The Bible can be traumatizing for many of us.
It can be especially traumatizing for children.
There are a lot of Bible stories that we tell children (and adults!) that might not be age appropriate. I have known adults who were taught violent Bible stories as a child and continue to carry the trauma of those stories with them.
I believe this situation is not because children just can’t handle these stories. After all, many adults can’t handle these stories. The problem is that we have not been taught to see what’s happening beneath the surface.
Let’s take one of the stories that has caused trauma to so many children for generations – Abraham’s near sacrifice of his son Isaac.
You can read the story in Genesis 22. God “tested” Abraham by telling him to, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt-offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.”
Yikes!
When I was a child, my Sunday school teacher said that God was testing Abraham’s faith. Abraham must do whatever God tells Abraham to do because God is God and demands our obedience.
Wait. God might call my dad to sacrifice me? My dad has always been a faithful Christian. So what if God tells my dad to sacrifice me? How could I trust God and how could I trust my dad?
Ahhh, the religious anxiety we induce in our children.
As I grew up and started reading the Bible, I noticed that Abraham isn’t always obedient to God’s will. In fact, Abraham argues, doubts, and questions God’s plans. And God even changes God’s original plans to destroy cities because of Abraham. There’s even a story where Abraham has the chutzpah to laugh at – not with – God.
So why does Abraham so easily submit to God telling him to sacrifice Isaac? I don’t know for sure, but after reading more of Abraham’s story, I grew increasingly suspicious that there might be something more going on in the story.
A New Perspective
One of my theological heroes is a gay Catholic priest named James Alison. In his adult education curriculum titled, Jesus the Forgiving Victim, James talks about this story in a way that shifted my understanding in very helpful ways. I hope it helps you, too.
James says that English translations miss something that the original Hebrew makes explicit – that there are different names for God in the story of Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac.
At the beginning of the story, God tells Abraham to take Isaac up the mountain to sacrifice him. But then what’s usually translated as “an angel of the LORD” stops Abraham from sacrificing Isaac.
And here is the key – there are two names for God in this passage. The first name for God in Hebrew is “Elohim.” The second name for God is YHWH, which often gets mistranslated as “angel of the LORD,” but really means LORD or God. As James states, “Elohim orders [Abraham] up the hill, and either YHWH or an Angel of YHWH does the countermanding” (pg 133).
Elohim was a generic term for God in the ancient Middle East. It’s a term that is in the plural, so it literally means “gods.” Abraham grew up in a household that had many gods, including gods of human sacrifice. He would have known the gods to command sacrificing son. But in the story, Abraham is introduced to a different understanding of God – one that does not demand human or child sacrifice. Instead of a human sacrifice, God provides a ram for Abraham to sacrifice.
James puts it like this:
So you get Abraham starting off with a story which he clearly understood perfectly well – sacrificing his son. And then what appears to be a story with which Abraham wasn’t familiar – a substitute animal sacrifice – takes over, and the overarching narrative becoming one about Abraham’s trust and obedience as he moved from one understanding of God to another, and so his being henceforth blessed because of that. (pg 133)
When we merely think this story is about Abraham being faithfully obedient to God, even if God demands child sacrifice, we miss the point.
A Shift in Understanding
That’s because the point of this story is a huge shift in the human understanding of God. This is a God who doesn’t demand human sacrifice, but provides another way.
Now, you might be thinking about that poor ram. And you would be right to be concerned about animals. But this story is about moving from an understanding of a god who desires human sacrifice to a God who stops us from the cycles of sacrificing other humans. Eventually, we will get to the Hebrew prophets, who move toward ending sacrifice altogether. This is seen in Hosea, who states that God “desires steadfast love, not sacrifice.”
I have not taught this story to my children. I was too young when I first heard this story. I didn’t have the tools to understand what was happening in the story. But my children will come across this story, and they need the tools to know how to interpret it in a healthier way than how I was taught. So it’s probably time for a Bible study with them.
