Abraham Asked Isaac What He Saw on Moriah

Abraham stopped on the third morning and lifted his face toward the ridge ahead. Dust clung to the hem of his robe. The knife rode hard against his hip. He did not look at the servants. He looked at the mountain.

Click for full size

"Do you see what I see?" he asked Isaac.

Isaac was thirty-seven. His hands were already a man's hands. He shaded his eyes and answered without hesitation. "I behold a glorious mountain encircled by a cloud."

Abraham turned to the young men. "Do you see anything at all?"

They squinted at the same horizon. One rubbed grit from his lashes. "We see only desert," they said.

"Then abide with the ass," Abraham commanded. "The ass sees nothing, and you see nothing." He left them there like beasts that carry wood and never understand where the wood is going. The ass shifted its weight and snorted. The young men sat. Abraham and Isaac walked on alone.

The Knife and the Missing Lamb

Abraham took fire and the slaughtering knife in his own hand. Isaac carried the wood on his back, the beams knocking his shoulders with every step. They walked yonder, toward the cloud, toward the place God had named. Abraham kept saying under his breath the old promise: so shall your seed be. He had told the servants they would worship and return. His mouth spoke peace. His body walked into a trial he himself had once invited when he begged heaven for a son and spoke of sacrifice in the heat of longing, then lived long enough to forget how heavy a vow can grow.

Wind pushed ash-smell up the slope. Isaac broke the quiet.

"My father."

"Here am I, my son."

"Behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?"

Fear seized Isaac the moment the question left him. His knees trembled. He had seen nothing prepared for the altar, and the absence told him more than any speech. He asked again, because the first answer might still be wrong. Abraham answered him straight. "Since you ask, the Holy One has selected you."

Isaac swallowed. Sweat ran into the corner of his mouth. "If He has chosen me, I will surrender my soul. But I am gravely concerned about my mother."

They went on together of one mind. One would slaughter. One would be slaughtered. The road did not fork. Father and son no longer looked like two men of the same age in every city. Trial had already begun to write years into Abraham's face, the mark he once asked for so the world could tell who must be honored first.

Bind Me So I Do Not Spoil the Offering

At the place God had shown him, Abraham built the altar stone by stone and arranged the wood. Isaac climbed up. The will to live was strong in him. He felt it rising like heat under his ribs, a living animal that did not care about heavens or vows.

"Father, bind my hands and feet," he said. "When I see the knife descending I may tremble, and the offering may become defective. Do not make me a blemished offering."

Abraham bound him. Rope bit into wrist and ankle. Isaac turned his face toward the empty air above the ridge and spoke one more charge. "Do not tell my mother about this while she stands at the edge of a pit or a roof, lest she hurl herself down and die."

Abraham stretched forth his hand and took the knife. He meant to draw blood until a measure of it left the body. Ha-Satan, the Accuser who serves the court above, shoved the hand. The knife fell and rang on stone. Abraham stooped for it again, fingers scraping. A voice cut the sky. "Lay not your hand upon the lad."

If that voice had delayed another breath, Isaac would have been sacrificed. The rope still held. The wood still waited for fire that would not take a son.

Abraham Refused an Angel's Order

An angel of the Lord called twice, because Abraham was already hurrying toward the cut. "Abraham, Abraham." The first call did not stop him. He demanded the source of the command with the knife still near the rope.

"Who are you?"

"An angel."

"When I was commanded to take my son, the Holy One spoke to me," Abraham said. "If He now wishes to stop me, let Him tell me so."

Only then did heaven open a second time. Abraham stood over the bound body and argued upward. A man tests a companion because he does not know the heart. God knows the heart and the kidneys. Why this trial at all? Heaven answered that now it was known Abraham feared God. Abraham would not climb down. He swore he would not leave the altar until he spoke what he came to speak. He held God to the old star-count: seed through Isaac. He asked that when Isaac's children sin and suffer, heaven count the binding as if ashes already lay piled on the stones, and pardon them and release them from their anguish.

God told him to turn. Behind them a ram stood caught in a thicket by its horns, one of the ten things prepared from the twilight of the first Sabbath eve. Abraham untied his son. The ropes left red rings on Isaac's skin. They offered the ram. The horn that held the beast became, in the charge heaven laid on him, the horn Israel would blow when judgment comes near and mercy must be reminded of a mountain and a knife that did not finish its work.

What the Road Cost on the Way Home

While the knife hung above Isaac, the Accuser went to Sarah in the guise of her son. She opened her arms. She asked what the father had done. The false Isaac told her of mountains, valleys, the altar, the rope, the blade. He said that only a cry from heaven had stopped the cut. Sarah fainted and died under that news, joy and terror collapsing into one. When Abraham came later to mourn and weep for her, he came from Moriah, still smelling of smoke and sheep's blood.

Isaac walked down the mountain with a body that had felt the rope. He did not speak much. Abraham walked with the trial written into his gait, white years and a vow kept and broken in the same hour. The cloud that only some eyes could see stayed behind them on the ridge. The servants waited with the ass in a desert that had never once looked like a mountain of glory. They rose when the two returned, and no one asked them what they had missed, because they still saw only sand.