Abraham and Isaac

Persian fresco of the sacrifice of Isaac

I was reading the Book of Genesis today with my daughter. And she, being a smart little person, immediately saw the problem with the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac.

“Wait a minute,” she interrupted, “I thought you weren’t supposed to kill people.”

Yep. Yet Abraham, here and elsewhere, is praised for a human sacrifice of his own son.

As I recall, this has come up on this blog before: it is an atheist objection to the Bible, evidence that religion can lead to immorality.

As Catholics, we believe that morality is an objective absolute, and God is by his nature all-good. Accordingly, he cannot by his nature require an objectively immoral act.

Moreover, not all inner voices are from God. There are other spirits. Even leave aside the devil. Schizophrenics are always hearing commanding voices telling them to kill themselves, for example. Or other strange things.

We are therefore called on, in the Bible, to “test the spirits.”

If a voice called for an objectively immoral act, that would be proof that it was not God, and we would not follow its instructions.

So why did Abraham not follow this advice, and why is he praised for not following it?

There are two possibilities. The first is that he did not accept the Catholic understanding of God as moral. There is a common theological position in both Judaism and Islam that God, being infinitely great, surpasses human understanding utterly, so that we cannot judge or know, what he asks may well violate our human understanding of morality.

That explains, for example, the often objectively immoral actions of ISIS, Al Qaeda, and similar Muslim groups. Moreover, at the time of Abraham, the pagan gods were certainly not understood as moral beings. And they regularly demanded child sacrifice.

But if this is your position, it seems to me that the atheist objection applies: religion can lead to objective immorality. And, from the Catholic side: how can you ever know that you are worshipping God and not the devil?

In fact, if you put obedience to a spirit voice above morality, from the Catholic view, you are automatically worshiping the devil. God is good; conversely, good is God.

This, it should be pointed out, is also a common Jewish opinion.

Bulgarian fresco of the sacrifice of Isaac

There is a second possibility: that Abraham was indeed a moralist in his understanding of the divine nature. He accepted that God could not command evil.

If God is good, he could not really require Abraham to sacrifice his son. Therefore, the real test was not whether Abraham would sacrifice his son, but that he trusted that God would not, in the end, require this. Technically, after all, the inner voice had not told Abraham to kill. It had told him to offer his son as a burnt sacrifice. So it may be that Abraham was trusting that God would make it possible for him to do so without killing. Which, after all, is just what happened.

It is not just the objective immorality of the act itself; it is also that, earlier, God, or this inner voice, had promised Abraham in solemn covenant that his descendants through Isaac would be a great nation.

Medieval French manuscript image of the sacrifice of Isaac.

If God was now going to require the death of Isaac, that would make him a liar. He would break his own solemn covenant.

And what is the point of having covenants with God—the very essence of the Abrahamic faith--if God himself does not respect them? This would make God immoral by his very nature.

So it might make more sense to see the story of Abraham and Isaac not as a test of Abraham’s obedience to God, but rather a test to determine the real nature of Yahweh. It is a “test of faith” to learn whether our God, Abraham’s inner voice, is trustworthy. Is he, in the end, just another spirit, like the pagan gods, or is he the true Supreme Being?

Isaac asks his father, on the way up the mountain, where the lamb is that they are going to sacrifice. And Abraham says, “Don’t worry. God himself will supply the lamb.”

This is exactly what happens. Does that not imply that this is what Abraham himself expected?

When he leaves his servants, Abraham says, “Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.” A gratuitous lie, unless this is what he himself believed—that both of them would return.

If the ram had not appeared tangled in the bushes at the last minute, on the downward stroke, Abraham still could have stayed his hand. And said, “aha! Now I know! Get behind me, Satan!”

Imnmorality in the Bible: Abraham and Isaac

The story of Abraham and Isaac: Ethiopian icon.

On the subject of immorality in the Bible, our next exhibit is quite a famous one: Abraham’s near-ritual sacrifice of Isaac.

Let’s give the whole story:

Genesis 22:

Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!”

“Here I am,” he replied.

2 Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.”

3 Early the next morning Abraham got up and loaded his donkey. He took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. When he had cut enough wood for the burnt offering, he set out for the place God had told him about. 4 On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place in the distance. 5 He said to his servants, “Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.”

6 Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and placed it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. As the two of them went on together, 7 Isaac spoke up and said to his father Abraham, “Father?”

“Yes, my son?” Abraham replied.

“The fire and wood are here,” Isaac said, “but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”

8 Abraham answered, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” And the two of them went on together.

9 When they reached the place God had told him about, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. 10 Then he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. 11 But the angel of the Lord called out to him from heaven, “Abraham! Abraham!”

“Here I am,” he replied.

12 “Do not lay a hand on the boy,” he said. “Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.”

13 Abraham looked up and there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son. 14 So Abraham called that place The Lord Will Provide. And to this day it is said, “On the mountain of the Lord it will be provided.”

15 The angel of the Lord called to Abraham from heaven a second time 16 and said, “I swear by myself, declares the Lord, that because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, 17 I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, 18 and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me.”

Rembrandt's version.

This, the site religioustolerance.com presents as a “near child sacrifice.”

Fair enough. Nothing untoward actually happened; but that does not matter. Sin is in the intent, not in the act.

If, therefore, Abraham willfully intended to execute his son, he was guilty of a moral wrong.

But he did not. The passage itself indicates that the act was entirely against Abraham’s own will: God himself refers to “your only son, whom you love.” He was doing it in obedience to God, who of course has the right of life and death.

Moreover, it is not clear that Abraham actually believed he would have to kill Isaac. Note his answer when Isaac asks about the sacrifice: “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering.”

Is he, the righteous Abraham, lying? Odd, then, that his words turn out to be literally true. Did he actually anticipate that this would happen?

After all, God had already promised him that he would be the father of many nations, through his son Isaac. Killing Isaac presumably would make that impossible, meaning that God had broken his covenant with him. Yet God is supposed to be all-good.

St. Paul suggests this in the New Testament: that Abraham’s faith was that God, capable of any kind of miracle, was going to ensure that Isaac would not die:

Frederick James Shields' interpretation.

“By faith Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. He who had embraced the promises was about to sacrifice his one and only son, 18 even though God had said to him, “It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.” 19 Abraham reasoned that God could even raise the dead, and so in a manner of speaking he did receive Isaac back from death.” (Hebrews 11:17-19).

The incident was a severe test of Abraham’s faith, i.e., trust, in God; as we might trust a good friend to be acting morally towards us even if it appears he might be acting immorally. Abraham’s faith, then, was that God would somehow ensure that it all worked out well in the end.

If Abraham had not intended to kill Isaac, but God had, this too would have been immoral—on God’s part, not on Abraham’s. And it would not have been an injustice to Isaac, but to Abraham—he would have lost his only son, and his posterity, and God would have broken faith with him, and Abraham would have done nothing to deserve this. Isaac would be in heaven.

However, rather obviously, since he did not allow Isaac to be killed, God never intended to kill Isaac.

Hence, there is no immorality shown in the passage.

The passage is significant for another reason: we know that, later on, Yahweh is distinctive in the Middle East for being associated with the complete rejection of child sacrifice as an abomination. And we know that child sacrifice was the common practice in the Ancient Middle East. One important reason for the story, then, is surely to make the theological point that God has the right to demand child sacrifice in terms of his power and primacy, but that, as a moral and good God, he refuses this tribute. This is necessary, perhaps, because perverse human sentiment tends to imagine that the brutality of an idol or an authority is some kind of validation of its reality and power. See, for this, Aesop’s fable about the frogs who wanted a king.

Activist government.

Of course, for Christians, the story also has obvious significance as a precursor and model of the story of Jesus Christ: of God himself, like Abraham, sacrificing his only begotten son, and of the son being “resurrected from the dead” in the end. Pondering what Abraham must have felt gives us insight into the depths of God’s love for us.