Now it hath been witnessed unto men that thou fearest God." God: "It was My wish that the world should become acquainted with thee, and should know that it is not without good reason that I have chosen thee from all the nations.
God: "It was manifest to Me, and I foreknew it, that thou wouldst withhold not even thy soul from Me."Ībraham: "And why, then, didst Thou afflict me thus?" But Thou surely didst know that I was ready to sacrifice my son!" When God commanded the father to desist from sacrificing Isaac, Abraham said: "One man tempts another, because he knoweth not what is in the heart of his neighbor. In Legends of the Jews, rabbi Louis Ginzberg argues that the binding of Isaac is a way for God to test Isaac's claim to Ishmael, and to silence Satan's protest about Abraham who had not brought up any offering to God after Isaac was born, also to show a proof to the world that Abraham is the true god-fearing man who is ready to fulfill any of God's commands, even to sacrifice his own son: As her study demonstrates, over the last century the "Binding of Isaac" has morphed into the "Sacrifice of Isaac", connoting both the glory and agony of heroic death on the battlefield. Feldman argues that the story of Isaac's binding, in both its biblical and post-biblical versions (the New Testament included) has had a great impact on the ethos of altruist heroism and self-sacrifice in modern Hebrew national culture. In Glory and Agony: Isaac's Sacrifice and National Narrative, Yael S. Second, because Abraham acted on a prophetic vision of what God had asked him to do, the story exemplifies how prophetic revelation has the same truth value as philosophical argument and thus carries equal certainty, notwithstanding the fact that it comes in a dream or vision. First, Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac demonstrates the limit of humanity's capability to both love and fear God. In The Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides argues that the story of the binding of Isaac contains two "great notions". The thought of actually killing Isaac never crossed their minds. Though readers of this parashah throughout the generations have been disturbed, even horrified, by the Akedah, there was no miscommunication between God and Abraham. Citing the Prophet Jeremiah's exhortation against child sacrifice (Chapter 19), they state unequivocally that such behavior "never crossed God’s mind", referring specifically to the sacrificial slaughter of Isaac. This is precisely how the sages of the Talmud (Taanit 4a) understood the Akedah.
God's commandment to Abraham was very specific, and Abraham understood it very precisely: Isaac was to be "raised up as an offering", and God would use the opportunity to teach humankind, once and for all, that human sacrifice, child sacrifice, is not acceptable. Isaac's death was never a possibility - not as far as Abraham was concerned, and not as far as God was concerned. Rabbi Ari Kahn (on the Orthodox Union website) elaborates this view as follows: In The Binding of Isaac, Religious Murders & Kabbalah, Lippman Bodoff argues that Abraham never intended to actually sacrifice his son, and that he had faith that God had no intention that he do so. Mosaic on the floor of Beth Alpha depicting the Akedah
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