The birth of a child and the high hopes that precede childbirth. The death of a child and the wreckage of hope that follows. The eleventh-hour rescue of a child in mortal danger. The selfless devotion of a young child to a parent in distress.
Few themes in all literature have more primal power than these, and these are the themes that, in both the Bible and the Qur’an, shape the story of Abraham and his two sons: the elder, Ishmael (with his mother, Hagar); and the younger, Isaac (with his mother, Sarah).
We begin, this time, with the Bible, again in the Book of Genesis, where not just years but decades have passed in Abram’s life since Yahweh promised him offspring as numerous as the dust on the ground and an empire stretching from Syria to Egypt. Abram is eighty-five years old and childless. His wife, Sarai, is apparently barren. In desperation, she has given her slave Hagar to Abram as a concubine, and Hagar has quickly become pregnant. Now, however, Hagar no longer defers as a slave to her mistress, and Abram allows the furious Sarai to so mistreat Hagar that, still pregnant, she flees into the desert, facing almost certain doom both for herself and her unborn child.
An angel then finds Hagar near a spring in the desert, commands her to return to her mistress, and goes on, consolingly:
“Now, you have conceived and will bear a son,
and you shall name him Ishmael,
for Yahweh has heard your cries of distress.” (Genesis 16:11)
Ishmael is a sentence-name, like many Hebrew names, and means “God has heard.”
So Hagar returns home, gives birth to Ishmael, and thirteen years pass. Abram is approaching ninety-nine, and Sarai has turned ninety, when Yahweh Elohim appears to Abram under the mysterious title El Shaddai (perhaps “God of the Mountain Peaks”), changes his name from Abram to Abraham, changes Sarai’s to Sarah, imposes male circumcision as a new sign for the already existing covenant, and then astonishes Abram/Abraham with the announcement that Sarai/Sarah will conceive after all:
“I shall bless her and moreover give you a son by her. I shall bless her and she will become nations: kings of peoples will issue from her.”…“Yes, your wife Sarah will bear you a son whom you must name Isaac. And I shall maintain my covenant with him, a covenant in perpetuity, to be his God and the God of his descendants after him.” (Genesis 17:16, 19)
How does Abraham receive this prediction? The New Jerusalem Bible translates: “Abraham bowed to the ground, and he laughed, thinking to himself, ‘Is a child to be born to a man one hundred years old, and will Sarah have a child at the age of ninety?’ ” (17:17) I prefer here the Jewish Publication Society translation, which opens: “Abraham threw himself on his face and laughed….”
Fertility can be miraculous in two ways. It can be, as already promised, so great as to defy all human calculation. Or, as now announced, it can occur in blatant defiance of the well-known laws of nature. Women of ninety do not conceive. A man of eighty-five might impregnate a much younger woman; such was Abram when he impregnated Hagar. But now? At ninety-nine? The prospect is laughable indeed. Abram will eventually be honored for his faith, but in this scene, his spontaneous reaction is a guffaw.
Quickly, however, it becomes evident that something quite serious is at issue. Abraham, still trusting Yahweh/Elohim’s promise, has been expecting for thirteen years now that this promise would be realized through his son and heir, Ishmael. Even after hearing Elohim’s declaration that Sarah will conceive and that his line is henceforth to continue through another son, still to be born, Abraham remains genuinely incredulous. He clings to his thought that young Ishmael is still likely to be his only heir: “May Ishmael live in your presence!” he implores Elohim; “That will be enough!” (17:18)
Elohim then backs partway off. Ishmael, too, he concedes, will father a great nation:
“For Ishmael too I grant you your request. I hereby bless him and will make him fruitful and exceedingly numerous. He will be the father of twelve princes, and I shall make him into a great nation.” (17:20)
And yet Elohim insists: “But my covenant I shall maintain with Isaac, whom Sarah will bear you at this time next year” (17:21).
A tension enters the story at this point, for all the males of Abraham’s household, slave as well as free, are to be brought into the covenant by circumcision, which Elohim has declared to be “the sign of the covenant between myself and you” (17:11). Ishmael, too, Abraham’s heir, even though the son of a slave mother, is marked with the sign of the covenant. In fact, underscoring the intimacy of the link between the father and son, the narrator reports:
Abraham was ninety-nine years old when his foreskin was circumcised. Ishmael his son was thirteen years old when his foreskin was circumcised. Abraham and his son Ishmael were circumcised on the very same day. (17:24–26)
How can Ishmael not be a son of the covenant? But then, too, if the covenant is essentially about fertility, does it matter whether Ishmael is included in the covenant or not since fertility seems to be promised equally to both heirs? Tension remains because although the two are both promised fertility and even greatness, they are not promised it in the same place. There is a territorial or national component to Yahweh’s covenant with Abraham that is absent from Allah’s.
Meanwhile, the renamed Sarah, despite what must have been her astonishment at this sudden mass circumcision, has not yet been told that she is to conceive. Abraham, it would seem, has done nothing lately to make her doubt that her childbearing years are over for good. Then, as the aged patriarch rests at the entrance to his tent, under the shade of an oak tree, Yahweh appears to him, or three men appear to him, or Yahweh and two men, or Yahweh and two angels: the Hebrew of Genesis 18–19 is mysteriously fluid as references to Yahweh, His message, and His messengers (angels) alternate so unpredictably as to blend together. In any case, Abraham recognizes that this is (or these are) no ordinary visitor(s), and he prepares a lavish meal for them with Sarah’s help. The visitors eat, and then the focus shifts to Sarah:
“Where is your wife Sarah?” they asked him. “She is in the tent,” he replied. Then his guest said, “I shall come back to you next year, and then your wife Sarah will have a son.” Now Abraham and Sarah were old, well on in years, and Sarah had ceased to have her monthly periods. Sarah was listening at the entrance of the tent behind him. So Sarah laughed to herself, thinking, “Now that I am past the age of childbearing, and my husband is an old man, is pleasure to come my way again?” But Yahweh asked Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh and say, ‘Am I really going to have a child now that I am old?’ Nothing is impossible for Yahweh. I shall come back to you at the same time next year and Sarah will have a son.” Sarah said, “I did not laugh,” because she was afraid. But he replied, “Oh yes, you did.” (18:9–15)
Sarah knows her own body. She knows her husband’s, too, all too well. But Yahweh is making a point: Ishmael’s birth was perhaps remarkable, but Isaac’s will be truly miraculous—a biological impossibility that nonetheless will come to pass. When fertility is miraculous, Yahweh Elohim owns it.
The Qur’an tells a similar story at 11:69−76 but with some intriguing differences or corrections:
Our envoys came to Abraham, bearing glad tidings.
They said: “Peace!”
He said: “Peace!”
At once he brought forth a roasted calf. When he saw that their hands did not stretch forth to it, he was in doubt about them and harboured some fear of them.
They said: “Fear not. We were sent to the people of Lot.”
His wife, standing by, laughed, so We brought her glad tidings of Isaac, and after Isaac, of Jacob.
She said: “Alas for me! Am I to give birth, me an old woman, and here is my husband, an old man? That would indeed be a marvel!”
They said: “Do you marvel at the command of God? May the mercy of God and His blessings descend upon you, O members of the house! He is All-Praiseworthy, All-Glorious.”
When fear left Abraham, and glad tidings came to him, he began to argue with Us regarding the people of Lot. Abraham was gentle, sighing much, penitent.
“O Abraham, make no mention of this matter. The command of your Lord is come and they—there shall come to them a torment irreversible.”
Allah is present in this story as its narrator but, as usual, He assigns Himself no speaking role in the story. His messengers/angels visit Abraham and his (unnamed) wife. He Himself does not.
When an Arab host entertains strangers, he serves them food as a sign of friendship. As a sign of answering friendship, they must consume it. For should they ignore it, they would be taken to have done so pointedly in order to decline the proffered friendship with the food. Are these visitors then enemies? What are their intentions toward their host, Abraham, and his family?
In Genesis 18, Abraham’s visitors do consume the food he lays before them. In Qur’an 11, they do not, but only because they are angelic messengers (ancient commentaries have reasoned) and so require no human nourishment. Abraham, not yet recognizing their nature, begins to fear hostile intentions on their part. They reassure him that, yes, their intentions are hostile but toward the people of Lot, Abraham’s nephew, and his people rather than toward Abraham and his. At this point, Abraham’s wife laughs, evidently in relief that she and her husband are not in danger after all. So far, nothing has yet been said about her coming pregnancy. When that word is imparted, her reaction is equal parts wonderment and blank dismay. In the Book of Genesis, Sarah laughs at the ludicrous but nonetheless agreeable prospect of sexual pleasure with her aged husband. In the Qur’an, the unnamed wife moans at the daunting prospect of pregnancy and childbirth at her advanced age. The same sentiment is the more vividly conveyed in a briefer but parallel telling of this episode at Qur’an 51:29–30:
His wife came forward, in utter amazement, scratching her face and saying: “A barren old woman!”
They said: “Thus spoke your Lord; He is All-Wise, All-Knowing.”
The striking of the face is a sign of extreme alarm and dismay, but the never-named wife must accept whatever lies ahead, for “Thus spoke your Lord.”
As Abraham realizes that these Allah-sent angels have brought good news for him and his house and bad news only for his nephew Lot and Lot’s house, Abraham begins to plead for divine mercy upon his relatives, just as we saw him earlier pleading for mercy for his own father. Allah, once again, praises Abraham as full of sighs and tenderness, and yet, once again, the message for him is that from Allah’s decrees there is no appeal, even for family: “O Abraham, make no mention of this matter. The command of your Lord is come and they—there shall come to them a torment irreversible.”
The biblical account continues as Isaac is born, circumcised, and weaned. In an era when infant mortality was common, it was a cause for celebration when a newborn survived long enough (perhaps two years) to be weaned. To celebrate Isaac’s weaning, Abraham holds a great celebration during which Sarah sees Ishmael, now about fifteen years old, playing with little Isaac. This demonstration of their affectionate brotherhood and so their presumed equality as Abraham’s sons and heirs revolts her, and she demands that Abraham disown Hagar and Ishmael and, more drastically, send them out into the desert to die. Abraham is distressed at the thought of doing away with his own firstborn son, but Yahweh reassures him that he may accede to Sarah’s deadly wishes, for Yahweh will intervene to save Hagar and Ishmael, and eventually to turn Ishmael, after all, into a great nation.
Hagar knows nothing of this as she is sent off with just some bread and a skin (a leather canteen) of water. Sarah knows nothing of it either. In the desert of Beersheba, Hagar’s water runs out. She believes that she is now facing death. Worse, her teenage son is dying more quickly than she is. She beds him down under a bush, and “Then she went and sat down at a distance, about a bowshot away, thinking, ‘I cannot bear to see the child die.’ Sitting at a distance, she began to sob” (21:16).
Ishmael, under his bush, is weeping as well, but then Elohim
heard the boy crying, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven, “What is wrong, Hagar?” he asked. “Do not be afraid, for God has heard the boy’s cry in his plight. Go and pick the boy up and hold him safe, for I shall make him into a great nation.” Then God opened Hagar’s eyes and she saw a well, so she went and filled the skin with water and gave the boy a drink.
God was with the boy. He grew up and made his home in the desert, and he became an archer. He made his home in the desert of Paran, and his mother got him a wife from Egypt. (21:17–21)
And just where is Paran? In the Bible, Ishmael is understood to be the ancestor of the Arabs: Arab and Ishmaelite are virtually synonymous. The Arab homeland is understood to be well south of the town of Beersheba, traditionally the southern boundary of the territory inhabited by the twelve tribes of Israel. But what the Bible calls “the desert of Beersheba” is effectively the desert that begins at Beersheba and runs south from there. It was somewhere in that desert that Hagar was visited by the angel and led to the life-saving spring. Ishmael came of age in that area, and his Egyptian mother found a wife for him in Egypt.
Ishmael had not known what Abraham knew about Yahweh Elohim’s intent to save his life and guarantee his grand future. Had he known, he would not have wept so under that bush. Did he resume contact with his father as he grew and as he traveled on? A parallel tradition, echoed rather than formally recounted in the Qur’an, suggests strongly that he did and that, in fact, Abraham had a hand in Ishmael’s eventual settling in the Hijaz, the desert region adjacent to Mecca, where, in Muhammad’s time, the hallowed Ka’aba—often called simply “the House” or “the Sacred House”—was located. At Qur’an 14:35−39, we read:
Remember when Abraham said: “My Lord, make this land safe, and avert from me and my offspring the worship of idols.
“My Lord, they have led astray so many people. Whoso follows me is of my number; whoso disobeys me, You are All-Forgiving, Compassionate to each.
“Our Lord, I have settled some of my progeny in a valley where no vegetation grows, near your Sacred House, our Lord, that they may perform the prayers. So turn the hearts of some towards them, and grant them some nourishment; perhaps they will render thanks.
“Our Lord, you know what we conceal and what we proclaim. Nor is anything concealed from God on earth or in heaven.
“Praise be to God Who granted me, though old, Ishmael and Isaac! My Lord hears full well all supplications.”
In the foreword to this book, we noted that Allah presumes a broad familiarity on Muhammad’s part with the tales told in the Bible. In the largely oral culture of the Hijaz, this familiarity would have come from repeated hearing rather than from reading and may have been more deeply rooted in local memory for that very reason. Typically, Allah reminds Muhammad of one or another of these already familiar tales and provides some of the highlights without troubling to provide a fully detailed account. Among such tales, if there were one that, above all others, Muhammad, like almost any other Arab of his time, could be presumed to know well, it would surely be the story of the descent of the Arabs of his home region from Abraham and Hagar through their son, Ishmael. Allah thus does not need to retell the story of Hagar for Muhammad’s benefit. Moreover, He can trust that Muhammad will easily hear Allah’s allusion to Abraham’s having settled Hagar and Ishmael in the Hijaz, even if the first step in the settlement seemed to the two of them to be a traumatic abandonment.
To repeat, what Muhammad knows—and Allah knows he knows—of the Bible does not come from reading the Bible. According to a longstanding tradition, Muhammad was illiterate. But the religious culture of the Hijaz mingled Jewish and Christian lore with Arab tribal polytheism in a rich oral tradition that “canonized” its own versions, often elaborated, of received material. Allah sometimes corrects these, but sometimes, as above, he simply incorporates them into his message to Muhammad, signaling his intentions with just the briefest of allusions.
So it happens that we read in the Qur’an at 2:158:
Al-Safa and al-Marwa are among the rites of God. As for him who performs the Greater Pilgrimage to the Sacred House or else the Lesser, no blame shall attach to him if he circumambulates them.
Al-Safa and al-Marwah were two hills near Mecca between or around which pilgrims would reenact Hagar’s desperate search for water in a formal ritual of lapping back and forth. The ritual, like the story of Hagar and Ishmael in the Hijaz, predated the lifetime of Muhammad and so predated the Qur’an. Was it then still legitimate after the coming of Muhammad? This was evidently a question that arose. Yes, Allah reassures Muhammad and his early followers, the old ritual is still legitimate, incorporated as it was and is not only into the Muslim haj (the Greater Pilgrimage which is to be made only at a designated time each year) but also into the related, simpler ‘umrah (the lesser pilgrimage that Muslims may make at any time).
Our intent here is not per se to discuss Islam’s pilgrimage rituals but only to note the felt presence in the Qur’an, despite formal silence, of the story of Abraham, Hagar, and Ishmael—this tale of the birth of Abraham’s firstborn son; of the early near-death experience of that son and his mother in the desert; and finally of their dramatic divine rescue.
The biblical story of Abraham and his sons continues, after the departure of Hagar and Ishmael, with the birth of Isaac. Then, “some time later,”
God put Abraham to the test. “Abraham, Abraham!” he called. “Here I am,” he replied. God said, “Take your son, your only son, your beloved Isaac, and go to the land of Moriah, where you are to offer him as a burnt offering on one of the mountains which I shall point out to you.” (Genesis 22:1–2)
Abraham has complied with Elohim’s every command so far, but has Elohim done His part? Has He provided the promised miraculous fertility? Abraham, having repeatedly complained of his childlessness, is now one hundred years old and has exactly two sons, one of whom he may never see again. Is his commitment to Yahweh Elohim weakening? But then, too, viewing the matter from Elohim’s side, has Abraham ever given Him any but an entirely conditional, quid pro quo commitment? Elohim, having forcefully limited His covenant commitment to Isaac and his future offspring, now brings the matter to a brutal head and demands that Abraham give Isaac back.
Fertility, we said earlier, was what this covenant was about. But what if Elohim now takes away the fertility, depriving Abraham of any descendants through Isaac and, it would seem, canceling His side of the covenant? Will Abraham obey this command? Will he pass this test? And why is the test necessary? What has Abraham done to rouse doubt in Elohim’s mind?
Or is this, perhaps, a paradoxical test—that is, a test you can only pass by failing it? Since Elohim has already forbidden murder, will Abraham, paradoxically, pass the test by disobeying Elohim? At Genesis 9:6, Elohim has solemnly proclaimed to Noah, in the aftermath of the great flood:
“He who sheds the blood of man,
by man shall his blood be shed,
for in the image of God
was man created.”
Isaac, still young enough to be living at home with his parents, is a man-child created in the image of Elohim. If Elohim orders him murdered, is He to be believed, or, as Abraham might well ask, in tones of incredulity: “What is this—some kind of test or something?” Which of Elohim’s two commands is Abraham to obey? Is Abraham even dealing with the same deity at all? Without ever declaring in so many words any compliant willingness to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham begins silently to go through the motions:
Early next morning Abraham saddled his donkey and took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. He chopped wood for the burnt offering and started on his journey to the place which God had indicated to him. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place in the distance. Then Abraham said to his servants, “Stay here with the donkey. The boy and I are going over there; we shall worship and then come back to you.” (22:3–5)
Worship: a most interesting word choice. It neither excludes nor necessarily includes sacrifice. The core meaning of the Hebrew root involved is simply bow down: obeisance, yes, but not necessarily obedience.
Abraham and his party have journeyed for three full days, beginning, apparently, from Beersheba at the southern extreme of later Israelite territory, but in what direction have they traveled? Later Jewish tradition identifies Mount Moriah with the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, but what if they were traveling southward, in the same direction that Hagar and Ishmael may have traveled, rather than northward toward Jerusalem? Abraham knows that once before, Elohim had seemed to sentence a son of his to death and then saved him after all. Will He do so again?
Tension builds as the Genesis story continues:
Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering, loaded it on Isaac, and carried in his own hands the fire and the knife. Then the two of them set out together. Isaac spoke to his father Abraham. “Father?” he said. “Yes, my son,” he replied. “Look,” he said, “here are the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” Abraham replied, “My son, God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering.” And the two of them went on together. (22:6–8)
Who is testing whom here? In Hebrew, Abraham’s sentence “God himself will provide” is identical to “Let God himself provide”; the verb, in Hebrew, may be either a future or what is called in Hebrew grammar a jussive—that is, a third-person imperative. Abraham may either be challenging God to provide an actual lamb or delicately concealing from Isaac that he is to be the sacrificial lamb. Suspense builds, for the words can be read either way.
And, by the way, which of the two—Abraham or Isaac—is undergoing the real test of faith here? The biblical text implies that Isaac—young, naïve, and trusting—has no inkling of what is in store for him, but it by no means rules out the possibility that he does in fact have some inkling. If he does, is he a willing or a horrified and unwilling victim?
The anonymous narrator of Genesis leaves this question unanswered, but Allah answers it in the Qur’an. In Sura 37, Allah states that He has rewarded Abraham for his zeal in attacking the idolatry of Azar and his people with the birth of a “gentle son.” But then, when that son
was old enough to accompany him, he said: “My son, I saw in a dream that I was sacrificing you, so reflect and give me your opinion.”
He said: “Father, do as you are commanded and you shall find me, God willing, steadfast.” (37:102)
Here, Allah sharply corrects the biblical account: Abraham does not conceal from his son the divine command that has come to him in a dream. And the son, for his part, does not proceed in oblivious trust, like Isaac in the Book of Genesis, but—being old enough to take a reflective and responsible part in the sacrifice—declares a forthright willingness to give up his life if such is Allah’s will. Like his father, he submits to his divine Lord—good Muslims both.
In Jewish interpretive tradition, the focus over centuries of time would shift gradually from Abraham to Isaac as persecuted Jews saw their traumatized trust in God mirrored in Isaac’s traumatized trust in Abraham.1 This shift is evident in The Lessons of Rabbi Eliezer (pirkêy de rabbi ’eli’ezer), a work written in Hebrew and brought to completion, probably after a long period of expansion and repeated revision, in the early ninth century. In this work, Isaac, facing his own immolation, cries out:
O my father! Bind for me my two hands, and my two feet, so that I do not curse thee; for instance, a word may issue from the mouth because of the violence and dread of death, and I shall be found to have slighted the precept, “Honor thy Father.” (Exodus 20:12)2
Given the relatively late date of this work and its possible origin in Mesopotamia under Muslim rule, it may well reflect the influence of the Qur’an.
As a boy, I was quietly disturbed at a rather young age by the word infant carried in the word infantry, and there does seem something curiously modern in the shift of emphasis from the sacrificing father to the sacrificed son. Wilfred Owen was clearly devastated by the sacrifice in World War I of “half the seed of Europe, one by one.” From the depths of the war in Vietnam, Leonard Cohen expressed a kindred emotion in his 1969 “Story of Isaac.”
The biblical account continues:
When they arrived at the place which God had indicated to him, Abraham built an altar there, and arranged the wood. Then he bound his son and put him on the altar on top of the wood. Abraham stretched out his hand and took the knife to kill his son.
But the angel of Yahweh called to him from heaven. “Abraham, Abraham!” he said. “Here I am,” he replied. “Do not raise your hand against the boy,” the angel said. “Do not harm him, for now I know you fear God. You have not refused me your own beloved son.” Then looking up, Abraham saw a ram caught by its horn in a bush. Abraham took the ram and offered it as a burnt offering in place of his son. Abraham called this place “Yahweh provides,” and hence the saying today “On the mountain Yahweh provides.” (Genesis 22:9–14)
In this entire episode, Abraham says nothing but “Here I am,” and he says that twice—the first time when Elohim calls to him and demands the sacrifice of his only and beloved son; the second time when the angel of Yahweh calls to him and revokes the command. If Yahweh Elohim knows that Abraham “has not refused me your own beloved son,” it is not because of anything that Abraham has actually said. As for what may be Isaac’s condition after this ordeal, the angel has nothing to say. An undercurrent of darkness and mystery runs through this tale, surely accounting for much of the endless Jewish and Christian commentary that it has attracted over the centuries.
In the Qur’an, Allah brings the story to a kind of surprise conclusion as follows:
When both submitted to the will of God, he bent his head down and on its side.
And We called out to him: “O Abraham, you have made your vision come true.”
Thus do We reward the virtuous.
That was indeed a conspicuous ordeal.
And We ransomed him with a mighty sacrifice,
And conferred honour upon him among later generations.
Peace be upon Abraham! Thus do We reward the virtuous.
He was one of our faithful worshippers.
And We gave him glad tidings of Isaac, a prophet and man of virtue. (37:103–112)
No wood, no binding, no knife, and no inscrutable silence on Abraham’s part: Abraham places his son’s face sideways lest their eyes should meet, and on the spot Allah accepts this as submission and cancels the sacrifice. Allah “ransoms” Abraham’s son by providing a substitute sacrifice for the two of them and perhaps other guests to consume in a great celebration, the celebration memorialized today in Islam’s annual Eid al-Adha (Feast of the Sacrifice).
In literary terms, the biblical account has foreshadowing, irony, ambiguity, and suspense, with perhaps its most electrifying moment coming in the very last line. The qur’anic account aims at none of these effects, but then Allah never aims for effect. He is not attempting to entertain Muhammad but only to remind him of stories Muhammad already knows, each of them recalled to make essentially the same point: the supreme importance of submission, ’islam, to Allah.
I do not mean to suggest that Genesis 22, as originally composed, was a mere entertainment. Child sacrifice is clearly attested to in Canaanite archeological evidence. If no Israelites had ever engaged in the same practice, Yahweh would not have needed to forbid it as He does in the Book of Leviticus: “You will not allow any of your children to be sacrificed to Molech, thus profaning the name of your God. I am Yahweh” (18:21). Centuries later, King Josiah of Judah would not have had to campaign to stop that very practice in Jerusalem (2 Kings 23:10).
The structure of the Genesis story might well be borrowed from a Canaanite myth in which Molech demanded the sacrifice of a child, a Molech worshipper performed the sacrifice, and Molech was pleased. Here, the story begins in the same way but then, at the crucial moment, is reversed. It could thus quite conceivably be a myth consciously designed to counter an earlier myth. Over time, while the key elements of the story survived, its moral may have changed several times over, for successive interpretive communities.
But not to deprive the qur’anic version of all suspense or mystery, it certainly does leave the hearer with one large question: who is the unnamed son of this sacrifice? One plausible way to read the phrase “glad tidings of Isaac,” which comes in the aftermath of the “submission,” is as an allusion to the passage already considered—namely, the passage in which Allah gave Abraham and his wife the news that Isaac would be born. But then if Isaac, the younger son, is still to be born, it can only be the older son, Ishmael, who has just acquitted himself so nobly in the sacrifice story, or so some Muslim commentators have reasoned, according to The Study Quran. The editors add, however: “Others understand this verse as a separate statement affirming that Isaac was the subject of the sacrifice and was to be given the gift of prophethood.”
In the Book of Genesis, the story that Jewish tradition calls the Akedah (Hebrew, “binding”) of Isaac ends only after the angel of Yahweh calls to Abraham once again, this time with a final message from Yahweh:
“I swear by my own self, Yahweh declares, that because you have done this, because you have not refused me your own beloved son, I will shower blessings on you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars of heaven and the grains of sand on the seashore. Your descendants will gain possession of the gates of their enemies. All nations on earth will bless themselves by your descendants, because you have obeyed my command.” (22:16−18)
To this, the taciturn Abraham makes no reply at all but simply turns back to his waiting servants and heads homeward to Beersheba. Yahweh has promised nothing whatsoever in the aftermath of this traumatic episode that He had not already promised. Nothing, initially, was required of Abraham except his obedience to the command to “leave your country, your kindred and your father’s house” (12:1). At this climactic moment, once again nothing but obedience has been required, but are we to conclude that Abraham has once again obeyed, or is it rather that Yahweh has blinked and countermanded His own command without ever learning whether Abraham would commit the sin of parricide rather than break covenant with Him?
The Akedah contains in microcosm the entire saga of Israelite and later Jewish history, for what is the antithesis of miraculous fertility if not genocide? Is it not the annihilation of immense populations, to the point that the very annihilation becomes proverbial, the antithesis of the promised proverbial fertility, fertility so wondrous that “all clans on earth will bless themselves by you” (12:3)?
Abraham in the Akedah and Moses in Egypt are related as thesis and antithesis. Had Abraham slain Isaac, the myriad Israelite descendants miraculously saved from Pharaoh’s pursuing army would never have been born. It would be as if they had gone up in smoke, dying with Isaac on Abraham’s sacrificial pyre.
Isaac’s birth to a postmenopausal, ninety-year-old woman was a miracle, as great a miracle as a virgin birth. It happened only because of divine intervention. Isaac’s survival—the loosing of his bonds that day on Mount Moriah—came about through another act of divine intervention. And because the only afterlife recognized in the Book of Genesis is life extended through one’s offspring, the life restored to Isaac when the knife was taken from his neck was restored as well to Abraham.
Intriguingly, the text does not say that Abraham and Isaac rejoined the servants and then returned together to Beersheba. Did Isaac, once unbound, flee homeward alone to rejoin his mother, Sarah, and tell her what happened? Sarah dies in the following chapter, and later, when Isaac marries, we read (Genesis 24:67): “He married Rebekah and made her his wife. And in his love for her, Isaac was consoled for the loss of his mother.”
Did the old woman die of shock? How many years had passed between the akedah and his marriage? How old was he on that fateful day? The Bible does not tell us. The Lessons of Rabbi Eli’ezer offers a guess: “Isaac was thirty-seven years old.”3
Any younger, and he might have lost his faith. But unmarried at that age? Hardly typical for that time and place, historians would maintain, but then, too, Isaac lived an exceptional life in so many ways.
Centuries later, the first Christians would identify faithful trust as that which God had shown himself to desire most from mankind from Abel down to Abraham and on down to their own trusting faith in the resurrection of Jesus. Of Abraham, the Letter to the Hebrews says:
It was by faith that Abraham, when put to the test, offered up Isaac. He offered to sacrifice his only son even though he had yet to receive what had been promised, and he had been told: Isaac is the one through whom your name will be carried on. He was confident that God had the power even to raise the dead; and so, figuratively speaking, he was given back Isaac from the dead. (Hebrews 11:17–19, with internal quotes from other biblical books italicized)
In the Letter to the Romans and the Letter to the Galatians, Paul relativizes the entire Mosaic Covenant—whose intent was and is by upright living to maintain Israel’s covenant with God—by noting that Abraham lived long before Moses, and yet God said of him, in a line already twice quoted, “Abram put his faith in Yahweh, and this was reckoned to him as uprightness” (Genesis 15:6). Paul thus leaps back over Moses and centuries of righteous Israelite life within the Mosaic Covenant to Abraham’s faith-based path to the same righteousness. He then sees the impossibly glorious fertility promise to Abraham fulfilled not in physical descendants but in Paul’s own new and growing throng of converts, spiritual descendants of Abraham—those who are sons of Abraham through faith rather than by birth:
Abraham, you remember, put his faith in God, and this was reckoned to him as uprightness. Be sure, then, that it is people of faith who are the children of Abraham. And it was because scripture foresaw that God would give saving justice to the gentiles through faith, that it announced the future gospel to Abraham in the words: All nations will be blessed in you. So it is people of faith who receive the same blessing as Abraham, the man of faith. (Galatians 3:6–9, quoting Genesis 15:6 and 12:3 in italic)
What Paul does in this way to his fellow Jews, Allah does to Jews and Christians alike, and to all disputes between them over Abraham, when he addresses them together as what He calls “People of the Book”:
O People of the Book, why do you dispute concerning Abraham? The Torah and Evangel {Gospel} were revealed only after his time. Will you not be reasonable? Consider. It was you who argued about a matter of which you have knowledge. Why then do you argue about a matter of which you have no knowledge? God knows and you do not know. Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian, but a man of pristine faith, a Muslim, nor was he an idolater. Of all mankind, those most deserving of Abraham are his followers, and this prophet standing before you {Muhammad}, and those who believe. God is the Patron of believers. (3:65–68)
Here, with exceptional clarity, Allah identifies the submission of Abraham with that of Muhammad, relativizing all that lies between the two. Another, more powerful such identification is made—with a plausible link to the tale of Abraham, Ishmael, and the suspended sacrifice—at Qur’an 2:124 and following:
Remember when his Lord tested Abraham with certain rulings and how Abraham fulfilled them.
God said: “I shall appoint you an exemplar to mankind.”
Abraham said: “And also my descendants.”
God said: “Evildoers shall not enjoy My covenant.”
Remember when We set up the House as a place frequented by mankind, a sanctuary: “Take the station of Abraham as a place of worship.” And We thus commanded Abraham and Ishmael: “To sanctify My House for those who circle around it, those who seclude themselves in it and those who bow and prostrate themselves in prayer.”
Remember when Abraham said: “Lord, make this city a sanctuary and bless its people with sustenance, those of them who believe in God and the Last Day.”
God said: “As for him who disbelieves, I shall grant him brief enjoyment and then shall consign him to the torment of the Fire, a wretched fate indeed.”
Remember when Abraham and Ishmael were raising up the foundations of the House:
“Our Lord, accept this from us,
You are All-Hearing, All-Knowing,
Our Lord, make us surrender ourselves to You,
And from our descendants a nation which surrenders itself to You.
Show us our holy rituals,
And forgive us. You are All-Forgiving, All-Merciful.
Our Lord, send them a messenger, of their number,
Who shall recite to them Your verses,
Teaching them the Book and the Wisdom,
And who shall purify them.
You are the Almighty, the All-Wise.”
Who can willfully abandon the religion of Abraham unless it be one who makes a fool of himself? (2: 124–130)
Here, again, the identification of the “religion of Abraham” with the message of Muhammad is complete. But note well: Abraham has been made an exemplar “to mankind.” The Ka’aba, built by Abraham and Ishmael, has been made “a place frequented by mankind.” Accordingly, the message of Muhammad, so powerfully identified with Abraham, is for mankind as well.
And yet, in a special way, it remains a message for the Arabs. Just as Yahweh claims sovereignty over all mankind but delivers His scripture in Hebrew and makes His covenant only with Israel, locating it not on the planet as a whole but only in the Promised Land, so Allah, too, claims universal sovereignty but gives his revelation in Arabic and organizes his worship around one very particular spot in Arabia. At the outset of his prophetic career, Muhammad instructed his followers that the direction (Arabic, qiblah) of their prayers should be toward Jerusalem. Later, Allah instructed him that Muslim prayers should be directed, instead, toward “the House,” in Mecca. This redirection, this new qiblah, was a crucial moment in the individuation of Islam as neither a new form of Judaism nor a new form of Christianity but a distinct new community with, geographically as well as spiritually, a new orientation. Jews turned toward Jerusalem—Zion, the City of David—when they prayed. Christian churches were oriented toward the sunrise, a symbol of Christ’s resurrection. Each of the two has its own qiblah. But Allah was now taking Muhammad in a new direction:
We have seen you turning your face from side to side in the heavens,
So We will now turn you towards a direction that will please you:
Turn your face towards the Sacred Mosque.
Wherever you may be, turn your faces towards it.
Those granted the Book know that this is the truth from their Lord.
God is not unaware of what they do. (Qur’an 2:144)
Speaking through Muhammad to Arabs newly converted to Islam, Allah says at another point in the Qur’an:
Behold the revelations of the Manifest Book!
We have sent it down as an Arabic Qur’an; perhaps you will understand.
We narrate to you the fairest of narratives, through what We revealed to you—this Qur’an.
And yet before it you were heedless. (12:2–3)
Among the fair narratives, that of the heroic joint submission of Abraham and his son stands supreme. Historic in the Hebrew Bible, symbolic in the New Testament, their ordeal becomes both paradigmatic and foundational in Islam, linked as it is both to the Arabic Qur’an and to the supremely hallowed desert oasis in Arabia to which, around the world, millions of Muslims still direct their prayers, their theolatry, five times a day.