Abraham and the Sacrifice of Isaac: A Modern Interpretation of an Ancient Story

Augustine Mensah
University of Cape Coast
Cape Coast, Ghana
[email protected]

Abstract

The story of Abraham’s near sacrifice of his son Isaac in Genesis 22 is traditionally understood as
highlighting the man’s faith in God. However, reading the text closely, a method of reading which
seeks to disclose even the repressed and unconscious dimensions of texts – ‘turn it and turn it again
for everything is in it’ (Avoth 5:22) – the author argues that Abraham’s action in this story will, in
today’s world, reveal him not as the man of faith many readers think him to be in the story, but as one
who abuses his child; a father who betrays his son’s trust in him. This reading proceeds inductively,
allowing the text itself to inform our understanding of child’s abuse. It is meant to show the other side
of the Bible stories that are often closed or lost to us, the side that makes the Bible literature.

Introduction

Traditionally, Abraham is praised as the quintessential person of faith. He is said to be a

model of faith and a time honoured tradition sees him – as it does many of the biblical figures

– as tzaddiq (‘righteous one’). To suggest then that this honoured figure in the Bible

sometimes acted inappropriately might therefore make readers uncomfortable. Yet it is how

the biblical account at times reveals him to us when read closely.

Significantly, it is not only Abraham whose action the Bible portrays as inappropriate.

King David too has his action condemned when he gets Uriah killed after sleeping with his

wife and getting her pregnant. The Bible says that David’s action did not please God; it was

evil in his eyes (2 Sam 11:27). Thus the Bible, as Plaskow (2008) observes, makes clear that

the biblical ancestors are by no means always models of ethical behaviour that edify and

inspire us. On the contrary, it often holds up a mirror to the ugliest aspects of their nature or

of human society.

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 The same can be said of the Talmud, which is the title of two great collections of rabbinic

teaching – the Jerusalem Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud – compiled after 200 CE as an

extensive commentary on the Mishnah and Gemara and regarded as authoritative on matters

of everyday life. In it, one observes that while the rabbis often portray the biblical ancestors

in a positive light, there are occasions when they also criticise them for their actions. One

such criticism is found in the story about Joseph and Potiphar’s wife in Gen 39:1-23.

The story is that Potiphar’s wife wanted Joseph to sleep with her and the woman kept

badgering him but Joseph refused. Then one day, when ‘none of the men of the house was

there in the house,’ the text reads (see Gen 39:11), Joseph went there to do his household

duties and the woman seized him by his clothes, demanding that he slept with her (Gen

39:12). The rabbis reading that Joseph went to the house when none of the men of the house

was in the house (39:11) interpreted the phrase as implying that Joseph had the intention of

acting immorally (Sotah 36b). And so, just as the Torah, the Talmud also does not hesitate to

point out the flaws and weaknesses of the biblical heroes to show us the other side of their

nature.

So how does the Genesis story then expose the flaws of Abraham? How does it show his

action towards his son to qualify as betrayal or abuse in the modern sense of the word? To

answer the question, let us first turn to the story. But before that, let us reiterate the point

about the method adopted in this reading. We indicate it is close reading, a method that

attempts to account for every detail of the text such as plot, characterisation, setting, point of

view, figurative language and allusion and, in the process, disclosing even the repressed an

unconscious dimension of the text. It proceeds inductively, allowing the text itself to inform

our understanding of child abuse.

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Genesis 22: The Story

The story has it that one day, apparently without warning, God asks Abraham to take his son

Isaac to a distant mountain. There, he was to slay him and offer him up as a burnt offering.

The command is as direct, and brutal in the Hebrew text: qach-na’ ’et-bincha … yitzhak …

velech-lecha … veha’alehu … le’olah (‘Take your son … Isaac … and go … and offer him

… as a burnt offering’; 22:2).1

From what one notes about Abraham in the story, he does not hesitate. Hearing the

command to go, he rises early in the morning (vayyishkem) – perhaps before Sarah sees what

is happening – and harnessing his horse, ‘he took Isaac his son, arose and went’ (vayyiqach

’et yitzhak b’no … vayyaqom vayyelech (v 3). It is just as he had been commanded, his non –

hesitancy in obeying God’s command seen in the narrator’s repetition of the same words that

God uses in commanding him. Thus in verse 2, we have God tell Abraham: qach-na’ …

yitzhak … velech (‘Take … Isaac … and go’) and here in verse 3 we have the narrator say of

Abraham: vayyiqach … yitzhak … vayyelech (‘And he took … Isaac … and went’). And so,

Abraham, convinced of the command he has received from God, takes his son Isaac to go to

the mountain to slaughter him.

When he and the boy arrive at the place he is to kill him, at Moriah we are told, Abraham

builds an altar, arranges the wood on it, binds the boy, takes a knife, raises it over him, ready

to bring it down upon Isaac to slaughter him (22:9-10). Only a miracle saves the boy. An

angel of God calls from the heavens to stop Abraham from murdering his son. And so it

shows that while God is actually not willing to have the boy killed Abraham is.

1. The translations of the Hebrew Bible (and also the Greek Bible) into English are my own unless stated.

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Interpretations of Abraham’s Action

For centuries, Abraham’s action at Moriah has sparked debate and countless

commentaries. Biblical scholars, religious leaders and philosophers have all sought to find

answers to what he did and why he did it and the opinions and suggestions have varied. For

example, the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard (1983) suggests that Abraham’s action is an

instance of heroism and he explains this heroism as Abraham’s ability to suspend ethical law

in response to the Divine imperative. That is, Abraham acting the way he does, shows him to

be aware of a Divine Commander who transcends even the Divine Commander’s own ethic.

Or take the recent interpretation by Zoltan Fisher, who understands the test as meant to

open Abraham’s thinking to a better understanding of God. In other words, according to

Fisher, the test was not demanding that Abraham sacrificed Isaac. Rather God was using it to

make a statement once and for all, that he does not want human sacrifice (2007:174).

But very significant is the interpretation from Christianity. This interpretation raises some

pertinent questions. Interestingly, it is an interpretation that also appears to have won more

followers. The interpretation is that Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son is to prove that the

man has faith in God. This is what the Christian book, the so-called letter to the Hebrews tells

us: ‘By faith,’ it says, ‘Abraham, when he was tested offered up Isaac’ (see, Hebrews 11:17).

But one may ask, ‘what kind of faith is it to want to kill one’s own son because a god has

asked one to do so?’ And what kind of god would want children be killed? Is it the Christian

God? And yet Christians say their God is merciful and just? Does a merciful and just God

command that children be killed?

It does appear then that the argument God wants Abraham to kill Isaac to show him how

faithful or devoted he (Abraham) is to him, does not make sense (and the text has shown that

God actually did not want the boy dead). And anyway, it was also not unusual in those days

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for nobility to sacrifice offspring to their various gods. Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his

son would therefore not have been particularly outstanding in terms of devotion. And neither

was God’s request, taken in a straightforward way, going to differentiate Abraham from his

contemporaries or his God from those that the nearby peoples were worshipping.

But if we then are willing to read the lines and between them and understand the story

within the larger context of the Abraham story, we would notice that what we have here is

more than a sign of devotion to God. (In fact, in one’s thinking, God would find Abraham’s

blind obedience a disappointing performance.) Rather God’s command to Abraham is his

way of wanting to hear an argument put forth from Abraham’s ethical nature. In other words,

one’s thesis is that the story of God’s testing of Abraham in Gen 22 was for God to see if

there is ever a point where Abraham was willing to sacrifice himself rather than his family.

And the thesis is based on a reading that is attentive to the consistency of character especially

if one is to reconcile Gen 22 with the preceding episodes (note how the story itself begins:

vayhi ’ahar haddevarim ha’elleh [‘and so it happened that after these things’], that is, after

the things preceding).

In that reading, the reading prompting our thesis, one observes that Abraham is a man who

has little problem sacrificing members of his family. Not that he does violence personally to

any of them but, as Gunn and Fewell (1993) indicate, he is ever ready to give their bodies

over to certain violence; for up until now Abraham has sacrificed three members of his

household: he has sacrificed his first wife Sarah to strangers on two occasions (Gen 12:10-20;

20); he has also sacrificed his second wife Hagar first to affliction (Gen 16:6) and then to

ostracism (Gen 21:9-15); and he has sacrificed his first-born son Ishmael to the wilds of the

desert (Gen 21:14-21). And so in Gen 22, God now appears to want to know if Abraham will

go so far as to sacrifice the son of promise also. Will Abraham do it or will he for once tell

God, ‘No God, not this boy and not this time! Take me instead, I am old. The boy has his

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whole life before him’? In other words, will Abraham now be willing to sacrifice himself

rather than sacrifice another member of his family?

But even more important is the question, ‘will Abraham prove to be the just man he had

not long ago appeared to be when he challenged God to behave justly?’ It is a question that is

provoked by his behaviour in Gen 18. There in that episode, God had told Abraham about his

decision to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah because the inhabitants of these two cities had

become too evil. Upon hearing this, Abraham rebukes God: ‘Far be it from you to do such a

thing, to want to bring death upon the innocent as if they were guilty. Far be that from you!

Shall not the judge of all the earth do what is just?’ (Gen 18:25; RSV).

And so here we tend to be given a picture of Abraham the ‘just’ man, standing before God

with full confidence in his deepest moral convictions and invoking his moral sensibilities to

criticise ‘the judge of all the earth’ for not being moral. Here was Abraham, calling God to

account; Abraham, putting God in the dock. Not surprisingly we are told that the verse which

now reads ve’avraham … ‘omed lifne ‘adonai (‘Abraham was … standing before Yhwh’) had

previously read ve’adonai … ‘omed lifne ’avraham (‘Yhwh was … standing before

Abraham,’ Gen 18:22); but the Masoretes, i.e., the Hebrew biblical scholars responsible for

preserving and transmitting the biblical text and incorporating vowel points and accent

marks, decided to emend the original reading which had Yhwh2 standing before Abraham to

what we have now as Abraham standing before Yhwh. This was done in order to avoid the

text becoming a scandal to readers; that is, to have a God, the divine, stand before a human

being. Unfortunately, it is exactly what the story was.

2. YHWH (without vowels) is the current scholarly practice in reproducing what is seen in the text – the
personal name of the biblical God. This is what English versions translate as LORD. It is called the
tetragrammaton, a word derived from Greek and meaning ‘four letters’ (tetra – ‘four’ ; gramma – ‘letter’).

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 And so not long after criticising God for not being moral, God tests Abraham, requesting

that he sacrifices his son, the son of promise. The behaviour of Abraham that we have seen

until now, i.e., his readiness to forfeit his family to danger and, especially, his show of moral

uprightness, thus cast a shadow on the story of Gen 22. The Gen 22 story in this way

becomes an issue of character. It becomes a test in which God would want to see just how far

Abraham will go in sacrificing Isaac. Will he disobey and perhaps suffer the consequence for

the sake of this one son, or he will, as usual, sacrifice the boy as he has done other members

of his family?

Abraham chooses the latter. He chooses to sacrifice his son. Thus, when he hears the

request, Abraham does not question God. He does not challenge him. In fact there is no

indication in the text that shows Abraham to have had any second thought or wavered about

God’s request to kill his son. Instead, what we have the text show us when Yhwh issued his

command is Abraham readying and methodically getting things for the journey. The narrator

artfully presents his action in a sentence that harbingers the destiny of the poor boy. Thus, at

the beginning of the sentence he has three indicative verbs that describe Abraham’s

meticulous activity: rose, saddled, and took; then at the end he has another three: cut, rose

and went; and in the centre he inserts the phrase ‘Isaac his son.’ In outline the structure looks

like this:

Abraham rose … saddled … and took …

Isaac his son

[Abraham] cut … rose … and went ….(Gen 22:3).

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 From this structure one can thus see, as Trible observes, that Abraham’s activity

surrounding his son is not to protect him in life but to prepare him for death (1991:173).

Interestingly, Abraham, in Genesis chapter 17, negotiates for Ishmael, asking God not to

forget him when he (God) decides to make the unborn Isaac rather than Ishmael the

repository of his covenant promise (v 18). And in chapter 18, we have him again actively

negotiate for the people of Sodom when God decides to destroy them, pleading that the lives

of some ten hypothetical righteous people be spared (Gen 18:23-33). Could Abraham then in

Gen 22 not have also negotiated for Isaac? If he could negotiate for people he did not even

know, why not his own son?

Child Abuse and the Abraham Story

The UN Human Rights Committee (UNHRC 1992) defines child abuse as any action by

another person – adult or child – that causes significant harm, physical, sexual or emotional

to a child. It can just as often be also about lack of love, care and attention or neglect (Star

and Wolfe 1991; Theoklitu, Kabitsis, and Kabitsi 2012; Martin, Anderson, Romans et al.

1993). There are four main types that are identified: physical, sexual, neglect and

psychological. Physical abuse is understood as when a child (under 18 years) is hurt or

injured by a child or an adult either by being hit, kicked, punched or through other ways that

inflict pain and injury on him or her (Theoklitu, Kabitsis, Kabitsi 2012). For sexual abuse, it

is any sexual act between an adult and child and includes kissing, touching the child’s

genitals or breast, sexual intercourse, encouraging a child to look at pornographic magazines

or videos, or getting her into child prostitution. Neglect is the failure by a parent or carer to

provide a child with his/her basic needs such as love, adequate food and water, appropriate

housing or shelter, safety, education and medical care. Emotional or psychological abuse is

defined as the attitude or behaviour of a parent or carer to interfere with a child’s mental

health or social development through such activity as yelling, screaming, name-calling,

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shaming, negative comparisons to others or other forms of behaviour that cause the child to

be forlorn or distance himself or herself from the abuser .

As a father whose duty is to protect his child and seek for his safety, Abraham’s attempt at

killing his, no matter the excuse, would thus be child abuse. The Gen 22 story begins with the

words ‘God put Abraham to the test’ (veha’elohim nissah ‘et avraham, v 1). In failing to

protect Isaac, in refusing to plead on his behalf as he did in the case of the people of Sodom

and Gomorrah, Abraham thus fails the test.

It is significant to note that the story that immediately follows after this attempted killing

of Isaac is the announcement of the death of Sarah, his mother (cf. Chapter 23). The Rabbis

of the Midrash have sought to answer why the two episodes, that is, Abraham’s near-sacrifice

of Isaac and Sarah’s death narrative, are so arranged in the Hebrew Bible; and they explain

that the narrator meant the two stories to be seen as not unconnected. In other words, that the

story of Sarah’s death which comes immediately after the story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice

of Isaac in the Hebrew text was to show that Sarah died as a result of Abraham’s action; that

the old woman died, learning that Abraham had taken her only child to go and sacrifice him,

sacrifice the child who was the reason for her entire happiness and joy (so that at the boy’s

birth Sarah could not stop laughing. ‘God has brought me laughter,’ she says, ‘everyone who

hears will laugh with me’ [Gen 21:6]). Sarah, according to the rabbinic scholars, could not

believe how Abraham could do such a thing; she could not believe how the idea to kill Isaac

could come from God. It was wrong. What god would or could command such an act? Any

god who issued such a command, Sarah had thought, must be rejected (see Tanhuma Vayera

23).

If this reading is convincing, it means that for Sarah unlike Abraham, as Kierkegaard

thinks, there is no category that transcends the ethical; there is no God greater than human

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relations; and there is no commandment holier than the responsibility not to inflict pain on

others, pain on one’s own son, an only child, the child of one’s old age. It means for her

relations are the ultimate testing grounds of morality, of faith, of God. If it is, then it is where

Abraham fails, for Abraham priced allegiance to God over all human ties even over his own

son.

The result? Abraham loses Isaac – and this is in the real sense of the word; for as Abraham

comes down from the mountain, it is observed that Isaac is not with him. The text hardly

pictures father and son walking arm-in-arm coming down the mountain in the way it had

earlier shown them go up it together (22:6). Instead what it has is Abraham coming down

alone (Gen 22:19). Nothing is said of Isaac. Even at his mother’s burial and his father’s

mourning period for her, Isaac is never present (Gen 23:19-20). In fact, after the incident at

Moriah, Isaac is never again mentioned being with Abraham. Why?

It is interesting to note that The UN Report on child abuse indicates that when a child is

emotionally or psychologically abused, he or she tends to distance him - or herself from the

abuser (see p. 108). Could it be that after his near-death experience with his father Isaac is so

distraught and fearful of him that he distances himself from him?

The next time we hear of Isaac – this is after his near escape from slaughter – he is settled

in the land of the negev, in the vicinity of what the narrator indicates is Beer-lahai-roi (Gen

24:62; see also 25:11). And Beer-lahai-roi? It is the place Hagar and her son Ishmael go

when Abraham drives them away from his house (cf., Gen 16:14). In that story, according to

the Septuagint’s version, the cause of their being sent away by Abraham was that Ishmael

was found ‘playing’ (paizonta) with the little boy Isaac (Gen 21:9). Could it then be that

following his escape from his father, Isaac runs away to the one person who used to show

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him love or make him happy by playing with him; the one person who also has had an

experience of Abraham’s ugly side or betrayal?

The text will continue that when Abraham dies Isaac goes with Ishmael to bury him (Gen

25:9). Thus, the text has the two together, the cast-out brother and the almost sacrificed

brother, with the former serving as a refuge for the latter. And so when Isaac is most broken,

when he is most alone, and when he is most distrustful of his father, it appears the text has

Ishmael to be there for him.

Conclusion

My reading of this Abraham Story as an example of child abuse or a father’s betrayal of his

son is likely to be judged by some as too much of a particular modern occupation. But to such

people my response would be what then would be the importance of ancient literature for us,

how would it become alive for us, if not for modern readings? As Exum (1992) notes, the

Bible then could well become a document purely of antiquarian interest or concern only to

the religious.

Yes, I do acknowledge my modern perspective but I contend that the issue I call child

abuse is there, even if implicitly, from ancient times and that my reading is an effort to

demonstrate its enduring power; for, if in today’s world we have a parent take his/her child,

bind the child, place the child on an altar, and lift up a knife with the full intent to slaughter

the child – with the excuse that a god is asking him/her to do it – that parent would have the

courts charge him/her with child abuse or perhaps have him/her sectioned, thinking him/her

deranged. The parent’s action would be seen as an abuse of power; it would be a betrayal of

the sacred trust that the child held for him/her.

Perhaps betrayal may be thought by some to be too strong a designation and a description

for the action of Abraham in this story. Nonetheless, it is one of many valid ways to

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characterize and understand his actions in wanting to kill Isaac, that is, in having himself

bound Isaac, placed him on an altar and lifted up a knife with the intent to slaughter him. In

doing all these, Abraham proved disloyal to Isaac’s trust in him. Abraham betrayed his son.

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