The Story of Abraham and Family Trauma Part 1

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Year “A” of the Revised Common Lectionary offers worshippers the chance to re-visit the stories of Abraham and the next three generations of his descendants These texts from the Book of Genesis are shared with our Jewish friends, as well, and some people – Christians and Jews alike, find these texts traumatizing. To some extent, they are. However, the stories, like that of Abraham and his descendants, enable us in our modern times to understand that stories of family dysfunction are not at all new. These stories give us much with which to wrestle with as we learn and ponder them anew. 

When Abraham settled in Canaan, God entered into a covenant with Abraham and promised him more descendants than the stars in the sky and the sands on the shore (Genesis 15). There was just one problem: Abraham’s wife, Sarah, appeared to be barren. They were advancing in years, and Sarah had not conceived and borne a child. 

It was probably good that Sarah didn’t conceive early in their marriage: Twice (Genesis 12 and Genesis 20), Abraham passed Sarah off to foreign kings as his sister, so that Abraham would not be harmed because he was traveling with his beautiful wife. Twice, these foreign kings took the beautiful Sarah, whom they believed to be Abraham’s sister, for themselves – for a time, that is, until their households were punished because of their relationships with Sarah. Genesis reveals quite a bit about Sarah and her opinions (She is far from silent!), but readers are not told how Sarah reacted to having been placed in the hands of Pharaoh and King Abimelech. Maybe she expected to have to commit herself to whatever she needed to do to keep Abraham safe. Maybe she felt betrayed, violated, and ashamed. Maybe she wondered if her inability to conceive might have resulted from her having been taken as the “wife” of other men. 

When Sarah and Abraham continued on their way, and still no children had been born to them despite God’s promise of descendants, Sarah took matters into her own hands, offering up her Egyptian slave woman, Hagar, to Abraham so that he might have children through her. Hagar conceived and bore Abraham a son, named Ishmael (Genesis 16). But as Genesis also teaches us, humankind really hasn’t changed much over the ages, and as we might imagine, conflict quickly arises between Sarah and Hagar. Ultimately, Sarah – at age 90 – does indeed bear a child of her own, who is named Isaac. With Hagar and Ishmael’s “usefulness” having ended, Sarah demands that Abraham remove them from the encampment (Genesis 21). And, so, the last encounter recorded in Genesis between Abraham and his firstborn son, Ishmael, takes place on the fateful day that Abraham takes Ishmael and Hagar and leaves them in the desert, with a single skin of water, ostensibly to die. Ishmael is a young teen by this point – old enough to understand, and certainly to be scarred by, the fate to which his father is leaving him and his mother.  

All won’t go smoothly for Isaac, either: We are told in Genesis 22 that God tested Abraham in asking that Isaac be sacrificed. The last encounter between Abraham and Isaac recorded in Genesis takes place when Abraham bound Isaac on the altar, preparing to sacrifice him to God. For all of the arguments that Abraham had previously given God for sparing the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah when God is preparing to destroy them, Abraham met God’s request to sacrifice Isaac with seemingly little to no resistance.  

Hebrews 11:17-19 extols Abraham for having trusted in God when he prepared to sacrifice Isaac. Perhaps that is true. Perhaps a broken Abraham wonders the price that he must pay for what he has done to Ishmael and Hagar. However Abraham has received this request from God, we fail to ask how Isaac has been scarred and traumatized by this episode. Isaac is old enough to understand that there is to be a sacrifice – and even asks Abraham about the lamb for the sacrifice. Does he truly understand when he is bound and tied that he is the intended sacrifice – until, that is, God steps in and provides a ram? What does Isaac tell Sarah when they return home? How does a mother begin to understand a husband’s need to follow a command from God to sacrifice a child for whom she’d waited 90 years? 

There are no further scenes of Abraham together with his family after the sacrifice. Sarah leaves Abraham’s encampment, and dies in another land, where Abraham purchases land for a burial place. Isaac settles in another land, as well. 

The suffering doesn’t end with Isaac’s near-death experience; it continues through at least three generations. 

Isaac married his kinswoman, Rebekah, who also struggled to conceive. When she finally became pregnant, she gave birth to twins who emerged from her womb embroiled in their own battle. The older twin, Esau, grew up to be an outdoorsy hunter and gatherer. The younger twin, Jacob, received his name because he literally was born holding on to Esau’s heel. Jacob’s envy of his brother as heir would ultimately tear apart their family, when Jacob (at his mother’s urging) tricked a then-infirm Isaac and cheated his older brother, Esau, of his blessing and birthright.  

Jacob made a life for himself apart from Esau, and settled with his mother’s brother, Laban. Believing that he had married his true love, Laban’s younger daughter, Rachel, he had been tricked by his uncle, and had married older sister, Leah, instead (“This is not done in our country – giving the younger before the firstborn.” Genesis 29:26). Although Leah bore several sons for Jacob, his favorite son was Rachel’s firstborn, a son named Joseph. Joseph became the target of his older brothers’ jealousy and rage – and while the older brothers plotted to kill Joseph, they ultimately chose to sell him into slavery, pocketing twenty silver coins for him, and representing to their father that he had been killed by wild animals (Genesis 37:22-34). Jacob, too, would know separation from the son he loved. 

All was not peaceful or happy among Abraham and his descendants. All is not happy in many families. If we tend to feel alone in family dysfunction, we remember that even the family of our ancestor most chosen and loved by God, Abraham, struggled. Faith persisted, even amid that struggle.