Moriah and Sinai Lean Together Toward One Jerusalem

Two Men and a Command That Made No Sense

Abraham saddled his own donkey. He did not ask a servant to do it. The rabbis noticed this and said it indicated the urgency of his obedience, or his desire to keep the journey private, or the particular attention a man pays to a task he is not sure he will understand at the end of it. He took Isaac and two young men and the wood for the burnt offering and went toward the place God had named.

On the third day he saw it from a distance. He told the young men to wait with the donkey while he and the boy went up to worship. He said they would both come back. Whether he believed this or was protecting the servants from confusion, or was himself still holding on to the promise that Isaac was the heir through whom his descendants would be counted, is a question the rabbinic tradition never stopped asking.

Bind Me Tightly

The Torah leaves Isaac almost completely silent in Genesis 22. He carries the wood up the mountain. He asks where the lamb is. He receives an answer that is either faith or deflection. Then he is on the altar and the knife is in the air.

Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, the Aramaic translation of the Torah composed sometime in the early medieval period drawing on much older aggadic material, gives Isaac a voice. He tells Abraham to bind him tightly so that fear will not make his trembling invalidate the offering. He is not refusing. He is asking for the preparation that will let him hold still. He sees the angels above him looking down and he looks up at them, not at the knife.

That detail changes what Moriah means. It is not only the mountain where Abraham obeyed. It is the mountain where Isaac chose to be held, where a son's willingness made his father's action into something more than obedience. The Akedah is a double act: two people fully committed to the same command, neither one understanding it completely, both trusting something beyond what they could see.

The Ram That Was Ready

When God stopped Abraham's hand and the angel called from heaven, Abraham looked up and saw a ram caught in the thicket. He offered it in place of his son. The tradition in Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer, the eighth-century CE aggadic work, and in the midrashic collections surrounding the Akedah, teaches that this particular ram was not accidental. It was created at twilight on the sixth day of creation, at the last moment before the first Sabbath, placed in readiness from the beginning of the world for exactly this use at exactly this mountain on exactly this day.

The ram's horn became the shofar at Sinai. One horn was blown when God descended on the mountain in fire and cloud and thunder and the entire camp trembled. The other horn, the larger one, is reserved. The tradition teaches that it will be sounded at the end of days, when the scattered of Israel are gathered from every place they have been dispersed, when the long exile ends and the mountain that refused the knife becomes the mountain that opens the final chapter.

Jerusalem Stands on Both

The thirteenth-century Yalkut Shimoni, a comprehensive midrashic anthology, and the earlier Midrash Aggadah sources it drew upon, made the geographical argument explicit: Moriah and Sinai are not rival mountains. Jerusalem is built on the convergence of what both of them gave. Moriah gave the site of trust, the place where a father raised his hand and a son held still and God accepted the fear instead of the death. Sinai gave the text, the commandments inscribed in stone and carried through the wilderness and eventually housed in the Temple that stood on Moriah's slope.

A city built on both is a city that holds together the demands of law and the demands of faith, the word spoken in thunder and the silence of a man lying on an altar looking up at angels, the shofar blast that terrified the camp at Sinai and the shofar waiting in the second horn of the ram for a morning that has not yet come.