Abraham

by Bruce Feiler

  “And did it make a good sound?”

  He raised his hands and shrugged his shoulders in the universal Yiddish expression for modest, sly, self-satisfaction: “Hey, not for me to say. But if you really want to know the truth . . .”

  THE BINDING OF Abraham’s favored son is the most celebrated episode in the patriarch’s life. All three religions hail it as the ultimate expression of Abraham’s relationship with God. But what the incident actually says, where it took place, even which son is involved are matters of centuries-old dispute. All of this makes the binding the most debated, the most misunderstood, and the most combustible event in the entire Abraham story.

  In the opening words of Genesis 22, God once again suddenly and without preamble calls to his chosen one, “Abraham.” This time, however, in a sign of Abraham’s growing voice, the patriarch speaks back, “Here I am.” “Take your son,” God says, “your favored one, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the heights which I will point out to you.”

  Once again God summons Abraham to go forth on a journey whose true purpose is not articulated and whose destination is not known. We have arrived at a second Call, a new lech-lecha, the final climax in Abraham’s life with God. As exciting as it is to recognize the familiar chords of grand drama—sort of like hearing the reprise of a favored melody in a symphony—the text also sends a chilling message. Four times God has to identify which son Abraham should take—“your son, your favored one, Isaac, whom you love”—as if Abraham isn’t sure which son to take, which son is his favorite, or, once he knows it’s Isaac, whether what he feels toward him is love. Even with Ishmael out of the picture, Isaac’s status is still compromised.

  Early the next morning, Abraham saddles his ass, takes Isaac and two servants, and sets out. On the third day, spotting the place from afar, he tells the servants, “The boy and I will go up there; we will worship and we will return to you.” At the moment, Abraham, who says we will return, clearly believes Isaac will survive. But Isaac is not so sure. As they depart, he asks, “Father, here are the firestone and the wood; but where is the sheep for the burnt offering?” This is the most poignant moment in the story, and Abraham’s response is matter-of-fact. “God will see to the sheep for his burnt offering, my son.”

  Abraham’s treatment of his son—caring, but also cavalier and curt—reflects a larger ambivalence the Bible seems to feel for Isaac. Isaac is by far the least compelling of the patriarchs, and one of the least formidable major characters in the Pentateuch. Abraham is the father of the world, Jacob is the father of Israel, Isaac is merely the father of twins. The only memorable things about Isaac are what he wasn’t: he wasn’t unborn, he wasn’t displaced, he wasn’t sacrificed. As for what he was, well, he was teased by his brother, he was coddled by his mother, he was nearly killed by his father, and, after Abraham’s death, he was deceived by his wife and outwitted by his second son, Jacob. Isaac is not in the least bit godly. He’s a simple man whom everyone takes advantage of.

  At the outset of the binding, we don’t know Isaac’s age. Legions of artists have depicted him as a child, though the text suggests otherwise. Isaac himself carries the wood for the offering, which a young child couldn’t do, and he’s clearly capable of abstract reasoning, as shown by his question, “Where is the sheep?” Josephus said Isaac was twenty-five, while the Talmud proposes thirty-three, the same age as Jesus when he was crucified. One popular theory suggests he was older. Sarah was ninety when she had Isaac, and one hundred twenty-seven when she died. Because her death is depicted immediately following the binding and was triggered, many suggest, by news of the event, Isaac would have been thirty-seven.

  However old Isaac is, he arrives at the spot with Abraham, who builds an altar. Abraham arranges the wood, binds his son, and lays Isaac on the altar atop the wood. Then he picks up the knife and prepares to slay his son. Will he? Will the great human hope, our surrogate creator, become as deadly a destroyer as God? And will Isaac just lie there quietly as his father slices his neck? We crave their inner thoughts. We await their debate with God.

  No debate occurs. Isaac’s silence at this moment may be unnerving, but Abraham’s is unthinkable. The man who earlier berated God over the killing of people he didn’t even know now seems willing to slay his own son. What was he thinking?

  Interpreters have suggested possibilities. Perhaps Abraham knew Isaac was not going to die. That would explain his earlier comment that both would return. Perhaps Abraham believed Isaac really belonged to God, as suggested by the line from Exodus—“the first issue of every womb among the Israelites is mine.” Finally, perhaps Abraham trusted God. He had faith. This would explain his line to Isaac, “God will provide.”

  But another possibility also arises. Almost all interpretations of the binding suggest it’s a test, specifically a trial of Abraham’s love for God: Would he be willing to do whatever God asked, however inhuman? Even the text takes this position, stating at the outset that “God put Abraham to the test.” But God never tells Abraham it’s a test. Even more, he never asks Abraham to kill his son. God demands only that Abraham take Isaac to a mountain and offer him as a burnt offering. Abraham is never explicitly given the order to slay his son. Early Jews, mindful of this nuance, referred to the event as an offering, not a binding and not a sacrifice. Death was not con sidered part of the story. As Binyomin Cohen said to me, quoting the Talmud, “A potter doesn’t test defective jars, they would break. He only tests sound ones.”

  As a result, maybe Abraham is not being tested at all. Maybe he’s doing the testing. Perhaps the episode is Abraham’s way of testing God, specifically God’s promise in the preceding chapter that Abraham’s offspring will be continued through Isaac. Given that God pressured Abraham to expel Ishmael, Abraham surely would have been doubting God’s loyalty. His attempt to kill Isaac thus becomes a way for Abraham to determine if God is a figure of mercy and compassion, which is deeply in question at the moment. If Isaac dies, then God is a liar. The offering, therefore, becomes Abraham’s Call to God. Instead of “Go forth,” Abraham says, “Come hither!”

  And faced with his moment of decision, God acts. An angel of the Lord calls out, “Abraham! Abraham!” And once again Abraham answers, “Here I am.” “Do not raise your hand against the boy,” the angel says, “or do anything to him. For now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your favored one, from me.”

  Abraham looks up and spots a ram caught in a thicket by its horns. (This is the hook that links the shofar to the akedah.) Abraham offers the ram to God in lieu of his son. In return, the angel enhances God’s pledge—“And your descendants shall seize the gates of their foes”—and Abraham returns alone to his servants. Whoever is doing the testing, Abraham emerges strengthened from the experience. No mention is made of Isaac.

  The episode comes to a close.

  But the consequences have just begun. The offering is Abraham’s de facto answer to the Call and marks an inversion in the roles of Abraham and God. Instead of elevating Abraham to heaven, the incident brings God down to earth. Abraham has become the actor, God the reactor. Abraham thus inherits the mantle God has been dangling before him for a generation. He is God’s partner. The human one has become unhuman; the ungodly one has become godlike.

  Far from abstract, the difference is pronounced. Whereas in the beginning of the narrative Abraham belonged to God, now God, in a sense, belongs to Abraham. Forever after, God is referred to as the “God of Abraham.” Their mutual trials completed, their love consummated, Abraham and God have now been irreparably fused. What fate has joined together, let no one put asunder.

  YET, OF COURSE, people tried.

  About sixty miles north of Jerusalem, the Jezreel Valley climbs from the Jordan River in the east to Megiddo in the west. To the north is the placid Sea of Galilee. These plush hills, bursting year-round with wildflowers, persimmons, grapes, and avocados, have cradled some o
f religion’s most pivotal events, from Joshua’s conquest to Jesus’ mission. The soil is littered with stones that speak of these moments, including a tiny synagogue in the town of Beit Alpha that contains the earliest known depiction of Abraham offering his son.

  Beit Alpha synagogue was built in the sixth century C.E. by a small community of Jews. Designed to hold about three hundred worshipers, the limestone building faces south toward Jerusalem, with an apse and nave similar to those of churches at the time. The entire prayer hall is speckled with mosaics—tan, ocher, orange, and crimson. The tessellations depict an ark, a zodiac, and, closest to the door, a ten-foot-wide tableau of Abraham, Isaac, the ram, and a small arm of God crying, in Hebrew, “Do not raise your hand.”

  “Already by this time,” said my archaeologist friend Avner Goren, “the akedah is the ultimate example of man’s devotion to God. That’s why it’s at the center of a synagogue.”

  This was not always the case. After its description in Genesis 22, the binding is mentioned noplace else in the Hebrew Bible. Not David, Solomon, or any of the prophets refers to the story, though they allude to many other events in the patriarchs’ lives. When later books cite Abraham, they mention his departure from Ur, his receipt of the covenant, his promise of land. Perhaps they were perplexed by the event. Perhaps they wanted to distance themselves from an allusion to child sacrifice. We don’t know.

  After centuries of neglect, however, the story began to gain prominence near the end of the first millennium B.C.E., during a time when the Israelites faced persecution. The Bible says Abraham’s descendants were led out of slavery, then conquered the Promised Land by around 1000 B.C.E. They occupied the land for half a millennium, before being conquered themselves and sent into exile in 586 B.C.E. While in exile, lead ers of the vanquished nation developed a series of practices and prayers that became the core of Judaism.

  Even when they regained the land fifty years later, the Israelites no longer lived all together. Jews now practiced their religion in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Arabia. For these communities, surrounded by hostile non-Jews, Abraham’s offering of Isaac became a powerful symbol of the suffering a pious individual must endure for faith. As Philo, the Jewish philosopher who lived in Egypt in the first century B.C.E., wrote, Abraham served his Creator “out of love, with his whole heart.”

  The clearest mark of the new importance placed on the offering is that Isaac now becomes a willing victim. In Josephus’s epic, The Antiquities of the Jews, which retells the story of the patriarchs, Abraham delivers a calm and reasoned speech to his son before the episode explaining his action. Isaac is so pleased that he assures Abraham he was not worthy of being born at all and will “readily resign himself” to the pleasures of God and his father. He then rushes to the altar to die.

  For Jews of this period, deeply influenced by Greek philosophy, the binding symbolized the power of reason to triumph over raw emotion, even parental love. In one popular story, told in the apocryphal book 4 Maccabees, a mother and her seven sons refuse to eat pork or meat sacrificed to idols and are brutally tortured and killed. “Sympathy for her children did not sway the mother of the young men; she was of the same mind as Abraham.” The martyred priest Eliezer goes further, crying on his deathbed that Jews should be like Isaac: willing to sacrifice themselves for God. “O children of Abraham, die nobly for your religion!” Suddenly the offering is not just a test; it’s the standard of piety.

  The binding of Isaac, ignored for centuries, had been transformed by the time of Jesus into a defining moment in the life of Abraham and a powerful allegory for suffering Jews that they must be willing to look death in the face and still hold fast to themselves, their faith, and their father. Sacrificial death, even for Judaism, has become a path to divine redemption.

  CHRISTIANS PICKED up this view of the binding and transformed it even further: into the centerpiece of an iconic link between Abraham and Jesus.

  A short walk west from the Temple Mount in the Old City rises one of the more oddly constructed buildings in Jerusalem, a sprawling, oft-remodeled basilica with extra chapels, cupolas, clerestories, and domes affixed to every surface. The Holy Sepulcher is to a church what a Picasso is to a portrait—a cubist vision of fractured beauty. The seventeen-hundred-year-old shrine that marks the spot where Jesus was crucified, entombed, and resurrected is so sanctified that dominion over its quadrants is divided disproportionally among the Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Copts, Armenians, and Syrians. And a Muslim holds the key to the front door.

  The Golgotha, also known as Calvary or Rock of the Crucifixion, is itself the locus of a two-floor chapel, the bottom controlled by the Greek Orthodox, the top divided between the Greeks and Roman Catholics. The Catholic quarter is decorated with three large mosaics: in the middle Mary Magdalene; on the left, Jesus just removed from the cross; and on the right, Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac. The image of Jesus sprawled on the unction stone is nearly identical to the image of Isaac on the altar. Both men are nude except for a cloth around their waists; their expressions show pained acceptance. Behind Jesus is a bush with no leaves; behind Isaac is a bush with a ram.

  “It’s clear that the message here is that Mount Moriah and Calvary are the same,” explained Jessica Harani, a professor of religion at Tel Aviv University. “Abraham loves God so much that he will sacrifice his son. God loves humanity so much that he will sacrifice his son. There’s an equation here. And this is how it should be.”

  “But there’s one big difference,” I said. “Abraham doesn’t sacrifice his son.”

  “Christian typology sees the Christ as the fulfillment of all typologies.”

  For all their differences in later years, Christianity and Judaism shared something profound in the early centuries of the first millennium C.E.: Both were persecuted by the Romans. In this context, both religions needed models not just of faith but of faith in the face of challenge. Both found inspiration in Abraham’s willingness to murder his son—and in Isaac’s willingness to be murdered.

  The connection between the binding and the crucifixion was first made by Paul. He placed the Golgotha at the heart of the new religion and saw in it the culmination of history: In one case, Abraham acts for the merit of Israel; in the other, God acts for the sake of all humanity. In both instances, God spares the life of the victim. “By faith Abraham, when put to the test, offered up Isaac,” Paul wrote in Hebrews 11. “He who had received the promises was ready to offer up his only son.” Abraham considered the fact that God is able to raise someone from the dead—“and figuratively speaking, he did receive him back.”

  Other Christians of the era elaborated on this link. John calls Jesus the “Lamb of God.” Irenaeus exhorts Christians to bear the cross for their faith as Isaac bore the wood for his offering. Tertullian notes that the reason Isaac carries his own wood to his sacrifice was a mystery kept secret until Christ was asked to carry his wooden cross to his sacrifice.

  Moreover, Isaac, like Jesus, was born outside the realm of nature to a childless mother. Both births were announced by angels. The Gospels even set the date of Jesus’ crucifixion at Passover, the same season in which Jewish interpreters place the offering of Isaac.

  The idea of prefigurement—the notion that something that occurs in the Hebrew Bible represents something that occurs in the New Testament even before it happened in real life—powerfully joins the two stories together and reveals anew how Judaism and Christianity emerged out of the same crucible. But prefigurement also introduces the suggestion of hierarchy, which would later hobble relations between Jews and Christians. For Christians, from now on, stories in the Hebrew Bible are no longer separate and autonomous; they become mere foreshadowings for events in the New Testament, where they reach their spiritual fulfillment. In this view, Jesus does not evoke Isaac, he supersedes him. The twin mosaics alongside the Golgotha, for example, include one powerful difference: Isaac has no golden halo; Jesus does.

  Jesus, this reminds, actually died.

/>   Isaac did not.

  OR DID HE?

  The early rise of Christianity corresponded with a period of retrenchment for Judaism, which suffered another mortal blow with the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. Jews of the era, already feeling victimized by the Romans, now felt even more imperiled. Few traditions experienced the impact of this change more than the episode on Moriah. The Christian interpretation of the story had become so powerful that Jewish interpreters felt the need to respond. Specifically, Jews followed the Christian lead and began to focus more on Isaac. Isaac, like the Jews, was a victim. Isaac, like the Jews, suffered in silence.

  In one mark of this transformation, the Jewish name for the event shifted during this period, from offering, a word that appears in the story, to binding, a word that does not. (The common English term for the event, sacrifice or near sacrifice, also reflects this Christian influence.) In addition, the akedah first enters Jewish liturgy during this period, around the third century. Forever after, Jews would read the story of the binding during their New Year celebrations.

  The significance of this change is that, in the early years of Christianity, Abraham has already gone from a figure of common origin to one the religions are struggling to control. Both religions want to present themselves as natural heirs to his legacy: “We’re more like Abraham than you!”

  This battle would only worsen over time. By the time of the Crusades, Christian-Jewish enmity had become so severe that Jewish interpreters took the ultimate step in attempting to reclaim their heritage for themselves. In the eleventh century, marauding Christians initiated a rash of bloody persecutions of Jews. In Mainz, Worms, Cologne, and elsewhere, Jews were asked to relinquish their religion and convert. If they declined, they were tortured. Rather than apostatize, many Jews opted to kill themselves and their children. Jewish prayer books at the time actually contained prayers to be recited before killing children and committing suicide.