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.