Master of Life

Commentators through the centuries have struggled to explain why God commands Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, the child born through a miracle to Sarah and him in their old age (Gen. 22).¹ Von Rad declared that the story is so rich in meaning that there is no primary interpretation.² A prevalent theory, based on the first verse of the chapter, is that Abraham not only passes the “test” of faith in what usually is called “the Binding of Isaac” or “the Akedah,” but also becomes the model of obedience to God for all time.

To refer to the passage in these ways, however, is to emphasize Abraham’s act rather than God’s command that sets the events in motion and begs the important questions: Why does God need to try Abraham at this point in his life, after so many other trials, and why this horrible test? Did Abraham do something that prompted God to command this sacrifice? A popular interpretation is that God wants to demonstrate that the ritual of child sacrifice is now forbidden;³ most scholars have rejected this idea because Isaac is not an infant and there is no urgent crisis, the two situations when such offerings were made.⁴ The medieval commentator Rashi quotes a midrash that Isaac had boasted of his religious devotion, stating that he would gladly offer his life for God; God punishes him by bringing him to the brink of death.⁵ Polish offers the view that the command to sacrifice Isaac is God’s punishment of Abraham for expelling Ishmael from the camp, since Genesis 22:1 begins After these things, referring to the events in Genesis 21.⁶ I will counter that this politically correct interpretation is refuted by God’s explicit command for Abraham to listen to Sarah’s demand to expel Ishmael in Genesis 21:12, and that it is not so much atonement that God seeks from Abraham but a test to see whether he knows Who is the true Master of life.

Buber thinks that it is Abraham who must atone for questioning why he has not been granted an heir in Genesis 15:2-3; the command to sacrifice Isaac is made “as if to actively atone for that moment of doubt.”⁷ Yet Abraham’s doubts seem to be answered in that very moment as Abram put his trust in the LORD and God in turn reckoned it to his merit in Genesis 15:6. I believe that of much greater significance than this questioning of God in Genesis 15 is the ongoing doubts Abraham will have about God’s plan to give him a child.

The best-known treatment of the passage is that of Søren Kierkegaard (Fear and Trembling), who sees Abraham as the “knight of faith” willing to be involved in a “teleological suspension of the ethical”; Abraham silently renounces everything he holds dear, including his love of Isaac and the sense of justice that compelled him to challenge God’s pronouncement of doom over Sodom and Gomorrah, to obey God.⁸ Many, such as Milton Steinberg, find this view abhorrent, saying that the whole point of the story is that God does not want immoral tribute.⁹ Simon argues that Judaism is a moral religion and would never suspend the ethical; this is why Abraham is ordered to stay his hand. The command to sacrifice Isaac is a way to warn against a complete identification of the religion with naturalistic ethics.¹⁰

While all these philosophical positions are interesting, it seems to me that the passage is not so much about ethics or love from a human point of view as it is all about God’s demonstration of God’s power over life and the perpetuation of the covenant.

Levenson states that the Akedah is a crucial moment in religious history. He argues that the Akedah takes the earlier promises of God (e.g., Gen. 12) that were rooted only in God’s grace and grounds those promises “on the basis of Abraham’s willingness to donate Isaac for sacrifice.”¹¹ Blumenthal focuses, instead, on God and asks the question: What did God do in Genesis 22 that He had not previously done? Blumenthal states that it is that He swears by Himself that He will keep the promises He had made earlier — Abraham forces God to go all the way and to actually swear by God’s very own Self.¹² I disagree with both of these interpretations. I do not think that Genesis 22 is foundational in the Hebrew Bible; it is never mentioned again in any biblical book.¹³ One would think that a foundational story would warrant some explicit reference. While I quite agree that we should focus on the reason for God’s command, I believe that we should see Genesis 22 in the context of the Abraham saga.

While there is no further reference to this incident in the Hebrew Bible, the passage influenced Jewish, Christian and Islamic thought.¹⁴ I believe that, in a sense, Genesis 22 has been over-interpreted to the point that it is difficult to simply read the narrative without these layers of exegesis.¹⁵ We have to rid ourselves of all preconceptions and biases and read the passage in its context. In a very different manner, I will suggest that God wants Abraham to demonstrate that he knows who is in control of life.

The Command to Sacrifice Isaac in Context

In the Book of Genesis, God speaks to Abraham eight times and all of these speeches relate to his children and/or descendants.¹⁶ These speeches are clear: God will provide him with innumerable progeny. In Genesis 12, God states: I will make of you a great nation. In Genesis 13, God states: I give all the land that you see to you and your offspring forever. In Genesis 15, Abraham complains to God that he is getting older and still does not have an heir, and God assures him that He will provide a son; Abraham bends his head, And because he put his trust in the LORD, He reckoned it to his merit. God approves of Abraham’s submission and makes a covenant in dramatic fashion, declaring the future for Abraham’s descendants.

And yet, in the very next chapter (Gen. 16), Abraham accepts Sarah’s suggestion to cohabit with Hagar so that Sarah can have a son through her. Sarah acknowledges that God has closed her womb and wants to have a child through a surrogate.¹⁷ Sarah’s idea and Abraham’s compliance fly in the face of what God has commanded and what Abraham had seemed to accept in the previous chapter. Sarah’s childbearing years had ended thirty years earlier, and yet Abram had made no move to produce a child with anyone else. Even if this restraint is partly a tribute to his love for Sarah, it seems that he has been waiting for God to fulfill His promise. Even though he has waited so long, his mistake still is that he does not wait for God to fulfill His promise.

Sarah herself regrets her idea soon enough and blames Abraham and Hagar, treating the pregnant Hagar harshly with Abram’s acquiescence. When Hagar flees from Sarah’s mistreatment, an angel speaks to this runaway Egyptian maidservant — the first time an angel speaks in the Bible (16:7-12). God’s promise to Hagar seems to be the same promise God has made several times to Abraham, in that Hagar will bear a son who will be a father of Abraham’s innumerable descendants (16:10-11). Still, this is different from saying that Ishmael will be the one to perpetuate the covenant.

It is now, in Genesis 17, that God will provide the heir to the covenant to Abraham through Sarah. Abraham scoffs at the possibility, and this skepticism shows that he has lost his faith in God’s original promise. For thirteen years, Abraham has lived with Ishmael, and looks upon him as his heir. The narrative mentions Ishmael’s circumcision no less than three times (17:23, 25 and 26); his place in the tribe seems prominent.¹⁸ Abraham laughs at God’s promise to produce another child with Sarah. If God reckons Abraham’s faith in that promise as righteousness in Genesis 15, how does God reckon the demurral and mocking in Genesis 17?

All of this is about fertility: Abraham must know that fertility, life itself, comes from God. After Gen. 17, God apparently feels the need to come back and visit Abraham and Sarah with the same message about the miraculous birth of Isaac in Genesis 18. Sarah scoffs at the announcement of a child, doubting God’s ability to make her fertile (18:12). Note that there is no protest on behalf of Ishmael’s rights; there is no mention of Ishmael at all in this story.

In Genesis 21, Isaac is born and grows; at a celebration of his weaning, Sarah sees Ishmael metzahek “playing” and demands that Ishmael be expelled from the clan so that he will not inherit the leadership ahead of her son Isaac. Ishmael mocks Isaac, the miracle child, as Abraham did.¹⁹ Abraham agrees, reluctantly, but only because God commands it (21:12-13).

In 17 and 18, Abraham and Sarah do not have enough faith, just as Abraham had not had enough faith that God would protect them from Pharaoh in Genesis 12:11-20.²⁰ It is possible that it is this lack of faith that provokes God’s command to sacrifice Isaac. It is not just an ‘uncanny’ God who commands these things; it is a God Who has a plan and will fulfill this plan no matter what the human characters do.

It may be that it was not so much that the mother of the child had to be Sarah, as that a child through the previously infertile Sarah (she is described as barren when we first meet her in Genesis 11:30) had been God’s plan, and the plan could not be changed. We see both God’s rigidity and flexibility. He insists on His original plan, but allows for the unplanned Ishmael, and will not let him die in the wilderness either in utero (16) or as a boy (21) and gives him a great destiny. Still, Ishmael is not to be the heir, so that when God commands Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, He states: Take your son, your only son, Isaac, as if Ishmael never existed.

Perhaps God commands the sacrifice of Isaac because Abraham has not sufficiently trusted in God, and wants Abraham to show that his trust is complete. For any objections we may have, this is what the narrative implies. The test of Genesis 22 is decreed to see if Abraham will do what he is supposed to do. God states: For now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your favored one, from Me. To paraphrase: “Now I know that you know that I am the master of all procreation and fertility.” God keeps Sarah infertile during her child bearing years so that He can make her reproduce supernaturally for the first time at an extremely advanced age. He sends a series of Ten Plagues to show that the Egyptian magicians might replicate a few of them but cannot match the Plague of the Firstborn (Ex. 7:14-11:10). God leads the Israelites of the Exodus into a trap, a position with their backs against the Sea, to prove that His power trumps that of the strongest human political entity (Ex. 14). Miracles such as the birth of Isaac are not only designed to save but also to demonstrate God’s Power.

Abraham and Sarah, in Genesis 17 and 18, respectively, mock God’s Power in their laughter. The birth of Yitzhak, “he will laugh,” certainly should have been more than sufficient response to their laughter. Perhaps Yitzhak should not be translated “he will laugh” but “He will laugh.” They should have integrated the meaning of this birth and understood that Isaac was the one to carry on the covenant. I do not think that God initially had any plans to do anything further in this regard; God had told Abraham in Genesis 17 that Isaac would be the one to carry on the covenantal promise and that Ishmael would have a separate but great destiny.

It is the event described in Genesis 21 that motivates God to take further action. While it is not clear what Ishmael is doing, the verb metzahek is certainly loaded with meaning; Ishmael seems to be mocking the celebration or Isaac or both. Sarah understands, on her level, that Ishmael will not make way for Isaac, and demands that Ishmael be sent away — she is doing this for her own reason: ambition for her son.²¹ Abraham, for his part, still does not fully understand, either; he does not reprimand Ishmael for his mocking, and is in fact grieved with the thought of expelling Ishmael. Abraham, Sarah and Ishmael all have mocked God’s power, even though they have witnessed an incredible miracle with their own eyes.

It is not that God forbids His chosen ones from taking initiatives. There are, however, special cases where God wants His commands to be followed to the letter. The first Hebrew child, Abraham’s link to the future, will be a demonstration of God’s promise that this people will be fertile and multiply.

Abraham’s union with Hagar is not the problem — God even saves Hagar in Gen. 16 when she runs away, and tells her to go back to Abraham, while making clear that Ishmael will not have the qualities to be Abraham’s successor (Gen. 16:12). The union with Hagar is not the problem, but it does lead to problems. So when God announces the impending birth of Isaac in Genesis 17, Abraham not only mocks the whole idea of a miracle child, but pleads for Ishmael to be his covenantal successor. Abraham is not listening well to God’s very specific plan. Perhaps this is why God and His angels need to come again in Genesis 18, not only so Sarah will hear but to reaffirm the announcement in person.

Abraham does not show a general lack of faith. But he does not show that he fears God about this all-important subject. After these things, God now feels that He must take further action in response to all this mocking. If Isaac’s birth has not convinced Abraham of God’s power, maybe the threat of Isaac’s death will. This is the test, not so much of Abraham’s faith in God but that God is in complete control of life. What God wants to test is whether Abraham is beyond laughing and fully understands, as Job will (Job 1:21), that it is God Who gives and it is God Who can take it away.

We can try to look at these events from God’s perspective. God acts, but God also reacts to human actions. Very often, if God does something in the Bible that we find difficult to understand, the text does give us an explicit reason for the action, if we are willing to hear it. Take a couple of the most problematic of God’s actions, such as His wrestling with Jacob at the Jabbok in Genesis 32 or God’s killing of Nadav and Avihu in Leviticus 10. In Leviticus 10, God explicitly says why He killed Nadav and Avihu: Through those near to Me I show Myself holy. God says what motivates His actions and reactions.

Even though God did not explicitly say, ‘Do not take another wife/surrogate/concubine,’ God thought that it was clear that God, and only God, would give Abraham his true link to his descendants. God can be displeased with certain acts even when God did not issue a command or express displeasure at the possible act. And so in the Akedah: God’s command and promise was I will make of you a great nation (Gen. 12:1); I will make your offspring as the dust of the earth (Gen. 13:16); I make you the father of a multitude of nations, I will make you exceedingly fertile (17:5-6). It is correct to say that God does not say: ‘Do not go have a baby any way that you like.’ But God does say: ‘I will give you a child.’ In all of these verses, the emphasis should be on the “I.”

God says, For now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your favored one, from Me (v. 12); this means that God did not know this before. It is as if God is saying, ‘When you mocked Me, when you allowed your son to mock Me, when you resisted My clear instruction about Ishmael and Isaac, I did not know if you truly feared me.’ And then God says: Because you have done this and not withheld your son, your favored one, I will bestow My blessing upon you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars of heaven and the sands of the seashore, and your descendants shall seize the gates of their foes (22:16-17). God reaffirms that Abraham’s life will go on forever through his progeny now that Abraham finally completely understands that as the Creator of the world and all human beings, God is the Master of Life.