Isaac

Isaac is the son God promised to a couple too old to have one. He was born to Abraham at a hundred and to Sarah at ninety, and God gave him his name a year before he existed. The name is built on the Hebrew verb for laughing, which is what both parents did when they heard the promise. Every time anyone says his name they are saying that word. He is the middle link of the three patriarchs and the one readers move past. Genesis gives him one famous scene, and it is nearly always told as a story about his father. From his own side it runs differently. He is woken early and told nothing. He walks three days beside a silent man. The wood of a whole burnt offering goes on his back while his father carries the fire and the knife. He is the one who works out what is missing from the procession, and he asks. Then he is bound and laid on the wood he carried. Genesis never says how old he was that day. The word it uses of him covers a wide range of ages, and Sarah's death in the next chapter puts a ceiling of thirty-seven on him. The questions below set out the evidence and the three readings and settle none of them. Genesis 26 is the only chapter where Isaac is the subject from the first verse to the last. God appears to him and speaks the covenant into his own hearing. His next recorded act is a lie. He tells the men of Gerar that his wife is his sister because he is afraid they will kill him for her. Then he farms through a famine and reaps a hundredfold, digs his father's wells out again and puts his father's names back on them, is pushed off two wells without fighting for either, and credits God rather than his own patience when he finally has room. He married Rebekah at forty and had no children until sixty. His parents had faced the same trial and his father's answer had been Hagar. Isaac's answer was twenty years of prayer, and Genesis 25:21 says the LORD heard him. Then the twins came and the house divided. He loved Esau because he had a taste for wild game, and Rebekah loved Jacob, and the text says so plainly about both parents. Old and blind, he moved to bless Esau against an oracle he had been given sixty years earlier. He tested the son in front of him four times, said out loud that the voice was Jacob's, and blessed him anyway. When he learned what had happened he trembled violently and refused to take the blessing back. Hebrews 11:20 counts that as faith. Later he called Jacob in knowing exactly who stood there, and handed on the blessing of Abraham by its own name. He lived a hundred and eighty years, longer than his father and longer than his son, and he never once left the land he was promised. He owned none of it. Esau and Jacob buried him together at Machpelah, the way he and Ishmael had buried Abraham. God's own name for Himself carries Isaac in the middle of it, and Jesus read the present tense of that formula as proof that Isaac is alive.

Hebrews 11:17-19 is the passage the New Testament builds on. It calls Isaac Abraham's one and only son, says Abraham reasoned that God could raise the dead, and says that in a sense he did receive Isaac back from death. The Greek word behind that phrase is parabole. The dominant reading takes the return as an enacted parable of resurrection. Adam Clarke offered a second in 1832, that parabole here means a jeoparding of life, so the verse describes an escape from imminent death rather than a figure. Both readings sit in the commentary tradition. Genesis 22:2 describes Isaac three ways in a row, your son, your only son, whom you love, and Romans 8:32 runs the same construction in reverse over God, who did not spare His own Son. Genesis 22:6 puts the timber of a whole burnt offering on Isaac's back, and John 19:17 has Jesus carrying His own cross. Clement of Alexandria stated the reading about AD 200. Isaac was a son as the Son is, a victim as the Lord was, and all he did was carry the wood of his sacrifice. Origen worked it further about AD 245. Carrying the wood for a burnt offering is a priest's duty, so Isaac stands as victim and priest at once, and the text has him walking with his father rather than behind him. Bonaventure repeated the reading in 1257 and John Wesley in 1765. These are readings offered by named men, and Genesis makes no such claim about itself. Genesis 22:13 says the ram was offered in place of his son. The Hebrew behind that phrase is tachath, and the same word carries the same load at Genesis 44:33, where Judah offers himself as a slave in place of the boy, to his father, over a brother. The vocabulary of Moriah comes back inside Isaac's own family two generations later. Isaac asked for a lamb and a ram came, so the lamb is still owed at the end of Genesis 22, and John 1:29 answers the question he asked. Two of the oldest Christian writers on the chapter set the limit that keeps the reading honest. Athanasius of Alexandria wrote in a festal letter about AD 334 that the death of Isaac would not buy freedom for the world, and that only the death of the Savior could. Caesarius of Arles said the same from the other side about AD 530, that the ram was killed and Isaac was not because Isaac was a figure and not the reality. Hebrews 11:20 is the only verse in the Bible that credits Isaac himself with faith, and the chapter it credits him for is Genesis 27, where he was deceived. Matthew Henry, writing in 1710, put the weight where it belongs. Isaac's faith recovered itself and he ratified the blessing. Jesus then takes Isaac's name somewhere further. In Matthew 22:32 He builds the case for the resurrection out of a verb tense in Exodus 3:6, because God says I am the God of Isaac to Moses centuries after Isaac had died. He is not the God of the dead, but of the living. The son who was as good as dead and came back is named by Christ as proof that the dead live. A second reading has a long history and no apostolic citation behind it. Genesis 24 has a father send a servant far off to bring a bride to the son, and Origen read Rebekah following the servant to Isaac as the church coming to Christ, about AD 245. Caesarius of Arles worked the same scene about AD 530. No New Testament writer applies Genesis 24 to Christ and the church, and the servant is never called the Spirit in Scripture. It is a reading held by named men, and this page presents it as a reading rather than as the meaning of the chapter. Galatians 4:28 tells Gentile believers that they, like Isaac, are children of promise. Albert Barnes explained the mechanics with no triumph in them: born after the Spirit means born by the special agency of God rather than in the ordinary course of events. None of this takes anything from Israel. Romans 9 opens by insisting that God's word has not failed. Romans 11:1 asks whether God rejected His people and answers no. Romans 11:18 tells the grafted Gentile not to boast over the branches, because he does not support the root, the root supports him. Romans 11:29 says God's gifts and His call are irrevocable. Being a child of promise like Isaac describes how anyone comes in, by God's promise rather than by descent or by effort, and it takes nothing from anybody. This site's tradition holds that God's promises to Israel stand.