The Sacrifice of Isaac: Why They Got it Wrong

So many great thinkers, painters, and artists, from Augustine to Kierkegaard, Rembrandt to Chagall, Bob Dylan to Leonard Cohen, have struggled to make sense of the “binding of Isaac” in Genesis 22 in the Old Testament. They all understand the words of God to Abraham as an absolute command that must be obeyed. As Dylan has God say to a reluctant Abraham in his song, “Highway 61,” “You can do what you want Abe, but the next time you see me coming, you better run.”

 Abraham, the knight of faith, is considered great because of his blind obedience to what on the surface seems like the grossest violation of human nature. The problem is that these thinkers, artists and musicians read the story in translation and NOT in the Hebrew original. Their view is based on a mistake in translation. English translations give the opening phrase in the key verse typically as follows: “Take your son, your favored one, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the heights that I will point out to you.”

 The phrase “Take your son,” however, does not fit the Hebrew original, “kakh na” נא קח.

 The verb “kakh” קח means “take.” So what does “na” נא mean? “Na” נא is one of those deliciously untranslatable words. There are twenty-five examples of “na” נא in Genesis alone and seven in Abraham narratives. In every case, it indicates a request, often an unusual request so that “kakh na” נא קח might be translated, “Please take” or “Why not take.” It is not the language of command but of a polite request. God is asking; Abraham can refuse. We know that Abraham has the capacity to stand up to God from an earlier story. When God tells Abraham that he is about to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham does not passively sit back . As I wrote in my new preface to the Libertary edition of the “The First Father:"

 Genesis 18 gives Abraham’s response:

Avraham came close and said:

Will you really sweep away the innocent along with the guilty?

Perhaps there are fifty innocent within the city,

Will you really sweep it away? …

Heaven forbid for you!

The judge of all earth – will not do what is just?

 Abraham’s response is unique in Biblical history, if not in all of Western spiritual tradition. Abraham’s first lesson is that humanity’s relationship with Divinity is based on dialogue and not blind submission to a Higher Authority. A second message is that while a person must know his place—Abraham says, “I am but earth and ashes” (18:26)—there are times when one can, and indeed should, argue with God.

 Abraham is someone who knows how to argue. His silence cannot mean blind obedience to an all-powerful God. It has to mean something else. One way to understand what it might mean is to return to the Hebrew text. Scripture prefaces the story with the phrase, “And it came to pass after these things” (Genesis 22:1, King James translation). Which “things” the intelligent reader is compelled to ask? Which events provide the clarifying context in which to see this act of a father going off to slaughter his son as something other than a horrible perversion?