Genesis: From Creation to Covenant by Grumet Zvi

Author:Grumet, Zvi [Grumet, Zvi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Maggid Books
Published: 2017-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

The first lekh lekha ( 12:1)

The second lekh lekha ( 22:2 )

God said to Abram,

Lekh lekha from your aretz ,

your moledet ,

and your beit av ,

to go to the land

which I will show you.

He said,

Take, please, your son,

your only son,

the one you love,

Isaac!

And lekh lekha to the land of Moriah.

And bring him up there as a burnt-offering

on one of the mountains which

I will tell you.

Both lekh lekha calls include an instruction to go to an unspecified place, and both seem to identify the mission using multiple terms: aretz , moledet , and beit av in the first; “your son,” “your only son,” and “the one you love” in the second. Yet while aretz , moledet , and beit av apparently refer to three distinct entities, the identifiers in the second lekh lekha serve to progressively narrow the focus in order to leave no room for ambiguity, climaxing with the son’s name – Isaac! 5

This unambiguous focusing heightens the crisis into which God corners Abraham. Let us recall that for Abraham, the primal son is Ishmael; Abraham is both ambivalent about Isaac’s birth and reluctant to send Ishmael away. Abraham’s subsequent relationship with Isaac is a matter for speculation – the text is silent about that (until they trek together to Mount Moriah). Yet God opens this story demanding that Abraham first acknowledge Isaac as his son, then acknowledge that Isaac is the only son (confirming Ishmael’s expulsion as final), and finally to acknowledge his love for that only son.

One can easily imagine this call to Abraham in slow motion, with pauses in between each demand – or even as a process taking multiple years. It is only after Abraham makes the internal moves to accept Isaac’s uniqueness and status that God commands Abraham to sacrifice the very one he has learned to love. 6 The challenge for Abraham is as much intensely personal as it is theological.

AMBIGUITY PURSUES ABRAHAM

The clarity and laser-like focus on Isaac in the second lekh lekha call stand in stark contrast to the ambiguity of what to do with him. This ambiguity is evident only in the original Hebrew text and is lost in any translation. God tells Abraham, “Vehaalehu sham le’ola ,” using both the verb form and the noun form of the root a-l-h. Literally, that root means “to go up,” so that the form of the first verb used here literally means, “Raise him up.” That could certainly imply sacrifice, but it could also mean something as simple as “Bring him up to the mountain.” 7

To further complicate matters, while the meaning of the word ola (based on the same root, a-l-h) in sacrificial terms unambiguously refers to a burnt-offering, in Genesis that definition is less than clear since Genesis precedes the sacrificial order first presented in Exodus. In fact, prior to this incident, there is only one sacrifice mentioned in the entire Torah. 8 The ambiguities in both the noun and the verb lead the medieval scholar Rabbi Yosef Bekhor Shor to comment:

The Holy One, blessed be He, spoke in unclear terms.

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