This is an enormously complicated and difficult and even painful
passage. It has been the subject of contentious debated since forever, perhaps from the
first time that anyone passed it down from one generation to the next. In terms
of preaching and teaching, there are usually three fairly consistent popular
interpretations of it.
First is the one on its face. Abraham is tempted by God to see how
faithful he would be. To see if he would be willing to sacrifice everything,
including his own son and the promise of descendant blessings in order to obey
God. This is the one most commonly used by preachers. Brueggemann stresses this
point in his Interpretation: Genesis commentary. William
Willimon followed this thinking in an old 2002 Pulpit Resource article.
The second is that the story was constructed by the Elohist writer to help
combat the child sacrifice of his time. Child sacrifice was found in Judah
during the time in which the Elohist was writing (2 Kings 16:3; 21:6 (“He made
his son pass through fire”); 23:10 (“He defiled Topheth…so that no one would
make a son or a daughter pass through fire as an offering to Molech); Jer.
19:4,5 (“Because the people have…filled this place with the blood of the
innocent, 5 and gone on building the high places of
Baal to burn their children in the fire as burnt offerings to Baal, which I did
not command or decree,…6Therefore…”). The so-called “Covenant Code”
allows for the first born child to be “given” to the deity just as the first
born animal was given. Cf. Exodus 22:29-30,
“You shall not delay to make offerings from the fullness of your harvest
and from the outflow of your presses. The firstborn of your sons you
shall give to me. 30You shall do the same with your oxen
and with your sheep: seven days it shall remain with its mother; on the eighth
day you shall give it to me.”
So the theory was that the Abraham and Isaac story was written to help
overcome child sacrifices in ancient Israel during the divided
monarchy, when “E” was writing. And it’s true that subsequent ancient
legislation contained clauses which provided for the replacement of a potential
child sacrifice with an animal (such as a “ram”).
See for example, Exodus 13:13-16:
“But every firstborn donkey you shall redeem with a sheep; if you do not
redeem it, you must break its neck. Every firstborn male among your
children you shall redeem. 14When in the future your child asks you,
‘What does this mean?’ you shall answer, ‘By strength of hand the LORD brought
us out of Egypt, from the house of slavery. 15When Pharaoh
stubbornly refused to let us go, the LORD killed all the firstborn in the land of Egypt,
from human firstborn to the firstborn of animals. Therefore I
sacrifice to the LORD every male that first opens the womb, but every
firstborn of my sons I redeem.’16It shall serve as a sign on
your hand and as an emblem on your forehead that by strength of hand the LORD brought
us out of Egypt.”
“So, it is possible that the E story, in which Abraham, the father of
the people, with whom the descendants feel corporate responsibility, was meant
to dramatize the deity’s demand for the substitutionary practice, and
was one of the factors which brought about cultic reform and the
abandonment of human sacrifice. The biblical prophets and the laws in
Deuteronomy and Leviticus expressly forbid this practice, but that fact also
implies strongly that it continued to occur. In fact, the story of Abraham’s “sacrifice” of Isaac
suggests that Abraham was familiar with human sacrifice. He knew how to do it,
and he was not surprised by Yahweh’s demand.” [a]
The third interpretation is that Abraham knew all the time that
God was just testing him and there was really nothing particularly scary about
the story. He was going along with it because he knew that God would never make
him actually do it. The story of “faith” in this version is that he had enough
faith in God to know that God wouldn’t actually do it (or, better, allow
Abraham to do it). I personally think this is bunk. It’s demeaning and detracts
from the pain the author or the real life participants went through in the
story. However, I have, and I’m sure everyone has, heard a sermon on this text
using this theme.
A fourth possibility is from Michael Lerner, which repeats
some ancient thinking of the rabbis on the story. In it Abraham is internally
torn because of things that had happened to him by his father in his own youth
and he was repeating down to his child the habits and demonic voices of that
pain. “The real task,” says Lerner, following this interpretation, “was for him
to be able to separate out the voices within him and discern the voice of the
one true God from the gods of the pain and destruction of his childhood.”
What follows is the gist of my sermon, based roughly on Lerner’s theory,
but I’m not altogether happy with it.
SO WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
The story is basically from the Elohist, though there is some confusion
over the use of the name YHWH (Yahweh) at vv. 11, 14, and 16. Some
believe that vv. 14-18 are insertions from the hand of the Yahwist. But that
doesn’t explain the first use of YHWH at v. 11, where the angel of
the lord comes to Abraham again and tells him not to sacrifice Isaac.
The insertions appear purposeful, and appear to make a statement. My guess is
that it probably has to do with the primacy of Yahwist religion over Elohist religion.
Exactly what is the key question of the passage.
Michael Lerner, in “Cruelty Is Not Destiny: Abraham and the
Psychodynamics of Childhood” (Tikkun, n.d., p. 33 ff.) argues that
Abraham is a man wracked with conflict over abuses in his own childhood,
stories of which Lerner finds in early Rabbinic midrash on this
passage. Abraham, according to the stories, grew up as a monotheist in a
typically polytheistic society. His father was a maker of idols for the
culture, and Abraham early on realized how useless they were for
helping crops or love lives. In a very revealing story, once Abraham’s
father went away for a while and left Abraham to sell the idols by
himself. “A man came and wished to buy one. ‘How old are you”’ Abraham asked
him. ‘Fifty years,’ was the reply. ‘Woe to such a man!’ he exclaimed, ‘you are
fifty years old and would worship a day-old-object!’ At this the man
became ashamed and departed.” (p. 33). According to the story, these exchanges
continued, and finally the father, who made his living supporting these idols,
turned Abraham over to the king, who tortured him to make him believe in the
idols, and threw him into a fiery furnace. Abraham does not die from the
occasion, but he comes out scarred both externally, and internally. His internal
burns are probably deeper and more dangerous than his external ones. He never
again lives in his father’s house, and eventually, when his father dies, he
leaves the country altogether and travels north to Canaan becoming a
wandering nomad. The root definition of the word ivri, which
we translate as “Hebrew,” is one who crosses boundaries, who is rootless. It is
to this troubled, boundary crossing, contradictory, sometimes violent, unhealed
monotheist that God finally comes and chooses as the beginning of his new
religion.
In the Abraham and Isaac story then, according to this
interpretation, Abraham is a victim of “repetition compulsion,” a Freudian term
which means he is repeating on his son the same horror he experienced
by his father (remember “Corporate personality”? We pass it all down to our
kids). The Rabbis theorized that the first message that Abraham receives in v.
1, is from Elohim, the many raging internal gods which tell him that he has
done despicable things in the way he has treated Hagar, his wife, his child
Ishmael, and deserves not to have the blessing of God, and now the best way to
get out of the pain is to destroy the promise, to kill the child of laughter.
He, Abraham, is a child of violence, and unable to deal with the world without
violence, and now in his despair and misery with his life, he resorts to end
everything with violence. The voice he hears from the beginning is the voice of
the pain of his childhood which he projected into the voice of God,
telling him to do to his own son what was done to him. As he was thrown into
the fire, so he will pass the pain on to his own beloved. “Take your son, your
only son, the one whom you love, Isaac, and offer him in burnt offering.…”
All of us do this. We act out of the fundamental traumas of our
childhood. There is something about doing the things that were done to us as
kids that somehow makes us think we can master them, or have control over them.
In childhood events in which we were powerless or victimized, we attempt rightourselves
as adults by repeating the sin on someone else. (“The parents have eaten
sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” [Jeremiah 31:29]). We
pass down or pain to our offspring as a prize of their inheritance. Then they
despise us for it and pass it down to their offspring. All but a few of us
hated something in our parents. And all but a few of us who have children have
something in us that we have blotted them with that came from our childhoods
and which they hate within us. We should put our wounds in our wills, for that
is the largest thing that people inherit from us.
Whoever inserted “Yahweh” as the speaker in the second message, v. 11,
intended it to be a different voice than the first. Lerner, following the
Rabbis, believes that it was intended to represent a word that is truly from
God. The task (“test”?) of Abraham was not that he was willing to take his son
Isaac to a mountain and sacrifice him to God. The real task was for him to be
able to separate out the voices within him and discern the voice of the one
true God from the gods of the pain and destruction of his childhood. To
separate out the voices of the gods of humiliation, and defeat, and abuse, and unlove,
and to hear instead the voice of the God of the Covenant and the gift and the
laughter, and the God who gives sight and vision to see the resources what will
rescue us. the greatness of Abraham is not that he was tough enough
to obey a God’s command to kill his own son; the greatness of Abraham is that
he didn’t go through with it! “At that very last moment, Abraham hears the true
voice of God, the voice that says, ‘Don’t send your hand onto the youth and
don’t make any blemish.’” (Lerner) Don’t do it, God says, you don’t have to do
it. You do not have to hurt others to get over your own hurts. You do not have
to damage others to get over your own buried sense of damage.
The distinction of the voices is that the first one is plural, “the
gods.” The many voices that Paul speaks of that torture us with threats and
challenges. The second is YHWH, the one voice, the one God. The God who
says the chain of pain can be broken, who the God of the redemption
and liberation of Israelfrom Egypt.
Note that Jews read this story every year at Rosh Ha Shanah, the
traditional time of atonement. It is the time when that which has been in our
lives does not ultimately and completely have to bind us, limit us, make us
less than we could be and should be. If Abraham can transcend the voices of his
childhood, the ceremony says, then so can we.
Exegetical
Notes
Genesis 22:1-18
After these things[2] God[3] tested[4] Abraham.[5] He said
to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.”[6] 2 He
said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love,[7] and go to
the land of Moriah,[8] and offer
him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.”[9]
3 So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled
his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; he cut
the wood for the burnt offering, and set out and went to the place in the
distance that God had shown him. 4On the third day Abraham
looked up and saw[10] the
place far away. 5Then Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here
with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there;[11] we
will worship, and then we will come back to you.” 6Abraham took
the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he himself
carried the fire and the knife. So the two of them walked on together. 7Isaac
said to his father Abraham, “Father!” And he said, “Here I am, my son.” He
said, “The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt
offering?”[12] 8Abraham
said, “God himself will provide[13] the
lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” So the two of them walked on together.
9 When they came to the place that God had
shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound
his son Isaac, and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. 10Then
Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill[14] his
son. 11 But the angel of the Lord[15] called
to him from heaven, and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.”[16] 12 He
said, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know
that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from
me.” 13 And Abraham looked up and saw[17] a
ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and
offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. 14 So
Abraham called that place “The Lord will provide”[18];
as it is said to this day, “On the mount of theLord it shall be provided.”[19]
15 The angel of the Lord[20] called
to Abraham a second time from heaven,16 and said, “By myself
I have sworn, says the Lord: Because you have done this, and have not
withheld your son, your only son, 17 I will indeed bless
you, and I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven and as
the sand that is on the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of
their enemies, 18 and by your offspring shall all the
nations of the earth gain blessing for themselves, because you have obeyed my
voice.”[21] 19So
Abraham returned to his young men, and they arose and went together to Beer-sheba;[22] and
Abraham lived at Beer-sheba.
[a]Victor Harold Matthews, Mark W. Chavalas and
John H. Walton, The IVP Bible Background Commentary : Old
Testament (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000).
[2] “After these things”: A conventional
opening to a new section, meaningsometime afterwards. See also 15:1; 22:20; 39:7; 40:1.
[3] “God” (’elohim ) Plural
of 'elowahh, deity in general, or the Deity. In
the ordinary sense it means “gods,” but usually used (when plural) of God.
[4] “Test” (נסה nâsâh) verb, to test, try, prove, tempt,
assay, put to the proof or test (BDB Dictionary). “Testing, however,
does not always suggest tempting or enticing someone to sin, as when the Queen
of Sheba tested Solomon’s wisdom (1Ki. 10:1; 2Ch. 9:1); and Daniel’s physical
appearance was tested after a ten-day vegetarian diet (Dan. 1:12, Dan. 1:14)….can
refer to the testing of equipment, such as swords or armor (1Sa. 17:39)” (The
Complete Word Study Dictionary).
“In most contexts nasa has
the idea of testing or proving the quality of someone or something, often
through adversity or hardship. The rendering ‘tempt’…generally means prove,
test, put to the test, rather than the current English idea of “entice to do
wrong.” In a number of passages nasa means to attempt to do
something. It is used of attempting or venturing a word which might offend the
hearer (Job. 4:2), of venturing to touch one’s foot to the ground (Deu. 28:56),
and of trying to take a nation (Israel) from another nation (Egypt) (Deu.
4:34)….The largest number of references, however, deal with situations where a
person or a nation is undergoing a trial or difficult time brought about by
another. Though man is forbidden to put God to the test (Deu. 6:16), the OT
records that he did so. The wilderness place of Massah (“trial”)
becomes a byword in this regard, often combined in a play on words with nasa,
“to try” (Exo. 17:2, Exo. 17:7; Deu. 6:16; Deu. 33:8; Psa. 95:8, Psa. 95:9; cf. Deu.
9:22). Those who put God to the proof in the wilderness would not see Canaan (Num.
14:22-23). The hymns of Israel reflect this defiant attitude (see
Psa. 78:18, Psa. 78:41, Psa. 78:56; Psa. 106:14)” (Theological Dictionary of
the Old Testament).
[5] “God tested Abraham”: Elsewhere in the Pentateuch, God tests the people
Israel: see Exodus 15:26; 16:4;
Deuteronomy 8:2, 16; 13:3; 33:8.
[6] “Here I am”: Often used to indicate
readiness and availability with respect to God’s command. See also 31:11 (Jacob); 46:2 (Jacob);
Exodus 3:4 (Moses);
1 Samuel 3:8 (Samuel).
Used here three times, vv. 7 and 11. Especially interesting is v. 7, where
Abraham says the words in response to being addressed by Isaac.
[8] Moriah (mountain) Traditional (but
unlikely) site of Solomon's Temple atJerusalem, on the threshing
floor of Araunah. Cf. 2 Chronicles 3:1 “Solomon began to build the house of the Lord in Jerusalem on Mount Moriah,
where the Lord had appeared to his father David, at the place that
David had designated, on the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite.” However,
the image of Abraham sacrificing on Moriah Mountain was seen as
a prototype to the Moriah temple and Isaac’s “sacrifice” was seen as
the foundation of the sacrificial system. There is a substitutionary nature
to sacrifice. As later in the Passover, a ram is slaughtered in place of a son
(cf. Exo. 12), and over the centuries the blood of bulls and goats is
added to the blood of the ram slain for Isaac. In the latter days, Jesus is the
Passover sacrificed for us. Adapted from “Blogging toward Sunday,”
Peter J. Leithart, Theolog(http://www.theolog.org/blog/2008/06/blogging-towa-3.html#more).
[9] “Go to the land of Moriah…on
one of the mountains that I shall show you.” Evidence of a redaction: Moriah is
the name of a mountain, not a region. You can’t go a particular mountain and
then wait for God to tell you which mountain to go to. The name “Moriah” was
probably added to tie the story tothe founding of the Temple Moriah in
Jerusalem, to imply that Abraham was the founder of that temple. But he clearly
was not.
[10] Saw, yi’reh, a prim. root;
“to see,” lit. or fig. Also, “provide,” “cause to (let) show (self).”
The first of a series of plays on the word yi’reh, which
continues the complex wordplay on “seeing,” which has been prominent throughout
the Abrahamic stories, 16:13-14; 21:9. Seeing and providing are closely linked
linguistically in Hebrew, and especially theologically in these passages. See
especially below on 22:8, and 14.
[11] “Over there.” The IB notes that in
accordance with Hebrew Scripture usage, if they were really going to Mount Moriah,
then Abraham would not have said that we will “go over there,” but that we will
“go up.” Another indication that Moriah was a redaction to the
earlier story.
[13] God…will provide, ’elohim, yi’reh, same
word as used in v. 4. Means in this case, “God will see to it” or God will make
it visible.” Haslam suggests that the phrase may intend irony as in “God
himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering - my son.”
[14] “Kill” (ָשַׁחט šāḥaṭ). Verb, to slaughter, to
kill, to offer, to slay. Haslam says that “The Hebrew word is a technical term
used specifically to describe animal sacrifice.”
[15]Lord (yhwh, Yahweh).
Note the change from Elohim to Yahweh. Some
believe that it was inserted by the redactor to make a distinction between two
gods. Others say it is two different understandings of the one God, or it is
the merging together of writings by two authors (Elohist and Yahwist). If it is
two writers, then vv. 14-18 are probably from the Yahwist, because they relate
naming the place using Yahweh’s name. But that doesn’t explain v. 11, where
Yahweh first appears. It is fairly clear that a redactor stuck it there for a
reason. What the reason was, is the question. See below on Michael Lerner, who
relates rabbinic Midrash that said it was two voices within Abraham’s head. The
good God and the bad God.
[16] “Here I am” (ִהֵנּה hinnēh) Behold, or look. Continuing
the theme of sightunderneath this passage. “An interjection meaning
behold, look, now; if. It is used often and expresses strong feelings,
surprise, hope, expectation, certainty, thus giving vividness depending on its
surrounding context. Its main meanings can only be summarized briefly here: It
stresses a following word referring to persons or things (Gen. 12:19; Gen.
15:17; Gen. 18:9). It is used to answer, with the first person suffix attached,
when one is called (Gen. 22:1, Gen. 22:7).” (Complete word Study Dictionary)
[19] On the mount of the Lord…provided, yhwh …yi’reh.
Either, “The mountain where Yahweh will provide (a ram)” or “…where Yahweh can
be seen.” Either is possible.
[20] “The angel of the Lord.” For the
angel’s role in story of the flight of Ishmael and Hagar, see 21:17-19.
The J writer typically has God speak directly to humans. The E writer usually
speaks through angels.
[21] God has made promises to Abraham six
times: see 12:2-3, 7; 13:14-17; 15; 17; 18. Now the angel repeats for the
seventh and climatic time (12:2-3, 7; 13:14-17; 15; 17; 18) the great promises
in their most generous form. For the first time, Abraham is blessed because he
has heeded God’s command. [NJBC]
[22] Beersheba. “This important city, often
identified as the southern limit ofIsrael’s territory (Judg 20:1; 1 Sam 3:20), is
traditionally located in the northern Negev at Tell es-Seba’ (three miles east of the modern city). Its
name derives from its association with the wells dug to provide water for the
people and flocks in this area (see Gen 26:23–33) (Victor Harold Matthews, Mark W.Chavalas and
John H. Walton, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament (Downers
Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000).
