John A. Broussard

Not being a student of the bible, I may be getting this wrong, but it seems that god ordered Abraham to kill his son. At the last minute, god called off the deed.

Now, the question is: "Would Abraham have been justified in following god's original command?"

The question seems especially appropriate at the moment, since there's some evidence that the recent mass school killing was done at what the perpetrator felt was god's order.

I've had people who were much more knowledgeable in such matters give me their answers--of which I now have a half-dozen. I just wondered if there are more of them out there.

Anat

Yeshayahu Leibowitz said that yes, he would have. Leibowitz's God has the right to make arbitrary demands of his believers, and they *must* follow, no ifs no buts.

Anat

To continue my reply, Leibowitz's worldview did not apply this thinking to non-Jews, as from a Jewish POV they aren't bound by any commandments beyond the Noachide ones (Genesis 9). But in Leibowitz's view the sole purpose of a Jew's existence is the acceptance of the yoke of heaven and following God's commandments to the best interpretation that prevails in one's generation, regardless of consequences, positive or negative.

chokmah

As I had posted in another forum, there was a tradition held by few that Abraham actually carried out the action. I read about it in a Torah Comentary by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. The editor was Gunther Plaut. Basically, it ties in the use of the "ashes of Isaac" during a fast. Pretty interesting consideration. Granted, it has a plethora of problems that would be compounded upon the top of this belief; but nonetheless, interesting.

John A. Broussard

Query to Anat.

If God's orders are to be followed, no matter what, how can one be sure it's God doing the ordering? Might it not be Satan engaging in trickery? Or a chemical imbalance making for delusions?

Or, if God can order man to do anything, doesn't this make any rule-following absurd? E.g., Any or all of the ten commandments can be violated if God orders man to violate them, so they have no significance in themselves.

It would seem to me that the doctrine you described reduces ethics to individual, revealed experience. Do you agree?

To chokmah: Interesting variant. I never heard of it before. I can't see where that version has any implications for the ethical question involved. Do you see any?

Agemegos

Faith.

Anat

The Jewish response to that is that God stopped commanding Jews directly at some point. Probably the last time God is supposed to have said anything about laws and behavior to Jews was in the latter part of the 1st century CE, when a voice from heaven announced that the law regarding ritual impurity follows the ruling of a certain sage (Eliezer Hyrkanos) but the rest of the sages chose to ignore the Voice, claiming that the law should be interpreted according to the majority of the sages of the time, and that God can't contradict them since he already gave the law at Sinai, and now it is theirs to interpret. Thus there is an easy way out - all these outragious commands belong in the past and are of merely academic interest to our generations.

Back to Leibowitz, I was very curious about his position regarding the wars of Joshua bib-Nun, because of the contradiction between his belief in acceptance of 'the yoke of heavens' regardless of contents and his persistant opposition to the occupation, to the point of demanding that soldiers disobey orders. All I could find was his remark that the wars of Joshua were the wars with the greatest historical impact on the Jews, yet they are not celebrated, as opposed to the wars of the Hasmoneans that are. (I ignore the lack of historicity of Joshua at this point, since the exodus isn't historical either, but is celebrated.)