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

The Night That Is Not Named

The Torah says Abraham rose early in the morning. Genesis 22:3 is specific about the morning. It is not specific about the night before. Abraham had the command. He knew what he was going to do when the sun came up. He knew who was going with him and what he would be asked to carry when they reached the mountain. The Torah passes over the night in silence, and the tradition found that silence almost unbearable.

Yalkut Shimoni, the thirteenth-century anthology, reaches across the canon to fill it. The night of Song of Songs 3:1, the night a beloved lies on her bed and rises to search for the one her soul loves through the streets of the city, is identified as the night before the Akeidah. The lover in the dark is Abraham. The one being sought, from whom the night feels like absence and whose presence is the only thing that could make the morning bearable, is God.

Two Loves That Could Not Both Survive

Abraham waited a hundred years for Isaac. God promised him that the covenant would continue through this child, that from Isaac would come a people as numerous as the stars. Then came the command to offer the child on Moriah. Abraham held two loves that the command had placed in direct opposition: love of God, which had governed everything in his life since Ur of the Chaldeans, and love of the promised son, which was also love of the covenant itself, since Isaac was the covenant in human form.

The night before the journey was the night those two loves stood unresolved. By morning Abraham would rise and saddle the donkey and take the wood and the knife and the son. The resolution would be enacted in motion before it was understood in the mind. But the night held the full weight of what he had been asked, undistracted by action, and Yalkut Shimoni says he spent it searching, like a lover in the dark streets of the Song, for the Presence that had given him both the son and the command.

Isaac Was Not a Silent Object

The Legends of the Jews, Ginzberg's synthesis of the aggadic tradition published in the early twentieth century, insists that Isaac went to Moriah knowing what was planned. He was thirty-seven years old, the tradition reckoned, old enough to understand what his father carried, old enough to refuse if he chose to refuse, and he did not refuse. He asked to be bound tightly so he would not flinch and cause his father to sin by striking an imperfect sacrifice. He was not a passive child led by an obedient patriarch. He was a man making his own offering in full knowledge of what the offering cost.

The tradition held this because it needed Isaac's participation to make the Akeidah coherent as a moral event rather than simply as a test of Abraham's obedience. A father sacrificing an unaware child is a tragedy. A father and son walking together toward the same altar, both choosing the same God over the same loss, is something the tradition could call holy.

The Shofar That Echoes Every Year

God promised that the ram's horn blown at Moriah would echo through history. Every Rosh Hashanah, when the shofar sounds, the tradition says God hears in it the horn of the ram that was caught in the thicket when Isaac was released. The blast does not merely remind God of the Akeidah. It carries the merit of that morning, the merit of a father who did not withhold and a son who did not run, forward into every generation's appeal for the year to come.

The princes of the nations are bound in that same moment, the tradition adds. The shofar that breaks the silence of Rosh Hashanah is also the sound that loosens what was bound against Israel, the heavenly accusers who would press charges against a people that does not always live up to its covenant. Abraham's binding of Isaac became the mechanism for unbinding the judgment that Israel would otherwise face without defense. The night of searching in the Song of Songs opened into a morning that still reverberates at the new year's turn.