This would demonstrate that if Abraham was wrong to go to sacrifice his son, that Abraham’s motives was to follow God, and even if we make a mistake in action or response, God will cover that - if we are trying to follow Him.
Abraham was following God as much as he was able. It is possible that this test was needed to teach Abraham more about who God is, in particular not just someone to obey, but someone who really cares about him and his family.
I have nothing to add except:
The term you’re looking for is Demiurge - Wikipedia. And I’ll agree that, when reading the Bible in any literal sense, it’s impossible to see the Old Testament God as anything but a bullying, schizophrenic, genocidal monster who accidentally got hold of a Cosmic Cube and promptly got to oppressing the universe.
According to Roman and Greek sources, the Phoenicians, living near ancient Israel, wouldn’t have thought that way. According to 2nd Kings, the also nearby Moabites wouldn’t. One of the great themes of the Hebrew Bible is concern over Jews picking up religious practices from neighboring peoples. Why shouldn’t human sacrifice be one of the practices they were worried about?
Abraham didn’t seem to think that way. He doesn’t argue, as he did when God said he was going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. His response isn’t what you’d expect from someone who has internalized the idea that human sacrifice is wrong. It’s a dramatic way to drive home a point, admittedly. I’m not sure that whoever wrote down the story didn’t embellish the drama a bit.
I should explain here: I don’t think the Torah or the rest of the Hebrew Bible was handed down directly word-for-word from God. I think it’s basically some people’s notes on experiences with the divine. As anyone who has taught knows, what gets into students’ notes isn’t always an infallible record of what the teacher said or meant.
Always? I’m sure you can think of some information you’d rather not know, or that you were happier before you did know. I certainly can. But then again, I read Lovecraft. As a very mundane example, I was happier before I knew what happens when you forget to send in a credit card payment. I’m glad I don’t know what it is like to be homeless, or what I would do if I found out I had terminal cancer.
Personally, I think the Adam and Eve story is about growing up, and about nostalgia for childhood. Who hasn’t looked back and thought there was at least something better about being a child than being an adult? It’s also about new parents realizing that their lives have changed, and that some of those changes aren’t entirely for the better. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the expulsion from Eden happens around the same point in the story where Adam and Eve have children.
There’s also a message in there about not trying to blame others for your own mistakes, and that doing something bad and then lying about it is worse than just doing something bad.
God in Torah certainly isn’t (immediately apparently) omniscient. Yahweh has to ask all kinds of questions, like where Adam and Eve were hiding, why Sarah laughed, etc.
My favorite reading of the Akedah at the moment is that it was important for Abraham and God to prove and seal the covenant with actions, instead of just words, thereby making it more permanent. Abraham proved that he would always trust God, and God proved that God would always do the right thing in the end.
I’ve been flipping through the study anthology at the back of my machzor (we read this story every year on Rosh Hashanah, obviously) to see what sort of commentary the UK Reform movement chose to include on it. These are the most useful ones to me:
(As a note, I’m fairly certain that, considering the source, Bergman doesn’t mean supernatural revelations, but ones like Darwin’s revelation of evolution, where humans figure out big things we didn’t know yet.)
Dan,
Those stories are from the Old Testament. You see a much more forgiving God in the New Testament because he sends his only son Jesus to the world. Jesus died to save us from our sins. There is a lot more hope the latter part of the bible. God sacrificed his only son.
God is good, it is humans that are sometimes bad. We are imperfect. He gave us free will and tools but if we don’t use them we don’t see their benefit. We are not evil by nature but we can choose to be evil.
All of get up every day and make many choices. If we make good ones our lives are happy and we bear good fruit. If we make bad choices we pay for them and it is painful. Sometimes it is easy to place the blame on something or someone else but ultimately we make the choices and we have to live with them.
I read FriarTed as saying that Yahweh is establishing the terms of his interaction with Abraham and his heirs. The gods of Ur, whom Abraham may have worshipped in his youth, probably would not have balked at requiring a human sacrifice; even if they did not routinely call for such a thing. Yahweh needed to establish, in ABRAHAM’s mind, that such a thing was off the table.
Yahweh seems omniscient in the sense that (to use my usual silly example) Superman might be considered omniscient. He can find out anything he really wants to know; keeping a secret from him is not within human capability. But he’s not constantly watching. I mean, sometimes Thor, Zeus, and Perun are around the house for a four-way thunderbolt-hurling contest, and he has to concentrate on that. 
What? It’s not like I’m not going to hell anyway.
I read the posts by “more knowledgeable people”, but saw nothing to change my mind that your answer – to argue against human sacrifice – is the correct one. A new religion’s underpinnings are likely to be arguments against the old religion and I think many or most experts agree the early Philistines practiced child sacrifice.
I’ve long felt that Abraham knew G-d would stop him. As Captain Amazing says, Abraham does not argue with G-d. He just rushes off to do it. BUT, when G-d threatens to destroy Sodom and Gamorrah and Abraham knows He means it- Abraham tries to talk the Lord out of it. Why the difference? IMHO because Abraham never believes that G-d will let his son die. But, when Abraham sees the wickedness of the two cities, he knows that G-d really is going to do it.
This is similar to Elie Weisel’s position in one of his essays.
I’m not a Muslim, Jew, or Christian (save perhaps in the broadest sense), but Herman Wouk was a devout Jew and this is how he addressed the question in the second volume of his WW2 saga, War and Remembrance. The character Aaron Jastrow (played by John Houseman and later John Gielgud in the miniseries if interested) is a Polish born Jewish professor who has lived most of his life in the U.S. as a secular professor before becoming a well-to-do expatriate author in Italy and rediscovering his Judaism while fleeing Hitler. While in hiding on one of the Mediterranean isles (Elba, I believe) he’s hosted by a Jewish family:
Here’s Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, mentioned above, on the issue.
Similarly, as alternative interpretation of the The Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, and Forbidden Fruit poaching story, I see it almost as a Robin Hood Story… It is a hierarchal and class distinction cautionary tale based on the Reserved Royal Food of the Royal Gardens. It has perhaps always been so in the culinary world, delicacies, conserved, preserved especially for the elite… forbidden by the Sheriff to the Plebes. Adam and Eve were banished because they were poachers of the Royal Food… the Lord’s Reserve.
That was a beautiful passage and link. Thanks!
“Blinked” implied that God backed out and changed his plan at the last instant. There is simply no reason to believe that. It was indeed a test, but there was no “blinking” involved.
That one is not supported by the text either. Quite the contrary; Genesis 22:16-18 says,
“By Myself I have sworn, says the LORD, because you have done this thing, and have not withheld your son, your only son— blessing I will bless you, and multiplying I will multiply your descendants as the stars of the heaven and as the sand which is on the seashore; and your descendants shall possess the gate of their enemies. In your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, because you have obeyed My voice.”
That doesn’t sound like a declaration of failure to me.
None of that implies any ignorance on Yahweh’s part. Human parents frequently ask their children questions that they already know the answers to. For example, a parent might ask a child, “Why did you do that?” even though the parent knows full well what the answer is.
The purpose is to make the child confront his own answers.
I can’t recommend reading this enough. It uses Abraham as an example, but it’s not too heavy on the God stuff, for those of you with allergies.
I figure it was a test and one which Abraham failed.
God gave people a set of rules to live by - these came directly from God - because he wasn’t planning on always being an active presence.
But God also knew that some people would set themselves up as religious authorities when he was not actively present. These people would claim to represent God and would declare that their commands were based on God’s authority. And in some cases, their commands would be violations of the laws God had decreed. Or false gods or demons would claim to be the true God and would try to deceive people into disobeying God’s laws.
So God tested Abraham. He told Abraham to do something that Abraham had been told was wrong. Abraham was supposed to refuse - he was supposed to obey God’s laws even when God himself commanded him to break the law.
But Abraham failed. He submitted to a higher authority and was willing to break God’s law. God was probably saddend by this but he accepted human weakness.
Time went by and Abraham’s story was written down. And the people who wrote it down were religious authorities - the exact kind of people God had worried about. They had the basic facts of what happened but added their own interpretation of what it meant.
Being religious authorities, they weren’t inclined to interpret this story as evidence that God didn’t want people to obey religious authorities. So they turned it around and declared that Abraham had passed the test by submitting to God’s authority and doing what he was told.
There’s also the story of Zipporah at the inn. It’s a very short passage but it appears God wanted to kill someone and Zipporah defied him. And God accepted that defiance even though Zipporah obviously wouldn’t have been able to stop God if he truly wished to kill someone. I think Zipporah passed the test that Abraham failed.
But like Abraham’s story, Zipporah’s story was relayed through other people. Again, they weren’t the kind of people who would promote the idea of independant thinking and questioning authority. Nor were they the kind of people who would consider the possibility that a woman was able to do something right that the great patriach Abraham had done wrong. So they just skipped over Zipporah’s story as quickly as possible.
Not according to Genesis 22:16-18 though, which I posted earlier.
Only if you except the Bible as being inerrant, which I don’t. Even if you accept the premise that God is perfect, that doesn’t mean that everything said about God is perfect. I see the Bible as being a book written by imperfect human beings. People took down the things that God said or did and then added in some stuff to explain what they think God meant.
Uh, when was Abraham told that it would be wrong to sacrifice Isaac?
I’m amazed about how some people here can twist themselves to put a positive spin on this story. Take the whole thing to a different context, one which you don’t have strong preconceptions, and look at it fresh.
Imagine a community leader has a bunch of guys reporting to him. The leader instructs an underling to murder his own son, which the underling makes all the preparations to carry out. At the last moment, the leader grabs the underling’s arm as it’s bringing the knife down onto his son, who has already been tied up, and the leader says “you don’t have to go through with it, I just wanted to make sure that I have your loyalty. But you did good!”
What would you think of both of these guys? What the hell kind of sadistic loyalty test is that?