MadJ, There is no problem entering into Genesis 22 if we simply read the text exactly as it is in the Bible and probe the words Jehovah used.
'Take your son,' God said 'your only child Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah. There you shall offer him as a burnt offering, on a mountain I will point out to you.'
Alah/offering--yes. Olah/burnt offering--yes. Zebach/sacrifice--NO.
Mindmelda points out that while the Bible's words offer great insight to understanding the Bible, that being too literal can corrupt meaning just as surely as can ignorance of the Hebrew definitions. One might think two words seemingly related intranslation are interchangable, but a Hebrew reader might know these words are not at all the same. Hebrew words hold hidden keys to the cultural backgrounds in which they were first uttered, the basic root of a word revealing the perceptions men had of their physical world. And in their world when first men reached toward God, they did it with bloody hands, bloody minds and bloody words. They moved close to God through the death of an animal. Jehovah had hard going inserting His ideas in this world. "God is love" is a statement so simple that it make us angry that he couldn't teach it faster and better than he did. Some maintain that he never tried to teach it at all.
But if he wanted to teach it, he would have to reach us through the barrier of words that reflected our own dark thoughts. So how to communicate with us at all? He would have to establish rudimentary concepts. Hopefully a conversational thread with these basic ideas would take root, flourish and enlighten a small cadre of mankind, a "prepared people". Then he could send an individual to fully represent his thoughts to them. Even when Jesus the teacher arrived he was careful of using the emblems of old thought--old words like old wineskins could not hold the new meanings he brought without careful redefinition. So his parables and his own life as the Logos enlarged hearts, minds and words at the same time: Neighbor, love, peace, faith, forgiveness were infused with new meaning.
But there was a lot of history that went down before Jesus came. Jehovah had to start from scratch before the People of the Book even had The Book. Before anyone was having a conversation with God.
But a conversational thread did start with Abraham, the kind of back-and-forth that comes as two personalities try one another out, search one another's souls so to speak. How did it happen? We don't know. Did a word sound itself in Ur that Abraham could hear? Or was it a thought in Abraham's head that had to be parsed out afterward? Again, we don't know. Ultimately though, Abraham had to match God's thoughts, for better or worse, to his own vocabulary, using one of the Hebrew expressions then in currency. Though Abraham left Ur behind and many old pagan ways, still his words were framed by men that killed animals to make their gods happy. Even for the true God, this was then and has been a problem in understanding who he is. We know because today- humans invariably revert to a bloody tale where God told Abraham to kill his miracle child, Isaac.
A word from the past, from another culture, is a fragile a vessel. Even if a word perfectly describes its intended object or action at one particular instance it tends to change over time and place. It happens in our present time in the space of--less than a generation. Abraham's story and its spiritual significance had all but disappeared by Jesus day. But it is important to recognize that the words of the story were not foreign to the Jews; yet being "a child of Abraham" was just a brand name to Abraham's heirs. "Do the works of Abraham" Jesus told them. But words alone failed to change their hearts. Jesus' audience had no "ears" to hear whatAbraham's test really meant. "Do you know why you cannot take in what I say? It is because you do not understand my language." he tells his fellow Jews at John 8:43. But it wasn't time or language that separated Jesus 'words from those around him. Nothing but the desire to hear.
That said, how could the willig listener, Abraham, understand God ? How did God get through to Abraham? The only easy times were when the angel-men talked to Abraham, presumably in Hebrew. Even then Abraham found the messages hard to understand. At other times it was chancy at best. And he made a lot of mistakes. God had to bail him out on a few occasions because Abraham just couldn't get what God had in mind. But toward the end, the miraculous birth of Isaac provided hard evidence that Abraham, well, he wasn't just a crazy old man. He really had pretty much heard God right.
So what is it that occurs at Genesis 22 that gives us all a knot in our stomach? We are confronted with the cognitive dissonance that Abraham grappled with so long ago. It is well at this point to slow down in the story, to slow down and review the God's conversation from a vantage point that Abraham and Isaac didn't have and couldn't have: It was only in the very act of worship that the understanding comes. Only when the knife was poised did Abraham and Isaac learn what Jehovah had asked. And there was a ram in the thicket caught by its horns. And it was said "in the mountain of Jehovah it will be provided".
Jephthah's daughter at Judges 11, too, was a burnt offering. Yet her father never faced the quandary that Abraham and Isaac did when they walked toward Moriah's mountains with wood, fire and a burning question in their hearts. They knew how she would become "olah". God's conversation through Abraham and Isaac was showing some small progress.
The fact is that God did not want sacrifice then. The word for ritual slaughter could so easily been conveyed. Certainly Abraham didn't give the word zebach to the story. Do I think God played with Abraham? No, I don't. But I do think the challenge lies in allowing God to call us to an way unfamiliar and infinitely higher,knowing that doing so has a certain amount of risk. It was a risk when God employed a concept familiar to Abraham. But he needed a thought that implied an act equal to releasing his son entirely, as though to death, but one that could not besmirch his holiness, his unimpeachable loving-kindness. Abraham brought to the command his whole-hearted trust in God's loving-kindness and power. Their faith in one another was so well matched that it fused into a whole new element.
Ratcheting up an old word to this level God was going to be tricky. The word olah was the only candidate for the job. It had no blood on it. It had to do with smoke , ascent, going up , as an offering. Its meaning was as close to being purely spiritual as any word got in that bloody land. No body could afterward say that he had commanded what he truly abhorred, or that he had lied, or that he condoned child sacrifice.To insist otherwise we would have to confess that we prefer a cruel, capricious and unreliable God.
Isn't is apparent that God's test of Abraham could never have been anything but a beautiful moment for both of them? After Jesus had mirrored this act of olah by undergoing slaughter at the hands of sinners--but not God-- we see God's conversation bearing fruit in the once-murderous Paul: "Think of God's mercy, my brothers, and worship him, I beg you, in a way that is worthy of thinking beings, by offering your living bodies as a holy sacrifice, truly pleasing to God. Do not model yourselves on the behavior of the world around you, but let your behaviour change, modelled by your new mind. This is the only way to discover the will of God and know what is good, what it is that God wants, what is the perfect thing to do."
Amen
