“Now I know…”—“Didn’t You Know Before?”

 

Nowadays, this week’s Torah reading justly troubles a great many readers. It contains the famous account of God’s command to Abraham to kill his own son, sacrificing him like some animal on an altar. Modern readers have wondered how a just God could issue such a horrible order to anyone, even if it was, as the Torah says, only a “test” (Gen 22:1), one that God never intended to be carried out. Equally troubling, people rightly ask how any father could actually set out to obey such an order—what does this say about Abraham himself?

 

Interestingly, however, neither of these questions was what most troubled ancient Jewish interpreters of the Torah. Rather, their question was: Why did God have to test Abraham in the first place? Surely He must have known how the test would turn out, so why put Abraham through this ordeal? The answer, they suggested, was to be found in the opening words of the story, “And so it was after these things…” As is well known, the word for “things” in Hebrew, devarim, can also mean “words.” If understood as “words,” this sentence could be hinting that certain words that were spoken, and that these words then led God to put Abraham to the test. (After all, the Bible sometimes only hints at its full meaning, leaving interpreters to fill in the blanks.)

 

If so, what words could the Torah be hinting at? The book of Jubilees, an ancient (ca. 200 BCE) and expansive retelling of some of the stories in Genesis, recounts that these were words in praise of Abraham—presumably spoken by the heavenly angels—to the effect that Abraham was “faithful in everything that we have told him.” Hearing this, Satan challenges God to put Abraham’s obedience to the test—much as He puts Job to the test in the biblical book of Job. In Abraham’s case, the test was God’s order to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac: “Only then,” Satan tells God, “will you know if he is indeed faithful in every way in which you test him.” Of course God knew that Abraham would pass this test, but He nonetheless went through with it in order to prove to Satan Abraham’s absolute obedience and faithfulness.

 

A slightly different version of the same idea is found in the Talmud (Sanhedrin 89b). There, at the time of the family’s celebration of Isaac’s weaning, Satan had said to God: “Abraham made this whole celebration and did not think to offer up a single bull or ram as a sacrifice to You?!” God responded: “Abraham holds nothing dearer than his own son, yet if I were to say to him, ‘Sacrifice him to Me,’ he would not refuse.”

 

One way or another, these two traditions provide the same basic answer: God certainly knew that Abraham was His faithful servant long before this episode, and being God, He also knew how the test would turn out before it took place. It was only as a response to Satan’s challenge that God agreed to put Abraham to this test, precisely because He knew how it would turn out.

 

And yet… There was one problem with such an explanation. After Abraham had tied up Isaac and placed him on the altar to be sacrificed, a voice called out from heaven: “Do not raise your hand against the boy or do anything to harm him, because now I know that you are someone who fears God, since you have not held back your son, your only one, from Me” (Gen 22:12). The words now I know seemed to imply: “I didn’t know before.” But if so, these words contradicted the whole supposition of divine foreknowledge.

 

Two further explanations of this matter have come down from ancient times. The first focuses on the word yada‘ti, “I know.” The Torah was of course given without those little dots and dashes that nowadays indicate the accepted pronunciation of the consonantal text. Without them, the word yada‘ti could be pronounced slightly differently, as yidda‘ti; this would mean, “I have made known,” “I have informed.” If so, God could be saying at the conclusion of this test, “Now I have made known”—to Satan, indeed, to the whole world—“that you [Abraham] fear God.”

 

The second explanation highlighted the fact that the words of this verse were not actually spoken by God at all. It was an angel who called out, “Do not lift up your hand against the boy or do anything to harm him, because now I know that you are someone who fears God.” God is omniscient, but angels are not. Of course, God had told the angel what to say, but the angel could not help inserting that little word “now” into his version of God’s order: “Don’t hurt the boy, because I know—in fact, I [the angel] just now found out—that you are one who fears God…” But God had known this all along.

 

Shabbat shalom!