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C h a p t e r 2 “Thy People Shall Be My People”: Typology, Gender, and Biblical Converts God’s charge to Abram in Genesis 12.1, “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from they father’s house, unto a land that I will show thee,” captures the inextricable link between the formation of a new identity and the necessary separation from earlier attachments such a new identity demands; in answering this divine call, Abram enters into a privileged, covenantal relationship with God. He differentiates himself from the surrounding world, turning away from his own family and people to establish a new community. Abram is also the first biblical character to acquire a new name as a function of this changed relationship with God. As the text elaborates on the covenant between God and Abram several chapters later, God tells Abram, “Neither shall thy name any more be called Abram, but thy name shall be Abraham: for a father of many nations have I made thee” (Gen. 17.5).1 This name change—yet another way in which identity comes into being through difference—marks a further moment of transformation, one that came to stand for a turn to the God of Israel and, subsequently, to the God of Christians. Janet Adelman has observed that for the early modern reader the name Abraham encoded “the contested genealogy that expresses Christianity’s vexed relation to Judaism . . . [by recording] the moment of Jewish displacement,” the moment at which Abram, avram, ceased to be the fleshly father of the Israelites and became, instead, Abraham, avraham , the spiritual father to the Gentiles.2 Christian biblical commentaries read the change of Abraham’s name as the formal confirmation of a kind of proto-conversion begun at the moment God called on Abram to leave his land and family. The gloss to Genesis 17.5 in the Geneva Bible (1560) observes that while Abram may have been father according to the flesh, Abraham was “Thy People Shall Be My People” 41 father “of a farre greater multitude by faith.”3 The Catholic Douay-Rheims Bible (1609) offers a similar understanding: “For albeit Abraham was natural father of foure nations, the Ismaelites, Madianites, Idumeans, and the Israelites, yet he was spiritual father of manie more, to wit, of al nations that beleue in Christ from his owne time to the end of the world” (65). Elaborating even further on the implications of this first biblical conversion, the English Separatist, Henry Ainsworth, provides the following explication of the name change: “a multitude:] that is, of many nations, as Paul expoundeth it Rom. 4. 16–17, where the Apostle sheweth a twofold seed, that which is of the Law, and that which of the Faith of Abraham, who is the Father of us all. So by the multitude of nations, is meant besides his natural posteritie, all Christian beleevers in the world, Gal. 3. 28. 29. Who should inherit from him, (as children receive inheritance from their fathers,) the justice that is by faith, & blessedness accompanying the same, through the covenant of grace, propagated by Abrams doctrine and example: see Rom. 4 and Gal. 3.”4 Citing key passages from Paul’s letters to the Roman and to the Galatians, Ainsworth makes explicit the conversion of Abraham from the genealogical father of Israel of the flesh, “his natural posteritie,” to the typological father of “all Christian beleevers,” Israel of the spirit. There is nothing especially unusual or innovative about Ainsworth’s annotation. It is, as Adelman has noted, consistent with a long-standing reading of Abraham beginning at least as early as Augustine. What is noteworthy in Ainsworth’s comment, however, is the source he offers for such a reading. His annotation continues, “To this the Hebrew canons doe accord: A stranger (they say) bringeth first fruits &c. for it was sayd to Abraham, a father of a multitude of nations, have I given thee to be, (Gen. 17. 5.) Behold he is Father of the world, which shalbe gathered under the wings of the majestie of God: Maimony in Misn. Treat. Of Firstfruits, chap. 4 S. 3.” As evidence of Abraham’s status as father of all Christian believers, Ainsworth explicitly cites Jewish rabbinical authorities, specifically the deliberations of Maimonides in his legal code, the Mishneh Torah. I shall return to this rabbinic interpretation, and how Ainsworth might have come to know it, below. For the moment, however, I want to take note of...

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