Retired Prof said...
Dennis, your comment about the story of Abraham and Isaac is pertinent to an anthology I am composing, with the working title "Fables of the Gods." The pattern is to summarize a story that includes a god or gods from one ancient tradition or another. Then I follow it with a moral like those attached to Aesop's fables.
Here's the moral for this story: "Not being human themselves, the gods see no reason to follow basic rules of human decency when they play a practical joke. Deal with it."
Your emphasis on Abraham's culpability is equally justifiable. In fact, way more so, if we're talking psychology instead of theology.
Here's the moral for this story: "Not being human themselves, the gods see no reason to follow basic rules of human decency when they play a practical joke. Deal with it."
Your emphasis on Abraham's culpability is equally justifiable. In fact, way more so, if we're talking psychology instead of theology.
RT Even as a child in Sunday School, this story puzzled me but also terrified me. What father would do that? What if the voices in his head were wrong? How damaged and distrusting of his father would Isaac forevermore be? What did Mrs. Abraham think of this? It never made sense to me and I never took it as a story of great faith worthy of note. It seemed a manifestation of mental illness. At any rate, I was NEVER inspired by it. And in the Dutch Reformed Sunday School classes, Abraham got a pass and was one of the great men of the Bible. Not in my young world.
So for your consideration, this sums up an alternative answer to the whole thing nicely for me and would have had I seen it as a child! :)
YHWH's Amazing Test
NOTE
There is also some consideration in theological circles that the story was a transitional story between the Age of Moses and Taurus the Bull, 4000-2000 BCE where Bulls and Calves were the prominent icon of worship (i.e. Golden Calf worship) and the now beginning of the Age of Aries, the Lamb. Thus the change in symbols to be used in worship.
(An "Age" is noted as the 2100 years or so the Sun is found in each of the 12 Constellations ending in one complete cycle of 25,000 years, called the "Great Year")
Even Mithraism, which preceded Christianity, notes the change with the God Mithras slaying the Bull in it's iconography making way for the new age of Aries. The death of Jesus in the story marks the end of the Age of Aries with the death of the Lamb of God and the beginning of Pices, the Two Fish (ahem) and the Church Age of Christianity. I personally think when this Age, which is about to end and whose sacred fluid is blood, without which there is NO forgiveness, the Age of Aquarius , the Water Man, will find the sacred fluid of the future to be WATER. .
