Biblion Bible Commentary
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God will provide himself the lamb
Genesis 22:1-8
1 After these things, God tested Abraham, and said to him, “Abraham!” He said, “Here I am.” · WEB
The command is the worst a father could be given, and the answer Abraham gives his son on the way up turns out to be exactly right.
After these things, God tested Abraham. The reader is told at the outset what this is, and Abraham is not. Everything that follows is read by us as a test and was lived by him as a command.
The command is constructed to hurt. Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love. Four descriptions, each one narrowing and each one an added weight — the son, the only son now that Ishmael is gone, the name that means laughter, and then the one word that has no function except to press: whom you love. This is the first occurrence of the word love in Scripture, and it is in a sentence ordering a father to kill.
And it is a three-day journey, which is its own cruelty. A command like this executed on the spot would be an impulse survived. Three days of walking, of camping, of meals, of a boy's conversation, is something else.
The moral difficulty has to be faced rather than managed, because Scripture itself faces it. God elsewhere states that child sacrifice is an abomination he detests, and says of it in the plainest possible terms that it is a thing which I didn't command, nor did it come into my mind Jeremiah 7:31 Leviticus 18:21. The practice was common in Canaan and God's judgment on it is absolute. So the passage is not an endorsement of the thing it describes; it is a narrative that moves deliberately toward a moment when the hand is stopped and a substitute is supplied, and it ends by naming a mountain after provision. Read whole, it is the strongest repudiation of child sacrifice in the Old Testament, made by staging the demand and refusing it.
Abraham's obedience is described in short, practical verbs — rose early, saddled, took, split the wood — and no speech at all. He says nothing to Sarah, nothing to the servants, and nothing to God.
But he says two things on the mountain, and both are more than he could have known.
To the young men: Stay here with the donkey. The boy and I will go over there. We will worship, and come back to you. The verb is plural. He says two will return, and there is no sign he is lying to keep them from interfering. The New Testament reads it as belief that God could raise the dead Hebrews 11:19 — the only explanation that fits a man walking up a hill with a knife and a plural verb.
And then Isaac's question, which is the quietest devastating line in Genesis. My father? — Here I am, my son — Here is the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering? The boy is old enough to carry the wood and to notice what is missing, and he asks the one question there is no answer to.
His father gives one anyway: God will provide himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son. It can be heard as a father putting off a child, and the chapter will show it was not. So they both went together — the same phrase as two verses earlier, repeated after the question, as though nothing had changed between them.
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