This month, we’ll conclude the first year of Sects, Lies, and Videotape by ringing in the new year. It’s Rosh ha-Shanah, and that means it’s time to think about the people we’ve wronged, the good works we’ve failed to do, the children we’ve tried to kill, etc. As always, I am open to suggestions. Thanks to a delay brought to you by the Hollywood strike, 2024 is completely full. Now accepting second requests!
Shanah tovah u-metuqah! Welcome to 5784 anno mundi. As we celebrate Rosh ha-Shanah and enter the Days of Awe, let us contemplate one of the central mysteries of the Abrahamic religions: that one time Abraham nearly (?) sacrificed his own son—the Akedah, or the binding of Isaac. No, not that one. The terse narrative is the Torah reading for the second day of Rosh ha-Shanah. It is also the basis for this month’s movie, His Only Son, released this past Easter by Angel Studios, the perpetrators of The Chosen. It is an unapologetically Christian reading of the story. Fair is fair: the book of Genesis is Christian Scripture too. It affords us the opportunity to look at the especially rich interpretative history of this strange text in both religions. Let’s begin!
Sects!
I mentioned that the story is brief. How brief? Brief enough that I can fit it all here (I regret that I cannot translate it into Gen Z).
After these things, God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham.” He replied, “Here I am.” He said to him, “Take your son, your only one, whom you love, Isaac, and go to the land of Moriah. Offer him up there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains which I will tell you.
Abraham woke up early the next morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his servants with him as well as Isaac, his son. He cut the wood for the sacrifice and rose and went to the place that God had told to him. On the third day, Abraham lifted his eyes and saw the place from afar. Abraham said to his servants, “Stay here with the donkey. The boy and I will go yonder, then we will pray and return to you.”
Abraham took the wood for the sacrifice and placed it upon Isaac, his son. He took the torch and the knife in his hands, and the two of them took off together. Isaac said to his father Abraham, “My father.” He said, “Here I am, my son.” He said, “Here is the torch and the wood. But where is the lamb for the sacrifice?” Abraham said, “God will see to it, my son, the lamb for the sacrifice.” Then the two of them continued together.
They arrived at the place which God had told to him. Abraham built the altar there and arranged the wood. He bound Isaac, his son, and placed him on the altar above the wood. Abraham stretched forth his hand and took the knife to slaughter his son.
But an angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” Abraham said, “Here I am.” He said to him, “Don’t raise your hand against the boy! Don’t do anything to him! For now I know that you fear God, you will not spare your only son from me” (Gen 22:1–12).
That’s it. That’s the story. Now that I’ve covered what the text tells us, here is everything it doesn’t: Why is God doing this? What does Abraham think about it? How old is Isaac? What is he thinking? Did he even struggle? Where is Abraham at the start? Where is the “land of Moriah”? Which mountain did Abraham go to? What were the names of the servants? What lesson are we even supposed to take away from this? In brief, everything but the bare narrative facts are occluded from us. As Erich Auerbach stated in his famous essay “Odysseus’ Scar,” which compares biblical storytelling to the Homeric poems, “Everything remains unexpressed.”
Compounding the mystery is the number of times this episode is subsequently mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, which is zero. Even in the Gospels, Isaac is not so much as mentioned, except in the genealogy of Jesus. The rest of the New Testament only mentions the episode a few times. One thing is certain: The New Testament never connects the binding of Isaac with the crucifixion of Jesus. That reading comes later, though not much later, as the earliest generations of Gentile Christians struggled over what to do with that newly created book, the “Old Testament.”
One popular strategy was to read the Old Testament narratives as foreshadowing the events of the Gospels, particularly the Passion. Genesis 22 was ground zero for this kind of reading. It has all the elements: a father, a son, a mountain, a piece of wood, a sacrifice, and even a surprise ending. Eventually, typology would bleed into history, and you have some accounts where the binding of Isaac not only foreshadows the crucifixion, it takes place on the very spot where Jesus died. This is, in fact, the perspective of His Only Son.
Jews, as you might imagine, have a different perspective. But not so different. First, the binding of Isaac was seen as the sanctification of a holy place—the Temple Mount. This idea is as old as the Hebrew Bible. The book of Chronicles states that Solomon’s Temple was built on “Mount Moriah,” the name the Temple Mount carries to this day.
While the connection is slight in the Bible, it is explicit in later Jewish literature. This is the first similarity—and also the first major difference—between the two religions, since the Temple Mount and Golgotha (Calvary, the site of the crucifixion) are evidently not the same place. This is also the point to mention the Qur’anic rendition of the story (Q 37:102–111), which is so laconic that it does not even name the son. After four or so centuries of debate to hammer out all the details, it was finally decided that the sacrificial son was Ishmael and the event took place in the environs of Mecca, where father and son would later build the Ka‘ba.
Another important aspect of the Jewish interpretation is the concept of the “Merits of the Fathers,” that the good actions of the three patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) built up a treasury of merit to pay off Israel’s sins in later generations. If that concept sounds familiar, it is because it is more or less the same as certain Christian theories of atonement, where Jesus’ obedience unto death creates an inexhaustible store of merit to be applied to the debts of sinners. Other theories of atonement focus instead on Jesus’ victory over the devil, and guess who pops up in Jewish retellings of the Akedah! Could it be…?
That’s right. Satan himself pops up to impede the sacrifice, using both moral arguments (“Killing is wrong”) and physical impediments. He even suggests to Isaac that Ishmael will get all of his stuff if he dies. The tenor of this episode is reminiscent of the three temptations of Jesus in the wilderness. I would even suggest that the rabbinic accounts of the Akedah are inspired by the Christian tradition. Why should the enemy of humanity be averse to thwarting God’s promises? That is exactly what the devil wants in the oldest, pre-Christian retelling of the Akedah, the one found in the book of Jubilees. That version opens with a Jobian “prologue in heaven,” where the devil challenges God to put Abraham to the test in the hope that he will, in fact, kill the child.
Something about the story changed after the advent of Christianity. This leads me to a final surprising development in the retelling of the story. In some medieval versions, Isaac dies. He gets better, of course, but he dies first, and sometimes Abraham not only spills his blood but burns him to ashes. Then God revives him with a special revivifying dew. This makes Isaac a somewhat unexpected symbol of the resurrection.
Isaac is also a symbol of martyrdom. The image of the Akedah comes up during times of persecution. The books of the Maccabees—which I intend to revisit in December—recount the gruesome story of a mother and her seven sons who choose death over apostasy. The mother, who is the last to go, encourages her sons by appealing to the example of Isaac, who embraced death in the hope of a future resurrection.
A millennium later, the victims of the Rhineland massacres of 1096 would commit mass suicide to avoid a worse fate. The poets and chroniclers of these atrocities compared them to the fate of Isaac. This particular phenomenon led Shalom Spiegel to write his classic work, The Last Trial, an eminently readable (and short!) study of the Akedah motif in Jewish literature.
Lies!
My issues with His Only Son’s adaptation of the Akedah begins with the title. The title technically comes from Scripture—not only Genesis 22 but its echoes in the New Testament (such as the divine proclamation “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased”). Abraham, however, had eight sons by three different women. The lack of specificity lies at the center of a playful midrash on the opening verses of Genesis 22, where Abraham interrogates God about which son he means. Here is the tradition as it appears in The Chapters of Rabbi Eliezer, the work I wrote about in my thesis (will I never be free of this text?!).
Ishmael came to see his father Abraham. That very night, the Holy One, Blessed be He, revealed himself to our father Abraham and said, “Take your son.” Abraham, having pity on Isaac, said, “Which son?” He said to him, “Your only son.” Abraham said, “This one is the only son of his mother, and that one is the only son of his mother.” He said to him, “The one whom you love.” Abraham said, “I love them both!” He said to him, “Isaac.”
In a similar way, the film zeroes in from the general to the specific The opening title card informs us “For 4000 years, the faith of Abraham has given hope to billions.”
I’m not going to interrogate here what the “faith of Abraham” means. It’s an inclusive gambit, a kind of gesture to all the religions that claim Abraham as a forefather.
That gesture is dashed as soon as the second title card appears.
Is the full account of Abraham’s life recorded in the book of Genesis? I don’t think so. Even this very film adds things that I cannot find in my Bible, such as the idea that Abraham left his homeland for Canaan because he had come to believe in only one God. You won’t find that in Genesis, but you will find it in the Qur’an. Muslims, however, reject Genesis for giving a distorted and incomplete account of the life of the patriarch.
Anyway, we’ve weeded out Islam and are left with Judaism and Christianity. And soon we be will left with just Christianity, as the THIRD title card reminds us that this is also a story about Jesus.
When I write, “a story about Jesus,” I don’t merely mean that the events of the film prefigure the life of Christ but that Jesus is actually an active participant in the story.
“Big J was Cap G,” as Zoomers might say. That idea, adapted from the Gospel of John, led to the curious reading—already current in the second century—that every reference to God in the Old Testament is, in truth, a reference to Jesus Christ. Jesus—God the Son—is the immanent persona of the deity, who gets his hands dirty tending to us mortals. God the Father is the transcendent persona and remains kind of aloof and distant.
In this film, God is not a disembodied voice but a normal-sized dude who pops up from time to time, such as his initial delivery of the not-so-good news.
His face is never seen, Ben Hur style, but there are some context clues that this is supposed to be the pre-incarnate Son of God. Like when we catch a brief glimpse of him walking on water in a dream sequence.
Also, in its momentary depiction of the three men who visit Abraham and announce Isaac’s birth (Genesis 18), all three figures resemble this mysterious divine person.
Genesis 18 is an important crux in Trinitarian theology because the story begins with three men talking to Abraham but suddenly switches to God alone speaking with him. While this connection might seem Trini-trite, it has inspired art more profound than this movie, such as the famous icon of the Trinity by one Andrei Rublev.
I can’t abandon this subject without mentioning that the theological ideas at play in this movie are the very reason that the God of the Old Testament looks like Jesus in some medieval paintings.
The movie also demonstrates its theological positions by what it omits. Notably, anything that seems a little too Jewish gets the shaft. Any reference to the covenant of circumcision (speaking of shafts) has been cut and discarded. There is only one disparaging reference very late in the movie.
It has also removed references to the Exodus. One of the first episodes in the story of Abraham (Genesis 12) is that, due to a famine, Abraham must abandon his new settlement in Canaan to go down to Egypt. His wife Sarah is then taken captive by Pharaoh, but God afflicts Egypt with disasters until Pharaoh relents and let’s Abraham’s people go. He returns to Canaan fabulously wealthy, having despoiled the Egyptians. Sound familiar? Christians weren’t the only ones in the typology business.
The other reference to the Exodus occurs during God’s first covenant with Abraham (Genesis 15), where he promises him both land and descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky. God does not attach any conditions to this covenant, but there is a catch: Abraham’s heirs will first be enslaved for 400 years in a foreign land because the people currently living in Canaan are not wicked enough yet to deserve what’s coming to them. Not a word about this in His Only Son.
Ishmael, like a consummate Milford man, is neither seen nor heard. When he is mentioned, Abraham hangs his head in shame, as if he’s more ashamed of having another son than he is of having banished him and his mother to the wilderness where they nearly died. From here, we move away from the movie’s theological ideas to its, uh, political ideas, and that’s where I really start to part ways with its perspective on the life of Abraham.
Videotape!
This movie is DULL. You know how people complain that The Lord of the Rings trilogy is just a very long walk? At least those movies have incident. Note that in the Genesis account a grand total of nothing occurs from the time Abraham departs until he arrives at the mountain. In this, His Only Son strives for perfect biblical accuracy—and succeeds!
This 106-minute film does not have 106 minutes of stuff, so the filmmakers have added a new dramatic element. Like Dewey Cox, Abraham needs to think about his entire life before he performs. So we get some greatest hits moments, minus the stuff I mentioned in the last section. But… the film’s microbudget precludes any of the grand spectacle one could wrench out of the more exciting moments in Abraham’s life.
So, for example, Abraham participates in the first biblical war (Genesis 14). We will have this war described to us at length. Will we see any of it? Nope! Abraham also witnesses the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Will we see that? Only a brief shot of the aftermath.
Abraham had a run-in with Abimelech, king of the Philistines, who abducted his wife (again). Abraham tells this tale in dialogue. Abimelech will stay offscreen.
What we do see are numerous flashbacks of Abraham talking to Sarah at different stages in their life, having This Is Us tier conversations about their childlessness. Sarah’s facial tattoos are a permanent source of distraction in these scenes. She looks like she’s either available for download or The Last Airbender.
This is all about as good as an average episode of The Chosen, but there are two things that really put the movie beyond the pale. On each of the nights Abraham and company spend camping in the wilderness, Abraham sits the group down for a good old-fashioned sermon.
In one of these, Abraham talks about how his actions in life are nothing but filthy rags before the Most High, and he does not feel justified before God no matter how many animals he butchers (which is why, I guess, he is so comfortable upgrading to humans). We see here that Abraham has read Paul by means of John Calvin. Since so much Christian media deliberately tries to avoid sectarian disagreements (such as… The Chosen), it’s refreshing to see one that doesn’t give a fig about appealing to a broader audience.
On the other hand, it rankles. One of the few times the Akedah is invoked in the New Testament, it is to make the exact opposite point that Paul-via-Abraham is making.
You foolish person, do you want evidence that faith without deeds is useless? Was not our father Abraham considered righteous for what he did when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? You see that his faith and his actions were working together, and his faith was made complete by what he did. And the scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness,” and he was called God’s friend. You see that a person is considered righteous by what they do and not by faith alone (James 2:20–24).
Even if Abraham gave a more ecumenical account of Christian theology, I can’t say it would have made for especially compelling cinema.
All this is nothing compared to the events of the last night, the culmination of a subplot involving the Philistines. Abimelech is never seen in the film, but his soldiers are roaming around, extorting travelers, murdering some of them, and bolstering the local slave economy. Don’t you see how evil and wicked this world is? How desperately it needs redemption?!
More than that—one of the two servants traveling with Abraham is a Philistine who resents (reasonably enough) being a slave and, furthermore, dislikes that Abraham looks down on his religion. The movie never uses the word “Philistine,” instead preferring the Hebraized form.
Once the servant—his name is Eshcolam, which has overtones of the biblical Eshkol—goes on his tirade against Abraham, it becomes abundantly clear that the viewer is supposed to equate the ancient Philistines with the modern-day Palestinians. In a rage, Eshcolam screams, “You come plant yourself here in my homeland and seek to build a slave army to overthrow my people! This is my land!” Abraham responds by smacking him with his staff. Typology!
I think it is too much to ask that biblical epics avoid “actualizing” their source stories for modern audiences. The box office returns of Robert Eggers’ films show that this is not a winning strategy. Still, if you are going to interrogate thorny issues such as slavery in the Bible or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you had better have something interesting to say. The subplot is never resolved, satisfactorily or otherwise. It just stops so we can get to the sacrifice.
How is that sacrifice handled? A light show and a flat line reading from God. If you look at any artistic depiction of the Akedah, you are bound (haha) to see the angel physically restraining Abraham.
That’s not a biblical detail. You can read in the text above that the angel calls from heaven. But the story almost demands this dramatic movement. I haven’t seen The Bible: In the Beginning, but I can’t imagine that it would stage the scene otherwise. John Huston knew a thing or two about cinema, and surely he…
Never meet your heroes, they say. I guess I now know why.
Anyway, final verdict on the Akedah: unfilmable.
Gavin McDowell is a Hoosier by birth and French by adoption. He received his doctorate in “Languages, History, and Literature of the Ancient World from the Beginning until Late Antiquity” and is currently investigating Aramaic translations of the Bible. He is supremely unqualified to talk about film. For more of his unprovoked movie opinions, see his Letterboxd account.