Abraham & Isaac: Sacrifice

Cory Howell
Bible and Prayer Book
4 min readMar 9, 2019

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Abraham & Isaac

This morning I read from the Daily Office of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, and the Old Testament Lesson was Genesis 22:1–14, the story of Abraham hearing the command to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac. Of all of the stories in the Bible, this is one of the toughest to read. I remember my late mother hated this story: she refused to believe that a loving God could ever ask such a thing of any parent. On the other end of the spectrum, I have heard people repeat the usual platitudes: “You know, God sacrificed His beloved Son” or “of course, it was a test of Abraham’s faith.” Certainly a Christian reading of the story connects well with the story of God sending His only Son as a sacrifice. But I’ve always been torn on this one.

There is no denying the dramatic quality of the story: a fanatically devoted patriarch binding his son to the altar, Isaac’s seemingly naive question about the absence of a sacrificial lamb, and the deus ex machina that concludes the tale. We can picture a tearful Abraham raising the knife, and then hearing the voice of an angel stopping him. But the question always comes to my mind (as I know it has to others): what would we think of a parent who was convinced God told them to murder their child? We would come to the obvious conclusion that the person was dangerously psychotic, would we not?

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Bible and Prayer Book
Bible and Prayer Book

Published in Bible and Prayer Book

Journeying through the Bible with the Book of Common Prayer

Cory Howell
Cory Howell

Written by Cory Howell

Full-time dad & part-time church musician in the United Methodist Church; occasional blogger; fan of Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes, language, the Bible, and more

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