Genesis 22:1-14
Twentieth Century Germany produced the aberration that was the German Christian movement, a Nazi-aligned religion that looked very much like today’s MAGA evangelicals. And yet, Germany was also the center of biblical scholarship for more than a century, led primarily by Protestant scholars.
One important understanding that emerged from that scholarship was what is now known as the Documentary Hypothesis, “documentary” in this case referring to documents, not journalistic filmmaking. Though the foundation was laid a century earlier, the idea became part of the scholarly mainstream in the late 1870s through the work of Julius Wellhausen.
The Documentary Hypothesis identifies multiple source texts and traditions in the Torah, the first five books of the Jewish Bible, often falsely attributed to Moses. In fact, the Torah was assembled over the course of several centuries by combining at least four text traditions, including story arcs believed to have come from the Northern Kingdom, Israel, already destroyed by Assyria at that point, and from the Southern Kingdom, Judah, which would fall to Babylon. This is particularly noticeable in the Book of Genesis, where there are narrative duplications, couplets, that are slightly off, for example, two stories of creation.
These texts were likely assembled, edited, and added to by a school associated with the Book of Deuteronomy and many of the historic texts like 1st and 2nd Kings, as well as by the caste of priests who had a vested interest in seeing priestly authority attributed to Moses.
There is debate over exactly how many source texts can be identified, and what historic period each represents, but no serious scholar disputes the idea of multiple sources.
While those of us who read in translation may notice things like inconsistencies in the story and the narrative couplets, we rarely notice significant differences in the underlying ancient Hebrew. For example, the tradition we know as the “E” text, derived from the Northern Kingdom, uses the generic term Elohim for God until the divine name is revealed to Moses at the Burning Bush, while the “J” text, from the Southern Kingdom, uses Yahweh, sometimes written as Jehovah, throughout.
This is all wonky and technical, but hopefully interesting when it comes to thinking about how pre-Rabbinic Judaism constructed its religion over the course of centuries. After all, in the United Church of Christ, our right of Christian consciences makes us responsible for constructing our own theologies.
And the construction of the Torah tradition is particularly relevant when it comes to a careful examination of today’s reading, the Binding of Isaac.
If we tease out the layers of text, we note that the God who demands the sacrifice of Isaac is identified as Elohim, generically God or gods, while it is the angel of Yahweh who stops the sacrifice. We do not know if this is the original form of the myth, Yahweh stopping the sacrifice to bloodthirsty primitive gods, or if there was a text layer where Isaac does actually die.
What we do know is that despite this text, child sacrifice was common, not only in the Ancient Near East generally, but in Judah specifically. The Book of Jeremiah, the last prophetic text of the First Temple period and the source of last week’s reading, denounces child sacrifice three times.
Animal sacrifice was central to almost all primitive religions. The economy of both the First Temple, known as the Temple of Solomon, and the Second Temple, the one still standing when Jesus was alive, depended on sacrificial offerings brought by worshippers, sometimes coin, mostly livestock and other agricultural products. A symbolic portion would be burned and offered to God, while the majority went to feed the priests and their families. Even after Jesus, Paul would weigh in on the debate about whether eating meat that had been sacrificed to pagan gods was a problem.
But child sacrifice is different altogether. It isn’t about the economics of a self-serving cult. It is this much darker thing, feverish fear making meaning out of the unknown and unknowable, and that meaning a psychopathic version of ourselves, hungry gods consuming what is tender and vulnerable.
Is the Binding of Isaac about testing Abraham? Because, like the Forbidden Fruit in the Garden of Eden, that makes God out to be either too petty or too evil to be worthy of our worship.
Is the Binding of Isaac about signaling the end of child sacrifice? Declaring that it had no place in the Yahweh cult? Then why did we so quickly sign up for Paul’s theology of “blood atonement,” when God becomes the new Abraham, Jesus a new Isaac, sacrificed on a cross to a violent and co-dependent immortal, God demanding the death of God?
If we turn to the prophets of the Biblical Age, to the colleagues and predecessors of Jeremiah, we find a pretty consistent answer. God says again and again that sacrifice is not required, that God has no need of being offered what is already God’s, that God is not, in fact, a hungry God. The prophets announce God’s utter disdain for showy religion and burnt offerings.
What does the Lord require? Let justice flow down like a river.
What does the Lord require? Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly.
What does the Lord require? Stop ripping each other off already! Be fair and honest and generous.
What does the Lord require? I got news for you buddy. It isn’t an unblemished lamb, not of the four-legged variety, not of the two-legged variety. Killing innocents does not make you holy.
And yet, we engage in child sacrifice every day and call it civilization. How many children will be a sufficient price for the right of angry racists to carry assault weapons this year?
How many dead children will it take to keep Netanyahu out of prison? To distract from the Epstein Files and the sacrifice of children and youth to the sexual appetites of rich men?
How many Black Sub-Saharan African children have to die before Elon Musk’s greed and grievance are filled?
And in recent days here in New York, three children and their parents dead in an arson attack on a motel used by the un-sheltered outside of Binghamton, four children murdered in Saratoga County in a custody dispute.
When will our hearts stop breaking?
There is no such thing as a holy war. But God bless the courageous women and men who step up, have stepped up in every age, to protect the innocent from the violence of others, for they are imperfectly human and perfectly holy.
The Cross does not demonstrate divine violence. It is not a window into the mind of God. It is nothing more than a mirror. Holiness is found at the tomb, in the idea that love is stronger than death.
The story of the Binding of Isaac tells me nothing about God and everything about us, how even as we claim that we refuse idols, we worship idols humans created, not the Creator. For nothing we can write, nothing we can edit, nothing we can paint, is good enough or holy enough, not Michelangelo’s Chapel, not Mozart’s Requiem. We gesture toward the holy. That is the best we can hope for, fragile, fickle, and finite as we are.
And beautiful. For even in this wretched story that so caricatures the holy, most of us know love, have been given the gift of empathy, agonize with Abraham so that now, twenty five centuries after this story was put into this final form, we are still trying to figure out what sort of God would do such an awful thing. And there is God, not in the story, but in our response, in our heartbreak and anger and questioning.
The 13th century German mystic Meister Eckhart wrote that every creature is a word of God and a book about God. Not some distant cosmic entity on a work from home contract, phoning it in until apocalypse. Active, here, in every Isaac, in every Mary, in every child and every creature, in the butterfly and the butterfly bush.
I know that it can be hard to see sometimes. God knows I struggle to see it sometimes. But this is our call, the call of a loving God who made the world a living expression of Her holy creativity, to see, hear, taste and touch the holy. That is not a hypothesis. It is fact. May it always be so. Amen.
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer
Let us pray.
Mother and Father of All Creation,
we pray today for the Lost Boys
and the Lost Girls,
in Broome County and Saratoga County,
in collapsed buildings in Venezuela,
and bombed buildings in Ukraine and Iran,
in famine ridden and disease stricken Sub-Saharan Africa,
in the quiet rooms of hospice care.
We have celebrated mothers and fathers in recent weeks,
but we must name the children as well,
the holes where children should be,
the blessing of children who are still with us,
those to whom we are close,
and even those who are estranged,
for we are a people of hope,
a people of restoration,
of prodigal sons and daughters.
Even on the Cross,
Jesus cared for his earthly mother,
cried out to his heavenly parent,
“My God! My God!”,
so we pray as he taught us, saying:
Our Father…