Baidarka

2 Then God said, "Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah.

If Isaac is Abraham's only son who is Ishmael? Chopped liver?

I think that we are dealing with layers upon layers of interwoven stories and that the contradictions are there because the redactor sometimes got sloppy.
Just as Walt Disney cleaned up old fairy tales to make them safe for America's Children, the Redactor Changed God's penis into a foot, Abraham's balls into a thigh and replaced the horrific sacrifice of Isaac with the more benign sacrifice of a ram.

Clivedurdle

Do we have in Isaac another dying and resurrecting godman, this time from Judaism?

Baidarka

"Do we have in Isaac another dying and resurrecting godman, this time from Judaism?"

Perhaps dying and resurrecting without a godman.
Perhaps dying without resurrecting.
The resurrection story could have been influenced by the Christian myth.

It is interesting to note that this would be a resurrection from ashes without bones.
The Norse myth of Thor's resurrection of his goats requires all the whole unbroken bones.
The Christian Jesus myth also seems to require unbroken bones.

John 19-31Now it was the day of Preparation, and the next day was to be a special Sabbath. Because the Jews did not want the bodies left on the crosses during the Sabbath, they asked Pilate to have the legs broken and the bodies taken down. 32The soldiers therefore came and broke the legs of the first man who had been crucified with Jesus, and then those of the other. 33But when they came to Jesus and found that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. 34Instead, one of the soldiers pierced Jesus' side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of blood and water. 35The man who saw it has given testimony, and his testimony is true. He knows that he tells the truth, and he testifies so that you also may believe. 36These things happened so that the scripture would be fulfilled: "Not one of his bones will be broken,"[2] 37and, as another scripture says, "They will look on the one they have pierced."[3]

gregor

That Genesis contains multiple stories that were cobbled together is beyond dispute. The Abe / Isaac story would appear to be a candidate for such a situation.

I recall a few years ago Dr. X (before he was banned) cited some references to alternative narratives that perhaps the Judah tribe or the Israel tribe believed that the sacrifice actually occurred.

Chili

But it did, especially in the mind of the Judah and Israel tribes.

yalla

Somewhere ,later on in the Jewish Bible , there is a story about Abraham sending a servant [slave?] off to find a wife for Isaac.[There is a curious bit about Abraham telling the servant to feel beneath his [Abe's] skirt].Still later on Isaac buries his father so I reckon Isaac was not sacrificed .But it does illustrate that whenever the story of Abe and Isaac was written there was a transition from the sacrifice of first born males ["all those who open the womb"] to the practice being discouraged.I'll try to find the exact cites for all this.

Baidarka

"Still later on Isaac buries his father so I reckon Isaac was not sacrificed ."Since we are probably dealing with fiction and we are probably dealing with layers of intertwined traditions, this type of logic, which would work if we were dealing with real events, may be meaningless in this context.

Jack the Bodiless

IIRC, Isaac never reappears in the "E source" of the Pentateuch (where "God" is "Elohim"). The intervening angel is sent by YHWH, implying an alteration to the story.

yalla

Baidarka...I agree.I did not mean to imply that the story was factual only that within the story Isaac is portrayed as being alive after the aborted sacrifice.

River

Muslims believe that Ishmael (pbuh) was almost sacrificed...