Mac just put up a post about the difficulty of understanding Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac. Her reaction to the role of the other characters in the story — Sarah and the old servant — is that it suggests that Abraham knew there was something wrong with what he was doing. This reminds me of a commentary I read once about this story, in which the author remarked that God would have made things easier for everybody if He had also come down and explained to Sarah and to Isaac what Abraham was doing. As it appears in the Bible, however, God never speaks directly to anyone but Abraham about the sacrifice, so it is hard to imagine how it must have looked to everyone else.
It occurred to me that you might be interested in seeing the two images below. Both are by the Dutch painter Rembrandt (1606-1669), and both depict the climactic moment of the Abraham and Isaac story, the point when the angel appears to stop Abraham from killing his son. The first one was painted in 1634, when Rembrandt was only 28; the second, an etching, was done in 1655, when Rembrandt was 49. It is clear that his emotional perspective on the story changed during those twenty-one years. The first looks like a violent, anguished encounter, while the second suggests a kind of tender grief. I wonder what your reaction to these two pictures is, and what you think it says about how Rembrandt himself might have changed during the intervening decades. I find the difference in facial expression between the two Abrahams to be especially interesting. Between the time of the first and second artworks, Rembrandt had seen his first three children die in infancy, followed by a son who survived, and then followed by the death of his wife, Saskia. (Click here to compare the two images side-by-side.)
Oh — and, for Monday, bring your paper draft, and begin with the next set of readings on the syllabus.
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