PETERSON: The Call To Abraham

The following is a transcript excerpt from Dr. Jordan Peterson’s Biblical Series exploring the psychological significance of the biblical stories in the book of Genesis. You can now listen to or watch the lecture series on DailyWire+.

Let’s read the stories. The first one is about Abraham, Sarah, and Lot. “Now these are the generations of Terah. Terah begat Abram.” His name is Abram to begin with, and that actually turns out to be important. It’s not Abraham. “Nahor and Haran; and Haran begat Lot.” So Haran is Abram’s brother. “And Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his nativity, in Ur of the Chaldees. And Abram and Nahor took them wives: the name of Abram’s wife was Sarai; and the name of Nahor’s wife, Milcah, the daughter of Haran, the father of Milcah and the father of Iscah. But Sarai was barren; she had no child. And Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran his son’s son, and Sarai her daughter in law, his son Abram’s wife; and they went forth with them from the Ur of Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan;” — that’s exile — “and they came unto Haran, and dwelt there. And the days of Terah were 205 years: and Terah died in Haran.”

There’s a reason that Sarai is introduced as barren, and it’s to set the stage. I think it was Anton Chekhov, who talked about the stage setting for a play, that if there was a rifle hanging on the wall, then it had better be used before, I believe, the second act or it shouldn’t be hanging there at all. So this is stage setting. Part of the reason that the Biblical writers are pointing out that Abram’s wife is barren is because it’s a real catastrophe for Abraham, and for Sarai as well, that she’s barren. It’s showing the trouble that Abram’s in at the beginning of the story. What happens as the story progresses is that Abraham and Sarah are eventually granted a son, but it’s way late in the story and they’re very, very old by the time it happens. Of course, you’re not going to be a father of nations without having a child, and so the writers are attempting to make the case that if you forthrightly pursue that which God directs you to pursue, let’s say, that all things are possible. That’s the idea and the narrative.

You might say that’s naive, and it’s not. You think it when you’re naive, and then you dispense with that idea. When you stop being the sort of person who dispenses with ideas, you come to another place, and that’s the place where you think you have no idea what might be possible for you if you got things together and pursued what you should pursue. You don’t know how much what’s impossible to you right now would become possible under those conditions. It’s an unknown phenomena. I’ve watched people who have put themselves together across time, incrementally and continually, and they become capable of things that are not only jaw-droppingly amazing, but also sometimes metaphysically impossible to understand. We don’t know the limits of human endeavor. We truly don’t. It’s premature to put a cap on what it is that we are, what it is that we’re capable of. You’re already something, and maybe you’re not so bad in your current configuration, but you might wonder if you did nothing for the next 30 years except put yourself together, just exactly what would you be able to do? You might think that’s worth finding out. But of course that’s the adoption of responsibility.

Watch the lecture in its entirety here.

I’ve been curious about this battle between meaning and nihilism. I could see for a long while the rationale in nihilism and the power of the nihilistic argument, but it occurred to me across time that the power of the nihilistic argument is more powerful than naive optimism. But it’s not more powerful than the optimism that is not naive because the optimism that is not naive says, it’s self-evident that the world is a place of suffering and that there are things to be done about that. And it’s self-evident that people are flawed and that there’s things to be done about that. Then the non-naive optimist says, the suffering could be reduced and the insufficiency could be overcome if people oriented themselves properly and did what they were capable of doing. I do not believe that’s deniable. I think that human potential is virtually limitless, and there’s nothing perhaps that’s beyond our grasp if we’re careful as individuals and as a society.

So I think that there’s no reason for nihilism, and there’s no reason for hopelessness, and there’s no reason to