SYNOPSIS: God
asks Abraham to make a sacrifice of his son Isaac. Abraham sets out to
the place God has told him with Isaac, two servants and an ass. They
reach the place, Abraham builds an altar, and when he is about to kill
Isaac, an angel tells him not to hurt his son, for now he knows that
Abraham will hold back nothing from God. A ram appears and is sacrificed
instead. Abraham names the place YHWH-yir'e. The angel promises that Abraham will be blessed for his obedience. Abraham returns to Beer-Sheba.
And so we come to what is in many ways one of the central passages of Genesis, so famous, so talked-about and so unforgettable that it has been given a name of its own in Jewish lore: the
‛aqeda (Akedah), i.e. The Binding. Morally and symbolically, this is the most climactic event in the life of its central figure, Abraham. After this, in fact, his story is nearly over, for it only remains to tell of the passing of his wife Sarah and the aged father's concerns over whom his son would marry; then the narrative will quickly move on to other matters. Before any of that, however, there is this awful, terrifying, heart-rending scene. At this place in the book, like no other, time itself seems to stand still for a moment; the world we have known (or which the book has brought to life for us) hangs in the balance; the literary entity of Genesis stops, freezes, becomes immobile for a fraction of a second, and so, indeed, does the reader's or listener's respiration.
But hang on a moment (OK, breathe!): doesn't this whole story contain a massive, unresolved contradiction? Yes it does. The central point of the story is, at least on the surface, a sacrificial act that is, in the last resort, cancelled. Sacrifices are nothing new in Genesis or throughout the Old Testament, but this story talks about a human sacrifice: how many of those are there? The historical reality is that cultures all over the place at that time did practise human sacrifices, but Israel was the exception, and God (by which I mean the God of the people who wrote Genesis) had expressly forbidden it. Today many of us may even find animal sacrifices repugnant; in their immediate context, on the other hand, given that human sacrifices were rife, animal sacrifices can be seen in a very positive light if their function is to replace and hence to avoid the worse evil. This seems likely, since the whole concept of transferring a ritual act onto a surrogate victim is a familiar one in Jewish customs: witness the
scapegoat. In context, then, the Hebrew Bible condones animal sacrifice
but absolutely forbids human sacrifice, contrasting in this with the Canaanites and other neighbours. The point of the scapegoat is that it is a goat (rather than a person); its moral function is for the person or community performing the ritual of casting out the scapegoat to recognise their own faults (sin, guilt, blame) and, in demonstration thereof, to offer "payment" to square off their debt; God's benevolence consists of accepting a lesser "fee" in lieu of the one really owed, and thereby cancelling the debt. Christianity seems to have reversed the whole point of this with its portrayal of God's son (presumably more, not less, than a "mere human") playing the part of the goat (or lamb: same difference) to expiate human sin. The crucifixion is represented in the Christian texts as a real human sacrifice symbolizing a ritual sacrifice: the business of choosing between which Jesus to crucify (Barabbas or the one from Galilee) even mimics the ancient custom of deciding by lot on a scapegoat out of two candidate animals. Reading this in a Jewish framework, the allusion could hardly be missed, but also the reversal of the whole original idea: animals were meant to stand in for human victims, not vice-versa! The association between the old tradition of the scapegoat and today's passage about the near-sacrifice of Isaac is also inescapable, once we know what the baseline is: the sacrifice of a human (for whatever reason, for we are never told) is here contemplated, exceptionally, only to lead up to the order given to Abraham in v. 12:
al tishlax yad'kha el hanná‛ar w'al ta‛ase m'úma 'Don't stretch out your hand against the boy or do anything [to him]', followed by the provision of another candidate, a mere animal, which will take the brunt of it: a ram! Perhaps, then, this is a story meant to impress on everyone the requirement that animals must replace humans as sacrificial victims. Perhaps... who knows! It is a matter of debate, in a religion that not only permits but encourages individual affiliates to argue and wonder about the meaning of its tracts, rather than binding believers through the imposition of obligatory dogmas.
The austerity, the economy of words and images that tell this short but gripping story is an amazing literary feat. The feeling of unease and angst it produces in us can only have been intended. Even when we know how it will end (and some commentators believe that the passage tells us as much in its first sentence [22:1, JPS]:
wayhi axar hadd'varim ha'élle w'ha'elohim nissa et avraham 'some time afterward, God put Abraham to the test' - so, we're warned that it's just going to be a test!), it is
still hard to read and infinitely poignant.
But, after the spine-chilling account is finished and we recover ourselves, what is this about? What is it's point? Why do they (the narrators, the creators of the tradition, God...)
do this?? Morally, psychologically and historically, how should we read this? The questions seem interminable and so is the discussion, both in time (this debate has been going on forever!) and in the ideas that have been suggested. Let me copy a few quotes from here and there in my books (and you might like to check out
the article about it on Wikipedia - yes, it has its own article!).
We'll start with Buber (MB, p. 145):
This paradoxical story of the second in the line of the patriarchs, of his being born and very nearly being killed, shows what is at stake: a begetting, but the begetting of a people standing at the disposal of God; a begetting, but a begetting commanded by God.
Next, Speiser (EAS, pp. 165-6):
What is the meaning of this shattering ordeal? In this infinitely sensitive account the author has left so much unsaid that there is now the danger of one's reading into it too much - or too little. Certainly, the object of the story had to be something other than a protest against human sacrifice in general, or child sacrifice in particular - an explanation that is often advanced... The object of the ordeal, then, was to discover how firm was the patriarch's faith in the ultimate divine purpose. It was one thing to start out resolutely for the Promised Land, but it was a very different thing to maintain confidence in the promise when all appeared lost.
And now Everett Fox (EF, p. 87):
This story is certainly one of the masterpieces of biblical literature... Chapter 22 is a tale of God's seeming retraction of his promise (of "seed") to Avraham.... Coming just one chapter after the birth of the long-awaited son, the story completely turns around the tension of the whole cycle and creates a new, frightening tension of its own. The real horror of the story lies in this threatened contradiction to what has gone before. Most noticeable in the narrative is Avraham's silence, his mute acceptance of, and acting on, God's command. We are told of no sleepless night, nor does he ever say a word to God... In many ways this story is the midpoint of Genesis. It brings the central theme of continuity and discontinuity to a head in the strongest possible way. After Moriyya, we can breathe easier, knowing that God will come to the rescue of his chosen ones in the direst of circumstances. At the same time we are left to ponder the difficulties of being a chosen one, subject to such an incredible test.
Having read the passage carefully while pondering on the different commentaries and on my own thoughts collected below about some of the details, the idea I finally come away with is that the function of this important scene is some sort of final ratification ritual
regarding God's covenant with Abraham. In this passage he is subjected to the most terrifying ordeal of his entire life: what could have been more awful for him than to have to bring to a sudden end, by his own hand, everything we have seen him strive to achieve, spurred on by God's promises, and now ordered by that very same God to abandon and destroy? The outcome of that act would surely have been much worse for Abraham than death itself: to do away with all that is meaningful in his life, and through a voluntary act which he has the power to obey or not!
Yet is there not also something unreal about the whole thing? Is Abraham
actually going to kill Isaac? No; we know that, though perhaps he would have. (But then there would have been no Israel, no patriarchs and no Genesis to read and discuss.) Did God truly want him to? No; we trust him not to, because he loves his people, and in any case we know the story's end and there he reveals the fact that he doesn't. If the death of Isaac at his father's hands is not real, then what does that make it? Symbolic! So this is a ritual, in which, maybe a little like the
mabbul when the world was young, everything that has been "created and made" is brought right up to the brink of disaster, the edge of the cliff, but then God says: stop! Enough. Now live, and don't take for granted what you have, because I am giving it to you.
It has also been called a rite of passage, a deliberately traumatic, life-changing ceremony whose purpose is to prepare an adolescent for adult life. A coming of age for Isaac (by the way, we have no idea how old he is supposed to have been when this occurred, so we can use our imagination, but he had to be at least old enough to carry the firewood), or perhaps symbolically a collective rite of passage also for the great people who would emerge one day from Abraham's seed in accordance with the covenant now reaffirmed.
A barmitzvah! Mazaltov!
22:1 wayyómer hinnéni
'And he said: Here I am.' That this is a story about devout obedience is confirmed by the three quasi-symbolic occurrences of the word
hinnéni 'here I am' in the passages, always on the lips of Abraham, the protagonist. In this verse God calls him (saying:
avraham) and Abraham simply responds:
hinnéni. Then in v. 7, when Abraham and his son have left the servants behind and are walking alone, Isaac addresses his father (saying:
avi 'My father'), and Abraham likewise responds:
hinnénni v'ni 'Here I am, my son.' Lastly, when God's messenger (or angel) intervenes in v. 11 as Abraham stands knife in hand, he calls:
avraham avraham; and Abraham's only word is:
hinnéni. This word is sometimes used in the same way elsewhere in Gen., though not so insistently, e.g. when the aged Isaac wishes to summon his oldest son Esau he calls his name, and Esau responds:
hinnéni. This is the story of Jacob's deception of Isaac to steal Esau's blessing, and when Esau later comes back and addresses his father (
avi), Isaac replies:
hinnéni mi atta v'ni 'Here I am; who are you my son?'
22:2 et y'xid'kha asher ahávta
KJV: 'thy only son Isaac, whom thou lovest'; Vulg.
...unigenitum quem diligis Isaac; LXX
ton agapêton hon agapêsas [sic!]; EAS 'your beloved one, Isaac whom you hold so dear'; JPS: 'your favored one, whom you love.' Speiser justifies his translation of
y'xid'kha as 'your beloved one' on the grounds that the word
yaxid of which this is a possessed form "is not the regular word for 'one,' but a noun meaning 'the unique one, one and only.' Isaac, of course, was not the only son... The correct rendering is already found in LXX, and the meaning is reinforced in Heb. by the phrase that immediately follows." I beg to differ with Speiser (and the JPS translation which follows the same line) on this interpretation. To me it seems that, whether we like it or not, the dictionary meaning of
yaxid is (CHALOT) 'only; one's only son/daughter', (EK) '(adj.) alone, only one.' Nobody says its dictionary meaning is 'beloved' or 'favored', and the only way I can see to interpret it as "really meaning" that here is via metaphorical extension - which is fine, but in the H original it is left to the
reader to carry out, if wished, that extrapolation of meanings; it is not hard-wired into the text. Shouldn't the translation follow suit? I am not denying that
yaxid can be
understood in some such sense, I'm just pointing out that the
primary meaning of what the text
says is
not that. Yiddish speakers may recognise the term בן־יחיד
benyokhed 'only son' (UW), perhaps from the beloved song
Rozhinkes mit mandlen which commences thus: אין דעם בית המקדש / אין א ווינקל חדר / זיצט די אלמנה בת ציון אליין / איר
בן יחיד’ל יידעלע’ן / וויגט זי כסדר / און זינגט אים צום .שלאפן א לידעלע שיין
In dem beys hamikdash / In a vinkl kheyder /
Zitst di almone Bas Tsioyn aleyn. / Ir ben yokhidl Yidele / Vigt zi keseyder / Un zingt im tsum shlofn a lidele sheyn, 'In the temple, / In the corner of a room, / The widow Daughter of Zion is sitting alone, / As to her
only son Yidele / She sings a pretty lullaby.' I think we would all agree that the way we interpret the diminutive
benyokhidl in this context is essentially analogous to the meaning suggested by
yaxid in the Genesis text (and that is no coincidence; Yiddish folklore has always drunk from such sources!): namely, the primary meaning is 'only son', but the idea conveyed is
also one of special love and tenderness. The trouble is, of course, that as Speiser and other commentators are quick to point out, Isaac
isn't Abraham's only son; there is Ishmael! Well, that may well be but I don't see it as the translator's job to sweep the contradiction, if there is one, under the carpet. I imagine that the source critics can't admit an assumption that the source of the present passage doesn't know about Ishmael, not because that is impossible a priori but rather because following their methods they have assigned this passage to the same source as the Ishmael story, so the source
has to know about Ishmael. Once again, if that is a problem, it isn't the translator's job to solve it. God says
y'xid'kha (and will say it again, for good measure, in v. 12, and yet again in v. 16), and it means 'only son'! I expect that God knows why.
w'lekh l'kha
There is surely some irony in the fact that God here uses the exact same phrase,
lekh l'kha 'Go!', which he first spoke to Abraham in 12:1; regarding the idiomatic use of
l'kha, see my note below on 22:8. Furthermore, there he said:
lekh l'kha... el ha'áretz asher ar'ékka 'Go... to the land which I will show you', and here he goes on to say
...‛al axad heharim asher omar elékha 'on one of the hills which I will tell you.' The irony seems to be that there, God's command opened up to Abraham a new life and introduced a promise; here, his orders seem to be aimed at putting an end to that same promise! Buber (MB, p. 41) notes that on both occasions when God tells Abraham lekh l'kha, the text goes on to tell us that wayyélekh - 'and he [i.e. Abra(ha)m] went.'
22:8 elohim yir'e lo hasse l'‛ola b'ni
JPS: 'God will see to the sheep for His burnt offering, my son.' KJV: 'My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering.' Vulg. 'Deus providebit sibi victimam holocausti fili mi.' A highly charged and magnificently poignant utterance, displaying Genesis at its literary best. First a word about yir'e lo, a BH idiom. Literally it means (almost untranslatably): 'God will see for himself a...' The lo, which is literally 'to him(self)', formed from the prepositional clitic l' and the pronominal suffix -o, is used here as l'kha is in the phrase lekh l'kha (see 12:1 and 22:2), in an idiomatic fashion to impart to the verb a nuance resembling a middle voice: so lekh is 'Go!', while lekh l'kha (with l'kha 'to you(rself)') is somewhat more emphatic, perhaps 'get thee!' In the present case, the verb that is being so reinforced, yir'e, literally means '(he) will see', but r-'-h is here being employed with what appears to be an extended, idiomatic sense of 'provide' (cf. the etymological makeup of this English verb: Latin pro-video, and see the Vulgate rendering above), or perhaps as suggested in CHALOT, 'choose'; or again, it may be best, after all, to stick with the idiomatic English translation offered in JPS ('see to'), which agrees with Speiser. Note that the H doesn't say 'his burnt offering' and I assume this possessive has been introduced in an attempt to compensate for the apparent absence of a literal equivalent (which is impossible anyway) of the H lo; but I am doubtful that this is necessary or an improvement of the translation, since this use of lo, as just explained, has the idiomatic function of nuancing the "voice" of the verb (perhaps to something like 'will see/choose for himself'), and that sense is in no way replicated by making the burnt offering 'his' instead of 'the'. But even if the ultimate meaning of the H verb in this context is something like 'provide' or 'choose', it still remains, literally, the verb 'to see', and that, in the H text, is significant. First of all, because it is the basis for the name game in v. 14. Buber takes the matter further, and believes that this very verb, r-'-h 'to see', is thematic to the entire Abraham cycle and therefore symbolic on a higher level (see MB, pp. 40-43); the argument he develops culminates with this (p. 43): "the symbols of this 'seeing' in all the stories become united for us in one mighty theme-word, not stated in Scripture precisely because it is so fundamental that we are expected to read it between the lines: Abraham the Seer." However, whatever we may make of that, let us return to the immediacy of the text as it is presented to us at this point and read it in all its simplicity: Isaac asks his father: Where is the animal for the sacrifice? and Abraham replies: God will see to the animal for the sacrifice, my son. There is no special vocative form in H: b'ni 'my son' might just as easily be a part of the answer to Isaac's question, a sort of coded admission of the truth; but I think Speiser is right to emphasize that, above all else, b'ni is used both here and in v. 7 (hinnénni v'ni) "as a mark of great tenderness." But what is perhaps most salient of all in Abraham's reply, from a literary viewpoint, is its calculated weakness: what sort of an answer is that?! For all that God will see and all that, it isn't much of an answer to a straightforward question! He might as well have said: "We'll see." In the dynamic of human verbal interactions, such an answer to such a question invites the addressee to ponder on what the speaker could possibly mean; it is the subtlest of hints, communicatively appropriate where the truth is pragmatically unspeakable. The delicacy with which all these implications have been artfully sown into a minimalistic dialogue that is superficially simple to the point of starkness can only be described as exquisite.
wayyél'khu sh'nehem yaxdaw
The repetition of the same clause exactly, 'and the two of them walked [on] together', at the end of vv. 6 and 8, which might normally be eschewed in modern prose and even thought "clumsy", is a perfectly calculated device in this narrative which draws on the standard resources of oral literature, turning the words into a sort of refrain which at the same time as it seems innocuous enough on the surface, acquires increasingly troubling overtones in the listener's mind with each enunciation because of the listener's foreknowledge of what is on Abraham's (and Isaac's??) mind. Because the text is thus, so to speak, "playing with us", and this seems to be an important psychological feature of the passage, I think it was a mistake of the JPS translation, which shows a lack of sensitivity to the true feel of the text, to disguise the drumbeat-like repetition of the identical words through stylistic variation, albeit minor: 'and the two walked off together', 'and the two of them walked on together.' (Incidentally, I commited the same error myself in the NBIE draft translation!)
22:9
I can do no better than quote Etz Hayim (p. 119-120) at this point: "The narrative busies itself with the details of the preparatory procedures. Both Abraham and Isaac are silent. The anguish of this moment is beyond words." This is the result of highly controlled verbal art. The text at this critical point is simultaneously verbose and reticent. A word less would not make the story better; a word more would risk diminishing the pathos of the scene! (Translators take note.)
wayya‛aqod et yitzxaq
'And he bound Isaac.' This is the verb root (‛-q-d) which gave rise to the traditional name for the story, ‛aqeda (see comment).
22:12 ki ‛atta yadá‛ti ki y're elohim atta
'For now I know that you fear God' (lit. '...that you are God-fearing' or '...that you are a fearer of God' or something similar; it is a participial construction) is the crucial reason given for stopping the function. In other words: You have passed the test. We always knew he would, of course; and so did God. As for Isaac, he was perhaps hopeful. In that case, it might be thought that the "for now I know" is a bit of a poor reason, almost untrue even (the now part): how could God not have known, since he's God? And since he already knew what the trial was set up to "find out", isn't this ordeal excessively cruel and unnecessary for a good man past his hundredth winter, not to mention the beloved son and future patriarch? Such questions have been asked through the ages and great sages have given their views on them, so I'm not going to say anything new. But we might wish to at least make sure we understand the verb yadá‛ti 'I know' which is at the heart of this conundrum. BH doesn't have an explicit present tense; in the indicative mood verbs have two tense-aspects, called perfect and imperfect, either of which can and do, in different contexts, convey a present but often with potential ambiguity. Stative verbs in particularly tend to adopt the perfect form to refer to the present time and this makes them aspectually as well as temporally ambiguous: among the possible meanings that can be read into yadá‛ti are 'I know' (stative, describes a resulting state) and 'I have found out' (dynamic, describes a current situation resulting from a completed "action"). I knew but I just thought I'd check, maybe?
22:13 w'hinne áyil axar
This and the next verse contain several awkwardnesses in terms of syntax: things just don't flow, and it is believed highly likely that some corruptions or other oddities have crept into the text. Here is one: as Speiser points out, literally this means 'and behold, a ram after'. Which, as he observes, makes about as much sense in Hebrew as it does in English. Some translations have tried to wrestle this into some sort of acceptabe shape by turning 'after' into 'behind', but apart from the fact that 'and behold, a ram behind' is only marginally a syntactic improvement, as Speiser notes, in terms of narrative context it is still pretty disastrous. If, against all the odds, we assume that the narrator had wished to say that the ram was behind Abraham, in H the expectation would be for the personal form axaraw 'behind him', not the bare axar. The most likely guess is that axar (which in consonantal writing is אחר, i.e. 'xr), was a "scribe-o" (or whatever they had instead of typos in those days) for exad 'one' (written אחד, i.e. 'xd; notice the similarity between the letters dalet and resh) so that the text must originally have said w'hinne áyil exad ne'exaz bass'vakh b'qarnaw 'and behold: one ram caught in the thicket by its horns.' Now nearly all copies of the Hebrew text do contain the unlikely axar, which means, since copyists were extremely meticulous when it came to the Torah, that the miscopying must have taken place a long, long time ago; once the mistake had been committed, later copyists were bound to repeat it by their code of not changing a jot or a tittle. Evidence for the assumed original, however, comes from LXX which says here kai idou krios heis 'and behold one ram', exactly as we hypothesize. The Vulg. is having none of it, and if the H text says 'behind' then 'behind' it shall be - but inserts tergum after post to improve the sense: viditque post tergum arietem 'and he saw a ram behind his back', which is not what usually happens when you raise your eyes as Abraham just did (a fuller quote is: levavit Abraham oculos viditque post tergum arietem), and in any case this can hardly be called a more literal rendering when the Hebrew says nothing about tergum. Onk. endeavours to get to the same place without mentioning anyone's back by saying that Abraham looked batar illen 'behind them'. KJV follows along, smoothing things over as much as it can: 'And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns.' On this occasion Speiser recommends we go with LXX and common sense, reading áyil exad (which is something) rather than áyil axar (which is nothing) and translating accordingly, and JPS likewise has: 'When Abraham looked up, his eye fell upon a ram, caught in the thicket by its horns.' It is true that 'a ram' is not exactly the same as 'one ram'; H does not use exad 'one' as an indefinite article in the manner of many languages, so that this means 'one ram', which miraculously was exactly the number Abraham needed for his purpose.
22:14 YHWH yir'e, YHWH yera'e
YHWH yir'e means 'YHWH will see (future)' or 'YHWH sees (consuetudinal present)', which may be taken on face value but of course harks back to v. 8 where Abraham said to Isaac elohim yir'e lo hasse 'God will see to (or provide, or choose) the lamb' (see note above). Thus the story incorporates a name game; except that this is not a very conventional kind of name for a hill. At the beginning of the narrative (v. 2) the region is named as éretz hammoriyya 'the land of Moriah' (the identity of which is uncertain), and it has been conjectured that perhaps (by a certain amount of implied sleight of hand) the present allusion to the verb form yir'e (or the root r-'-h) might have been intended as a clever (albeit obscure) presumed etymology for that name. Since there is a bit of apparent confusion in this part of the text, anything is possible. And the confusion continues with the comment added in the second part of the verse which changes both the syntax and the pointing in יראה to give a second version: (b'har YHWH) yera'e, meaning '(on God's mountain) it will be seen' or '...will appear' (or '...will be provided/chosen'?). If we can pick out anything in the haze, it is perhaps that there was a cluster of different, though similar, traditional folk explanations (such things happen) mixing up YHWH yir'e, elohim yir'é lo hasse, b'har YHWH yera'e, éretz hammoriyya... and the writers, who couldn't make their mind up which one to go with, attempted to stick them all in together and let us, the listeners or readers, worry about it. Talk about a translator's nightmare!
22:15 ff.
At first glance, the statement (v. 15) that "the angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time from heaven" appears to usher in a repetition of the praise we have heard in 22:12, when "the angel" spoke to him for the first time, but as it turns out, what follows, although based on the event that has just occurred, is in reality a (as it turns out, final) restatement, in vv. 17-18a, of God's promise and covenant with Abraham, which has been documented over the past ten chapters, and is thus a rounding off not just of this passage but of the main part of the whole Abraham story (although we have yet to read a little about his latter years in the fifth parasha to which we are now coming).
22:16 bi nishbá‛ti
This formula, lit. 'I swear by myself', appears to be simply a solemn announcement of God's ratification of his promise.
n'um YHWH
This is also a conventional formula, used nowhere else in Gen. but common in the prophets, which usually either introduces or concludes the words of God; KJV 'saith the Lord.' The word n'um is perhaps the construct state of na'um, passive participle of the verb n-'-m 'to utter, speak, utter a prophecy' (EK); this would make the formula rather close to the Spanish Palabra de Dios.
yá‛an asher
'Because.' Only occurs this once in Gen. but nearly a hundred times in the Tanakh. Derived from the verb root ‛-n-h 'to answer (etc.).'
22:17-18a
This is the recap of Abraham's covenant. See my note higher up.
22:18b ‛éqev asher
Another compound subordinating conjunction, only occurring in Gen. here and in 26:5, which may contain a deliberate (though not a verbally explicit) reference to this very event, thus emphasising its function as a ratification of the covenant: Isaac will be told there that the covenant is renewed in him ‛éqev asher shama‛ avraham b'qoli 'inasmuch as Abraham obeyed Me' (JPS). There are a dozen occurrences of this conjunction elsewhere in the Tanakh. The meaning is 'in consequence of the fact that, on account of (etc.), because'. The noun ‛éqev is literally 'heel' (cf. the name games around Isaac's son ya‛aqov 'Jacob' playing on the word 'heel'); thus it means '[on] the heel of (the fact that)...', so to speak.