Skip to main content

Genesis 22: Abraham gets ready to kill his son Isaac

Buy at Art.com
Caravaggio - The Sacrifice of Isaac (1603)




A bit later on, God was chatting with Abraham again.  “Fine boy you got there,” He said.  “A wonderful addition to your family and to the whole tribe.  Which is why I need to you take young Isaac up into the mountains and make him into a burnt offering to Me.”

What parent hasn’t dreamed of this moment every now and then?  Abraham gathered up some kindling, his boy, two servants and a donkey.  They headed for the land of Moriah, which apparently had pretty lax child endangerment statutes, and in three days found a mountain suitable for burnt offerings of your own child.  Abraham told the servants to stay put with the donkey while he and Isaac went off to worship in private.  He made Isaac carry the wood for the burnt offering.

“Why must I carry the wood, Father?” asked Isaac.

“Difficult chores build character,” explained Abraham.

“Oh.  Say, what’s our burnt offering going to be, anyway?  We didn’t bring an animal to…”

“Enough questions!”  An awkward silence followed.  “Um… the Lord will provide,” Abraham added.

More awkward silence followed as Abraham built an altar, arranged the wood, bound his son up, and placed him on top of the wood.  “Father—“

“I said the Lord will provide!” snapped Abraham, lifting a knife above Isaac.

“We probably should have talked more,” mused Isaac.  “At the same time, I’m kinda glad we didn’t.”

Right then, the angel of Yahweh called down from heaven.  “Abraham, Abraham!”

“I’m doing it, already!  Leave me alone!”

“But you don’t have—“

“Quiet!  I’m in the zone!”

“Maybe listen to that angel first, Father?”

“Every Sabbath, you just can’t keep your mouth shut during the ceremonies, can you, boy?”

“Abraham!  You really don’t have to do this!  Stop sacrificing your son!”

“What?”

“It’s true!  This was all just a test, and you passed!”

“A test?  A test for what?”

“A test to see if you fear God—and obviously, you do!  You were willing to sacrifice your own son to Him!”

Abraham stopped and thought about this for a bit.  “Really?”

“Really!”

“Really?” asked Isaac.

“Really!” said the angel.

“Really,” repeated Abraham.  “I’ll tell you what: anyone who’d put me through something like that is about as scary as they get.  That’s just freaky.”

“Yes, but now we know!  We know you fear God!”

“And what I know is that you’ll mess with me like that and not really mean it.  Next time you pull something like that, you won’t follow through.  See if I get ready to kill one of my kids again.”

“Yes, well, the Lord still wants something,” said the angel.  “That ram over in the brush will do.”

“Sure, that ram will do, yes, fine,” Abraham groused.  “He put it there just now, didn’t He?  Might as well sacrifice it to Him.  This Guy sure plays a lot of head games.”

“Yes, well…”

“Let’s just call this place ‘The Lord Shall Provide’, huh?  That way we’ll always remember this touching lesson.  Boy, I’ll never want to forget about this, no sir!”

“Look, Abraham!  God said he’s really impressed by what you were willing to do, so He’s going to give you so many blessings, and so many descendents, and it’s going to be so awesome, because you heard Him ask for this, and you—“

“I brought my own son out into the middle of nowhere and nearly slashed him up like a sheep and burned the corpse.  Yeah, is the Lord going to help me get to sleep at night now?  Ch’yeah, you let me know.”  At that, Abraham went home and slept fitfully.  Later on, he found out that all those descendents were coming mostly in the form of nephews.  The nephews were born of his brother’s wife and her concubine.  The Lord did not make Abraham’s brother chase the concubine’s children into the desert with their mother, nor did He make him take any of his wife’s sons to an altar for a fake-out sacrifice.  “One son to worry about, I have,” Abraham sometimes said to himself.  “Any more than that and I’d need to sleep a whole lot more than I can.”

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How the Lemon was Invented

Lemons How do you make a lemon?  Silly question, isn’t it?  You just take the seeds out of one and plant them, and wait for the tree to come up, right?  That’s true, but it hasn’t always been that easy.  Lemons today are a widely cultivated citrus fruit, with a flavor used in cuisines of countries where no lemon tree would ever grow.  You might think that it was just a matter of ancient peoples finding the trees, enjoying their fruit and growing more of them, but that’s not true.  The lemon is a human invention that’s maybe only a few thousand years old. The first lemons came from East Asia, possibly southern China or Burma.  (These days, some prefer to refer to Burma as Myanmar .  I’ll try to stay out of that controversy here and stick to fruit.)  The exact date of the lemon’s first cultivation is not known, but scientists figure it’s been around for more than 4,000 years.  The lemon is a cross breed of several fruits.  One fruit is the bitter orange, best known in the west for

Origins of the Word Hoser, eh?

Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as cultural icons Bob and Doug McKenzie These days we often hear Canadians referred to as “Hosers”.  It’s a strange word, and it sounds a little insulting, but it’s sometimes used more with affection than malice.  Any such word is difficult to use correctly, especially if you don’t belong to the group the word describes.   I can’t say I feel comfortable throwing the word around, myself, but I can offer a little information about it that might shed some light on what it means. First off: is it an insult?  Yes… and no.   The word hoser can be used as an insult or as a term of endearment; the variation hosehead , is certainly an insult.  It’s a mild insult, meaning something like jerk or idiot or loser .  Its origin is unclear, and there are several debatable etymologies of the word.  One claims that it comes from the days before the zamboni was invented, when the losing team of an outdoor ice hockey game would have to hose down the rink in or

The Whoopie Cap

What can you do with your father’s old hats?  If you were born after, say, 1955, the answer is probably “Not much.”  Men were still wearing fedoras in the 1970s and 1980s, but by 1990, fashion had turned to the point where unless you were Indiana Jones, the hat didn’t look right.  Some blame Jack Kennedy for starting it all, strutting around perfectly coiffed and bare-headed in the early 1960s.  In 1953, Harry Truman, a haberdasher by trade, stepped out of office, and just eight years later we had a president who didn’t care for hats?  The times, they were a-changin’. If you set the WABAC machine to the 1920s or 1930s (when Indiana Jones was supposed to have lived), you would see the fedora was still very much in style.  Men just didn’t leave the house without a hat of some kind, and for what remained of the middle class, the fedora was the topper of choice.  But like any other piece of clothing, hats wear out, too.  When that happened, you’d just throw it away.  Though if there were