Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths

By Feiler, Bruce
Harper Perennial Publishers, 2005, Paperback, 272 pp., ISBN: 0060838663, $12.95

The first monotheist (and, Feiler argues, the first martyr), Abraham serves as a patriarch for three very different faiths -- Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

Feiler begins with Abraham as we meet him in Genesis: old, married to Sarah, fatherless, and childless. But the old man fathers Ishmael through Sarah's servant Hagar, and then Sarah becomes miraculously pregnant with Isaac. This is the symbolic beginning of the rift between Jews and Muslims (Jews trace their lineage through Isaac, Muslims through Ishmael), and much of the book explores how Jewish, Christian, and Islamic understandings of Abraham have expressed historic and contemporary interfaith disagreements.

Feiler discusses dozens of "Abrahams," from the Abraham used to justify pacifism to the one seen as a model of sacrifice, the patriarch of martyrs. Along the way, Feiler poses some fascinating theological questions, but this isn't dry reading at all. Like his hugely popular Walking the Bible (2000), Feiler keeps our interest by mixing theological meditation with adventurous travelogue and sly wit. And this quietly brilliant examination of Abraham, which begins as part lit-crit thesis and part theological treatise, becomes, in the end, a passionate and prayerful argument for peace between faiths. John Green