Satan Tried to Stop the Binding of Isaac
On the road to Moriah, Satan appeared three times to block Abraham and Isaac. He became an old man, a young man, and a river. None of it worked.
The command came suddenly. Take your son. Not: one of your sons. Not: the one you love. God and Abraham bargained over the words, each phrase tightening like a snare, until at the end of the exchange only one name remained: Isaac. And God said: to the land I will show you. And when you arrive there, I will consecrate you and make you a priest. Abraham, who was not a priest, who had never performed a sacrifice, received his ordination on the road.
He did not tell Sarah the truth. He told her he was taking Isaac to study Torah at the academy of Shem and Eber. She dressed the boy herself, chose a fine garment from among those Abimelech had given her, placed a turban on his head and set a precious stone in it, packed provisions. She walked with them to the edge of the road. When they told her to go back to the tent, she wept. Abraham wept. Isaac wept. Even the servants wept. Sarah held the boy and held him and finally let go, saying: who knows if I will ever see you again after this day.
This is the account preserved in the Legends of the Jews, where Louis Ginzberg wove together the strands of midrashic tradition surrounding the binding of Isaac, one of the most extensively interpreted passages in all of Jewish sacred literature. The Akedah is not a single story in the rabbinic imagination. It is a theater of competing pressures, a three-day journey populated by angels watching from heaven and adversaries blocking the road.
On the road, as Abraham and Isaac walked, two of his young men walked with them: Ishmael and Eliezer. The two men argued quietly about inheritance. Ishmael said: when Abraham returns, everything will come to me, the firstborn. Eliezer replied: you were cast off with your mother. It will come to me, the faithful servant. A voice from the holy spirit said: neither of you will inherit Abraham.
Then the Accuser appeared.
Ha-Satan, the heavenly prosecutor described throughout rabbinic literature as God's agent of testing, came to Abraham in the form of a very old man, humble, bent, sorrowful, and said: are you silly, that you would go and slaughter your only son? God would not command such a thing. This cannot be from the Lord. Abraham recognized him and rebuked him and he departed. Then Ha-Satan came to Isaac as a young man, handsome and sincere, and said: your silly old father is taking you to be slaughtered for nothing. Do not listen to him. Isaac told his father, and Abraham told his son: this is the Accuser, trying to lead us astray. He rebuked him again.
Ha-Satan tried once more. He transformed himself into a river stretching across the road, wide and powerful as floodwaters. Abraham and Isaac and the two young men waded in. The water rose to their necks. Abraham looked around and recognized the landscape. There had been no water here before. He said to Isaac: this is the Accuser again. He turned and rebuked Ha-Satan by name, saying: the Lord rebuke you. Be gone from us, for we go by the command of God. And Ha-Satan was terrified at the voice of Abraham, and the place became dry land again.
The Book of Jubilees, composed in Hebrew in the second century BCE and preserved in full only in the Ethiopian tradition, gives the angel's perspective at the moment of the binding. It was the angel of the presence who spoke the words: lay not your hand upon the lad. And Abraham looked up and saw the ram caught by his horns, and offered it instead. The Book of Jubilees calls the place not Moriah but Mount Sion, the place where God is seen, the mountain where the sanctuary would one day stand.
On the third day of the journey, before the trials on the road were over, Abraham lifted his eyes and saw the mountain. He saw a pillar of fire reaching from earth to heaven, and a cloud, and in the cloud the glory of God. He asked Isaac: do you see what I see? Isaac said: yes, a pillar of fire and a cloud, and the glory of the Lord. He asked Ishmael and Eliezer: do you see what we see? They said: we see nothing more than other mountains. Abraham said to them: stay here with the donkey. And to Isaac he did not say anything at all, because there was nothing left to say.
They went on together. The text of Genesis uses the phrase yachdav, together, twice in four verses. The rabbis counted. Together means something here that ordinary togetherness does not mean: two people walking toward the same destination, each fully aware of what waits there, neither turning back.