Sacrifice and Natality: Surrogacy Structures

2.1 Aqerah/Akedah: Sacrifice as Antithesis and Surrogate of Birth

In our conversation after the lecture which then grew into this article, that attentive close reader Katerina Koci reminded me that in earlier work I had talked about the very striking proximity between aqerah (barrenness) and akedah (binding): the Jewish term for the text of Genesis 22 (the aqedah or Aqedat Yizthak, binding of Isaac). In Hebrew, the two terms look almost identical. It is hard to read the book of Genesis and not be struck by three things: firstly, the incredible, one might also say unbelievable, barrenness of the matriarchs. (Genesis is already like Atwood’s postnuclear Genesis in The Handmaid’s Tale; the poor patriarchs can’t find a fertile woman anywhere.) Secondly – and relatedly, as the very basis of the family and human relationships – the lack of daughters and incredible preponderance of sons. It seems there were an extraordinary number of y chromosomes in the ancient world. And thirdly, that death and birth are terrifying close. Women regularly die in childbirth. Rachel, who proclaims “Give me children or I will die!” (Gen. 30.1), dies giving birth to her second son (35.16-20).

Taken together, the first two myth facts look like an Introduction to Partriarchy 101. The symbolic order reverses the natural order. Barrenness, aqerah, is gendered female. This is a denial and a reversal of the fact that only women have children, naturally speaking, at the level of the body and what happens down here on earth. Women repeatedly and emphatically do not have children in Genesis. Women’s role in making (a) people is only recognised when there is an inability to conceive. Women are only the ones who have children when there is a lack of children, for which they are responsible in ways that they are never responsible for the coming into being of a living child. Women become the beginning, the genesis, only when the beginning cannot get started; only when the beginning is so weak and needy that it has to be supplemented by divine intervention, leading to unnatural, supernatural birth (“birth done better”) as if by divine ivf.

Sarah, Abraham’s wife, is the perfect matriarch for the book of Genesis because she is an old woman, a barren non-mother, unable to conceive. If we avoid the coy translations, Genesis 21 opens with God visiting (the Hebrew verb is pqd) her, seemingly bypassing the human father, leading to pregnancy and the birth of the inconceivable, unbelievable, unnatural, supernatural child. This scene is more than a little bit like a prototype for the virgin birth. And the child who comes from Sarah’s womb is like a big belly laugh. He is called Yitzhak, “he laughs,” the one whose very being makes you laugh. Then, directly after his birth, in the very next chapter, God speaks to Abraham only (Sarah does not even get to overhear, as she listens in on the angelic visitors at Mamre who announce the birth of Isaac [Gen. 18.10]), telling only the father to take his son, his only son, his yaḥid, and offer him as an olah, a whole burnt offering. Because the son is his, he does not need to consult the mother, or even (a fact which deeply troubled later readers, including Luther, Calvin, and Kierkegaard) the son. Sura 37 of the Qur’ān overcomes this ethical problem by having Ibrahim ask the son what he thinks of what his father heard in the dream. What follows is a “sacrifice”: a real raw human sacrifice aborted at the very last moment. Blood is shed and not shed and sacrifice is given and not given (but also “not withheld” [Gen. 22.12]), because there is a surrogate: a ram (which/whom some Jewish midrashim say was also called “Isaac”) who has been hiding on top of the mountain in the thicket all along. The son Isaac is spared and/but there must be some sacrifice, a lesser sacrifice. The gift of a ram is far less painful to Abraham. In the hierarchies of Genesis 22, the animal is lower than the human. The offering of the ram is a relief and a release.

Son sacrifice is transformed into something less painful and less momentous, more everyday. But the power of sacrifice is miraculously not only retained but also multiplied. Sacrifice always does something. This is what separates it from mere killing. The act, or “act” of sacrifice, is productive, reproductive, and miraculous. It turns death (thanatos) into life (zōē). Because you have “done” this says the messenger (“done” being in inverted commas, with what Abraham has “done” shifting from a “sacrifice” to a “not-withholding”) “I will make a heavenful of sons like stars, and sons as numerous as the sand, or dust of the land” (cf. Gen. 22.17). Sons, so to speak, splattered across the sky like stars in the heaven – not only up above, in the skies (truly transcendent), but also down below. For the sons are also to be like the sand on the seashore, and the dust of the land, this land, under your feet, down on the ground.

Nativity, nation, sacrifice. Nascere; sacer facere. Genesis 22 is a textbook example of sacrifice as “birth done better,” as Nancy Jay puts it in her important book Throughout Your Generations Forever.^[2] As Jay argues, in all patrilineal societies “an eternal agnatic (a one-sided tracing of ancestors) maintained by sacrifice, transcends individual mortality and transitory relatedness through women, prevents social chaos and gives enduring continuity to men’s social world.”^[3] Hyperbirth: the creation of many many sons, by the monotheistic God and the only parent, all alone, out on the limb of his own courage, on the mountaintop. Male autogeneration without passing through the body of a woman, consecrating the Father and the Founding Father (or King) as the Origin of It All.

The explosive and sudden birth of an entire people as numerous as a heavenful of stars in the “sacrifice” of Isaac is even queerer than the C-section back in Eden, where the woman is extracted from the side gash in man and then called, as if to beg the question, “Mother of all Living” and “Havvah” or “Life” (Gen. 3.20). Aqerah and Aqedah. “Do not go near a woman (before you come close to the holy mountain)” (Exod. 19. 15–18).

The sacrifice of women tends to be performed in one sense of the genitive, but not the other. Though Jay notes rare exceptions such as the Lovedu of South Africa,^[4] the few exceptions seem to enforce the rule. Women, especially married, sexual women (rather than postmenopausal women or virgins) are infrequently the agents of sacrifice. While there are no global or universal truths, this rule does not only apply to the Abrahamic/Ibrahamic and “Western Metaphysics.” For example, Indira Arumugam concludes “seldom do women organize and lead sacrifices or themselves sacrifice” in either Vedic Hinduism or popular Tamil Hinduism.^[5] Women might kill, in myth and fact, and even kill children, like Medea. But when it comes to sacrifice, they are usually on the altar, not above it. They do not sacrifice, at the raw and literal end of sacrifice, because to make a sacrifice you need a manfathersovereign, a figure above the law. There are lots of daughters in the place of Isaac, such as Iphigenia or Jephthah’s daughter. But it is hard to imagine a female Abraham or Christ (in the position of being sacrificed, and sacrificing himself, at the same time).

As Peggy McCracken argues in The Curse of Eve, the Wound of the Hero,^[6] Fathers and Kings sacrifice because they are the ones who “have” children, socially and ritually speaking. The right and power to sacrifice children anxiously consecrates this myth of the Father as the one who fathers as a verb (in the sense of originate). Perhaps, so much sacrificial blood has been shed because of the very absurdity of this idea.

2.2 Soft and Hard Sacrifice (Mothers versus Fathers)

In the last decade, sex and gender identities have become publicly fluid, to the point where it seems as if gender essentialisms are now the main focus for demystification and unbelief. And yet the division of labour (literally the division of labour) between “mothers” and “fathers” seems to be the exception: a gender apartheid that is strikingly intransigent, stubborn, and set in its ways.^[7] Sex and gender divisions become most non-negotiable and rigid and “stuck in the past” at the moment when the future could be most open, when a child is born. In social and symbolic divisions of labour, the father becomes the origin, the one who fathers in the sense of owns and originates, at a distance. The mother becomes the one who “mothers” as a verb, as a hands-on activity, associated with umbilical attachment, breasts, and care. Mothers and fathers suffer from the maternal mystique, in all its umbilical intimacy, and its corollary, the distanced, symbolic father (far away, up in the sky; on the bed of conception, but then out at work or elsewhere thereafter). In the idea and ideal of the mother, in contrast to the idea and ideal of the father, the mothers sacrifice endlessly, at the soft metaphorical end of sacrifice, where sacrifice means self-giving care.^[8]

Sacrifice is one of those words that means everything and nothing. (It reminds me of Osho’s hilarious exposition of the myriad meanings of the word “fuck.”^[9]) Sacrifice leaves the poor Oxford English Dictionary floundering around in glorious imprecision. It is momentous and dangerous, valorised, and denigrated. Sacer facere: “making holy,” doing holy. Literal killing which is especially and exceptionally religious. (Religious violence.) But also, in its softer, nicer, metaphorical senses, surrender or care or sacrificing oneself for another, in extreme acts like devoting oneself to being the caregiver for a dying relative, but also modest “sacrifices” like picking someone else’s children up from school. The word is as high and dangerous as could be possibly imagined – and it peters out, dwindles, to almost nothing, divided between the two extremes. In English, things that can be sacrificed include a lower-value chess piece (a mere pawn: collateral damage in the interest of a greater objective in the game); or a portion of a salary for an investment component of a pension; or a mouse in a scientific experiment. Or a beloved son. At the level of intention, sacrifice can be a matter of calculus, strategy, economics; or disinterested self-giving; or pure worship, homage to the One.

The division of labour between the mother and the father is often the division between the softer and stronger senses of sacrifice. A woman-mother cannot offer up her child as a sacrifice because she lacks the powers of the denegation of murder as sacrifice, because the child is not her property. But the woman-mother is the one who is seen, far more than the father (irrespective of what either party does), as the one who sacrifices in the softer sense, who nurses, who cares. In this soft sense maternal sacrifice, and not paternal sacrifice, is the commonplace, the everyday expectation – as opposed to Sacrifice as the exceptional, sacred event.

The mother is the one who birthed in some hazy forgotten space back behind all the rituals, scripts, and symbolic orders. But she did not originate. Birthing and originating are opposites. Raw, literal sacrifice is an affair of men. Man’s heroic sacrifice adventures, the supernatural trials of the “knights of faith,” and the tests of sacrificial blood are set in opposition to menstrual blood and merely natural birth. As Jay shows, menstruating women are regularly prohibited from the altar of blood sacrifice, less so post-menopausal “old” women and young girls. “The life of the flesh is in the blood” (Lev. 17.11). Except for the menstrual blood. The blood that gives life to flesh and blood is the symbolic opposite of menstrual blood. The myth fact is extremely strange. Even though nitrogen and oxygen from the mother’s blood flow into the baby’s bloodstream through the miraculous exchange system of the placenta, this “shared” blood, and the blood that comes from the womb in birth and menstruation are, in the symbolic order, the opposite of the life-giving blood. When sacrifices happen, women who still have periods, and therefore children (real and possible children), should be far away, elsewhere, down below, deep down in the flesh. Offsite. Offpage.

3.1 Transgender Sacrifice?: Sacrifice as an Arena for Transformations and Surrogacies and New Beginnings without End

One way – but only one way – of looking at the sacrifice of Abraham/Ibrahim is as the theft of natural reproduction: birth transformed into alienating supernatural technologies and structures, and the victory of the death cult and the father, as origin. “Let us show you how to do it ladies.” Mere birth “between faeces and urine/ Inter faeces et urinam nascimur” (a sweet statement attributed to Augustine, but that in fact comes from a mis-citation in a medical textbook published in Vienna^[15]) is substituted by the convoluted and altogether queerer sacrificial architecture of a boy, almost cut and burnt by the father, then substituted by a surrogate in an infinitely productive act. Following the cues in the biblical text, those brilliant close readers, Luther and Calvin, followed by Kierkegaard, read this as the foundational jeopardy not just of a single boy, but a whole future, “there in Isaac’s loins.”^[16] Natal, native, nativity, nation. This is a foundational nativity scene of the birth of a nation. Because the family (represented by the Father) trusted to the point where it was prepared to kill itself for God, the boy, the first member of a whole people, was saved, rejuvenated, born better, born infinitely, born again – so the disturbing sacrificial logic goes.

But the text and its legacies are also so much queerer than this, stranger than this, because it is a sacrifice, and the altar is a place of alterity and alteration, as Michael Taussig so rightly says.^[17] The act, or “act” of sacrifice is productive, reproductive, and miraculous. What separates the idea of sacrifice from the idea of merely dying or merely killing is the fact that sacrifice does something, makes something, and thereby justifies the effort gone to, the bloodshed, the waste that is not waste. In the sacrifice of Isaac or the akedah, death or near-death is transformed into life infinite and resilient, maybe eternal. But this is only one of the transformations. Equally miraculous and magical, in a series of alterations on the sacrificial altar, a boy becomes (is substituted by) a ram. And then the boy births a whole people and metaphorically turns into dust and stars. Once the powers of sacrifice are unleashed, the transformations and transubstantiations and re-creations keep coming thick and fast. In Jewish midrash and liturgy, Isaac becomes the “ram” (also called Isaac), and one source for the ram’s horn, the shofar. In the Christian sequel, or prequel in Christianity’s preposterous^[18] Judeo-Christian history, Isaac becomes a type of Jesus. Jesus is the God who was born as a baby. He is both Abraham and Isaac, sacrificial “lamb,” priest, and victim of his own sacrifice. Symbolically and more than symbolically his sacrificed and resurrected body becomes food and drink to be taken into other bodies: the sacrificial body of God as bread and wine.

In an earlier article called “Cutting Up Life,”^[19] I looked at how sacrifice (and the incessant movement and transformation that characterises sacrifice) relates to the precarious absence of “Man,” suspended between a celestial and terrestrial nature, somewhere in the No-Mans-Land between animal plus and divinity minus – always more and less than himself. I described sacrifice as a multilayered and paradoxical practise. On one level, all the rites and infinite categorisations of sacrificial practises stabilise Man qua Man: the one who offers the animal (beneath him and beneath him on the altar) to the God. But even as sacrifice stabilises Man, it also, like the myths of Prometheus or Adam, acts as a statement of the uniqueness of man as nakedness and lack and deficit and need. Man alone sacrifices, not just because he alone can cook, or write detailed recipes and rituals and theatres of sacrifices, but (also) because he alone (as opposed to the animals and the gods) needs so many sacrifices of thanksgiving, worship, atonement, sin, and guilt.

Nancy Jay argues that sacrifice “prevents social chaos and gives enduring continuity to men’s social world.”^[20] This is certainly true, in the sense that sacrifice stabilises at the level of genealogy and patrilineality. But sacrifice also destabilises, and quite profoundly. Sacrifice has functioned as the most hair-raising fairground ride, the one called “the Altar”: the place where man has hurled himself between the antipodes of being – between living and dying; but also between man, plant and animal and divinity. The sacrifices of Isaac and Jesus cross the borders between the living and the non-living: man and dust and stars and bread and wine.

In sacrifice, life can become pluripotent or totipotent, like the early embryo. In sacrifice, we can live forever and become anything. Anything is possible: no surrogacy, substitution, or transformation, is out of bounds. Neither-nor and both-and. Chaos, swirling. This mutating into that. Sacrifice is a place of fantasies of self-extension, self-amplification, and self-interrogation: man giving himself alternative futures; making himself otherwise; but also making life suffer and change. In sacrifice, “Man” can feel himself falling, changing, in the safe space of text and rite.

In my earlier article, I largely bracketed out the complex question of gender, instead concentrating on the instability of “Man” secured and insecured through acts and texts of sacrifice. I knew that when it came to sacrifice, “woman” could neither be included in Man, by simply backdating inclusive language. But nor could she simply be collapsed into a variety of “the animal.” In the remainder of this article, I want to further unpick the complex question of women, mothers, fathers, and sacrifice, taking my cue from the perverse attraction to what I’m calling surrogacy structures in some unexpected sources in philosophical, biblical, and post-biblical texts. Just as sacrifice is pluripotent like the embryo, creating an energy that produces profound transformations of life (from sons to stars to gods to lambs), so, it seems, sacrifice becomes a site for strange alterations and transformations of gender and familial roles: mother as son, father as mother, grown man as baby, man as animal, the mother as the other mother, the surrogate – surrogates all over the place – even as it is also a site for the constant movement that we discussed earlier, between abstraction and literalisation, the meta-physical and raw embodied sacrifice in the blood and in the flesh.

The relationship between birth and sacrifice is not simply one of replacement: birth done better. Far from being a recent feminist hope or fantasy, these surrogacy structures are there on the surface of some rather unexpected texts.

3.2 Surrogacies and Mothers in the Attunement Section of Fear and Trembling

My first example is the most recent: Kierkegaard’s extended poetico-philosophical-autobiographical response to the sacrifice of Isaac in Fear and Trembling, first published in 1843. In problema 3, the author, the pseudonym Johnannes de Silentio asks, “Was it ethically defensible for Abraham to conceal his undertaking from Sarah … and from Isaac?”^[21] But this is a question that he treats far more effectively and somatically and dramatically in the section called Attunement/Tuning up/Atmosphere (in Danish “Stemming”), in dramas of the nervous system and the flesh.

The Attunement section – which itself fractures into four imperfect beginnings – is the second of no less than four prefaces (“Preface,” “Attunement,” “Preliminary Expectoration,” and “Preamble from the heart”). Kierkegaard/Johannes gives four poignant versions of the biblical narrative that are not quite right (but not wrong). These are interspersed by four soliloquies, (more in the style of the Edinburgh fringe than Kierkegaard’s beloved Konigstadter Theater) where the weaning of a child is described as blackening the breast and covering the virgin breast:

When the child is to be weaned the mother blackens her breast, for it would be a shame were the breast to look pleasing when the child is not to have it. So the child believes that the breast has changed but the mother is the same, her look as loving and tender as ever. Lucky the one who needed no more terrible means to wean the child!^[22]

…

When the child has grown and is to be weaned the mother virginally covers her breast, so that the child no more has a mother. Lucky the child that lost its mother in no other way.^[23]

…

When the child is to be weaned, the mother too is not without sorrow, that she and the child grow more and more apart; that the child which first lay beneath her heart, yet later rested at her breast, should no longer be so close. Thus, together they suffer this brief sorrow. Lucky was the one who kept the child so close and had no need to be sorrowful.^[24]

…

When the child is to be weaned the mother has more solid food at hand, so that the child will not perish. Lucky the one who has more solid food at hand.^[25]

When I first wrote on these curious maternal irruptions back in 2000, I was struck by how Johannes de Silentio started to sound more like Johanna de Silentio – as if the akedah were breaking out into something like Julia Kristeva’s “Stabat Matar” or Luce Irigaray “Le Corps à Corps avec La Mère.”^[26] Finding these passages in Kierkegaard was as shocking as discovering what Jennifer Banks calls an exuberant “rough draft of natality”^[27] in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra or The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche’s later writings are strangely preoccupied with procreation, pregnancy, nursing, sex, wombs, heirs, and children.^[28] Even as Zarathustra announces “Whoever has to give birth is sick; but whoever has given birth is unclean,”^[29] he also proclaims “The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred ‘Yes’. For the game of creation…a sacred ‘Yes’ is needed”;^[30] and “I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”^[31] Just as Nietzsche, famously, emphasised the Dionysian, the earth, fertility, rebirth, the lust for existence, the belly of being, and the human, all too human – so Kierkegaard seems to embody a somatic exegesis: an attempt to read the biblical story as an all too human, poor existing individual, not a professor in a comfortable “chair” by the fire, parsing out the Hebrew in sublime detachment, or a pastor puffing at his pipe and unleashing hellfire by preaching bland metaphysical transformations such as “Abraham gave his best.”

Like Combs-Schilling, Kierkegaard tries to create a somatic experience of the sacrifice, but in a very different way. The experience of the text can never be purely textual. If you really read it, your brain will reel, you will become sleepless, you will feel all the convulsions (or concussions?) of existence, and you will be paralysed by the twists of thought that you must put your mental body through like a tightrope dancer or a trampoline artist in a circus.^[32] The text comes with a health warning like a packet of cigarettes.

Philosophers have tended to read the weaning mother and her child as “shadowgraph” projections of Soren’s secreted relations with his father (Michael), his fiancé (Regine) or Ane, his mother and his father’s former housemaid. But I see/feel other sources. The mother is body in a way that the fathers are not. The weaning mothers return as Johannes/Kierkegaard reaches for a sensation of sacrifice as unbelievable, incredible, and also repellent, creating an allergic reaction in the flesh. The effect is as if Johannes (Johanna?) had just read and responded to Marcella Althaus Reid’s Indecent Theology, where she asks “Why does feminist theology select the female gaze as a privileged place of discourse? Why not a theology with women’s hands, legs, breasts or head or sex?”^[33]

There is also a second, completely neglected source: the uncanny mirroring between sacrifice and natality, mothers and fathers and surrogates, in the original biblical texts. The intruding maternal presences in Kierkegaard’s Abraham variations reflect the strange thematic rhymes in the Genesis 21-23 triptych, and their amplification in early Jewish and Christian interpretations, some of which he may well have read.

The four derailed retellings of the biblical sacrifice deserve slow and careful reading. Here, I offer a quick synopsis of these strangely maternally fixated texts. In one dysfunctional drama, Abraham leaves early in the morning, just as in the Hebrew Bible, but then “Sarah watches the father and son from the window until she can see them no more.” Sarah is neither outside the sacrifice drama, nor inside, on the inside, in the know. She appears, but she is pointedly left inside the house, with her face pressed up against the window. Alternatively, Abraham embraces Sarah, the bride of his old age, or, in another version, the young mother, and Sarah kisses Isaac “her delight, her joy forever, the son who had taken her disgrace from her, was her pride and hope for generations.” Then, as he rides up to Mount Moriah, Abraham is haunted by guilt over Hagar and the son driven out into the desert. Kierkegaard spoils the narrative with Sarah and also remembers the surrogate: the other mother. He amplifies the triptych of Genesis 21-23, where the double mothers are already encroaching on the scene of sacrifice in a complex of surrogacy and birth-and-death.

3.3 The Genesis 21-23 Triptych

Whatever else contributed to Soren Kierkegaard’s strange experiments with the weaning mother, one source, surely, was scripture. As a Christian against Christianity, opposed to the tight lacings of the “spiritual corset” of Christian doctrine which turns men into “geldings”^[34] – as someone able to imagine that God could have been incarnated as a “rare, enormously large green bird, with a red beak whist[ling] in an unprecedented manner” or to “as a man who is twelve feet tall”^[35] – surely Kierkegaard would have noticed, and appreciated, how these inconceivable scriptures burst out of anything that might be expected from a biblical text.

Genesis 22 is not alone, not the only, any more than Isaac is the only son, as Genesis 22.2 falsely claims. Genesis 22 is the central panel in a triptych, flanked by Genesis 21 and Genesis 23. Two mothers lean into the sacrifice, encroaching on it, birthing, weaning, dying, holding sons and nations in their arms, like a pieta or a nativity and a pieta and a nativity at the same time.

Genesis 21 presents a Sarah-nativity, and a Hagar-pieta. It sets the sacrifice of Isaac in relationships of debt and deficit to the two mothers (two mothers who are in an intimate relationship of antagonism, competition, and surrogacy). Sarah, the barren non-mother, gives birth to the inconceivable child and (a strange detail given the infamous terseness of Hebrew narrative) weans him (Gen. 21.8). In chapter 21, Isaac is a baby; in chapter 22, he is sacrificed. Isaac is the baby father of the nation, through sacrifice. It is hardly surprising that many interpreters blur the chapters and imagine the sacrifice of a boy, a child.

Before the sacrifice, back in Genesis 21, the birth of Isaac leads to Hagar being cast out into the desert in a story that mimics and reverses Israel’s two watershed dramas: the birth of the nation on the altar and the birth of the nation through the Exodus from Egypt, clearly echoed in the vocabulary and themes of Hagar’s expulsion in Genesis 16 and 21.^[36] Hagar, whose name means “resident alien” just as Abraham is also a “resident alien,” is an Abraham double and also a surrogate for Sarah. She is brought in to fill the lack in the Abrahamic family: the inability to have a son (Genesis 16). In the Exodus-before-the-Exodus in Genesis 21, the story is told in such a way as to create sympathy for the Egyptian slave other – and guilt for the nascent family of Abraham. The other son is saved by an angel, and God gives his promise to Hagar that he will “so greatly multiply her offspring that they cannot be counted for multitude” (21.18). The Egyptian surrogate Hagar is presented as a slave, as a patriarch, as a surrogate mother, and an alternative motherland, cradling the half-living, half-dying, nation in her arms.

The narrative surrogacies and substitutions come thick and fast, as if the story of the nascent family of Abraham wants to harm itself with all this chaos, all these substitutions, all this confusion – not unlike the pluripotent chaos of sacrifice – about who is who and who or what is being sacrificed and what lives and worlds burst forth as a result. The sequence Genesis 21-23 is arranged so that God’s command to take “the only” (Gen. 22.2) appears as a metaphysical or theological lie, a ruse of purity and oneness. Even the most forgetful reader must remember that Abraham has another son.

No one is there at one’s own birth. And no one was there at the birth of the nation. Given that the origin is hazy, the writers and mythmakers were free to make their Genesis how they liked it. Why not, then, tell a simple story of monogenesis; a united family, born of the single father? Instead, the beginning of Genesis is like the beginning of Fear and Trembling: messy and precarious, like birth. As Fear and Trembling begins with four prefaces, the second of which fractures into four imperfect beginnings that need to begin again, so Genesis 22, the great new beginning, begins after an act of surrogacy that can’t be forgotten or undone.

In Genesis 23, the third panel in the triptych, the mother who weans and cares so much (too much) for the one son that she forces the other son and the other mother to near death in the desert, dies. “And or But Sarah Died.” The word for “and,” the waw, is just a line in Hebrew. It can be read as “and” or “but.” The rest of the chapter is a laborious description of how the great father who has been given the promised land and secured, through sacrifice, the promise of sons as numerous of the dust of the land, has to negotiate and overpay for a grave-sized piece of Canaan: a cave in which to bury his wife. The massive overpayment hints at the father’s lack and deficit in relation to both the people of the land and the dead mother-wife.

In early Jewish and Christian interpretation, the death in Genesis 23 is bound tight to Genesis 22 in a relationship of cause and effect. Isaac lived, in the end, because of the angel and the ram. But. But the mother died. Therefore, the sacrifice happened, as an aftershock, to the woman, on a slight time delay. “But, or therefore, Sarah died from that very pain.”^[37] In the ongoing transformations and surrogacies of sacrifice, the mother becomes the son and dies like the son. This is a truly shocking surrogacy: the mother becoming Isaac, the literally sacrificed one.

By making a point of Sarah’s corpse, interpreters may be expressing a bodily allergy to literal sacrifice; and moral and ethical pushback. Son sacrifice would and could have only taken place over the mother’s dead body. Sarah’s corpse stands for the refusal to accept the alchemy of the metaphysical, the metaphorical. Having its cake and eating it, or having its sacrifice and sacrificing it, Genesis 22 hopes and prays that one transforms and metaphorises son sacrifice and still gets all the reward. But in the death of Sarah, real death returns, in the flesh. Sacrifice can kill, even when it is metaphorised. Sacrifice is deadly. It hurts. Really hurts.

In Jewish tradition, Isaac is replaced by the ram (so that at most he only dies a little bit, or gives just a little blood) and the akedah is commemorated by blowing into a fragment of the dead ram’s body: the ram’s horn or shofar. The deep resonant sounds of the shofar – beyond and beneath words – are described variously as wailing, mourning, a sound of victory, a call to arms, a call to God to remember the great obedience of Abraham, and have mercy on his people, and a cry for aid. God tells the descendants of Abraham that they should blow on the ram’s horn when they are in trouble and he will save them.^[38] But then Leviticus Rabbah says that alongside the sounds of salvation, the shofar also carries the echoes of dying Sarah’s screams.

3.4 Transgendered Transformations: Sacrifice Taken Over by the Mother

In two anonymous early Christian Syriac liturgical Easter poems, Sarah (also, typologically, Mary) comes out of her biblical hiding to take over the whole event. Sarah, who is also Mary, just as Isaac is also Christ, becomes Isaac and Abraham and the source of redemption, a redemption allied more closely with the body and birth than with death.

The poems move between the secret (raz or raza) in the higher typological sense and the lower sense, the realm of poor existing (all too human) individuals, here on earth. Sarah both becomes Abraham and resists him. She accosts her departing husband:

Why are you sharpening your knife? Who do you intend to slaughter with it?

This secret today—why have you hidden it from me?’

Where are you taking my only begotten? Where is the child of my vows off to?^[39]

Isaac is Sarah’s only, only her only. At the human level, it is unjust and repugnant to keep secrets from the mother. When Abraham (rep)lies and says he is going to slaughter a sheep, Sarah disbelieves and resists:

If it is a sheep you are wanting to see to, then be off and see to the sheep and return;

leave the child behind lest something happen, and untimely death meet him,

for I am being unjustly deprived of the single son to whom I have given birth

…You are so drunk with the love of God—who is your God and my God—

and if He so bids you concerning the child, you would kill him without hesitation […]^[40]

Abraham is drunk on a passion for God, in a positive and negative sense. He would do anything for God. And there are many tones to the statement “Abraham would do anything for God.” But Abraham dismisses the mother and her stake in the boy who is only her only. “This secret today women cannot be aware of.” Sacrifice is a hard, steely, masculine place. It is no place for mothers and girls.

In poetry, which does not have to take up a stable position, the roles of Sarah are conflicted and diffuse. Unpersuaded by Abraham’s ruse, the mother is convinced that there is going to be a whole burnt sacrifice which she understands quite literally and refuses to metaphorise or turn into typology. In an excruciating emphasis on the physical, Sarah pleads that Abraham will at least let her be an equal, a co-sacrificer. If her son is to be bound, she wants him to be bound with the locks of her white hairs. If he is going to be buried, she wants to “dig the hole with her own hands.” Sarah’s body bleeds into Abraham’s, and Isaac’s. In visceral embodied imagery, she wants her white hair around her son’s hands and her hands on the dirt and the corpse of her only son. When Abraham returns, he reports Isaac’s graphic death, not “death,” to test her. Sarah’s lament is excruciatingly somatic:

I was wishing I was an eagle, or had the speed of a turtle-dove,

so that I might go and behold that place where my only child, my beloved, was sacrificed,

that I might see the place of his ashes, and see the place of his binding,

and bring back a little of his blood to be comforted by its smell.

I was wishing I had some of his hair to place somewhere inside my clothes,

so that when grief overcame me, I could place it over my eyes

I wished I could see his pyre and the place where his bones were burnt

and could bring a little of his ashes and gaze on them always to be comforted.^[41]

The rather Gothic mother imagines binding herself to the corpse of Isaac, swaddling herself with the son: his burnt bones and ashes before her eyes always, the smell of his blood inside her nostrils, his hair inside her clothes. She dreams of melding and merging with his body and taking him back inside her, as he was before his birth.

In an Easter sermon, Pseudo-Chrysostom imagines that Sarah would have done anything to save Isaac, even, if possible, wrapping him back up in her womb to hide him, for as Pseudo-Chrysostom comments: “Women are in such cases very emotionally involved.”^[42] In the two Syriac poems, the mother’s near death and “grievous pain” at her separation from her beloved son becomes central, and Sarah is transfigured into Mary, as Mater Dolorosa. Boldly, the meaning of the sacrifice is reorganised around the suffering of the mother: “Because of the suffering of his mother, in Your compassion return to us what we ask.”

The complex play of contrast and homology between father, son and mother, and birth and sacrifice is pushed even further, to a transgendered movement between the usually very clearly segregated categories of “mother” and “father” in a sixth-century Kontakion or liturgical poem for the fourth Sunday in Lent.^[43] When God tells Abraham:

Take the child of your body, the very child that you received as consolation in your old age, and for my honour cut his throat.

The poet comments:

Oh! What pain for him in these words! God did not say (simply) “Your child”; a single word did not suffice: he wanted to cause his very bowels/womb/compassion to revolt/rebel.^[44]

The insides of Abraham are already turning into the womb of Sarah. And then, the poem breaks out into an ingenious use of ethopoiia, hypothetical speech. “Why did you not say […]?” asks the poet, before giving several passionate stanzas full of what Abraham emphatically did not say – but could have and maybe even should have.^[45] Abraham’s strong Kierkegaardian “words” include:

“Why did you give me the title of father, master, and not the assassin of my child… ? Because I won’t have been called father for very long, but for eternity I will be proclaimed the murderer of my child”;^[46]

and

“What! Destroy with my own hands the one whom I hoped would close my eyelids with his fingers? He whose swaddling clothes I unwrapped/unbound, shall I bind him in order to kill him? He whom I watched playing (frolicking), praising you for having given him to me; he whom I nursed, I cannot be his assassin”;^[47]

and

“Alas! My flesh, your infant babbling will be made mute by your father’s hand, as he cuts your throat. Your eyelids will not be closed by Sarah. Your red lips, I will render motionless by carrying out the command of the one who gave you to me.”^[48]

In this multi-tonal performance, each stanza ends with the affirmation “Because he alone is the saviour of our souls.”

Not only does this Abraham seem to have got hold of an advance copy of Fear and Trembling, but he also appears to be turning into Sarah. It is Sarah who watches Isaac playing, and Sarah who is remembered for her laughter. In the divisions of labour between mothers and fathers, swaddling and weaning evoke maternal care.

The poem becomes even queerer when somehow Sarah overhears Abraham’s unspoken words (what he would have and could have said but never did) and breaks out into furious speech, articulate screams:

“Get away from me, immediately! I’m taking him in my arms, this child who caused so much pain in my belly, because I want to have my fill of him”^[49]

and

Leave the child with me, old man, he is mine; when he who has called you wills it, he will let me know. He announced to me by his angel my son’s coming into the world: he will surely let me know if he wants his blood. I don’t entrust/commit the child to you, I don’t give him to you—Because he alone is the saviour of our souls.^[50]

The coda of salvation (“Because he alone is the saviour of our souls”) now feels like a repudiation of Abraham and an affirmation of the true divine sovereign who will save the son from sacrifice and from the father. God the sovereign and Abraham the father split. Condemning Abraham as “torturer” and “executioner,” Sarah categorically refuses to be the chief mourner in the funeral entourage for the son whom her husband has killed. She also protests that the mutiny of Abraham’s belly/compassion is nothing compared with the mutiny of her belly, which is far more intimately (umbilically) bound to the son. “The little life which I have left, I want to live it with him.” Separation from Isaac will kill her. She will forever mourn the sight that she will never see, the tears that will never be shed: Isaac’s tears over her death. She hopes and prays that mother and son will both die of natural causes, in a natural order – son after the mother. She sends up offerings of prayer to both God and Isaac, that “you [Isaac] will close my eyes, you who, along with your children, will return me to the bosom of my fathers” and that “you will come to cry for me on the bed where you first saw the light.” In her words, her poetry, and her prayers, she turns sacrifice into one of its safer, transformed manifestations, as prayer, the “cows of the lips” (cf. Hos. 6.6).

3.5 Birth as Heroic Adventure and Extreme Risk

Romanos Melodos’s Sarah has one more important point to make for us, before we leave her. If Isaac is killed, she asks, will the fathers expect her to conceive once more, suckle once more, and then, when the fruit is ripe, give it back to God and Abraham? How will she trust them? Once more? One more son? Sacrifice is easy. Birth is hard; laborious. It is relatively easy and quick to take a three-day walk up a mountain and take a knife to a son and put him on the fire. It takes nine months and so much courage and labour and nurture to make another son.

Thus Romanos’s Sarah highlights something that the book of Genesis insists on, though it is often ignored: the courage required to bear a child in cultures outside modern medicine (which is to say all of the world, for most of history), where childbirth often leads to death. We have already mentioned Rachel who struggles from barrenness to fertility, cries for children and then dies giving birth to her second son Benjamin (Gen. 35.16-19). Far from being forgotten, Rachel was transformed into a symbolic figure crying for the whole nation of Israel, an eternal source of empathy and lament (Jer. 31.15; Matt. 2.18). Other biblical woman also die in childbirth (cf. 1 Sam. 4.19-22). Genesis 3.16 seems to me to be an aetiology of women’s social and physical need (desire) for children and sex. Pregnancy is a deeply ambiguous experience: mortality and natality conflated in a single swelling body, the future of which is acutely uncertain. In the worlds of Genesis, sex can be truly lethal, as it still is for over 300,000 (recorded) women every year across the globe, one every two minutes, or approximately 830 women every day. Women die of babies. Asexuality (or same-sex relations, or the kind of sex in which the man spills his seed) would be an understandable self-preserving (non-sacrificial) response. The stigmatisation of barren and unmarried women, and the social mantra that women do still desire their husbands despite the pain and danger (Gen. 3.16) are symptoms of a strong social need to coerce women’s far from “natural” desire. An aetiology is needed because birth is so painful, and because in these cultures, it is hard to think birth and death antithetically. Genesis needs an aetiology of birth and sex as much as it needs an aetiology of humans who come from dust and return to dust and experience death.

In the Bible, the heroism and danger of birth are present, but backgrounded. Occasionally, they surface. The few surviving records from the Nahua peoples in pre-Christian pre-colonial Mesoamerica attest to a powerful mythology of the heroism of labour and the battlefield of birth.^[51] If the mother lived through the moment of birthdeath, the midwives (tlamatlquiticitl) shouted war cries, proclaiming the woman as a brave warrior who had fought a good battle and returned from the bloody war with a little baby captive. The midwife declared “O my daughter, o valiant woman, you worked/you toiled./You soared like an eagle, you sprang like a jaguar/you put all your strength behind the shield, behind the buckler/You endured.”^[52] If the woman warrior lost her battle, her body would be lovingly washed and dressed and caressed with the words of softstrong prayers: “Oh strong and war-like woman, much-loved daughter! Brave woman, beautiful and tender as a dove. My lady, you have struggled and worked bravely. You have won!”^[53] It was believed that the power in her body was so strong that her family would have to guard her corpse against male warriors on the hunt for a relic (some hair, a finger) to give them strength. The dead birthing mother would be praised for her sacrifice and transformed into one of the Cihuateteo, goddesses tasked with tending the sun just as they would have cared for their own children, had they lived. The spirit beings of the women who had lost their battle in childbirth carried the sun to its rest in the underworld at night on a blanket of green feathers from the highly prized quetzal bird, thereby satisfying their longing to put their child to bed.

Such a developed, recorded, and remembered mythology of the battlefield of birth is very rare. But it is the unwritten experience of all families, lurking outside the rites and scriptures. In an everyday extreme known by fathers, sons, and brothers, a daughter, mother, sister, or wife goes out to birth, to that place that is not for men. She may or may not return. The baby may or may not return. The experience is dramatic and terrifying. Terrifying for the mother, who is there. Terrifying for the ones who watch and wait, experiencing powerlessness but not the same powerlessness and power as the woman whose body is convulsing, as if by itself. Fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons hope and pray that she lives and that the baby lives. Perhaps the fathers, brothers, sons, and husbands write a story or make a ritual of sacrifice not just as an opposite, something better, but as an imitation, to try to get closer to it, this chaotic mystery of life-and-death. The simulations may be driven by complex emotions: birth envy, birth horror, a desire to repeat the relief of a safe birth, and a desire for involvement, and intimacy with a beginning (the man doing what the woman did, but in a twisted, mirrored way).

Perhaps, the menfolk write a story of how the father went away to a place without any women, far away, out of sight, and how he did things that he cannot speak of … then came back to his family, bringing a story that tells some things, but leaves a great deal shrouded in silence. There is a lot he does not, cannot, say. But this, at least, he can tell them, tell us: the animal died and writhed and the boy nearly died, but was snatched back from the brink of birth-and-death. The child and the father survived, thanks be to god. What relief! He has come back to them, come back to us, brought himself and the son back alive, and the story of it also.

Perhaps, this is the true origin story of Genesis 22.