Sacrificing Isaac: A Conclusion Different from Kierkegaard’s

It is on the subject of faith and the Isaac story by Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous text Fear and Trembling that I will try to construct a path that might lead us to a conclusion different from that of Kierkegaard, as revealed in the story of Abraham and his relationship with his God and his son Isaac. Kierkegaard uses the story to pronounce on faith, calling Abraham “the father of faith.” Wendy Hamblet’s study Sacred Monstrous, investigating the legitimization of violence in ancient tales and myths, notes, “Perhaps the most dangerous of the biblical myths in the Judeo-Christian heritage is the story of Abraham’s willing sacrifice of his son Isaac.”¹ The story is highly significant, for Abraham is considered the progenitor of three peoples, each associated with a different faith tradition that has paradigmatically broad influence in the world. Accordingly, for Christians it is a story of faith, for the followers of Islam it is a story of obedience, and for Judaism it is the beginning of a quest that ends with the building of the temple in Jerusalem. This quest can be realized only through Isaac. His survival is essential to its accomplishment, and there can be no other solution possible.

Kierkegaard, in examining the story from different points of view, sees three problemata. He asks in Problema I, “Is there a teleological suspension of the ethical?” The story of Abraham does contain such a teleological suspension, for Abraham acts by virtue of the paradox understood as a telos that is outside the universal. In that action as “the single individual he became higher than the universal.² In Problema II, the question is asked, “Is there an absolute duty to God?”³ The conclusion to this question, therefore, is that either there is an absolute duty to God, and the individual stands in absolute relation to him, or else faith never existed because it has always existed, and Abraham is lost.⁴ The question posed by Problema III is “Was it ethically defensible for Abraham to conceal his undertaking from Sarah, Eliezer, and Isaac?”⁵ Kierkergaard, asking, “And what did he achieve?,” then answers that Abraham remained “true to his love. But anyone who loves God needs no tears, no admiration; he forgets the suffering in the love.”⁶

Let us leave Kierkegaard’s three problems for the moment, for before any conclusions are drawn about them, it is best to examine the Genesis narrative of Abraham, as a person and an individual, to shed some light on his actions and on questions of faith, obedience, quest, and violence. Abraham came from Ur of the Chaldes, a city in a province of the Sumerian/Akadian empire. The date is estimated to be around 1800 bce, and Ur, as described by James Breasted, had been a flourishing city state since 2900 bce.⁷ The earliest known king was Mes-ani-padda, and it was his son who built a temple to the cow goddess, whose excavation in 1930 revealed sophisticated sculptures in copper of an advanced civilization—wealthy, powerful, skilled, and educated. In about 2500 bce a Semitic chieftain, Sargon, rose up in Akkad and overcame the Sumerian city kings and in so doing forced his nomadic tribesmen to change their lifestyle from nomadic wanderers to city dwellers. They quickly learned to adapt and excel over their Sumerian teachers in all aspects of settled life and to memorize their stories and myths. Later when the Hebrew civilization had risen in Palestine, they were proud to trace their ancestry back to Abraham, to Ur, and to the myths of their past. Monotheism was not part of the religious culture of Abraham’s environment in Ur, where every well, every unusual mound, every season, every tribe, every city state had its gods, and every person had a personal god. Human sacrifice, even the demand for virgin sacrifice, was an accepted part of their religious practice and common to Abraham’s experience.

In the Genesis account of the King James version of the Bible, chapter 11, verse 31, we are introduced to...