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All of us know, of course, the penultimate moment in Abraham's story: following the command of his God, he prepares to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. And not just his only son: he will also sacrifice all that God has promised him. ‘I will make of thee a great nation’, God had vowed, (Gen. XII, 1), and Abraham's entire life has been utterly shaped by this promise: this appalling sacrifice will undo everything. It seems we are about to witness one of the great reversals of fortune in all of history. For the purpose of this review I ask you to imagine you are witnessing this scene without knowing what happens next. Now do a bit of guided imaging: become Abraham. Hold the knife over your only son; prepare yourself to change, as your son's blood flows over your hand, from an exalted and heroic leader to a person who submits unquestioningly to a cruel and arbitrary God. That God who promised you a shining destiny now gives you no choice but to destroy all that matters.
I ask you to freeze this moment in your mind because to do so is to imagine that Abraham becomes us, or we become Abraham. To ‘be’ him, even momentarily, is to explore whether he is like us in some way, or whether his whole history is somehow Other: more ‘mystic’, more heroic, more literary, or more historic than we think of our own little lives as being. This, I believe, is the question Dreifuss and Riemer had to address as they entered into the project of this book: Who, and What, is Abraham in relation to us? I believe they have answered this question with resonant success: Abraham is an individuating human being. This hardly comes as news in a Jungian context; but I believe the authors have gracefully put forth their thesis while avoiding a myriad of pitfalls. Let me say a bit about what two of those pitfalls seem to me to be.
One way to think about the question of what Abraham ‘is’ is to ask how he is located as a hero within the narrative. Northrop Frye, in his Anatomy of Criticism [Princeton UP, 1957],