The Binding Of Isaac King Baby
Giselda Sasao
Especially in art, the episode is often called the Sacrifice of Isaac, although in the end Isaac was not sacrificed. In addition to being addressed by modern scholarship, this biblical episode has been the focus of a great deal of commentary in traditional sources of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
According to the Hebrew Bible, God commands Abraham to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice.[1] After Isaac is bound to an altar, a messenger from God stops Abraham before he can complete the sacrifice, saying, "now I know you fear God". Abraham looks up and sees a ram and sacrifices it instead of Isaac.
The passage states that the event occurred at "the mount of the LORD"[2] in "the land of Moriah".[3] 2 Chronicles 3:1[4] refers to "mount Moriah" as the site of Solomon's Temple, while Psalms 24:3,[5] Isaiah 2:3[6] and 30:29,[7] and Zechariah 8:3[8] use the term "the mount of the LORD" to refer to the site of Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem, the location believed to be the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. In the Samaritan Pentateuch, Genesis 22:14, the phrase YHWH yireh is taken to mean "in the mountain the Lord was seen", the mountain being Mount Gerizim.[9]
In The Binding of Isaac, Religious Murders & Kabbalah, Lippman Bodoff argues that Abraham never intended to actually sacrifice his son, and that he had faith that God had no intention that he do so.[10] Rabbi Ari Kahn elaborates this view on the Orthodox Union website as follows:
In The Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides argues that the story of the binding of Isaac contains two "great notions". First, Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac demonstrates the limit of humanity's capability to both love and fear God. Second, because Abraham acted on a prophetic vision of what God had asked him to do, the story exemplifies how prophetic revelation has the same truth value as philosophical argument and thus carries equal certainty, notwithstanding the fact that it comes in a dream or vision.[12]
In Glory and Agony: Isaac's Sacrifice and National Narrative, Yael Feldman argues that the story of Isaac's binding, in both its biblical and post-biblical versions (the New Testament included), has had a great impact on the ethos of altruist heroism and self-sacrifice in modern Hebrew national culture. As her study demonstrates, over the last century the "Binding of Isaac" has morphed into the "Sacrifice of Isaac," connoting both the glory and agony of heroic death on the battlefield.[13]In Legends of the Jews, Rabbi Louis Ginzberg argues that the binding of Isaac is a way for God to test Isaac's claim to Ishmael, and to silence Satan's protest about Abraham who had not brought up any offering to God after Isaac was born. It was also to show proof to the world that Abraham is a true God-fearing man who is ready to fulfill any of God's commands, even to sacrifice his own son:
When God commanded the father to desist from sacrificing Isaac, Abraham said: "One man tempts another, because he knoweth not what is in the heart of his neighbor. But Thou surely didst know that I was ready to sacrifice my son!"
God: "It was My wish that the world should become acquainted with thee, and should know that it is not without good reason that I have chosen thee from all the nations. Now it hath been witnessed unto men that thou fearest God."
Jacob Howland has pointed out that "Ginzberg's work must be used with caution, because his project fabricating a unified narrative from multiple sources inevitably makes the tradition of rabbinic commentary seem more univocal than it actually is." Ginzberg's work does not encompass the way in which midrash on 'Akedah mirrored the different needs of diverse Jewish communities. Isaac was resurrected after the slaughter in the version of medieval Ashkenaz. Spiegel has interpreted this as designed to recast the biblical figures in the context of the Crusades.[15]
The Book of Genesis does not tell the age of Isaac at the time.[16] Some Talmudic sages teach that Isaac was an adult aged thirty seven,[14] likely based on the next biblical story, which is of Sarah's death at 127 years,[17] being 90 when Isaac was born.[18][19] Isaac's reaction to the binding is unstated in the biblical narrative. Some commentators have argued that he was traumatized and angry, often citing the fact that he and Abraham are never seen to speak to each other again; however, Jon D. Levenson notes that the biblical text never depicts them speaking before the binding, either.[20]
Abraham's faith in God is such that he felt God would be able to resurrect the slain Isaac, in order that his prophecy (Genesis 21:12) might be fulfilled. Early Christian preaching sometimes accepted Jewish interpretations of the binding of Isaac without elaborating. For example, Hippolytus of Rome says in his Commentary on the Song of Songs, "The blessed Isaac became desirous of the anointing and he wished to sacrifice himself for the sake of the world" (On the Song 2:15).[citation needed]
The version in the Quran differs from that in Genesis in two aspects: the identity of the sacrificed son and the son's reaction towards the requested sacrifice. In Islamic sources, when Abraham tells his son about the vision, his son agreed to be sacrificed for the fulfillment of God's command, and no binding to the altar occurred. The Quran states that when Abraham asked for a righteous son, God granted him a son possessing forbearance. The son mentioned here is traditionally understood to be Ishmael. When the son was able to walk and work with him, Abraham saw a vision about sacrificing him. When he told his son about it, his son agreed to fulfill the command of God in the vision. When they both had submitted their will to God and were ready for the sacrifice, God told Abraham he had fulfilled the vision, and provided him with a ram to sacrifice instead. God promised to reward Abraham.[23][better source needed] The next two verses state God also granted Abraham the righteous son Isaac and promised more rewards.[24][better source needed]
The submission of Abraham and his son is celebrated and commemorated by Muslims on the days of Eid al-Adha. During the festival, those who can afford and the ones in the pilgrimage sacrifice a ram, cow, sheep or a camel. Part of the sacrifice meat is eaten by the household and remaining is distributed to the neighbors and the needy. The festival marks the end of the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.
The binding also figures prominently in the writings of several of the more important modern theologians, such as Sren Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling and Shalom Spiegel in The Last Trial. Jewish communities regularly review this literature, for instance the 2009 mock trial held by more than 600 members of the University Synagogue of Orange County, California.[26] Derrida also looks at the story of the sacrifice as well as Kierkegaard's reading in The Gift of Death.
In Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, the literary critic Erich Auerbach considers the Hebrew narrative of the binding of Isaac, along with Homer's description of Odysseus's scar, as the two paradigmatic models for the representation of reality in literature. Auerbach contrasts Homer's attention to detail and foregrounding of the spatial, historical, as well as personal contexts for events to the Bible's sparse account, in which virtually all context is kept in the background or left outside of the narrative. As Auerbach observes, this narrative strategy virtually compels readers to add their own interpretations to the text.
Interpretations of the text have contradicted the version where a ram is sacrificed. For example, Martin S. Bergmann stated "The Aggadah rabbis asserted that "father Isaac was bound on the altar and reduced to ashes, and his sacrificial dust was cast on Mount Moriah."[35] A similar interpretation was made in the Epistle to the Hebrews.[35] Margaret Barker said that "Abraham returned to Bersheeba without Isaac" according to Genesis 22:19 a possible sign that he was indeed sacrificed.[36] Barker also said that wall paintings in the ancient Dura-Europos synagogue explicitly show Isaac being sacrificed, followed by his soul traveling to heaven.[36] According to Jon D. Levenson a part of Jewish tradition interpreted Isaac as having been sacrificed.[37] Similarly the German theologians Christian Rose [de] and Hans-Friedrich Wei [de] said that due to the grammatical perfect tense used to describe Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, he did, in fact, follow through with the action.[37]
This theme is taken up in Wilfred Owen's poem "The Parable of the Old Man and the Young", set to music by Benjamin Britten in his War Requiem, which ends with the couplet "But the old man would not so, but slew his son, And half the seed of Europe, one by one."[38]
Rav Kook, the first Chief Rabbi of Israel, said that the climax of the story, commanding Abraham not to sacrifice Isaac, is the whole point: to put an end to, and God's total aversion to, the ritual of child sacrifice.[39] According to Irving Greenberg the story of the binding of Isaac symbolizes the prohibition to worship God by human sacrifices, at a time when human sacrifices were the norm worldwide.[40]
It has been suggested that Genesis 22 contains an intrusion of the liturgy of a rite of passage, including mock sacrifice, as commonly found in early and preliterate societies, marking the passage from youth to adulthood.[41]
The myth at the Heraion of Samos is that of Hera. According to the local tradition, the goddess was born under a lygos tree (Vitex agnus-castus, the "chaste-tree"). At the annual Samian festival called the Toneia, the "binding", the cult image of Hera was ceremonially bound with lygos branches, before being carried down to the sea to be washed. The tree still featured on the coinage of Samos in Roman times and Pausanias mentions that the tree still stood in the sanctuary.[42]
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