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The Blessings of Abraham: Becoming a Zion People (Book Review)
The Blessings of Abraham: Becoming a Zion People
By E. Douglas Clark
With a foreword by Truman G. Madsen
Editor's Note: We choose books to serialize on Meridian that we think are so
refreshing, insightful and excellent that we think everyone should have the
opportunity to read them. Many books are delivered to our office —
unfortunately, way too many for us to read. However, I could not resist reading
E. Douglas Clark's The Blessings of Abraham, Becoming a Zion People. It is the
product of 35 years of research and fascination with Abraham, and is essentially
his biography and a discussion of what is entailed in creating Zion. It brought
me joy to read it. Watch for installments every Wednesday and be enthralled as
he describes the world in which Abraham was born — a world without Zion — and
then delineates Abraham's stunning and remarkable life. Maurine Proctor
Foreword
When the BYU Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies was near completion, a
discussion was held on what to name it. One proposal was Beit Abraham, meaning
“house of Abraham.”
Why so?
Because in Jerusalem all three monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and
Islam — and more inclusively still, the Latter-day Saints — identify with
Abraham. Members of each tradition trace crucial elements of their faith, their
sense of mission, their aspirations, their mode of life, and even their rituals
to him.
The name, it was thought, would suggest that the Center was focused on reconciling the family of Abraham. At the core would be the Messiah. We soon found that many segments of the religious world tend to claim Abraham unto themselves and only themselves. And those divisions run deep.
So the name idea was dropped.
Yet common roots go deeper. DNA analysis suggests that 95 percent of the present
population of the earth have a genetic connection to Abraham. He has become not
only the father of nations but the father of virtually all nations. For these
and other reasons, Abraham has been described as the most pivotal man in human
history[1]
In the Encyclopedia of Mormonism, Douglas Clark has written a concise and
coherent summary of all this. Now in lively detail he has distilled decades of
exhaustive study into this book.
The task required that he become adept in Hebrew and related languages, compass
the entire spectrum of documents, some only recently recovered, including
canonical books, legends, inscriptions, iconography, and apocryphal and
pseudepigraphal works. And much else. At the heart of his study are
much-neglected insights in the Book of Abraham, the Doctrine and Covenants, and
the teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith.
There is a Biblical and Talmudic admonition never to speak of God as “the God of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” But rather as “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac,
and the God of Jacob” — thus to underline that each patriarch and matriarch came
directly to God. Each found him in the same way and at the same sacrificial
cost.
Our own Book of Abraham describes how Abraham’s eyes were opened to wondrous
visions of the cosmos and his place in it. He was touched by the hand of God.
And then he began to see.
Then what superlative promises and fulfillments came to him and to his? And how
do they relate to our destiny in the cause of Christ, which will culminate in
the redemption of Zion?
This book is a definitive answer. It enables one to see, with 20-20 clarity, the
legacy of Abraham and Sarah and what it means — or can mean — to all the human
family. Read on.
Truman G. Madsen
Preface
One cannot grow up in the Church, attending seminary and Sunday school, without
learning something about the greatness of Abraham. For me, however, he seemed
merely one of many such prophets and patriarchs of ages past — until one day as
a senior in high school I opened our monthly Church magazine and began to read
an article by Dr. Hugh Nibley.
The subject was Abraham, whose life was depicted from numerous ancient
traditions and sources of which I had never heard. I still cannot adequately
express what I experienced, except to say that as I read, I felt irresistibly
drawn to this uniquely remarkable man and felt utterly compelled to find out
everything possible about him.
This book, completed some thirty-five years later, is the result.
The years following high school afforded me increasing opportunities to learn of
the great Patriarch. As a student at Brigham Young University, I sat on the
front row of Dr. Nibley’s Pearl of Great Price class, attended all his lectures
on campus, collected all his publications, asked him questions about Abraham,
and bought his book Abraham in Egypt the day it first appeared in the campus
bookstore. Years later I felt honored to be asked to write the foreword to the
expanded edition of that book.
Other BYU professors also taught me about Abraham — men like Dr. Truman Madsen,
whose stories in our Book of Mormon class about his tour of the Holy Land with
President Hugh B. Brown remain vivid in my memory. But it was a research paper
assignment in an Old Testament class that allowed me to discover for myself some
of the sources that Nibley had quoted. For a week I practically lived in the
library, missing all my classes while mining newly found treasures telling of
Abraham.
So why hadn’t someone, I began to ask myself, woven all this information into a
comprehensive biography? I was sure that such a book must have been written, and
I continued to search for it long after I completed my research paper. Only when
I concluded that the book did not exist did I determine to try and write it
myself.
Doors seemed to open as I pursued the project. During law school at BYU,
Professor John (“Jack”) Welch’s biblical law seminar afforded me an opportunity
to plumb the depths of the story of Isaac’s offering in ways I had not done
before. Since then I have been a beneficiary of Jack’s friendship and
significant scholarly contributions.
It was also during law school that I came to feel stymied because I could not
read the Genesis story of Abraham in its original Hebrew. Weeks later in a
casual conversation with a friend, I happened to learn of a beginning Hebrew
seminar to be taught on campus the following summer by David Noel Freedman,
renowned biblical scholar and editor-in-chief of Doubleday’s prestigious Anchor
Bible series. I immediately registered for one of the few remaining slots.
On the first day of class, Dr. Freedman announced that he had chosen Genesis 22,
the story of Abraham’s offering of Isaac, as the text from which to teach us
Hebrew.
Our daily classes lasted all morning, and in the afternoons Dr. Freedman kept
visiting hours, of which I took full advantage. To my surprise, I was usually
the only one there, asking a question after question in what turned into
personal tutoring sessions on Abraham by Dr. Freedman. The next summer I was
fortunate to be a part of his follow-up course.
From Dr. Freedman I learned of the Society of Biblical Literature and its annual
meeting, a four-day event held every November that attracts thousands of
biblical scholars who present papers, exchange ideas, and discuss research. My
attendance at these meetings over the next two decades provided significant
opportunities to learn from numerous scholars.
Those same years saw an unprecedented emergence of ancient Abrahamic texts that
had been lost or forgotten for many centuries. Much of this material is part of
that body of Bible-related literature known as the pseudepigrapha — the word
literally means “false writings” or “writings with false superscriptions” — so
called because it is generally assumed that these texts could not possibly have
been written by the purported authors, namely prophets and patriarchs going all
the way back to Abraham and Enoch and even Adam. We Latter-day Saints, with our
restored scriptures containing actual words of those very men, have a different
view of what is possible.
While some of those recently emerged ancient texts have been available for a
century or more, many more became available for the first time in the 1980s,
with the publication of a massive two-volume set edited by James H. Charlesworth
of Princeton. A few years later, thanks to an aggressive media campaign waged by
Hershel Shanks, editor of Biblical Archeology Review, the remaining unreleased
Dead Sea Scrolls, first discovered in the late 1940s, were finally made
available. Meanwhile, other ancient documents and traditions have continued to
come to light in what might well be called an explosion of biblical texts,
greatly expanding our knowledge of the Abraham story. It was an unusually
propitious time to be seeking information about him.
During my initial years of law practice in Salt Lake City, I was fortunate to
take an evening Hebrew class from John Tvedtnes, and then arranged for private
tutoring by him in the Abraham portion of the Hebrew Bible. In the ensuing
years, John has magnanimously shared from his extensive knowledge, answering
numerous questions I have posed to him about Abraham and other subjects.
I was also fortunate to be part of a guest seminar taught at BYU by visiting
lecturer Rabbi Aron Siegman, who read the book of Genesis with us in Hebrew and
shared with us his lifetime of rabbinical learning. He kindly discussed with me
various aspects of the Abraham story and deepened my understanding of the rich
rabbinical heritage that preserved so much of that story.
As a young lawyer, I participated in a two-week legal study tour of the Soviet
Union. There I saw what I still believe to be the greatest work of Abrahamic art
ever produced. It is Rembrandt’s immortal masterpiece of Abraham’s sacrifice of
Isaac, and it hangs in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg (called Leningrad when I
was there). The cover of this book is adorned by Abraham’s face from that
painting. On the day I first saw it, I wrote the following in my journal.
In late afternoon I went into the Hermitage and, after a long and brisk walk,
guided by the responses to my repeated question “Where’s Rembrandt?,” my own
eyes beheld Rembrandt’s beautiful original canvas The Sacrifice of Abraham. I
was awed, and remained there for approximately an hour as I studied the painting
intensely and reflected on this most graphic and moving depiction. The areas of
greatest light on the canvas are Abraham’s face and Isaac’s youthful body. The
knife is in midair, just dropped from Abraham’s strong hand. Abraham’s face, and
particularly the eyes, tell the real story. His brow is wrinkled with intensity.
Tears are visible. But the eyes show a resolute submission, a look of having
already made the sacrifice. They represent resignation to and trust in the
wisdom of Him who ordered the deed; they show a total lack of understanding of
why the deed is necessary, combined with a total resolve to do it; they reveal
ultimate obedience, submission; and startled by the voice from heaven, Abraham
appears almost in a trance, but ever ready to hear and obey. My eyes were fixed
on his eyes for a long while as I tried to contemplate the greatness of the soul
of Abraham. My soul was touched, as I realized that I am a descendant of these
men, inheritor, through faithfulness, of the blessings of Abraham. I also
contemplated the fact that as Abraham did not withhold his son, so God did not
withhold a later Son of both Abraham and God so that all of God’s children might
be blessed. Standing before that work of art, I vowed to God to finish my book.
Back home as I worked toward my goal, I came to believe that there were
important things about Abraham I would not understand until I walked where he
had walked. After substantial planning, I traveled for a month to the
Mediterranean and the Middle East, where I retraced Abraham’s route in the
spring of 1987, fortuitously just months before the Intifada closed much of the
West Bank that contains key Abrahamic sites.
My journey began with a flight from Salt Lake to New York, and then to Rome,
where I walked through the Christian catacombs and saw the frescoes of the Bible
stories, including the sacrifice of Isaac. Athens was my next stop, where I
visited the Agora, where the Apostle Paul had preached the gospel, as he said,
in fulfillment of God’s covenant to Abraham.
Continuing to Istanbul, I encountered a gracious university professor who
liberally imparted from his wealth of knowledge about the area of Urfa (or
SanliUrfa, “famous Urfa”), Turkey — my destination as the probable place of
Abraham’s birth and then generously shared a disproportionate share of his
family’s evening meal. From Istanbul I flew west to Ankara, and from there still
west to Diyarbakir, where I hired a taxi for the long ride to Urfa. When I
explained to the Kurdish driver that I was there to explore the route of
Abraham, or Ibrahim, he corrected me with a smile: “Ibrahim Khalil,” he
emphasized — “Abraham the Friend.” The ancient Patriarch’s friendship with the
Almighty is still a living reality for many of his descendants.
In fact, their friendship seemed to shelter me as I traveled through the land of
our mutual forefather, the land “whose hills and valleys echo with the footsteps
of the Patriarchs.” [2] For two days in Urfa and Haran a young Turkish guide
cheerfully guided me with no expectation of reward, recounting the local
traditions about the birth and early life of the prophet Abraham.
When I left Turkey for Syria, a fellow traveler from Lybia took it upon himself
to watch over me and assure my safety as he included me in his small circle of
travelers, which included a student from Lebanon and a sheik from Saudi Arabia.
Not long before, the United States had bombed Libya, but my Libyan friend
assured me earnestly: “Reagan, Qaddafi — enemies. You, me — friends.” It seemed
remarkable that traveling in Arab lands, where many Americans feared to tread, I
felt shielded by the legendary Muslim hospitality that remains part of the
living heritage of Abraham.
In Egypt I joined a BYU travel study group for an unforgettable tour of Giza,
Luxor, and the Valley of the Kings, where our Book of Abraham, as Parley Pratt
described, “slumbered in the bosom of the dead” for over three millennia, “in
the sacred archives of Egypt’s moldering ruins.”<[3] Slumbering with it in the
Valley of the Kings were many of the once mighty pharaohs who had falsely
claimed the patriarchal authority possessed by Abraham.
And as Abraham came out of Egypt to Canaan, so did we. Dann and Shirley Hone
graciously put me up in their Jerusalem home and made sure that I got to see
every place I desired. I walked around one of Abraham’s wells near Beersheba;
stood between Bethel and Ai, where Abraham had camped; visited Nablus near where
Abraham may have met Melchizedek; looked with wonder on the great stone in
Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock, where Abraham nearly offered his son; and went to
Hebron, where Abraham entertained the three mysterious strangers and where he
was later buried. Even more memorable were my visits to the places where
Abraham’s preeminent Descendant, the Son of God himself, walked in the flesh,
worked his miracles, wrought the Atonement, and rose from the dead — all in
fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant.
Not long after returning home, I was asked to write the article on Abraham for
the Encyclopedia of Mormonism, a task that required me to stop and crystallize
what I had learned about the great Patriarch so far. My expert editor, Dr. Kent
Brown of BYU, helped immensely in compressing what I wanted to say into the
short space allotted.
As I had left Israel, I was told that visiting Jerusalem would change my life
forever. It did, for I soon met the wonderful woman who would become my wife,
Mila. We were married in the Salt Lake Temple, where I heard the same phrase
that had been spoken many years earlier by an inspired patriarch: “the blessings
of Abraham.”
Within a couple of years, our growing family moved to Mesa, Arizona, settling in
a family neighborhood that at first seemed nothing out of the ordinary. We soon
discovered, however, that we had landed among a group of extraordinary saints
whose lives were Abrahamic in every important way. They were building Zion by
raising a righteous posterity, magnifying their callings, serving in the temple,
teaching the gospel, and graciously reaching out in love to bless mankind. I
found that I was learning things about Abraham and Sarah that I could not learn
in books.
Perhaps it was this experiential convergence of the themes of Zion and Abraham
that prepared me to discover a new dimension to the Abraham story that I had
somehow missed. One day I was reading for the first time a New Testament
apocryphal text called the Revelation of Stephen, which included Stephen’s
description of the Savior’s Second Coming. It was as if I were hearing a
familiar melody, but one that I could not quite recognize, and my mind raced to
grasp it.
It took a few minutes before it dawned on me that I was hearing echoes of the
Book of Abraham passage (which is much more detailed than the corresponding
biblical passage) in which the Lord covenants with Abraham and calls him to go
forth to bless the world (Abr. 2:6–11). The parallels between the two passages
seemed so striking as to defy coincidence. For the first time, I considered the
possibility that the Lord’s covenant to Abraham to begin his momentous mission
may have intentionally been couched in language looking forward to the
latter-day fulfillment of that covenant. The beginning of the process
encompassed the end.
“I thought I knew this story” [4] admitted one modern writer of his “aha”
experience with the Abraham story, and so it happened with me as I began to see
things I had never noticed in the story I thought I knew so well. What I came to
see was not only a closer connection between Abraham and the latter-day Zion
than I had imagined, but also that Abraham’s mission and accomplishments were in
fact all about Zion. More than merely one additional fact or source among so
many, this was proving to be a key to understanding Abraham, the unifying theme
running throughout his long and eventful life. It is not for nothing that
Isaiah’s words — “great words,” the Savior called them — urging the righteous to
look to Abraham, also tell why we should do so: “For the Lord shall comfort
Zion.” Abraham provides the pattern for his posterity to build Zion.
The global significance of the Abrahamic covenant in our day has come home to me
in an expanded way in the last several years in my work for a pro-family
organization accredited in the United Nations. Attending meetings in New York
and various parts of the world, I have felt continually awed to see the Kingdom
of God rolling forth in direct fulfillment of God’s covenant with Abraham to
bless all nations. This is the day to which Abraham and numerous other prophets
looked forward with joy, explained the Prophet Joseph, and it is our privilege
to participate in the fulfillment of the covenant to Abraham as we extend his
blessings to our brothers and sisters across the globe.
In reconstructing the life of Abraham and its significance, I begin with the
certainties known to us through the Restoration, with its revelations and
restored scripture about Abraham. “Rich treasures” [5] is what Wilford Woodruff
called these, and with good reason, for besides their striking corroboration by
the voluminous ancient texts that have come to light since, their most important
information and insights remain unmatched among any of those additional texts.
What these sources do offer is rich supporting detail consistent with the
Restoration’s portrait of Abraham. To the extent feasible, I have tried to let
the sources speak in their own voice.
That these texts hail from such a diversity of places and times is, I have come
to believe, a stunning reflection of the promise made to Abraham that through
him and his posterity, all nations would be blessed. His admiring descendants
through the ages and around the globe carefully preserved their traditions about
him. And despite the inevitable speculations and embellishments that accrued
along the way, the common core remains a remarkable witness to the antiquity and
authenticity of those traditions. It was Nibley who observed that “after viewing
many texts from many times and places, all telling the same story, one emerges
with the conviction that there was indeed one Abraham story.” [6]
And what a story! Studying the life of Abraham is eye-opening, exhilarating, and
ultimately transforming. One begins to see what matters and what the Lord cares
about. One begins also to appreciate as never before the majesty and wisdom of
God’s great plan, at the center of which is the life and atoning sacrifice of
Abraham’s unique Descendant, Jesus the Christ, as so poignantly foreshadowed by
Abraham.
The conclusions reached in the book are mine, and do not necessarily reflect the
position or belief of any other person or of the publisher or of The Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I alone accept full responsibility for any
errors. I also look forward to what I am convinced will be a continuing
crescendo of yet additional Abrahamic texts brought forth from antiquity to tell
us more about the man whose works we are commanded to do.
Meanwhile, as his descendants and heirs to his blessings, we can indeed rise up
and bless him as our forefather as we follow his lead in seeking to bring forth
and establish the cause of Zion, offering to all the blessings of Abraham made
available through his Descendant and God’s Beloved Son, Jesus the Christ.
Notes to Foreword
[1] .So writes Middle East historian Cyrus Gordon.
Notes to Preface
[2]. Scherman and Zlotowitz, Bereishis: Genesis 1(a):402
3] Parley P. Pratt, “Editorial Remarks,” Millennial Star 3/4 (August 1842): 70.
[4]. James Carroll, “The Story of Abraham,” in Rosenberg, Genesis: As It Is
Written, 71.
[5] . Kenney, Wilford Woodruff’s Journal 2:155.
[6] . Nibley, Abraham in Egypt, 30.