Sacrifice of Isaac. The Binding of Isaac is a story from the Hebrew Bible found in Genesis 22. In the biblical narrative, God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, on Moriah. Abraham begins to comply, when a messenger from God interrupts him. Abraham then sees a ram and sacrifices it instead. This episode has been the focus of a great deal of commentary in traditional Jewish, Christian, and Muslim sources, as well as being addressed by modern scholarship. According to the Hebrew Bible, God commands Abraham to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice. After Isaac is bound to an altar, a messenger from God stops Abraham before the sacrifice finishes, saying now I know you fear God. Abraham looks up and sees a ram and sacrifices it instead of Isaac. The passage states that the event occurred at the mount of the L in the land of Moriah. 2 Chronicles 3:1 refers to mount Moriah as the site of Solomon's Temple, while Psalms 24:3; Isaiah 2:3 & 30:29; and Zechariah 8:3 use the term the mount of the LORD to refer to the site of Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem, the location believed to be the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. In The Binding of Isaac, Religious Murders & Kabbalah, Lippman Bodoff argues that Abraham never intended to actually sacrifice his son, and that he had faith that God had no intention that he do so. Rabbi Ari Kahn elaborates this view as follows: Isaac's death was never a possibility, not as far as Abraham was concerned, and not as far as God was concerned. God's commandment to Abraham was very specific, and Abraham understood it very precisely: Isaac was to be raised up as an offering, and God would use the opportunity to teach humankind, once and for all, that human sacrifice, child sacrifice, is not acceptable. This is precisely how the sages of the Talmud understood the Akedah. Citing the Prophet Jeremiah's exhortation against child sacrifice, they state unequivocally that such behavior never crossed God's mind, referring specifically to the sacrificial slaughter of Isaac. Though readers of this parashah throughout the generations have been disturbed, even horrified, by the Akedah, there was no miscommunication between God and Abraham. The thought of actually killing Isaac never crossed their minds. The Jewish Publication Society suggests Abraham's apparent complicity with the sacrifice was actually his way of testing God. Abraham had previously argued with God to save lives in Sodom and Gomorrah. By silently complying with God's instructions to kill Isaac, Abraham was putting pressure on God to act in a moral way to preserve life. More evidence that Abraham thought that he would not actually sacrifice Isaac comes from Genesis 22:5, where Abraham said to his servants, You stay here with the ass. The boy and I will go up there; we will worship and we will return to you. By saying we, he meant that both he and Isaac would return. Thus, he did not believe that Isaac would be sacrificed in the end. In The Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides argues that the story of the Binding of Isaac contains two great notions. First, Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac demonstrates the limit of humanity's capability to both love and fear God. Second, because Abraham acted on a prophetic vision of what God had asked him to do, the story exemplifies how prophetic revelation has the same truth value as philosophical argument and thus carries equal certainty, notwithstanding the fact that it comes in a dream or vision. In Glory and Agony: Isaac's Sacrifice and National Narrative, Yael S. Feldman argues that the story of Isaac's Binding, in both its biblical and post-biblical versions has had a great impact on the ethos of altruist heroism and self-sacrifice in modern Hebrew national culture. As her study demonstrates, over the last century the Binding of Isaac has morphed into the Sacrifice of Isaac, connoting both the glory and agony of heroic death on the battlefield. In Legends of the Jews, rabbi Louis Ginzberg argues that the binding of Isaac is a way of God to test Isaac's claim to Ishmael, and to silence Satan's protest about Abraham who had not brought up any offering to God after Isaac was born, also to show a proof to the world that Abraham is the true god-fearing man who is ready to fulfill any of God's commands, even to sacrifice his own son: When God commanded the father to desist from sacrificing Isaac, Abraham said: One man tempts another, because he knoweth not what is in the heart of his neighbor.