The Night of the Binding of Isaac Lives Inside Song of Songs

The Song of Songs opens at night. A lover lies on her bed searching. "On my bed at night I sought the one whom my soul loves." The surface reading is romantic, the nighttime longing that drives someone to rise and search through the city streets. But the rabbis were never satisfied with surface readings, especially not in the Song of Songs, which they understood as the holiest book in the entire canon, the place where the relationship between God and Israel was expressed with the most direct emotional intensity.

Which night was the poet describing? Yalkut Shimoni provides an answer that transforms the poem entirely: it was the night before the Akeidah, the night Abraham and Isaac lay under the stars before the morning that would test everything they had built together.

What Yalkut Shimoni Finds in Three Words

Yalkut Shimoni on Nach, section 986, examines the verse from Song of Songs (3:1) with the characteristic rabbinic assumption that no word in the sacred text is accidental. "On my bed at night" contains a night that must be identified. "I sought the one whom my soul loves" describes a search that must be located in the actual history of Israel's relationship with God.

The Akeidah is the most extreme moment of that relationship in Genesis. Abraham, who had waited one hundred years for a son, who had been promised that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars, receives the command to take that son to Mount Moriah and offer him as a burnt offering. The night before the journey is a night the Torah does not describe. It says Abraham rose early in the morning. What happened the night before is silence.

Yalkut Shimoni fills the silence with the Song of Songs: that night was the night of seeking, the night of lying on the bed and reaching toward the one whom the soul loves, the night of maximum tension between love and incomprehension. Abraham loved God. Abraham loved Isaac. The command put these loves in apparent conflict, and the night was the space in which that conflict had to be held before the morning resolved it.

The 3,205 texts of the midrash-aggadah collection treat the Akeidah as the event that, more than any other in the patriarchal period, established the terms of Israel's covenantal relationship with God. Its echoes sound through every subsequent crisis in Jewish history.

Isaac's Role in the Night

The midrashic tradition is interested in Isaac's experience of the Akeidah in a way that the Torah text itself is not. The Torah gives Abraham's actions and God's interventions. It does not tell us whether Isaac knew what was planned for him, when he knew, or how he responded.

The Legends of the Jews preserves the tradition that Isaac knew. He had been told by Abraham, or perhaps by the angels who spoke among themselves within earshot, or perhaps he understood from the absence of a sacrificial animal when they set out, taking fire and wood but no lamb. He understood and he went willingly. His willingness is the heart of the Akeidah's theological significance: it was not merely a test of Abraham's obedience but a test, and a demonstration, of Isaac's own capacity for self-offering.

If Isaac knew the night before, then the night of the Song of Songs belonged to him as well as to Abraham. Father and son lay down knowing what the morning held, each holding a love that was about to be tested against itself. Abraham's love for God against his love for Isaac. Isaac's love for his father, and for the God his father served, against his love for life. The night contained both of them, seeking the one whom the soul loves in the darkness before the dawn.

The Merits of the Akeidah in Later Jewish Theology

The theological concept of zekhut avot, the merit of the ancestors, holds that the righteous acts of the patriarchs and matriarchs generate a reservoir of divine favor from which their descendants can draw in times of crisis. The Akeidah is the supreme source of this merit. When Israel faces destruction, when the prophets intercede on Israel's behalf, when the High Priest enters the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur, the merit of the Akeidah is invoked.

The kabbalistic literature, particularly the Lurianic school of sixteenth-century Safed, understood the merit of the Akeidah in terms of the divine attribute of din, strict judgment, being softened by the attribute of rachamim, mercy. Isaac is associated with the attribute of din; his willingness to be offered is the moment when strict judgment was applied to itself and found capable of self-restraint. The ram that was substituted for Isaac was caught in a thicket by its horns, and the ram's horns become, in this symbolic system, the shofar that will wake the dead at the end of days. The Akeidah reverberates all the way to the resurrection.

Why the Song of Songs Contains the Darkest Night

Rabbi Akiva declared in the second century CE that if all the writings of Israel were holy, the Song of Songs was the Holy of Holies. This was not an obvious claim to make about a poem that never mentions God by name and is, on its surface, an erotic love poem. But Rabbi Akiva understood the Song as the text that expressed the relationship between God and Israel at its most direct and least mediated, with the emotional intensity of lovers rather than the procedural formality of law.

If the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies of literature, then the night that opens its third chapter is the night that the relationship reached its most extreme point. Not the most joyful point, not the most formally committed point, but the most tested point. The night before the Akeidah is the night when love for God was pressed to the limit that human love can go, and went past it anyway.

Yalkut Shimoni's identification of Song of Songs 3:1 with the Akeidah night is a claim that the love poetry of the Song is not separate from the anguished theology of the Akeidah but is its proper expression. The night of seeking is the night of maximum commitment. The one the soul loves is worth seeking even through the darkest night, even when the morning promises something that the night cannot fully prepare you for.

The Binding That Never Quite Ended

The Akeidah did not end cleanly. God stopped Abraham, the ram was offered, Isaac went home. But the tradition insists that Isaac was changed by the experience in ways the text does not describe. Midrash Rabbah on Genesis notes that after the Akeidah, the text says "Abraham returned" to the servants waiting below; it does not say that Isaac returned with him. Isaac had been somewhere else. He had been, in some traditions, briefly in the world of the dead, or in the Garden of Eden, or in a state that ordinary life does not contain. He came back, but he carried something from that night that ordinary life cannot erase.

The seeker in the Song of Songs rises from her bed and searches the city and finds the one she loves and holds him and will not let him go. The holding is the point. After the Akeidah night, after every night of seeking at the extremity of love, the finding and the holding are what the darkness was preparing for.