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 The account of God's orders to Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac is known as the Akedah in Jewish tradition. The Akedah plays a vital role in Jewish liturgy. For example, in synagogues, it is read as the Pentateuchal, and pietists repeat it every day.[1] As a result, this story became the template for Jewish martyrdom, exerting a tremendous influence on the thought of Jewish schools throughout history. Some of the problems raised by this scripture from a Jewish perspective are how and why the Lord ordered Abraham to slay his son. This question is exacerbated by the fact that other passages in the Torah call child sacrifice an abomination before the Lord.[2]

God commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, the beloved son of his old age. Abraham set out to do it, and was about to, when God stopped him. He sacrificed a ram instead. In the end, Abraham had demonstrated his willingness to accept God and His law, and God said that He could not accept human blood, and that He rejected all human sacrifices.

That interpretation dates back to at least the thirteenth century. It can be found in Ibn Kaspi's writings, where he claims not only that the story's purpose was to uproot, undermine, and weaken the then-practice of child sacrifice, but also that Abraham himself understood that child sacrifice was an abomination to God. It did not acquire traction until after the Enlightenment, and it became especially prominent in nineteenth-century biblical scholarship followed by popularizations of that schol­ar­ship in the twentieth century. Today, the idea that the story was a polemic against child sacrifice is as common as any other interpretation.

In other parts of the Bible, there is no mention of Abraham's predicament. Furthermore, the literature did not appear prominently in post-biblical Jewish literal works until the third century CE. Biblical scholars, both Jewish and non-Jewish, interpreted the verse as a protest against human moral norms about human sacrifice.[3] The high point of these complaints is that the angel arrived to save Isaac, preventing murder, which is viewed as an obscene crime that God despises and could never have intended. In a traditional Jewish perspective, Isaac's bound is viewed as a model for Jewish martyrdom. Jews are always ready to offer up their lives for the sanctification of Kiddush Ha-Shem, or the heavenly name.

One could interpret the text as evidence that Abraham did not love his son. God addresses Isaac as "your son, your only son, whom you love," before the Akedah (Genesis 22:2). After that, God speaks to Isaac twice as "your son, your only son" (Genesis 22:12,16), leaving out the phrase "whom you love." I feel the reverse is true: I have always seen enormous sensitivity and love in the way Abraham carried the perilous goods himself, as well as in the way he reacted to his son with the same "Hinneni" ("Here I am") and "presence" that he presented to God.

Rather, it required the threat of the knife for Abraham to realize the importance of the single, unique soul that he and Sarah had created together, as opposed to the numerous souls/followers that they had "made" in Haran and brought with them to Canaan (Genesis 12:5). It needed an incredible heavenly decree for Abraham to be genuinely present with his son. We all face Abraham's challenge.



[1] Abraham Kuruvilla, "The Aqedah (Genesis 22): What Is the Author Doing with What He Is Saying?." Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 55, no. 3 (2012): 489-490.

[2] Zoltan Fischer "Sacrificing Isaac: a new interpretation." Jewish Bible Quarterly 35, no. 3 (2007), 173.

[3] Fischer, 173-174.

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