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Here I am. Abraham, Genesis 22:1 That man . . . did not know Hebrew; if he had known Hebrew, he perhaps would easily have understood the story of Abraham. Johannes de Silentio, Fear and Trembling Introduction Even a brief encounter with Johannes de Silentio confirms that he is decidedly, even comically, misnamed. Garrulous to the extreme, he is prone to lengthy disputations, didactic digressions, elliptical illustrations, and parabolic comparisons . Despite announcing on several occasions that he does not understand Abraham, he nevertheless proceeds to weave an elaborate narrative concerning the various ways in which his readers might approach the mysterious patriarch. One might naturally conclude that the misnomer of Johannes de Silentio constitutes a simple exercise in irony, as if the name of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous narrator were nothing more than a spoof of his gift for gab. Yet irony alone fails to capture the complexity of Johannes’s relationship to his name. First of all, we know from Johannes himself that incessant “chatter ” can yield a kind of wordful silence (116).1 If nothing of import is uttered, if passion is neither produced nor replenished nor conveyed, then speech may just as well be silence.2 In addition to his weakness for chatter, Johannes also maintains a more literal silence on topics that one might plausibly judge to be of central importance to his discussion of Abraham. He is mostly silent, for example, about the larger context of Abraham’s life, as recorded in the Book of 14. Abraham’s Final Word DanielW.Conway 176 · Daniel W. Conway Genesis. While he acknowledges in passing the potential importance of events that precede and follow the journey to Mount Moriah,3 he clearly wishes to isolate this journey, excising it from the larger narrative of Abraham’s remarkable life. He consequently restricts the focus of his discussion to the story of the Aqedah, i.e., the binding of Isaac, which is related in Gen. 22:1–19.4 This restriction of focus is noteworthy in that it helps us to fix more precisely Johannes’s purported interest in the faith of Abraham. For the most part, Johannes is not interested in what others might identify as Abraham’s most impressive displays of faith: his acceptance of the covenant; his willingness to relocate under a new name and a new God; his negotiations with his God over the (admittedly few) righteous citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah; his confidence in his God to ensure the fruition of an aged couple’s loving embrace; and his trust in his God to bless the pregnancy of his skeptical, laughing wife. While it is certainly possible that Johannes may mean to presuppose these (and other) precedent acts of faith, his explicit discussions of the faith of Abraham pertain nearly exclusively to the story of the Aqedah. When Johannes celebrates the faith of Abraham, as that which makes the patriarch great, he usually has in mind the faith that sustained Abraham’s journey to Mount Moriah. As we shall see, in fact, he regards the faith of Abraham as the product of the second stage in a “double-movement,” which originates in his resolute decision to obey the command to sacrifice Isaac. Indeed, Johannes is relatively unique among commentators in his relentless attention to Abraham’s reception of this command . It is here that Abraham makes the “double-movement” that marks him as a “knight of faith.” For Johannes, everything that follows Abraham’s faithful reception of the first command—including, most notably, his decision to terminate the commanded sacrifice—pales by comparison. Even with respect to the story of the Aqedah, however, Johannes remains conspicuously silent. For example, he is mostly silent about Isaac, blithely proceeding as if the lad related to his father as we supposedly do.5 He is also mostly silent about Sarah and the implications of the journey for the ethical life of the family. But his most obtrusive silence pertains to the events that transpired atop Mount Moriah. Of particular interest to me in this essay is his silence with respect to Abraham’s response to the angel of the Lord (Gen. 22:11). Johannes not only fails to acknowledge this response, but also assigns its rightful place— namely, as Abraham’s “final word”—to another, earlier utterance. In developing his interpretation of Abraham’s “final word,” that is, he refuses to acknowledge the final word attributed to Abraham in Chapter 22 of Genesis. In an attempt to respond to Johannes’s...

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