Why Abraham heard that he was told to build an Altar, to burn his Oldest Son Isaac as a Sacrifice to God.

Why Abraham heard that he was told to build an Altar, to burn his Oldest Son Isaac as a Sacrifice to God.

By William A. Schaeffer

In the Bible, we read that Abraham was from the city state of Ur.   The remains of the city of Ur may be found in present day Iraq on the Euphrates River.  Ur, at that time, was a member of a loose confederation of Sumerian city states that all shared a common culture.  The people of Ur are generally considered to have been Semitic.

The date of Abraham’s departure is roughly agreed upon to be about 1800 B.C. which would place him in the third Sumerian dynasty at Ur.   When Abraham left Ur, he traveled to Egypt where he lived for a while.   We remember the famous Biblical story where he entered in disguise as his wife’s brother and this saved his life.   After some intrigue, his wife was returned to him, and he left Egypt.   He was childless and growing older.   Eventually, when they both were very old, his wife bore him a son Isaac.   In a vision God told him to take Isaac to the top of a mountain, build a pyre, and sacrifice his son.  At the last minute God told Abraham he could make a replacement of a Ram on the sacrificial pyre.   This has traditionally been viewed as the supreme test of Abraham’s faith in God.

However, there might be another explanation.

Each of the Sumerian City states had a different patron God and the patron god of Ur was Nanna, the moon god.  Other popular gods were worshipped were Baal and Astarte.

The worship of Baal is mentioned in the Bible and is one of the evils that the early Hebrew Tribes fought.   Baal worship was very popular for hundreds of years and continued right to the classic era of Greece and Rome.

The city of Carthage in North Africa was also populated with people of the same culture.  Originally a Phoenician colony that outgrew the mother city, by 300 B.C. Carthage was the richest and most powerful city state on the Mediterranean Sea.   Carthaginian sailors controlled trade on the Mediterranean and Carthage had colonies in Spain, and Sicily.   Carthage’s patron god was Moloch who was considered a variant of Baal, being called Moloch Baal.   Curiously, it seems that the Carthaginian name for themselves in their own language could be translated as “The Philistines.”

At this time Rome was a growing power and eager to expand her influence and trade.   Rome however, had no navy.   The first Punic war saw Rome build a fleet of ships based on an improvement of Carthaginian design.   With this Navy, Rome defeated Carthage and ended the first Punic War.  

In the second Punic War Hannibal unsuccessfully attacked Rome, and eventually had to defend Carthage from a counter attack by Rome’s famous general Scipio Africanus, the elder.   During the siege of Carthage, the Carthaginians implored favor from their god Moloch.   Moloch was a cruel god of fire that required extreme sacrifice.   In this case, the city fathers were required to sacrifice their oldest children to Moloch to gain his divine assistance.

Eyewitness accounts indicate that the statues of Moloch had upraised arms that descended into an opening with a burning fire.   The first born children were placed upon the arms and rolled alive into the burning flames.   Apparently, this was a prescribed measure of sacrifice to Moloch in extreme and trying circumstances. 

One can only assume that the custom was ancient and familiar to Moloch’s other manifestation as Baal also.

If so, then when Abraham built a pyre to sacrifice his son Isaac, he was really following the custom typical of Sumerian civilization in desperate and trying circumstances.   And God, who the people of Ur were used to associating with fire, appeared to Abraham as a burning bush.   The fact that Abraham was instructed to substitute a Ram for his son was a Theological advancement that marked the beginning of a new religion of the people of Abraham who would prosper and eventually give us the book we know as the Bible.

Addendum 2014:

In many ways I like this historical interpretation of the story more than the traditional Theological justification.   If this event was just a test of Faith then it portrays God as being capricious and mean, testing his subject’s loyalty in the face of the absolute moral horror of burning your own son alive.  However, if the story is a symbol of the advancement of the moral concepts of Theology through history, and a new era of understanding Divine Will, then the God can be seen as a supreme moral authority, advancing mankind’s understanding of spirituality by prohibiting human sacrifice, and substituting animal sacrifice instead.

It is interesting to note that almost two thousand years later, another evolution in Theological thought, among the early Christians, resulted in the prohibition of animal sacrifice altogether, and the substitution of a singular blood sacrifice in its place, in the person of Jesus the Christ.

Sources: 

1) "The Holy Bible"

2) "The Story of Civilization," by Will and Ariel Durant

3) "History begins at Sumer," by Samuel Noah Kramer

Copyright © 2006, 2014 William A. Schaeffer