Journal of the American Academy of Religion December 2004, Vol. 72, No. 4, pp. 821–861
doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfh081
© 2004 The American Academy of Religion
ARTICLES
Binding–Unbinding:
Divided Responses of Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam to the
“Sacrifice” of Abraham’s
Beloved Son
Yvonne Sherwood
Media treatments of religion and violence after 9/11 have tended to
polarize into two equal and opposite positions: the view that the attacks
represent the “hijack” of the “Abrahamic” religions which, properly
understood, are antithetical to violence, and the claim that violence and
religion are virtual synonyms—a view epitomized in the British journalist
Nick Cohen’s “Damn Them All.”1
Both positions share the belief that
Yvonne Sherwood is Senior Lecturer in Old Testament/Tanakh at the University of Glasgow,
Glasgow G12 8QQ, Scotland, UK.
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the invitation of the Netherlands School for Advanced
Studies in Theology and Religion, Second International Conference on Religion and Violence, Soesterberg,
20–22 January 2003. I thank Glenn Yocum, the JAAR reviewers, Catherine Keller, and Mona Siddiqui for
all their extremely insightful comments, which I have, wherever possible, tried to take into account.
1
The subtitle of Cohen’s article is “If blame is to be cast, then the world’s religions must take a
major share,” and the central illustration is Jacopo da Empoli’s “The Sacrifice of Isaac.” For a discussion
of the polarized responses to religion and the metaphor of “hijack,” see Castelli.
822 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
violence can be expelled to a putative outside: either outside religion or
outside progressive secularism as it frees itself from the ties of its religious
other, conceived of as an archaic site of submissiveness, passivity, and
heteronomy. This study problematizes these easy antitheses through a
close reading of tangled, ancient responses to the so-called sacrifice of
Abraham’s beloved son. The contemporary antitheses seem both inadequate
and naïve when compared to paradoxes of binding–unbinding in
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
TEXTUAL CRITICISM AFTER 9/11
The ethical expression for what Abraham did is that he was willing to
murder Isaac; the religious expression is that he was willing to sacrifice
Isaac, but in this anguish lies the contradiction that can indeed make
one sleepless.
—Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
THE VIOLENT RUPTURE THAT we know, by shorthand, as “9/11”
raises new possibilities, and responsibilities, for those who study sacred
texts and their afterlives—not least through the challenge of two new
“religious” texts discovered, not in leather cases or stone jars at Nag
Hammadi or En Gedi but in unchecked luggage at Logan airport and
in the wreckage of American Airlines flight 93. In their brief public
lifetimes these two documents have already gone through several versions,
translations, and recensions and are already gathering complex
textual histories to rival those of ancient papyri. The first document
(which exists in three versions) was first published as a four-page letter,
in Arabic, by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Friday, 28
September 2001, under the heading “Hijack letter found at three locations.”
(Having first, mistakenly, described the document as a “suicide
note,” the FBI cautiously offered no interpretation or translation, but
translations swiftly followed from The Observer, ABC News, and the
Los Angeles Times). However, an article published on the same day by
Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward described a five-page document
that he had been shown that began with a heretical basmallah,
“In the name of God, of myself and of my family,” and that was adorned
with various doodles—suggesting that a now missing page, never
published, was retracted after being briefly waved before the public eye.
Confusion was compounded by the existence of a second document
(often confused with the first, not least because of the FBI’s early misinterpretation
of the first document as a suicide note): a will, found in
Muhammad Atta’s luggage and including reference to “this action,”
Sherwood: Binding–Unbinding 823
though it was last updated on 11 April 1996. Published in translation by
the FBI as a document beginning “In the name of God all mighty Death
Certificate [sic],” it was first published by Der Spiegel on October 1, in a
German translation based on the FBI English translation, and was also
published on October 4 by ABC News.2
As is now well known, rather than evoking an explicitly political context—for
example, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank or the presence
of American military bases in Saudi Arabia—the first document
locates the “action” in the mythical environment of the “state-building”
period of Islam (622–632) and conceives of that action as a ghazwah, a
raid. As Makiya and Mneimneh put it, it scripts a “sacred drama” (2002a:
19) played out in the arena of Boeing 757s, where contemporary vocabularies
of “taxis,” “100%,” and “passports” mingle uneasily with a lexis of
paradise, ablutions, prayer, and jihad, and where the United States’
“equipment and gates and technology” are pointedly juxtaposed with a
rudimentary tool kit of “bag,” “cloth,” “knife,” “tools,” and “weapon.”
Seventh- and twenty-first-centuries, script and fact, uncannily collide as
the text considers what to do if passengers launch a “counterattack” (as
they did on American Airlines flight 93): “If God grants (manna) any one
of you a slaughter, a dhabaha, you should perform it as an offering on
behalf of your father and mother . . .” Dhabaha, a far more specific word
than qatala (“to kill”), refers to slaughter, the act of cleaving, slitting, or
ripping something open—as Makiya and Mneimneh put it, “one does
not slaughter with a gun, or a bomb, from afar” (2002a: 19). And the
objects of dhabaha are dehumanized as animals—a point chillingly highlighted
by the ABC translation of the passengers as “prey.”
For readers of Old Testament/Tanakh the animalization of human
beings and the detailed preparations of bag, cloth, knife, and tools are
more than vaguely reminiscent of the “sacrifice” of Isaac (note the eery
use of the verb cab as Abraham prepares not to “kill” but to “slaughter”
2
The FBI press release of the first document, in Arabic, is still available at the time of writing at
www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel01/letter.htm. Translations can be found at http://observer.guardian.
co.uk/international/story/0,6903,560773,00.html and in Makiya and Mneimneh 2002b: 319–327 and
Lincoln: 93–98. However, compare this widely published four-page version with Woodward’s piece
in the Washington Post where he quotes the heretical basmallah and describes how “The author
doodled on the paper, drawing a small, arrowhead-like sword. Two circles entwine the shaft which
also has serpentine swirls drawn onto it. The doodle also resembles a key.” (Lincoln cites Woodward
as implying a conventional basmallah, as well as the heretical one, and builds this into his
hypothetical first page, but I find no mention of this in Woodward’s text.) For a brief discussion of
the discrepancy between the FBI and Washington Post versions, see Whitaker. For the text of the will
or “death certificate,” see Der Spiegel 40/2001 “Im Namen Gottes, des Allmächtigen” (1 October 2001)
and http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/atta/resources/documents/will1.htm. The text of the will is no
longer available on the FBI website.
824 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Isaac [22.11] and the emphasis on tools and preparation: the belabored
saddling of the donkey, the cutting of the wood, and the carrying of the
rudimentary tools of “knife,” “wood,” and “fire” [Gen. 22.3, 6]). The
unsettling echo is driven home—home, that is, to Islam and Judaism and
Christianity—by the way in which the two al-Qaeda documents more
than hint at an allusion to the Abrahamic sacrifice in the Qur’an. Though
used in colloquial street Arabic, the verb dhabaha (used of the terrorists’
justified “slaughter” of resisting passengers) arguably also refers back to
Ibrahim’s near-sacrifice of the one popularly known in Islam as the
dhabih allah, the “intended sacrifice of God” (Makiya and Mneimneh
2002b; Ruthven: 37). Though the status of the allusion is debatable, a
reference to the Abrahamic “sacrifice” as the epitome of Islam, aslama,
surrender, would certainly not be out of place in a document in which
the “first” (more likely second) page begins with an exhortation to
“present [to God] our sacrifices and obedience” (ABC translation) or to
undertake “actions that make us closer to God and actions of obedience”
(Makiya and Mneimneh’s translation in 2002b: 320). And the reference
back to this primal scene of sacrifice is made explicit in the second document—Atta’s
will. Here, just before the author embarks on long and
detailed instructions of what is to happen to his corpse (gloves are to be
worn when touching the genitalia; pregnant women or other unclean
people are to have no contact with him; women are not to go to the grave
either during the funeral or afterward), he exhorts his family and everyone
who reads this, in his memory, to “do what Ibrahim (a prophet) told
his son to do, to die as a good Muslim.”
This particularly deviant citation and mutation of the “Abrahamic”
seems to urge a new kind of analysis from those who, as I do, study
Judaism, Christianity, or Islam primarily through their texts. It signals
a need to sacrifice traditional disciplinary focus (around one particular
author or time frame) for a larger macro-interpretation across the Jewish,
Christian, and Islamic, and also a need to move away from a certain reification
of the word alone and its particular Protestant and Lutheran heritage
(cf. Asad: 287). Indeed, there could be no starker illustration of the
need to study sacred texts within a wider web of structures, institutions,
and performances than Muhammad Atta’s instructions that the Qur’an
be spoken into cupped hands, then rubbed into the bag, tools, knife,
and bodies of the perpetrators (Lincoln: 9). These abhorrent declensions
of the Abrahamic grammars point to a need for textual scholars to push
beyond the quest for ever more precise presentations of the text’s philology,
sources, historical context, and literary qualities, toward questions of
responsibility, critique, and, above all, the complex, always imperfectly
resolved, negotiations between religion and ethics. For the minutiae,
Sherwood: Binding–Unbinding 825
nuance, and relative freedom of academic work can and must also be
used to explore how—in a place beneath the necessary public pragmatism
of the Sunni Cairo Statement and its firm separation of Islam and
killing—lies the specter of religious violence that cannot simply be exorcised
into a renegade “Islamism” outside “Islam” proper any more than
it can legitimately be expelled into a scapegoat body of militant Islam
outside the Judeo-Christian West.3
This study is a modest attempt to suggest what it might mean to read
the ancient texts in ways that matter. It is an attempt to show how the
ancient sources open up timely questions about wounds between the
religions and between ethics and religion, and also how they resonate,
unexpectedly, with contemporary themes of “missing persons,” “collateral
damage,” and sacrifice as productivity versus sacrifice as waste.
THREE SIBLINGS, EACH THE “ONLY”:
ISAAC-SLASH-ISHMAEL-SLASH-JESUS
A particularly bland response to 9/11 was that of Tony Blair, who, in
rather paternalistic political-e(a)se, affirmed that “Jews, Christians and
Muslims are all children of Abraham” and that “This is the moment to
bring the faiths closer together in the understanding of our common
value and heritage.” In contrast, any close reading of Genesis 22 and Sura 37
(99–113) and the genealogical and interpretative lines that extend from
them would have to say that far from offering a tranquil scene of hospitality
played out beneath the generous canopy of the Abrahamic, these
narratives stage conflicts or cuts of identity along the lines of Isaac/
Ishmael/Jesus. (These dividing lines should be vocalized not as the gentle
British “stroke” but as the North-American “slash”: “Isaac slash Ishmael
slash Jesus.”4
)
3
The Sunni Cairo Statement, issued in November 2001 by the Islamic Research Council at al Ahzar
in Cairo, maintained that Islam was based on “ethical norms” that “forbid the killing of noncombatants”—a
crucial political intervention, though one that imperfectly represented the
relationship between religion and ethics in Islam (and also Judaism and Christianity; for the
potential for what could be called “domestic violence” on the “home” ground of the so-called JudeoChristian
is also the issue here). For samples of the numerous displacements of the specter of
religious violence onto Islam (alone), see, for example, Kenneth Adelman’s description of “Islam as a
militaristic, not a peaceful religion” and his declaration that its founder was a “warrior and not a
peace advocate like Jesus” and Eliot Cohen’s declaration that “militant Islam” was the new enemy of
the United States (as cited in Fisk). For the separation of Islamic and Islamist, see Ruthven and the
Sunni Cairo Statement above. The distilling out of the Islamist from the Islamic is, of course,
intimately related to the larger move that expels the violent Islamic from the Jewish and the
Christian.
4
This observation on the violent “slash” versus the more pacifying “stroke” is borrowed from
Moore: 377.
826 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
The biblical “sacrifice” of Isaac fits perfectly into that biblical book of
thwarted, tortured Geneses, where, as Regina Schwartz has noted, monotheism
is tied up with scarcity (blessing only for the one) and where
the founding myths are not those of autochthony but of sibling rivalry,
filial struggle, belatedness, and inverted primogeniture (often haunted
by a residual guilt over the one who has been dispossessed). It effects the
legitimation of the second true son, Isaac, now the “one” and “only”
(Gen. 22.2) over and above the first son Ishmael, who has just been
expelled, with his Egyptian slave-mother, Hagar, into the desert. As Fethi
Benslama argues, the Egyptian woman, Hagar, who conceives her “wildass”
or animal son through natural means (sexual intercourse with his
father), and her son seem to exist to be a foil to the supernatural promise
child, conceived by postmenopausal, divinely “visited” Sarah (Gen.
21.1). Their demotion to the realm of the desert and the animal serves to
highlight the elevation of the promise child: as they are of the creaturely,
the natural, the animal, the ground, so he is of the miracle, the
sky, the mountaintop, the stars (Benslama: 132).5
But Ishmael and
Hagar are also figures of residual guilt and anxiety. There is something
deeply counterproductive about the way in which Genesis 22 mimics
and recalls Genesis 21 and (as Phyllis Trible and others have noted)
something strange about the way in which the Egyptian flight from the
oppressive house of Israel seems to take the form of a proleptic reverse
Exodus.
The opening gambit of the biblical narrative, “Take your son, your
only son, whom you love/your favored one,” seems to make of Ishmael a
missing person and raises the question whether Ishmael is, like so many
missing persons, dead or, at the very least, dead in effect. But then the biblical
text, as it sometimes does, draws attention to this act of repression (or
supersession) by beginning Genesis 22 with the words “After these things”
(22.1) as if deliberately to bring Genesis 21 to mind, and then (guiltily?)
tells the story of the almost-death of Isaac in a way that seems to mimic
the vocabulary and structure of the story of the almost-death of Ishmael.
God’s command “Take your son, your only son, the one you love” is, we
could say, anxiously overqualified, and the fifth-century midrash Genesis
Rabbah (c. 400–450 C.E.) exploits this anxiety by opening up all the old
5
Benslama seems to go a little too far in identifying Isaac as the child born of “spirit” (132) and
generally seems to assume too much closeness between Judaism and Christianity as opposed to
Islam. Compare Levenson’s warning that one needs to describe the difference between Ishmael and
Isaac in Genesis’s own terms without retrojecting Pauline idioms of the replacement of “birth” with
“faith” and the “natural” with “spirit.” Levenson carefully defines Isaac as “the son [or one] whose
very existence from the moment of the angelic annunciation of his impending birth, has run counter
to the naturalness of familial life” (70, 126; my italics).
Sherwood: Binding–Unbinding 827
wounds of identity6
in the biblical text. The midrash imagines Abraham
punctuating and querying God’s strangely garrulous command as
follows:
God: Take your son
Abraham: I have two sons
God: Your only one
Abraham: This one is the only son to his mother and this one is the only
son to his mother
God: The one you love
Abraham: I love them both
God: Isaac. (Genesis Rabbah 55.7; cf. B.Sanhedrin 89b)7
The exchange is remarkable, making it clear that God is unable to
make a clear distinction between the sons from any solid conceptual
ground whatsoever and can only close the discussion by pronouncing
what alone is unique and proper to Isaac, what alone can affirm the primacy
of Isaac: his name. Genesis Rabbah as good as affirms that only the
name and the choice of God can make any difference between the only
(the one) and the not-only (the other) prior to the sacrifice, but at the
same time8
it argues that the priority of Isaac is established by the fact of
the sacrifice, so that Isaac is authentically first, and not second, when he
comes back down from Mount Moriah. According to the Midrash the
sacrifice is preceded by, and contextualized within, a competition between
Ishmael and Isaac over which son is the most loving and beloved, interpreted
in terms of who is the most circumcised or who bears the deepest
love-scar for God:
Isaac and Ishmael were engaged in a controversy: the latter argued,
“I am more beloved than you, because I was circumcised at the age of
thirteen” while the other retorted “I am more beloved than you because
I was circumcised at eight days.” Ishmael said to him: “I am more
6
This apt phrase is taken from Brett: 73.
7
This same conversation creeps through midrash into early Islamic interpretation in an
abbreviated form. One early source attributed to Uthman Ibn Hadir (d.249/823) reports: “Abraham
said to his Lord ‘Which of my two sons am I to sacrifice?’ And his Lord revealed ‘The one most loved
by you (ahabbu-huma ilay-ka)’ ” (cit. and trans. in Calder: 381).
8
As Jacques Derrida has pointed out, we use the phrase “at the same time” to mark a disjunction
and a conjunction: “it is like this, but at the same [i.e., different] time, it is different.” This divided
phrase perfectly expresses the midrash’s division between the similarity and (at the same time)
difference between Ishmael and Isaac, a division based on the difference in time between the “before”
and “after” of the sacrifice. For Derrida’s discussion of “at the same time,” see 2002: 93. For his
fascinating response to this particular midrash, which he reads as “the beginning of secularization:
the transition from heteronomy to autonomy,” see Derrida 2004.
828 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
beloved because I could have protested, and yet I did not.” At that
moment Isaac exclaimed “O that God would appear to me and bid me
cut off my limbs then I would not refuse!” God said, “Even if I bid you
to sacrifice yourself, you will not refuse.”
Another version: And it came to pass after these things when Isaac and
Ishmael quarreled. Ishmael said, “I am the one who is most appropriate
to inherit from my father since I am his first-born.” Isaac said “I am
more appropriate because I am the son of his wife Sarah while you are
the son of Hagar, my mother’s maid.” Ishmael said to him: “I am more
beloved than you, since I was circumcised at the age of thirteen, but you
were circumcised as a baby and could not refuse.” Isaac retorted: “All
that you did was to lend to the Holy One, Blessed be He, three drops of
blood. But I am now thirty-seven years old yet if God desired of me that
I be slaughtered, I would not refuse.” (Genesis Rabbah 55.4)9
By reading the sacrifice as, in effect, a hypercircumcision, the midrash
affirms the primacy of Isaac and constructs Jewish identity around descent
from Isaac, the true, most wounded son. Similarly, but this time at the
expense of the “Jew,” the New Covenant/Testament constructs Christian
identity around descent, by faith, from the Christ who is both Isaac and
the lamb, and achieves what could be called the Ishmaelization of the
Jews. In the striking typology10
of Galatians 4.21–4.31, Paul cuts antithetical
slashes between the children of the flesh and the children of the
promise, slave and free, Mount Sinai and Mount Golgotha, so effectively
making a new map of the terrain of salvation in which Golgotha is either
overlaid on Mount Moriah or conceived of as part of the same mountain
range (Sinai now being a long way off, in a different mountain range, in
the region of “Law/Works” rather than “Promise/Faith”). Reading the
collective noun “seed” (zera; spermatos) in Gen. 13.16 and Gen. 17.8 as a
deliberate, emphatic singular, Paul claims that this explicitly refers to
Christ, the only, and thus makes it clear that the Abrahamic promise is
being universalized, paradoxically, by being focused through a single
christological channel (Gal. 3.13–3.16).11
As H. Richard Niebuhr says, “to be a self is to have a God, to have a
God is to have a history . . . and to have one God is to have one history”
9
This translation is taken from Freedman and Simon: 484–485. I have italicized their “latter” and
“other” as it seems (perhaps more than accidentally) to suggest that, from the vantage point of each
son, each other is “latter” and “other,” and each other is secondary. This is less to the fore in the
terser Hebrew original where each son is referred to simply as “this one,” “zeh.”
10
As Mark C. Taylor points out, “typology” derives from tupos, related to tupto “to strike,” and
signifies an image/model and the mark or trace left by a blow or the application of pressure, like the
mark of the nails in Jesus’ hands (56).
11
For a more detailed discussion of the implications of this transition, see Levenson: 210–213.
Sherwood: Binding–Unbinding 829
(59), but when there is more than one self and more than one monotheism,
then history, theology, and geography must split—a split staged,
most self-consciously, in the tangled lines of (af)filiation to Abraham’s
most beloved son. This is not to say that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
are Abrahamic in any simplistic sense or that labeling these three
religions “Abrahamic” might be any more helpful than labeling them as
“monotheistic”:12
each comes after Abraham but traces itself back to
Abraham, the autodidact with monotheism welling up inside him before
Sinai, before Jesus, before Muhammad, and before Torah, Qur’an, and
Christian Bibles, but each is also so-much-more-than-Abrahamic.
Judaism is also Mosaic and Davidic and Rabbinic, Muhammad repeats
and affirms some of the actions of Ibrahim but takes the center of the
new religion elsewhere (both chronologically and geographically), and in
Christianity Jesus, in the line of Abraham, is also more and better than
Abraham (Hebrews 7) and also prior to father Abraham because before
Abraham son-Jesus was, or “is” (John 8.58).
Yet even as they exceed Abraham the three religions are also involved
in a struggle to possess this pure origin, or father, from whom everything
and everyone is descended and to make the man from Ur the ur-man of
their own religion. In the battle of the competing narratives time itself is
reinvented: Jesus “is” prior to Abraham, and Christian theology makes of
Jewish-Ishmael a usurped elder, a first that now comes second. And then
(in a revolution that contests the very sequence implied by this “then”)
Islam, the old-new, first-last religion, relocates Judaism and Christianity
somewhere between its own culmination in the revelation to Muhammad,
the last prophet, and its own beginning in Abraham, the hanif. These
reconceptions of time are absolutely impervious to contextual historical
studies that have themselves been skewed by Orientalizing structures of
geography and chronology, locating the center, source, and culmination
“here” in the richly overspilling “West.” Scholars have habitually traced
interpretative lines that assume that the putative hybrid, the “JudeoChristian,”
is superior to Islam, that the Bible and post-biblical literatures
are prior to the always derivative Qur’an, and that the story-trade
between Jews, Christians, and Muslims only ever went in one direction,
to the East from a (qualifiedly Eastern) proto-West.
Sura 37 of the Qur’an famously does not name the dhabih allah or
“intended sacrifice of God,” referring to him simply as the “gentle son.”
But though early Islamic sources argue, in about equal proportions, for
12
Compare Martin Jaffee’s questions about “monotheism” and whether “there are other, more
salient ways of dividing the turf of religion than counting divinities” (754).
830 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Isaac and Ishmael as the dhabih, by around the tenth century this twoness
had consolidated into a oneness and the Islamic site of the story had
moved south from Jerusalem to the Hijaz.13
In the early centuries of Islam there was a strong geographical dimension
to the debate over the identity of the son, which in turn was tied to
the question of Islam’s distinctiveness and its relation to Judaism and
Christianity: it was generally (though not exclusively) assumed that
scholars must adjudicate between an Isaac-and-Syria tradition, on the
one hand, and a Mecca-Ishmael tradition, on the other. As Ishmael came
to the fore as the dhabih, Islamic scholars increasingly disparaged the
alternative view, now increasingly marked as distinctively “Jewish” (and
also “Persian”). Al-Tha’labi (d.427/1036) reported that “the Jews claim
that it was Isaac, but the Jews lie” (Ara’is al-Majalis, cit. and trans. in
Firestone: 137),14
and a popular story, found in no less than eight
sources, told how a Jewish scholar who had converted to Islam had
confessed to the Ummayad Caliph Umar that the Jews had known all
along that the intended was really Ishmael but had purposefully denied
that fact. According to this “confession,” the Jews had deliberately changed
the story because they “envied the Arab community because their father
was the one commanded to be sacrificed, and because he was the one who
was ascribed for merit for his steadfastness” and had falsely inserted Isaac
into the text in order to redirect the flow of divine blessing and merit
toward the Jews (al-Tabari, Commentary 23.84–23.85, History 299; alThalabi
92; al-Zamakhshari 3.350; al-Tabarsi 23.75; Ibn Kathir,
Commentary 4.18, History 235–236; Mujir-al-Din 140–141, cit. and trans.
by Firestone: 143; my italics). Ibn Kathir (d.774/1373) claimed to find the
evidence for this substitution in the biblical text, which he read closely,
with an eye to its wounds, lacunae, and contradictions. He argued that one
could clearly see how the Jews had “dishonestly and slanderously forced Isaac
in” because the reading “Isaac” actually “contradicts their own book”—
indeed, they could only have read it thus by squeezing from the words
“your only son” the sense that “you have no other than he” (Imad al-Din
13
In the seventh and eighth centuries Islam was more open to Biblicist traditions than it became in
the ninth and tenth, when a distinct intellectual and theological identity was consolidated under the
Abbasid Caliphate (750/132-1258/656). According to Reuven Firestone the battle between Isaac and
Ishmael was probably won by Ishmael even before the time of al-Tabari (d.310/923), although the
Isaac tradition survives because it is grounded in the first two centuries of Islam. For discussion, see
Firestone: 320–321.
14
I do not want to create any illusion of having read the Arabic texts in the original. I have relied
entirely on translations by Islamicists (primarily Firestone and Calder) and, where possible, comparisons
between them. My study has been circumscribed by the range of texts available in English
translation.
Sherwood: Binding–Unbinding 831
Isma’il b. Umar ibn Kathir, Tafsir al-Qur’an al-Azim 4.14, cit. and trans.
by Firestone: 139).
As early Christianity Ishmaelizes the Jews and as Islam deflects the
true line away from Isaac toward Ishmael, so early Judaism condemns
impostor Muslim and Christian sons who inauthentically trace their ancestry
back through the true, almost sacrificed son. Whereas pre-Islamic Midrash
Rabbah is ambiguous about the relationship between Ishmael and Isaac
(making the similarity explicit and the differences slight), the ninth-century
Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer is more zealous about effecting the disinheritance
of Ishmael and his sons. This midrash, written in the context of the
expanding Muslim empire,15
imagines a conversation between Eliezer and
Ishmael, in which a self-interested Ishmael expresses his eagerness to
possess the inheritance that will now be his (now that Abraham is slaying
his rival up on the mountain) and imagines Eliezer castigating him (in a
speech obviously designed to elicit the pleasure and schadenfreude of the
Islam-dominated Jewish community): “You will not inherit . . . He has
already driven you out like a woman divorced from her husband, and has
sent you away to the wilderness” (Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer 31; my italics). The
text, demoting Ishmael-as-Islam and, to a lesser extent, Eliezer-as-Christianity,
acts, as Burton Vizgotzky suggests, as an antidote for the impotence of
the Jews, over and against the larger Empires struggling for control of the
Mediterranean basin, while also celebrating Isaac as the most authentic
son as the forerunner of Rabbinic Judaism (11).
What in the early texts appear to be fresh, still smarting, cuts of identity
are now just scars, no longer enflamed by debate: for Jews the son
is Isaac, for Muslims he is Ishmael, and for Christians he is both Isaac and
the Isaac-Christ. Yet even within the academy, western, Christian-authored
dictionaries and encyclopedias of Islam have tended to overemphasize
contemporary Islamic identification of the son as Isaac (now all but nonexistent)
and to disingenuously suggest that the question of the identity
of the almost-dead son is, for Muslims, still alive. The 1927 Encyclopaedia
of Islam includes the account of the sacrifice under the heading “Is-hak”
and not “Isma’il” (Houtsma et al.: 4. 532; compare the 1978 revised edition,
which discusses the sacrifice under both names [van Donzel et al.:
4.109–4.110 and 184–185]), whereas Edward Westermarck’s suspiciously
titled Pagan Survivals in Muhamedan [sic] Civilization reports that the
Moroccan Muslims generally believe Isaac to have been the dhabih (62).
15
The Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer gives the name of the wives of Ishmael as Fatima and Ayesha and
refers to the land reforms of Mu’awiya, to the caliphate of the sons of Harun al-Rashid, and to
the Muslim conquest of Rome. There are also several allusions to Islam as the “fourth kingdom,”
destined to persecute the chosen people prior to the dawn of the messianic kingdom (see Baron: 163).
832 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
The Christian-authored A Dictionary of Islam claims that because 11.74
says, “we told her that she would give birth to Isaac,” and then 37.99
reports, “we gave him news of a gentle son,” “there can be no doubt in
any candid mind that, as far as the Qur’an in concerned, Isaac and not
Ishmael is intended” (Hughes: 219). (This appeal to all candid minds
conveniently ignores the fact that, even if one were to accept that it were
legitimate to interpret the Qur’an chronologically, the birth of Isaac also
comes after the “sacrifice,” if strict chronology is to be observed.16
)
The interpretative slashes between Ishmael/Isaac/Jesus are revealing,
cutting as they do along the distinction between Abraham as the special
father of the Synagogue, the Church, and the Umma and Abraham as the
father of generally dispersed Abrahamic seed. Abraham can no more
sacrifice both sons than any one of the monotheisms can fully relinquish
the precious status of the only-one-ness. The impossibility of the true
blood- or faith-line—flowing equally through both branches/sons—
points to the vexed relationships of all the monotheisms to questions of
“particularism” and “universalism”: the wide-ranging discussions in
Judaism on the relations between the chosen and the others; Christianity’s
reach toward a “democratizing,” universalizing vision that stumbles over
the limit of the non- and never-to-be Christian other (of whom the Jew,
as insider-outsider, is the iconic representative); and Islam’s assertions of
the commonality of the Abrahamic monotheisms (Sura 3.64) but also of
a definition of Islam that is more supersessionist and exclusivist (e.g.,
Sura 3.19; 3.85; 61.9). Now, more than ever, it seems crucial to emphasize
the struggle between universality and particularity that takes place
within all three “Abrahamic” religions—not least to counter prevalent
mythologies of a Christian universalism allied with progressive, secular
democracy over and against Jewish or Islamic tendencies toward “theocracy”
and “xenophobia” (this not to deny the need for a careful analysis
of relations between religion, democracy, and theocracy but rather to
confront the deep mythologies that often dictate a reflex response). Far
from being a simplistic canopy, the Abrahamic family tree is a tangled
thicket, sprawling, impossibly overdetermined. And if we go back to
the Bible—where we find, in addition to the problematic two, six more
named Abrahamic sons (Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak, and
Shuah, sons of Keturah, see Genesis 25), not to mention the sons of
Abraham’s concubines, to whom he “gives gifts” (Gen. 25.6)—we see
that, in truth, the Abrahamic family, and so the truth, is overdetermined
from the start.
16
Cf. the brief discussion in Combs-Schilling: 320–321. Note the emphatic point that no
Moroccan Muslim interviewed ever expressed the view that Isaac was the dhabih.
Sherwood: Binding–Unbinding 833
THE HIGHEST, HOLIEST OF STORIES AND GOOD
(PRODUCTIVE) WOUNDS
As if to demonstrate the importance and centrality of the sacrifice
narrative—which the biblical version locates, instructively, on a mountaintop—the
story gravitates toward the highest, holiest days in the
liturgical calendars and converges on the geographical and ritual centers
of the three religions of the book. Christianity embraces it, as it were,
with a passion, tying it to the gift of the blood and body of God’s beloved,
his agapetos, and the bound lamb (agnus dei) who is symbolically a composite
of the paschal lamb and the Isaac (and ram) of Mount Moriah.17
Liturgically and iconographically, the story clusters around Good Friday
and the celebration of the Eucharist or Lord’s Supper: as in the sixthcentury
altarpiece at Ravenna (figure 1), when the Eucharist is offered,
the son-offering Abraham frequently stands nearby.
As the early Christian fathers took the wood from Isaac’s back and
made it into a cross, and took the thicket and made from it a crown of
thorns, so Jewish tradition takes the basic material of the narrative and
redistributes it around its central symbols, performances, and texts.
According to tradition the ashes and wood of the Abrahamic altar
formed the basis of the altar in the Solomonic temple, at the geographical
height, and heart that is the Holy of Holies, on the temple mount in
Jerusalem (see, e.g., 2 Chron. 3.1 and Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer 31).18
Liturgically,
the ram offered on Mount Moriah was linked to the two daily lamb
offerings in the temple and hence, in the shift from physical offerings to
sacrifices of the lips, to their substitution by the two daily offerings of the
Shemoneh esreh or Amidah, the central pillar of Jewish prayer. Not only
does the akedah thus inhabit the deep history of the liturgy, but it surfaces,
overtly and explicitly, on Rosh Hashanah—the head of the year
and the beginning of the High Holy Days—where the redemptive,
memorial, and intercessory power of Abraham and Isaac’s self-offering is
evoked in the blast of the ram’s horn, the shofar.19
In Islam the sacrifice
of Ibrahim is imprinted on the landscape and ritual performances of the
17
The influential Septuagint translation of Hebrew yahid, the favored one (Gen. 22.2, 12, 16), into
agapetos (the beloved son) can be traced through Mark 1.11 (Matt. 3.17, Luke 3.22), 2 Pet 1.17, and
John 3.16 (cf. Rom. 8.32). Jesus is paschal lamb in 1 Cor. 5.7, the last supper in the synoptics and the
crucifixion in John. As Jon Levenson argues, the Johannine crucifixion scene seems to fuse the
paschal and the yahid through allusions to Exod. 12.46 and Zech. 12.10. See Levenson: 206–207.
18
For a more detailed discussion of how Judaism uses and redistributes the basic word material of
the Akedah, see Sherwood 2004.
19
For the explicit relationship between the daily offering of lambs in the temple to the binding of
Isaac, see Leviticus Rabbah 2.11. For the redemptive power of the binding evoked through the blast of
the shofar on Rosh Hashanah see, for example Targum Neofiti to Lev. 22.27, B. Rosh Hashanah 16a.
834 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Hajj and so built into the foundations of one of the pillars of Islam. The
running ritual (al-sa’i) between Safa and Marwa evokes Hagar’s search
for water in the desert; the act of throwing stones at the three pillars at
Mina recalls Ibrahim and Ishmael’s defeat of Satan as he tried to thwart
the sacrifice; Ibrahim’s dramatic act of obedience is remembered by the
Hajjis as they meditate on the plains of Arafat; some traditions also say
that the ram’s horn was hung on the Ka’ba; and the sacrifice is commemorated
with the slaughter of a goat or ram on Id al-Kabir (the “Greater
Festival”) or the Great Bairam or Id al-adha (the “Sacrificial Feast”) that
lasts for three days from the tenth day of the Hajj.
Figure 1. Abraham offering Isaac on the right hand side of the eucharistic altar (on
the left hand side Abel offers a lamb and Melchizedek presides). Ravenna, S. Apollinare
i Classe, sixth century. Photograph Alastair Hunter.
Sherwood: Binding–Unbinding 835
The three religions also share the sense that, theologically, this “sacrificial”
moment serves as a kind of Waterloo, Midway, or El-Alamein in
the showdown between Good (God) and its Opponents: as Christianity
locates the narrative, typologically, at the heart of the drama of salvation,
so, as if to emphasize the absolute preciousness of what is achieved,
Islamic tafarsir20
and Jewish midrashim imagine the sacrifice vigorously
opposed by iblis/the devil/Satan/mastema/al-shaytan.21
An Islamic tradition
authenticated by Ka’b al Akbar depicts al-shaytan as seeing this text
as his greatest crisis and greatest opportunity and vowing, “If I do not
beguile the family of Abraham now, I will never beguile them” (Firestone:
111; my italics).22
Jewish and Islamic traditions embroider the biblical and
Qur’anic narrative with details of how the devil turns himself into a river
and almost drowns Abraham; throws stones at Isaac in an attempt to
make him ritually unfit; whispers fiendishly to Sarah and Isaac or Hagar
and Ishmael that the son is not actually going on an errand or going out
to gather firewood, as Abraham has told them; and at the crucial, climatic
moment, attempts to knock the knife out of the patriarch’s hand (see,
e.g., Midrash Aggadah, Vayera 51; Midrash Tanhuma, Vayera 81; al-Tha’labi,
Ara’is al-Majalis 94–95; Ibn Kathir 4.15; al-Tabari, Commentary 23.82
and History 292–294; Islamic sources cit. and trans. in Firestone: 111).
The ubiquity of Satan, particularly in Judaism where he is usually
only a minor player, testifies to the absolute importance of what is
demonstrated in the sacrifice—namely, the creative, productive power of
surrender to God, expressed with different inflections in the distinctive
monotheistic vocabularies. In the kenosis of the Christ, Jesus submits
even unto death on a cross (Phil 2.8), and that humbling is productive of
a whole world of descendants as the single Abrahamic seed falls to the
ground and dies (Gal. 3.13–3.16; John 12.24). Similar, though not identical,
declensions in Judaism are suggested by a medieval Machzor for Rosh
Hashanah that imagines the sacrifice taking place beneath the canopy of
the final k d of “king”: def (“melek”)—that is beneath, and as a supreme
illustration of, God’s kingship (figure 2); by the comment of Saadia Gaon
20
Tafsir (plural tafarsir) is Islamic textual commentary, as opposed to ta’rikh, history, and qisas
al-anbiya (“tales of the prophets”). It is akin to Jewish midrash (Jewish textual commentary that
often takes the form of narrative). As midrash comes from the root d-r-s, “to seek,” so tafsir comes
from the root f-s-r, “to reveal.”
21
In Judaism, in a tradition that goes as far back as the book of Jubilees (second century B.C.E.),
the sacrifice of Isaac is the culmination of the so-called trials of Abraham. The Qur’an also reports
the trials of Abraham (2.124) but rarely makes a connection between the sacrifice and the trials (see
Firestone: 108).
22
For the associated sense that this moment is the tradition’s greatest point of weakness—and
hence Satan’s greatest opportunity—see below.
836 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
(882–942) that the shofar is blown to “remind us of Isaac who offered his
life to Heaven and to exhort us to offer up our lives to heaven” (39); and
by Sifre Deuteronomy’s statement that “Isaac, who bound himself upon
the altar” becomes the iconic example of loving God with all your soul,
according to the injunction at the heart of the shema (Sifre Deuteronomy
32 on Deut. 6.5). Relatedly, in Islam, by surrendering (aslama), Ibrahim
and Ishmael demonstrate the fundamental principle of Islam (“surrender”);
moreover, as the halim, the son is the “patient and forbearing”
one, an epithet also applied to Abraham (cf. 9.114 and 11.75) and even,
in a different sense, to Allah (Caspi and Cohen: 100). With his forehead
(jabin) to the ground—the posture explicitly given to him in the
Qur’an—the gentle son takes up the typical posture assumed by a Muslim
at salat and becomes the perfect example of the absolute emptying of
the self for Sufis like Ibn ‘Arabi.
Judaism and Christianity add a further declension of the scene of submission
that is virtually absent in Islamic grammar. For a brief moment
that too-easily-invoked hybrid, the “Judeo-Christian,” actually seems to
come into existence, as the two religions cross (surprisingly enough)
Figure 2. The sacrifice taking place beneath the canopy of the final d of “king”: def Klm.
Ms. Reggio 1, folio 159v. Machzor, Germany, first half of fourteenth century. Copyright
Bodleian Library, Oxford.
Sherwood: Binding–Unbinding 837
around the figure of the cross and read the story in a similar vein by linking
it to the same vein of wonder-working, atoning blood. In Christianity the
lamb and the son become one; the second, greater Isaac really dies and rises
again, and, in a logic embraced more openly in some epochs and theologies
than others, the scars (stigmata) are productive, for new life grows
from those scars (figure 3).23
Curiously, Jewish Isaac bears an uncanny
resemblance to Christian Jesus, and just as Christian typology makes a
cross from the wood on Jesus-Isaac’s back, so some midrashim imagine
Isaac carrying his cross (Genesis Rabbah 56.3; Pesikta Rabbati 31; Midrash
Sekhel Tov 61). To intensify the sense of a tangled, “Judeo-Christian”
thicket of interpretation, some medieval midrashim suggest that the ram
was also called Isaac, so making it possible for “Isaac” to die, or perhaps to
die, or for “Isaac” to die and, at the same time, for “Isaac” to be spared
(Midrash ha-Gadol on Gen. 22.13; “Midrash Composed Under the Holy
Spirit” in Mann: 67). Turning dying “Isaac,” for a brief moment, definitively
into the son, the Rosh Hashanah liturgy proclaims that God “deals
with his children in accordance to the attribute of Mercy” when he sees
heaped on top of the altar the “ashes of Father Isaac,” whereas other
midrashim delicately maintain the paradox by claiming that Isaac left “a
quarter [a log] of his blood upon the altar” (a log being, undecideably, all
the blood a person has and also just a quarter), so that Isaac is, at the very
least, scarred, burnt a little bit, or subject to a wound as mini-death.24
This delicately balanced “death of Isaac” is productive, producing sustained
life through divine forgiveness (because of the Akedah, reports of
Israel’s sin will go in one of God’s ears and out the other; see Genesis
Rabbah 56.3 and Midrash ha-Gadol 353) and also the first instance, and
sometimes even the basis, of resurrection, for “by the merit [or blood/
ash] of Isaac who offered himself upon the altar, the Holy One Blessed
be He will in future resurrect the dead” (Pesikta de Rav Kahana, 32,
200a; cf. Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer 31). It seems that both Judaism and Christianity
take that biblical burst of star-sons, that superlative promise of so
much more life in Genesis 22.17, and convert it into what it always seems
23
It would be too simplistic to consign this understanding to a particular denomination (most
obviously, Catholicism) or to a particular epoch (the medieval European). The fecund productivity
of the blood of Christ flows through different theologies, past and present, in complicated ways, that
can only be reductively polarized between “Protestantism” and “Catholicism” as homogeneous
macroentities.
24
For the ashes of Isaac, see “Traditional supplication for the one who sounds the shofar” Vienna
Machzor (ed. by Heidenheim, 1827), cit. in Spiegel: 38; Tanhuma Vayikra 23; and Midrash Rabbah
on Lev. 26.42. Cf. Ta’an 2.1 and b.Berkakhot 62b, where ashes are placed on the head as a “reminder
of the ashes of Isaac.” For Isaac’s blood, see Midrash ha-Gadol 353. The definition of a “log” comes
from B.Sotah 5a.
838 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Figure 3. Christ with Ears of Wheat and Grape Vine. From the studio of Fritz Herlin,
German artist of the early Swabian School, 1469. Hirsch, Nördlingen.
Sherwood: Binding–Unbinding 839
to be dreaming of being—that is, a promise and prooftext of the resurrection,
more life in the most superlative and everlasting sense.
Islam, in contrast, relates the sacrifice to resurrection only insofar as
it locates the narrative in a Sura about the righteous who will obtain
paradise. It emphatically does not let the beloved die, even in a partial,
momentary way, and makes hardly anything of the sacrificial logic
whereby life is made from, and is dependent on, the redemptive power of
death. In fact, searching through translations of Islamic tafarsir on Sura
37, I can only find two related early traditions that bring the role of the
dhabih anywhere close to that of Christian Jesus and certain Jewish
Isaacs. Two slightly different early traditions tell how Allah granted Isaac
a wish in acknowledgement of the fact that, as Reuven Firestone puts it,
in his own gloss, “the sacrifice ordeal was unfair to its intended victim
and that [Isaac] was therefore deserving of recompense, or that Isaac’s
merit was so great for having agreed wholeheartedly to the act that he was
deserving of reward” (133). According to these two traditions Isaac used
his wish either to request that Allah would allow “any person in any era
who does not attribute any partner to you25
to enter Paradise” or to be
permitted to intercede for all the Muslim people who died after him, and
in both cases the wish was granted (al-Tha’labi 92 and Ibn Kathir 4.16,
citing a tradition attributed to Abu Huraya; cit. and trans. in Firestone:
132). However, the fact that these narratives are associated with Isaac,
that they never “took” to Ishmael, and that they were later criticized (e.g.,
by Ibn Kathir) for being inferior and reliant on a single source suggests
that they represent an early Jewish and/or Christian legacy that Islam
chose to marginalize if never quite expel.
In Islam the dhabih never dies, nor is there any extensive tradition of
Ishmael/Isaac’s wound comparable to Jewish Isaac’s scar (or ash) and Jesus’
stigmata. In the Shi’a26
al-Tabarsi tradition Ishmael is cut, but only
accidentally and not productively: Ibrahim actually brings the knife down
on the son’s throat before Gibreel turns it over onto its blunt side (for more
on this frequently repeated protective action, see below), and when Sarah
rushes to the scene she does indeed see “the sign of the knife scratched into
[her son’s] throat” (al-Tabarsi [d.518/1153] Majma ‘al-Bayan fi ‘Ullum alQur’an
23.77, cit. and trans. in Firestone: 112–113). Another tradition
traceable back to the Jewish convert to Islam, Ka’b al-Qurazi (d.735),
25
The question of the masculinity and asexuality of God “without a (female) partner” is of course a
common feature of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (albeit made more explicit in the phraseology of
Islam) and is hardly unrelated to the questions that we are exploring here. For a cogent critique of the
implications of this theological axiom as it relates to the whole problematic of sacrifice, see Delaney.
26
It is generally the case that the Shi’ites borrow more freely from Jewish tradition than the Sunnis.
840 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
reports how when Moses asked why the Israelites referred to God as the
God of Abraham, Ishmael, and Israel,27
God replied that Abraham loved
him superlatively, that Israel (Jacob) never despaired of him, and that
“Ishmael was most generous with his blood” (al-Zamakhshari, on the
authority of Ka’b al-Qurazi, Al-kashshaf ‘an Haqa’iq al-Tanzil wa’Uyun alAqawil
fi Wujuh al-Tawil, cit. and trans. in Firestone: 141). However,
though a very little bit of the son’s blood seeps into Islam, it seems that
nothing comes of (or grows from) it, and the blood is not so much fertile
or redemptive as a sign of the very most that we can give. The son’s blood
seems to stop its signifying flow at the point where it indicates, simply,
the utmost that can be offered, rather as in the tafsir which describes how
Abraham worked up to the sacrifice of the son by increments. This version
of the sacrifice reports how Ibrahim first sacrificed a bull, but God
demanded something greater, so he sacrificed a camel, but God demanded
something greater: only then did he realize that he was to sacrifice the most
precious thing, that is the dhabih (al-Kisai, Qisas al-Anbiya, cit. and trans.
in Firestone: 124–125). Like Midrash Rabbah this narrative imaginatively
reconstructs the pre-sacrifice drama but stops short at the observation
that body, blood, or life is the most that one can give, rather than flowing
into the risky but powerful terrain of the redemptive power of blood and
the demonstrable efficacy of whole- or part-body “circumcision.”
LIFE, REGENERATION, PROTECTION: MAKING A MOOT
(OR MUTE) POINT OF SACRIFICE
This dampening of the sacrificial theme is evident if, with all the caution
that such a comparison would involve, we compare Genesis 22 with
Sura 37 of the Qur’an.28
It seems significant that in the Qur’an the second
27
The report that the Israelites were calling their God the “God of Abraham, Ishmael, and Israel
(Jacob),” thus naming Abraham as the father of Ishmael and Israel (rather than Isaac and Israel), is
an interesting variation on the relationship of the sons. The passage is worth quoting in full: “A pious
Israelite used to say when praying ‘O God, God of Abraham, Ishmael, and Israel.’ And Moses said
‘O Lord, what should the pious children of Israel say when praying? O God of Abraham, Ishmael,
and Israel, I should be included among them. You let me hear your words. You have chosen me as
your messenger!’ God replied: ‘O Moses, no one ever loved me with Abraham’s love and nothing
ever tempted him away from Me. Ishmael was most generous with his own blood. And as for Israel,
he never despaired of My Spirit despite the hardships that befell him.’ ”
28
It is, of course, inaccurate to think of those who wrote down the oral recitation of the Qur’an as
working to annotate and rewrite a pre-given biblical text, or even as working on a model of scripture
similar to that of the Bible (this untranslatability of what Christians mean by Bible also applies, in a
different sense, to Jews). For the more accurate model of Qur’an and Bible as “written precipitates of
wide-spread story-telling tradition,” or as Qur’an as drawing on oral “biblicist” traditions (i.e.,
traditions that included those unorthodox and sectarian traditions outwith what became Christian
scripture proper), see Calder: 387 and Firestone: 3–10.
Sherwood: Binding–Unbinding 841
voice of God says simply, “Abraham, you have already fulfilled the vision”
and not (and I am summarizing here to convey a sense of Gen. 22.16–22.17
that Jews and Christians often, for very good reasons, soften29
), “Because you
have done this, I will surely bless you and scatter your sacrificially fertilized
seed throughout the world” (my italics). Fascinatingly, the Qur’an retains
the metaphor of seed but cultivates it in a different direction, training it
away from the seed that by dying, germinates, and grafting it onto something
closer to the seed in the Christian parable of the sower: “We blessed
him and Isaac. But of their progeny are those that do right and those that
clearly do wrong. They reap their own rewards” (37.113; following
Firestone’s translation, 107). The meaning of seed is earthed (that is discharged
of potential sacrificial sparks and shocks) by bringing it down to
the level of a general ethical exhortation along the lines of “What you sow,
you will reap.” Similarly, although the sacrifice is located in a Sura about
the resurrection of the righteous, resurrection is in no way tied to death,
even part-death, or interiorized or metaphorized “death” (in inverted
commas). Ibrahim and the dhabih do right but not superlatively, sacrificially
so: they are simply part of a long chain of surrender that stretches
through Noah, Moses and Aaron, Elijah (Ilyas), Lot, and Jonah. The
hearer is exhorted to join the ranks of the righteous who will live eternally
in paradise, but there is no hint that the “sacrifice” of the beloved
son establishes the very basis of that afterlife. Thus, the role of the dhabih
is limited and separated from that of some Jewish Isaacs and Jesus.
But this muting of sacrifice is by no means an exclusively Islamic
move. The interpretative thicket becomes denser and more complex
when we realize that the softening within the Qur’an reflects a recoil
already taking place within the biblical text. Historical critical scholars of
the Bible have long maintained, very plausibly, that the biblical narrative
is itself a story that has been modified from actual sacrifice to almost
sacrifice, the editorial smoking gun or “bloody knife” leading to this conclusion
being the return of the father and servants in Genesis 22.19 minus
the son. That is, for the biblical editor this scene must not be sacrifice, but
“sacrifice,” an event to which those marks that we colloquially call “scarequotes”
(i.e., grammatical frighteners, qualifying “beware” marks) quite
literally apply. The Qur’an extrapolates, and heightens, this biblical tradition
of making a moot, or mute, point of sacrifice: there is no fire, no
knife, no firewood, as if to deflect the attention away from the image of
the (almost) cut and (almost) burnt son. Moreover, the dhabih is consulted
by the father and, crucially, gives his consent. Having heard the
29
For a fuller discussion of these modes of softening, and the reasons for them, see below.
842 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
command of Allah in a dream, Ibrahim asks, “Son, what is your view?”
and the son replies, “My father, do as you are commanded.”
This conversation effectively pours salve on the major ethical wound in
the biblical narrative: the fact that this is not a text of (almost) martyrdom
(which would be one thing) but of (almost) martyrdom at one remove. The
fact that the powerful trinity that is God, Abraham, and the narrator never
explicitly seeks out the response of Isaac (even as his father holds the knife
above him) is the omission that gives readers most torment. Unable to bear
this particular lacuna, Martin Luther, for example, supplies an in-depth
father–son consultation and castigates “Moses” for his negligence (113).
The reason for Luther’s, and many others’, anxiety is clear (though often
repressed) and can be translated into starkly contemporary terms: although
the analogy needs to be firmly swaddled in qualifying clauses and caveats,
the absence of consultation with the victim means that there is more
potential for closeness than we would like between this fundamental text
and the script and actions of Muhammad Atta, Abraham’s “fundamentalist”
imitator. In many respects the difference is comfortingly abyssal: one kills, one
only “kills”; one kills nearly three thousand, one “kills” only one; one loves
the one he “kills,” one hates. One takes life when we know for certain that
the desire of those whose life was taken would have been emphatically not
to die; one “kills” when the complicity of the one to be killed is simply not
stated. Isaac may have agreed to be the lamb, he may not; the unbearable
thing is that the voice of Isaac is a question mark, a white space.30
Painfully,
this means that the only firm barricades that we can erect between ground
zero and the outlands of the patriarchal “out-law” on Mount Moriah are
degree, scale, and the difference between an inauthentic hearing and a genuine
hearing of the voice of God (though the basis on which we do that—
on the Kantian grounds that true religion is ethical, or that it never
demands the killing of non-combatants as the Sunni Cairo Statement
affirms—again begs questions of this foundational ur-text). Treading very,
very carefully, and trembling as we go, we have to concede that this white
space, this negligence of the victim, leads to a possibility that this story that
Judaism calls the binding—after the fact that Isaac is “bound”31
—cannot
be absolutely severed from the possibility of acts of terror. It suggests,
unnervingly, that we cannot completely eradicate the possibility of “binding”
between this biblical text of “fear and trembling” and those “terrorist” acts
30
For a more detailed exploration of the unsettling role of Isaac as question mark within the
biblical text, see Sherwood 2004a.
31
The detail of the binding (aqd) of Isaac (Gen. 22.9)—highlighted by the Jewish title for the
story—is hardly irrelevant here, for it foregrounds the question of Isaac’s compliance. Was Isaac
bound because he resisted (if he willingly submitted, why bind him?), and why does he say nothing
when he is being bound?
Sherwood: Binding–Unbinding 843
that inauthentically make the world convulse and that we name, as Mark
Jurgensmeyer says, from the root terrere (“to cause to tremble”) (5).
Those within the cultural universes of Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam know this and indeed acknowledge it every time they attempt to
modify, or even nullify, the theme of sacrifice and counteract the potentially
explosive qualification that this story adds to the precious “Thou
shalt not kill” (Exod. 20.3–20.17; Deut. 5.7–5.21; cf. Qur’an 6.152).
Although the three religions habitually instigate qualifications along the
lines of “unless you are killing an animal” or “unless you are killing the
one who threatens violence against you, from outside the community,”
they all instinctively recoil against the more dangerous parenthetical
qualification “Thou shalt not kill a human being (although you should be
prepared to offer a family member as a burnt offering if God tells you
to).”32
Knowing, just as surely as Søren Kierkegaard knows, that this story
opens up a fundamental cut, or wound, between religion and ethics and
that it takes place in the shadows, beyond morality’s searchlight, they aim
to bring the patriarchal outlaw back within the law and to bring these
extreme, mountaintop events down to a safer, more human(e) place.
The biblical narrative opens with the qualifier (?) “God tested
Abraham,” and the Qur’an frames the “sacrifice” with the statement
“For this was a clear [straightforward33
] test,” implying that this is clearly
(only) a test, as well as implying the clarity of the lesson. N.J. Dawood
goes further, to the point of virtual critique, translating/interpreting
37.106 as “This was indeed a bitter test” (my italics). Perhaps by way of reaction
to Jewish and Christian conflations of man and ram (the conflation
of Isaac and the Isaac-ram in midrash, the Isaac-Jesus led like a lamb to
the slaughter), or perhaps by way of a counter-pull to the disturbing connotations
of dhabaha in its own narrative (cf. Genesis 22.11’s “slaughter”;
cab), the Qur’an places the dhabih on his forehead, not on his side, facing
Mecca, so making his posture markedly different from the accepted
position for a sacrificial animal. Although the sacrifice of Id al-Kabir
draws on the power of the Abrahamic “sacrifice,” it also ushers the significance
away from “sacrifice” firmly into the realm of ethics. The emphasis
is deflected toward survival and redemption from death (sons emphatically
don’t die; rams, camels, or goats do), toward an economically (metaphorically)
“sacrificial” gift that can cost up to twenty percent of the
household’s annual income, and toward charity (zakat) as testified to by
32
For a cogent discussion of how the phrase “Thou shalt not kill” has never been understood as an
unqualified “Thou shalt not put to death the living in general,” see Derrida 1995: 279–283.
33
The Arabic verb used here is the verb used in the Qur’an to describe the nature of the Qur’an:
simple, straightforward, clear.
844 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
the strangely traditio-modern phenomenon of refrigerated planes flying
out to Africa from Saudi Arabia.
Similarly, the Christian reworking of the basic materials of Genesis 22
into the cross and resurrection can be seen as, among many other things, a
means of treating the ethical “sin” of virtual martyrdom-at-one-remove.
For the conflation of the roles of God, father, son, and ram (or lamb) in
a single body and the grounding assumption that the father and son are,
this time, homo-ousin, of one being, substance (so will and agency) creates
an at-one-ment in the Christian passion narrative that in some sense
attempts to foreclose connotations of paternal/divine “child abuse.”34
Moreover, Christianity celebrates the gift of God’s son (Rom. 8.32) and
the productivity of son sacrifice but also understands this as the sacrifice
to end all sacrifice, hence sacrifice in some sense turning back on and sacrificing
itself, thus replicating and intensifying the move that puts inverted
commas round the “sacrifice” of Genesis 22. The doubled proclamation
and anxious qualification of the power of death finds its most classic
expression in the welter of understandings that attend the gift of God’s son’s
body—bread and wine, blood and body, mass, host, but also “eucharist”
(thanksgiving), or “meal” (according to Calvin), and holy communion—
with different understandings often entwining within the same community,
or the writing of the same theologian, and intimating a strand of anxiety
that, in some qualified sense, anticipates explicit contemporary Christian
recoil from understandings of atonement as forensic and feudal.35
From
the first centuries of the Christian era onward, Genesis 22 has been a
subject of worry, qualification, and even parody for Christians: the Christianized
Jewish Testament of Abraham (after first century C.E.) parodies
Abraham as a would-be murderer and law-breaker; whereas, long before
Kierkegaard, Thomas Aquinas was clearly suffering sleepless nights over
God’s seeming abrogation of the natural moral law and his suspension of his
own command that the innocent should not be slain (Summa Theologicae,
Questio 94 [S-Th I-II, 94, 5]).36
Reading emphatically in the direction of life,
early Christian funereal art orients the narrative around its ending, understood
in terms of resurrection and recreation. In third- to sixth-century
34
This is not to say that this attempt is entirely successful. For discussion of implications of divine
child abuse in traditional Christian atonement theologies, see, for example, Carlson Brown and
Parker; Nakashima Brock and Parker.
35
For contemporary discussions that attempt to marshal traditional Christian resources as a
counter-voice to the dominant Anselmian strain in understandings of atonement, see, for example,
Bartlett; Tanner. (I am grateful to Kathryn Tanner for sharing this paper prior to publication.)
36
For the parody of Abraham as murderer and adulterer, see “Testament of Abraham,” recension
B, chapter 12 in Charlesworth: 871–902 (901). For discussion, see Jeffers. For a discussion of
Aquinas’s anxious response to Genesis 22, and his equally anxious answer that the God who makes
the natural law can change it, see Jans.
Sherwood: Binding–Unbinding 845
sarcophagi, catacombs, and frescos, Abrahams and Isaacs get up from their
altars alongside Noahs, Daniels, Jonahs, or Lazaruses walking out of their
arks, furnaces, fish, or tombs (see Kessler).
This deflection is mirrored in contemporary commentaries which,
still using the very same subterfuges that Kierkegaard specifically detailed
in the 1840s, regularly use God’s second command, “Do not lay your
hand on the boy or do anything to him,” dialectically to subsume and
nullify the first command, “Take your son and burn him as a holocaust,”
and write repeatedly of an Abraham who, now rehabilitated as perfect
ethical paradigm, does not give his son so much as his abstracted “best.”37
This deflection in turn reflects a distancing (or rather interiorizing) move
already taking place in Hebrews 11.17–11.19, where the significance is
deflected away from Abraham’s actions toward his faith or belief (indeed,
as Hebrews has it, Abraham’s “belief” also coheres with, and reinforces,
the ending of the story as opposed to the beginning, for Abraham has faith
that God is able to resurrect the dead and Isaac is indeed “resurrected”).
Bolder yet is the commentators’ move that claims—despite the internal
textual evidence that Abraham clearly feels unable to speak the command
to anyone (suggesting, quite clearly, that he hardly inhabits a world
where child-sacrifice is normative); despite the fact that he is rewarded,
not castigated or corrected, for his willingness to sacrifice Isaac; and
despite the fact that that “sacrifice” is productive of a world of sand
sons—that this story was conceived as a piece of anti-child-sacrifice
polemic.38
This perception of the story as a teach-text for the rudimentary
elements of ethical monotheism, or a counter-blast to the heinous practices
of neighboring Canaanites or Phoenecians, reflects the deep need
for monotheism to purge itself of violence, expelled to a geographical or
chronological elsewhere (an ur-time, or geographical out-lands, before
and beyond the Bible proper). A similar desire is reflected in Emmanuel
Lévinas’s curiously Hegelian move that sees the first command of God
“Burn your son” as a sensation-and-adventure-filled view of religion that
is typically Christian and Protestant and Kierkegaardian—not typically
Jewish—and that reads the second voice as far more illustrative of the
ethical “flat calm” of Judaism (1990: 33; cf. 1996a and 1996b).
37
Compare Kierkegaard’s criticisms of commentators who speak in Abraham’s honor by “making
it a commonplace: ‘his greatness was that he so loved God that he was willing to offer him the best he
had.’ That is true but ‘best’ is a very vague expression. In word and thought one can quite safely
identify Isaac with the best, and the man who so thinks can very well puff at his pipe as he does so,
and the listener can very well leisurely stretch out his legs” (59).
38
For an early critique of the anti-child-sacrifice-polemic theory, with its reassuring sense of an
“awakening,” “protesting” “humanitarianism,” see von Rad: 243–244; for a more thorough rebuttal,
which nevertheless omits the internal evidence of Abraham’s marked silence within the biblical text,
see Levenson.
846 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Lévinas’s claim can only be made in unawareness of the significance
of the redemptive power of Isaac’s blood and Isaac’s ash in Jewish
tradition and of the way in which strands of all three Abrahamic monotheisms
attempt to bring the Akedah down to the “flat calm” he aspires
to (ironically, given the marginality of the Arab and the Qur’an in
Lévinas, it is the Qur’an that most overtly brings the text down to the
flat).39
But Lévinas’s attempts to defuse the “sacrifice” and make it safe
mirror earlier moves in Judaism: as Islam ensures that the dhabih is
consulted and the Christian father-son-lamb takes death into his own
body, so Jewish tradition makes Isaac into a thirty-something adult male
who goes knowingly yachdav (together) with his father, and through
togetherness, and the virtual synonymity of son and fathers, also makes
from the twoness a less problematic oneness.40
Midrash, too, proclaims
divine protection and safety and the sublation of death in life (and so the
first command in the second) in protracted scenes in which the angels
melt the knife with their tears or turn it over onto its blunt side (Pesikta
Rabbati 40; Genesis Rabbah 56.7). This midrashic scene is extrapolated in
Islam, where Gibreel turns the knife over onto its blunt side three times
(each time emphatically repeating, and underscoring, the narrative turn
from death to life) and where the angels pound a sheet of copper over
the son’s throat, or even over his whole torso, emphatically encasing his
all-too-vulnerable body in a protective shield (see the Sunni al-Suddi,
Mujir al-Din, and Ibn Ishaq traditions, and the Shi-ite al-Yaqubi and alQummi
traditions as summarized in Firestone: 116–121).
COLLATERAL DAMAGE: ISAAC’S MOUTH (AS SPEAKING
WOUND), ISAAC’S KICK, AND THE ELOQUENT
RESISTANCE OF THE RAM, THE DEVIL, THE MOTHER
Strangely, in a way that rather confuses assumed trajectories of
evolution from pious fidelity to critical scholarship, or from the archaic
swamps of heteronomy toward autonomy, ancient Jewish, Christian, and
Islamic sources often seem more radical than contemporary scholars in
39
I do not want to make too much of the perhaps incidental point that Sura 37 is not, like Genesis
22, set on the mountaintop and that the Hajj associates it with the plains of Arafat. But the lack of
mountaintop can be read as a convenient image of the way in which Islam attempts to discharge the
dangers of the “sacrifice” by bringing it back within the sphere of the human, the ethical, down low
(see the discussion above).
40
Developing the biblical text’s allusion, twice, to father and son walking on together (“yachdav”)
Pesikta Rabbati says, “What is implied by ‘together’? That Isaac was not distressed by what his father
had said to him. Even as one rejoiced to make the offering, the other rejoiced to be made an offering . . .
Abraham rejoiced to cut the throat of the sacrifice, and Isaac rejoiced to have the throat cut” (Pesikta
Rabbati 40; cf. Midrash haGadol 353).
Sherwood: Binding–Unbinding 847
the depth and range of their ethical critique. Jewish midrashim and tafarsir,
in particular, seem prepared to push the question “What if these events are
not ultimately embraced by the all-sublating logic of sacrifice in which pain
is always healed and always productive?” and are prepared to explore the
potential for what John Caputo terms disaster—that is, pain or wasting
of life that cannot be incorporated into a “result” or a redemptive, solvent
system (28). Those very contemporary-seeming questions about the justification
of what we call, euphemistically, “collateral damage” or about the
justification of material, physical pain in the name of transcendent truths,
greater causes, or starry visions are poignantly played out in the ancient
texts. For, more than any contemporary work, the ancient interpreters
press the question of what the effect would be—on Sarah or Hagar as well
as Isaac or Ishmael—of this story that presents itself as a very private
story between God and Abraham (only) in a monotheistic tête-à-tête.
This critique of wounding—for whatever purpose—seems most pronounced
in Judaism, which, even as it expresses the wound from which
blood/forgiveness/merit/redemption flows, also explores a very different
kind of wound: a wound that testifies to trauma and that requires posttraumatic
salve and care. This pain is primarily expressed through the
body of Isaac and the mouth of Isaac, which also becomes, effectively, the
speaking (expressive) wound of Isaac. Isaac is absent in Genesis 22.19,
some midrashim say, because he had been spirited away to the Garden of
Eden (which functions as a kind of hospital) to be attended by the nurseangels:
“And the angels bore him to Paradise, where he tarried three
years, to be healed from the wound inflicted on him by Abraham on
the occasion of the akedah” (Paaneah Raza, Yalkut Reubeni, and Midrash
ha-Gadol on Gen. 22.19). The negative, messy, s(c)eptic(al) wound of
Isaac—the other side of the positive wound of Isaac—is not expressed in
the words of Christian interpretation but does find expression pictorially:
Caravaggio’s Isaac (figure 4) clearly does not feel the comfort of the
inverted commas that make this sacrifice just a “sacrifice,” and we could
say that Isaac’s wound is here transformed into Isaac’s scream. In Judaism
and Islam Isaac’s wound and Isaac’s mouth seem to merge, and the
mouth of Isaac clearly articulates pain, in scripts that perch themselves
very precariously on the hyphen in the idea of “binding–unbinding.”
For in Judaism and Islam the son, lying on the altar, utters numerous,
potentially disastrous, chaos-bringing last words such as: “Father throw
me onto my forehead so that you don’t have to look at me and compassion
overcome you”; or “Father bind my hands and my feet, for the
instinct of life is so strong that when I see the knife coming towards me,
I may move convulsively and have you cut me in a place that will
disqualify me as an offering”; or “Father bind me tightly lest I lead you
848 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
astray”; or “Father throw me onto my face so that you will not look upon
me and have mercy for me, or that I would look at the knife and be
anxious, but rather insert the knife from underneath me”; or “Father, tie
up my shoulders lest I squirm between your hands and it cause you
pain”; or “Father, do not sacrifice me when you look into my face lest
you have mercy upon me . . . Tie my hand to my neck and put my face to
the ground”; or “Father bind my hands and my feet so I will not kick
you and thus be desecrating the commandment of honoring the father,
since the soul of a person is uncowable (or ‘not to be intimidated’)”; or
“Sharpen your knife and finish me off quickly, for death is severe.”41
These are not the speeches of a modern, Romantic “Isaac Unbound” who
is about to tear off his bonds and run down the mountain: they are
41
Sources are, in order of citation: Ibn Ishaq tradition in Firestone: 118; Pesikta Rabbati 40; Suyuti,
Durr, V, 283–284, cited from ‘Abd ibn Hamid (d.249/823) and attributed to Uthman ibn Hadir, cit. and
trans. in Calder: 380; al-Tabari, Commentary 23.79 and History 309, cit. and trans. in Firestone: 124;
al-Kisai, Qisas al-Anbiya, cit. and trans. in Firestone: 125; al-Tabari (fragment attributed to Mujahid),
Commentary 23.80 and History 309; Midrash Tanhuma on Gen. 22.9; Midrash Bereshit Rabbati 55,
90; and, again, the tradition attributed to Ibn Ishaq as summarized by Firestone: 118. I have deliberately
alternated Jewish and Islamic sources to show how similar they are. The only significant difference is
the Jewish insistence on the bodily integrity of the sacrifice, absent from Islamic vocabulary.
Figure 4. Caravaggio, “The Sacrifice of Isaac”, c. 1603. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.
Sherwood: Binding–Unbinding 849
always carefully couched in filial piety but are also delicately, paradoxically,
scripted so that Isaac can take a position inside, but also more than slightly
outside, the narrative of prescribed obedience unto death. The danger of—
and to—the text is mooted through the silent, uncontrollable, reflexes
of Isaac’s body, in some sense outside the zone of conscious responsibility
that is the soul or brain. Like Caravaggio’s Isaac’s scream (seen but
never heard), Isaac’s squirm, convulsion, kick, upsurging life-spirit,
pleading eyes, or resisting hands evoke at a base, bodily, level a fundamental
non-compliance that will resonate with any(human)body, and
that by implication mutinies (or kicks against) this over-hard, over“bitter”
test.
The silent reflex of Isaac’s body and the prospect of Isaac’s bad,
untreatable wound express the idea that this quintessential Abrahamic
text, which runs through the liturgical and theological center of the three
religions, is also not one to which they can readily offer “Abrahamic”
hospitality, and this theme is taken up, and amplified, by a background
chorus made up of the supplementary mouths and bodies of the devil,
the mother, and the ram. In the Islamic al-Kisai account of the sacrifice the
ram stands up and offers himself to Ibrahim with the words, “O Friend
of God, sacrifice me instead of your son, for I am more appropriate for
sacrifice than he” (Qisas al-Anbiya, cit. and trans. in Firestone: 126), thus
obliquely condemning God, Abraham, and the text through a relatively
minor, animal mouth for even having countenanced treating a human being
like an animal. In two Shi’a sources, al-shaytan appears to Abraham in
disguise and says, “Heaven forbid that you will sacrifice an innocent boy,”
and warns of the dangerous consequences of such a precedent: “O Abraham,
you are a leader whom people follow. If you sacrifice him, then all the people
will sacrifice their children” (al Qummi, Tafsir al-Qummi, 2.225 and
al-Tabarsi 23.77, cit. and trans. in Firestone: 112)—a point to which
Abraham, who thus far has answered all the devil’s questions, simply
“speak[s] to him no longer,” as if he has nothing cogent to say (compare
the silence of the God of Midrash Rabbah, above, who terminates the
conversation at the point where he is unable to articulate difference
between the sons). Not only does al-shaytan raise a crucial and also
timely question (“What could happen if this potentially explosive text
were to ignite in the minds of some of the more zealous of Ishmael/
Isaac’s sons?’), but, far from being overtly devilish, his words seem to
have an impressive precedent (a kind of isnad?42
) in the protest of the
Quraysh tribe against the most famous of pre-Islamic stories about the
42
In Islam the isnad is the record of authentication that traces the tradition back to its most
ancient sources: the closer the saying is to the circle and the time of Muhammad and the greater the
number of authenticated witnesses, the more authoritative the source.
850 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
evils of human sacrifice. According to tradition, Muhammad’s grandfather,
‘Abd al-Muttalib, made a vow that he would sacrifice the son who
was destined to become Muhammad’s father but was prevented by the
members of the Quraysh tribe. Crucially, they stayed his hand by posing
the rhetorical question “If you do a thing like this, there will be no stopping
men from coming to sacrifice their sons, and what will become of
the people then?” (Guillaume: 66–68)—precisely the question now posed
by Satan to Abraham.43
In both Jewish and Islamic traditions the devil seems to become, as
Yaakov Elbaum puts it, a spokesperson for “humanity, compassion, and
elementary ethics” (109)—someone who plays, in the most literal sense,
devil’s advocate and does so with potentially disastrous effectiveness as
the combined forces of the pathos of flesh and the will-to-survival rally to
his aid. His recurring presence in retellings of the sacrifice seems to indicate
not only the importance of this moment in the battle between good
and evil but also the awareness that the “sacrifice” is his greatest opportunity,
for it is at this point that God’s case (and scripture) seems to be at its
most vulnerable. Again, the traditions maintain a delicate “both and” and
simultaneously bind and unbind: the satanic counterplot and countervoice
also function, as explored earlier, as a way of stressing the fundamental
preciousness and goodness of the story by making the forces of
evil attack it at every stage. But they are also a means of expressing something
deeply critical, at a slant, through the conveniently qualified voice
of devils. Precisely because he is only a devil, the midrashic Satan can point
to the very thin line between murder and sacrifice (as if he has somehow
got his hands on an advance copy of Fear and Trembling) and say to
Abraham, “Today God says ‘Sacrifice your son,’ but tomorrow he will say
‘You are a murderer and you are guilty.’” He can also talk to Isaac of the
madness of Abraham, or the offense that the proposed sacrifice constitutes
to the mother, and can also talk to the mother directly, empathizing
43
The sacrifice was prevented by Muhammad’s maternal uncles, and ‘Abd al-Muttalib redeemed
the son with one hundred camels. Compare the following widely attested conversation, where
Muhammad is referred to as the “son of two intended sacrifices”: “We were with Mu’awiya b. Abi
Sufyan when they said ‘Was the intended sacrificial victim Ishmael or Isaac?’ He answered: ‘You have
come to someone well-informed about the matter! We were with the Apostle of God when a man
came up and said: “O Apostle of God, repeat to me [the knowledge] that God has bestowed upon
you, O son of two intended sacrifices!” So he laughed. Then I said to him, “O commander of the
faithful, who were the two intended sacrifices?” He answered “When ‘Abd al-Muttalib was
commanded to dig Zamzam, he vowed to God that if it were easy for him, he would sacrifice one of
his sons. The lot [arrow] fell on Abdallah. But his maternal uncles prevented him, saying, “Redeem
your son with one hundred camels!” So he redeemed him with camels. Ishmael was the second.’ ”
(see, for example, al-Tabari, Commentary 23.85; History 290–291; Ibn Kathir, Commentary 4.18, cit.
and trans. in Firestone: 142).
Sherwood: Binding–Unbinding 851
with her “helplessness” with the air of a compassionate counselor (Yalkut
Shimoni 98; Genesis Rabbah 56.4).
Indeed, together with the resistant body and bad wound of the son
and the eloquent devil, the mother—and, more specifically, the body of
the mother—becomes (for all the monotheisms) a major site of ethical
opposition to the “sacrifice” (presumably because devils, women, and
mutinying sub-rational bodies occupy the same secondary, dubious status,
which means that through them anything can be expressed). The mother,
who is entirely absent in the biblical and Qur’anic narratives, is frequently
brought back to be set up in postures of care or opposition:
a sixth-century Christian sarcophagus depicts a woman with her hand
to her mouth watching the sacrifice in a seeming attitude of horror,
whereas a fourth-century chapel in the El Bagwat necropolis in Egypt
depicts her standing beside her son on the altar and lifting up her arms to
the sky (in prayer) (see Kessler: 82–83). Two fifth-century Christian Syriac
poems, written for performance during the Easter liturgy (see the translation
by Brock), radically locate the action within the all-seeing eye of the
mother and annotate the drama with her relentless, searching questions:
“Tell me your secret,” “Where is the child of my vows off to?,” and “Where
are you taking my only-begotten?”—this being a new and pointed twist
on the motif of the “only” (Gen 22.2), as if that phrase points not only to
the clumsy omission of Ishmael but also to the gauche omission of Sarah.
(Why use that provocative qualifier “only” when this inevitably begs the
question of why the only parent for whom Isaac is indeed the “only” is in
fact strangely absent from the scriptural account of the test?).
Indeed, it seems that Sarah can only be construed as a fecund source
of “whys?,” subverting the fecundity and exemplarity of sacrifice. The
Syriac Christian poems imagine Sarah’s presence as necessarily interrupting
or interrogating the narrative: in one, in response to Abraham’s smokescreen
announcement that he is taking Isaac to sacrifice a sheep, Sarah
says, in so many words, “If you are genuinely wanting to slaughter a
sheep, be off and see to the sheep, but leave the child behind lest something
happen to him”; in the other, when she sees Abraham holding the
knife, her “heart groans” and she warns (in a protest worthy of Rita
Nakashima Brock or Rebecca Parker), “You are so drunk with the love
of God . . . [that] if he so bids you concerning the child, you will kill
him without a thought.” This pointed critique of God-drunk Abraham
through the mouth of Sarah finds analogies in Islamic tradition, where
Sarah utters a scandalized “Why?” when told what Ibrahim is up to, or
angrily accosts him on his return, “You would sacrifice my son and not
inform me?,” so castigating the patriarch who thinks that he lives in the
rarefied a-social air of the mountaintop where men live alone with
852 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
their sons and their God (al-Qummi 2.225, al-Tabarsi 23.77, and the
paradigmatic al-Suddi and ibn-Ishaq traditions, as translated and
summarized by Firestone: 113, 117).44
The Sarah of the Christian Syriac poems encompasses and stifles the
narrative and also cradles the body of Isaac in the posture of a pietà:
when Abraham returns from Moriah, he finds her grieving over locks of
Isaac’s hair and clutching at his cloak, as if she were somehow trying to
maintain an umbilical attachment to the son’s (dead) body, and when
Abraham decides to “test” her by telling her that her son has indeed been
sacrificed she laments (rather gruesomely): “I was wishing I was an eagle,
and had the speed of a turtle dove, so that I might go and behold the
place where my only child, my beloved, was sacrificed, that I might see the
place of his ashes . . . and bring back a little of his blood to be comforted
by its smell.” As if developing implicit biblical analogies between Sarah
and Mary,45
these two remarkable Christian poems seem to make of Sarah
an Old Testament Mater Dolorosa and culminate in a request for God to
respond not to the sacrificial gift of Abraham or Isaac but to the extreme
suffering of the mother: “Because of the suffering of his mother . . . in
Your compassion give us what we ask.”
The suffering of the mother is given a yet more extreme—indeed
final—inflection in Jewish and Islamic interpretations which, taking
their cue, or pretext, from the biblical sequence, argue that the effect of
the “sacrifice” on the mother was terminal and that Genesis 23 (the
death of Sarah) follows Genesis 22 in a logic of cause and effect (alTabarsi
23.77, cit. and trans. in Firestone: 113; Genesis Rabbah 58.5;
Rashi).46
The death of Sarah is imagined as casting a retrospective
shadow over the preceding narrative, and in its retelling, the suffering of
the mother is conjured up at moments when it is most likely to afflict
acute ethical damage on the text. Midrash Tanhuma imagines Isaac warning
his knife-wielding father not to “tell my mother when she is standing by
a pit or when she is on the roof because she will fall and die,” whereas
(bringing this Jewish mother close to the Christian Syriac mother and
44
Note that the Sarah in the Shi’ite al-Qummi and al-Tabarsi traditions also adds, “O Lord, do not
punish me for what I did to the mother of Ishmael,” so explicitly connecting the pain of the
“sacrifice” to crimes committed against Hagar and Ishmael by Abraham and Sarah.
45
I am referring here to the way in which God “visits” Sarah in Gen. 21.1 and she conceives (see
the brief discussion above in the section “Three Siblings, Each The ‘Only’ ”). Crossing the important
reservations expressed in footnote 5 (applicable to scholars only), the Christian poems seem to intuit
that Genesis’s Sarah is rather like Mary and that Abraham, in his seeming absence from the scene of
“visiting,” is like Joseph.
46
Note that the theme of the mother’s death is less prevalent in Islam than in Judaism. It only
appears in Shi’ite sources and is usually applied to Sarah.
Sherwood: Binding–Unbinding 853
her longing for Isaac-relics, such as Isaac-blood or Isaac-ash) Midrash
Bereshit Rabbati imagines Isaac instructing Abraham to “gather the
ashes” and to put them in a casket in his mother’s chamber so that “at all
hours, whenever she enters her chamber, she will remember her son
Isaac and weep” (Midrash Tanhuma, Vayera 81; Midrash Bereshit
Rabbati 55, 90). Similarly, the Islamic al-Suddi and ibn Ishaq traditions
have the son instruct the father to “give greetings (salam) to [his]
mother” when he returns to her without him (the very fact of these
greetings [salam] perhaps questioning the use of the story as a perfect
paradigm of aslama [surrender])—and also have him instruct the father
to keep back some of his clothes so that no blood will soil them and
cause Hagar or Sarah to grieve, or, alternatively, to return his shirt to his
mother so that it can give her some comfort in her grief (paradigmatic
al-Suddi, ibn Ishaq, and Mujir al-Din traditions, and al-Kisai, Qisas alAnbiya,
translated and summarized by Firestone: 116–118, 125).47
Even
more starkly, when the Isaac of Genesis Rabbah is told by his father “You
are the lamb,” he tears his hair and asks: “Is this what you have told my
mother?,” invoking the mother as the most natural site of incredulity
and opposition (Genesis Rabbah 56.4). Supremely, Leviticus Rabbah and
the Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer say that the six blasts of the shofar on Rosh
Hashanah also memorialize the final three long cries and three short
howls of Sarah in her death-throws, so making the proclamation of
redemption and its subversion collide in the very same breath (Leviticus
Rabbah 20.2; Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer 32).
The functions of the body, and cries, of the mother in these traditional
texts are multiple and complex: “she”48
demonstrates that women
are below or outside the Kampfsreligion of the fathers but also critiques
the “God-drunk” passion that inspires this vision of religion. And as a
quintessential figure of the home (the level of the humane, the social, the
domestic), “she” makes it clear that this sacrifice story necessarily comes
accompanied by the caveat “Don’t do this at home,” or “Don’t tell anyone
at home,” above all “Don’t tell the mothers” (thus Genesis Rabbah above).
“She” also functions as a point of opposition—a way of saying, in effect,
that this death will take place over her dead body—and as a means of
embodying the possibility of disaster by foregrounding the fact that death
is not eradicated, only displaced. Just as the fact that this sacrifice is only
“sacrifice,” bandaged up and softened by inverted commas, does not always
47
The image of the mother grieving over bloodstained clothes may have borrowed something
from the story of Joseph, the longest continuous narrative in the Qur’an.
48
The “she” invoked is, of course, a completely stereotypical figure of the maternal. I certainly do
not mean to reclaim Sarah as a figure of the ideal mother. See further Sherwood 2003.
854 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
prevent the son from getting wounded or receiving a mini-death that
requires ministration by the nurse-angels, so the mother’s body, like the
ram’s, is given up to death. So deeply, it seems, is Jewish Sarah’s soul
“bound to” Isaac’s soul49
by an umbilical cord of empathy that the
damage done to Isaac’s body (the momentary death or the partial death
from which he must recover in the Intensive Care Unit at Eden hospital)
becomes for her actual whole-body death without any coda of resurrection.
Thus, her dead body silently embodies the danger of sacrifice tipping
over into disaster: that is, suffering that is absolutely unredeemable
and unresurrectable.
BINDING–UNBINDING
This article confirms that the “sacrifice” of the beloved son is, as
Judah Goldin once put it (xxi), located at the very nerve center of Judaism
and Christianity (and Islam) but that—as perhaps intimated by Goldin’s
intriguing choice of metaphor—it has also perennially set the nerves on
edge. Looking over these analyses, I am struck by the combination of
a struggle for direct descent and possession combined with a deeply
ambiguous relation to the text once that text has been successfully possessed.
I am struck, too, by the equally tangled thicket of relations
between the “ancient” and the “modern” and the “religious” and the
“secular”: long before Enlightenment images of the Kantian Abrahambutcher
or Kierkegaardian threats of sleepless nights, this text clearly
functioned as a source of the most disturbing nightmares as well as the
most important star- and heaven-gazing dreams.50
Responses that are
also recoils, approaches that are also a running away, challenge the
simplicity with which we habitually construe things like “response,”
“approach,” and “tradition.” And the genuflecting position that we
instinctively ascribe to the ancient, the fundamental, is disturbed by
evidence of an ancient battle between heteronomy and autonomy and a
sense of profound debt to the sacred text that can also be, at the same
time, “hypercritical” (cf. Derrida 1998: 45).
Such a conclusion resonates with recent, important work on religion
and violence that foregrounds the “internal pluralism” of religions and
the “ambivalence of the sacred,” or the paradoxical relation between
49
Cf. Louis Ginzberg’s apposite phrase, summarizing the implications of the midrashim in this
potentially subversive twist on “binding” (275).
50
See Kant’s revulsion at “Abraham butchering and burning his only son like a sheep at God’s
command” (1979: 115; cf. 1970: 175). Kierkegaard’s sleeplessness is invoked by way of epigraph to
this article.
Sherwood: Binding–Unbinding 855
religious violence and hopes for a “tranquil,” peaceful “ideal” (see Appleby:
9–10, 31; Jurgensmeyer: 242). Where it gives us pause is at the point
where those works identify “the Enlightenment” as the major source of
all our hopes of “moderation,” “rationality,” and “fair play,” to be injected
into religion’s “passion,” as it were from outside (Jurgensmeyer: 243), or
at the point where social scientific models suggest that it is possible fully
to unbind fundamentally violent from fundamentally peaceful expressions
of the same religious inheritances. What these discussions seem to
bracket out is writing and all the ambiguous things that one can do with
writing: far from being unequivocal scripts for actions, religious scriptures
give rise to writing and performances through which it is possible
(and often desirable) to inherit delicately, ambiguously. How is one to
disentangle the embrace of sacred violence from the human(e) recoil in
these multiply orchestrated responses where the affirming bass notes of
God and Abraham are in counterpoint with the alto of the devil, the
soprano of the mother, and the bleat of the animal (or the scream of the
human animal)? How is one to disentangle the affirmation of aslama
from the son’s request that the father give greetings (salam) to his
mother? How is one to unbind the official meaning of the ram’s horn on
Rosh Hashanah from the under- or overtones of Sarah’s scream? Without
in any way suggesting a facile collapse between the worlds of these
ancient authors and our contemporary worlds, this article suggests that
the ancient interpreters come surprisingly close to “us” and also give us
some iconic ways of thinking paradoxes still very relevant to “us,” we
who are still, as Charles Taylor has persuasively argued “on both sides of
the great intramural moral disputes . . . between the espousal of hypergoods
and the defense of those goods that are sacrificed in their name”
(105). In these delicately balanced dramas Abraham and obedience to God
as “hypergood” are held in tension with the protests of the “sacrificed” in
the graphic, audible form of Isaac’s kick and Sarah’s scream.
The audacity, risk, and critique of ancient interpretation challenge
the common retrojection of a past that allegedly piously affirmed the
“transcendental unambiguity of the Holy Word” (cf. Almond: 98)—
a past that too easily functions as a straw man in the Religion and
Modernity wars and all their academic correlates by representing the
conservation of truth in contrast to the modern/postmodern/secular
“fall” from truth or, alternatively, “retrogressive fundamentalism”. And
it might also make us think a little more about the question of choice,
and the equation of modernity with the guardianship, even invention, of
autonomy and choice, and also about why these ancient interpreters
sometimes seem more able to live with and through the paradox of
binding–unbinding than some of their co-religionist contemporaries.
856 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Could it be that the pre-Enlightenment condition of being Jewish, being
Christian, being Muslim before all choice leads to more active and audacious
acts of interpreting, deciding, and choosing in complex relation to
the texts and vocabularies in which one lives, moves, and has one’s
being—for when the vocabularies and texts of God and Abraham simply
are, they cannot be feared to vanish or diminish in the face of critique.
Instead of simply ushering us into a new era of autonomy and choice,
might it be that modernity, by leading us to choose our place as
“religious” or “non-religious” and identify with (protect?) that choice
thereafter, also—at least potentially—replaces these little acts of microchoosing
and micro-critique with one vast act of macro-choosing?
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