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Discord Invitation

18th February 2017

Post with 1 note

A Biblical Counterfactual

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Suppose that no angel had appeared to stay Abraham’s hand, that no ram had appeared in the nearby bushes as an alternate sacrifice, and so Abraham raised the knife over the bound Isaac, hesitated only a moment – a moment that was an eternity, both too long and too short – and then, in obedience to God, slew his son on the altar and made of his son a burnt offering as God had commanded.

The canonical version of the story of Abraham and Isaac can be found in Genesis, chapter 22. Here is Kierkegaard’s account of Abraham, from Fear and Trembling, up to the moment when Abraham raises the knife:

“And Abraham rose early in the morning” – as though it were to a festival, so he hastened, and early in the morning he had come to the place spoken of, to Mount Moriah. He said nothing to Sarah, nothing to Eleazar. Indeed who could understand him? Had not the temptation by its very nature exacted of him an oath of silence? He cleft the wood, he bound Isaac, he lit the pyre, he drew the knife. My hearer, there was many a father who believed that with his son he lost everything that was dearest to him in the world, that he was deprived of every hope for the future, but yet there was none that was the child of promise in the sense that Isaac was for Abraham. There was many a father who lost his child; but then it was God, it was the unalterable, the unsearchable will of the Almighty, it was His hand took the child. Not so with Abraham. For him was reserved a harder trial, and Isaac’s fate was laid along with the knife in Abraham’s hand. And there he stood, the old man, with his only hope! But he did not doubt, he did not look anxiously to the right or to the left, he did not challenge heaven with his prayers. He knew that it was God the Almighty who was trying him, he knew that it was the hardest sacrifice that could be required of him; but he knew also that no sacrifice was too hard when God required it – and he drew the knife.

All of this is consistent with my counterfactual, and indeed it is consistent with history. Child sacrifice was not unknown in the ancient world. One could be forgiven for mistaking God for Moloch, who also demanded the sacrifice of children. Of such sacrifices to Moloch Plutarch wrote:

“…but with full knowledge and understanding they themselves offered up their own children, and those who had no children would buy little ones from poor people and cut their throats as if they were so many lambs or young birds; meanwhile the mother stood by without a tear or moan; but should she utter a single moan or let fall a single tear, she had to forfeit the money, and her child was sacrificed nevertheless; and the whole area before the statue was filled with a loud noise of flutes and drums that the cries of wailing should not reach the ears of the people.”

One must imagine Abraham returning from Mount Moriah with the ashes and the bones of Isaac not consumed on the pyre of the burnt offering. As he approached the two servants he had left with the ass, no doubt they would have been horrified, as they would have immediately grasped the significance of Abraham’s gruesome bundle. The three day walk back would have transpired in the most oppressive silence. And then Abraham have had to return to home and the Sarah, who had bore Isaac in her 90th year, delivering to her the bundle of ashes and bones. 

Would Abraham have had “friends” like Job’s friends (usually called “Job’s comforters”) to tell him that he must have done something wrong to have received such an horrific command from God? Abraham might have protested, as did Job, that he was an upright man, and indeed the sacrifice of Isaac would have been proof that Abraham was willing to carry out any commandment that God handed down.

Perhaps Abraham’s friends might have gone farther, and said that Abraham, in hesitating a moment before bringing down the knife on the throat of his son, had both defied God (and here I am thinking of the mere moment’s hesitation that Lancelot showed in jumping into the dwarf’s cart, so that when Lancelot finally catches up with Guinevere, she treats him coldly for his momentary hesitation) and killed his own son. An upright man, they might have said, would either have obeyed God’s command without hesitation, or would have defied God and spared his son. Abraham, in this counterfactual, has done neither, and so its twice wretched. 

What if, again like Job, who was given another family after living through torments that included the loss of earlier family, God gave Abraham another son? Would this have been compensation enough for being commanded by God to sacrifice his son? Would Abraham have looked upon his next son and wondered if he would be commanded to sacrifice this boy also?  

It is the definition of folklore that it exists in many different versions. I would not be at all surprised to learn that, once upon a time, there were alternate versions of the Abraham and Isaac story, in some of which Isaac is sacrified, as I would not be surprised if there were alternate versions of the Job story, in some of which Satan breaks his promise to God and kills Job.

Even if it doesn’t make any sense to formulate a “counterfactual” to a mythological story, it does make sense to ask about the counterfactual of a society that preserves a different version of a mythological story. What kind of cultural traditions and institutions would come out of a counterfactual history in which different versions of these stories survived? Would it have made any difference at all, or does the outline of the story itself preserve what is essential to the tradition?

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Tagged: AbrahamIsaacsacrificeJobLancelotcounterfactualmythology

  1. geopolicraticus posted this