Content area
The character of Isaac in Genesis 22, the story of Abraham's near sacrifice of Isaac, is constrained so that Isaac's age, level of awareness, degree of participation, and reaction to his impending fate remain ambiguous. Since this story primarily concerns Abraham, one might contend that these details of Isaac's character are irrelevant. Readers, however, have consistently responded to this ambiguity by providing answers to some or all of these aspects of Isaac's character by various interpretive methods and literary genres. This dissertation considers the interpretations of the character of Isaac by Jewish and Christian authors from the Bible through the sixth century of the common era.
Chapter 1 of the dissertation outlines approaches to literary character by biblical and classical authors as well as modern and postmodern literary criticism. This discussion indicates how the ancient interpreters might have perceived a character in a biblical text, and it also provides a context for the contemporary understanding of literary character. The discussion of individual interpretations is divided into chapters grouped according to Jewish or Christian tradition, and each chapter generally proceeds chronologically. Chapter 2 concerns the earliest Jewish interpretations of the character of Isaac from the Septuagint to Josephus, and Chapter 3 discusses the earliest Christian interpretations of Isaac from works in the New Testament to Origen. Chapter 4 treats the targumic and rabbinic interpretations, and, finally, Chapter 5 addresses the Christian interpretations from Athanasius to Valerian.
The character of Isaac in Genesis 22 proves to be highly significant in both the Christian and Jewish exegesis of this period, as Isaac represents a type of Christ for Christian authors and a meritorious and martyr figure for Jewish commentators. The amount of exegetical effort devoted to the character of Isaac suggests that the very constraint of Isaac's character prompts the reader to want to know more about Isaac and, in turn, indicates something of the relationship between the biblical text and its readers. While external factors influence how each reader interprets Isaac's character, the internal factors posed by the text itself shape the interpretation.