The Discovery of God
Abraham and the Birth of Monotheism
by David Klinghoffer
Doubleday, 368 pp., $26 ON THE OUTSKIRTS of Kazan, a Tartar city of the former Soviet Union, a huge brick-and-glass structure rises above the countryside. Atop one dome is a Cross; atop a second dome, a Crescent; and atop a third, a Star of David.
This somewhat bizarre place of worship is called the "Temple of All Faiths," and its founder--a man named Ildar Khanov--envisions a day when people of all faiths will pray side by side in the edifice he has constructed.
One doubts this vision will become reality anytime soon. Bloodshed still stalks the lands once roamed by Abraham, the father of monotheism. But some of his descendants--Jews, Christians, and Muslims--continue to seek, if not Khanov's strange unity, then at least amity through their shared history. The most recent is David Klinghoffer, in his book "The Discovery of God: Abraham and the Birth of Monotheism."
Bruce Feiler's "Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths" has been on bestseller lists since last fall. Klinghoffer--author of the 1998 "The Lord Will Gather Me In"--has yet to make Feiler's sort of splash, perhaps because of the very things that make his book valuable: the endless attention to detail and the depth of his research.
"The issue of Abraham's spiritual estate continues to haunt the Western world, with each religion claiming that it alone truly understands what Abraham meant to teach," Klinghoffer writes. And "The Discovery of God" regularly drops enough titillating details to keep the pages turning. For example: When the family of Abraham, then still Abram, arrives in Egypt, the pharaoh tries to take his beautiful wife Sarai--but he and his entire court are doubled over with a powerful pain in the groin. And had you heard the story that Abraham was a tumtum, a person with a defect in which the genitals remain inside his body? Or thought about the possibility that Abraham did kill Isaac?
THE ABRAHAM of Klinghoffer's biography is barely likeable but infinitely interesting. Fraught with flaws, he is an imperious landowner who sleeps with his slaves, and time and again he leaves his wife in the lurch. He abandons one son to die in the desert and tries to put another to death himself. The question--asked by everyone from S ren Kierkegaard in "Fear and Trembling" to Leon Kass in his new study "The Beginning of Wisdom"--is how, despite all this, Abraham can be "Abraham," the father of faith?
It is direct confrontation with Abraham in all his flaws and all his successes that imbues Klinghoffer's book with relevance for contemporary civilization. The story of Abraham's sons, Ishmael and Isaac, is still central to religious violence that claims lives almost daily in the Middle East. By understanding those sons' father, perhaps we can see more closely the Father himself, the one God worshipped by three faiths that together make up more than half the world's population.
"A great deal rides on our accepting the tradition that the patriarch worshipped the One God alone," Klinghoffer writes. "To put it simply, if Abram wasn't a monotheist, and if we want to be consistent, we must give up any faith in the religions that arise from the Bible."
Lila Arzua, a former reporter for the Miami Herald, is a recent graduate of Columbia School of Journalism.