a human figure (although it may, notwithstanding Descartes’ proof of the existence of God—that if inherently imperfect beings can conceive of perfection, then God must exist). I mean instead that inasmuch as God's movements are pictured as having perfection as a desideratum, as if this quality had gone missing and needs to be restored, the figure of God has been assimilated to a human sensibility and aspiration. It was Rousseau (1992: 25–26) who spoke of self-perfectibility as the human faculty that “develops all the others,” and who, doubtless taking his cue from a biblical theme, was inclined to see it as “the source of all man's misfortunes.”
This interpretation suggests that in this story the figure of God, as profoundly informed by otherness as it may be, might also share in the identity of Abraham. I have already shown that as Isaac is identifiable with the ram of God, so Abraham is identifiable with Isaac. As a matter of fact, the basis on which these identities are fixed leads one to see that the same sort of identity-in-difference obtains between God and Abraham.
Anthropomorphism: From Abraham's Psyche to God's Mouth
The defining identity between Abraham and Isaac is both the same as and different from the identity between Isaac and the ram. Isaac, after all, is tied to Abraham by virtue of biological continuity, making the identity between them the only sort that, at least for certain purposes, moderns are likely to take as seriously as that between an individual and him- or herself. But it is crucial to recall that even in this biological aspect, the identity between Abraham and his son is given by God in a miraculous manner. When Sarah is 90 and Abraham 100 years old, God promises Abraham that “Sarah your wife shall bear you a son, and you shall call his name Isaac” (Genesis: chap. 17). In effect, then, in the case not only of the ram but also of Isaac, it was indeed the Lord who provided, consecrating identity between, on the one hand, Isaac and the ram and, on the other, Abraham and Isaac, and therewith among the three of them.
By the same token, Abraham is identified with God. Isaac is the issue of Abraham's loins, but those geriatric sinews are miraculously invigorated by God's initiative. It may be seen, then, that in the child of their union—an unequal union, to be sure, of spirit and matter—Abraham and God are in a sense made one ‘flesh’; together they constitute a marvelous identity in and of fatherhood. The fact of the story is that as a creational elision between the figures of God and Abraham, Isaac's father is both one and two at the same time—that is to say (a theme given added and more other-worldly emphasis in the figure of Jesus), Isaac is both the son of man and the son of God.
None of this is to say that these three dyadic identities—Isaac and the ram, Abraham and Isaac, and God and Abraham—are not also relationships of critical difference. That between Isaac and the ram holds the difference of economy in sacrifice, a difference so vital as to make a virtual world of difference between the cessation and the continuation of a people called Israel. And that between Abraham and Isaac, as between God and Abraham, holds the difference of belatedness, according to which one of the two parties to each pair enjoys over the other the tremendous authority owing to generative others and claimed by creator-patriarchs.
But these differences do not so much spring from or conceal identities as foster them. I do not think that this story can be understood unless the god-figure's infinite and originary difference from man is placed alongside that figure's substantial identity with man, for its meaning lies precisely in this paradox. The story pictures Abraham as a creaturely extension of God's person, but, paradoxically, an extension with a mind of his own.11 Hence, while Abraham responds to God's authoritarian command bodily, just as if he were a hand of God, his response is seen also to constitute an autonomous decision.
The story itself thus authorizes the identity between God and Abraham as flowing directly from God's creative initiative to his creatures. What I want to suggest here, though, is the possibility that identity also flows the other way—it backs up, so to speak, informing the figure of God with the figure of man. This is hardly a bold or novel thesis, in view of the well-known consideration that anthropomorphism is a characteristic feature of the Hebrew bible's depiction of the godhead (e.g., Johnson 1961, 1964). In the story in question, it seems to me that God's command to offer up Isaac registers just such a reflux of identity. By calling in all debts, that command expresses a diagnostically human want of perfection: it prescribes a sacrifice that would put an end to all sacrifice and therewith to life itself. In effect, although it issues from God's mouth, it smacks of an ever-present temptation on the part of humanity to overreach itself.
The interpretation of the Akedah as primarily a trial of Abraham's faith is predicated on the presumptive, utter righteousness of the order to take Isaac's life in sacrifice. If, though, it is correct that logically perfect sacrifice on the part of man must constitute a threat not only to the law of man but also to the primacy of the Other, then the interpretation to faith should not go unquestioned. It would seem that the justice of both God's command to Abraham, a mere mortal, to kill his own son and of God's subsequent approval of Abraham's zealous response is open to serious question from a perspective that is more than humanistic and runs deeper than the patriarchal warrant recorded in the story.12 If it is to be identified with the creational force registered at the end of the story (by the promise of life), then the figure of God appearing at the beginning would seem to be disturbingly compromised. For whereas the creational force is a vital force, the command to cut Isaac's throat on the altar is so perfectly lethal, so globally destructive, that it is out of keeping with even the undeniable sense in which death may be construed as a chronic condition of life.
Between Perfect and Perfectly Imperfect Sacrifice
Total Economy and the Anti-sacrifice
If, then, the story's apparent lesson about faith is neither as plain nor patent as has been thought, can we dismiss it? I do not think so. For taken together with the lesson about surrogation in sacrifice, it yields an interpretation of the story that serves to enlighten beyond both lessons.
Generations of readers have noted that in this story the terms for the deity alternate between Elohim or God and Yahweh or the Lord, the former appearing five times in the first half of the story, the latter appearing in the second half, also five times (Spiegel 1993: 121–22). Accordingly, the story has been controverted as at least two-sided, one side centering on God's (Elohim's) test and command to bind Isaac (his ‘power’) and the other on the Lord's (Yahweh's) saving intervention and promise of life (his ‘mercy’). Indeed, it has been argued by experts that the story is not simply two-sided but in fact is made up of at least two distinct prime documents (Spiegel 1993: 122ff.). For my purposes, though, what counts is that the two sides appear together as one story, and whether or not they are narratologically reconcilable, their pairing yields a discerning portrait of the human condition.
As I have shown, the highly suspect nature of the command to bind Isaac is brought to light by seeing the command as reflected in the mirror of the Lord's countermand to substitute a beast for the boy. In other words, in contrast to the vital economy provided by surrogate or imperfect sacrifice, perfect sacrifice looks stupidly lethal and therefore cannot emerge as a demand in any sacrificial logic determined by an overarching reproductive imperative. By the same token, when it is seen in the mirror of God's distinctly non-viable call for a holocaust, a pure gift, the economic relief brought by the Lord's provision of a surrogate victim also looms suspect. By insinuating the possibility of a total economy, one that is logically no less absolute than a perfect sacrifice, the offering of a proxy undermines the very ideas of gift and sacrifice. The economizing capacity of surrogation projects an image of a no-cost existence, wherein salvation is realized as self-savings—the ‘I’ banks itself with a miserly and ultimately self-destructive completeness.
In point of fact, every act of substitution in sacrifice is intrinsically open to interpretation as hypocrisy. No doubt there is cause to celebrate the Akedah narrative's evident implication that human sacrifice is a pagan abomination in the eyes of the Lord (Spiegel 1993). But what about the ram, whose
