Understanding the Sacrifice of Isaac

“God put Abraham to the test. He called to him, ‘Abraham!’ ‘Ready!’ he replied. Then God said: ‘Take your son Isaac, your only one, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah. There you shall offer him as a holocaust on a height that I will point out to you.’ Early the next morning Abraham saddled his donkey, took with him his son Isaac, and two of his servants as well, and with the wood that he had cut for the holocaust, set out for the place of which God had told him.” — Genesis 22:1-3

For thousands of years, the sacrifice of Isaac has challenged readers of Scripture to reconcile the God who commands “Thou shalt not kill” with the God who commands Abraham to kill his own son. Can the God who condemns the killing of the innocent be the same God who orders the innocent to be killed? How could God command such a morally abhorrent action? The biblical account undoubtedly will continue to disturb, perplex, jar, and even shock those who read it.

Some seek to escape the unease the incident induces by concluding that it is a fable told for its pedagogical value. They conclude that the sacrifice of Isaac is not historical; God never actually told Abraham to kill his son. The late Catholic moral theologian William May was one such person. He wrote:

Were I to receive a command from God to take a burning cigarette and burn the eyes out of an infant…I would refuse to do so on one or the other of the following grounds: 1) The supposed command is an hallucination, because the true God is not the kind of God who makes such commands; something is not wrong because it is forbidden or good because it is commanded, rather something is forbidden because it is wrong and commanded because it is good; 2) if this were truly a divine command, I would conclude that the God giving it is not the Summum Bonum, the greatest friend a man could ever have, and therefore not a being worthy of human worship. (“The Moral Meaning of Human Acts,” Homiletic & Pastoral Review, Oct. 1978)

Others affirm the historical validity of the incident. Old Testament scholar Gerard Von Rad states that the sacred author indeed is “reporting an event” and cautions that “the narrative must not be interpreted as the representation of a general unhistorical religious truth” (Genesis: A Commentary, 1961). With Von Rad, I believe we must deal with the incident as having actually occurred and not mitigate its perplexities by reducing the sacrifice of Isaac to mere fable.

Judeo-Christian ethics teaches that evil cannot be directly intended even for the sake of a good end. One may not directly cause evil, and, of course, the slaying of an innocent person is a serious moral evil. How, then, is it possible for the God of the Jews to command Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, to directly end the life of his son? St. Thomas Aquinas provided an explanation for why God did not command Abraham to commit an act of homicide. Certain actions, Aquinas said, may be performed on two levels: the order of nature and the human order that involves the intention of the will. For instance, in the order of nature, the conjugal act and the act of fornication are, physically and externally, the same type of action. But context and intention of the will render fornication a sinful action, while true marital acts are morally licit. Likewise, an act of self-defense and the act of killing an innocent person, according to nature, may look exactly the same. However, the person who kills another in self-defense does not directly intend the death of the unjust aggressor but directly wills to preserve the good of his own life. The death of the assailant is the indirect consequence of the good of self-preservation.

What is the moral meaning of God’s command to Abraham to slay Isaac that renders it not a command to commit murder, not a command to directly commit an evil act? William Patrick Lee examined Aquinas’s explanation in his Marquette University dissertation “The Natural Law and the Decalogue in St. Thomas Aquinas and Blessed John Duns Scotus” (1980). Lee states that, according to Aquinas, God’s command to Abraham constituted an “ontological change in the act that accounts for its moral change…. As St. Thomas explains, acts can be identical in the order of nature and yet differ in the order of morals — and by the order of morals he does not mean a non-ontological, purely evaluative order, but the ontological order of reason and will.”

Aquinas argues that in the order of justice, as a consequence of Original Sin, all men, the just and the unjust, suffer the penalty of death. In the killing of Isaac, the direct object of Abraham’s will is the same as God’s object. Abraham intends the justice God intends, even though its nature surpasses Abraham’s comprehension. Lee writes, “Here we begin to see why in discussing God’s command to Abraham, the test case in these discussions, St. Thomas insists that Abraham was carrying out the sentence of God as Judge.” Aquinas explains:

Similarly, also Abraham, when he consented to kill his son, did not consent to murder: because it was due him to be killed through the command of God, who is the Lord of life and death. For He it is who inflicts the penalty of death on all men, just and unjust, for the sin of the first parent: and if the man is the executor of this sentence by divine authority, then he will not be a murderer, just as God will not be. (Summa Theologica I-II, q. 100, a. 8, ad. 3)

Lee explains that Abraham’s precise act was to carry out the command God had given him. This was the human act; to accomplish God’s intention was the direct object of his will. Lee writes:

May we say then, that according to St. Thomas, Abraham did not directly intend the death of his child at all? This, I think, is exactly what St. Thomas is getting at in the text above, and in others like it: Abraham’s act was similar to God’s act, since he was God’s executor, and God’s intention (had He allowed Abraham to carry out the sentence) was toward the order of justice and not directly toward the death [of Isaac]….

Aquinas goes on to explain in De Potentia Dei that Abraham doesn’t understand completely the mind of God: “And therefore, though to kill an innocent son, of itself can be a mortal sin, nevertheless, if this be done from a precept of God, for the sake of the end which God foresees and ordains, even if it is unknown to the man, it is not a sin, but a meritorious act….”

The direct object of Abraham’s act here is: the justice that God intends in this act, even if Abraham doesn’t understand how it is just.

The strength of the Thomistic argument is that Abraham is at least not subjectively, if not objectively, directly willing the murder of Isaac. In other words, his will is not directed toward an act of homicide. His will is directed toward, and the object of his action directed toward, accomplishing the justice of God under a command of God. In short, according to this explanation, God is not commanding murder, which is forbidden, and neither is Abraham committing murder. Aquinas resolves the moral issue by arguing that while the act of slaying Isaac in the order of nature is the same kind of external action a murderer would perform, nonetheless this action and its meaning on the divine and human levels are altogether different.

Lee states more than once that what God commands is beyond Abraham’s “comprehension.” The key to the sacrifice of Isaac lies precisely in what it means that Abraham is incapable of completely understanding God’s intention. I do not propose that the following explanation resolves all the perplexities of this most disturbing biblical episode, but I think it will bring us closer to demonstrating that God did not command Abraham to commit an act of homicide.

We need to respect the fact that Abraham is called to trust that somehow, should Isaac die, God’s promises to him will miraculously be fulfilled: that he will be the father of a great nation, that his descendants will be as numerous as the stars in the sky. Abraham is willing to be God’s instrument in a mystery of God’s will. There is more than a hint that Abraham trusts that ultimately he is not meant to slay his beloved son. When Isaac asks him, “Where is the sheep for the holocaust?” Abraham answers prophetically, “God himself will provide the sheep for the holocaust.” It’s absurd to interpret Abraham’s response as placating Isaac, as the response projects the reader toward not simply the immanent sacrifice but toward the essence of the New Covenant. Nonetheless, Abraham’s role is cloaked in darkness, and he is called to live in hope.

God alone knows the full meaning of the drama; Abraham is the mere physical instrument to accomplish God’s deeper, mysterious intention. Abraham is an actor in God’s drama, a living parable, for the purpose of teaching a lesson. God never intends Isaac to be killed. Does God give the command to kill the boy? Yes, but God knows the deeper meaning of His command. Abraham is called only to trust God, the God who will provide the holocaust, and that is indeed what he does. Because Abraham is willing to follow the command of God, willing to obey God even to the point of “not withholding from me your beloved son” — meaning Abraham was willing to give all to God and trust Him in everything — God declares to Abraham, “I will bless you abundantly and make your descendants as countless as the stars in the sky and the sands of the seashore…and in your descendants all the nations of the earth will find blessing — all this because you obeyed my command” (Gen. 22:17-18).

The story begins with the statement that God is putting Abraham to the test. And as Abraham needed to trust the God who had told him to “go forth from the land of your kinsfolk, and from your father’s house to a land that I will show you” (Gen. 12:1), Abraham is now called to an even more radical trust that God will be true to His promises. The Letter to the Hebrews hints that Abraham trusted, in a way unknown to him, that Isaac would be spared: “By faith Abraham, when put to the test, offered up Isaac; he who had received the promises was ready to sacrifice his only son, of whom it was said, ‘Through Isaac shall your descendants be called.’ He reasoned that God was able to raise from the dead, and so he received Isaac back as a symbol” (11:17-19). Von Rad provides a much-respected, classical interpretation:

When Israel read and related this story in later times it could only see itself represented by Isaac, i.e., laid on Yahweh’s altar. Given back to him, then given life again by him alone. That is to say, it could base its existence in history not on its own legal titles as other nations did, but only on the will of Him, who in the freedom of his grace permitted Isaac to live.

The sacrifice of Isaac is a living parable in which the characters, including God, literally act out an incident to teach a lesson. Parables function via symbols and analogies in which persons and things stand for something else. If it is correct that the incident functions as a living parable, then the lesson it teaches has something to say about the meaning of Judaism and, ultimately, Christianity.

Abraham is told to perform an act that the religion of Judaism considered abhorrent, and that God considered an abomination — namely, human sacrifice, and in this case, child sacrifice. The ancient Jews were surrounded by other cultures that offered up human beings, even infants, to their gods. As the late Vincentian priest Fr. Bruce Vawter explained, “Human sacrifice, and particularly child sacrifice, was widely practiced by Israel’s Semitic neighbors, including those who could boast of superior cultural attainments…. One of the sadder aspects of Canaanite archeology is the constant reoccurrence of infant skeletons buried beneath the thresholds of city gates and houses, evidence of the tiny lives that had been sacrificed to ward away evil and ensure divine protection” (On Genesis: A New Reading, 1977).

The most egregious sin that marks ancient Judaism is idolatry, the worship of false gods. It is no accident that the first of the Ten Commandments forbids this very sin: “I, the Lord, am your God…. You shall not have any gods besides me” (Exod. 20:1). The prohibition is repeated in the Book of Deuteronomy:

You know in what surroundings we lived in the land of Egypt and what we passed by in the nations we traversed, and you saw the loathsome idols of wood and stone, of gold and silver, they possess. Let there be, then, no man or woman, no clan or tribe among you, who would now turn their hearts from the Lord, our God, to go and serve these pagan gods! Let there be no root that would bear such poison and wormwood among you. If any such person, upon hearing the words of this curse, should beguile himself into thinking he can safely persist in his stubbornness of heart…the Lord’s wrath and jealousy will flare up against that man, and every curse mentioned in this book will alight on him. (29:15-19)

Child sacrifice arguably is the most extreme act of idolatry. The condemnation of such atrocities as found in the Book of Leviticus could not be clearer:

The Lord said to Moses, “Tell the Israelites: Anyone, whether an Israelite or an alien residing in Israel, who gives any of his offspring to Molech shall be put to death. Let his fellow citizens stone him. I myself will turn against such a man and cut him off from the body of his people; for in giving his offspring to Molech, he has defiled my sanctuary and profaned my holy name.” (20:1-3)

To engage in such pagan rites is to defile what is sacred to the Lord — the human being who is “fearfully, wonderfully made,” as Psalm 139 declares — and constitutes false worship in false rites to false gods. Thus, these ceremonies violate all that God has called the Jews to be: His consecrated people in a holy covenant, a covenant that mediates His presence, His grace, His truth, and His redemption. God gave the condemnations of idol worship to the Jews early in their formation as His people. What primarily shapes the Jews and marks them as God’s people is their worship, their rites and ceremonies focused on the One True God. Their formation as a nation means the Jews cannot fall back into paganism, into what is false and contrary to true worship. It is by worship that the true covenant between God and man is established, and it is the means by which mankind achieves unity with God. In other words, it matters what men believe about God and the rites by which they offer worship to Him. And so, the sacrifice of Isaac has to do with right worship. Thus, the living parable of the sacrifice of Isaac teaches the following lesson.

As mentioned above, parables function according to symbols. Abraham is not simply a singular person; he is the father of the Jews. The entire nation of Israel is represented in him. Isaac, the son of the promise, represents the covenant. Without Isaac, there would be no covenant, no chosen people brought into a privileged unity with God. Abraham is performing a ritual act of worship in which Isaac is to be slaughtered — indeed, slaughtered according to the rites of false worship. In the living parable, the nation of Israel, symbolized by Abraham their father, has run after false gods, erected altars to deities of wood and stone, and, by practicing idolatry in its most monstrous form, turned away from God and violated the covenant He made with them. The parable is a lesson to God’s people that despite their infidelity to Him, He will be faithful to them. Their idol worship “kills” the covenant. Yet, no matter how far they stray from that covenant, Isaac is spared. God remains faithful to the covenant, even when His people are not.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that there are not curses, punishments, and the removal of blessings. As the Babylonian captivity demonstrates, the removal of God’s blessings may be felt for generations. Indeed, the living parable may contain a double lesson, consistent with Aquinas’s argument. The punishment for pagan worship, according to the passage from Deuteronomy quoted above, is death, and Isaac, in this interpretation, is a sign of that penalty, as Abraham, representing the command and judgment of God, will execute that penalty. But, in any case, God will not leave His people. The history of the Jews still brings the Messiah — the Word who became flesh and dwelt among us — and in Jesus the covenant is sealed forever in His blood.

In essence, the sacrifice of Isaac is about the meaning of true worship and the redemptive covenant of God. As a living parable, it speaks not only of the first covenant but serves as a prefigurement of the New Covenant founded through the perfect sacrifice offered to the Father, by which the world is saved, established in the death of Christ.

God identifies Isaac in these words to Abraham: “Take your son Isaac, your only one, whom you love” (Gen. 22:2). He echoes these words when speaking of Jesus: “You are my beloved Son” (Mk. 1:11), and “This is my Son, my beloved” (Mk. 9:7). The living parable about false worship serves as a prefigurement of true worship. As Abraham will give up his son as a sacrifice, the Father gives His Son as a sacrifice: “Yes, God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that whoever believes in him may not die but may have eternal life” (Jn. 3:16).

As the wood of the sacrifice is laid upon Isaac’s shoulders, so Jesus also carries upon His shoulders the wood of the Cross. And as father and son walk their via dolorosa to the mount of worship, Isaac asks Abraham, “Where is the sheep for the holocaust?” Abraham responds, “Son, God himself will provide the sheep for the holocaust” (Gen. 22:7-8). Some scholars say Abraham is merely giving Isaac an evasive answer, not daring to tell his son that he is the sheep for the slaughter. Even in the literal sense of the text, the words Abraham speaks are prophetic. In fulfillment of the covenant, “God himself will provide the sheep for the holocaust.” His Son will be the very Lamb of God!

When God stops Abraham from killing Isaac, a substitute is provided, “a ram caught by its horns in a thicket” (Gen. 22:13). The ram sacrificed in true worship, instead of a pagan rite of child sacrifice, is a sign of Christ, whose head is crowned with a thicket of thorns.

The living parable of the sacrifice of Isaac speaks of the meaning of true worship and the everlasting covenant of God. It finds its full exegesis as a prophecy of Christ. He is the Lamb of God who offers the perfect act of love, and thus the perfect act of worship acceptable to the Father. And by this act of perfect worship, in the blood of the True Lamb, the order of creation is renewed, and the Everlasting Covenant sealed. The sacrifice of Abraham teaches that no matter how hard men might try, the covenant cannot be killed.

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