God's Little Helpers

There can be little doubt that the brightest character in the Old Testament (the veritable Stephen Fry of Biblical characters) is Jonah. When God gave him the news that he was to be the next prophet, he saw the writing on the wall (not literally, of course, because the writing on the wall was aimed at Belshazzar) and scarpered.

The attentions of God are generally not a good thing in the Bible. First (well, duh!) there was Adam (that unpleasant business that was picked over several blogs back), and it wasn't long before Abraham was receiving instructions on how to do away with his son.

This story, the story of Abraham and Isaac, is only even slightly tolerable if you see it entirely from the human perspective. God doesn't come too well out of the Garden of Eden debacle, but here He is surely just being sadistic, to ask a father to take his son up the mountain and sacrifice him. After all, there's the omniscience thing again; God knew full well that Abraham was so incapable of independent thought that he would slavishly obey. The only point, then, in going through the entire rigmarole was in order to demonstrate (either to Abraham, to Isaac, or to us) that strict adherence to Divine instruction would probably work out alright in the end.

There we go: moral instruction inculcated and no one harmed except for a ram that thought that the worst part of its day was getting caught in a thicket until Abraham happened along with a murderous gleam in his eye.

And yet, one has to think that Isaac (who uncomplainingly allowed himself to be bound and laid on an altar by the person previously known as "Dad") would have slept less easy in his bed that night. Had psychoanalysis existed in those times, I would have though some intensive counselling and arguably a full course 0f the talking therapy might have done him some good. Abraham himself is likely have looked away evasively as Sarah caught his eye while cooking up (what my knowledge of early-era cooking only extends to describing as) a mess of potage that evening. All cannot have been well in the Abraham household for some days after, and I suspect that they were not permitted to eat the ram to assuage their collective misery, however free-range and hand-cut it might have been.

Were God inclined to justify His own ways to men, he might counter that facing the threat of sacrificing one's son is nothing compared to genuinely sacrificing one's son for the redemption of the world. Moreover, given that God's wrath extends even to an extinction event survived by only one family and a large number of breeding pairs, I don't think that I would be inclined to argue with Him.

But I would be ever so grateful if He were to pass me by next time that He was selecting a helper.