Lecture Six - The Patriarchs (3)

The next story makes no sense to me at all.

After promising Abraham a great nation through his descendants and after helping an aged and barren Sarah to conceive, God decides to test Abraham, and in the worst possible way.  He tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.  Why??  Why does God need to test us?  Can’t he already see how we will respond?  Abraham has tied Isaac up and just as he raises the knife, an angel of the Lord tells him not to harm Isaac as he knows now that Abraham “fears the Lord”.  He didn’t know before?

What kind of Sophie’s Choice is that anyway?   What kind of God would put a person in that kind of position?  Show your love for me by being prepared to kill your own kid.  Now that is bad enough but I am not giving Abraham a pass either.  What was he thinking?  Here is the guy who in a previous story bartered with God over the fate of Sodom to save a few innocent men, strangers to him, yet he doesn’t raise a single objection to the killing of his own, presumably innocent, son.  

In Hamlet, the ghost of Hamlet’s father tells Hamlet that he was killed by his own brother who has since stolen his throne and Hamlet’s inheritance.  Hamlet wants to avenge his father’s death, but he is unwilling to do so right away because he is uncertain if this ghost is actually his father and is actually telling the truth.   Isn’t that a more normal response?  What would happen to one of us, today, if we acted on the voice of God?  We would be locked up.  Considering that Eve (and all humankind) was punished for listening to the seductive lies of the snake, shouldn’t Abraham have been a smidgeon skeptical?  Wouldn’t a reasonable person, assume that this is not God asking him to commit a morally reprehensible act; and therefore, refuse to comply?  Wouldn’t a reasonable person think that if this were a test maybe passing it would be to refuse the command?  Aren’t heroic acts those that are used by people to stand up for justice rather be complicit in an act of injustice?

And finally, I would love to know how Isaac felt about this whole event.  How much did he know and understand?  Did he struggle?  How did he feel around his father in later years?  Isaac is the least developed of the patriarchs, the one we learn the least about.  He was probably too busy looking over his shoulder to do much of anything else.

I have researched this story and there are a lot of differing interpretations, but I see that as people trying to find some justification for an event so horrific that it is beyond comprehension.   Can anybody suggest some way that we can gain value from this story?