Jean Louis Ska, «Genesis 22: What Question Should We Ask the Text?», Vol. 94 (2013) 257-267
Among the questions raised by Gen 22,1-19, this short study grapples with those concerning the figure of God, the peculiarities of the plot, and the date of the text. God puts Abraham to the test 'to know' how the latter will pass this test. The plot is therefore a plot of discovery that ends with an anagnorisis, a passage from ignorance to knowledge in 22,12. There is no explicit peripeteia in the narrative, however, and this means that the reader must imagine the change of situation. All these features point towards a later date.
ANIMADVERSIONES
Genesis 22: What Question Should We Ask the Text 1?
I. Introduction: the basic question
Almost everyone knows the famous sentence by Immanuel Kant about
Genesis 22: “That I should not kill my son is absolutely sure. But that you,
who appear to me, are God in person, of that I am not sure at all even when
your voice thunders from heaven†2. This question had been asked already
in Antiquity by such Church writers as Origen and Augustine. The Genesis
Rabbah explains that Sarah dies in Genesis 23 because she learned from
Abraham, when coming back, that her son could have been offered in sac-
rifice (GenRabbah 58,5). All this is to say that, for ancient as for more re-
cent writers, Abraham’s trial raises many questions about the figure of God
that appears in the story 3. Earlier, for the Book of Jubilees (160-150 BCE
circa), the divine being who puts Abraham to the test is not God in person,
but the demon Mastema (17,16). In recent times, B. Jacob proposed a sim-
ilar exegesis. For him, hÄ’ĕlÅhîm in Gen 22,1 is but a divine being, a mem-
ber of the divine court, as Satan or the “sons of God†in Job 1,6, the “spiritâ€
in 1 Kgs 22,19-23, or the angel of YHWH in Num 22,22 4.
Revised text of a conference given at the SBL Congress in Chicago, IL,
1
on the 17th of November, 2012. I thank the organizer, Prof. Klaus-Peter Adam,
and the participants, Profs. Joel Baden, Hans-Christoph Schmitt, Jörg Jere-
mias, and Konrad Schmid, for their useful remarks and observations.
Immanuel KANT, “Der Streit der Fakultäten†(1798), Werke in sechs Bän-
2
den (Hrsg. W. WEISCHEDEL) (Darmstadt 1956, 41998) VI, 333.
For the early and recent exegesis of Genesis 22, see D. LERCH, Isaaks
3
Opferung christlich gedeutet. Eine auslegungsgeschichtliche Untersuchung
(BHTh 12; Tübingen 1950); J.A. FITZMYER, “The Sacrifice of Isaac in Qumran
Literatureâ€, Bib 83 (2002) 211-212; R.M. JENSEN, “The Offering of Isaac in
Jewish and Christian Traditionâ€, BibInt 2 (1994) 85-110; F. MANNS (ed.), The
Sacrifice of Isaac in the three Monotheistic Religions (SBFAn 41; Jerusalem
1995); J.A. STEIGER – U. HEINEN, Isaaks Opferung (Gen 22) in den Konfessio-
nen und Medien der frühen Neuzeit (Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte 101;
Berlin – New York 2006).
B. JACOB, Das erste Buch der Tora. Genesis (Berlin 1934) 491-492.
4
BIBLICA 94.2 (2013) 257-267
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