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.
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.