of feminist criticism of patriarchal stories.) However, she continues, ‘I cannot provide such a myth – no one person can do that,’ and so her book is not taken up with offering new gender-free myths to live by, but with a surprised and outraged analysis of the patriarchal assumptions in the story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac. Her surprise is somewhat surprising. When Delaney declares that she has discovered ‘sexist presumptions’ in Luther’s understanding of the Scriptures, adding, ‘Nor does he ask what right Abraham had to involve other people in such a unilateral decision’, and announces that she believes that the story of the binding of Isaac ‘represents the construction, establishment and naturalisation of sex role differences [her italics]’ you can only shake your head and murmur: ‘Well, yes, and the Pope’s a Catholic.’