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.[ref] Os Guinness, Fool’s Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion (Downers Grove: IVP, 2015), 48, emphasis his. [/ref]

“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.[ref] 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. [/ref] 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.[ref]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.” [/ref] 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.

na’ar: boy or young man?

The story of Abraham binding Isaac is in Genesis 22; the prior chapter (21) brings Isaac to adolescence and in the following chapter (23) he is thirty-seven. The ESV translates the Hebrew word na’ar as “boy” in Genesis 22:5, 12, but elsewhere translates it “young man.” The word is used of the trained men who went with Abraham to rescue Lot (Gen. 14:24); of the men who attempted to rape angels (Gen. 19:4); of Joseph at age 28 (Gen. 41:12); of the spies whom Rahab hid (Jos. 6:23); of trained soldiers (2Sam. 2:14); and of Absalom when he tried to overthrow David’s throne (2Sam. 18:32).[/notice]

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.”[ref]Recht, Journal of Religion and Violence, 404. Emphasis mine. [/ref]

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.”[ref]John Day, Molech: A god of human sacrifice in the Old Testament (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 62-63. [/ref]

apotropaic: intended to ward off evil[/notice]

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

“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.

Related Posts

• Was Abraham Wrong? Answering Rachel Held Evans, Part 1: Does conscience require us to stamp the story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac as false or Abraham a moral failure?
• 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?
• Does God’s Motive Matter? Answering Rachel Held Evans, Part 4: If God’s defining characteristic is supposed to be love, why would he ask Abraham to sacrifice Isaac?
• Conscience says Abraham Wrong? Answering Rachel Held Evans, Part 5: Does God expect us to deny conscience by accepting the story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac?
• Abraham, Isaac & Child Sacrifice: A short version of this series
• Jesus in the Old Testament