Our Farmer Abraham: The Binding of Isaac and Willing What God Wills

Abstract

In The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, Yoram Hazony suggests that it is part of Rabbinic tradition that in the Akedah, Abraham never intended to sacrifice Isaac (2012, 115-118). In a recent paper, Sam Lebens (2017, 501) argued that in making this claim, Hazony is misrepresenting Rabbinic tradition. In this paper, I show that Hazony can concede to Lebens’s argument and still have something interesting to say about the Akedah, namely, that it provides an opportunity to reflect on what might happen when a ‘Shepherd’ is commanded by God to violate what they understand to be a principle of natural law.