Joseph A. Fitzmyer, «The sacrifice of Isaac in Qumran literature», Vol. 83 (2002) 211-229

Gen 22,1-19 the account of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac, is discussed first in its Hebrew and Old Greek form; then as it was developed in the Book of Jubilees 17,15–18,16, and especially in the form of Pseudo-Jubilees, as it is preserved in 4Q225 2 i and ii (4QPs-Jub^a 2 i 7-14, 2 ii 1-14), in order to ascertain how much of the development of the account can be traced to pre-Christian Palestinian Jewish tradition prior to the New Testament. Finally, building on such evidence, the article traces the development in other texts of the first Christian century and in the later targumic and rabbinic tradition about the Aqedah.

appropriate details of the Passion [of Jesus from the New Testament] to heighten the drama of Isaac’s Offering and to deny thereby the uniqueness of Jesus’ offering’²⁴. Their understanding of the Aqedah in this sense was not new, for a form of it was proposed already in 1872 by A. Geiger²⁵.

        Exaggerations in the thesis of Davies and Chilton have been noted by others, which I shall not rehearse²⁶. The real question now, however, is whether the Qumran fragment reveals ‘the pre-Christian skeleton of the Targumic-midrashic representation of the sacrifice of Isaac’, and whether it renders ‘the hypothesis of an Amoraic origin of the Aqedah at least highly improbable’²⁷.

        In his article, Vermes, after discussing certain aspects of the newly published Qumran text, concludes with a ‘Synoptic Table’, which lines up twelve elements that he considers ‘the pre-Christian skeleton’. I reproduce the table here²⁸:

		B.C.E.	1st C.E.	PT	Tan	Amor/Later
1.	Isaac adult		Jos	PsJ/FT/N		GenR
2.	Fire/bright cloud	4Q225		PsJ		GenR, PRE
3.	Isaac informed		Jos/LAB	FT/N		GenR
4.	Isaac consents	4Q225?	Jos/LAB/4Macc			GenR
5.	Asks to be bound	4Q225?		PsJ/FT/N	SifDt
6.	Presence of angels	4Q225		FT/N		GenR
7.	Crying angels	4Q225				GenR
8.	Merit of Isaac	4Q225?	LAB		Mekh	GenR
9.	Temple Mount	2Chr, Jub	Jos	FT/N		GenR
10.	Passover	Jub		FT/N	Mekh	GenR
11.	Lamb sacrifice			FT/N/PsJ
12.	Isaac’s blood/ashes		LAB		Sifra	GenR/y/bTaan