Isaac Asks for the Lamb and Learns He Is It

Isaac carried the wood, so he was the one who could count. His father had the fire and the knife, he had the load on his back, and between them, on a rope, there should have been an animal balking the way animals balk on a climb. There was no rope. They had walked three days and he had not asked, because as long as he did not ask, the lamb could still be waiting somewhere up the mountain.

Click for full size

He asked on the last stretch. "Behold, the fire and the wood," he said, "but where then is the lamb for a burnt offering before the Lord?" (Genesis 22:7). It did not come out soft. He had already worked it out and he wanted the words said aloud by the man who had been carrying them for three days.

The Answer That Did Not Slow the Walk

Abraham had a riddle ready if he wanted it, since the plain words about God seeing to the lamb would have held for another hour, but he did not use them. "The Lord hath chosen thee, my son, for a perfect burnt offering, instead of the lamb."

Nothing stopped. That was the part Isaac could not have braced for, if a boy can brace for anything on a road like that one: the sandals kept lifting the same dust in the same rhythm, and his father kept the fire steady at the same height, and the mountain sat exactly where it had been sitting before the sentence was spoken. He shifted the bundle because the strap had begun to cut into him. He was carrying the fuel for his own body and his shoulder had no opinion about it. There was a taste like a coin somewhere behind his teeth.

The Question Abraham Had to Ask Twice

Isaac did not run, and he did not ask for a year or a week. "I will do all that the Lord hath spoken to thee with joy and cheerfulness of heart."

That answer came out too clean, so Abraham pushed at it. "Is there in thy heart any thought or counsel concerning this which is not proper? Tell me, my son, I pray thee. Conceal it not from me." He needed the yes to hold weight, because a yes that cracks on the altar cracks in front of Heaven, and nothing up there can be repaired afterward.

Isaac swore by the life of the Lord and by his father's own soul that nothing in him had bent to the right or the left from the word that had been spoken, that neither limb nor muscle had stirred on account of it, and that he was joyful and cheerful in the matter, and blessed was the Lord who had chosen him this day to be a burnt offering. Abraham had asked for a flinch and had not been given one. There was nothing left to do but climb.

The Cords and the Ram

On the height the cords went on and the wood went under him, and because both of them had already said everything there was to say, the work went quickly. The knife came up. The knife stopped. A ram had a horn caught in a thicket and did not get free in time, so it burned in Isaac's place, though the cords had already left their marks on him and the marks stayed while it burned.

The Tent With Nobody In It

Abraham came down the mountain with his son walking beside him, which should have made that the lightest road of his life. Then he came to mourn for Sarah (Genesis 23:2). She had died while the two of them were gone, so the last she ever knew of Isaac was the morning he went out with the wood on his back, and there was nobody in the world who could go back and tell her the knife had stopped.

Isaac walked into a tent that had a body in it. He had been carried up a mountain to die and had been sent home alive instead, and the price had been paid anyway, in a room he was not standing in.

Three Years, and Then Rebecca

He mourned her three years. Three years is long enough to learn the shape of a tent without the person who used to be in it, and Isaac was not a man who did anything by halves, since he had already proved on Moriah how still he could hold.

Then Rebecca came up the road with Abraham's servant, and Isaac brought her into the tent that had been his mother's, and he forgot the mourning for his mother. Not because three years had used it up, and not because a son's love is cheap. Until a man marries, his love sits with his parents, but when he marries, the love of his soul cleaves to his wife, as it is said, therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and shall cleave unto his wife (Genesis 2:24). The commandment to honor did not go anywhere. The weight moved.

The boy who had asked for the lamb was a married man in his mother's tent, and for the first time since Moriah there were two people breathing under that cloth.