Abstract / DOI
Why Did God Tempt Abraham? Reading Genesis 22 «From Below». The story of Abraham’s sacrifice in Genesis 22 has troubled readers for many centuries. God’s command for Abraham to sacrifice his only beloved son Isaac entails not only Abraham’s killing of his son, but also God’s renouncing the promise that Abraham would become a great and numerous people: Isaac is the necessary means of fulfilling this promise. God’s tempting of Abraham has its religious-historical background in the Persian period, when the promises to Israel seemed to have lost validity. Abraham thus becomes a prototype for Israel in a seemingly hopeless situation after the Babylonian exile.