if I could ask God anything and get the real, genuine answer, I’d ask him why He commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. He knew He was going to stop him. He knew that He’d never truly ask him to do it. He knew that if he went through with it then His promise would be frustrated.
The thing is… the story has led parents to think it’s okay to sacrifice their children, metaphorically and sometimes literally, for a false sense of moral superiority. How many LGBT+ children have been sacrificed in the supposed name of Christianity? How many autistic children? How many orphaned children? How many abused children?
Maybe it was the right lesson for Abraham, especially about how it paralleled Christ’s atonement. But it’s not a story that has translated well into modern times.
do you want the Jewish answer? It was to challenge him to think critically about commandments from g-d (and translating to religion as an institution, rulings from religious leaders and scripture), and it’s a challenge he failed. He was supposed to, theoretically, fight g-d and say “no, by no means am I going to do this. I don’t care that you created everything, that is my child and my world, and I’m not going to do it just because you said so.”
Instead, Abraham royally screws up, traumatises his son, and in doing so, loses his son, loses g-d’s will and favor, and in the Tanakh we never really hear from Abraham again after this point, because he failed.
It’s a story about someone blindly following in faith, and losing the most important things to them because they never stopped to think “Wait, did I hear this right? And if I did hear this right, am I so sure that this is something I want to follow?”
Isaac was Abraham’s only son at the time, and the child he had fought so hard to have. Him following an order blindly without thinking of the consequences is not supposed to be a good thing (It just kind of benefits the feudal society that eventually embraced Christianity, which is why the understanding was changed in Christian worldviews.)
I wish I could say I was surprised at the totally different meanings being derived here…
I am growing very, very tired of hearing that this is The Jewish Answer to this particular question. Because there is no The Jewish Answer to anything.
Jews have been discussing the Tanakh for as long as we have existed, and if you have ever encountered a difficulty within that vast and rambling text I guarantee you we have discussed it, interrogated it, weighed it, and absolutely not resolved it definitively. The idea that Abraham was supposed to refuse or question God’s order to sacrifice Isaac, and that he actually failed the test, is ONE (1) of VERY MANY Jewish takes on the story.
And it’s one that I personally can’t make ring true, because God tells Abraham he did right and will be rewarded for it. And what is the point of a test if you tell someone they passed when they failed? If Abraham has lost God’s favor, why does God tell him the exact opposite of that?
(Does that mean this interpretation is wrong? Of course not. Just that it doesn’t work for me. I’m sure I’m not the first to raise that particular difficulty, and I won’t be the last, and difficulties aren’t disqualifying.)
The fact that any parents anywhere think this story means they should sacrifice their children is, of course, a monstrous misreading – as is (in Jewish thought, generally, at least) the notion that the Binding of Isaac foreshadows the Crucifixion. The former assumes that God’s exceedingly specific commandment to Abraham is in any way intended as a general instruction to future parents; furthermore, both of these misreadings lose sight of the crucial climactic moment of the story, in which the child-sacrifice is prevented, because it is not something that God wants anyone, ever, under any circumstances, to actually do.
But I don’t think that necessarily means Abraham was supposed to argue, or refuse. I think Abraham was asked to do it specifically because he knew it wasn’t what God really wanted, and maybe the point of it was to see if his loyalty to this God of his was actually contingent on the fact that unlike most of the other religions around at the time, this one wouldn’t demand that he sacrifice a child. So is he really in this because he thinks it’s right, or because it’s easier for him? Maybe that’s what’s being tested here – and maybe (as has been suggested elsewhere) it’s not that God wants to find that out, it’s that God wants to give Abraham the chance to demonstrate it for his own self-awareness.
Or maybe it’s not that at all, because there isn’t just one Jewish answer.
Don’t come at me about the Bible and homosexuality if you’re using it to justify your homophobia. I will demolishyou.
Also, for some cultures including early Christianity, sodomite could very well have ment someone gravely inhospitable, as the sin of Sodom was inhospitality and not anal sex.
I wanted to talk about that too but I was running out of tweets I could put on a singular thread thank you so much for this addition!
I’m reblogging this partially because it’s frickin awesome, and partially for future reference, cus yeah the evangelical community is really scary to be in as part of the LGBTQA community
Whoa this is one of the BEST things I’ve ever seen!! And I learned a lot from it which I can tell my LGBTQ+ friends so that they can also destroy someone with this knowledge! Thank you so much for making a stand!
This was some hella good stuff here. I knew there was corruption with Bible verses and such but wow this was supremely informative!
the website Gay Christian 101 also has some fantastic in-depth discussion of these topics
