Carol Delaney is Associate Professor in Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University. She has a Master's
degree in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School and a Doctorate in Cultural Anthropology from the University
of Chicago. Her other works include The Seed and the Soil: Gender and Cosmology in Turkish Village Society.
Review
This provocative and thoughtful analysis will resonate with all who are bothered by a father's readiness to
sacrifice his son in order to demonstrate his unquestioning devotion to God.
--National Jewish Post and Opinion
A thoughtprovoking argument.
--Library Journal
A strikingly original and provocative analysis of a topic that is intensely controversial and yet peculiarly
conventional. Carol Delaney's combination of critical methods as well as her particular focus on the implications
of the Abraham story for our understanding of kinship, gender, and reproduction are unique, and bring to our attention
major common ethical problems among Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike.
--Gillian Feeley Harnik, The Johns Hopkins University
Submitted by the Publisher, April, 2002
Summary
Abraham on Trial questions the foundations of faith that have made a virtue out of the willingness to sacrifice
a child. Through his desire to obey God at all costs, even if it meant sacrificing his son, Abraham became the
definitive model of faith for the major world religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In this bold look
at the legacy of this biblical and qur'anic story, Carol Delaney explores how the sacrifice rather than the protection
of children became the focus of faith, to the point where the abuse and betrayal of children has today become widespread
and sometimes institutionalized. Her strikingly original analysis also offers a new perspective on what unites
and divides the peoples of the sibling religions derived from Abraham and, implicitly, a way to overcome the increasing
violence among them. Delaney critically examines evidence from Jewish, Christian, and Muslim interpretations, from
archaeology and Freudian theory, as well as a recent trial in which a father sacrificed his child in obedience
to God's voice, and shows how the meaning of Abraham's story is bound up with a specific notion of fatherhood.
The preeminence of the father (which is part of the meaning of the name Abraham) comes from the still operative
theory of procreation in which men transmit life by means of their "seed," an image that encapsulates
the generative, creative power that symbolically allies men with God. The communities of faith argue interminably
about who is the true seed of Abraham, who can claim the patrimony, but until now, no one has asked what is this
seed. Kinship and origin myths, the cultural construction of fatherhood and motherhood, suspicions of actual child
sacrifices in ancient times, and a revisiting of Freud's Oedipus complex all contribute to Delaney's remarkably
rich discussion. She shows how the story of Abraham legitimates a hierarchical structure of authority, a specific
form of family, definitions of gender, and the value of obedience that have become the bedrock of society. The
question she leaves us with is whether we should perpetuate this story and the lessons it teaches.