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What made Abraham Different? Answering Rachel Held Evans: Part 3

Rachel Held Evans says if she’d been Abraham, she’d have sooner been struck dead than obeyed; what made Abraham different?

In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sir Henry Baskerville fumes at a hotel waiter over losing two boots a maid was to have polished: a new brown boot the night before and now an old black boot. Sir Henry returns to his room and finds the first, never-worn boot beneath a cabinet under which he is sure he already looked.

Most see the hotel’s ineptness as annoying, but certainly not connected to the Baskervilles’ larger worries about the curse of a deadly, demonic hound that locals claimed to have seen and heard about the time Sir Henry’s uncle died. Only Sherlock Holmes grasps the boots’ significance and concludes the uncle was murdered and Sir Henry himself is now in danger. Later when all is resolved, Holmes explains to Watson about the missing boots:

… a most instructive incident, since it proved conclusively to my mind that we were dealing with a real hound, as no other supposition could explain this anxiety to obtain an old boot and this indifference to a new one. The more outré and grotesque an incident is the more carefully it deserves to be examined, and the very point which appears to complicate a case is, when duly considered and scientifically handled, the one which is most likely to elucidate it.

In many mystery stories, the key to the solution is found in some odd fact that is overlooked by unskilled observers.

The story of God asking Abraham to sacrifice Isaac is like such mystery stories. The key to understanding Abraham’s response is in a fact whose significance is often missed: God’s miraculous, unmistakable revelation of himself, his trustworthiness, and his power to Abraham. Indeed, it’s a fact that Rachel Held Evans’s post, “I would fail Abraham’s test (and I bet you would too),” overlooks.

What made Abraham different?

Woodcut of the Lord directing Abram to count the stars, for “Die Bibel in Bildern” by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, 1860 [public domain]

Recap. In Part 1 of this series, we looked at Evans’s main argument about the Bible story of Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac: Either God’s “real test is in whether you refuse,” or “stories” such as these are not “historical realities,” or the “deity you were taught to worship does evil things” so people should “question the deity’s very existence.” This is a faulty dilemma because missing facts make everything clear. Part 2 of this series looked at the missing fact that Abraham’s culture considered ritual human sacrifice to be morally good. Today we’ll look at a second missing fact, one that’s there in the story but which is easily overlooked as significant: miraculous revelation.

About God asking Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, Evans says:

I’d like to think that even if those demands thundered from the heavens in a voice that sounded like God’s, I’d have sooner been struck dead than obeyed them. 

So what made Abraham different?

Abraham different in how God prepared him

The significant fact leading up to Abraham’s test is God’s revelation of himself to Abraham. God prepared Abraham for the test by giving Abraham and his family unmistakable evidence of himself and his character.

  • God revealed his Person: For seventy-five years, Abraham and his family worshiped the moon god Sin and various idols of wood and gold (Joshua 24:2). Then one day God spoke to Abraham and said, “Go … to the land that I will show you” (Genesis 12:1). Think of the significance of this: God spoke. This was a God whom Abraham didn’t know, but this God knew him. When Abraham obeyed and went to the land, God appeared to him in a theophany (12:7). In fact, the story tells us God appeared to him in visions and theophanies multiple times (15:1, 17:1, 18:1). He also appeared to Abraham’s wife (18:9-15). In one theophany, the Lord and two angels ate food Abraham and Sarah prepared (Genesis 18:8). This was unmistakable evidence of God’s presence—in other words, it wasn’t a dream or a vision but a physical encounter.
  • God revealed he sees, hears, and helps: “Fear not, Abram, I am your shield,” the Lord told Abraham. Abraham and at least five family members—Hagar, Sarah, Lot, Lot’s wife, Lot’s daughters—spoke with angels in ways that communicated that God hears when people cry out and he watches over those who are his (Genesis 16:7, 18:20-21, 19:15-16, 21:17). Additionally, God protected Sarah twice when powerful men tried to take her as wife (12:17-20, 20:3), and he helped Abraham defeat four armies with just 318 men (Genesis 14:1, 14-15).
  • God revealed his justice: The Lord told Abraham that the “outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great,” and he was investigating whether they were as bad as the outcry said (Genesis 18:20-21). Abraham knew the evil of the city so he interceded, asking if the Lord would destroy entire cities if “ten are found there” who are righteous. The Lord said, “For the sake of ten I will not destroy it” (18:32). But ten righteous people could not be found. Two angels rescued Abraham’s nephew and his nephew’s daughters, and fire from heaven destroyed the cities. When Abraham saw the smoke rising from the cities, he knew that God investigates when people cry to him about injustice, and there is a point at which he will destroy those intent on harming others.
  • God revealed his grace: From all we know, Abraham hadn’t lived the first seventy-five years of life honoring God or following his ways. But when God appeared to Abraham in a vision and promised him a son and future offspring as numerous as the stars (Gen. 15), Abraham “believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness.” God showed He cared for Abraham.
  • God revealed his trustworthiness: When God first called Abraham to move to Canaan, he said that he would make of him a great nation. But twenty-four years later, his wife Sarah was ninety, past menopause (“the way of women had ceased to be with Sarah,” Genesis 18:11), and still childless. Yet the Lord appeared and told Abraham and Sarah that Sarah would bear a child by that time the following year. Impossible? Humanly speaking, yes. But God was true to his word, and Sarah conceived and bore Isaac (21:1-2).
  • God revealed his miraculous power: Through all these revelations, theophanies, destruction of evil, extraordinary helps, fulfilled promises, and the miraculous birth of the child of promise—Isaac—Abraham saw God’s unmistakable power and God’s willingness to use it.

Abraham and the angeles

“Abraham and the Angels” by Aert de Gelder, 1680-1685 [public domain]

It’s important not to miss the significance of all this: Abraham knew God. By the time God asked him to sacrifice his son Isaac, Abraham knew God well enough to believe he could trust God even when he didn’t know all the answers. God had promised to make a nation from his son Isaac, and God had asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. To Abraham, both must be true. Thus, as Hebrews 11:19 says, Abraham reasoned that God would raise Isaac from the dead.

Abraham different in calling

The harder the call, the more evidence God gives. God gave Abraham unmistakable evidence of himself not only because he was establishing a covenant—involving God revealing himself to the world through a nation descended through Isaac that could teach his ways—but because he was going to call Abraham to do something exceedingly difficult: the sacrifice of Isaac. For that Abraham needed complete faith in God’s character and promise. Over the 40-55 years between God’s call to Abraham to go to Canaan and his call to sacrifice Isaac, God gave him the evidence he needed to complete the task.

Abraham different in faith

Rachel Held Evans says that if she had been in Abraham’s place, “I’d have sooner been struck dead than obeyed.” What made Abraham different? Abraham saw the evidence of God’s power and goodness; Abraham heard God’s promises about Isaac; and Abraham believed God.

***

Why was this test so important that God carefully prepared Abraham for it? The next post reveals the third missing fact: motive.

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Abraham & Human Sacrifice? Answering Rachel Held Evans, Part 2

Did Rachel Held Evans miss cultural facts about the binding of Isaac and human sacrifice?

As I read Rachel Held Evans’s blog, “I would fail Abraham’s test (and I bet you would too),” I was reminded of Dorothy Sayers’s mystery novel, Strong Poison. In it, Harriet Vane stands accused of murder with substantial evidence against her. The police are certain of her guilt, but the novel’s hero, Lord Peter Wimsey, knows they’re wrong. Author Os Guinness describes why:

But into that grave situation steps the fearless hero, Lord Peter Wimsey. He knows Harriet, so he believes in her innocence, and his logic has a steel to match the prosecutor’s case. The known facts may be against her, but because he knows her, he knows that the known facts cannot be all the facts. The challenge is to find the missing facts that change the picture entirely. The police had jumped to the wrong conclusion on watertight-seeming evidence that was actually incomplete.[1]

Abraham & human sacrifice

“The Sacrifice of Isaac” by Juan de Valdes Leal, 1659

It’s no surprise that by the end of the novel, Lord Peter has uncovered the missing facts and proven Harriet was framed.

Here’s what the novel has to do with the story of Abraham’s binding of Isaac. Just as the police jumped to conclusions about Harriet Vane’s guilt before they had all the facts, so we can jump to conclusions about God’s guilt in this story before having all the facts, as Evans’s blog post appears to do. Just as Lord Peter knew Harriet enough to trust her and search for the missing facts he knew had to exist, so many Christians know God well enough to trust him until the missing facts come in; Evans readily admits that she is not in such a place of trust yet.

Evans’s main argument, as I understand it, is that the conscience “God … imprinted us all with” tells her “that I would sooner turn my back on everything I know to be true than sacrifice my child on the altar of religion” as Abraham almost did; therefore, either God’s “real test is in whether you refuse,” or “stories” such as these are not “historical realities,” or the “deity you were taught to worship does evil things” so “question the deity’s very existence.” In short, either Abraham failed God’s test, or the story isn’t historically authentic, or a good God doesn’t exist.

I addressed why the first two options of Evans’s argument are unsatisfactory: (a) both the Old and New Testaments affirm that Abraham’s obedience was what God wanted; and (b) the New Testament treats the story not only as historically authentic, but as preaching the gospel beforehand, with Abraham and Isaac prophetically acting out a momentous future event (more on this in a future post).

Now, the question remains, if the story is historically accurate, does it make God into a deity who “does evil things” that “look like abuse” such that “our moral compass is rendered totally unreliable”? No, this is a faulty dilemma: we could be missing the facts that clear up the issues.

Indeed, most of us when we first read this story are missing three types of facts:

  1. Cultural facts: facts about the culture which are missing from the story
  2. Overlooked facts: facts that are in the story but which have significance that is easily overlooked
  3. Motive: theological facts that are revealed later

It is the cultural facts that I want to examine today.

Now, Evans does say the story “makes a bit more sense in its ancient Near Eastern context.” But she neither explains that context nor tells why she considers it insufficient.

Abraham lived in a culture gone terribly wrong

Genesis says that Abraham was born in the city of Ur (traditionally in 2166 b.c.). Abraham and his extended family worshiped “other gods” (Josh. 24:2). Throughout the ancient Near East by this time, people believed that deities were behind the forces of nature. These deities weren’t much interested in human lives, and so to get their attention and manipulate them to drive nature in beneficial ways (for instance, send rain), people acted out rituals.

In Abraham’s birthplace Ur, religious rituals included human sacrifice. One of the most startling excavations from Ur is the so-called “Royal Cemetery” with its pits containing human sacrifices, most of them adults.[2] One pit had over seventy human sacrifices elaborately arrayed.

Human sacrifices found in Ur date prior to and during the age in which Abraham lived.[3] Later, Abraham moved to Haran, not far from other sites where human sacrifices have been uncovered from the same age in which Abraham lived (see ANE Human Sacrifices).

Although there were also infant sacrifices in the regions, these are mostly adult sacrifices. This is significant because at the time God tested Abraham by asking him to sacrifice Isaac, Isaac was not a child: he was around fifteen to thirty.

Abraham’s culture did not think human sacrifice wrong

The people of Abraham’s day would not have thought there was anything immoral about human sacrifices. In fact, they considered it an act of great piety. Archaeologist Laerke Recht notes that we should take care in our assumptions because “we may see a creature being sacrificed as a ‘victim’, while others could see it as honoured, sacred or some other aspect not immediately clear to us.”[4]

Additionally, in cultures that believed in gods that give blessings in return for sacrifices, sacrificing offspring would be considered a moral good. Imagine living in such a culture during a time of catastrophic drought: Children will die if no rain comes. In such a culture, it would be morally obligatory to do all you can to appease the gods and save your village. Oxford professor John Day says, “Desperate circumstances required desperate measures … and the offering of human sacrifice was thought to possess especially strong apotropaic power.”[5]

Abraham would not have thought that God’s request to sacrifice Isaac was morally wrong; it is more likely he considered it normal. Still, he believed God’s promises about Isaac and told his servants that he and Isaac would return together after the sacrifice (Genesis 22:5); Hebrews 11:19 says he considered that God would raise Isaac from the dead.

God’s provision brought a shift

Abraham lived in Ur where human sacrifice was practiced

“Ram Caught in Thicket” was found in Royal Cemetery of Ur along with many ritual human sacrifices

When Abraham took his knife to sacrifice Isaac, the angel of the Lord called to him and told him not to touch Isaac. Abraham looked and saw a ram caught in a thicket. Abraham offered the ram as a sacrifice and called the name of the place, “The Lord will provide.”

The answer

Rachel Held Evans asserts that if God did not mean for Abraham to protest and the story is historically accurate, then God is a deity who “does evil things” that “look like abuse” such that “our moral compass is rendered totally unreliable.” But the cultural facts tell us something different.

God asked Abraham to perform the ritual act that his culture considered the ultimate sign of devotion and perhaps the ultimate moral good. It was a test and proof to all that Abraham’s devotion to his God was as high as all others’ devotion to their gods. Then the Lord God provided a ram to show that this God was different: This God did not want humans sacrificing humans.

By this act the Lord showed he wanted his followers’ full devotion, as much devotion as they gave to other gods, but—again—he did not want humans sacrificing humans. By this act he depicted a future event which would open the way for sinful humans to have relationship with God and show the fullness of the Prophet Abraham’s words, “The Lord will provide.”

***

In the next post, we’ll examine a fact whose significance is often overlooked.

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  1. [1] Os Guinness, Fool’s Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion (Downers Grove: IVP, 2015), 48, emphasis his. ↩
  2. [2] Laerke Recht, “Symbolic Order: Liminality and Simulation in Human Sacrifice in the Bronze-age Aegean and Near East,” Journal of Religion and Violence (Academic Publishing, ISSN 0738-098X, 2014), 2:3, 413-414. ↩
  3. [3]Laerke Recht, “Human sacrifice in the ancient Near East,” Trinity College Dublin Journal of Postgraduate Research (Dublin: Brunswick Press, 2010), 9:171. Recht says, “The tradition of human sacrifice appears to have continued at Ur into the Ur III period, as shown by the evidence from the Mausoleum of King Shulgi and Amar-sin, where one tomb chamber belonged to the king, and another contained a number of human skeletons, interpreted as sacrificial victims.” ↩
  4. [4]Recht, Journal of Religion and Violence, 404. Emphasis mine. ↩
  5. [5]John Day, Molech: A god of human sacrifice in the Old Testament (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 62-63. ↩
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