"Then God said, "Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about."" - Genesis 22:2 (NIV)
Many readers over the years have had understandable objections to this story. They have interpreted the "moral" of this story as meaning that doing cruel and violent things is fine, as long as you believe it is God's will. No one has spoken more vividly about this than Søren Kierkegaard, whose book Fear and Trembling is based on the story of Abraham and Isaac. Kierkegaard ultimately reasons that faith is irrational and absurd. Abraham thought the command made no sense at all, and contradicted everything else God had ever said, yet he followed the command.
Would this command have been totally irrational to Abraham? Kierkegaard's interpretation of the story does not take into consideration the meaning of the firstborn son in Jewish thought and symbolism. Jon Levenson, a Jewish scholar who teaches at Harvard, has written The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son. In this volume he reminds us that ancient cultures were not as individualistic as ours. People's hopes and dreams were never for their own personal success, prosperity, or prominence. Since everyone was part of a family, and no one lived apart from the family, these things were only sought for the entire clan. We must also remember the ancient law of primogeniture. The oldest son got the majority of the estate and wealth so the family would not lose its place in society.
In an individualistic culture like ours, an adult's identity and sense of worth is often bound up in abilities and achievements, but in ancient times, all the hopes and dreams of a man and his family rested in the firstborn son. The call to give up the firstborn son would be analogous to a surgeon giving up the use of his hands, or of a visual artist losing the use of her eyes.
Levenson argues that we can only understand God's command to Abraham against this cultural background. The Bible repeatedly states that, because of the Israelites' sinfulness, the lives of their firstborn are automatically forfeit, though they might be redeemed through regular sacrifice (Exodus 22:29, 34:20) or through service at the tabernacle among the Levites (Numbers 3:40-41) or through a ransom payment to the tabernacle and priests (Numbers 3:46-48).
When God brought judgment on Egypt for enslaving the Israelites, His ultimate punishment was taking the lives of their firstborn. The firstborns' lives were forfeit, because of the sins of the families and the nation. Why? The firstborn son was the family. So when God told the Israelites that the firstborn's life belonged to Him unless ransomed, He was saying in the most vivid way possible in those cultures that every family on earth owed a debt to eternal justice - the debt of sin.
All this is crucial for interpreting God's directive to Abraham. If Abraham had heard a voice sounding like God's saying, "Get up and kill Sarah," Abraham would probably never have done it. He would have rightly assumed that he was hallucinating, for God would not ask him to do something that clearly contradicted everything he had ever said about justice and righteousness. But when God stated that his only son's life was forfeit, that was not an irrational, contradictory statement to him. Notice, God was not asking him to walk over into Isaac's tent and just murder him. He asked him to make him a burnt offering. He was calling in Abraham's debt. His son was going to die for the sins of the family.
- Timothy Keller, Counterfeit Gods
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