Genesis22chapter 22

Genesis 22:1

The phrase after these things points back to chapter 21, where Ishmael was sent away, so by the time God speaks Isaac is the only son left in the tent. The word rendered tempt here means to test or to prove, and James says plainly that God tempts no man with evil. Abraham answers Behold, here I am, and he gives that same answer to Isaac in verse 7 and to the angel in verse 11, three times in one chapter.

Genesis 22:2

The command is worded in rising order of cost, thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and Clarke, following Warburton, notes that the order of the words raises the price with every clause. This is the first time love is named anywhere in Scripture, and it is a father's love for a son he is being told to offer. The Hebrew phrase behind get thee into the land of Moriah is the one that opened his life at Get thee out of thy country in chapter 12, and it occurs nowhere else. Moriah is the mount where 2 Chronicles 3:1 puts Solomon's temple.

Genesis 22:3-4

He rises early and cleaves the wood himself before setting out, so he carries the means of his son's death for three days before he reaches the place. The text gives no account of the night before and never says he told Sarah, which Henry marks as a silence rather than filling it. Gill measures Beersheba at about forty miles from Moriah and makes that the two days behind the third. Jerome argues from the same three days that Abraham set out from Gerar instead, since Mamre lies barely a day off.

Genesis 22:5

This is the first time worship is named in Scripture, and the act it names is the surrender of a son. Abraham tells the young men that he and the lad will go yonder and worship and come again to you, speaking of the return as something both of them will do. Clarke asks how he could say it consistently with the truth, and Hebrews answers that he reckoned God was able to raise him up even from the dead.

Genesis 22:6

Abraham keeps the fire and the knife in his own hands and lays the wood on the son who is to be burnt with it. Wesley and the older writers set the son carrying the wood beside Christ carrying his cross, and since the New Testament never draws that line itself, it stands here as their reading with their names on it. The sentence they went both of them together closes this verse and closes verse 8 as well, on either side of the only words Isaac speaks.

Genesis 22:7-8

These are the only words Isaac speaks in the whole account, and it is the right question. The first lamb in Scripture is the seven ewe lambs Abraham sets before Abimelech in chapter 21, and this is the first lamb for a burnt offering. Abraham answers that God will provide himself a lamb, and what God provides on the mountain is a ram, so the word he used is still standing when the chapter ends. Clarke takes the answer as prophecy and points forward to the Lamb of God that John the Baptist names.

Genesis 22:9

Isaac carries wood enough to burn a body up a mountain while his father is well past a hundred, so Calvin and Clarke both take it that the binding happened because the son allowed it. The word Genesis uses of him here and at verse 5 is the one it uses of Joseph at seventeen in 37:2 and of Benjamin when he is a grown man with sons of his own, so it decides nothing about a small child. Sarah dies at a hundred and twenty-seven in the next chapter and Isaac was born when she was ninety, which puts a ceiling of thirty-seven on his age at this altar; Josephus reckons twenty-five, and Jewish tradition commonly gives thirty-seven by reading the two chapters together. The Hebrew name for the episode, the Akedah, comes from this one word for binding.

Genesis 22:10

Genesis spends one verse on the act and gives not one word of what either man felt. The knife is out and the hand already stretched before anything interrupts, so the test runs to the last moment it can. Ambrose reads the father's hand as steadier than his heart, fearing the stroke would miss rather than that it would land.

Genesis 22:11-12

The voice calls the name twice, and a doubled name marks the hinge of a life elsewhere in the book as well, Jacob at 46:2 and Moses later at the bush. Abraham answers Here am I for the third time in this chapter, to God, to his son, and now out of heaven. The words handed back to him are his own orders returned, thy son, thine only son, and the reason given for stopping him is that he had not withheld his son.

Genesis 22:13

The ram is behind Abraham and caught fast, which means it was there before he turned and before it was wanted. He offers it in the stead of his son, and it is the first animal in Scripture that dies in the place of a named person. Athanasius makes the limit of it plain, that the death of Isaac would have bought nothing for the world, and that the sacrifice was for Abraham's testing rather than for Isaac.

Genesis 22:14

The name means the LORD will see, or will provide, and Clarke notes it is the same verb Abraham had already used in his answer to Isaac in verse 8. The saying that outlived him is in the passive, In the mount of the LORD it shall be seen, so one man's relief on one morning became a proverb other men used. Jerome records the Hebrew use of it in his own day, that when they are in distress they say it of themselves, as God had pity on Abraham so will he have pity on us.

Genesis 22:15-16

Heaven speaks a second time, and Genesis states its own rule about a doubled word at 41:32, that the thing is established by God. What follows is the only oath in Genesis in which God swears by himself, and Hebrews builds an argument on the fact that he could swear by no greater. Clarke takes the speaker who says saith the LORD and yet swears by himself to be the Mediator the offering pointed to, and that identification is his reading rather than a settled one.

Genesis 22:17-18

The promise is enlarged rather than repeated, since the seed possessing the gate of his enemies is new here and turns the blessing toward conquest. Clarke reads the gate as the whole strength of an enemy, its troops, its counsels and its walled cities. The blessing on all the nations had been given freely in chapter 12 and is now sealed because thou hast obeyed my voice, the first appearance of the word obey in Scripture, and Paul presses the singular in the word seed when he applies the promise to Christ.

Genesis 22:19

The verse counts the party going home and does not name Isaac among them, and Genesis never again records the two of them speaking to each other. They go to Beersheba, where Abraham settles, and where Isaac is living when God appears to him in chapter 26. The next thing the book reports is Sarah's death, and then the only ground Abraham ever owns in the land of promise, a burial cave bought for four hundred shekels.

Genesis 22:20-22

News from home reaches Abraham right after the mountain, and the book drops the drama to read out a family register. Eight sons are named for his brother Nahor, and some of the names carry on into the rest of Scripture, since Clarke ties Huz to the land of Uz where Job lived and Buz to Elihu the Buzite. Only the last man on the list matters to the story Genesis is telling, and Gill says the others are named for Bethuel's sake.

Genesis 22:23-24

Rebekah is named once, at the end of a list, and the reader is told nothing about why she matters. Two chapters on, the servant will travel to this town, stop at a well and meet her there, which is the same shape Jacob's meeting with Rachel takes in chapter 29. She will also be barren for twenty years before the twins come, as Sarah was for twenty-five, so the wife supplied here arrives with the same obstacle standing in front of the same promise.