Was it Isaac or Ishmael that Abraham almost sacrificed?

Genesis names Isaac

There is no doubt in the Hebrew text. The name is in the command itself.

He said, “Now take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go into the land of Moriah. Offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains which I will tell you of.”

The chapter repeats “your son, your only son” twice more, when the angel stops the knife and when God swears his oath (22:12, 16). But Abraham had two sons. Ishmael, born to Hagar when Abraham was eighty-six (Genesis 16:16), was fourteen years older than Isaac, born when his father was a hundred (21:5). Why “only”?

Genesis has already answered. In chapter 21 Hagar and Ishmael are sent off into the wilderness of Beersheba, and God tells Abraham that “your offspring will be named through Isaac” (21:12). In chapter 22 Isaac is the son at home and the son of the promise. The rabbis turned the verse into a famous dialogue (Genesis Rabbah 55:7; Sanhedrin 89b). Take your son. I have two sons. Your only one. Each is the only son of his mother. Whom you love. I love them both. Isaac. The New Testament follows Genesis.

By faith, Abraham, being tested, offered up Isaac. Yes, he who had gladly received the promises was offering up his only born son

The Quran tells it without a name

Surah 37 tells the test in fifteen verses (37:99–113). Abraham, leaving his people, prays for a righteous son and is given good news of a gentle, forbearing boy. When the boy is old enough to work beside him, Abraham tells him of a dream in which he is sacrificing him, and asks what he thinks. The son answers: do as you are commanded, and God willing you will find me patient. Both submit, and Abraham lays him down on his forehead. A voice calls out that he has fulfilled the vision, and God ransoms the boy with a great sacrifice. Only after the story ends does the passage add a second gift: good news of Isaac, a prophet among the righteous (37:112).

Two differences stand out. The son is never named, and unlike Isaac in Genesis, who asks where the lamb is (22:7), he knows and agrees.

How Muslim scholars named the son

The first generations of commentators split. Some, among them Ibn Qutayba and the great historian al-Tabari, who died in 923, held that the son was Isaac. Others argued for Ishmael, for two reasons drawn from the Quran itself. The good news of Isaac comes after the sacrifice, as if he were a reward for it. And Isaac had been promised a son of his own, Jacob (11:71), so he could not die as a boy. The 14th-century commentator Ibn Kathir pressed the case for Ishmael and treated the reports naming Isaac as borrowings from Jewish lore.

That view won. Today most Muslims hold that the son was Ismail, who in Islamic tradition grew up with Hagar in the valley of Mecca and is honored as an ancestor of the Prophet Muhammad. During the Hajj, pilgrims at Mina throw stones at three pillars where, tradition says, Satan tried to turn Abraham from the sacrifice, and at Eid al-Adha Muslims around the world sacrifice an animal in memory of the ram.

Two sons, one grave

The quarrel is over a name, not over the man. Genesis blesses Ishmael too: God promises to make him “a great nation” (17:20). And when Abraham dies at 175, “Isaac and Ishmael, his sons, buried him in the cave of Machpelah” (25:9), together. Why God asked for the sacrifice at all is a question of its own: see why God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.