TERM

AND
REFLECTION PAPER
IN
RELIGION

Ivanka Alexa Rousele Pia

Submitted by
Ms. Laura Lebios
Submitted to
 ABRAHAM

Introduction: Abraham is reserved as a father and a founder. The Bible calls him “our spiritual

faith”. Archaeology knows him as literally impossible to trace. History calls him the father of

monotheism and originator of a great battle –spanning centuries- for pride and a little place: the

land of Israel. Abraham was born Abram, son of Terah, at the beginning of millennium BC in

Ur, the capital of Mesopotamia at the height of its splendour as a highly developed ancient

world. According to Jewish tradition, he was then son of an idol maker and destroyed all of his

father’s idols except one in a story that foreshadows his devotion to one God. The Koran tells of

a time when Abraham confronts his father about his idol worship and is condemned to burn in a

furnace by King Nimrod of Babylon, but God protected him. His family left Ur to travel

northwest along the trade route and the Euphrates River to the city of Haran. Abram settled down

in Haran with his family. He married Sarai and entered into a lifelong partnership with her.
Abram was in Haran at age 75 when he got a call from God to leave his family behind and

follow God into strange land that he would give him. Abram took his wife, his nephew, Lot and

his possessions and departed. Abram moved South into the land of Canaan, a land inhabited by a

warrior people called Canaanites. God told Abraham his descendants would inherit the Canaanite

land. According to Judaism Christianity, Isaac is the son whom the offering story is about.

According to Islamic interpretation, Ishmael is the son in the story. Either way, Abraham was

asked in a test of faith by God to take one of his sons onto Mount Moriah and sacrifice him as a

burnt offering. At the time, children were often sacrificed as burnt offerings to a variety of

deities. Abraham submitted, despite the fact that he “loved” his son. He took the son up on the

mountain and prepared to sacrifice him. At the last moment, God told him to stay his hand and

ram appeared in the bushes. Abraham and his son slayed the ram as an offering, instead. God

reiterated His promises to Abraham again, at this point, and made the covenant binding. Because

Abraham had faith in the One God, God showed Himself different from other gods who desired

humans sacrificed and started His history with a people, the Jews or the Muslims. Christianity

also lays claim to this story as the fore-shadowing of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

Christian scholars have likened this story as a foretelling of the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus. As

Isaac was spared, and compassion shown for the sake of his father’s love, Jesus took upon

himself that sacrifice that was removed from Isaac and his father Abraham. Jesus allowed

himself to be sacrificed for the sake of others. This concept is born of the ancient Jewish tradition

of the Day of Atonement. During Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, a time of intense

prayer and fasting, for seeking forgiveness of all the sins committed during the previous year,

one goat was selected for slaughter, as atonement and another sent out into the people. Jesus is
considered by some Christian scholars to be the sacrifice, given in atonement for the sins of the

people, in place of Isaac who escaped slaughter. As Abraham placed he wood for the sacrificial

fire on Isaac’s back to carry up the mountain, so the wood of the cross on which Jesus was

crucified was placed on his back to carry up the Mount of Calvary.

Body: In the Bible, the story of Abraham’s devotion to God was criterion by the sacrificial of his

son, Isaac. He sent his son, Ishmael, into the desert with Hagar, putatively to die. God adjures

Abraham to acquiesce to Sarah’s wishes, and he then does so. Left with his son, Isaac, the son on

whom all the assumptions of an elderly father and mother have wished their future and the future

of all they have worked for during their lives. And Abraham is told to sacrifice him. On the face

of it, this is a story of God testing the faith of his beloved follower. God wants to know the

devotion Abraham holds for God is greater than that which he holds for his own son. This

somewhat appears to be the act of jealous God, rather than a God of love, of generosity.

Significant to this story is the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his beloved and cherished

child for the sake of God’s devotion and word. To the eyes of a literalist this is the demand of a

brutal, possessive and punishing God, and if we leave the story there without analysing further

we cannot comprehend the God of Compassion, bringing a message of Love to Humanity. But

for Christian, who sees the Holy Spirit of God moving within the whole of creation, as moving

within each and every one of us, the story of Abraham and Isaac holds a equivalent with God

willing to give up the life of the mortal offspring for the sake of the Love of the whole of

humanity, God loving so much the children of his formation, a God willing to sacrifice all he has

and loves for the sake of all he loves. And we have an obedient son, a son who knows the pain of

sacrifice he must undergo, but is willing nevertheless to endure that shame and pain, to be bound,
to be slaughtered, for the sake of the errors and mistakes of us all. It is not that God demands the

sacrifice of beloved child to compensate for our sins, but rather our jealous and hostile cry that

God prove the depth of his love for us painfully sacrificing that Love on the cross.

Conclusion: There is a riddle which asks how one can hold onto Love. And the answer is that

you cannot hold Love, you cannot keep it for yourself or protect it or cage it. The only way you

can hold onto Love is to set it free. Perhaps this story, the sacrificial of Isaac on the pyre is a

metaphor for the ways in which we seek to enchain up that which we love to our own purpose,

and in doing so we carnage, we slaughter, we annihilate the object of our affections. But when

we vent that yearn to enchain, to control, or even destroy lest others get their hands on it, when

we let go, and that process of letting go, process of sacrificial can be painful, God provides. Just

as God provided a ram for Abraham to annihilate instead of his son, God’s Holy Spirit

emblematize in the form of a dove hovered over Jesus when he was baptised in the Jordan river,

in releasing the bonds of control, we release our own souls from their bondage.