--- To possess the Yoke of Abraham is to inherit the Yoke of the Sacred Brutality. The genesis lies in the monstrous covenantal promise of civilization's root sin: Abraham is human and he yearns for liberation, thus he dispossess through naming possession of the land and body of the other. The covenant of Abraham begins with the sacred vision - freedom from economic tyranny. God ordains thusly: > [!Genesis 12 - The Calling of Abraham] > > [**1**](https://biblehub.com/genesis/12-1.htm)Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee: > > [**2**](https://biblehub.com/genesis/12-2.htm)And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: > > [**3**](https://biblehub.com/genesis/12-3.htm)And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed. > > [**4**](https://biblehub.com/genesis/12-4.htm)So Abram departed, as the LORD had spoken unto him The modern notion of God’s favor amounts to something of an immaterial expression of vague bestowal of goodwill. That Abraham now sojourns, looked upon kindly by God.  Yet consider God's promise to him of a land of riches through his loins. He is promised a name great. In other words, a patrilineal claim to land that necessitated, in those days, a son. He journeys, tricks the Pharaoh through God's command, and now cast out with the dowry won by offering up his wife, wanders. He journeys out into the wilderness, exiled from civilization as he has known his entire life. Then, breaking with his nephew Lot, his companion, forms a land. All the while on this continued visionary presupposition from God, repeated again like a drumbeat. "Lift up your eyes and look from the place where you are, [...] for all the land that you see I give to you and your offspring forever [...] I will make your offspring the dust of the earth. So that if one can count the dust of the earth, your offspring can also be counted." The promise is again, clear - it is the indefinite ownership of vast tracts of land, thus the means for the extraction of wealth. Throughout human time, the fruit of prosperity has flowed from the land; to name land is to thus create a claim on the fruits of the earth, and the flow of wealth. Yet the declaration of land being passed down through inheritance of primogeniture, the continued sole property ownership of the very few, over the fruits of civilization necessary to sustain life for the many. Thus, the result of this covenant with God is a patrilineal estate of enormous wealth producing land possession. Let us return to the notion of God’s bestowal. The root word for "bless" in Hebrew is בָּרַךְ (barak). The definition we receive from the cultural inheritance is again, this rather nebulous promise of goodwill.  This definition however implies the meaning of this second section - that from Abraham’s inheritance, so will his fulfillment render some vague moral good upon all families of the earth.  Yet if we accept this understanding of the contractual promise struck between God and Abraham, God lies.  Abraham’s wealth, sanctified through declaration, passed through name, alienates the other, the true Abrahamic inheritance of the dispossessed. Thus God tempts Abraham into sin through the delayed sanctification of the sacred promise. Amidst flowing, continuous promise from this idolatrous God, there is just no mention of this one, absurd fact: he has staked his entire family on this vision, yet fifteen years on, he still has no son. This sits at the continued promises of God, no mention made of doubt. Yet, we with human heart must hear Abraham's own desperate longing for confirmation unanswered in the grandiose, yet-unrealized proclamations of God. The Abrahamic sacrifice begins with the monstrosity of its delayed absurdity. Some fifteen years after he casts his lot in with this God, he cries out, finally: Lord GOD, what wilt thou give me, seeing I go childless, and the steward of my house is this Eliezer of Damascus? [3](https://biblehub.com/genesis/15-3.htm)And Abram said, Behold, to me thou hast given no seed: and, lo, one born in my house is mine heir. [4](https://biblehub.com/genesis/15-4.htm)And, behold, the word of the LORD came unto him, saying, This shall not be thine heir; but he that shall come forth out of thine own bowels shall be thine heir. The sanctity of Abraham's yearning is only human, we the acquiescing reader, taken in our identification with Abraham's desires, must now feel. He hath traveled upon the path of righteousness, driven by faith towards the land of plenty, longing and mad, hoping finally for relief from the sacred uncertainty. We are structurally goaded into identification with the intrepid moral hero. So noble of purpose, striving towards the foundation of destiny, ordained by the holiest of holies, en route to the foundation of a dynastic inheritance of prosperous wealth. Thus we are tempted, like Abraham, into sin. We are goaded to forget the fact: Abraham already does have a son born of his loins. He is born of Hagar, conceived of Abraham’s seed. In fact there is no inherent reason why he cannot be his heir. In the Egyptian civilization this might have been true, for it might've been legally forbidden. Yet Abraham has broken with Egypt. He has loosed himself from its clutches. Thus, he can now claim Ishmael without the fear of bowing before an inherited repressive legal code. Hallucinatory constraints of society be damned, he is free.  Right? The first Abrahamic sacrifice is woman. His wife Sarai has been used by God with reckless sexism. She is used to bait the Pharaoh into letting them survive - offered up as an object. Now she offers up the bond of womanhood, to God. She accepts the covenant Abraham has made - and allows him to rape their servant Hagar - with her blessing to bear him a child. This is the most monstrous. Hagar feels betrayed by Sarai, and Sarai feels ashamed. She tells Abraham that she has done as was her duty in those days, that it is both his and this "lord" that this wicked, holy deed must be answered to. She cannot bear the moral responsibility in her heart, so she deflects. Then Abraham tells her to punish Hagar. She does and Hagar runs, not as faithful sojourning companion but as brutalized object. She is nothing more than a womb, filled at will like an oven, for God. This is the terrible covenant from which Abraham's first son Ishmael, the next Abrahamic sacrifice, is born from: the sanctioned rape of a servant legally chained to serve master through the legal ownership logic of enclosure. It has been allowed by Sarai who betrays the sacred bond of womanhood to offer her up, to Abraham who commits one of the most vile of human acts. The child however is not fit, thus he is discarded. When Isaac is born he plays with Ishmael. Abraham's wife now rechristened Sarah - refuses to allow this. Perhaps she cannot bear witness to this child born of her betrayal, and her own perceived shortcomings. She orders Abraham cast out his own son and the woman he has raped in the hopes of producing his destiny. He is angered and disturbed, though not to the extent he will protect his son. God commands him to obey his wife, the only time he listens to her, to cast out the servant she offered up to impregnate, and the child. Rather than protect his own son, Abraham obeys God. This rings in the mind upon hearing his desperate plea to God at the climax of the text. Now it should strike with lived cruelty. He tells God that "thou hast given no seed: and, lo, one born in my house is mine heir." He unnames Ishmael as his own son, referring to him only as "one born in my house." To this God implicitly agrees - the blessing of his loins cannot happen through Ishmael, and thus Ishmael his son is no more than a house guest to him and his God. Thus the next Abrahamic sacrifice is not the offering of the second son. It is the rejection of the first. Abraham has raped his servant, and unnamed him as his own kin in the eyes of God. He does not fight it when his wife orders him to cast out his own son - whom she had given sanction to create through rape - and submits to God's order that he cast out his child and his mother. Why can Ishmael not be heir? Abraham follows God faithfully, to sacralize a covenant born of the exodus from slavery - only to own slaves himself, and to continue despite it being revealed that this covenant will guarantee own children as slaves for 400 years. To do that, he turns from his slave son. Liberator now enslaver, he turns from his own son because he is born of the slave - not good enough to lead his descendants once again into slavery. This is beyond the pale, beyond morality. This is wickedness. That is the holy covenant at its most terrible: to commit sin, in the name of the lord. Abraham has fallen into the wickedness of sin - at the word of God. The genesis of the Abrahamic sacrifice is the monstrosity of its delayed absurdity. Continuously past the point of exile God reveals increasingly numerous moral transgressions - he shall be conscripted into a covenant sanctified on the abandonment of his family, morality, decency, of Sarai, of the family, of Hagar's dignity and personhood and love itself. These sacrifices are demanded so far after the point of no return. The Abrahamic sacrifice is not merely Isaac on the altar. It is the creation of a child so rooted in sin, so terrible the blood that nourished him, so wicked the family that had sprung forth. The love, the family, the good, life, choice - all must kneel. That is the Abrahamic sacrifice - the good. Thus even Abraham and Sarah's celebration of Isaac's birth is a monstrous happiness It lays atop staggering amounts of pain of others. By the time that Abraham trudges up the mountain with knife in hand to kill his precious boy born of blood oath, nausea fills the heart. We cannot but tremble at the heart of this man, whose covetous covenant with God knows no human bounds. But prior to witnessing Abraham raise that knife from within the folds of his tunic above the wide eyes of the betrayed son, ready to kill his own precious heir born of blood oath, let us first ask ourselves - what are we to make of the covenant? ## The Holy Suture The Abrahamic Sacrifice is perhaps one of the most foundational documents of Western Civilization. Abraham's covenant is monstrous; it is thus that the sacrifice has been redeemed. It is always assumed without question that the stories of the Old Testament are a priori stories in which the human must cast themselves as hero. Yet this is never justified explicitly from within the confines of the text. The culturally embedded myth of the Abrahamic sacrifice assumes that there is a true good that lies behind the deepest holy sin. It is from this longing that the son of Abraham is guaranteed by God. Thus there is a long tradition of attempting to redeem the Abrahamic Sacrifice. In Fear and Trembling, famous Existential philosopher Soren Kierkegaard performs the holy suture most adroitly, stitching the brutal covenant into tutelary redemption through understanding Abraham's sacrifice as tat of the individualized hero. He engages in the teleological suspension of the ethical, the heroic of state of transcending the categorical morality for faith through leap. The underlying assumption of all biblical parables are that they should be treated as heroes to be emulated. It is assumed they are prescriptive, not at their heart descriptive - telling us to emulate hero, not to bear witness to what lays hidden in the text. That this is a heroic story is implied through an unquestioned presumption - the covenant itself must be good because deeply and categorically, God is good. Yet, the soul revolts. It is of extreme significance that the story of Abraham sits wedge between the fall of man from Eden, and the beginning of Exodus, the book of Israelite prophets who lead their people from slavery into the desert. They are led by Abraham's descendants. Consider what God's covenant in this case promises. As he says, [17](http://biblehub.com/genesis/15-17.htm)When the sun had gone down and it was dark, behold, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. [18](http://biblehub.com/genesis/15-18.htm)On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your offspring I give[c](https://biblehub.com/esv/genesis/15.htm#footnotes) this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, [19](http://biblehub.com/genesis/15-19.htm)the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, [20](http://biblehub.com/genesis/15-20.htm)the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, [21](http://biblehub.com/genesis/15-21.htm)the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites and the Jebusites.” Let us speak plainly about what this means: Abraham is promised that his people will be conquerors of countless others. They will be "give[n]" the lands of countless others. They will become an empire. This will be an empire rooted on the sacrifice of the family, basic morality, the good, the sacrosanct morality of his family, his wife's sacred bond with fellow woman, Abraham's sacred bond with his own son, the sacred morality of his family - one that would be rooted at its core on the enforced rape of the servant, to conceive of a child born of sin, that would be offered up. For what? Abraham's covenant is this - escape from slavery, sacrifice all that is sanctified about life - to become the master enslaver. Consider God's original promise: [2](https://biblehub.com/genesis/12-2.htm)And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: [3](https://biblehub.com/genesis/12-3.htm)And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed. [4](https://biblehub.com/genesis/12-4.htm)So Abram departed, as the LORD had spoken unto him Yet, what is left protected and sacred? It is not his wife. Not his servant. Not his first born. Not his second born. Not his family. Not his offspring. Not his soul. Here again, is the promise of God, with his lies ommitted. [2](https://biblehub.com/genesis/12-2.htm)I will make of thee a "great" nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great and curse him that curseth thee: It is only the continuation of his own name. # Possessio Ex Nihilo “The American Beauty Rose can be produced in its splendor and fragrance only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it." - J. D. ROCKEFELLER, JR. In each case, the brutal necessary begins with an act of dispossession, sanctified through the protection of possession. Abraham rapes Hagar and steals her womb and her dignity. This is made possible by the fact that he owns her legally; that despite journeying from the laws of civilization and all mechanisms of legitimacy that would continue to legally justify that slavery, she still remains "his" through custom. Thus it is that his first child is born - to a piece of property. It is this that makes the dispossession of Ishmael's inheritance possible: he is his son but, more importantly, his property. Property supersedes sonhood. It is more ontologically real than familial bondage, thus Ishmael is not a "son" in the heritable sense that he can be legally given the title of being Abraham's son and heir, a patrilineal legal claim. Thus, familial inheritance is at root a transfer of proprietorship more sanctified than blood. The naming of property precedes life itself. It is through the prior classification of Ishmael as property from the moment he was conceived that he was linguistically encoded into inheritance as property himself. This is the Godelian tautology of property. It precedes reality. Once Ishmael is born he is named as property. Thus the right of primogeniture - the right of the firstborn son to inherit from the father, cannot be fulfilled. Thus the recursive tautology: Property cannot own property. He exists within a linguistic tautology made unbreakable. They have wandered from the civilization, and thus any necessity of their continued ownership. Why do they continue to remain, to Abraham, his property? Even Abraham refuses to break the recursive tautology. Once they have since been his property, they cannot by definition, become anything but such, even despite his own grasp towards liberation. He also follows God in demanding his wife Hagar offer her personhood up to the Pharaoh. Once on the road, it is questionable in what sense she can at this point challenge God. Yet it is not merely that she goes along with the rape. She swallows her own womanhood, and participates in the violence of casting off the lesser. She too has wicked yearning in her heart for the promised land, and thus she too turns to casting out Hagar and her son from her sight. She too takes part in the violence of ownership: Hagar is her property too, thus she too uses her as such. This is the true covenant: the dispossession of freedom and dignity, of self and other, through the naming of the body of the other as possession. This is the lie of God's origin promise to Abraham. He promises to make him a "blessing," in whom "all families of the earth be blessed." Yet in every case, Abraham destroys the sanctity of his fmaily, dismantling it sacrifice by sacrifice. He uses his wife's body. He destroys his servant's body. He destroys his wife's bond with womanhood. He unnames his first-born son from inheritance, makes him a bastard, despite no longer constrained to do so. He will murder his second son. He will doom his progeny to slavery for four hundred years. He murders the sanctity of his family. Thus it is that he murders his own family The sin of Abraham is the sanctified continuation of his own name. The blood sin of civilization is the sanctification of ownership of the body of the other - blood spilled to nourish the sacred. The yoke of empire is properietorship of the dispossessed. The Gaze of the Devotional Slave The heroism of Abraham is of course, based on who is asked to do the anointing. It is structured into the logic if one looks upon the events thusly and seeks to emulate. Yet to gaze upon the myth in this fashion is itself assumptive of the yoke. In treating Abraham as the hero, one finds in one's own sight the glint of progeny, and thus the forbearance of the chaining of the other. We as reader may feel the cloying chill of Hagar's scream unmade from the page, left from existence. In fact though this is the final comfort we believe the text bequeaths us: despite the horror, we are Abraham or even Sarai, not Hagar or Ishmael. The end of Abraham's vision reveals the true sacrifice on the altar of progress. Abraham revolts from the tyranny of Pharaoh, to himself create the enslavement of his children. The lands of Abraham are both our inheritance, and yet we are enslaved. This again, is framed as an act of sacrificial suspension - in which the delay of the good lays the seeds of glorious freedom. Yet this is recursive, and in fact inverts the events of Abraham's life itself. It is all of us. To cast oneself as oppressor, wrapped in chains by the covenant sanctified by one's own gaze - is the logic of servitude one accepts in gazing upon Abraham as conqueror. [[economicpossibilitiesofourgrandchildren.pdf]] Thus the gaze of the reader is itself interrogated. The very identification with the yearnings of Abraham that have underlay the foundations of Western society - the assumption of the yoke of Abraham, and the holy suture of continuous moral sanctification it requires - is the moral indictment revealed to the reader. We must use the story thus as a rippling mirror. In the society's treatment of the story as such, it odes not so much reveal the character of the story as the society form whence this unspoken inheritance of continuous re-suturing comes from. The desirous longing and unconscious assumption of the moral posture of Abraham reveals itself as the culture of those who have continued to recreate it. It is in light of this that we the reader must ask ourselves, for the moment of liberation required it, on what grounds are we to assume that we should act like Abraham? On what grounds are we to assume that we should accept a covenant, even when promised a future of dazzling wealth and prosperity, that would so murder all that is so sanctified in the human soul? To remain human, when the time is right one must revolt from the bases of society which would appear to be the sacred covenant, the Ur-text of one's civilization. To remain human, one must revolt against all sacred covenant rooted in sin, even if it promises the land of plenty. # Liberation from the Brutal Unnecessary In his famed 1930 essay "Economic Possibilities of our Grandchildren, renowned English economist John Maynard Keynes gave vision to this world-shattering revelation. Keynes names the extraordinary technological capacities that had come onrushing into society and seeded the world with immense material possibility for the freeing of the human soul from that prison of back-breaking labor to which its masses had almost wholly been subject to. As he writes, ([[economicpossibilitiesofourgrandchildren.pdf#page=6&selection=4,1,42,38&color=note|economicpossibilitiesofourgrandchildren, p.6]]) If [...] we look into the past—we find that the economic problem, the struggle for subsistence, always has been hitherto the primary, most pressing problem of the human race—not only of the human race, but of the whole of the biological kingdom from the beginnings of life. Thus we have been expressly evolved by nature—with all our impulses and deepest instincts—for the purpose of solving the economic problem. If the economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose This was the horror at the heart of human history. That to have felt morally in revolt against Empire would have been to be morally in revolt against the conditions of prosperity itself. The deepest structural monstrosity that has been true for all of human history save for the last hundred years is that there has never been enough surplus labor to create lives of leisure, prosperity, and freedom - without the oppression and extraction of the other. This monstrous requirement was hard-coded into the material scarcity of history - that all goodness had to be founded on blood soil. All civilizations who would produce art, lives of enjoyment and freedom from labor - had to do so at the expense of repressing some unnamed, externalized mass of the other. This was the monstrous contradiction: that freedom which the human soul most longed from, was rooted in sin. It was rooted in oppression of the other, and thus the sacrifice of one's base notions of goodness. Like an ancient virus, we have encoded feudal hoarding into the underlying common law fabric of our nation. They are best encapsulated in the words of Robber Baron JD Rockefeller, Jr., whose Standard Oil monopoly waged economic terrorism on the masses of Americans. The trust was a legal fiction borne from hereditary English feudal serfdom. The system hoarded ancient wealth, recursively structured into inevitability through the conceptual categories of enclosure at the heart of the common law. The sacrifice of Abraham was the act of life-giving violence. Creative destruction at the level of being. This was the implicit yoke of the economic system abstracted, recursively codified into the extractive feudal ownership logos of the common law. This was the assumption driving the false techno-liberation brought into the world - that the life-giving - innovation, progress, creativity and radical progress - had to overturn life. This was the root story that underlay the mythic progress of techno-feudal society. Progress was driven by the beast enslaved under the yoke of the brutal necessary. Yet, sometime around the 20th century, the most significant fact, perhaps in the entirety of humanity's blood-soaked history, passed by without much of a whisper. Owing to the enormous technological capacities of civilization, capable of producing enormous surplus of necessaries without human labor, perhaps this was no longer true. 95 years and Keynes' vision is still entirely possible - yet it has not come true. Why? The reason is not material. It is Godelian Recursion. The feudal extractive ownership logic embedded in the common law continues to recursively generate massive private hoarded enclosure of the wealth flows of the world. This feudal ownership logic has recursively entrenched itself. It was born from that most monstrous if human truths that seemed eternal - that freedom was to oppress. To love the self was to destroy the other. Thus it was that the Abrahamic yoke, the sacred crime of the brutal necessary, was encoded into the extractive feudal ownership logic of the common law. He also names today's root problem - ([[economicpossibilitiesofourgrandchildren.pdf#page=5&selection=5,0,27,44&color=note|economicpossibilitiesofourgrandchildren, p.5]]) We are being afflicted with a new disease [...] — namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment [...] outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour. Technological innovation had brought the creation of the proletarian middle-children of history, masses who continuously found themselves adapted to a world overtaken by a new one that did not have a use for them. This was a deep problem - that Keynes attributes to a growing pain. Yet the root of Keynes' vision is alive, and its societal implications are radical. ([[economicpossibilitiesofourgrandchildren.pdf#page=6&selection=4,1,42,38&color=note|economicpossibilitiesofourgrandchildren, p.6]]) A point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes. Perhaps the values of society - innovation, progress, creativity, entrepreneurship, abundance - are possible without denying the masses the ability to own shelter, food, time with loved ones, health. This "American" Rose was nourished by the burial in it soil with the the bloodied, stumped and impoverished heart of the American patriot. Necessarily - he was the American Beauty Rose, springing dewy and unharmed from the sacrifice - of American freedom. Yet that luminous sacred flame that shines through dark from lady liberty's outstretched hand, burns at these words. It demands with clear eyed fury, spoken in the tongue of the true patriot: No. This is a land by the people, for the people. It is time to Get thee from this sacred land. In other words, the blood sin is no longer necessary to sacralize the covenant. We must cast off the yoke of Abraham. We must begin the exodus from the yoke of the brutal unnecessary. We must begin to walk to free our brother and sister. We must begin to trust they will free us. For this is the real sacrifice of Abraham: the sanctity of his own soul. He sacrifices all goodness, all morality, the covenant of his family - for that terrible yoke shackled to his chest, pulling him forth towards becoming the terrible tyrant he once escaped. The glittering yoke of tyranny comes as a brilliant, dazzling scepter, gleaming with jewel, of descendants, an eternal name, command of all lands of oppression. Empire built of blood sin is rooted in the desirous longing of the human heart - yet for the first time, perhaps we have a chance to seed the conditions of a new covenant. In this, the wriggling buds of the new world born from the ashes of the old emerge, calling with eternal hope this soft whisper - we can at long last unshackle ourselves from that crave to bear the whip of the oppressor in the name of sacred desire for the self. We can free our brothers and sisters from their chain. And thus we can count on our brother to unshackle the chains of economic oppression and desperation that now gnaw into so many of our own soft neck's flesh. We can at long last free each other from those ancient bonds of feudal extraction. For the salvation of the human soul. For the first time in the entirety of our history, we will be free. Free to spend time with our loved ones. Free to labor sacredly on those pursuits most meaningful. Free to create without fear, free to dream with unshackled hearts of ways to use technology to better our world for everyone. Free to get on with better ways of spending our time. Free to truly begin making this world a community of shared paradise. Perhaps then our civilization's soul may arc into the yawning dawn sky, with the exuberant wild of freedom's flight, and bellow into the new day's light that most sacred thunder from the mountaintop first uttered by Dr. Martin Luther King: "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, we are free at last!" ---