All that said, there is reason enough to believe, at least for our purpose today, that child sacrifice was a familiar practice if not a common one—something the Moabites did, something the Ammonites did, something that might well have been done in Ur, the land out of which God called Abraham in the first place. (And maybe this was one reason why.) Perhaps even the earliest Israelites did it.
Consider: the place called gehenna that Jesus spoke of, a word rendered in English as “hell,” was an ever-burning garbage dump that’s believed to have been a once-sacred site used for child sacrifice.
Consider: the lovely assurance the prophet Micah issues, that all the Lord requires of the people is for them “to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” Indeed, consider that this comes in direct response to this question posed: “Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” which indicates that such a thing was a possibility, a possible requirement for getting right with God.
Consider: Abraham, though loving of Isaac, yet perhaps doubted that God’s promise to him would be fulfilled through Isaac because, of course, the call would come for Abraham to give Isaac back. The call would come, that common call to slaughter your own child for righteousness’ sake. And Abraham would do it, the common, culturally dictated thing to do. And Isaac would comply, having perhaps lived his whole short life under the shadow of this dark question: Will I be allowed to live or will I be chosen to die?
Consider (if you can) all the things you do because it’s what we do in this culture. Militarism. Consumerism. Racism—the unshakeable idea that there are different races within the human race and that these reveal essential value and capability and character. The eating of animals that have been brutalized and enslaved. The burning of fossil fuels over which wars are waged and by which whole ecosystems are devastated while the many climates of the whole world wobble and warm.
Consider (if such a thing is even possible) all the things you don’t even question doing because our cultural framing of reality doesn’t allow for such questioning. (The tricky thing about assumptions is that you don’t know what your assumptions are, you don’t even know you have them, until something radical—radically strange, radically other—comes along and reveals them to you, sometimes to your dismay, sometimes to our shame.)
Of course, Abraham would walk with Isaac to the land Moriah. Of course he would! The wondrous thing is that together they walked home.
Yes, of course! The marvelous act of obedience on Abraham’s part wasn’t when he obeyed the call of God to offer his beloved son, but was when he obeyed the call of the angel of the Lord not to lay a hand on him.
There’s a funny thing in this story that I can’t ever get past—the name of the deity changes midway through the narrative. See: that while it’s God who tested Abraham and it’s God who told him to take his son, his only son, Isaac, whom he loves, to the land Moriah; while it’s God who showed him the mountain that these two would climb together and it’s God whom Abraham believed would provide the lamb for the burnt offering (a confession so ominous it’s chilling, said to Isaac, “God will provide the lamb for a burnt-offering, my son”); yes, while it’s God whom Abraham was praised for fearing, and rightly so, for it’s God whose word is terrible and violent and cruel; it is yet the Lord whose angel calls from heaven to say, “Abraham, do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him”; and it is yet the LORD in whom Abraham does at last confess faith, upon seeing the ram caught in the thicket, upon offering it up instead of his son, calling the place where this all happened, “The LORD will provide,” as if to say, “The LORD, and not merely God, will provide.” At the peak of the story, at the watershed moment when Isaac’s life is spared and the LORD’s promise to Abraham moves evermore toward fulfillment, the deity’s referent changes from “God” to “the LORD.”
Why?
There are two ways in the Hebrew Bible by which the deity is named. El and its many variants (El Shaddai, Elohim, El Olam, etc.) is the more generic term, most often translated “God” and used in reference both to the God of the Israelites and the gods of other peoples. The other is an unpronounceable name referred to as the tetragrammaton, meaning a word having four letters, these being YHWH. This is the name that Moses heard uttered from the burning bush when he asked it, “Whom shall I say sent me?” It’s rendered in English, “I Am,” or alternatively, “I Am that I Am,” or, “I Am that I Shall Be,” or “I Am that Is.” It’s been turned into a name that can be pronounced, Yahweh, or this earlier version, Jehovah, or this most common among English Bibles, printed in capital letters, “the LORD.” But here’s the crucial point about “the LORD”—that the only god ever called the LORD is Israel’s God, which is to say Jesus’ God, which is to say our God. The only God ever called the LORD is the God known to us in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.
This is a god who upsets social convention, preferring instead the freedom of eternal life.
This is a god who breaks down human culture, preferring instead the Kingdom of Heaven.
Standing in contrast to all those countless gods of human assuming and arranging—the primitive gods of human sacrifice and sacred violence, the political gods of imperialism and authoritarianism, the contemporary gods of capitalism and militarism and consumerism—the LORD is a God sovereign over all, casting in full relief the falseness of these functional gods and promising that, though what is will fall away, what abides is absolute blessing for all.
Calling to us from beyond the boundaries of the world as we know it—boundaries of what’s expected and appropriate, what’s customary and conventional, what’s a given and taken for granted and accepted as just the way things are—the LORD is a God who goes ever before us, leading us out of what we think we know is true and into the realm we know only in our hope and our imagination, where the rule is love, the dynamic is redemption that nothing is lost, the aim is reconciliation that all might be one, and the end is life free of death, life that has no end.
Much has been made of Abraham’s obedience—or rather much is made of it in certain circles. In other circles, though, obedience would be the last posture in life worthy of amazement and admiration. In some circles, obedience is considered worthy only of derision. Originality: this is what’s worthy of praise. Self-determined originality: this has value these days; this is a primary objective. Self-made men. Self-actualized women. Expressive teenagers. Children who’ve found their “passion.”
I was a teacher of high school English students for a short while. I remember writing assignments in which students struggled after originality. It was either the content of the papers, or their form. How to be original? Writing backwards, capitalizing only the improper nouns, appropriating punctuation (but hadn’t e. e. cummings already done that?). How to be original? It caused no small amount of angst. In fact, in a couple cases it caused a great deal of angst, troubling these two teenagers whom I have in mind, troubling these who were already quite troubled. Evidence of the struggle was indeed the last paper one girl handed in before committing suicide that weekend. And, though I doubt it was a straight line, though I doubt that her recognizing herself as at least somewhat derivative is what suddenly made life too difficult to take, I do think there’s something here to explore. I do think the pressure to be original is real.
Poet Mary Oliver is known in a most beloved poem, “Wild Geese,” for assuring people of our need not to be good, merely to be. She likely meant to comfort with this. If