Abraham Unbound

In the Jewish tradition, Genesis 22:1-19 is referred to as the Akedah (ah-kay-DAH), or “binding” of Isaac. Christians will usually refer to it as the sacrifice of Isaac or even the testing of Abraham.

In this powerful story, God orders Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac as a burnt offering. Along with servants, they travel three days from Beersheba to the land of Moriah, the place of sacrifice. At the moment Abraham is ready to plunge a knife into Isaac, an angel calls out to him to stay his hand and a ram caught by its horns in a nearby thicket is substituted for Isaac. Jews remember this story on Rosh Hashanah when the ram’s horn (shofar) is blown. The shofar represents the ram substituted for Isaac and reminds God of his promise to bestow blessings upon Abraham and his descendants.

Christians view the story as a foreshadowing of the Passion narratives. Isaac is a precursor to Christ, the beloved Son offered as a sacrifice by the Father. The story was allegorized: Isaac carried the wood for the sacrifice just as Jesus carried his cross, the journey to Moriah took three days and Jesus spent three days in the tomb, etc. In this accounting, Jesus was the perfect sacrifice because he actually suffered and died, whereas Isaac was released and a ram substituted.

The Land or Hill of Moriah?

Where is the place of sacrifice, “the land of Moriah”? Moriah is only mentioned in one other place in the Bible. In 2 Chr 3:1, Solomon built the Temple on “Mount Moriah”. The same verse identifies Mount Moriah as the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite (called Araunah the Jebusite in 2 Sam 24). Connecting these two references to “Moriah”, Jewish tradition saw the sacrifice of Isaac as a precursor of all the sacrifices to come later once the Temple was built.

Scholars are dubious that the two references to “Moriah” identify the same place. Gen 22 refers to a general area – the “land of Moriah” – but Chronicles refers to a specific hill called “Mount Moriah” which became known as the Temple Mount. Furthermore, Jerusalem is in a wooded area and it would have been unnecessary to load firewood on Isaac’s back since it could be acquired on-site.

There are two theories to explain the mismatch. The first theory is that the reference to the land of Moriah in Gen 22 was original and the Chronicler appropriated the name to associate the Temple Mount with the site of Isaac’s aborted sacrifice. But if this were the case, one suspects that the Chronicler would have made the connection more obvious. The second theory is that the Temple Mount was originally called Mount Moriah and the actual location in Gen 22 was suppressed and replaced with the name Moriah to link Abraham with the future site of the temple. This theory appears more likely to me.

Sacrifice of Isaac (1635) by Rembrandt (1606-1669) captures the dramatic moment when an angel stays Abraham’s hand. Note how Abraham’s left hand covers Isaac’s face and the look of amazement on Abraham’s face bordering on madness.

Would God Order the Sacrifice of Isaac?

The traditional understanding of the Akedah is that God never intended for Abraham to slaughter Isaac but was testing his faith. By trusting in God and not withholding his son, Abraham demonstrated his fear of God. Abraham is praised for being prepared to do whatever God asks, even at great personal cost. Some interpreters take it further and claim the story is a polemic against child sacrifice: God is demonstrating to Abraham that he will never ask a parent to murder their own child as an offering.

I don’t agree that the narrative is intended as a condemnation of the idea of child sacrifice. Even if God never intended for Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, when asked to do it Abraham didn’t argue with God over the justice of killing an innocent the way he did when told about the impending destruction of Sodom. Any interpretation of Abraham’s actions needs to begin with the understanding that a deity’s demand for a child sacrifice was not an absurd or unusual request in ancient times. It is not surprising that Abraham accepted God’s command without question.

Certainly, from our vantage point, it seems unusually cruel for God to put Abraham through the mental anguish of preparing to sacrifice his own son, only to stop him at the last moment. But the biblical authors didn’t think in those terms. If they weren’t bothered by physical torture (see the instruction to Hagar to return to beatings at the hand of Sarah), the idea of psychological torture certainly wouldn’t have crossed their minds.

Divine Intervention?

Some commentators have suggested that, in the original telling of the story, Abraham completed his sacrifice of Isaac. They point to v. 19 which reads that Abraham – and not Abraham and Isaac – returned to his servants and they then journeyed home to Beersheba. Could this be a clue to how the original story went? According to this theory, later editors subsequently covered this up by the introduction of the angelic messenger who stayed Abraham’s hand in vv. 11-12. Evidence these verses might be a later addition is how they refer to “the angel of YHWH” while the rest of the narrative (except for v. 14 which might be another addition) uses God (= Elohim) as the name of the deity. The ram caught in the thicket in v. 13 would also have been invented as a replacement for Isaac’s aborted sacrifice.

The main problem I have with this theory is that Isaac would then be dead. What happens to the promise then? As we have seen, up to this point the promise of land and descendants to inherit the land are major running themes in the Abraham cycle. Praising Abraham for sacrificing his son while promising to make his offspring as numerous as the stars would really be rubbing salt in the wound. Killing off Isaac would necessitate the introduction of a new heir to fulfill the promise.

A third interpretation keeps the ram as part of the original story but rejects the idea Abraham completed the sacrifice. Following the logic above, YHWH’s messenger in vv. 11-12 is still considered a later interpolation. The text would then have flowed from v. 10 to v. 13: “Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son, but then he looked up and saw a ram…and offered it up instead of his son.” If this preserves the original narrative, then Abraham would have considered the trapped ram a sign that God wanted him to sacrifice it instead of his son. Later redactors, possibly bothered by the idea that Abraham would disobey a divine order, introduced YHWH’s messenger to provide divine sanction for the substitution.

Troubling Questions for Today

What difference does it make how we understand the Akedah? I’ll answer that with a question: If Abraham had completed the sacrifice of Isaac, would he still be considered the exemplar of a righteous man, the father of faith? After all, he was just following orders. Orders from God, in this case. Aren’t we supposed to follow the divine will, not our own?

This train of thought is not assuaged by the intervention of YHWH’s messenger because that still implies Abraham was ready to kill Isaac following God’s mandate until he was stopped in the act. Yes, God stayed his hand once Abraham had proved that he was prepared to go through with the sacrifice. But is Abraham a righteous man simply because he was stopped a moment before slaughtering his own innocent son? 

It is only in the scenario where there was no divine messenger do we have some glimmer that maybe Abraham was looking for a way out of his predicament, that he wasn’t really fully prepared to slaughter his son. In this scenario, we could consider Abraham to be a human being with parental affections similar to our own and not a mindless robot carrying out divine instructions. A man who, in the final analysis, chose the life of his son over blindly following the dictates of what he perceived to be God’s will is someone we might find worthy of emulating today.