Genesis study guide – Good Question

How could God traumatize Isaac by having Abraham nearly sacrifice him?

isaacsacrifice — Anton Losenko, “Abraham Sacrifices His Son Isaac”

Q. One of the things I struggle with most is God requesting Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. I get the dynamic between God and Abraham on this, but why wouldn’t God at least have done it when Isaac was a baby and couldn’t remember it? It just seems cruel to me to inflict lifelong psychological damage on someone from the terror and other emotions that your father tying you up, ready to sacrifice you, would cause. I’m not sure any level of faith in God would compensate for the damage that would do to a person.

In these study guides, I often ask groups to envision particular biblical stories through the eyes of one of their characters. Your question is a sensitive and compassionate one that arises from a perceptive reading of this story through Isaac’s eyes.

We typically interpret this story from God’s perspective and see in it a foreshadowing of the substitutionary atonement: “God himself will provide the lamb.” Or, we see it from Abraham’s perspective and read it as an object lesson in faith and difficult obedience. (Charles Spurgeon preached a famous sermon on this passage, using Abraham as a positive example, about the kind of obedience that faith produces: immediate, unconditional, complete, etc.)

But when we see the story through Isaac’s eyes, it is pretty terrifying. It would be bad enough to be tied up and nearly sacrificed by anybody, but for your father to do this, when he’s supposed to be your protector, would be devastating.

One possibility to consider is that Isaac might have experienced this event somewhat differently from the way a person would today. This story is, among other things, about Abraham and his family coming to understand better the character of the God who has called them into a covenant relationship in order to make them a blessing to the whole world. Considered in that light, it’s actually a polemic against human sacrifice, which was widely practiced in this place and time.

It’s not as though God thought up human sacrifice as an extreme way to test Abraham’s loyalty. Rather, God was asking of Abraham what it was believed the other gods were asking of their followers. When Abraham demonstrated his complete devotion, God then made clear that he didn’t want human sacrifices.

But going into the story, Abraham and Isaac don’t yet realize how different God is from the other so-called gods in this respect. This is why neither one of them balks when they realize that a human sacrifice is in view (Abraham at the beginning, Isaac later on): if you didn’t do what the gods expected of you, they would bring disaster on you and your family. In effect, Isaac may not have expected his father to protect him from a demand like this from the gods–no one was able to defy them, and trying to do so would only expose the family to greater danger and damage. Children today don’t have issues with their parents for not keeping a tornado from hitting their house.

But I think this is only a secondary answer. I agree with you that, whatever the cultural differences, for Isaac to be tied up by his own father and nearly turned into a human sacrifice must have been terrifying and traumatic on some level. So the primary answer must be that coming to know God deeply and truly as our Heavenly Father can and does bring healing from the psychological damage we suffer through things our parents do. If they fail to protect us, or if they actively harm us, this does more damage than almost any other person could cause. But even when this has happened, coming to know God, in a deep relational sense, as our Heavenly Father brings emotional and psychological healing by reassuring us of our infinite worth in his eyes and giving us renewed confidence in his love and protection. And this is what I hope all readers of this story from Isaac’s life will experience.

Was Noah’s flood a worldwide event or a local one?

Q. In your Genesis study guide you seem to take for granted that Noah’s flood was a worldwide event. You write, “God must have used some extraordinary means to cause a flood of this magnitude, since ordinary rainfall, even a downpour of forty days, wouldn’t be sufficient to cover all the mountains on earth.” But I’ve heard some people claim instead that this flood was a local event. How would you respond?

You’re right, one school of interpretation does hold that Noah’s flood was a local event in which the waters rose 15 cubits (22 feet) above their usual height, or else this far above their flood stage. This would still be a tremendous flood, but local one. However, the statement in Genesis that the high hills (or mountains) were all covered with water would seem to rule this out.

The statement is actually made within a poetic couplet that’s based on the repetition of meaning, whose second line provides greater focus, as is typical of Hebrew poetry. The couplet can be translated this way:

And the waters were great, exceedingly, exceedingly, upon the earth
and they covered all the high hills that were under the skies;
Five and ten cubits upwards were the waters great
and they covered the high hills.

“All the high hills that were under the skies” are in view, and the claim is that these were covered to a height of 15 cubits, so I think the writer’s intention is to describe a worldwide event.

However, it’s important to remember that all of this is written from an observational perspective. The author of the flood account is reporting that all of the high hills out to the visible horizon (“under the skies”) were covered by the waters. So this would conceivably still allow for a local flood, although it’s being envisioned as a worldwide event.

In either case, however, this would still be a flood of such magnitude that the problem of its mechanism remains. Some extraordinary means must have been responsible, because as I go on to say in the guide, the description of the flood in Genesis, no matter how we interpret it, “doesn’t line up with our modern cosmology. Much of the universe is described here by analogy to things in human experience, so that there are ‘floodgates’ in the sky and ‘springs’ in the ‘great deep.'” So it’s a real challenge to get from the way the author envisioned the created world to the way we understand it today.

I think it’s more profitable to realize that the Genesis account here is describing a wrestling match between the waters and the earth. The waters “were great” or “prevailed” over the earth: “Prevail” in Hebrew is the root GBR, while the adjective “high” applied to the mountains or hills is GBH. Both roots convey the sense of strength and might. In other words, the greatest strength that the earth can muster—supposedly immovable mountains—cannot resist the force that God raises against it.

The flood was sent because almost the entire human race had turned away from God into violence and wickedness, but if they felt nothing could stop them from taking that path, their false sense of security has now been exposed. The story ultimately has a moral lesson, so if the only thing we take away from it is a conclusion about how widespread the flood was, or about how it happened, we’ve missed the point.

For a further discussion of the flood in light of the way the biblical authors envisioned the created world, see this related post.

Ranking God as a character

Q. I’m using your Genesis guide in my ladies’ Bible class at church. The women say the study guide is the best one that they have ever used. They like Genesis so much that they want to do Exodus next. Thank you for all your work in writing these guides! We do have a question, though. The women want to know why God is included among the characters who are rated from best to worst in the Hagar story (question 3 on page 65 of the study guide to Genesis).

Thanks so much for this encouraging report! I hope you all continue to enjoy studying Genesis together this way. Unfortunately a guide to Exodus isn’t ready yet, but one may be published later in the series. In the meantime, you can see all the other guides that are available here.

To answer your question, the idea behind the ranking exercise was to give everyone the freedom and opportunity to share their thoughts and feelings about the Hagar story. We’re often taught in church, either directly or indirectly, that we can’t ask any questions about the way God does things. We get the message that we shouldn’t even feel uncomfortable about some things—that if we do, we must be bad Christians. But when we read the Hagar story, we may legitimately wonder why God sent her back to a mistress who was mistreating her, and we may feel badly for her.

I wanted to give people the freedom to express those questions and feelings. There are answers to them, but we’ll never find these answers if we don’t allow the questions. Some of the women in your group might feel that Hagar is actually the best or most sympathetic character in the story; they might have some questions about what God tells her to do; and they might feel that Abraham and Sarah could and should have done a lot of things differently. My goal was to give people the freedom to express thoughts like that—the kind we may not always feel are allowed in church—and so establish an atmosphere of acceptance and trust where people can find the answers to those questions together.

Questions as volleyballs

Q. Our small group is using your Genesis guide and the study is going really well, both the other leader and I think so. Our group is fairly large (8-12 each week), so discussion generally flows pretty freely. Your questions are good, although we don’t stay on them for very long. I guess the discussion typically goes like a volleyball game. The question serves the ball, then everyone hits it around for a while. When the ball finally hits the floor, whoever is leading the discussion serves up the next question. It works well. The group has talked quite a bit about chiasm and the chiastic structure of the narrative (we just finished Genesis 15), and that’s been really enjoyable. It’s definitely a new concept for most everyone in the group. I’m just curious—is our study working the way you hoped?

I’d say your study is going exactly the way I hoped. Once you pose the questions to the group, the goal isn’t to get everyone to “stick to the subject” or “find the right answer.” As the guide explains in the instructions for leaders at the beginning (p. 4), the goal is to help you all reflect on “the meaning of the whole passage, in the wider context of Genesis, in light of your personal experience.” That approach is necessarily going to generate a wide-ranging discussion. But I think that should be welcome, as a counterpart to times when we may have been led to focus on the minutiae of details in the Bible at the expense of the big picture.

Postmodern young adults who have little or no biblical background are one of the main intended audiences for these guides. I find that they’re accustomed to looking for meaning through the lens of their own experience. While our personal experience can’t be the primary authority in our lives, I believe it does provide one legitimate avenue into the authoritative truths we find in the Bible. In fact, it’s been said that we can’t understand anything in the Bible unless we have some partial kind of experience with it already. So I’d encourage you to continue allowing and fostering the kinds of discussions you’re already having, even if you feel that you don’t stay right on the questions for very long. From what you describe, I’d say they’re working!