Genesis 22 is the most famous test in the Hebrew Bible. The audience is a people who knew that the surrounding cultures sometimes sacrificed their children to bloodthirsty gods. The shock of the chapter is that God of Abraham comes close to that command — and then unbinds it. The story does not bless child sacrifice; it abolishes it forever inside the covenant.

From the writers we read together

Robert Alter

Hebrew literary scholar, translator of The Hebrew Bible (3 vols.)

Alter taught a generation to read Hebrew narrative as careful literary art. Genesis 22 is his classic example. The narrator tells us nothing of Abraham's interior — no anguished monologue, no doubt, no questions. The text is brutally restrained. We are told only what he does: he saddles, he rises, he walks, he binds.

That restraint is itself a theology. Faith is not what is going on inside Abraham's head; faith is the next step Abraham takes while he does not yet know how the story ends. If your devotional life is starved for feeling, do not despair. Genesis 22 says: the binding still counts as faith, even when the inner life is silent.