The Messenger who Stopped Avraham’s Hand
The request from the Eternal to Avraham to bring up his son on the mountain and sacrifice him there comes out of nowhere. Why? For the Eternal said to him with a promise: “For it is through Yitschak that will be called your descendants” (Genesis 21:12). But then He said: “Take your son …and bring him up” (Genesis 22:2). And now it was said to Avraham: “Do not extend your hand against the lad. Do not touch him”. We wonder though! Our question concerning this is: Did the Eternal give a son to Avraham in the last of his days in order to tell him now to go and slaughter him without any wrong doings of his, and destroy not only the life of his only son but also the Covenant of promise? Has anyone known or heard of it, that such a thing could have ever passed His mind to pour out the blood of innocents in order to establish righteousness? Has He ever said such a horrible thing like this to any man to slay his own child in order to test his righteousness? After they arrived at the mountain and Avraham tied Yitschak on an altar, the Eternal revealed to him that his plan was never actually to have his son offered up as a human sacrifice. He would not issue a command and then take it back, for He and His will are unchangeable. The Eternal never intended for Avraham to sacrifice Yitschak, for He said it through the prophet that such a horrible thing would never come into His mind, as we read,
Because they have forsaken Me and have profaned this place, … to burn their sons with fire for burnt-offerings to Ba’al, which I did not command or speak, nor did it come into My heart. (Jer 19:4-5) (See also 2Ki 21:16)
The whole subject of “binding Yitschak” is extremely confusing, when we look only at what has been translated for us. We already rethought this misconception of a human sacrifice as a test for righteousness and explained our new reading of the story of the attempt to sacrifice Yitschak in the article “Did YHVH Tell Abraham to Sacrifice Isaac?“. In it we argued that when the Eternal said to Avraham: “Take you your son!”, He did not say: “Slaughter him”, but rather, “Take your son and go to the land of Moriyah, and offer him there for an offering”. Nor did He say, “Take wood to burn your son”. The Eternal did not tell Avraham to sacrifice anything much less a human. Avraham took wood with him for the burnt-offering and tied his son on the altar by his own initiantive, as we explained in the foresaid article. There we interpreted the literal translation of the whole episode which is not distinctly explained by the commentators and exposed certain misconceptions that still exist. Rather, we believe that the Eternal said to Avraham (not commanded him), “Please, take your son and bring him up”.
The messenger
It is the object of this work to explain the unexpected appearance on the scene of an angel of the Eternal, who stopped Avraham sacrificing his son. In order to accomplish this, we need to resort to the writings of the Rabbis to make full sense of this whole episode in regard to this angel. In this endeavor, we are fully aware that we cannot remove all the difficulties we find in the text, but as in the foresaid article and here, we would like to posit another way to look at this, specifically in reference to the messenger the Eternal sent to save Yitschak from the hand of his father. The matter will become clear once we understand why the messenger was sent, which explained previously, and who that messenger was, which we will resort to the wisdom of the Rabbis. With that said, we are asking the reader to consider what we intend to say in the following. For the purpose of this study, we will focus on a single verse in Genesis 22:12.
When the Eternal saw that Avraham came on the mountain to sacrifice his son, as a burnt-offering, with all of his heart and with all of his soul, even though he had never been commanded to do such an abominable thing, immediately He told an angel to rescue him and sent him a ram as a ransom and substitute for Yitschak. Or, perhaps the ram had been there on the mountain, as orinally intended. And Avraham slew the ram for a burnt-offering before the Eternal instead of his son, and probably he sprinkled the ram’s blood on the altar he had made. And when Avraham had completed the services at the altar, and the ram offering was accepted by the Eternal, he must have come to the realization what great evil he was about to do, if the angel had not stopped his hand. And the Eternal blessed Avraham and his seed on that day, as He originally intended it to do.
When the Messenger of the Eternal called to Avraham from heaven to prevent him from killing his son, he called his name twice: “Avraham, Avraham!” Similarly, we find “Ya’akov, Ya’akov!” in Genesis 46:2, “Mosheh, Mosheh!” in Exodus 3:4, and “Sh’muel, Sh’muel!” in 1Samuel 3:10. These are the four persons whose names are doubled in Tanach. Why?
In the context of Genesis, the repetition of the name “Avraham” expresses urgency. It was because at the time he was preoccupied with the binding of his son to offer him on the altar, Avraham heard a voice without seeing a visual image. Hence, since Avraham was devoid of his physical senses, it was necessary to repeat the call in order to stop him with an alarming voice before he would have killed his son. And the messenger said something that raises questions,
Do not lay your hand on the lad, nor touch him. For now I know that you fear Elohim, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me. (Gen 22:12)
The difficulty in this verse is that the Torah suddenly refers to the messenger in first person. The messenger said to Avraham, “you have not withheld your son from Me“. Why was the messenger speaking in first person, “from Me”? Should he not have said, “”you have not withheld your son from the Eternal”? And even though the messenger was speaking in the manner the Omnipresent would speak, “you have not withheld your son from Me”, seeing that it was the Eternal who subjected Avraham to the trial, while the messenger was the one who prevented him from killing his son, it is to show that the messenger was an angel of a high category who spoke in first person. Yet, he was not the Eternal Himself on account of his title: מַלְאָךְ mal’ach, “messenger”, “angel”.
Rabbi Bahya ben Asher (1255–1340), aka Rabbeinu Bahya, gives the following explanation of this issue. He says that that “angel” was not of the category of the “nifradim” נפרדים, ”disembodied spiritual creatures”, but it belonged to what are known as the “netiyot” נטיעות, “the emanations of the Eternal, i.e., a celestial being much closer to the Eternal than the angels. In other words, that messenger was no ordinary angel, says Rabbeinu Bahya, for it is quite unthinkable that anyone of the lower category of angels would have been allowed to say in first person, “you did not withhold your son from Me”, that is, from the Eternal. Rabbeinu Bahya’s argument becomes even stronger when we bear in mind that another powerful angel appears in Exodus. Rather, continues Rabbeinu Bahya, that messenger was of a superior level: “this mal’ach, “messenger”, is also known as the great angel, who manifested himself in Exo 14:19 when the Torah describes him as traveling in front of Israel in the exodus from Egypt performing all kinds of miracles. Rabbeinu Bahya also argues that the words mal’ach haElohim in Exo 14:19 do not mean “angel of God”. Rather, the word Elohim in that verse must be understood as a reference to the word mal’ach, meaning mal’ach haElohim, “supernal messenger”. The Hebrew term Elohim literally means “power” or “force”, but in this case it explains the term malach , “messenger”, to serve as an adjective, hence, “supernal messenger”.
There is another noteworthy comment on the verse. We find support for this meaning of the word Elohim in the commentary of the leading Torah scholar of the Middle Ages Mosheh ben Nachman, also known as Ramban. He says that it is possible that the word mal’ach (angel) is not in a construct state (meaning “the angel of”) but instead it is to be understood as “Messenger the Elohim”. Thus, it will be clear to the reader that the perception of a messenger of a superior level is expressed by “Messenger the Elohim”. Is this choice of terminology significant for how the verse is understood? We believe it is. With further examination in the rabbinic literature on the matter, we learn that this is an allusion to the agent Metatron, who has been entrusted by the Eternal to run the universe, a hypothesis we made in other places on the matter of Metatron. We may best understand what the Rabbis had in mind by recalling that we encounter the same messenger in Exo 23:21 where the Eternal instructs Mosheh that the messenger, who is assigned to lead Israel to Kana’an, is to be revered and obeyed, “for he will not forgive sins, for My Name is within him” (Rabbeinu Bahya’s commentary on Genesis 22:13). Thus, what the Book of Genesis makes implicit, the Book of Exodus makes explicit. And we are satisfied with this, as we expounded the subject in the article When Mosheh Declined the Messenger of YHVH.
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