3. Tlie next recorded event in the life of Isaac is the menx.raldf one connected with the command of God to offer him up as a sacrifice on a mountain in the land of Moriali ((ien. xxii). B.C. cir. 2047. Nothing is said
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of his age at the time except that he is called " a lad" (12;D), perhaps sixteen years of age. According to Jo- sephus (A nt. i, 13, 2), he was twenty-five years old. That Isaac knew nothing of the relation in which he person- ally stood to the divine command, came affecthigly out in the question he put to his father while they journey- ed together, " Behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering?" Even then the se- cret was not disclosed to him ; and onh', it would ap- pear, when the act itself was in process of being con- summated, did the fearful truth burst upon his soul that he was himself to be the victim on the altar. Yet the sacred narrative tells of no remonstrant struggle on the part of this child of promise, no strivings for escape, no cries of agony or pleadings for deliverance : he seems to have surrendered himself as a willing sacrifice to the caU of Heaven, and to have therein showed how thor- oughly in him, as in his believing parent, the mind of the flesh had become subordinate to the mind of the spirit. To act thus was to prove himself the fitting type of him who had the law of God in his heart, and came to do, not his own will, but the will of him that sent him. But the death itself, which was to prove the life of the world, it belonged to the antitype, not to the type, to accomplish. The ram provided by God in the thicket must meanwhile take the place of the seed of blessing. In the surrender by the father of his " only son," the concurrence of the son's will with the father's, the sacrificial death which virtually took place, and the resurrection from the dead, whence Abraham received his son "in figure" (Heb. xi, 19), are all points of anal- ogy which cannot be overlooked.
The offering up of Isaac by Abraham has been view- ed in various lights. It is the subject of five disserta- tions by Frischmuth in the Thes. Theol. Philol. p. 197 (attached to Crit. Sacri ; originally Jena, 1662-5, 4to). By bishop Warburton {iJiv. Leg. b. vi, § 5) the whole transaction was regarded as " merely an information by action (comp. Jer. xxvii, 2 ; Ezek. xii, 3 ; Hos. i, 2), in- stead of words, of the great sacrifice of Christ for the re- demption of mankind, given at the earnest request of Abraham, who longed impatiently to see Christ's day." This view is adopted by dean Graves {On the Pinta- tiuch, pt. iii, § 4), and has become popular. But it is pronounced to be unsatisfactory' by Davidson {Primitive Sacrijice, pt. iv, § 2), who, pleading for the progressive communication of the knowledge of the Christian atone- ment, protests against the assumption of a contempo- rary disclosure of the import of the sacrifice to Abra- ham, and points ont that no expiation or atonement was joined with this emblematic oblation, which consequent- ly symbolized only the act, not the power or virtue of the Christian sacrifice. Mr. Maurice {Patriarchs and Larrgivers, iv) draws attention to the offering of Isaac as the last and culminating point (compare Ewald, Ge- schichte, i, 430-4) in the divine education of Abraham, that which taught him the meaning and ground of self- sacrifice. The same line of thought is followed up in a very instructive and striking sermon on the sacrifice of Abraham in Doctrine nf Sacrifice, iii, 33-48. Some Ger- man writers have spoken of the whole transaction as a dream (Eichhorn, BihUoih.f. lihl. Liter, i, 45 sq.), or a myth (De Wette), or as the explanation of a hieroglyph (()tman, in Henke's Magazin, ii, 517), and treat other events in Isaac's life as slips of the pen of a Jewish transcriber. Even the merit of novelty cannot be claim- ed for such views, which appear to have been in some measure forestalled in the time of Augustine (Sermo ii, Pe tentotione A braho'). They are, of course, irrecon- cilable with the declaration of St. James, that it was a work by which Abraham was justified. Eusebius {Prap. Kvang. iv, 16, and i, 10) has preserved a singular and inaccurate version of the offering of Isaac in an extract from the ancient Phoenician historian Sanchoniathon ; but it is absurd to suppose that the widely-spread (see Ewald, .') Itherthihner, p. 79, and Thomson's Bampton Lec- tures, 1853, p. 38) heathen practice of sacrificing human
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