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Home > Magazines > Archaeology Odyssey > May/June 2002

Iphigenia & Isaac

Saved at the altar

By Theodore H. Feder, Hershel Shanks

Iphigenia and Isaac, an unlikely pair. Yet both were almost sacrificed—one to a Greek goddess and the other to the universal Israelite God. Both Iphigenia and Isaac were innocent of any wrongdoing. In the end, both were saved when the deity relented and an animal 052sacrifice was substituted for the human sacrifice. Of course, there are many differences, too. One story is known from Greek mythology, preserved largely in two plays by Euripides (c. 480–406 B.C.), Iphigenia at Aulis and Iphigenia in Tauris. The other story comes from Hebrew tradition, preserved in Genesis 22.a The contexts of the two […]

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Footnotes

1.

For another comparison with the Hebrew story of the sacrifice of Isaac, see John Kaltner’s “Abraham’s Sons: How the Bible and Qur’an See the Same Story Differently,” BR 18:02.

Endnotes

1.

Quoted from Edith Hamilton’s discussion of Iphigenia at Aulis in The Greek Way (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993), p. 182.

2.

Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris, ll. 20–22, 212–213.

3.

Euripides, Iphigenia at Aulis, l. 1216 ff.

4.

Euripides, Iphigenia at Aulis, ll. 1395 and 1555 ff.

5.

Euripides has some choice words for seers: “What kind of man is a seer? A man who tells a few truths and many lies—and that is when things are going well for him” (Iphigenia at Aulis, ll. 956–958).

6.

Euripides, Iphigenia at Aulis, ll. 1547–1550.

7.

Yalkut, Deuteronomy 26, No. 938; Babylonian Talmud, Gitin 57b.

8.

Encyclopedia Judaica, “Akedah.”