[Glenn Wright]

The Binding of Isaac

After what God asked Abraham to give—
his country, father, name, and first-born son,
his foreskin, his wife’s honor—just to live
precariously in the country that he won

by his obedience to the God he chose,
or who chose him (this point is still unclear),
this all-demanding God must now propose
he kill his son, so innocent, so dear.

Why does the man who challenged God for Lot
not argue passionately for his son’s life?
How could he put the knife to Isaac’s throat?
Stained with his blood, how could he face his wife?

God sends an angel to announce, “Just kidding!”
and as with Job heaps on another blessing.
Abraham keeps doing his God’s bidding,
estranged from both his sons, his faith confessing.

How could Abraham ever have understood
the moral we learn in church: that God was willing
to sacrifice His Son for us. How could
Isaac have loved the fathers who planned his killing?

[W T Clark]

Isn't the whole poem in the last eight lines? Everything could go: and should, without it, I think you have a poem, with it, you have a lot of weighty theological questions set to metre.

Hope this helps.

[Matt Q]

Hi Glenn,

This poem isn't really working that well for me. I have some logical issues / areas of confusion, but more generally I don't really get what this poem is trying to communicate, what point it's trying to make. That could be down to me, of course.

A logical issue. The poem says, "After what God asked Abraham to give—his [...] first-born son [...] God must now propose he kill his son"

So, is being asked to give God his first-born different from being asked to sacrifice his? It kind of reads to me like it's saying: after being asked to sacrifice his son, he's asked to sacrifice his son. But that doesn't make much sense. So maybe I'm missing something? Are you saying that Isaac wasn't the first-born -- later you speak of "both" Abraham's sons.

EDIT: Ah OK, Abraham's first-born son is Ismael. I'd forgotten about him. Though I don't see that God asked him to give Ismael up. That seems to have been Sarah's demand.

I'm also not sure why God "must" do this, or anything. He's God. He can do whatsoever he chooses.

S4, especially with its "Just kidding!" seems to strike a satirical/jokey tone, though S5 seems straight and serious. It might be better to go with one of the other.

S4L3-4 has Abraham "estranged from both his sons", which has me confused. Who is Abraham's other son? After Sarah died he had six sons with Keturah. But in which case, why not "all his sons"? Or am I missing something?

EDIT: As above, I'd forgotten about Ismael. That gives two sons. The other six, presumably, not yet born at this point.

I don't really understand, "his faith confessing". His faith confessing what?

For me the last stanza isn't really working as a culmination to the poem. I don't really see how these question arise out of, or resolve, what's gone before, and I'm left with more questions than answers

How could Abraham ever have understood
the moral we learn in church: that God was willing
to sacrifice His Son for us.

I mean, yes, how could he? That teaching, in fact, that religion, arose many centuries later. It would have been impossible for him to encounter it. And what if he had known it and believed it? What difference would that have made? Would his faith have been even stronger? Would he have acted differently? Felt differently? Also, the sudden appearance of Christian teachings seems to come from nowhere.

............................................How could
Isaac have loved the fathers who planned his killing?

Ok, yes, assuming he did love them, how did Isaac love God and Abraham? It may have been tough. Or maybe it wasn't. And if he didn't love them, it would have been understandable. But, I get a real "so what?" here. What follows from this? What's the point being made?

So, I'm sure there's something you're after saying in the final stanza, but I reckon it might need either drawing out more, or to be better set up.

Meanwhile, I'm off to listen to Leonard Cohen's Story of Isaac. Haven't heard that for ages.

best,

Matt

[Carl Copeland]

An intriguing poem, Glenn. Matt has predigested it for me, God bless him, so I’ll parasitize his comments. All I’ll add of my own is that “so innocent, so dear” seems very rhyme-driven, and I get tripped up metrically in S3L2 (and “This” in the parenthetical aside should be lowercased).

Originally Posted by Matt Q

I have some logical issues / areas of confusion, but more generally I don't really get what this poem is trying to communicate, what point it's trying to make. That could be down to me, of course.

I also felt disoriented, though I haven’t gone deep enough to say whether I share all of Matt’s concerns.

Originally Posted by Matt Q

I don't really understand, "his faith confessing". His faith confessing what?

This I did understand. It’s an inversion, but that’s not going to make Matt any happier, and I’m inclined to agree with him.

Originally Posted by Matt Q

So, I'm sure there's something you're after saying in the final stanza, but I reckon it might need either drawing out more, or to be better set up.

Yes, you had me intrigued here, Glenn. There seems to be an implied question of how Jesus could have loved his father, but of course both are God in Christian theology, so I’m not sure how that plays out.

[John Riley]

Glenn, I won’t stay long. I can’t tell what is meant by “first-born son.” God didn’t get rid of the first one. Issac wasn’t Abraham’s first born son. He was Sarah’s but if you remember he knocked up Sarah’s handmaiden at Sarah’s insistence because they were both getting a little long in the tooth. But then when Yahweh finally came through on his promise and Sarah had Issac she made Abraham kick the handmaiden and her son to the curb. They went off to found some other place that isn’t there any more. So it was his wife who did it. Is that what you mean? It can go either way. I’m not sure.

To say Christians learn thousands of years later god was just into offing men’s sons has nothing to do with the Abraham story. Also, to say god did it too takes all the meaning and drama out of what Abraham went through. To try to turn into a parallel story makes no sense mostly because god knew all along his boy would come popping back up through the blue firmament once the Romans were finished. I know Christians are determined to find evidence of their existence in everything the Hebrews went through—cultural appropriation—but this is too far-fetched.

Who is estranged from both sons? Ishmael was kicked out but doesn’t Issac hang around?

Again, this poem is much too long for what we get in the end.

Whenever someone goes back to this story I hear Bob Dylan:

God said to Abraham
Kill me a son . . .

Have you read Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling?” I have no idea if you have from reading this but anyone who takes this story on in any style but comical should at least be aware of it. I don’t buy Soren’s attempt to give it meaning myself but he does a crackerjack of a job trying to make me.

Hope this helps

[Glenn Wright]

Hi, Cameron, Matt, Carl, and John—
Thanks for weighing in.
In Genesis 21:9-14, we learn that Sarah asked Abraham to get rid of Hagar and Ishmael and Abraham took it hard. He asked God what to do and God told him to do what Sarah told him. Thus, God was responsible for estranging Abraham from both of his first two sons. After the binding of Isaac, there is no record in the Bible of Isaac and Abraham ever speaking to each other again.

My point was that despite the after-the-fact justification of the demand by God for Isaac’s sacrifice, it remains a mystery. God should not need to test Abraham’s obedience. He knows Abraham’s heart and has already chosen him as the founder of His people. Why, then, did God make such a cruel demand? Was it to teach Abraham something? This is the Christian explanation. Isaac is a prefiguring of Christ. But none of that would have made any sense to Abraham or Isaac. Were they left to conclude that God is capricious and cruel? Kierkegaard concludes that God has to break Abraham before he can become capable of faith. He says, “Infinite resignation is the last stage before faith.” Another modern interpretation points to the demand for Isaac’s sacrifice as a prefiguring of the Holocaust. The question I leave the reader with is “Can you, like Abraham, remain faithful to a God who allows so much evil and who is capable of what appears to be monstrous cruelty?”
P.S. The Book of Job treats pretty much exactly the same theme.

[John Riley]

I should leave it alone but Kierkegaard did not mean god had to break Abraham to make him capable of faith. Resignation is not the same as being broken. Abraham wasn’t a horse that had to broken in by his master. Kierkegaard’s book is working hard to say Abraham always had free will and every step higher up the hill he used that free will to be faithful. Abraham is stronger coming down the mountain than going up. That’s the point.

Abraham wasn’t being taught anything. There was no lesson or superficial obedience. He was being tested. That was the point of my comment. To wrap Abraham’s faith into the lesson that was supposed to come from the cross is the difference between Shakespeare and Louisa May Alcott. The Christian myths are cold soup compared to the Hebrew myths. The poem is now neither betwixt nor between. That is what the comments agreed on.

[Glenn Wright]

Hi, John—
I don’t pretend to completely understand Fear and Trembling, but the main connection of my poem to Kierkegaard’s discussion of Abraham is his assertion that Abraham’s actions, and those of religious heroes (rather than tragic heroes) is that making the leap of faith renders those actions mysterious and incomprehensible. That’s what I tried to make clear in the last six lines. Both Hebrew midrash and Christian tradition try to explain Abraham’s unexplainable behavior.

[Carl Copeland]

Originally Posted by John Riley

To wrap Abraham’s faith into the lesson that was supposed to come from the cross … The poem is now neither betwixt nor between. That is what the comments agreed on.

This is still hazy for me, Glenn. If your message is that God’s demand and Abraham’s submission are unfathomable and require a leap of faith to be accepted, how does the story of the cross come in? Does it make sense of the earlier sacrifice? (Abraham’s actions would be explicable if he had “understood the moral we learn in church”?) Or are an all-powerful father’s need to sacrifice his son and the son’s unconditional love for his father just as mysterious?

[Glenn Wright]

Hi, Carl—
I didn’t necessarily have Kierkegaard and his “leap of faith” foremost in mind as I wrote the poem. I was struck by what seems like Abraham’s shocking nonchalance as he prepares to sacrifice his son, and how out-of-character that seemed considering how vigorously he argued with God on Lot’s behalf.

The explanation that the sacrifice of Isaac is an allegory for Christ’s sacrifice was given thousands of years later by Christians, but God never explicitly offers it in Genesis and it would have made no sense to Abraham or Isaac. It also raises many more questions. If Christ’s sacrifice is necessary to overcome sin and death, what is Isaac’s sacrifice supposed to accomplish?

In the poem I wanted to focus on how Abraham and Isaac would have understood God’s demand, and how would Isaac have understood Abraham’s willing obedience to it? I don’t have a neat answer, but it points toward the “problem of evil.” How can a loving God allow or even demand actions that we understand to be morally wrong? The reader is invited to consider whether Abraham did the right thing. On the surface, the story seems to have a happy ending, but the full Biblical narrative implies a deep alienation between Abraham and his offspring as a result of his obedience to God.