Genesis 22:1

The KJV says that “God did tempt Abraham”. The Hebrew verb behind “tempt” is nâçâh, which means to test, to try or to prove. It describes a trial that brings out the true quality and strength of something or someone. God was putting Abraham’s faith and obedience to the proof, so that their depth and genuineness would be shown, to Abraham himself and to every generation after him. Hebrews puts it simply: “By faith Abraham, when he was tried, offered up Isaac” (Hebrews 11:17).

Testing of this kind is something God does with his people. Moses reminded Israel that the LORD had led them forty years in the wilderness “to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep his commandments, or no” (Deuteronomy 8:2). A test from God reveals the heart, refines faith, and teaches his people to lean on his character and his promises alone.

The one who sets this test is God himself. The name used here, ʼĕlôhîym, is plural in form, and when it names the true God it is read as a plural of majesty, with its verbs usually singular. The one true God begins this, and he has every right to ask anything of Abraham. “And said unto him” uses ʼâmar, the everyday verb for saying, which can also mean to tell or to command. God speaks to Abraham directly and by name, and the whole encounter is personal from its first word.

“After these things”, in Hebrew ʼachar dâbâr, ties this test to everything that has just happened. Isaac, the son God had promised for so long, has been born (Genesis 21:1–7). The trouble between Sarah and Hagar has ended with Hagar and Ishmael sent away (Genesis 21:8–21), and Abraham has made a covenant with Abimelech at Beersheba (Genesis 21:22–34). The test comes after a long run of God’s promises kept.

By now Isaac was probably a young man. His age goes unstated, and tradition has put it anywhere from about fifteen to thirty-seven.

God had promised to make of Abraham a great nation and to bless all the families of the earth in him (Genesis 12:2–3), and he had said of Isaac, “I will establish my covenant with him for an everlasting covenant” (Genesis 17:19). So when the test comes, Abraham’s whole future and the line of the promised nation rest on this one son. That is what makes the test so searching. God asks Abraham to trust him with the very child through whom God’s own promises were to come true.

Abraham’s answer in Hebrew is hinneni, an expression found often in Scripture on the lips of someone who is ready, attentive and willing to do what is asked. Abraham says it before he knows what God will ask of him. He puts himself at God’s disposal ahead of the command, and that readiness comes from a relationship with God that has grown deep over many years. The same readiness carries him through the rest of the chapter.

God names the one he is asking for in three steps, and each makes the request heavier: “thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest.” He knows exactly what he is asking, and he says so.

“Son” is bên, the ordinary Hebrew word for a son, and here it means Isaac as Abraham’s own child. “Only” is yâchîyd, which means only, sole or unique, and can also carry the sense of beloved. Zechariah uses the same word for the bitterest grief: “they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son” (Zechariah 12:10).

Abraham had an elder son, Ishmael, who had just left the household with his mother (Genesis 21:9–21). Isaac was the only son of the promise, the one heir through whom the covenant would go on, and the word marks him as irreplaceable and precious.

“Lovest” is ʼâhab, to love or to have affection for a person. This is the first time love is named in Scripture, and it is a father’s love for his son. God names that love in the command itself. He is asking for the most precious relationship Abraham has, and the test is whether Abraham will hold God above even this.

God sends Abraham on a journey: “get thee into the land of Moriah”. A burnt offering, ʻôlâh, was an offering burned whole on the altar, and its name speaks of what goes up, as the whole offering rose in smoke. Burnt offerings had been part of the worship of God since the days of Noah, and giving the whole of the offering pictured complete dedication.

God also holds back the exact place. He speaks only of “one of the mountains which I will tell thee of”, so Abraham must set out trusting God to show him the place when the time comes. He saw it on the third day (Genesis 22:4). The journey itself was part of the test, three days of relying on God’s guidance with the command before him, and his obedience was deliberate from the first step to the last.

The name Moriah comes up again at the building of the temple, when Solomon “began to build the house of the LORD at Jerusalem in mount Moriah” (2 Chronicles 3:1). Tradition takes the mountain of Abraham’s offering to be that same hill, where Israel’s sacrifices would later be offered.

God was testing Abraham, as verse 1 says, and the whole command is to be read in that light. Some of the nations around Israel offered their children to their gods, especially in times of desperate crisis. Mesha, king of Moab, offered up his eldest son on the wall of his city (2 Kings 3:27). The LORD later forbade Israel to give any of their children to Molech (Leviticus 18:21). He called the burning of sons and daughters an abomination that he hates (Deuteronomy 12:31), “which I commanded them not, neither came it into my mind” (Jeremiah 32:35). So the command asked Abraham to go against a father’s natural love and, as the later law makes plain, against what God himself abhors. That is what made this test unlike any other.

Abraham went believing that the promise would stand. He told his young men that he and the lad would go and worship and “come again to you” (Genesis 22:5), and Hebrews explains his confidence: “Accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead; from whence also he received him in a figure” (Hebrews 11:17–19). God stopped Abraham’s hand before Isaac was harmed (Genesis 22:12), and he provided a ram to be offered in Isaac’s place (Genesis 22:11–13). The end of the test was Isaac alive, Abraham’s faith shown to be real, and a picture of a greater provision still to come. Scripture leaves unsaid why the test took this particular form, and it is wise to claim no more than it tells us.

James turns to this moment to show that Abraham’s faith was a living one: “Was not Abraham our father justified by works, when he had offered Isaac his son upon the altar?” He goes on to say that Abraham’s faith worked together with his works, and that he was called the Friend of God (James 2:21–23). Micah asks what the LORD wants of a worshipper, even “Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”, and answers that what the LORD requires is “to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God” (Micah 6:6–8).

The New Testament reads Genesis 22 as a picture of what God would do for us in Christ. God asked Abraham for his only son, whom he loved, and the Father gave his own Son: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). Abraham was spared from giving up Isaac, and God gave up his own Son for us. Paul draws the conclusion: “He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?” (Romans 8:32).

Other details in the chapter point the same way. Abraham laid the wood for the burnt offering on Isaac (Genesis 22:6), as Jesus went out “bearing his cross” (John 19:17). Hebrews says Abraham received Isaac back from the dead “in a figure” (Hebrews 11:19), and that receiving foreshadows Christ’s own resurrection on the third day. The ram caught in the thicket, given by God in Isaac’s place (Genesis 22:13), points to Jesus, “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). The test ends with God’s own provision of a substitute (Genesis 22:13–14), and at the cross God himself provided the perfect and final sacrifice for all who believe. By the traditional reckoning, Mount Moriah lies close to Golgotha, where Jesus was crucified.

In these two verses God calls Abraham by name, and when he asks the hardest thing, he names the love it will cost: “whom thou lovest.” God knows what he asks of his people and what it costs them. His tests come to prove and strengthen faith, and he brought this one to its end with Isaac alive and a ram in his place.

Abraham’s “Here I am” was spoken to a God who had kept every promise up to that day, and Abraham trusted that the God who gave him Isaac could raise Isaac up again. The heaviest words of the command, “thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest”, came true for God himself at the cross, where the Father gave the Son he loved. Whatever God asks of his people, he has already given them more, and Paul’s question stands over every trial: “how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?”