Well, deities should make themselves clear enough that (2) is very likely (maybe the voice is pulling your leg, but it wants you to at least get started on the son-killing). (3) is also near-certain because you’ve had chats with this voice for decades, about moving and having kids and changing your name and whether the voice should destroy a city.
So this correctly tests whether you believe (4) more than (1) - whether your trust in G-d is greater than your confidence in your object-level judgement.
You’re right that it’s not clear why Abraham believes or should believe (4). His culture told him so and the guy has mostly done nice things for him and his wife, and promised nice things then delivered, but this hardly justifies blind faith. (Then again I’ve trusted people on flimsier grounds, if with lower stakes.) G-d seems very big on trust so it makes sense that he’d select the president of his fan club according to that criterion, and reinforce the trust with “look, you trusted me even though you expected it to suck, and it didn’t suck”.
Well, if we’re shifting from our idealized post-Protestant-Reformation Abraham to the original Abraham-of-Genesis folk hero, then we should probably bracket all this Medieval talk about God’s omnibenevolence and omnipotence. The Yahweh of Genesis is described as being unable to do certain things, as lacking certain items of knowledge, and as making mistakes. Shall not the judge of all the Earth do right?
As Genesis presents the story, the relevant question doesn’t seem to be ‘Does my moral obligation to obey God outweigh my moral obligation to protect my son?’ Nor is it ‘Does my confidence in my moral intuitions outweigh my confidence in God’s moral intuitions plus my understanding of God’s commands?’ Rather, the question is: ‘Do I care more about obeying God than about my most beloved possession?’ Notice there’s nothing moral at stake here at all; it’s purely a question of weighing loyalties and desires, of weighing the amount I trust God’s promises and respect God’s authority against the amount of utility (love, happiness) I assign to my son.
The moral rights of the son, and the duties of the father, are not on the table; what’s at issue is whether Abraham’s such a good soldier-servant that he’s willing to give up his most cherished possessions (which just happen to be sentient persons). Replace ‘God’ with ‘Satan’ and you get the same fealty calculation on Abraham’s part, since God’s authority, power, and honesty, not his beneficence, are what Abraham has faith in.
If we’re going to talk about what actually happened, as opposed to a particular interpretation, the answer is “probably nothing”. Because it’s probably a metaphor for the Hebrews abandoning human sacrifice.
Just wanted to put that out there. It’s been bugging me.
More like [original research?]. I was under the impression that’s the closest thing to a “standard” interpretation, but it could as easily have been my local priest’s pet theory.
To my knowledge, this is a common theory, although I don’t know whether it’s standard. There are a number of references in the Tanakh to human sacrifice, and even if the early Jews didn’t practice (and had no cultural memory of having once practiced) human sacrifice, its presence as a known phenomenon in the Levant could have motivated the story. I can imagine several reasons:
(a) The writer was worried about human sacrifice, and wanted a narrative basis for forbidding it.
(b) The writer wasn’t worried about actual human sacrifice, but wanted to clearly distinguish his community from Those People who do child sacrifice.
(c) The writer didn’t just want to show a difference between Jews and human-sacrifice groups, but wanted to show that Jews were at least as badass. Being willing to sacrifice humans is an especially striking and impressive sign of devotion to a deity, so a binding-of-Isaac-style story serves to indicate that the Founding Figure (and, by implicit metonymy, the group as a whole, or its exemplars) is willing to give proof of that level of devotion, but is explicitly not required to do so by the god. This is an obvious win-win—we don’t have to actually kill anybody, but we get all the street-cred for being hardcore enough to do so if our God willed it.
All of these reasons may be wrong, though, if only because they treat the Bible’s narratives as discrete products of a unified agent with coherent motives and reasons. The real history of the Bible is sloppy, messy, and zigzagging. Richard Friedman suggests that in the original (Elohist-source) story, Abraham actually did carry out the sacrifice of Isaac. If later traditions then found the idea of sacrificing a human (or sacrificing Isaac specifically) repugnant, the transition-from-human-sacrifice might have been accomplished by editing the old story, rather than by inventing it out of whole cloth as a deliberate rationalization for the historical shift away from the kosherness of human sacrifice. This would help account for the strangeness of the story itself, and for early midrashic traditions that thought that Isaac had been sacrificed. This also explains why the Elohist source never mentions Isaac again after the story, and why the narrative shifts from E-vocabulary to J-vocabulary at the crucial moment when Isaac is spared. Maybe.
P.S.: No, I wasn’t speculating about ‘what actually happened.’ I was just shifting from our present-day, theologized pictures of Abraham to the more ancient figure actually depicted in the text, fictive though he be.
Well, deities should make themselves clear enough that (2) is very likely (maybe the voice is pulling your leg, but it wants you to at least get started on the son-killing). (3) is also near-certain because you’ve had chats with this voice for decades, about moving and having kids and changing your name and whether the voice should destroy a city.
So this correctly tests whether you believe (4) more than (1) - whether your trust in G-d is greater than your confidence in your object-level judgement.
You’re right that it’s not clear why Abraham believes or should believe (4). His culture told him so and the guy has mostly done nice things for him and his wife, and promised nice things then delivered, but this hardly justifies blind faith. (Then again I’ve trusted people on flimsier grounds, if with lower stakes.) G-d seems very big on trust so it makes sense that he’d select the president of his fan club according to that criterion, and reinforce the trust with “look, you trusted me even though you expected it to suck, and it didn’t suck”.
Well, if we’re shifting from our idealized post-Protestant-Reformation Abraham to the original Abraham-of-Genesis folk hero, then we should probably bracket all this Medieval talk about God’s omnibenevolence and omnipotence. The Yahweh of Genesis is described as being unable to do certain things, as lacking certain items of knowledge, and as making mistakes. Shall not the judge of all the Earth do right?
As Genesis presents the story, the relevant question doesn’t seem to be ‘Does my moral obligation to obey God outweigh my moral obligation to protect my son?’ Nor is it ‘Does my confidence in my moral intuitions outweigh my confidence in God’s moral intuitions plus my understanding of God’s commands?’ Rather, the question is: ‘Do I care more about obeying God than about my most beloved possession?’ Notice there’s nothing moral at stake here at all; it’s purely a question of weighing loyalties and desires, of weighing the amount I trust God’s promises and respect God’s authority against the amount of utility (love, happiness) I assign to my son.
The moral rights of the son, and the duties of the father, are not on the table; what’s at issue is whether Abraham’s such a good soldier-servant that he’s willing to give up his most cherished possessions (which just happen to be sentient persons). Replace ‘God’ with ‘Satan’ and you get the same fealty calculation on Abraham’s part, since God’s authority, power, and honesty, not his beneficence, are what Abraham has faith in.
If we’re going to talk about what actually happened, as opposed to a particular interpretation, the answer is “probably nothing”. Because it’s probably a metaphor for the Hebrews abandoning human sacrifice.
Just wanted to put that out there. It’s been bugging me.
[citation needed]
More like [original research?]. I was under the impression that’s the closest thing to a “standard” interpretation, but it could as easily have been my local priest’s pet theory.
You’ve gotta admit it makes sense, though.
To my knowledge, this is a common theory, although I don’t know whether it’s standard. There are a number of references in the Tanakh to human sacrifice, and even if the early Jews didn’t practice (and had no cultural memory of having once practiced) human sacrifice, its presence as a known phenomenon in the Levant could have motivated the story. I can imagine several reasons:
(a) The writer was worried about human sacrifice, and wanted a narrative basis for forbidding it.
(b) The writer wasn’t worried about actual human sacrifice, but wanted to clearly distinguish his community from Those People who do child sacrifice.
(c) The writer didn’t just want to show a difference between Jews and human-sacrifice groups, but wanted to show that Jews were at least as badass. Being willing to sacrifice humans is an especially striking and impressive sign of devotion to a deity, so a binding-of-Isaac-style story serves to indicate that the Founding Figure (and, by implicit metonymy, the group as a whole, or its exemplars) is willing to give proof of that level of devotion, but is explicitly not required to do so by the god. This is an obvious win-win—we don’t have to actually kill anybody, but we get all the street-cred for being hardcore enough to do so if our God willed it.
All of these reasons may be wrong, though, if only because they treat the Bible’s narratives as discrete products of a unified agent with coherent motives and reasons. The real history of the Bible is sloppy, messy, and zigzagging. Richard Friedman suggests that in the original (Elohist-source) story, Abraham actually did carry out the sacrifice of Isaac. If later traditions then found the idea of sacrificing a human (or sacrificing Isaac specifically) repugnant, the transition-from-human-sacrifice might have been accomplished by editing the old story, rather than by inventing it out of whole cloth as a deliberate rationalization for the historical shift away from the kosherness of human sacrifice. This would help account for the strangeness of the story itself, and for early midrashic traditions that thought that Isaac had been sacrificed. This also explains why the Elohist source never mentions Isaac again after the story, and why the narrative shifts from E-vocabulary to J-vocabulary at the crucial moment when Isaac is spared. Maybe.
P.S.: No, I wasn’t speculating about ‘what actually happened.’ I was just shifting from our present-day, theologized pictures of Abraham to the more ancient figure actually depicted in the text, fictive though he be.
I’ve never heard it before.
After nearly a decade of studying the Old Testament, I finally decided very little of it makes sense a few years ago.
Huh.
Well, it depends what you mean by “sense”, I guess.