One might be tempted to conclude, therefore, as against all received wisdom, that insofar as the command from God was a test, Abraham failed it alarmingly. As a god-fearing person, that is, one respectful of the infinite difference between humans and the Other, Abraham should have refused to comply with the command to offer his son as a holocaust, a perfect gift.10 Of course, the fact that at the story's end the angel of the Lord states plainly that Abraham is to be rewarded for his compliant behavior seems to rule out any such interpretation. But perhaps the words of the angel, which so credit God's command as gospel, themselves reflect a redactional loss of perspective or the failure to represent truly what is otherwise than representable.
Whether or not one thinks that the stories of Genesis are somehow god-given, there can be no reasonable doubt that they have been propagated by human hands, and that, in any event, they naturally and inextricably include a human point of view. As a result, in some substantial sense, the creational as well as the creatural principals in these scriptural tales cannot but present an earth-bound perspective, a view from somewhere rather than nowhere. I suggest that in the Akedah, God-Elohim, that high and mighty patriarchal figure, in ordering Abraham to make of his beloved and only son (by Sarah) a perfect gift, displays a disposition that is only too human. I have in mind the disposition to make everything come out even, which is to say, to bring everything to a final end or to seek perfection. I do not necessarily mean to imply that representing God in terms of perfection makes of him a human figure (although it may, notwithstanding Descartes’ proof of the existence of God—that if inherently imperfect beings can conceive of perfection, then God must exist). I mean instead that inasmuch as God's movements are pictured as having perfection as a desideratum, as if this quality had gone missing and needs to be restored, the figure of God has been assimilated to a human sensibility and aspiration. It was Rousseau (1992: 25–26) who spoke of self-perfectibility as the human faculty that “develops all the others,” and who, doubtless taking his cue from a biblical theme, was inclined to see it as “the source of all man's misfortunes.”
This interpretation suggests that in this story the figure of God, as profoundly informed by otherness as it may be, might also share in the identity of Abraham. I have already shown that as Isaac is identifiable with the ram of God, so Abraham is identifiable with Isaac. As a matter of fact, the basis on which these identities are fixed leads one to see that the same sort of identity-in-difference obtains between God and Abraham.
Anthropomorphism: From Abraham's Psyche to God's Mouth
The defining identity between Abraham and Isaac is both the same as and different from the identity between Isaac and the ram. Isaac, after all, is tied to Abraham by virtue of biological continuity, making the identity between them the only sort that, at least for certain purposes, moderns are likely to take as seriously as that between an individual and him- or herself. But it is crucial to recall that even in this biological aspect, the identity between Abraham and his son is given by God in a miraculous manner. When Sarah is 90 and Abraham 100 years old, God promises Abraham that “Sarah your wife shall bear you a son, and you shall call his name Isaac” (Genesis: chap. 17). In effect, then, in the case not only of the ram but also of Isaac, it was indeed the Lord who provided, consecrating identity between, on the one hand, Isaac and the ram and, on the other, Abraham and Isaac, and therewith among the three of them.
By the same token, Abraham is identified with God. Isaac is the issue of Abraham's loins, but those geriatric sinews are miraculously invigorated by God's initiative. It may be seen, then, that in the child of their union—an unequal union, to be sure, of spirit and matter—Abraham and God are in a sense made one ‘flesh’; together they constitute a marvelous identity in and of fatherhood. The fact of the story is that as a creational elision between the figures of God and Abraham, Isaac's father is both one and two at the same time—that is to say (a theme given added and more other-worldly emphasis in the figure of Jesus), Isaac is both the son of man and the son of God.
None of this is to say that these three dyadic identities—Isaac and the ram, Abraham and Isaac, and God and Abraham—are not also relationships of critical difference. That between Isaac and the ram holds the difference of economy in sacrifice, a difference so vital as to make a virtual world of difference between the cessation and the continuation of a people called Israel. And that between Abraham and Isaac, as between God and Abraham, holds the difference of belatedness, according to which one of the two parties to each pair enjoys over the other the tremendous authority owing to generative others and claimed by creator-patriarchs.
But these differences do not so much spring from or conceal identities as foster them. I do not think that this story can be understood unless the god-figure's infinite and originary difference from man is placed alongside that figure's substantial identity with man, for its meaning lies precisely in this paradox. The story pictures Abraham as a creaturely extension of God's person, but, paradoxically, an extension with a mind of his own.11 Hence, while Abraham responds to God's authoritarian command bodily, just as if he were a hand of God, his response is seen also to constitute an autonomous decision.
The story itself thus authorizes the identity between God and Abraham as flowing directly from God's creative initiative to his creatures. What I want to suggest here, though, is the possibility that identity also flows the other way—it backs up, so to speak, informing the figure of God with the figure of man. This is hardly a bold or novel thesis, in view of the well-known consideration that anthropomorphism is a characteristic feature of the Hebrew bible's depiction of the godhead (e.g., Johnson 1961, 1964). In the story in question, it seems to me that God's command to offer up Isaac registers just such a reflux of identity. By calling in all debts, that command expresses a diagnostically human want of perfection: it prescribes a sacrifice that would put an end to all sacrifice and therewith to life itself. In effect, although it issues from God's mouth, it smacks of an ever-present temptation on the part of humanity to overreach itself.
The interpretation of the Akedah as primarily a trial of Abraham's faith is predicated on the presumptive, utter righteousness of the order to take Isaac's life in sacrifice. If, though, it is correct that logically perfect sacrifice on the part of man must constitute a threat not only to the law of man but also to the primacy of the Other, then the interpretation to faith should not go unquestioned. It would seem that the justice of both God's command to Abraham, a mere mortal, to kill his own son and of God's subsequent approval of Abraham's zealous response is open to serious question from a perspective that is more than humanistic and runs deeper than the patriarchal warrant recorded in the story.12 If it is to be identified with the creational force registered at the end of the story (by the promise of life), then the figure of God appearing at the beginning would seem to be disturbingly compromised. For whereas the creational force is a vital force, the command to cut Isaac's throat on the altar is so perfectly lethal, so globally destructive, that it is out of keeping with even the undeniable sense in which death may be construed as a chronic condition of life.
Between Perfect and Perfectly Imperfect Sacrifice
Total Economy and the Anti-sacrifice
If, then, the story's apparent lesson about faith is neither as plain nor patent as has been thought, can we dismiss it? I do not think so. For taken together with the lesson about surrogation in sacrifice, it yields an interpretation of the story that serves to enlighten beyond both lessons.
Generations of readers have noted that in this story the terms for the deity alternate between Elohim or God and Yahweh or the Lord, the former appearing five times in the first half of the story, the latter appearing in the second half, also five times (Spiegel 1993: 121–22). Accordingly, the story has been controverted as at least two-sided, one side centering on God's (Elohim's) test and command to bind Isaac (his ‘power’) and the other on the Lord's (Yahweh's) saving intervention and promise of life (his ‘mercy’). Indeed, it has been argued by experts that the story is not simply two-sided but in fact is made up of at least two distinct prime documents (Spiegel 1993: 122ff.). For my purposes, though, what counts is that the two sides appear together as one story, and whether or not they are narratologically reconcilable, their pairing yields a discerning portrait of the human condition.