Broken Frontier

Testament: Akedah.  Douglas Rushkoff, Writer.  Liam Sharp, Artist.  DC Comics/Vertigo, 2006.

I recently received a letter from my friend Sufian, in which he wrote, "I would like to tell you who I think the real superheroes are.  They are the people who, with their voices, words and moral ideas can lead a nation towards justice.  We need people to write and voice their opinions about issues like equality between humans and care for our planet.  Let me quote a verse from the holy Koran. 

The quote says, to the best of my translation, God will not change what will happen to a nation until the people change what is inside themselves.  Let me elaborate on the meaning.  It means that God will not change the destiny of anyone.  People have to change their destiny themselves.  They've got to work on changing what's inside them."

The descendants of Abraham, Ishmael, and Isaac all inherit this outlook from the scriptures of their faiths.  One of the most fundamental assumptions of the religion of Abraham is that God does not act alone in the world.  God gives humans a genuine and active role in creating a life in harmony with divine intentions for peace, and the well-being of all living creatures. 

Roughly 20 stories about Abraham are gathered in Genesis 11:27 – 25:18.  Abraham's faithfulness is central to these tales.  He does not play a passive role in a drama determined by God's will and word.  What Abraham does and says has an effect on what happens in the future.  This is why the God of the book of Genesis does not have absolute foreknowledge of the future.  The actions of human beings make a difference to God.

The stories of Abraham recounted in Genesis form the parallel history for the dystopian near future in Rushkoff and Sharp's Testament, a comic book that asks the question: “What if the stories of the Bible were happening today?”  Part of the answer is that now, as then, people will fight for justice, regardless of the strength of their enemies, and will prevail because faith rules the day.

A large part of the first volume of Testament is concerned with the story told in Genesis 14.  Genesis 14 tells of how five kings from Canaan rebelled against four eastern kings who had subjugated them.  In the ensuing war, the four kings from the East defeated the five rebellious kings, and took their property and people.  Among the five rebellious kings were the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah, implying that Abraham's nephew Lot, who lived at Sodom, was also taken captive.  A survivor of the battle escaped and told Abraham that his nephew had been taken hostage.  So Abraham and his allies chased the four eastern kings, utterly defeated them, and brought the captured people and property home to Canaan.

How did Abraham and his allies succeed in defeating four powerful allies, when the five allied kings of Canaan could not?  The difference was Abraham's God, El Elyon, the Most High God.  When Abraham returned to Canaan, he was met by the king of Sodom, and by Melchizedek, the king of Salem.  Melchizedek blessed Abraham, saying, "Blessed be Abraham by God Most High, maker of heaven and earth; and blessed be God Most High, who has delivered your enemies into your hand!"  (Genesis 14:19-20)  In other words, Abraham was a formidably talented military leader, but it was his faithfulness in his God that made it possible for him to rescue the captives.

In the Bible, this story is relatively simple, but in the hands of Rushkoff and Sharp, it becomes a dramatic tale in which Abraham and his allies fight the "Anakim" who are in the service of the god Moloch and the goddess Astarte.  According to rabbinical tradition, the Anakim were legendary giants.  The captive men and women are grabbed from their cages and eaten alive by the Anakim.  Astarte says she will use her giants to kill Abraham and his God.  But Abraham tells his followers, "No giant is greater than our God." 

When Abraham engages the Anakim in battle, Melchizedek, transformed by Rushkoff and Sharp into a divine representative of the One True God, blesses them, saying, "May you appear to them as big as your faith in the Lord."  And by the power of faith, Abraham and his army grow until they are even larger than the Anakim.  The battle is a rout.  When Astarte commands Moloch to strengthen the Anakim, Moloch tells her, "I am spent.  The Anakim are too fearful."  The faith of Abraham easily defeats the fear of the giants, and the captives are freed.

Rushkoff and Sharp move back and forth between this ancient battle, and a more contemporary one.  Abraham's contemporary counterpart, Dr. Alan Stern, receives news from the survivors of an attack on a peace rally that his son Jake has been taken captive by a secret department of the Pentagon.  Dr. Stern is not yet aware of his ancient counterpart, Abraham, but he does not hesitate to set out to free his son, even though his son is held in a secret government facility and the soldiers have been given orders to shoot anything that moves.  Unlike Abraham, Stern is confronting the unhappy results of his own scientific research.  In Stern's world, God is not the creator, Stern is.  However, Stern sees this as his advantage, telling his son's young friends, "They use your work against you.  But if it's really your work, you always have a way to control it.  That's the difference.  You always stay connected to what you truly create."

Instead of Anakim, Stern and his allies confront giant robots, part of a military program called "Project Anakim."  Stern hacks the robots, and sends them away to tear down the facility in which the hostages are being kept.  Stern doesn't see what the reader does: the hand of Melchizedek, reaching from outside of time, to activate Stern's hacking protocol.  "Then as now," Melchizedek says, "faith rules the day."

Abraham is conscious of his God, but Stern is not.  Both are conscious of their connection to creation, and they understand how this makes their actions meaningful.  They understand that what they do makes a difference.  In the Bible, Abraham's mission to rescue Lot is a sign of God's intention to liberate all of creation.  We know how Abraham's story ends, but Dr. Stern's is just beginning.  We'll have to keep reading Testament to learn if Stern's rescue mission is a sign of the ultimate liberation of us all, but the same fundamental assumption runs through both the Bible and this comic book. 

Regardless of the outcome, we each have an active role to play in reclaiming the world for ourselves, and for God.  And thanks to the Bible, we even have an idea of the divine strategy.  Men and women will face the powers of war and destruction with faith, and faith will bring down giants. 

As Rushkoff and my friend Sufian say, they are the real superheroes.  And they could be any one of us.