The Binding of Isaac is a very strange story. I’m not talking about the video game with the same name, but instead the original biblical story. It’s a weird story.
A lot of stories in the Bible are very weird (particularly the Old Testament), so this isn’t exactly “surprising”, but what is surprising (at least to myself) is how it’s treated as some kind of insight as to God’s infinite virtue and nature.
And the reason it surprises me is because the message is wrong. It teaches the wrong lesson, and I would argue the lesson it does teach is actively harmful.
The Story
The tl;dr of the Binding of Isaac goes as follows:
God wants to test Abraham’s loyalty, and asks him to sacrifice, instead of an animal like usual, his son Isaac.
Abraham does not want to do this, but loves God so much that he eventually lures Isaac to be bound to a sacrificial table, and begins the sacrifice, only for an angel to stop the sacrifice at the last second explaining to them both that Abraham has thoroughly proven his faith and devotion to God.
I know there are slightly different ways the story is written and told, but I think I have summarized the broad strokes, or at least the colloquial understanding, though feel free to leave a comment if you think that I got something wrong.
What is a moral lesson?
I would argue that a “moral lesson” needs to be more than just “correct advice”. If someone told me that I should breathe regularly in order to ensure that my body keeps functioning, I wouldn’t really consider it as a “lesson”, but it’s plainly obvious: by virtue of being alive and understanding that message I probably already know breathing is important. No new information is being conveyed.
This is why most of the moral lessons we learn about as children (even the stuff in the Bible) tend to focus on non-obvious morality. The stories don’t generally boil down to “stealing is bad”, or “murder is wrong”, but instead bring up a scenario that is specifically not intuitive.
For example, the famous “Scorpion and the Frog” story teaches a non-obvious lesson. Intuition would tell us that the scorpion’s assured death would prevent him from stinging the frog. Instead, the scorpion is unable to resist stinging the frog, despite the fact that doing so ensures that they both die.
Whether or not you agree with the message (and I have skepticism myself), I think we can agree it is a non-obvious bit of morality, and that’s my point: the lesson it tries to teach is something that goes against our common sense: these teachings wouldn’t be necessary or useful if they were obvious.
My Issues
So what is wrong with this story?
Let’s ignore for a moment the weirdness of an ostensibly all-knowing omnipotent god needing to subject his followers to an extremely cruel test. What is the actual lesson to this story?
As far as I can tell, the lesson effectively boils down to “if something or someone bigger and stronger than you tells you to do something you don’t like…do it anyway.” Ignore your own ethical morality: if God tells you to do something, even something that he himself contradicted later, you should do it.
I would argue that this isn’t a “lesson” based on the definition I described. The intuitive thing to do in virtually any situation is to prioritize self-preservation. Abraham knows that God is bigger, smarter, and stronger than him, and knows that if he doesn’t follow God’s orders, he’s certainly not afraid to kill people he doesn’t like. Abraham prioritizes his own wellbeing over the wellbeing of his own child.
There is an argument that Isaac was prophesied to make a great nation and therefore it would affect Abraham negatively, but I would argue that by God making the demand to Abraham then he would presume that that prophecy was now void anyway.
Now, you might retort “Abraham wasn’t prioritizing himself over Isaac, he was prioritizing God!”, but, umm, why? Like, sure, being grateful for the Earth being created is fine, but if God is telling you to do something that you know is wrong, maybe, you know, you shouldn’t worship him. Especially if Isaac was prophesied to create a great nation, wouldn’t that be a good reason to actively not worship someone telling you to do something immoral?
And that’s what I’m getting at with it teaching “the wrong lesson”, and I think even later Bible entries seem to agree with me. In the New Testament in Hebrews, they claim that Abraham thought he could resurrect Isaac later, but of course that begs the question: if Abraham thought he could bring Isaac back, it sort of ceases to be a sacrifice. The writers of Hebrews felt the need to supply some sort of softening conditions, because otherwise the story was kind of unsettling.
In my mind, the better lesson would be something closer to the ending of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Spoilers for Huck Finn, but the emotional climax of the book involves Huck actively choosing to go to Hell by choosing to save Jim out from slavery. He knows that no matter how good heaven is, it is not worth it. Turning on your best friend so you can have an eternal orgasm in the sky is wrong, and despite knowing he faces eternal torment, he also knows that the right thing to do is to save Jim. Ultimately, this decision has Huck taking, and passing, the ultimate test: he valued Jim’s humanity more than his own safety.
In my mind, the story of the Binding of Isaac would be infinitely more compelling if, instead of an angel stopping Abraham from going through the final act, Abraham had stopped himself, and that was the test. If, instead of it being a strange “loyalty” test for God, it could instead be a morality test for Abraham. Abraham would pass the test by realizing that doing the right thing matters more than what some bully wants you to do.
In this version Abraham learns the lesson, instead of just the reader. Abraham would learn that he should do what he feels is right. Abraham would learn that we’re all autonomous people who make our own decision. Abraham would have gotten divine confirmation that doing the right thing is the right thing. Hell, it wouldn’t even be a contradiction: God could have said “I see you realized the importance of my upcoming bestseller ‘The Ten Commandments’ and it’s single ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’“.
What’s the harm?
I’m far from the first person to question the “why?” of following God’s edicts, and according to a quick check apparently even Immanuel Kant had something to say about the Binding of Isaac, but I personally haven’t seen this argued very much.
This story is very popular, and is used as an example of “good behavior” about extreme devotion to God.
An issue I have is that, as far as we know, people who hear the voice of God are typically schizophrenic. Even if some of them aren’t schizophrenic, how exactly do we differentiate people who “really” hear the voice of God and people who are hallucinating? What if these different voices of God have contradictions…which is the real one? What if one of these people hearing voices thinks that the Lord is telling them to murder their children, assuming that if it were actually wrong God would send an angel to stop them? Should we really be teaching people to not question the voices in their head?
But more broadly, I think it’s just a bad lesson to be teaching children, even disregarding schizophrenia. The lesson of “obey powerful people even when they tell you to do things that you know are wrong” isn’t something we should be encouraging people. The Nazis used the just following orders defense, and we rightfully determined that that was insufficient.
Every human will be handed countless ethical dilemmas throughout their existence. We all are responsible for our own actions, and we all build our own moral framework based on our experiences and the media we consume. The Bible is claimed to be the ultimate source of morality by a large quantity of people. By teaching terrible lessons, we’re teaching terrible morality to many people.