Fr. Stephen De Young: So we'll go ahead and get started, and when we get started, we'll be picking up at the beginning of Genesis 22, a completely non-controversial story with which I am sure no one here is familiar. [Laughter] Before that, a little bit of brief review, and it's going to be brief review because basically what we're about to read is the culmination of the story of Abraham. It's not going to be much longer, and we're going to make our first— So we're in this second part of the book of Genesis that runs from chapter 12 to chapter 50 that we talked about being the patriarchal narratives, that's describing the generations of this family. We're very close to making our first transition from Abraham to Isaac. What we're going to read tonight is really sort of the denouement of Abraham's story that we've been reading so far.

The key elements in terms of this culmination are basically two things. Number one, the promises to Abraham— and we've talked about how there were these promises on two levels. There is a set of promises. They've been reiterated several times, but there's a set of promises that has to do with Abraham having many descendants, a whole bunch of descendants, and descendants who are going to form multiple nations as we've talked about: not just one, but multiple nations. And that some of those descendants are going to come to possess this swath of land in the Levant in the future. That's sort of one set of promises.

The second set of promises that we saw had two pieces. Number one was that, in addition to the promise of multiple seed—tons and tons of descendants, and different nations being descended from him, that there would be one particular descendant. And in the short term that one particular descendant has taken the form of Isaac. Isaac is not Abraham's only son, technically, because there's also Ishmael. We're going to see there's even going to be a couple more before we're done, but Isaac is his described as being his "only son" in the sense that this singularity of his seed, of this one important line of descent. And that singular line of descent is what is going to bring about ultimately this larger promise.

We talked about how there's the quantitative promise about the number of his seed; there was also the qualitative promise, that his seed would be like the stars of heaven, not just in number but in quality. We talked about how the stars of heaven, for any guy growing up in Ur, anyone else in the Ancient Near East, those were the gods, those were angelic beings. And so there is a promise that, through a singular descendant of him, what we now call theosis, the transformation of humanity, is going to happen. And that involves, as we talked about, the reversal of the problems that we saw in Genesis 1-11: death came to humanity, sin came to rule over humanity, demonic powers came to rule over humanity. Through this singular seed, those are going to be defeated and humanity is going to be restored to its original purpose.

Within these sort of two levels or two valances of the promise, as we talked about, one serves as a sign of the other. This is very common in biblical prophecy. When a prophecy is given, there is some sort of immediate thing that happens that lets you know for sure that the ultimate fulfillment is going to happen. For example, in Luke 2, angel comes and announces to the shepherds that the Messiah has been born. The Messiah has been born in Bethlehem, and stars join in singing the praises. And then the angel says, "This will be a sign to you: go over here, and you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger, lying in an animal food trough." This is something you don't normally see: a newborn baby in an animal food trough in a cave. "This will be a sign to you: when you go and you see this kind of odd thing, then you'll know that the prophecy—that this is the Messiah, this is the Christ—then you'll know that that's true."

Or in Isaiah 7, Syro-Ephraimite War is going on. The Syro-Ephraimite War is poorly named, because it's not between the Syrians and the Ephraimites; it's the Syrians and the Ephraimites attacking Judah. The king of Judah is praying and asking God to deliver them because it looks like they're going to lose this war. And Isaiah says, "This will be a sign to you: this woman will give birth to a son, and his name will be Emmanuel, which means God With Us. And before he is old enough to know the difference between good and evil, while he still can't eat solid food, while he's still a baby, God will have delivered you from these attacking armies." Well, how does that prophecy work? Well, when you see this baby born, then you'll know: "Oh, God is for sure going to deliver us from these invading armies, because, look: the baby was born, just like the prophet said."

Q1: So in the New Testament, this is what people are referring to when they ask Jesus for a sign?

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so people come up to Jesus all the time when he's traveling from place to place and say, "Oh, show us some sign that what you're telling us is true. Show us some sign. Give us a sign. Give us a sign." And he said, "Cursed is the generation who asked for a sign." And why is it so horrible to ask for a sign? He's healing people, he's casting out demons… Like...

Q1: "How much sign do you want?"

Fr. Stephen: Right! So them coming and asking him for an additional sign is just a signifier of their doubts, of their disbelief, like their active rejection of him.

Q2: "Are you not entertained?"

Fr. Stephen: Right. "Oh, yeah, all that's old hat! Do something new!" [Laughter] Yeah. That's exactly that. So this is functioning within the promises to Abraham.

That first layer—you're going to have a bunch of kids, starting with this one kid you're going to have when you're 100 and your wife is 90, and they're going to come and they're going to take possession of this land—is the sign that this other promise is going to come true in the future. This is why the Torah concludes where it does, and Joshua's essentially an epilogue to the Torah. About a year from now, when we get to the end of Joshua, we'll see that at the end of Joshua it says, "Thus the Israelites took all the land that was promised to their forefather Abraham, and God failed to fulfill none of his promises," meaning that level of the promises, that sign level, of his descendants taking that land, was fulfilled at the end of the book of Joshua, according to the book of Joshua. It straightforwardly said that.

The point being: since we can read here and see that God kept that promise, we know that that larger piece, that singular seed, that descendant, who's going to accomplish those other things, is coming. And St. Paul picks up on this in Galatians, calls Christ uniquely Abraham's seed, sees Jesus as doing those things, but he's getting that from the Torah.

We've seen repeated several times this structure of these promises that have been given to Abraham, and the story of Abraham is revolved around these promises, about God teaching Abraham what these promises mean, reiterating these promises in various ways, to bring forth different elements, different aspects of the promises. Abraham, as we've seen— unfortunately, when Abraham has fallen into sin, it's been what? It's been when he doubted those promises, when, rather than trusting God and remaining faithful to God and trusting God to be faithful to him and keep the promises he had made, Abraham tried to engineer things himself under his own devices. "Well, there's no way me and Sarah can have a kid. That's crazy. So I will go and have a kid with my female slave." Or: "Oh no, I'm in danger going here. I'll lie about who Sarah is to protect myself, rather than trusting God to protect me until these promises are fulfilled." So that's been sort of the tension in his life.

Now that Isaac has been born and he's been told, "No, your line— This line, of this singular line, through this seed, is going to be reckoned through Isaac." Isaac, this son, is literally the embodiment of these promises. He is the sign to Abraham that should conclusively show that this is true and should conclusively allow him to now trust and be faithful to God, because his 90-year-old wife just gave birth to this baby, gave birth to this child! [Laughter] That's not something that happens. They knew it didn't happen back then. They weren't dumb. They understood menopause happens and women can't have babies any more. So this should be the badge.

This—this tension between the promises, Abraham's call to trust in them, them being embodied in Isaac—that's what now builds up to this climax that we're about to read in chapter 22. So unless anybody has any questions or comments or excerpts from 19th-century Evangelistic literature, we'll go ahead and start in Genesis 22:1.

"Now it came to pass after these things that God tested Abraham and said to him, 'Abraham, Abraham,' and he said, 'Here I am.' "

So this is yet another time— As we mentioned last time— I know we brought it up last time. We don't have this exhaustive description, obviously, of every moment of Abraham's life. We sort of pop in on Abraham's life at these various intervals, and usually most of them are structured around times when God appears to Abraham, so this is another one of those, where God is going to appear to Abraham and he talks to him and says, "Abraham, Abraham"; he says, "Here I am."

And I'm assuming everyone has read this story, so I'm not spoiling, but part of the issue of this story surrounds this word, "test." What we're about to read is a story about God testing Abraham and what that means. When I say "issues surrounding this story," I mean there's been a lot of ink spilled on this story. Kierkegaard wrote a whole book just about this story. And this has been turned into a philosophical problem, this has been all these different things.

But part of the problem in terms of interpreting what we're about to read has been historically—and this has been recently, not all of Christian history—is how we read that word, "tested." That word could actually be translated "tempted." They don't do that in most bibles, because, of course, Scriptures also say God tempts no one—but it's the same word. It's the same word. So we tend to think of "testing" in terms of modern testing. Someone gives me a test… I don't know if they have— When I was a kid—I'm an old man, but when I was a kid, they had Iowa Basics, the Iowa Test of Basic Learning, where, once a year, we had to spend a couple days filling in the little bubbles on the Scantron sheets with a number two pencil in order— and then those got run through a machine, and they'd see where we stood at in terms of our grade level in math and reading comprehension and all of these things. So it was like an assessment. It was an assessment. I know since No Child Left Behind and stuff, there's all kinds of different testing systems, different testing systems in different schools that do these assessments. And of course you have tests in school in general.

Those tests, the person giving the test, the people giving the test—in many cases may not know you at all, but they don't know what you know, in the sense that you go to take the SAT, the person giving it to you doesn't know what your mathematic and verbal abilities are, who's giving you the test. They're giving you the test to find out. The test is to discover or to uncover how much you've actually learned, how you're processing it, what you're doing, what your abilities are. So this marks a major difference here, because there's not something about Abraham that God doesn't know. God's going to tell Abraham to do something: it's not that God doesn't know whether he'll do it or not. God knows exactly what's going to happen before this whole thing starts. So that's not what "testing" means here. At all.

But there's an older use of this verb here that's translated as "test" or sometimes as "tempt," and that is related to, for example, blacksmithing and metallurgy, which is when you're forging metals you have to test them repeatedly, because impurities can get into them and make them brittle. They have to continually be purified; metals have to be folded to make them stronger. And so all along the process of forging something, you're continually testing it, to see if it needs to be purified more or more heat needs to be applied or it needs to be cooled. So this is the kind of usage of this verb that's used—not just here, but that's used throughout the Scriptures for the idea of being tested, or in some cases translated tempted, by God. When St. Paul says "the testing of our faithfulness develops perseverance," that's the imagery he's using.

Q1: That helps a lot.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah! This is the kind of testing. This is also, by the way, when Hebrews talks about Christ being tempted, this is the same verb that's used. That's one of the places where they translate it "tempted" instead of "tested." But that makes a big difference, how you translate it! Hebrews is not saying Jesus thought about sinning and just didn't do it; it's saying he was tested. He was tested and not found wanting, ever. Israel after the exodus is going to be tested in the wilderness, and they're going to be found wanting.

The use of this word, that God is going to test Abraham, is part of setting up this story as the climax of the story of Abraham, because God's been doing something with Abraham, through his relationship with Abraham, throughout Abraham's life, to bring him and grow him to maturity, to bring his faithfulness into fullness. And we've seen there've been setbacks, where Abraham messed up, where he sinned, where he did wrong, and where God had to explain things to him and correct him and bring him along. And so we're coming now toward the end of Abraham's life, and so now we get this testing because we're getting near to the final product of Abraham. This is giving us a particular view of the story of Abraham we've been reading, his relationship with God and, through that, of our relationship with God throughout our life. One of the reasons why we call God our Father is that he's helping raise us and grow us and discipline us and mature us into someone—whom we don't start out as—and bring us along. So we're now reaching this climax.

Verse two, Abraham has said, "Here I am": "Then he (being God) said, 'Take now your beloved son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moria' "—I said that just for the Lord of the Rings fans; it's Moriah. [Laughter] " 'Go to the land of Moriah (no dwarves) and offer him there as a whole-burnt offering on one of the mountains I tell you.' "

So. This is the form this test is going to take. God comes to him and says, "I want you to take your son, whom I've told you your family line is going to be reckoned through. All these promises are going to be fulfilled through him. I want you to take him, I want you to take him to the top of this mountain, I want you to sacrifice him to me, burn him up completely."

Whether you read Kirkegaard or some other philosophical rendition of this, it focuses on the idea that, well, if you're Abraham, what is the moral thing for you to do, if God tells you to go murder your son? That's the focus. There's a reason for this, and that's that, once we get into the modern period, everyone psychologizes everything, so it's all about: "I need to get into Abraham's head. What would I do if God told me to do this?" For the record, if you think God is telling you to go and sacrifice one of your children by burning them up completely, that's not God. I'm just going to lay that out right now, so you don't even have to come ask me.

But that's missing the point. That's missing the point of the narrative that we're reading here. That whole approach to reading the Scriptures is bad on any number of counts. It's very popular today. "How did St. Peter feel when this and that…?" This psychologizing. It gets even worse when people try to psychologize our Lord, Jesus Christ, because, of course, he's God. So, like, you can't get in his head. [Laughter] You don't know what it's like to be God, and you can't, so don't try. But even when we're just talking about people, that very modern psychological thing of "I need to try to identify with some character and figure out what they feel," that's not the point of the narrative. And you can tell that's not the point of the narrative, because we're very rarely told how people feel. I mean, once in a while you'll get: "So-and-so was sorely grieved," and it's usually obvious why: because someone they love has died or something. But you don't get this internal monologue of: "So-and-so thought to himself—"

Q1: Well, if you're looking at the Bible as literature, of course...

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] That's not even true of any literature before, like, the 20th century!

Q1: That's what those courses are about.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. That's a very modern literature thing. Even if you go and read early 20th-century literature—you go and read Tolkien, you go and read Brian Herbert, you go and read Isaac Asimov—nobody is inside anybody's head in any of that literature. So, yeah, we're not here to identify with Abraham. We're seeing what is God doing with Abraham here. Where has Abraham fallen so far in this story? Where has he messed up?

Q1: When he can't see how God's promises are going to come true.

Fr. Stephen: He can't see how God's promise is going to be kept, and so he tries to engineer things himself. So if he's still in that place where he was, if this is the old Abraham, if this is Abram whom we're dealing with, how would he respond to this command?

Q1: He would say that's his sister, and...

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, that's right! He would say, "Surely this can't mean— Maybe I— Should I go find Ishmael and sacrifice him? He's my son, too, right?" That's what— If this is the way he's previously operated when he— that would be where he goes. That's why this is the test. The test is: "I tell you to do something that makes no sense. I tell you to do something that seems to make it impossible for me to keep the promises I made to you, according to your human reasoning. Will you trust, will you be faithful, despite that? Or will you fall back into that old pattern?" And again, God knows which of those Abraham is going to do, but Abraham has to go through this experience of testing to learn himself, because this is how we learn things in life, especially me. Nobody can tell me much of anything; I have to go and do something stupid if I want to learn anything: get hit upside of the head by a two-by-four, and then I'm like: "Oh, okay!" And so this is— Abraham is going to go through this experience that God knows he's going to go through. It's going to refine that sense of faithfulness and that sense of trust.

Verse three:

So Abraham rose early in the morning and saddled his donkey and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and he split fireword for the whole-burnt offering, and arose and went to the place God told him.

Again, we don't get into Abraham's head; we don't have his thought process here, like: "Oh! What should I do? This, or this?" We're just told: "Okay, next morning, chop some firewood, get Isaac, get a couple servants to go with you," because he's over a hundred now; he's a very elderly man, "and let's set off and do this."

Verse four: "Then on the third day, Abraham lifted his eyes and saw the place afar off. Thus Abraham said to his young men, 'Stay here with the donkey. The lad and I will go yonder and worship.' " I love that translation. " 'The lad … will go yonder—and worship, and we will come back to you.' "

So this is kind of pragmatic, because if they bring the two servants, they're probably not going to be cool with the whole human sacrifice angle of this. So he says, "You guys wait here. We'll be right back." Notice he says, though, "We'll be right back." Keep that in the back of your head.

Q2: Does the phrase, "lift his eyes," have any significance?

Fr. Stephen: Well, it is on the third day also. And he's lifting his eyes because it's on a mountain.

Q2: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: So on the third day he sees the mountain out ahead of him.

Verse six: "So Abraham took the firewood of the whole-burnt offering and laid it on Isaac, his son. Then he took the fire in his hand and a knife, and the two of them went together." So he gets the supplies for the sacrifice, and the two of them head out and leave the servants.

Verse seven: "Then Isaac spoke to Abraham his father and said, 'My father.' And he said, 'Here I am, my son.' He said, 'Look, the fire and the firewood, but where is the sheep for a whole-burnt offering?' " Isaac: not stupid. He's like: "We've got everything except… a sacrifice."

And Abraham said, "God will provide for himself the sheep for a whole-burnt offering." So the two of them went together. They came to the place where God had told him, and Abraham built an altar there and placed the firewood there, and he bound Isaac his son, hand and foot, and laid him on the altar upon the firewood.

Something to notice here. We did see Isaac say something earlier; we don't have a record of Isaac saying anything here. This is something that people are going to note. When you look at most Jewish literature from the couple of centuries before Christ and in the first century AD that talks about the passages of Isaiah—that we'll read in a few years when we get to them— I said that stuff the first time through and people laughed, and then we got there, so. [Laughter] —about the passages in Isaiah that we sometimes call the Servant Songs, stuff about the Suffering Servant, the things we often quote, our liturgical practice about Christ, like he was led like a sheep to the slaughter, as a spotless lamb is dumb before his shearers so he openeth not his mouth. Those were mostly interpreted as being about Isaac, because Isaac here doesn't protest. Isaac here doesn't protest; Isaac just apparently allows himself to get tied up and thrown on an altar covered in wood, is willing to let himself be offered as a sacrifice.

Then it's through that symbolism of Isaac—who is, remember, this singular seed through whom ultimately deliverance from sin and death and the demonic powers is going to come— It's through that that it's connected to the Messiah, and by being connected to the Messiah it is connected to the life and death and resurrection of Christ.

But we're going to see there's another important piece in that that we'll see as we go forward, but a number of them— And there are a number of prayers from that period that are also reflections on this in the Torah, that see this moment as Isaac sort of agreeing to be offered to God as a sacrifice if that's what's necessary. That dynamic, then, is sort of a subset— Because what is Abraham being called to do? What's the point of this test? Abraham is being called to be faithful to God despite that faithfulness— What he has to concretely do to exhibit that faithfulness making no sense.

Q1: And being horrible.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and being horrible! And making absolutely no sense, just seeming to be a completely evil act that sabotages all of God's promises to him—but to be faithful anyway. Within this we see this image of Isaac, who at his young age has already learned this particular lesson that Abraham is now fully experiencing.

Isaac is an interesting figure. Isaac is the only figure in the patriarchal narratives and one of the [few] figures in the whole of the Hebrew Bible about whom pretty much nothing negative is really said. There's not really… I mean, the closest thing to a negative thing is going to be later: he's going to show preference for his first-born son, which was just sort of normal. [Laughter]

Q1: [Inaudible]

Fr. Stephen: Right, but that's other people tricking him. That's not a failing of his. The way we've seen Abraham has these moral failings, Jacob is definitely going to have moral failings, even Joseph is going to be kind of proud and arrogant as a kid—Isaac is sort of in a different category. But this particular lesson that his father has spent his life needing to learn, Isaac kind of already has, to his father.

Verse ten: "Then Abraham stretched out his hand and took the knife to slay his son, but the Angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, 'Abraham, Abraham!' So he said, 'Here I am.' " Notice how the word spoken by the Angel of the Lord and the word spoken by God in verse one are identical.

"He then replied, 'Do not lay your hand on the lad or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, since for my sake you have not spared your beloved son.' " Now look at that language. "Do not lay your hand or do anything… for now I know that you fear God—" so that's third-person—"since for my sake you have not spared your beloved son"—that's first-person. So this is one of many places we'll see along the way where the Angel of the Lord kind of is God and isn't the same person as God at the same time, which is going to be important. But we're here in Genesis already seeing examples of this.

So what does it mean, "now I know"? Does it mean that knowing is half the battle? This is— Again, we could read this as: "Oh, God didn't really know what Abraham would do, but now that Abraham did this, it was like: Oh no! He's going through with it! Quick, stop him!" [Laughter] No. The word here in the Greek that's translated "know, to know," is—we'll talk about the Hebrew word, too, but is a word that's actually related to a verb of seeing. There's several different words for knowing in Greek, and this is one that's related to seeing. It means "to know" in the sense that you've had it demonstrated to you. If someone— If I went and worked a differential equation on a chalkboard in front of you, and said, "Well, here's the problem," worked it all out, you could look at it and say, "Now I know that." And the reason you know that is not— It's different [from] just: "Oh, I know the answer to that problem"; it's: "I understand. I understand it because I've followed you through this process."

Q1: We say, "I see," in that sense all the time.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. "Oh, I see. Oh, I get it." The idea— The Greek word is chosen to give this idea of: it's now that Abraham has displayed something. St. James picks up on this when he refers to this in his epistle. He's using this episode in Abraham's life to talk about the relationship between faithfulness and works. He says, "You show me your faithfulness without works; I will show you my faithfulness by what I do." That "show" language. And so here Abraham is— The faithfulness that God's been working on with him, he's now displayed it for everyone to see. That idea.

The Hebrew word that's used here in the original of the Torah for "know" is the same word that's used a little further back in Genesis when it says that Eve knew her husband and brought forth a son. This kind of knowing in the Hebrew is not like knowing about something. It's not like: "Oh, I have some factual information." This is more like if I talk about knowing my wife. There are people—lifelong friends, her doctor—who know more data about my wife than I do, like her doctor looks at her bloodwork and knows all these things about her blood pressure, her exact weight, all these details, all these bits of data, and I don't have all that data, but I know my wife in a different way than her doctor does.

We have a basic understanding that knowing someone and knowing about someone are two different things. Knowing someone and knowing of someone are two different things. The Hebrew word, yada, is pointing to the knowing someone, so this is a relational word, describing the relationship between God and Abraham. Remember, Abraham is going to be called God's friend. So this "now I know" is talking about this new level of connection between God and Abraham.

After all, Abraham has just done what? He's been willing to sacrifice his son for God. Who's going to sacrifice his Son for Abraham?

Q2: That requires him, too, to know, because he says, "God's going to take care of it." Because he had to have known that that wasn't going to be...

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so this— Good segue. Thank you, David. [Laughter] I'll segue to it here. So this, when you look at, again, ancient interpretation of this story—and this is reflected in the New Testament, so this isn't just Jewish stuff, extrabiblical; this is also reflected in the New Testament—reading this story, he told the servants they'd both be back. What's going on?

Ancient interpretation was that this reflected a belief by Abraham, that Abraham believed so strongly in the promises of God, who had told him, "Through Isaac your descendants will be reckoned," that he believed God would raise Isaac from the dead. So why is that important? Well, because they're reading the story of Abraham, and if the problem Abraham's been having is not trusting in those promises and being scared and trying to engineer his way around those promises, what would be the ultimate expression of the other pole? It would be: There's nothing I can do to stop God from fulfilling these promises, even killing the son through whom they're all going to come, and setting him on fire and burning him to ashes—God will still give me descendants through Isaac, somehow.

So that's the place that Abraham has come to here at the end of his life: "Not only do I not have to worry that God won't keep his promises, no one can stop him from keeping them, including me." And so he can be completely faithful.

And this is referred to in Hebrews. It says that Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son because he believed in the resurrection. And there are actually Jewish traditions surrounding this that he did kill Isaac, and Isaac was raised from the dead—pre-Christian Jewish traditions, even though that's not what the text here says, that he was received back from the dead; Isaac was received back from the dead, which is part of the Isaac-Messiah connections that I mentioned earlier, that start to get drawn in the first century and in early Christianity, early Jewish Christian circles.

Verse 13: "Then Abraham lifted his eyes and looked, and there behind him a ram was caught in a thicket by its horns, so he brought it for a whole-burnt offering in the place of his son." We'll go ahead and pause there, because some of our friends are going to use this to want to talk about substitutionary atonement. "Oh, see, look: God gives him a lamb to offer instead of his son." What does that assume? That assumes God really needs somebody to kill something. [Laughter] "And so if I'm not going to let you kill your kid, we've got to kill something! So I guess I'll take this ram." Kind of a weird interpretation of this passage on its face.

What was the primary reason for which sacrifices were offered, later on in the Torah? Thanksgiving, on feasts, because, remember, sacrifices were about meals, normally. Whole-burnt offering obviously not, but—thanksgiving. Doesn't Abraham have something to be thankful for here? He has either metaphorically—or if you hold to those other traditions, literally—received his son back from the dead. This is going to be a trope in Genesis, by the way. Jacob's going to receive Joseph back from the dead, too. He's received his son back from the dead in some sense. That's something to give thanks for! And God provides him with the animal to do it with, because everything we offer to God really belongs to him already. It's why we say in the Liturgy, "Thine own of thine own we offer unto thee." We don't actually have any stuff that doesn't already belong to God that we can give him. We give him back some of his. So that's what's going on here. They're offering this animal to give thanks to God, because Abraham has received his son back from the dead.

Verse 14: "Thus Abraham called the name of the place The-Lord-Has-Appeared, as it is said to this day, "In the mountain the Lord was seen." Was he?

Q1: The Angel of the Lord.

Fr. Stephen: The Angel of the Lord. So the Angel of the Lord appeared and spoke to Abraham, and so he named the place Yahweh-Has-Appeared, and they say, "In the mountain Yahweh was seen." Once again, Angel of the Lord is Yahweh, not the same person… Right? Remember what we saw at Sodom and Gomorrah? Yahweh was standing there talking to Abraham standing next to him, and then he called down fire from Yahweh in heaven? We're tracing this through. Really, everything you need to know theologically is in the Torah if you read it correctly, but the New Testament helps a lot with reading it correctly.

Verse 15:

Then the Angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time out of heaven—

So we're still talking about the Angel of Yahweh.

—and said, "By myself I have sworn, says the Lord, because you did this thing and for my sake did not spare your beloved son, I will certainly bless you and assuredly multiply your seed as the stars of heaven and as the sand of the seashore, and your seed shall inherit the cities of their enemies. In your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed because you obeyed my voice."

So what is this? This is another reiteration of the promises. Notice again the two pieces: "I'm going to multiply your seed, going to take possession of the cities in Canaan, and in your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed because you obeyed my voice." That's those two sort of trajectories, the one being the sign of the other.

"So Abraham returned to his servants, and they rose and went together to the Well of Oath, and Abraham dwelt at the Well of Oath." Remember, that's where he made the oath with Abimelech last time.

Verse 20:

Now it came to pass after these things that it was told to Abraham, saying, "Indeed, Milcah has also borne sons to your brother Nahor: Huz his firstborn, Buz his brother, Kemuel the father of Aram, Chesed, Hazo, Pildash, Jidlaph, and Bethuel."

All these are great baby names, by the way. [Laughter] They'd be the only one in their class at school. And if you have two, naming one Huz and one Buz, I mean... [Laughter]

"And Bethuel begat Rebekah"—that's going to be important in a minute. Well, not in a minute; it's going to be important next time.

"These eight Milcah bore to Nahor, Abraham's brother. His concubine, whose name was Reumah, also bore Tebah, Gaham, Thahash, and Maachah." "Maachah" sounds bad, especially if you're around Greeks, so I wouldn't name your kid that, but "Thahash," that one's wide open.

Q1: I used to know a guy named Buzz.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, Buz: there are some Buzes: Buzz Aldrin. They usually have two Zs, though; this is one Z. And that would be bad for your kid, because then, every time your kid— "What's your name?" "Buz—with one Z." [Laughter]

Q1: I've seen worse.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, yeah, there's way worse. I spent my whole life having to say "Stephen with a ph." The whole reason I got a doctorate was so that when people asked me if it was Stephen with a ph, I could say it's Stephen with a PhD. [Laughter] That's the only reason. I went massively into debt just for that joke.

Chapter 23, verse one: "Now Sarah lived 127 years. Then Sarah died in the city of Kirjath Arba (that is, Hebron)—" This is one of those places where a place name has been updated. Remember back in the introduction to the Torah, I talked about how there are places where they've added names that are post-Moses? So Kirjath Arba was the original name; Hebron, we're going to see, is what it's going to get called when it becomes the main city of the tribe of Judah, a long time after Abraham.

—in the land of Canaan. And Abraham came to mourn for Sarah and to weep for her. Then Abraham stood up from before his dead and spoke to the sons of Heth, saying, "I am a sojourner and a stranger among you. Give me therefore a burial place among you, that I may bury my dead out of my sight."

Notice this language, because what was one of the other issues we saw Abraham struggle with earlier in his life, vis-à-vis his wife?

Q1: Someone might want her.

Fr. Stephen: How he treated her, right? It's like: "Well, I don't want to get killed, so I'll let someone else potentially sleep with my wife." Not great, right? [Laughter] And the way he handled the whole situation with her and Hagar and Ishmael: not great. So this chapter, here as we get to the end of Abraham's life, we're seeing where Abraham ends up. We've seen where he was along the way. Notice how he keeps describing her: "my dead." She's dead, but she's still his. He's mourning for her; he's weeping for her.

This reflects an important attitude toward a departed loved one. First of all, her body isn't some husk that she's done with and who cares. "Oh, you've escaped the prison-house of your soul. Fly free!" This is still her. This is the person he loves. And his primary concern here is that she be given a proper burial. And a proper burial means that she be buried in a particular place, as we're going to see, a particular place, the location of which is known and recorded here in the Torah. Why? So that he and his descendants could go there and visit.

What does that concretely mean? Ideas, including theological ideas, come out of practices. So if the place where Sarah, the foremother of the later Israelite people, if this is a place that's recorded, where not only her immediate family but her descendants for generations and generations—you can go visit it today, so generations and generations—would go and visit, what does that mean? That means she's still there. Not just "still there" in the sense that she hasn't ceased to exist—still there in that place. Her body, her relics, are still connected to her, and someone going there, visiting that place, is visiting her and has a connection with her that has survived her physical death. This is built in here. This practice makes no sense otherwise.

So if anybody comes around telling you that the ancient Israelites didn't believe in an afterlife, you should laugh at them, politely, because that's ridiculous. If they come to you and tell you that they didn't believe in something similar to our idea of saints who pray for people, that they didn't believe in relics, that they didn't believe in pilgrimages… You don't have to laugh; you can politely demur and take them here: Genesis, first book of the Bible, first half of it even. First burial that we see. This is part and parcel, not just of Christianity, but of biblical religion going all the way back to Genesis, this idea.

Those other ideas—of the body being the prison-house of the soul, the person going free, some kind of disembodied afterlife, or reincarnation or something—these are things that Greek guys come up with, like, a thousand years after Moses, that have nothing to do with biblical religion. The first procession with relics is going to happen in the book of Exodus—spoilers—when they carry Joseph's bones out of Egypt in procession. But anyway. [Laughter]

So this is important. This isn't just like a footnote. This is a critically important story, not just in the sense of being the climax of Abraham and Sarah's relationship, but of telling us something about death in the wake of Genesis 1-11.

Verse five: "So the sons of Heth answered Abraham, saying, 'Hear us, my lord, you are a king from God among us. Bury your dead in the choicest of our burial places. None of us will withhold his burial place from you to bury your dead there.'—" So what does this mean, "you are a king from God"? Well, remember the whole story with Abimelech and the things that happened, but also remember a king— At this point in history, circa 2000 BC, kings are priest-kings. So kings were not only political leaders or rulers but also had a special connection and were the primary point of connection with God or the gods. In the story with Abimelech from last time, they clearly saw that Abraham had this special kind of relationship with his god. They may not know all the ins and outs of that, but they know that much. And so they say, "Hey, you're—" [Laughter] The word for a priest-king in Sumerian is lugal, which literally means "big man." "You're a big man!" [Laughter] "Any of us whom you ask for a burial place, we're going to give it to you."

Then Abraham stood and bowed himself to the people of the land, the sons of Heth. Thus he spoke with them, saying, "If you have it in mind for me to bury my dead out of my sight, then listen to me and speak on my behalf to Ephron, the son of Zohar, that he may give me the cave of Machpelah, which he has at the end of his field. Let him give it to me at the full price as a burial place among you."

So they said, "We'll give you— Any of us will give you any place you want." He says, "I want to pay full price, for this one in particular."

Verse ten: "Now Ephron was sitting among the sons of Heth, and Ephron the Hittite answered Abraham in the presence of the sons of Heth and all who entered at the gate of the city, saying—"

Now, the "gate of the city"—remember, they didn't have courts; they didn't have a city council. The men of the city, the chief men of the city, would gather at the city gates during the day. There they would decide disputes; there they would witness business contracts and that kind of thing. So that's why this is happening there: this is a real estate contract, essentially. And so these sons of Heth are there as witnesses to this deal between Ephron and Abraham.

So he says in the presence of all those in the gate of the city, verse eleven:

"No, my lord, hear me: I give you both the field and the cave within it. I give it to you in the presence of all my fellow citizens. Bury your dead." Then Abraham bowed himself before the people of the land, and he spoke to Ephron in the hearing of the people of the land, saying, "If you are for me, hear me. I will give you money for the field. Take it from me and I will bury my dead there." Ephron then answered Abraham, saying to him, "My lord, listen to me. The land is worth 400 silver drachmas, but what is that between you and me? So bury your dead."

So this is the first instance of anti-haggling. [Laughter] "Your money's no good here!" "Take my money!" Verse 16:

So Abraham listened to Ephron, and Abraham weighed out the silver for Ephron, which he had mentioned in the hearing of the sons of Heth, the 400 silver drachmas, currency of the merchants. Thus the field of Ephron in Machpela, which was opposite Mamre, the field and the cave in it, and all the trees in the field, which were within all the surrounding borders, were deeded to Abraham as his possession in the presence of the sons of Heth, before all who entered the city. Then after this, Abraham buried Sarah his wife in the cave of the field of Machpela, which was opposite Mamre (that is, Hebron)—

Again, that's an update.

—in the land of Canaan. So the field and the cave in it were deeded to Abraham by the sons of Heth as property for a burial place.

And this place, again, not only— We're going to see it turn up again, but not only is this burial place there around the Old Testament period: you can go there today. This is a known spot and pilgrimage site. And today it's a pilgrimage site for everybody. Not only do Jewish people go there, but Christians and Muslims even, because Abraham, to this burial site. This is a known site.

We won't get into chapter 24, because as you can see that's a longer chapter, and we're going to be getting into the story of Isaac. So we'll finish here, unless anybody has any questions. We'll finish here at the end of Abraham's story. Get ready to get into Isaac next time. Thanks, everybody!