NOTES for Gen 22:10-13
The entire first half of Genesis, apart from the Prologue comprising its first eleven chapters, is devoted to describing how Abraham gradually, step by step, comes to know the God who called him to follow Him to Palestine, knowing Him ever better. The sacrifice of Isaac is the final and dramatic step in this encounter.
Why, one might ask, would God test a person with something he will never have to do? God does not need human sacrifices; they are an abomination to Him, as the Bible says repeatedly. Of course, the Bible does not always clearly distinguish God’s will from what He permits. Sometimes what He permits is regarded as God’s own intention and attributed directly to Him. Yet even this approach cannot be considered completely mistaken: if God does not decisively prevent something, then He has some plan connected with what is happening.
In any case, one thing is clear: Abraham withstands the trial, and God confirms this. What, then, is the meaning of the trial? Could Abraham have thought that his God would demand a human sacrifice from him? Perhaps he could. God had earlier called Himself by the name El Shaddai, “God of power,” and ancient pagans tended to seek gods with such names in the lower world rather than the upper, in the kingdom of the dead beneath the earth rather than in heaven.
Whatever the case, they placed the source of the power implied by the name God revealed to Abraham not in heaven, but in the lower world. A ruler of the lower world, the world of shades and the kingdom of the dead, might be expected to demand a human sacrifice. But how could Abraham’s God require him to sacrifice his son? Had He not said earlier that all the promises He had given would be connected precisely with this son, born into the world by a miracle?
What, then, could the demand to sacrifice him mean? Had everything been a deception from the beginning? But the promised son really had been born, at a time when such a birth was already entirely beyond expectation! This was a true trial, a trial by absurdity that could be endured only by relying on complete trust in God in a situation where reason refuses to comprehend the horror happening to a person.
Abraham withstands this trial: he hopes to the end. And in the end the situation is miraculously resolved, for God truly does not need human sacrifices. He needs our trust. Sometimes in defiance of what seems obvious.