Hebrew Myths (27 page)

Abraham asked: ‘Am I then a priest, to offer sacrifices?’

God said: ‘I will consecrate you My High Priest; and your son Isaac shall be the sacrifice!’
²⁸¹

Abraham rose early, saddled an ass and, having cut faggots for the burned offering, tied them on its back. Then he set out northward, accompanied by Isaac and two servants. On the third day he saw Mount Moriah from afar, and told his servants: ‘Stay here, with the ass; I and the lad will go yonder, worship God, and presently return.’ He loaded the faggots on Isaac’s shoulders, and himself carried the sacrificial knife, also charcoal embers in an earthen pot.

Isaac said: ‘Father, we have a knife and faggots; where is the lamb for sacrifice?’ Abraham replied: ‘God will provide it, my son!’ At the mountain top, Abraham built a stone altar, heaped the faggots around, tied Isaac and laid him upon it; but as he reached for the knife, a voice from Heaven cried ‘Abraham!’ He answered: ‘I am here, Lord!’ The voice cried again: ‘Put down your knife and do the lad no harm! Since you have not grudged Me so great a sacrifice, I know that your heart is perfect.’

Abraham turned about and saw a ram with its horns caught in a thicket; this he sacrificed instead of Isaac, and called the place Yahweh Yireh, saying ‘
God watches over me!’

God swore by His Name to multiply Abraham’s posterity like stars in Heaven or sand on the seashore, because he had obeyed without faltering. Abraham and Isaac thereupon rejoined the servants, and all together made for Beersheba.
²⁸²

(
b
) Some say that these servants were Ishmael, Hagar’s son, and Eliezer of Damascus; and that Ishmael told Eliezer, when they were alone: ‘My father has been commanded to sacrifice Isaac; now I shall be his heir!’ Eliezer replied: ‘Did not your father expel Hagar at Sarah’s plea, and thus disinherit you? Surely he will bequeath all his goods to me, who have served him faithfully day and night, ever since I became his bondman?’
²⁸³

(
c
) As Abraham ascended Mount Moriah, the fallen angel Samael stole up, in the shape of a humble grey-beard, and said: ‘Can a command to kill the son of your old age proceed from a God of mercy and justice? You have been deceived!’ Abraham, seeing through Samael’s disguise, drove him away; but he reappeared in the shape of a handsome youth, who whispered to Isaac: ‘Wretched son of a wretched mother! Was it for this that she awaited your birth so long and patiently? Why should your besotted father slaughter you without reason? Flee, while there is yet time!’ Isaac repeated these words to Abraham, who cursed Samael and sent him about his business.
²⁸⁴

(
d
) On the summit of Mount Moriah, Isaac willingly consented to die, saying: ‘Blessed be the Living God, who has chosen me as a burned offering before Him today!’ He also handed Abraham stones to rebuild the broken altar which stood there; it had been raised by Adam and used in turn by Abel, Noah and Shem.
²⁸⁵
Then he said: ‘Bind me tightly, my father, lest I shrink from the knife and make your offering unacceptable to God! Afterwards take the ashes and tell my mother Sarah: “These bear witness to the sweet savour of Isaac’s sacrificial flesh!”’
²⁸⁶

Having offered up the ram, Abraham prayed: ‘When You demanded the life of my beloved son, O Lord, I could have cried in anger: “Only yesterday You promised me a large posterity by him; must I now burn his bloodless body upon Your altar?” Yet I stood as though deaf and dumb. Therefore I pray that, if my descendants ever do evil, You will likewise refrain from anger; and that each year, when they have repented of their sins, and the ram’s horn sounds on the First Day of the Seventh Month, You will recall how I bound my son and, rising from the Throne of Judgement, will seat Yourself upon the Throne of Mercy!’
²⁸⁷

(
e
) Isaac spent the next three years in Paradise; or, some say, at
the house of Shem and Eber, where he studied God’s Law. But first he attended the burial of his mother Sarah who, going to Hebron for news of him, heard of his rescue and expired from pure joy—Samael having assured her that he had already been sacrificed.

Sarah died at the age of one hundred and twenty-seven years. Abraham bought the Cave and field of Machpelah from Ephron the Hittite, paying him four hundred silver shekels, buried Sarah there, and mourned her seven days.
²⁸⁸

***

1
. Sacrifice of first-born sons was common in ancient Palestine, and practised not only by the Moabite King Mesha, who burned his eldest son to the God Chemosh (2
Kings
III. 26–27); by the Ammonites, who offered their sons to Molech (
Leviticus
XVIII. 21 and XX. 2 ff); by the Aramaeans of Sepharvaim, whose gods were Adram-melech and Ana-melech; but also by the Hebrew Kings Ahaz (2
Kings
XVI. 3) and Manasseh (2
Kings
XXI. 6). King Saul’s attempt to sacrifice his warrior son Jonathan after a reverse in the Philistine war is hinted at (1
Samuel
XIV. 43–46), though the army elected to save him.

2
. Exodus XXII. 28–29 reads: ‘The first-born of thy sons shalt thou give unto Me, and of thine oxen and thy sheep, on the eighth day!’, which Ezekiel (XX. 24–26) later described as one of the ‘statutes that were not good’ and that polluted Israel as a punishment for idolatry. But this law referred to infant sacrifice rather than to that of youths or grown men, and could be evaded by a token sacrifice of the first-born’s foreskin at circumcision. Isaac’s sacrifice was of the kind resorted to in national emergencies—as by Mesha, Ahaz and Manasseh—or at foundation ceremonies, as by Hiel at Jericho (1
Kings
XVI. 34).

3
. Solomon had introduced into Jerusalem the worship of Molech and Chemosh (1
Kings
XI. 7), to whom children were burned in the Valley of Tophet,
alias
Gehenna (2
Kings
XXIII. 10). Some of these victims seem to have been offered as surrogates for the King, the incarnate Sun-god, at an annual demise of the crown. Micah (VI. 7), Jeremiah (VII. 31; XIX. 5–6; XXXII. 35) and Ezekiel (XVI. 20; XX. 26) denounced this practice; which was
also legislated against in
Deuteronomy
XII. 31 and in
Leviticus
XVIII. 21 and XX. 2 ff.
Exodus
XXXIV. 20, an amendment to XXII. 28–29, equates the first-born of man with that of the ass: both were redeemable with a lamb, or two young pigeons (
Exodus
XXXIV. 20;
Leviticus
XII. 6–8). Abraham’s interrupted sacrifice of Isaac displays his absolute obedience to God, and His mercy in waiving the ‘statute that was not good’, as an acknowledgement of obedience. Isaac, however, was no longer an infant but a ‘lad’ capable of carrying a heavy load of faggots, and Abraham redeemed him with a ram, not a lamb. A midrash that regards Sarah’s death as an indirect consequence of Isaac’s binding, deducts ninety years—her age when she bore Isaac, from 127, her age when she died—and makes him thirty-seven.

4
. The ram ‘caught in a thicket’ seems borrowed from Ur of the Chaldees, where a royal grave of the late fourth millennium
B.C.
has yielded two Sumerian statues of rams in gold, white shell and lapis lazuli, standing on their hind legs and bound with silver chains to a tall, flowering golden bush. This theme is common in Sumerian art.

5
. Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac is paralleled in Greek myth: the Cadmean story of Athamas and Phrixus. These Cadmeans (‘Easterners’ in Hebrew) traced their descent from Agenor (‘Canaan’). In the eleventh century
B.C.
, some of them seem to have wandered from Palestine to Cadmeia in Caria, then crossed the Aegean and founded Boeotian Thebes. Cadmeans also figure as ‘Children of Kedmah’ in Ishmael’s genealogy (see 29. 5). This parallel solves three important problems raised by
Genesis:
first, since Abraham was not founding a city, what emergency prompted him to sacrifice his grown-up son? Next: why was his first-born Ishmael not chosen in preference to Isaac? Lastly: did the quarrel for precedence between Sarah and Hagar, so important in the introductory chapters, bear any relation to the sacrifice?

6
. Here is the Cadmean story. King Athamas the Boeotian, having married Queen Nephele of Pelion, who bore him a son named Phrixus, afterwards begot a son, Melicertes (
Melkarth
, ‘ruler of the city’) on Nephele’s rival Ino the Cadmean. When Nephele heard of this, she cursed Athamas and Melicertes; whereupon Ino created a famine by secretly parching the seed-corn, and bribed Apollo’s priestess to announce that the land would recover its fertility only if Athamas sacrificed Nephele’s son Phrixus, his heir, on Mount Laphystium. Athamas had already grasped the sacrificial knife when Heracles ordered him to desist, crying: ‘My Father, Zeus, King of Heaven, loathes human sacrifices!’ A golden-fleeced ram, sent by Zeus, then appeared; and Phrixus escaped on its back to the Land of Colchis, where he prospered. Ino fled with Melicertes from Athamas’s anger and leaped into the sea, but both of them were rescued and deified by Zeus: Ino as the White Goddess, Melicertes as the New Year God of Corinth.

7
. This suggests that, in the original myth, Hagar avenged herself on Sarah by ascribing a famine to some action of Abraham’s; for one famine
occurs in the
Genesis
story when he is already married to Sarah (see 26.
a
), and another in the account of Isaac at Gerar, which seems to have originally been told about Abraham (see 37.
a
). It also suggests that the sacrifice was ordered by a false prophet, whom Hagar bribed to do so in revenge for Ishmael’s disinheritance. There may even be a recollection of this in Samael’s attempt to interrupt the sacrifice. Yet the cause of Sarah’s quarrel with Hagar, which is discussed in the ancient code of Hammurabi (see 29.
2
), reads more convincingly than the cause of Nephele’s quarrel with Ino and points to Sumeria as the original source of the story. The Cadmean version suggests, however, that Hagar’s second flight from Abraham (see 29.
c
) took place after the attempted sacrifice of Isaac, not before. ‘Athamas’ may be derived from the Hebrew
Ethan
, a mythical early sage and poet whose name, meaning ‘lasting’ or ‘strong’, is transcribed in the Septuagint as
Aitham.
The strange phrase ‘the fear of Isaac’ (
Genesis
XXXI. 42, 53) recalls the name Phrixus (‘Horror’). Famine in a nomadic society means drought, and the mock-sacrifice of a man dressed in a black ram’s fleece, still celebrated on Mount Laphystium by Boeotian shepherds at the Spring Equinox, is a rain-making rite.

8
. Two other myths are to the point here. The earlier one concerns Jephthah’s vow to give God the first living creature that met him after his victory over the Ammonites (
Judges
XI. 29 ff); the later concerns Idomeneus the Cretan’s similar vow to Poseidon when faced with shipwreck. Jephthah, however, came to no harm after sacrificing his daughter, this being ‘a custom in Israel’; whereas Idomeneus’s men were struck by plague, and he was banished from Crete. The Greeks, who had acquired a horror of human sacrifice at about the same period as the Hebrews, preferred for instance to believe that Iphigeneia, Agamemnon’s daughter, was redeemed with a doe when about to be despatched at Aulis, and then spirited away to the Tauric Chersonese. Plutarch records a case which combines the vow theme with that of a first-born son sacrificed in time of emergency: Maeander promised to reward the Queen of Heaven with the first person who should congratulate him on the storm of Pessinus; this proved to be his son Archelaus, whom he duly killed, but then remorsefully drowned himself in the river which now bears his name. The practice of burning children to Hercules Melkarth continued among the Phoenicians long after the Hebrews had abandoned it; and Micah’s view (VI. 6–8) that God dislikes not only human sacrifices but animal sacrifices, too-preferring justice, mercy and a humble heart—was a shockingly radical one at that epoch.

9
. The Jewish New Year ritual commemorates the binding of Isaac. When asked to explain the blowing of a ram’s horn (
shofar
) in
Leviticus
XXIII. 23–25, Rabbi Abbahu said: ‘It is done because God ordered our fathers “Blow Me a ram’s horn, that I may remember Abraham’s binding of Isaac; and count it as if you had bound yourselves before Me!”’ (B. Rosh Hashana 16a). The same explanation occurs in the New Year
mussaf
prayer; and a typically Tannaitic saying attributed to Jesus in the
Gospel of St. Thomas:
‘Raise the stone and ye shall find me, cleave the wood and I shall be there!’ clearly refers to Isaac’s binding, which was regarded as the greatest test of faith in all Scripture.

10
. Midrashic comment on the ram is expansive and fanciful. God had made this particular beast on the First Day of Creation; its ashes became the foundations of the Temple Sanctuary; King David used its sinews to string his harp; Elijah girded his loins with its skin; its left horn was blown by God on Mount Sinai, and the right horn will be sounded in the Days of the Messiah to recall the lost sheep of Israel from exile. When Abraham found the ram, it repeatedly freed itself from one thicket, only to become entangled in another; which signified that Israel would be similarly entangled in sin and misfortune, until at length redeemed by a blast on the right-hand horn.

11
. The
Genesis
chronicler purposely varies between ‘God’ and ‘an angel’ when writing of Abraham’s interlocutor: as he has done in his account of the divine visit to Abraham at Mamre (see 31.
1
). To connect the Mountain of Sacrifice with Mount Zion is inept, because it has already been recorded (see 27.
c
) that Melchizedek reigned there as King of Salem and priest of the Most High God—a midrash emphasizes this point by making Abraham ask God why the duty of sacrificing Isaac had not been entrusted to Shem—meaning Melchizedek (see 27.
d
). This is to contradict the reliable Samaritan tradition that Mount Moriah was the 2300-foot Mount Gerizim (
Deuteronomy
XI. 29 ff), which overlooks the ‘terebinths of Moreh’ where Abraham had offered his first sacrifice (
Genesis
XII. 6). The Authorised Version mistranslates this as ‘the plain of Moreh’, relying on an Aramaic text intended to disguise Abraham’s acceptance of Canaanite tree-worship. Moreh, afterwards Shechem, and now Nablus, was the holiest shrine in Israel—visited by Abraham, blessed by Moses, and famous both for Joshua’s memorial stone and Joseph’s grave (
Joshua
XXIV. 25 ff). It lost its holiness, however, when a prophecy (
Hosea
VI. 9) of God’s punishment for the idol-worship inaugurated there by King Jeroboam (1
Kings
XII. 25 ff) took effect, and all priests and leaders of the Northern Kingdom were carried off by Sennacherib. Jerusalem then became the sole legitimate centre of worship, and as many early myths as possible were transferred to Mount Zion, including those of Adam, Abel, Noah and Abraham.