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Genesis 22: 17 I will indeed bless you, and I will multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven and as the sand which is on the seashore. Abraham is told that he will be blessed with many children and descendants.
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To show you that I have this right, I should mention the verses right after the section we read today.
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Suddenly, there is a ram there ready to kill and throw on the fire. And low and behold there is a ram ready for sacrifice instead. And maybe it would help if God rewarded someone for substituting an animal for a child.Īnd that is what we basically have in this story: God says to Abraham, “ Go up there and kill your son.” Abraham says, “OK, this ain’t going to happen but I will do what I am told.” Later Abraham is told by an angel not to kill Isaac. Well, maybe it would be better if people sacrificed animals instead of children. If people do this on a regular basis, how does God get rid of child sacrifice? We have here a world in which it would not be strange for someone to believe that he or she should kill their own child. There definitely was child sacrifice carried out in Bible times and it was not uncommon. The Ten Commandments create a society in which people can trust each other to worship God, tell the truth, and not to hurt each other by theft or violence. In the Book of Exodus, God gives the Ten Commandments to the Hebrew People. We can read to the end and look backward. Now, we know the ethical direction in which the Bible goes. “If you mighty-power-thingus will forgive me for what I have done, I will offer you my child.” Bad forces or gods were repelled, and good forces attracted, by offering something valuable. Then, what is the point of the story? if it is not really a loyalty test, what is the story about? There is only one point that makes any real sense, and it starts with the fact that child sacrifice was common back then. “Then Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey the boy and I will go over there we will worship, and then we will come back to you.”” Abraham says, “we will come back to you.” Abraham knows it will be alright! Abraham trusts God and knows in his heart nothing will happen to Isaac. Abraham somehow knows this trip with his son Isaac is designed to teach everybody a lesson. This verse makes me believe that Abraham knows it is all an exercise. There is a verse that makes me believe that Abraham is “in” on the whole thing. That was the way the original story was told. Is God actually putting Abraham through a horrible loyalty test? That’s the way it is presented. The story obviously concerns child-sacrifice. I’ve struggled with this story for a long time. Where is Abraham? What time of day is it? How old is Isaac? Is Isaac 5 yrs. Where did it happen? Where is God? He just shows up and starts talking to Abraham. You read this story and there is so much missing. Is the author just trying to get through it as fast as possible? What’s going on here? If you’re a Jew or a Christian how are you going to defend it? This is totally different from the leisurely, fully developed, and completely explained soap opera of Homer’s epic tale.ġ4 verses. The author believes that there is one God, and that one God is the God of the Hebrew people. He believes that God told Abraham to kill his son. The author believes that Abraham was a real person. It had to be included in the Book of Genesis. The author of the Binding of Isaac set down an important story in the history of Israel. Auerbach’s thesis was that Homer was writing entertaining fiction, but in the Bible the author of the Binding of Isaac was writing what he believed to be absolutely true about God.
#The gate binding of isaac series
How Odysseus got the scar is laid out in an intricate series of flashback narratives. The scar on the leg of Odysseus is disclosed pretty far into the story. In Mimesis Auerbach compares the Binding of Isaac story to Homer’s description of Odysseus’s scar in the epic poem The Odyssey. It is subtitled The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. There is a famous book by the literary critic Erich Auerbach called Mimesis. The Binding of Isaac is also of great interest to modern secular scholars. The story is the subject of interest and study by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scholars. But this isn’t right because Isaac was not sacrificed. For a hundred years it has also been known as the Sacrifice of Isaac. The beginning of chapter 22 in The Book of Genesis is called by Jews the Akedah.