I began my ruminations about the patriarch Abraham with the story of the Akeidah, the sacrifice of Isaac. It seemed to me a perfect entry point for consideration of Abraham, and his contributions to Genesis, not to mention all of western thought, in part because the traditional interpretations of that story are so unsatisfactory. More recently, Barry Gruber lent me a study tool for biblical text, that contained sixteen separate midrashim about the Akeidah, and after reading all sixteen, I can report that there are no satisfactory explanations for the Akeidah, none whatsoever. No matter how much one reads about this event, it remains impossible to understand, if taken literally, if accepted at face value. And that’s part of the mystery of the Akeidah: How did an event that’s so resistant to understanding or explanation come to occupy such a central place in Jewish thought?
The traditional interpretations of the Akeidah focus on themes of faith and obedience. The Ramban (Nachmanides) emphasizes the difficulty for Abraham in completing this task, from the perspective of God rewarding Abraham, not merely for good thoughts, but for good deeds. God allows Abraham to earn extra credit in His eyes, for having agreed to undertake this most demanding test. Abraham earns the right to demonstrate his righteousness, if you will. But the test requires Abraham to perform an act that, while an abomination to us and to Abraham, would have been nothing remarkable for any of his neighbors. Any pagans -- the Sumerians, for example -- would have gladly performed human sacrifice, if they thought it would have brought them some benefit. Thus, only because Abraham had displayed characteristics inconsistent with the norms of his time, only because Abraham had himself come to realize that human sacrifice was ethically forbidden, would the test have had any significance. Why then debase Abraham, and reduce him to the moral level of his times? What did God prove, if Abraham agreed to deny his otherness, and chose merely to conform to the ethics of the time? What information had God learned, from Abraham’s willingness to kill Isaac, which would justify any reward either for Abraham or for his descendants?
Conversely, what about God’s command would have impressed Abraham, such that he would even have agreed to commit this unspeakable act? Abraham had previously left his home, and his family, and crossed over into Canaan, both physically, and morally. He did that because he had heard, and then answered a higher calling. If he had wanted to answer to gods who demanded human sacrifice, he could have stayed home in the first place.
The Talmud teaches a variation on this theme of obedience. Apparently, even as Abraham was demonstrating his obedience to God’s command, he was silently asking, in return, for consideration on behalf of his descendants. Abraham’s willingness to give Isaac over to God as a sacrifice should be remembered by God in generations to come. The Jewish people, in times of need, could later call on God, and could redeem this IOU so to speak. Of course, the debt went unpaid when the Crusaders swept through Europe on their way to the holy land, and it seems to have been long forgotten in the middle of the last century. No matter.
This peculiar interpretation has given way to even stranger, and more twisted readings of the Akeidah text. According to some scholars, after the birth of Christianity, which taught that Jesus suffered on the cross for the sake of humanity, some Jews came to see their own suffering as a symbol of their communion with God. The Akeidah then became a metaphor for Jewish history to come; accept suffering as a recognition of God’s love. Aside from the obvious difficulties with this interpretation, it’s clear that rabbis and scholars are twisting the story around to give it meaning outside the literal biblical text. The Akeidah story gains additional meaning because of some missing dialogue, or inner dialogue, or some events that preceded or followed the trip to Mount Moriah, even if those events are nowhere recorded. Which, of course, suggests to me that I am no more bound by the literal text than these scholars were.
The Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard goes off on one of these flights of fancy. In
Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard posits that Isaac threw himself at his father’s feet, and that Abraham responded not with mercy, but with anger and cruelty. Abraham took ownership of the sacrifice, and told Isaac it was his idea, and his alone. Isaac then called out to God, and was saved. The idea here being that Abraham can’t accept the thought that Isaac, knowing that the sacrifice was originally God’s idea, would abandon God. So instead, Abraham chose to have his son, his only son, Isaac, hate his father, and at the same time thank God for having saved him on Mount Moriah. That way, Isaac will preserve the faith in the years to come.
There are modern interpretations of the Akeidah that become even more unsatisfactory. Like the idea that Abraham is really testing God, after the visit to Mamre and the debate over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham takes Isaac up to the mountain, but never really intends to kill him; he just wants to be sure that God will stop the sacrifice and not actually require him to kill his son. That reading is the flip side of the midrash that explains that God needs to test Abraham after Mamre, precisely because Abraham had argued with God about whether to kill all the Sodomites. God apparently needed a patriarch who would obey first, and worry about justice and righteousness only secondarily.
The problem with these ever more convoluted versions of the Akeidah story is that they diminish these two participants, Abraham and God. After all, Abraham had long ago answered God’s call; left his family and homeland; renounced all other gods; and displayed his commitment to justice and righteousness by arguing on behalf of the innocent residents of Sodom. What more did he need to do in order to please this God? Or better, after having done all this, how did he then confirm his merit by agreeing to perform this abomination? On the other hand, from Abraham’s vantage point, he had long ago heard God’s call; had recognized him as the one true God; and had entered into the covenant on behalf of his people. What about the Akeidah then would have impressed that Abraham, the Ivrit, and persuaded him to ignore everything he had already come to learn in his many years wandering through the Middle East?
For me, the biggest source of misunderstanding about the Akeidah is the failure to consider its historical context, both in terms of the events, and the recording of those events. Abraham lived almost 2000 years BCE. The Akeidah story was not recorded for centuries thereafter. If you accept modern scholars’ interpretation of the authorship of the Tanach, then the first version of Genesis was written in the time of Solomon, a millennium later. Think of that – a thousand years. Today, if we were to look back a thousand years, William would still be in Normandy; the Magna Charta would not be written for another 200 years; the world would just be emerging from the dark ages. How accurately would we record the events of 1000 years ago? Moreover, these same scholars tell us that the Akeidah story wasn’t even present in the first versions of Genesis written by either the J or E authors; it only appeared centuries later. Setting aside the modern perspective, even if one accepts that the Torah was given verbatim to Moses on Sinai, that was still several hundred years after Abraham had walked on earth. So in any of these circumstances, by the time the Akeidah story was authored, everyone knew the outcome. Everyone, including the author and all the readers, or listeners, understood that Isaac had survived; regardless of how the story began, Isaac walked down off Mount Moriah with his father, Abraham, because he then had to give us Jacob, who then gave us Joseph, who preserved our people in captivity until Moses could arrive at the time of the exodus. So neither the author of the Akeidah, nor any of its readers, had any uncertainty whatsoever about how the story would turn out. Another odd thing about the Akeidah is that it appears in Genesis almost as an afterthought. In that way it resembles Genesis 14, the battle of the kings. It has very little, if anything, to do with the rest of the chronicle; Abraham has already answered the call; he has already entered into the covenant with God; and he’s already changed the nature of justice here on earth. Just before burying Sarah, Abraham is supposedly called upon to perform this one final, and unspeakable test.
In any event, no matter what one believes, by the time the Akeidah was recorded in Genesis, anywhere between six hundred and fifteen hundred years had passed since those events had supposedly taken place. Seen from that great a distance, what the Akeidah represents, what can still be recognized despite the passage of all that time, are Abraham’s ideas, as they are represented in the text. Despite the difficulties presented by this text, what we know is that Abraham was born into a world where human sacrifice was acceptable. It was, according to the prophets, still being practiced more than a thousand years after he died. But by the end of Abraham’s life, there was an understanding that human sacrifice was no longer acceptable. If one believes in the literal word of the Torah, God ended human sacrifice when he substituted the ram for Isaac. If, on the other hand, one sees Genesis as a record not so much of the events that occurred, but of Abraham’s thought, and how that thought changed the world, then the Akeidah represents recognition of Abraham’s great accomplishment in ending human sacrifice. After all the reading I’ve done, that is the only satisfactory explanation I could find.
