‘This is the sacrifice of Isaac on the altar and the ram caught by its horns’, Northern French Miscellany, 13th c. (adapted). British Library
Akedah: How Jews and Christians Explained Abraham’s Faith
God promised Abraham that Isaac would be his heir, yet God asked Abraham to offer Isaac as a sacrifice. What did Abraham believe that allowed him to reconcile this divine contradiction?
Published October 30, 2017
See, e.g., the NJPS translation,” some time afterward.”
Radak had some familiarity with Christian doctrine, as shown by his arguments against it elsewhere in his Bible commentary. Mordechai Cohen, “The Qimhi Family,” Hebrew Bible/Old Testament vol. 1, Pt 2, From the Beginnings to the Middle Ages (until 1300) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001), 396. David Kimhi’s father Joseph Kimhi wrote Sefer ha-berit, [The Book of the Covenant] one of the first comprehensive and systematic Jewish anti-Christian polemical works.
Unlike most of the New Testament epistle, this letter is anonymous. Though some in the early Church attributed it to Paul, the scholarly consensus is that it is not Pauline.
This is the consensus of contemporary scholarship. The Gloss is a composite commentary that drew heavily on earlier Christian exegesis, often quoting it directly. In its interpretations of Genesis 22, it draws primarily on Augustine, Jerome, Alcuin, and Isidore of Seville, each of whom had their own interpretations of the nature of Abraham’s test and how Abraham (correctly or incorrectly) interpreted it. The format of the Gloss was a dual commentary, one around the margins of the Biblical text and the other written between its lines. The marginal commentary is composed of direct quotes from earlier writers, usually citing them by name, and making no attempt to reconcile them when they contradict. For a comprehensive study of the Glossa Ordinaria, see Lesley Smith, The Glossa Ordinaria: The Making of a Medieval Bible Commentary (Leiden:Brill, 2009).
The Gloss was the foundation of twelfth- and thirteenth-century monastic and cathedral education and the basis for supercommentaries (commentaries on the Gloss itself) through the end of the Middle Ages and into the modern period.
The marginal gloss, at least in its later versions, quotes in full Isidore’s commentary in his Quaestiones in Vetus Testamentum. The interlinear gloss includes an abbreviated form of these comments.
For a critical edition and translation of the Glossa Ordinaria on Genesis 22, see my bookIsaac on Jewish and Christian Altars: Polemic and Exegesis in Rashi and the Glossa Ordinaria (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).
Luther’s Works vol. 4: Lectures on Genesis Chapters 21-25 (Jaroslav Pelikan, ed.; St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House 1964), p. 91-186.
Luther’s Works p. 95.
Luther’s Works p. 93.
Luther’s Works p. 96.
Luther’s Works p. 113.
Luther’s Works p. 96.
