264 JEAN LOUIS SKA tain, a few items such as the wood, the fire, and the knife, or the prepara- tion of the altar and as far as the hand of Abraham lifted up above Isaac’s throat. But there is never any clear hint at Abraham’s mental or emotional processes. All that remains in the background of the narrative. So much so that there is no explicit peripeteia (change of situation) in the present narrative 19. There is no hint at Abraham’s feelings, at his dis- tress or anguish, before the moment of the sacrifice. But there is no hint at his relief and jubilation after this moment either. The narrative does not even say that Abraham untied his son after the angel of God’s interven- tion. No gesture, no word, no tears of joy, no kissing, not even a glance towards his beloved son. Abraham only sees the ram caught in the bush (22,13) and offers it in sacrifice instead of his son whom we — readers — must imagine now beside the altar, and alive, albeit as silent and im- passible as his father. The narrative does not describe any change of at- mosphere, feeling, or situation after the angel of YHWH stops Abraham’s hand lifted up to sacrifice his only and beloved son. There is only a change of knowledge, an anagnorisis, and this happens only in the divine char- acter ’s “mind”. What does this mean? In my opinion, this means that the narrative tries first of all to involve the reader in Abraham’s drama. Nobody knows his inner feeling — not even the God that appears in the narrative. In other words, the reader’s task or role is to participate as much as possible in Abraham’s (and Isaac’s) tragic plight. The meaning of Genesis 22 is not exactly an idea, a message, a moral lesson, or even a truth. The real mean- ing is the active participation of the reader in the appalling quandary of a father asked to offer his son in holocaust to the very divinity that first promised and afterwards granted him this son. The meaning of the text depends to a large extent on the quality of the reader’s participation in the patriarch’s predicament. This bids us to take one step further. There must be a reason why the reader is invited to share Abraham’s disarray in the face of God’s unfore- seen and bewildering order. To look for a satisfactory answer we have to remember that Abraham is the ancestor of Israel and that, according to a famous aphorism by Ramban (Nachmanides, 1194-1270 CE), “what hap- pens to the fathers happens to the sons” 20. In simpler words, the narrative tries to project an experience of the reader into Abraham’s life and to de- scribe Abraham’s reaction as a paradigmatic answer to this situation. What is this experience? For the definition in Aristotle’s Poetics, see X, 1452a14-18 and, espe- 19 cially, XI, 1452a12-14. Nachmanides (Ramban – rabbi Moshe ben Nachman) 1194–1270 CE, 20 on Genesis 12,10-20; quoted by M.Z. BRETTLER, The Creation of History in Ancient Israel (London 1995) 52-53. © Gregorian Biblical Press 2013 - Tutti i diritti riservati