Why did God ask Abraham to sacrifice Isaac?

A test the reader is told about

The chapter opens by giving the answer away: “After these things, God tested Abraham” (Genesis 22:1). The reader knows it is a test. Abraham does not. Then comes the command, phrased to make it as hard as possible.

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 cruelty of the test is that it sets God against God. A chapter earlier, God told Abraham that “your offspring will be named through Isaac” (21:12). Now the son of the promise is to die. And the man who argued with God over Sodom, “Shouldn’t the Judge of all the earth do right?” (18:25), says nothing at all. He rises early and saddles his donkey.

The answer inside the story

On the mountain the angel of Yahweh calls out twice, and the first words explain the whole ordeal.

Don’t lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him. For now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.

To fear God, in Genesis, is to put him above everything, even the future he promised. The second speech swears a great blessing “because you have obeyed my voice” (22:18). Abraham names the place Yahweh Will Provide, literally “Yahweh will see,” the same verb as his answer to Isaac on the way up: God will see to the lamb (22:8, 14).

A story against child sacrifice?

Many modern readers hear a second purpose. Deuteronomy says Israel’s neighbors “even burn their sons and their daughters in the fire to their gods” (12:31). A king of Moab sacrifices his eldest son on the city wall in 2 Kings 3:27, and the prophets condemn the practice inside Israel too.

and have built the high places of Baal to burn their children in the fire for burnt offerings to Baal, which I didn’t command, nor speak, which didn’t even enter into my mind.

Read this way, the point of Genesis 22 is its ending. The God of Abraham stops the knife and accepts a ram instead. The story hands down a God who does not want children on the altar.

Three faiths, three readings

• Jews call it the Akedah, the binding. The Talmud imagines Satan provoking the test, as in Job (Sanhedrin 89b). Josephus made Isaac twenty-five and willing (Antiquities 1.227–232); Rashi, tying Sarah’s death in the next chapter to the news, makes him thirty-seven. Prayers at the New Year ask God to remember the binding in Israel’s favor. Maimonides said the test was given to show the world how far love of God can go (Guide 3.24).
• Christians read it as a foreshadowing. Hebrews says Abraham reasoned “that God is able to raise up even from the dead” (11:19). Paul echoes the angel’s words when he writes of God, who “didn’t spare his own Son” (Romans 8:32).
• Muslims read the Quran’s version (37:99–113), where the son hears of his father’s dream, tells him to do as he is commanded, and is ransomed with a great sacrifice. Most tradition names the son Ismail, a question of its own in Was it Isaac or Ishmael?

The philosophers’ problem

For modern thinkers the hard question is not why God asked but how Abraham could be sure. Immanuel Kant, in 1798, said Abraham should have answered that killing his son was certainly wrong, and that the voice being God was never certain. Søren Kierkegaard went the other way. In Fear and Trembling (1843) he called Abraham the knight of faith, a man who suspends ethics for a higher command and cannot explain himself to anyone. During the First World War, the poet Wilfred Owen rewrote the scene with an Abraham who refuses the ram and kills his son, “and half the seed of Europe, one by one.”