I’ve always found the story of Isaac a bit odd, in both what is says and what it doesn’t say. To recap, God tells Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Abraham takes this request without question, which is pretty dark.
What happens next has some strange gaps. Specifically, there is never an explicit mention of what happens to Sarah. What we know is that right before Abraham takes the final step to sacrifice his son, an angel calls out:
“And Abraham picked up the knife to slay his son.”
Then an angel of God called to him from heaven: Abraham! Abraham! And he answered. “Here I am.”
Do not raise your hand against the boy, or do anything to him. For now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your favored one, from Me.”
The sacrifice stops. Isaac survives. And then on the next page we find out that Sarah is dead. No explanation.
The translation I am using is the Sefaria reading from the Jewish Publication Society; most of the Christian Bibles specify “he” when talking about the angel. But what makes more sense? In the Hebrew Bible angels have no gender, so the retroactive assignment of a “he” is actually quite strange”.
Is it possible that Sarah was the angel and that’s why she died? God was never someone who demanded absolute obeying from here.
Note that Isaac never speaks to his father again in the Bible. Abraham doesn’t even go home, he stays in Beersheba for the rest of his life. He sends his servant to find Isaac as a wife, he does not go himself. When the servant succeeds:
“Isaac brought her into the tent of his mother Sarah, and he married Rebekah. So she became his wife, and he loved her; and Isaac was comforted after his mother’s death.”
He grieves greatly for his mother while seeming to have no problem erasing his father from his life forever.
Abraham’s test was supposedly to see if he would obey God at all costs, when our religion is based on debate and argumentation with God. Based on the virtues and values you see across follow I’d sooner believe that Sarah passed the test than Abraham. Who was the real one who passed the test, Abraham who would do anything God asked, including a blood sacrifice or Sarah who would do anything to save her son?
And if the latter, what is the real reason blood sacrifices stopped for the rest of the Hebrew Bible? Because of Sarah, the mother of the Jewish (and Christian)
I wasn’t there, so I can’t speak to my interpretation being correct. But I’m saying I think there’s a chance. And that this is the lesson I prefer to carry, one of bravery over blind obedience.
Amazing