“And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.” (Emphasis added)
I’ve read this passage dozens of
times before in English, but this time around I discovered something that’s
only evident in the text's original language of Biblical Hebrew. You’ll notice that I highlighted “whom
thou lovest” above. For some reason, the translators who produced the King
James Version of the Bible translated the verb “to love” in the
present tense here in spite of the fact that it was conjugated by the original
author using the past tense. In Hebrew, the passage literally reads
“whom thou hast loved” or “whom thou loved” (אֲשֶׁר-אָהַבְתָּ, ah-SHEHR ah-HAHV-tah) instead of “lovest” (אוהב,
oh-HEHV ).
Reading the account of Abraham’s
experiences last week impacted me more deeply than it ever had before because the wording in the original language implies something very
profound that’s lost in the English translation. The fact is I "have loved" our children in the past, but that love obviously still continues in the present as well. So there appears to be a dual meaning in the passage above that made the test all the harder. God's use of the past perfect tense
communicated finality and inevitability regarding the ultimate outcome. In
referring to Abraham’s feelings of love for Isaac as being in the past,
the message could have been interpreted by the patriarch as his relationship with Isaac
was then (at least temporarily) ending, that he had already lost Isaac, and that he would in fact be required to follow through
and sacrifice his son, just as Elohim would with His Beloved Son. There is no hint of the pending “ram in the thicket” that would
eventually substitute for Isaac as the required offering. This must have made
the test all the more faith-stretching and heart-breaking.
Some final thoughts on Abraham’s test and his life in general:
In Judaism, the account of the trial of Abraham’s faith is
referred to in Hebrew as the
Akedah (עֲקִידָה), which means “The
Binding”. This term relates directly to Abraham tying up or binding his son’s
hands, arms, and/or feet to prepare him to be sacrificed. Genesis 22:9 reads:
"And they came to the place which God had told him of; and Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood.”
Over time the Akedah came to represent the ultimate trial
of one’s faith, especially as related to Abraham’s test, but the theme of binding
also runs throughout the entire narrative of the Patriarch's life. Abram
himself was once physically restrained to be sacrificed while in the land of Ur,
something that adds a sharp sense of irony to the command God later gave him to
offer up Isaac. (See Abraham 1:15-20.) Then came the figurative binding nature
of the covenant that Jehovah established between Himself and Abram, who He then
names Abraham (Father of a Multitude), detailed in Genesis, chapter 17. Through
the Abrahamic Covenant, generations of the patriarch’s literal and spiritual
posterity that were likened in number to the stars of heaven or the grains of
sand on the shore are bound to him and to God. Later came the Akedah,
which included more references to literal and figurative binding, including:
1) The tying up of Isaac
2) The binding (restraining) of the ram in the thicket
3) The figurative binding of Abraham's heart to God’s
Touching on the third point, perhaps there’s no greater tribute to
the nobility of Abraham’s character than that God chose him to participate
in this exercise in empathy, what we know as "The Abrahamic Test". The
patriarch, who was above all a father, earned firsthand insight into Heavenly
Father’s tender feelings as an Eternal Parent and came to understand, perhaps
better than any mortal being, the emotional cost to God of voluntarily offering
up His Son for us.
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