God Tests Abraham

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In Jewish tradition, the Torah has 70—that is, many—facets. Its interpretations are inexhaustible. I would like to suggest a new interpretation of the Akedah, the binding of Isaac (Genesis 22), a story that has received as much “interpretation” as any in the Hebrew Bible.

The story of the Akedah has already been recounted in the preceding article by Robin Jensen. Briefly, God commands Abraham to slaughter his beloved son Isaac as a sacrifice to God. As Abraham is about to sacrifice the boy on the altar, an angel calls out to him to stop “because now I see that you are a God-fearing person and you would not withhold your son… from me” (Genesis 22:12).

In the traditional understanding of this story, God never intended Abraham to slaughter Isaac, because it was wrong—as we know from the beginning of the story, which 054speaks of God “testing” Abraham, and from the end of the story, when Abraham is told to desist. Abraham, on the other hand, out of fear of God, was willing to violate God’s moral law in faithfulness to God’s command. Abraham passed the test.

The message of the Akedah is quite plainly that God does not want even his most God-fearing adherents to go so far as to murder in his name or even at his command. Indeed, the angel orders Abraham “not to do anything to [the boy].” Implicitly, we are being told, God will never ask for this kind of proof of loyalty or fear of God again. He only asked it of Abraham, the first forefather of the Jewish people, to demonstrate Abraham’s boundless fear of God.

Because Abraham is praised for being prepared to do what we may not do, and because God, the source of all morality, asked Abraham to do what no moral person before or since should ever contemplate, the Akedah has remained one of the most difficult texts to understand, justify and transmit to new generations.

I believe there is a countermessage in the text that exists in parallel with its traditional meaning, a simultaneous and necessary conceptual theological balance to the awesome mystery and the daunting problems of the traditional interpretation.

I believe that God was testing Abraham to see if he would remain loyal to God’s moral law, but Abraham—who could not know this—was simultaneously testing God to see what kind of covenant and religion he Abraham was being asked to join.

After all, it was Abraham who found God, not the other way around. According to the midrash,^a “Until Abraham arrived, God reigned only over the 055heavens.”¹ It was Abraham who “crowned” him God on earth, the God of man.² In these circumstances, Abraham not surprisingly had certain moral expectations—and perhaps even requirements—of the all-powerful God of the ordered universe, whose tradition as a God who abhorred violence and all immorality he had received and studied, and in whose name he was about to establish a new world religion.

In testing God, as it were, Abraham was, ultimately, testing himself. I have found God, he seems to be saying, and my tradition and experience have revealed him and made him known to me as an all-powerful, all-knowing, just and compassionate God. But I need to be sure that this is the God which I truly wish to dedicate myself and my progeny and my followers for all time. If the God I have found demands the same kind of immorality that saw in my father’s pagan society, I must be mistaken. I must look further. To obey such a God not a moral advance at all. To paraphrase our sages, Better observance without God than God without observance.³

In short, Abraham wanted to see if God would stop him.

One may well ask, if this were the case, why didn’t Abraham challenge God at the outset, when first commanded to sacrifice Isaac. Abraham had earlier done just that when God had told him his plan to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18:20–32).^b We cannot justify Abraham’s refusal to at least protest God’s command that he kill Isaac on the grounds that prophets must silently obey whenever consulted or commanded by God. The opposite is true when God’s justice or compassion, and the morality of His commands, is at issue.

There is an alternative strategy, however—stalling for time. I do not believe Abraham ever intended to kill Isaac. He was obviously terribly concerned that God had commanded him to do so. However, those who seek simultaneously to obey their superiors—whom they admire, respect and sometimes fear—and give their superiors a chance to change their minds about what seems to be an unwise or immoral idea, rarely challenge the idea head on. They stretch things out.

The matter may be compared to a father who asks his son to violate the Sabbath in some way. The child does not know whether his father is testing his obedience to the law—which requires him to resist his father and observe the Sabbath commandments—or whether his father is testing his love (and fear) of his parent. The child can protest immediately, perhaps thereby showing disrespect and causing the parent anguish, or the child can make the necessary preparations to do what the parent has requested, seeming to go along, hoping that when the actual time comes the parent will never let the child take the last step.

This is precisely what the texts tells us that Abraham did.⁴ He did not rush—he stalled! He broke up the task that he was given into numerous tasks, or steps, and at each one he stopped waiting to see whether “the Boss” had reconsidered. It was never Abraham’s intention to kill his son, and 056God never indicated whether he wanted Abraham to kill Isaac, or whether he wanted Abraham to refuse to do so. Given Abraham’s moral purity, we may reasonably conclude that if, at the very end, God had not rescinded his command for Isaac’s death, Abraham would have rejected the command, chosen the moral course of not committing murder and saved his son—and then been forced to reexamine the prospects of his new religion, and the belief and faith on which it rested. Abraham was waiting for God to say: “Don’t do it.”

The text can be interpreted to show Abraham stalling. It does not show Abraham leaping from receipt of God’s command to his execution of it. Indeed, Abraham never agrees to accept this command and perform it. Instead, the text describes Abraham going through a series of separate steps: First he gets up, then he dresses his animals, then he gets his retinue in order, then he cuts the firewood, and then he sets off, and then he sees Moriah, and then he instructs his retinue to wait, and then he takes the firewood and places it on Isaac’s back, and then he takes “the fire and the knife,” and then he and Isaac walk (vayelkhu) not run toward Moriah and then there is a conversation, and then he makes the various preparations of the altar, and then he ties Isaac onto the altar, and then he ties Isaac onto the altar, and then he stretches out his arm and then, finally, he raises the knife above his son. Does this plodding, detailed sequence of steps connote a man rushing off to do God’s bidding? Hardly.

The point of the text is quite clear. At each step Abraham is waiting for God to evidence a change of mind, to withdraw his command. When that is, not forthcoming, Abraham takes the next step, and puts the Almighty to the next test—as it were—always showing obedience, always giving God the opportunity to make the moral statement that God does not want man to murder or to commit other immoral acts in God’s name. And, at the very end, when Abraham takes the last step before he would be forced by his conscience to stop and challenge God’s command, the angelic order to stop finally comes.⁵

Those who argue that Abraham intended to kill Isaac before being stopped, cannot prove it from the Akedah, because Abraham never agreed to kill his son, and never had to. Had he done so, and said “I still believe in God,” we would have had proof. We would also have had a religion to which few, perhaps none of us, could subscribe, because such a religion would never have endured.^c

When God says, “Because you have done this thing and have not withheld our son, your only, son… I will indeed bless you and I will indeed multiply your progeny….” (Genesis 22:16–17), he means only that “You (Abraham) were willing to endure the confused agony of going ahead^d and acting in seeming obedience to my [God’s] command, to the very point of killing Isaac—with faith that I would never allow that to happen.”^e

This is the same kind of faith that the children of Israel demonstrated when they plunged into the waters of the Red Sea at God’s command (Exodus 14:15–16)—not the serene faith that God wanted them to kill themselves and their families by drowning, and the zealous intention of doing so, but the confident faith that God would, somehow, save them and keep his redemptive promises to them. Such a faith demonstrates, as did Abraham’s, that God is, indeed, a God of justice and righteousness and not a God who tests the faith of His followers by testing their willingness to kill themselves or their loved ones just because God asks it.

Abraham did not want God’s moral law against murder to be affirmed merely as a divine response to a human plea, as occurred at Sodom, or to be proclaimed merely as a response to human 062arguments about God’s mercy, Justice and righteousness. To achieve this, Abraham had to have an enduring, unshakable faith in God’s justice and righteousness, a faith that allowed him to proceed with the Akedah, not with the steadfast, zealous intent to kill Isaac, but with the steadfast serene faith that God, without the need for human pleading, would ultimately pronounce for all, and for all time, the prohibition against murder—even for God’s glory and in God’s name.

The Akedah is a morality tale of Abraham’s staunch defense of God’s moral law against any temptation—even God’s command—to violate it. It establishes Judaism’s unique insight among ancient religions, cults and cultures about the dangers of having human beings submit to the orders of individuals who claim unique access to the wishes of “the gods,” or of any god.

The corrective is a religion based on covenant between God and all of the people, in a revealed text to which all have access and which all can master. No person or elite can misguide the people down paths of immorality in the name of a supernatural power.

God was testing Abraham to see if he would remain faithful to his revealed moral law even when divinely commanded to violate it, in order fully and finally to expunge the belief and practice of child sacrifice or any murder (ostensibly) in God’s name or for God’s benefit. Abraham never intended to kill Isaac but, with faith in God’s morality, Abraham was waiting for God to say, “Stop, don’t do it, I didn’t mean it,” just as God was waiting for Abraham to say, “I won’t do it.”

In his determination not to kill Isaac, and his willingness to go forward with God’s command until ordered to stop, Abraham passed the twin tests of the Akedah, the tests of the strongest moral courage and the purest religious faith.

For further details, see Lippman Bodoff, “The Real Test of the Akedah: Blind Obedience versus Moral Choice,” Judaism, 42/1 (1993), p. 71. However, endnote 5 and the footnotes on page 56 of this paper contain additional material not found in the earlier text.

In Jewish tradition, the Torah has 70—that is, many—facets. Its interpretations are inexhaustible. I would like to suggest a new interpretation of the Akedah, the binding of Isaac (Genesis 22), a story that has received as much “interpretation” as any in the Hebrew Bible. The story of the Akedah has already been recounted in the preceding article by Robin Jensen. Briefly, God commands Abraham to slaughter his beloved son Isaac as a sacrifice to God. As Abraham is about to sacrifice the boy on the altar, an angel calls out to him to stop “because now I see that […]