One asks, as one observes Abraham with Isaac and the two young men
journeying toward Mount Moriah, whether Abraham who complies without
objection to God's command has lost his sensitivity to the ethical.
 "Sensitivity" is indeed the issue; but it is not Abraham's sensitivity
to "the ethical" that should concern us, but *our* sensitivity to the
spiritual plight of a father who has heard voices, divine, demonic or
other, compelling him to thrust a knife into the heart of his only
long-awaited, and dearly loved son. That is the sensitivity test which
Kierkegaard propounded in "Fear and Trembling", and if we fill our
blue books instead with digressions about Abraham's sensitivity to
"the ethical", Kierkegaard is not going to give us a passing grade.

I agree that literal interpretation of the Bible is problematic,
but can (and must) be done.  I apologize for the laxity of my earlier
comments on this topic. In the sense that one is interpreting words,
all textual interpretation is unavoidably literal. Interpretation
entails numerous difficulties, of which I mention two:

1. How do we interpret a text which represents the supernatural
as being natural? Prime examples are the account of creation,
the miracles wrought by Jesus, his resurrection and his ascent
into heaven. This is not, to my mind, an issue with the Temptation
of Abraham. There, the only supernatural elements are the voices
which Abraham hears. Such voices are not uncommon in my clinical
experience, and whether they are divine, demonic or natural has
long constituted a tortured issue of ecclesiastical and secular
jurisprudence.

2. How do we interpret a text, such as that describing the Temptation
of Abraham which gives a perfectly plausible account of seemingly 
natural events, when this account contradicts what we believe to be
fundamentally true, in this case about God's love of Abraham and Isaac?
Here we have a choice: We may, with Kierkegaard, call upon faith to
reconcile the absurdity, or we may escape the absurdity by denying the
reality of the account, explaining it as a poetic invention, a parable,
not to be taken literally, but to be interpreted as expressing some
other than literal truth, in this case, the symbolic taking - and
giving back of a gift that was too great.

I intended to suggest that nature's rhythms, systole and diastole,
summer and winter, growth and decay, birth and death, health and
sickness, wealth and poverty, victory and defeat, are sometimes
reflected in Scripture as God's taking back, at least temporarily,
some of the promises that he has made to man.  I did not intend to
intimate that God in fact takes everything back.  Obviously he does
not. Not all of us earn our bread with the sweat of our brow; some
women do not suffer at all in childbirth; the Flood spared Noah,
his sons, their wives and all species of animals, and left us with
a rainbow to boot; the Tower of Babel did not confound *all* language,
we still have the Oxford English Dictionary. The angel intervened
just in time to prevent the sacrifice of Isaac, who subsequently had
two sons of his own, one of whom had twelve more. Even Job recovered
his health, acquired wealth greater than before, and a replacement
family superior to the one he had lost; you can't beat that, unless
like us Christians you proclaim with trumpets and fireworks every
Easter: "Christ is risen, Hallelujah". So all is well with the world,
and, as the Americans say after a near encounter with death on the
Interstate, A miss is as good as a mile. That, perhaps, should be
our final word about Isaac's narrow escape.

Ernst Meyer
review@netcom.com