It may or may not be a mere coincidence that by transposing the letters of the name Abraham we have the name Brahma—just as in the old legend of the sacrifice of the daughter of Agamemnon, Iphthi-genia, if we divide the syllables into words, Iphthi-geni, we have literally Jephthah’s daughter; so, after all, it may be greatly to the credit of Jephthah that the story is fabulous. These curious coincidences are not here offered as evidence. It is acknowledged, at least by implication, in the Bible itself that the story of Abraham is of Chaldean origin, as his father Terah was a native of Ur of the Chaldees and the alleged patriarch was a Chaldean. Now, these people were great astronomers in very ancient times, and were accustomed to veil their occult science under just such allegorical personifications and fabulous tales as this of Abraham. Paul, or whoever wrote the Epistle credited to him, lets out the whole secret (Gal. 4: 22-26): “For it is written Abraham had two sons, one by a bondmaid, the other by a free woman. But he who was of the bondwoman was born after the flesh, but he of the free woman was by promise; which things are an allegory,” etc. Now, if you carefully read the apostolic explanation in these verses, you will notice that the two sons of Abraham are two covenants, and the bondmaid Hagar represents an Arabian mountain, which by a magical change becomes the same as the city of Jerusalem. The name Abram signifies the “Father of Elevation,” which is the astronomical distinction of the planet Saturn, the exaltation of which, with its devious ways, well represents the alleged history of its prototype. The word Chasdim, translated Chaldees, literally means light, and is a professional not a geographical name, and probably refers to the art of magic and the work of astrologers; so that it is more than probable that Abram was not a person, any more than Chasdim was a place. There are many references in the Scriptures which favor this interpretation, but which cannot here be mentioned. Even in the Lord’s Prayer, found in Jewish rituals long before the Christian era, there are evidences that it was first addressed to Saturn. There never was any form of religious worship which did not contain an expression equivalent to Our Father who art in heaven. Even Jupiter means Our Father in the sky.
The name of Abram has many variations, and there is an important sense in which he may be called “the father of many nations.” He was the Esrael of the Chaldeans, the Israel of the Phœnicians, as the historian Sanchoniathon distinctly alleges that their name for Saturn was Israel: the names Abraham and Israel are used interchangeably in both the Old and New Testaments, and among the Hindoos, the Greeks, the Persians, and other nations he was the god Saturnus of the whole pagan world. Even upon the dials of our “grandfathers’ clocks,” cherished in many families as heirlooms in our day, his memory is kept green by the figure of the god of Time. Scores of other similitudes between Saturn and Abraham could here be introduced did space permit. Suffice it to say, Saturn in fable married his own sister, who was a star; and so did Abraham, and the name of his wife signifies a star. Both had many sons, but each had a favorite son, and Saturn called his Jeoud, which implies an only son, as Abraham so regarded Isaac. A learned English scholar has suggested that the name “Jeoud” is the real origin of the name “Jew,” and he assigns several philological and historical reasons for his theory. It is certain in the minds of many profound and independent investigators that the Jewish tribes originated in Arabia, and were originally a mere religious order, and that their so-called history is largely fabulous, and that their exodus is a comparatively modern novel with an ancient date, as has been shown.
Let us now take the best-remembered incident in the life of Abraham, the attempted murder and the rescue of his son Isaac, and see what will come of applying the symbolic instead of the literal interpretation to it.
Let it be noted that this is not an original story. The ancient Hindoos have one like it. King Haris-candra had no son. He prayed for one, and promised that if one should be born to him he would sacrifice him to the gods. One was born, and he named him Rohita. One day his father told him of his promise to Varuna to offer him in sacrifice. The son bought a substitute, and when he was about to be immolated he was marvellously rescued. Then there is the well-known similar story written by the Phœnician Sanchoniathon
thirteen hundred years before our era. Then there is the Grecian story of Agamemnon, to whom, when about to sacrifice his daughter, a stag was furnished by a goddess as a substitute. There is another Grecian fable in which a maiden was about to be sacrificed, and as the priest uplifted his knife to shed her blood the victim suddenly disappeared, and a goat of uncommon beauty stood in her place as a substitute. Another story runs thus: In Sparta the maiden Helena was about to be immolated on the altar of the gods, when an eagle carried off the knife of the priest and laid it upon the neck of a heifer, which was sacrificed in her stead. Similar stories might be produced from among many nations in the most ancient times, long before the Jews picked this up in Babylon and rewrote it, with modifications, so as to apply it to their mythical progenitor; for this fable of Abraham's offering was not written until after their return from their Babylonish captivity—much nearer our own time than is generally suspected.
Regarded as an historic account of a real transaction, this story of the attempted sacrifice of a beloved son by a venerable father is shocking in the extreme, dishonoring alike to God and to Abraham. A good God could not have done such an unnatural and cruel thing. He had no occasion to try Abraham to find out how much faith he had. He knew that already. Regarded as an astrological allegory, it is ingenious and contains a moral lesson, to wit: obedience to the voice of God and the hope of deliverance in the hour of extreme emergency. The defect in the story is, that God could trifle with a loving child, and pretend to require him to break one of his own commandments, “Thou shalt not kill,” and subject him to its own penalty, “Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed.” It would not have availed Abraham to plead that God told him to murder his son, any more than it availed the Pocasset crank when he pleaded that God had directed him to murder his little daughter. The State of Massachusetts sent the semi-lunatic to a safe place of confinement. This story of Abraham and Isaac has led to scores and scores of murders of children by their fathers, just as the passage in the Old Testament, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” has been pleaded in justification of the cool, deliberate murder of multitudes of men, women, and children on the charge of witchcraft.
The literal interpretation of what is called infallible Scripture has been the most bitter curse to deluded, priest-ridden humanity. It is the “stock in trade” of ignorant and selfish ecclesiastics to-day.
Let us look a little more closely at this Abraham-and-Isaac myth. Abraham was the personification of Saturn, the god of Time, while Isaac was the personification of the Sun. Abraham took Isaac up to Hebron—which means union or alliance, and clearly indicates a union of the ecliptic and equinoctial line—the very point at which the Ram of the vernal equinox passed by, or, as might be poetically said, was caught in a cloud or bush; so that the whole story was written long ages before in the celestial heavens, and emblazoned in the skies at the return of each vernal equinox. Writers on astro-theology point out details at great length to support the symbolic interpretation, but it is enough for pur purpose to merely give the keynote. Let the fact be specially noted that the names of the patriarchs have an astrological meaning,
and that the twelve sons of Jacob, the grandson of Abraham, who became the heads of the twelve tribes of Israel, have distinctly astrological characters, fully indicated in Jacob’s dying blessing on his sons (Gen. 49) and in the corresponding “Song of Moses” (Deut. 33), on the banner carried by the different tribes in their mythical march from Egypt to Canaan; and that on the breastplate of the officiating high priest the jewels correspond to the celestial signs of the solar zodiac; and although Jacob had children by several different women and was a first-class Mormon, his twelve sons are made to correspond with the twelve months of the year and the twelve signs of the zodiac. This fact is admitted by the orthodox author of The Gospel in the Stars. His daughters are not considered worthy of notice, as that would have spoiled the riddle. The philology and etymology of the name Jacob has suggestions of the serpent; and from his history he must have been a snaky fellow from the first to the last. He was born with his hand upon his brother’s “heel,” and he managed to cheat him out of his share of his mother’s affections, and lied to his father, and conspired with his mother to rob Esau, his brother, of his “blessing.” The stories of Laban and Leah and Rachel all conform to the symbolic rather than the literal hypothesis, as well as Jacob’s vision of the ladder, and his wrestling-match with the angel, when he openly obtained the astrological name of the children of Saturn—Israel. It must be admitted that the allegorical hypothesis relieves the patriarchs of the charge of many mean things, such as the heartless manner in which Abram treated Hagar when Sarah got jealous, and the manner in which he treated Sarah herself when he lied to the king through a selfish cowardice and gave his wife over to the lusts of the monarch Abimelech, who was (or one bearing his name) deceived by Isaac in regard to Rebekah by a similar trick (Gen. 26:1). Lot, the nephew of Abraham, was guilty of a meaner and more unmanly act when he himself proposed to give over his two virgin daughters to the worse than beastly lusts of a howling mob, to protect two angels who were guests at his tent (Gen. 19:1-11).
But theologians will never willingly admit that the Abraham of Genesis was a myth. They well know the logical conclusion. They would have to give up the “Abrahamic covenant,” which is the basis of sacerdotalism. When Professor Driver, of the orthodox University of Oxford, recently admitted only by implication that Abraham may have had no real personal existence, and claimed that such hypothesis would not be injurious to religion, his article was rejected and suppressed by the editor of an orthodox paper in Philadelphia as dangerous. But to assume that all the principal actors of Genesis and some other books were impersonations, not persons, would not destroy the good things they are alleged to have said and done. It is no more necessary to insist upon the real personality of Abraham than to insist upon the literal existence of Faithful and Great-Heart and other impersonations in Pilgrim’s Progress. Nobody insists that the characters in the parables accredited to Jesus must be taken in a literal sense. And yet it may be admitted that the fictions of Scripture may have been suggested by some persons and facts, just as in modern novels there generally is some person who stands for the original of the story. This is eminently so in the novels of Dickens and D’Israeli. Nevertheless, it is difficult to doubt that the principal characters of the Old Testament are mythical, pure and simple, as we find the originals in the older scriptures of different nations, confessedly founded upon the solar and other forms of Nature-worship. The feet is, that the only rational way to explain the marvellous stories of the Hebrew Scriptures is by the well-known methods of ancient symbolism.