Scripture and Modern Israeli Literature 289self-immolator, but not his own agent: he volunteers to go along with his
father’s plans, ready for the slaughter if needed (a contemporary version
not only of Genesis 22’s repeated phrase “and they both went together”
but also of the medieval martyrdom shared by parents and progeny in the
Hebrew Crusade Chronicles). However, center stage was given — paradoxi-
cally perhaps — back to the father. It is the contemporary Abraham who is
now imagined not only as the source of the command but also as the one
who either “volunteers” to take the blame or is blamed by the son.
Th is self-blame or blame can be quite tempered, as in Mossinsohn’s play
(“We’re a cruel generation that kills our young sons! Th e old go on living
— and the young are sent to their death”) or in Haim Gouri’s iconic poem
(“But that hour / He bequeathed to his progeny. / Th ey are born / With the
knife [ma’akhelet] in their heart”).24 It can also be ferocious, as in Moshe
Shamir’s or S. Yizhar’s unprecedented and unforgettable lines. Whereas
the former puts his harsh indictment in the mouth of a bereaving father
— “Nothing may interest me anymore or arouse my feelings save for the
sphere of the aqedah; I brought a helpless infant into this world only to
murder him, either with my own hands or through (God’s) agent [biyedei
shaliah],”25 the latter puts them in the mouth of the “son,” one of the elo-
quent fi ghters of his 1958 War of Independence mock epic Days of Ziklag: “I
hate our Father Abraham for going to bind Isaac. What right does he have
over Isaac. Let him bind himself.”26
Clearly, Yizhar’s protagonist found “Father Abraham” guilty for ostensi-
bly choosing to sacrifi ce the other — especially the next generation — over
sacrifi cing himself. It was this indignant moral judgment, sounded shortly
aft er the Sinai Campaign (1956), that soon captured the imagination of the
younger generation. In the 1960s, that peer group, later to be dubbed “the
Isaac Generation,” off ered a new fi ctional spin on the old story. In their
narratives, not only had the aqedah completely morphed from “binding”
to “blood sacrifi ce,” it also moved from the realm of traditional biblical/
Jewish psychology to that of its neighboring culture, classical Greek drama.
In contrast to the harmonious going together imagined in Genesis as well
as throughout premodern Jewish history and even in some of the cultural
products of the 1940s and 1950s, the aqedah now began to be reinterpreted
as the Hebraic equivalent of the oedipal scene, and especially as a Freudian
oedipal scene. Although this oedipalization of the aqedah was fi rst intro-
duced in Hebrew drama in the early 1940s,27 the violent potentiality of this
turn came to the fore only in the 1960s.
A. B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz are today the most familiar representatives