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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Islam In The Bible Sacrifice The paradigm of sacrifice in the Bible, and indeed in Islam, is the sacrifice of Abraham. The faithfulness of Abraham in offering up his son has caught the holy imagination of every faith. The Biblical account is found in Genesis twenty-two. `And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am.

And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.' This text has precipitated one of the great battles be­tween the books, with Jews and Christians on one side and Muslims on the other, for the Qur'an reports a similar test for Ishmael rather than Isaac. The key to understanding the text is in the phrase 'thine only son'.

The fact is that, even according to the Bible, Isaac was never Abraham's only son. Either the Bible has made a terrible mistake here, or we are dealing with something else. There is a consistent and coherent explanation. All over the world there are rites of passage as they are called for young people about the time of puberty. Nearly all of them include some kind of symbolic acts representing the death and rebirth of the initiate.

Very often they include a substitution sacrifice to represent the death of the youth. The phrase 'thine only son' fits consistently into a rite of this type, as does the rest of the conversation in the chapter. The phrase is obviously a part of the liturgical formula for the sacrifice of the first­born. Normally the first-born is the only son thus sacrificed, but in the case of polygamy, when the rite is repeated for the first-born of each wife, it may not be literally true.

In the case of Isaac it was not, but since it was a part of the ritual formula, the phrase was used in his case as it undoubtedly had been somewhat more accurately used in the case of Ishmael earlier. Both the Qur'an and the Bible report matters correctly. This consistent understanding of the text not only rec­onciles the Bible and the Qur'an, but deflates the belief in human sacrifice.

To imagine this to be a real test, in which Abraham actually agrees to offer his son, and is stopped from killing him only at the last moment, is to lay the foundation for accepting human sacrifice.