years. And stories evolve just like playing Telephone, a whole story emerging from a single misheard word or phrase. So let me tell you the story that morphed into the sacrifice of Isaac. (Isn’t morphed a marvelous word? From Ovid, to Kafka, to visual morphing in films.)
Isaac was spoiled by his father, his four big sisters, his mother, and by Hagar and Ishmael too, when they were all still living together in the same encampment. The Torah isn’t clear on this, but Ishmael was three years older than Isaac, and the two brothers adored each other, the younger following the older about like a puppy, the older teaching him everything he knew. But the tension between their mothers increased. Hagar left for a time, returning to her favorite little village, but she missed the others and, hoping to be able to work things through with Sarah, she and Ishmael went back, as I said before.
Sarah had some reason to be concerned about Ishmael’s influence on her son. He introduced Isaac to drugs at an early age, to the resins and hashish other herbal blends that were popular at that time. Sarah found out from their servants and went to Abraham in a rage, insisting that Hagar and Ishmael leave for good, which they did. Hurt and enraged when he found out, Isaac confronted his father and shouted at him, “Everyone knows you’re not my real father. Abimelech is!” This deeply wounded Abraham, in spite of the fact that Isaac was the very image of him (or so my Aunt Dinah told me) so there was no doubt about his paternity. Abraham couldn’t persuade Sarah to change her mind. A few months later Isaac disappeared. No one knew where he was, messengers were sent off to Hagar’s village of Lahai-roi, but Isaac wasn’t there. Finally Isaac’s sister Davah broke down and confessed, when she saw how distraught her parents were. Her brother had confided in her where he was going and what he wanted to do. Below are a few passages from a long lost written account of what happened.
And Abraham heard that his son Isaac, the only son of his wife Innati the princess, had entered the temple of Asherah in the city of Luz, to be a novice priest there.
There were many Asherahs in our time, the same way that there are Mary of Lourdes, Mary of Guadalupe, Mary of Fatima, who are the same Mary but also different. So too with Asherah, who was, again, the primary deity of our family. The Asherah of Luz was a goddess whose male cross-dressing priests castrated themselves after they were initiated, and this is the “cult” that Isaac had run off to join. The priestess there, Hattanit, was a kind of local guru, and lots of young men and women were drawn to her and to her temple. She taught what you might call, “the old way,” the path of the Great Mother, and the young people who were drawn to that path were Luddite hippies from over three thousand years ago.
For Abraham, who believed in a modern new religion with its androgynous and main, male god, that was the last straw! Drugs he could deal with, but he’d waited too long to have a son with his sister-wife to see Isaac enter a community like that. A typical Jewish father in a world that was becoming increasingly male-focused and patriarchal, Abraham expected Isaac to take over the family business, and then pass it on to his own sons. Isaac’s castrating himself would rob Abraham of his grandchildren, so you can sympathize with his fury. Now you might think that from circumcision to castration isn’t such a long journey, but in those days the whole foreskin of a baby wasn’t removed, only a ring at the end, something I’ll talk about later, when I get to the story of Moses. But given what happened with Abraham’s expectations, since that time our people have been uncomfortable with anyone who isn’t married with children, and have been particularly uncomfortable with eunuchs, although they were popular in China, Ottoman Turkey, and were singers in the Catholic Church until not so very long ago. One of my best friends in the Middle Ages in Europe was a man named Fratello Solli, a short shy eunuch with a glorious voice! But let me go back to the old story.
And his wrath was kindled against his son Isaac, the son of his loins, the son of his wife Innati the princess. And Abraham took his chief steward and five of his servants, and they set out for Luz to the temple. When they arrived they saw Isaac and the head priestess offering a sacrifice to the goddess. And they hid behind the oracle tree till the sacrifice was complete. And while Isaac and the priestess were eating their portion of the offering, Abraham and his servants sprang out and grabbed and bound the boy.
Not only had Abraham gotten angry at Isaac, but he’d also had a huge fight with Sarah. She understood why he was upset, but felt two things. First, she understood why Isaac was doing what he was doing. She was the devout one and had long felt a calling in her only son. And getting castrated was a part of their world. Men did it all the time. (Although I didn’t understand it then and I don’t understand it now.) And second, as the product of a matriarchal lineage and the mother of four daughters, Sarah had her own heirs and she didn’t feel the distress her beloved husband did. In fact, she tried to talk Abraham out of going, but he was adamant. His argument was rather like one you may have heard. “The boy’s too young. He has no idea what he’s doing. I’m not going to sit back and do nothing, and let him ruin his entire life by entering this ridiculous cult.”
The priestess of Asherah of Luz raised up the knife of sacrifice, still bloody, and tried to cut Isaac’s bindings, but she was subdued. “You cannot have this son of mine,” Abraham bellowed. “His is not yet of age. He is still a son of my tent.” For Isaac had lied to the priestess about his age. “I will kill him myself before I see him become a priest in your house,” he shouted. The priestess was dismayed, however she had acted honorably, having believed the boy when he said he was of age. But she knew that she could not take in and initiate the youth against his father’s wishes, and she told Isaac that he must go home with him and obey him. She told him that he could come back in a year, when he had finally come of age, if he still felt a calling to the goddess Asherah, to be Her sacred priest in Luz.
Without the support of the priestess there was nothing that Isaac could do. He had to go home with Abraham. But what made it even worse for Isaac was that many of the Canaanite boys in the area had come to see him assist with the sacrifice for the first time. They were his new friends and he’d bragged to all of them about it, so he felt deeply shamed to be dragged off in front of them, jeering and laughing at him. And here you can see very clearly how a single remembered line, “I will kill him myself,” gradually over time turned into the marvelous story that you all know from the Torah.
As I said, over three hundred years passed before the stories about the matriarchs and patriarchs were first written down. And the story that you know wasn’t authored and edited for another two hundred years after that. The world had changed a great deal in that time. The faith of Sarah and Abraham was largely forgotten. All goddesses and especially Asherah were considered false, if not evil, and Shaddai had fused with Yahweh and several other male gods to become God the Father. The first writer of the story about Isaac’s sacrifice was living at the time of King Saul, our first king, the first to unify all the tribes. Saul wanted his chief scribe to craft a saga that would inspire a new nation and fill it with stories that would set it apart from its neighbors.
In some ways people then were no different than people are now. We praise our allies by exaggerating their good deeds, and we condemn our enemies by accusing them of actions that they did not commit. The false statements of several world leaders who went to war to destroy banks of weapons of mass destruction that they knew did not exist is a case in point. In the first spoken tales of the life of Isaac, his whole life was told as he lived it, but as time when on, and stories became garbled, and then written down, Isaac’s real life vanished just as his real name did. And later editors of the story used his life as a polemic against Israel’s idolatrous enemies. The implication of the story was that Abraham was exempted by God from committing the kind of sacrifice of his children that Israel’s neighbors were said to commit, offering up their daughters and sons to the fire on altars of Moloch and other gods. And it’s true that human sacrifice was done in various cultures, the Aztecs and Carthaginians, but the Canaanites did not practice it. The story is subtle—and defames them, which I say as the Hebrew daughter of a woman of Canaan.
It’s true that animal sacrifice was a part of our lives. But having been a vegetarian for most of my three thousand
