tences: “God Himself will provide. The lamb for the burnt offering [is] my
son.” (Note that Hebrew has no verb “to be” in the present tense; thus, this
last sentence would be the same whether or not the word “is” is supplied in
translation.) Read in this way, Abraham’s answer to Isaac was not an eva-
sion but the brutal truth: “You’re the sacrifice, Isaac.” If, following that, the
text adds, “And the two of them walked together,” this would not be a
needless repetition at all: Abraham told his son that he was to be the sacri-
fice, and Isaac agreed; then the two of them “walked together” in the sense
that they were now of one mind to carry out God’s fearsome command.
Thus, in keeping with Assumptions 1and 3, the apparent repetition was no
repetition at all, and Abraham’s apparent evasion was actually an an-
nouncement to Isaac of the plain truth. The conduct of both Abraham and
Isaac was now above reproach: Abraham did not seek to deceive his son,
and Isaac, far from a mere victim, actively sought to do God’s will no less
than his father did. Indeed, their conduct might thus serve as an example
to be imitated by later readers (Assumption 2): even when God’s decrees
seem to be difficult, the righteous must follow them — and sometimes
they turn out merely to be a test.
But did interpreters actually believe their interpretations? Didn’t they
know they were distorting the text’s real meaning? This is always a difficult
question. It seems likely that, at least at first, ancient interpreters were
sometimes quite well aware that they were departing from the straightfor-
ward meaning of the text. But with time,that awareness began to dim. Bib-
lical interpretation soon became an institution in ancient Israel; one gen-
eration’s interpretations were passed on to the next, and eventually they
acquired the authority that time and tradition always grant.Midrash,as
this body of interpretation came to be called, simply became what the text
had always been intended to communicate. Along with the interpretations
themselves, the interpreters’ verymodus operandiacquired its own author-
ity: this was how the Bible was to be interpreted, period. Moreover, since
the midrashic method of searching the text carefully for hidden implica-
tions seemed to solve so many problems in the Bible that otherwise had no
solution, this indicated that the interpreters were going about things cor-
rectly. As time went on, new interpretations were created on the model of
older ones, until soon every chapter of the Bible came accompanied by a
host of clever explanations that accounted for any perceived difficulty in
its words.171
Early Jewish Biblical InterpretationEERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
Tuesday, October 09, 2012 12:04:00 PM