Eyre Lines

I looked at an essay wrestling with the story of Abraham ordered to sacrifice Isaac tonight, and coming to the conclusion that the right course of action was, respectfully, to point out that to sacrifice Isaac would make a nonsense of God’s pre-existing moral commandments. I thought it well captured the situation as it would have been looked at rather later – say when God comments on Rabbi Joshua’s rejection (on good scriptural grounds) of a divine voice supporting his opponent, Rabbi Eliezar in the story of the Oven of Akhnai, and God comments “My children have defeated me”. In fact, the author makes pretty much the same point as is attributed to the second or third century Rabbis.

That clearly holds good today. I’m not sure it held good when the story originally gained currency, though.

It isn’t by any means the first time I’ve read essays or heard sermons wrestling with the story of Abraham, and I doubt it will be the last. People have come down on both sides of the equation, either waiting for God’s countermand of the initial command but complying, or (as this author does) arguing with God and refusing. A very few have said they might actually have done as ordered.

However, I have never found essays or sermons centering on 1 Samuel 15:2-3 (or it’s many counterparts from Exodus 17 onwards) and debating whether God’s commands to wipe the Amalekite nation from existence including “man and woman, and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey” should be followed or demurred from. The basis might be that if killing (or murder) is bad, then genocide must be worse, and God has been fairly explicit about killing (at least where it’s murder) being a bad thing. In the case of the infants, I can’t see how it isn’t murder.

Perhaps the answer should, in fact, be the same. The text is there to test us, and we should argue with God about it and be firm in that conviction. I think the essay I linked to gives us the basis for making that argument from the pre-existing scriptures, and we can also remember that Jesus enjoined us to love our enemies (Luke 6:27). Loving them would not, I assume, include erasing all memory of them from history by killing man, woman, child and domestic animals too…

So, we should argue with God in the form of arguing with scripture. And we should try to win.

That, I can get behind as a concept.

Now, weren’t there a few verses of Leviticus which have been getting quoted a lot recently…?