Abraham and Isaac (Genesis 21-22)

We come to the story of Isaac. Isaac has been promised for sometime to Abraham and Isaac. But it took awhile. A lot of sojourning. A lot of doubts. A lot of hardship and suffering. A lot of conflict and division. But finally some hope. 

The name Isaac literally means "laughter." An interesting name for one who will give way to a nation's birth. But a 100 year-old and 90 year-old having a baby is really funny! 

On a side note, the link between laughter and the nation of Israel brought to mind this reel featuring Jerry Seinfeld, maybe the most famous Jewish comedians. 

So, the birth of Isaac is a big deal! In keeping with creativity helping with this week's blog, here's a wonderful and joyful song that tells the story of Isaac's birth in a creative and meaningful way. Please note the lyrics as you listen.

Isaac being born to adoring and proud parents, we turn to the horrifying story that comes in Genesis 22. As the story goes, God, as a test of Abraham's faith, asks him to sacrifice his son. Chapter 22 begins rather abruptly with these words:

God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!”

“Here I am,” he replied.

Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering...

It's a familiar story so you likely know the rest of it. Abraham accepts the test and does as God commands. Abraham actually gets to the point of binding up his son on the altar and raising his knife to do the evil deed. Abraham having met the test, the angel of the Lord stops him at the last moment. Instead, a ram caught in the thickets is the sacrifice offered to God.

It would be easy to dismiss this story as just another suspect example where the authors get God wrong. But we can't dismiss it. Christians have for millenia seen this story as a foreshadowing of Christ. God does what Abraham was prevented from doing - offering his son as a sacrifice to pay the price for the world. Christ becomes the ram in the thicket and takes Isaac's place.

We can't dsmiss the story. But we can question it and delve deeply into it for understanding's sake. That's what I do here.

I begin my delve as a father who experiences a great deal of emotional disgust with the story. How could Abraham do that to his son? How could he sense the questioning in his son's face, hear his cries as he bound him, and then see the fear in his son's eyes as he raises the knife? As a father, I cannot fathom it. It would never happen.

I cannot help but to consider Isaac's pain and trauma. Isaac didn't ask for this. He's powerless. He pays the cost of merely the threat of violence. And indeed mere threats of violence have a cost! Trauma is real. 

Jesus' words in Matthew. “Whoever causes one of these little ones to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea”

 

The trauma Isaac experiences - how could it not influence him to question, doubt, fail to understand who God really is? Imagine being Isaac and hearing this story retold about how God commanded his father to offer him as a sacrifice and how his father almost did just that. Talk about reliving childhood trauma! 

So with this emotional resistance to the story in mind, I move to how I interpret the text.

 

I read the Bible through the lens of Jesus. That lens tells me that the text gets God wrong up to verse 11. God didn't really command Abraham to take his son Isaac and get ready to sacrifice him. Abraham may have felt that God was telling him this. But Abraham was hearing incorrectly. In turn, the author of the story, like Abraham, gets it wrong. God doesn't really test Abraham in this way. 

Instead, what we are really reading about is the test to the religious sensibilities of that day and age. In that day and age, human sacrifice indeed was a thing! Infants were offered as a sacrifice to appease the gods. Even ancient Judaism was not immune to the practice, it seems. In Leviticus 18, we're given a command that implies that what is being commanded against was indeed being practiced. Why command against it if its not a thing to begin with. That thing in Leviticus 18:21 is infanct sacrifice.

So, the following is clear to me when it comes to the Abraham and Isaac story.

1,) Child Sacrifice was happening.

2.) Elements within Ancient Judaism engaged in the practice, too (see Lev 18:21).

3.) The practice was seen as divinely ordained by the religions of the day

4.) Genesis 22:12 makes clear it is not divinely ordained

5.) The practice of animal sacrifice is solely acceptable (until Jesus ends it)

To sum, while the Abraham and Isaac narrative is ghastly to our ears, and rightly so, in the evolution of religious practices, it was a step forward. It ended any quesiton that human sacrifice was not of God and must not continue. God will from here declare it as anathema and legislate it as evil and forbidden.