The Sacrifice of Isaac in Context: Recovering a Lost Ending of the Akedah

S. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling: A Dialectical Lyric [tr. Robert Payne]. London, Oxford University Press, 1939, chapter 5.

For more on this concept, see Zev Farber’s TABS essay, “The Resumptive Repetition: (Wiederaufnahme).”

Such prurient conduct is indeed implied in the parallel tale in Genesis 12. It is highly unlikely that Pharaoh remunerated Abraham simply out of aesthetic appreciation of Sarah’s beauty.

^יד וַיְהִ֕י כְּב֥וֹא אַבְרָ֖ם מִצְרָ֑יְמָה וַיִּרְא֤וּ הַמִּצְרִים֙ אֶת־הָ֣אִשָּׁ֔ה כִּֽי־יָפָ֥ה הִ֖וא מְאֹֽד: ^טו וַיִּרְא֤וּ אֹתָהּ֙ שָׂרֵ֣י פַרְעֹ֔ה וַיְהַֽלְל֥וּ אֹתָ֖הּ אֶל־פַּרְעֹ֑ה וַתֻּקַּ֥ח הָאִשָּׁ֖ה בֵּ֥ית פַּרְעֹֽה: ^טז וּלְאַבְרָ֥ם הֵיטִ֖יב בַּעֲבוּרָ֑הּ וַֽיְהִי־ל֤וֹ צֹאן־וּבָקָר֙ וַחֲמֹרִ֔ים וַעֲבָדִים֙ וּשְׁפָחֹ֔ת וַאֲתֹנֹ֖ת וּגְמַלִּֽים:

¹⁴ When Abram entered Egypt the Egyptians saw that the woman was very beautiful. ¹⁵When the officials of Pharaoh saw her, they praised her to Pharaoh. And the woman was taken into Pharaoh’s house. ¹⁶ And for her sake he dealt well with Abram; and he had sheep, oxen, male donkeys, male and female slaves, female donkeys, and camels.

Indeed, Abraham is acting on the precedent of Genesis 12:10-20, and afterwards his son Isaac does the same thing with his wife Rebecca in 26:7-11

Tzemah Yoreh, The First Book of God, (BZAW 402; Walter de Gruyter, 2010), p. 53-54.

Why is this excuse included? Perhaps the editor wished to imply that if Sarah is complicit in Abraham’s ruse it is because no harm has come to her because of it. In other words, Sarah is a willing participant according to this later editor only because neither Pharaoh nor Abimelech actually slept with her, even though the original unedited text implies exactly this.

וַתֻּקַּ֥ח הָאִשָּׁ֖ה בֵּ֥ית פַּרְעֹֽה: וּלְאַבְרָ֥ם הֵיטִ֖יב בַּעֲבוּרָ֑הּ וַֽיְהִי־ל֤וֹ צֹאן־וּבָקָר֙ וַחֲמֹרִ֔ים וַעֲבָדִים֙ וּשְׁפָחֹ֔ת וַאֲתֹנֹ֖ת וּגְמַלִּֽים

And the woman was taken into Pharaoh’s house. And for her sake he dealt well with Abram; and he had sheep, oxen, male donkeys, male and female slaves, female donkeys, and camels.

One wonders if “Abraham’s love” is a divine irony, or perhaps Abraham truly loved his son and acknowledged him as his own.

Isaac = “he shall laugh” in Biblical Hebrew – is it God’s laughter or the reader’s laughter, or both?

In a similar vein Alexander Rofé is able to articulate the following idea regarding the Man of God in 2 Kings 4:9 (the murder of forty two children by Elisha’s curse):

It is thus evident that not the ethical categories of good and evil are relevant in this and other stories, but those of the sacred and the profane. A Man of God is a holy figure (2 Kings 4:9) and as such must be treated with veneration, just as one behaves towards the divine and the objects associated with the divine. These youths profaned the Holy Man of God, and like the sons of Aaron (Lev 10:1-3) or Uzza (2 Sam 6:6-7), who acted with no intent of malice, their punishment is swift and terrible….

Alexander Rofé, Introduction to Prophetic Literature [tr. J. H. Seeligman], Sheffield, 1997, p. 15-16.

The excerpts are from Shalom Spiegel, The Last Trial, on the Legends and Lore of the Command to offer Isaac as a Sacrifice (trans. Judah Goldin; New York: Jewish Lights, 1967), p. 38

Claus Westermann, Genesis 12-36: A Commentary (trans. J. J. Scullion; Continental Commentary; Fortress Press, 1985), p. 361.

Suggesting a name change may seem like a stretch or special pleading, but there is more to it in this case. The name Y-HWH is tied deeply to J’s theology of mercy, as opposed to E’s theology of judgment, so J would want it to be an angel of Y-HWH calling from heaven to save Isaac. A longer discussion of this theological difference will have to wait for future essays, but I deal with it in my (above-referenced) book, The First Book of God.

Kundert (Die Opferung/Bindung Isaaks, Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1998, p. 1-12) and others also submit that the sacrifice was performed in the original account.

One famous and grisly example is in the Cain and Abel account in Genesis 4:8: “Cain said to his brother Abel, and when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him.” The extant verse in the Hebrew is seemingly incomplete, Biblical Hebrew requires that this inflected form of the verb “to say” be followed by what was said. The very fact that this clause was omitted indicates one of two; either a scribal error in the Hebrew text (i.e. Cain’s words were mistakenly omitted) or that the words were deemed superfluous by the author. I deem the first possibility (scribal error) less likely since positing a mistake in a generally well-preserved text should only be employed as a last resort. We are left then with the second possibility: If Cain words were deemed superfluous, than the contents of Cain’s omitted speech are likely implied in the verse itself (= ellipsis), and an educated guess would be that Cain asked his brother to go with him into the field. Indeed, according to the Greek Septuagint text (reconstruction?) as well as the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Syriac Peshitta, this is in fact what was said. We might also include the daughter of Jephthah who was also sacrificed by her father (Judg 11:39), and the text never kills her explicitly there either.

The reader may be wondering at this point, if Isaac is killed, how do we get from Abraham to Jacob? My answer is that we do not. In my view, E sees Jacob, not Abraham, as the father and founder of the Israelite nation. Abraham is an ancient hero and role model, not an ancestor.

An intriguing parallel is David and Batsheva’s bastard son, an innocent baby, who dies for his parents’ sin (2 Sam 12:14-19).

Israel Knohl, “In the Face of Death: Mortality and Religious Life in the Bible, in Rabbinic Literature, and in the Pauline Letters”, in Self, Soul, and Body in Religious Experience (Studies in the History of Religion 78, 1998), Boston: 87-95.