Isaac ( , "he will laugh"; , Yitzchok; ; ; or ; )
as described in the
Hebrew Bible, was
the only son
Abraham had with his wife
Sarah, and was the father of
Jacob and
Esau. Isaac is regarded
as one of the three
patriarch of
the
Jewish people. According to the
Book of Genesis,
Abraham was 100 years old when Isaac was born,
and Sarah was beyond childbearing years.
Isaac was the only Biblical patriarch whose name was not changed,
and the only one who did not leave
Canaan.
Compared to those of Abraham and Jacob, Isaac's story relates fewer
incidents of his life. He died when he was 180 years old,
making him the longest-lived patriarch.
The New Testament contains several references to Isaac. The
early Christian church viewed
Abraham's willingness to follow God's command to
sacrifice Isaac as an example of faith and
obedience. Muslims honor Ishaq (Isaac) as a
prophet of Islam, and a few of the
children of Isaac are mentioned in the
Qur'an, which describes Isaac as the father of the
Israelites and a righteous
servant of God. The Qur'an states that Isaac
and his progeny are blessed as long as they uphold their covenant
with God, a view that ceased to find support among Muslim scholars
in later centuries.
Some academic scholars have described Isaac as "a legendary
figure", while others view him as "a figure representing tribal
history, though as a historical individual" or as "a seminomadic
leader".
Etymology and meaning
The
Anglicized name Isaac is a
transliteration of the Hebrew term which literally means "may God
smile." The term conforms to an established
Northwest Semitic linguist type, but is
not spoken elsewhere.
Ugaritic texts dating
from the
13th century BCE refer to
the benevolent smile of the
Canaanite deity
El.
Genesis,
however, ascribes the laughter to Isaac's mother
Sarah rather than
El.
According to the Biblical narrative, Sarai laughed privately when
Elohim imparted to
Abram
the news of their son's eventual birth. Sarah laughed because she
was past the age of childbearing; both she and Abram were advanced
in age.
Biblical narrative
The angel hinders the offering up of
Isaac, by Rembrandt
Isaac (Yitschaq, Yischaq) is mentioned by name 80 times in the
King James Version of
Genesis, 32 times in the remainder of the
Hebrew Bible, and 20 times in the
New Testament. In the narrative, God
calls Isaac the "only son" of Abraham ( , , cf. ), though Abraham's
sons also include
Ishmael and six others.
Variations of the formula "Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" occur 23
times in the Hebrew Bible. Isaac is first prophesied at , is born
at , dies at , and is remembered at . According to the
documentary hypothesis, use of
names of God indicates authorship, and
form critics variously assign passages
like to the
Yahwist source, and , , and to
the
Elohist source; this
source-critical approach has admitted problems, in that the name
"
Yahweh" appears in Elohist material.
According to the compilation hypothesis, the formulaic use of the
word
toledoth (generations) indicates that is Isaac's
record through Abraham's death (with Ishmael's record appended),
and is Jacob's record through Isaac's death (with Esau's records
appended).
When Sarah was beyond child-bearing age, God told Abraham and Sarah
that she would still give birth, at which she privately laughed (
). Isaac was born when Abraham was 100, and Abraham
circumcised Isaac when the boy was eight days old
( ). Isaac was Sarah's first and only child, but Abraham had had
another son,
Ishmael, thirteen years
earlier, borne by Sarah's maidservant,
Hagar ( ). After Isaac had been weaned, Sarah
saw Ishmael mocking, and urged her husband to banish Hagar and
Ishmael so that Isaac would be Abraham's only heir. Abraham was
hesitant, but at God's order he listened to his wife's request (
).
Later, God tested Abraham by
commanding
him to sacrifice his son. Abraham obeyed and took Isaac to
mount
Moriah. Without murmuring, Isaac let
Abraham bind him and lay him upon the altar as a sacrifice. Abraham
took the knife and raised his hand to kill his son; at the last
minute, the angel of the prevented him from doing so. Instead of
Isaac, Abraham sacrificed a ram that was trapped in a thicket
nearby. (According to Islam, the Biblical narrative is incorrect
and these events happened to Ishmael instead.)
When Isaac was 40, Abraham sent
Eliezer, his
steward, into Mesopotamia to find a wife for Isaac, from his nephew
Bethuel's family. Eliezer chose
Rebekah for Isaac. After many years of marriage to
Isaac, Rebekah had still not given birth to a child and was
believed to be barren. Isaac prayed for her and she conceived ( ).
Rebekah gave birth to twin boys,
Esau and
Jacob. Isaac was 60 years old when his two
sons were born ( ). Isaac favored Esau, and Rebekah favored
Jacob.
As Abraham grew rich, Isaac stayed with his father, and was about
75 when his father died. Like Abraham, Isaac deceived
Abimelech about his wife, and Isaac built his
business by digging wells, unstopping those that his father had dug
and the
Philistines had stopped up.
Isaac had
a vision of God at Beersheba
and made a treaty with Abimelech
there.
Isaac grew old and became blind. He called his son Esau and
directed him to procure some venison for him, in order to receive
Isaac's blessing. While Esau was hunting, Jacob deceptively
misrepresented himself as Esau to his blind father and obtained his
father's blessing, making Jacob Isaac's primary heir, and leaving
Esau in an inferior position. Isaac sent Jacob into Mesopotamia to
take a wife of his own family. After 20 years working for
Laban, Jacob returned home, and he and Esau
buried Isaac when Isaac died at the age of 180 ( ).
Jewish traditions
In rabbinical tradition the age of Isaac at the time of binding is
taken to be 37 which contrasts with common portrayals of Isaac as a
child. The
rabbis also thought that the reason
for the death of
Sarah was the news of the
intended sacrifice of Isaac. The sacrifice of Isaac was cited in
appeals for the
mercy of God in the later
Jewish traditions. The post-Biblical Jewish
interpretations often elaborate the role of Isaac beyond the
Biblical description and largely focus on Abraham's intended
sacrifice of Isaac, called the
aqedah ("binding"). According to a version
of these interpretations, Isaac died in the sacrifice and was
revived. According to many accounts of
Aggadah, unlike the Bible, it is Satan who is
testing Isaac and not God.Brock, Sebastian P.,
Brill's New
Pauly,
Isaac. Isaac's willingness to follow God's
command at the cost of his death has been a model for many Jews who
preferred
martyrdom to violation of the
Jewish law.
According to the Jewish tradition Isaac instituted the afternoon
prayer. This tradition is based on ("Isaac went out to meditate in
the field at the eventide").
Isaac was the only
patriarch who stayed in
Canaan during his whole life and though once
he tried to leave, God told him not to do so ( ). Rabbinic
tradition gave the explanation that Isaac was almost sacrificed and
anything dedicated as a sacrifice may not leave the
Land of Israel. Isaac was the oldest of the
Biblical patriarchs at the time of his death, and the only
patriarch whose name was not changed.
Rabbinic literature also linked
Isaac's blindness in old age, as stated in the Bible, to the
sacrificial binding: Isaac's eyes went blind because the tears of
angels present at the time of his sacrifice fell on Isaac's
eyes.
New Testament
In the
New Testament, there are
references to Isaac having been "offered up" by his father, and to
his blessing his sons.
Paul contrasted Isaac, symbolizing Christian liberty, with the rejected older
son Ishmael, symbolizing slavery ( ); Hagar is associated with the
Sinai
covenant, while Sarah is
associated with the covenant of grace, into which her son Isaac
enters. states that the sacrifice of Isaac shows that
justification (in the Johannine sense) requires both faith and
works.
In the early
Christian church,
Abraham's
willingness to follow God's command to sacrifice Isaac was used as
an example of faith ( ) and of obedience ( ). views the release of
Isaac from sacrifice as analogous to the
resurrection of Jesus, the idea of the
sacrifice of Isaac being a prefigure of the sacrifice of Jesus on
the
cross.
Islam
Ishaq/Ishak (Isaac) is a
prophet
in
Islam, mentioned in a number of
Qur'anic passages. Like many other Hebrew prophets,
the Qur'anic references to Isaac assume the audience is already
familiar with him and his stories. There is little narrative of
Isaac in the Qur'an.
The Qur'an recalls that Isaac was given to Sarah, when she and her
husband Abraham were both old ( ). God gave Abraham the good news
of the birth of Isaac, "a prophet, one of the Righteous" ( ), via
messengers sent against the people of
Lut.
Sarah, however, is said to have laughed at the glad tidings of
Isaac, and after him, of Jacob.
Several other verses of the Qur'an speak of Isaac and Jacob being
given to Abraham ( , , ), and say that God "made prophethood and
the Book to be among his offspring" (cf. , ). The formula "We gave
Abraham Isaac and Jacob" has been "thought by some scholars to
demonstrate that in the early revelations Jacob was considered to
be a son of Abraham and not his grandson." In some instances, the
Qur'an joins together Isaac and Ishmael and "Abraham praises God
for giving him the two although he was old" ( ). In other instances
Isaac's name occurs in lists ( , , ). Isaac is also mentioned
alongside the twelve
asbat (meaning tribes), who were the
descendants of Isaac from Jacob.
The Qur'an states that Abraham was commanded to sacrifice his son.
The son is not however named in the Qur'an (e.g., ). In early
Islam, there was a dispute over the identity of the son. However,
Muslim scholars came to endorse that it was Ishmael. The argument
of those early scholars who believed it was Isaac rather than
Ishmael (notably Ibn Ḳutayba, and al-Ṭabarī) was that "God's
perfecting his mercy on Abraham and Isaac" ( ) referred to his
making Abraham his friend and saving him from the burning bush, and
to his rescuing Isaac. The other parties held that the promise to
Sarah was of a son, Isaac, and a grandson, Jacob ( ), excluded the
possibility of a premature death of Isaac. The early dispute was
more concerned with
Persian rather
than Jewish rivalry with
Arabs, since the
Persians claimed to be of descendants of Isaac.
Al-Masudi, for example, reports a Persian poet
(902 C.E.) who claimed superiority over Arabs through descent from
Isaac.
Academic view
Some scholars have described Isaac as "a
legendary figure" while others view him "as a
figure representing
tribal history, though as
a
historical individual" or "as a
seminomadic leader."
The stories of Isaac, like other patriarchal stories of Genesis,
are generally believed in liberal Western scholarship to have
"their origin in folk memories and oral traditions of the early
Hebrew pastoralist experience." Conservative Western scholarship
believes the stories of Isaac, and other patriarchal stories in
Genesis, to be factual.
The Cambridge Companion to the
Bible makes the following comment on the Biblical stories of
the patriarchs:
Yet for all that these stories maintain a distance
between their world and that of their time of literary growth and
composition, they reflect the political realities of the later
periods.
Many of the narratives deal with the relationship
between the ancestors and peoples who were part of Israel’s
political world at the time the stories began to be written down
(eighth century B.C.E.).
Lot is the ancestor of the Transjordanian peoples of
Ammon and Moab, and Ishmael personifies the nomadic peoples known
to have inhibited north Arabia, although located in the Old
Testament in the Negev.
Esau personifies Edom (36:1), and Laban represents the
Aramean states to Israel’s north.
A persistent theme is that of difference between the
ancestors and the indigenous Canaanites… In fact, the theme of the
differences between Judah and Israel, as personified by the
ancestors, and the neighboring peoples of the time of the monarchy
is pressed effectively into theological service to articulate the
choosing by God of Judah and Israel to bring blessing to all
peoples.”
According to
Martin Noth, a scholar of
the Hebrew Bible, the narratives of Isaac date back to an older
cultural stage than that of the West-Jordanian
Jacob. At that era, the
Israelite tribes were not yet sedentary. In the
course of looking for grazing areas, they had come in contact in
southern
Palestine with the inhabitants of
the settled countryside. The Biblical historian, A. Jopsen,
believes in the connection between the Isaac traditions and the
North and in support of this theory adduces
Amos 7:9 ("the high places of Isaac").
Albrecht Alt and Martin Noth hold that, "The figure of Isaac was
enhanced when the theme of promise, previously bound to the cults
of the 'God the Fathers' was incorporated into the Israelite creed
during the southern-Palestinian stage of the growth of the
Pentateuch tradition." According to Martin Noth,
at the Southern Palestinian stage of the growth of the Pentateuch
tradition, Isaac became established as one of the Biblical
patriarchs, but his traditions were receded in the favor of
Abraham.
Testament
The
Testament of Isaac is a pseudonymous
text which was most likely composed in Greek in Egypt
after
100 C.E. It is also dependent on the
Testament of Abraham. In this
testament, God sends the angel
Michael to Isaac in order to inform him
of his impending death. Isaac accepts God's decree but Jacob
resists. Isaac in his bed-chamber tells Jacob of the inevitability
of death. Isaac has a tour of
heaven and
hell shortly before his death in which God's
compassion to repentant sinners is emphasized. In this testament,
Isaac also talks with the crowds on the subjects of
priesthood,
asceticism,
and the moral life.
In art
The earliest Christian portrayal of Isaac is found in the Roman
catacomb frescoes. Excluding the fragments, Alison Moore Smith
classifies these artistic works in three categories:
"Abraham leads Isaac, bearing faggots, towards the
altar; or Isaac approaches with the bundle of sticks, Abraham
having preceded him to the place of offering ....
Abraham is upon a pedestal and Isaac stands near at
hand, both figures in orant attitude ....
Abraham is shown about to sacrifice Isaac while the
latter stands or kneels on the ground beside the
altar.
Sometimes Abraham grasps Isaac by the
hair.
Occasionally the ram is added to the scene and in the
later paintings the Hand of God emerges from above."
See also
Notes
References
External links
.jpg/180px-Fresco_Binding_of_Isaac_(Persian).jpg)
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