[What do we know about the biblical Abraham except what we read in the Bereshiyth chapters focused on him? And yet the Midrash of the Jews elaborate on the basic text with additional information and that is what you will read in the ADDITIONAL NOTES to the Commentary we have been featuring: Pentateuch and Haftorahs, ed. Dr. J.H. Hertz. What is the ‘Midrash’? Wikipedia: “an ancient commentary on part of the Hebrew scriptures, attached to the biblical text. The earliest Midrashim come from the 2nd century AD, although much of their content is older.” —Admin1.]
THE BINDING OF ISAAC (AKEDAH)
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This Chapter is of great importance both in the life of Abraham and in the life of Israel. The aged Patriarch, who had longed for a rightful heir (‘O Lord God, what wilt Thou give me, seeing I go hence childless?’), and who had had his longing fulfilled in the birth of Isaac, is now bidden offer up this child as a burnt offering unto the Lord. The purpose of the command was to apply a supreme test to Abraham’s faith, thus strengthening his faith by the heroic exercise of it. The proofs of a man’s love of God are his willingness to serve Him with all his heart, all his soul and all his might; as well as his readiness to sacrifice unto Him what is even dearer than life. It was a test safe only in a Divine hand, capable of intervening as He did intervene, and as it was His purpose from the first to intervene, as soon as the spiritual end of the trial was accomplished.
So much for what may be called the positive lesson of the Akedah. We shall now examine another side, the great negative teaching of this trial of Abraham. The story of the Binding of Isaac opens the age-long warfare of Israel against the abominations of child sacrifice, which was rife among the Semitic peoples, as well as their Egyptian and Aryan neighbours. In that age, it was astounding that Abraham’s God should have interposed to prevent the sacrifice, not that He should have asked for it. A primary purpose of this command, therefore, was to demonstrate to Abraham and his descendants after him that God abhorred human sacrifice with an infinite abhorrence. Unlike the cruel heathen deities, it was the spiritual surrender alone that God required. Moses warns his people not to serve God in the manner of the surrounding nations. ‘For every abomination to the LORD, which He hateth, have they done unto their gods; for even their sons and their daughters do they burn in the fire to their gods’ (Deuteronomy XII,31). All the Prophets alike shudder at this hideous aberration of man’s sense of worship, and they do not rest till all Israel shares their horror of this savage custom. It is due to the influence of their teaching that the name Ge-Hinnom, the valley where the wicked kings practised this horrible rite, became a synonym for ‘Hell’.
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A new meaning and influence begin for the Akedah, and its demand for man’s unconditional surrender to God’s will and the behests of God’s law, with the Maccabean revolt, when Jews were first called upon to die for their Faith. Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice his most sacred affections on the altar of his God evoked and developed a new ideal in Israel, the ideal of martyrdom. The story of Hannah and her seven sons, immortalized in the Second Book of Maccabees, has come down to us in many forms. In one of these, the martyr mother says to her youngest child, ‘Go to Abraham our Father, and tell him that I have bettered his instruction. He offered one child to God; I offered seven. He merely bound the sacrifice; I performed it’ (Midrash). As persecution deepened during later centuries, the Binding of Isaac was ever in the mind of men and women who might at any moment be given the dread alternative of apostasy or death. Allusions to the Akedah early found their way into the Liturgy; and in time a whole cycle of synagogue hymns (piyyutim) grew round it. In the Middle Ages, it gave fathers and mothers the superhuman courage to immolate themselves and their children, rather than see them fall away to idolatry or baptism. English Jews need but think of the soul-stirring tragedy enacted at York Castle in the year 1190 to understand the lines of the modern Jewish poet:—
‘We have sacrificed all. We have given our wealth.
Our homes, our honours, our land, our health,
Our lives—like Hannah her children seven—
For the sake of the Torah that came from Heaven’
(J.L. Gordon).
Many today have no understanding of martyrdom. They fail to see that it represents the highest moral triumph of humanity—unwavering steadfastness to principle, even at the cost of life. They equally fail to see the lasting influence of such martyrdoms upon the life and character of the nation whose history they adorn. those who are thus blind to unconquerable courage and endurance naturally display hostility to the whole idea of the Akedah and its place and associations in Jewish thought. ‘Only a Moloch requires human sacrifices’ (Geiger), they exclaim. But in all human history, there is not a single noble cause, movement or achievement that did not call for sacrifice, nay sacrifice of life itself. Science, Liberty, Humanity, all took their toll of martyrs; and so did and does Judaism. Israel is the classical people of martyrdom. No other people has made similar sacrifices for Truth, Conscience, Human Honour and Human Freedom (Martin Schreiner). Even in our own day, Jewish parents in Eastern and Central European lands have refused, and refuse, fortune and honours for the sake of conscience. What is far harder, they sacrifice the careers of their children, whenever these involve disloyalty to the God of their Fathers. Few chapters of the Bible have had a more potent and more lasting influence on the lives and souls of men than the Akedah.