Genesis 22. When carefully reading what the text says, the message of this chapter is that God does not want Isaac to be sacrificed. God’s love and mercy are available to humanity without having to be earned by sacrificing another human being.
an estimated 54% of the world’s population, some 3.8 billion people, revere the patriarch Abraham as the common ancestor of all religions of Semitic origin. An authentic Abrahamic tradition, Jewish, Christian or Islamic would be one that would follow the reason given in the Torah for Abraham’s preeminence
The flood was caused by “hamas,” the Hebrew word used by the Torah to refer to “violence.”
“Hamas” is the same word the Scriptures use to describe the sin for which Nineveh was to be destroyed in the book of Jonas and for which “sulfurous fire” rained down upon Sodom and Gomorrah.
The miracles reported in the Bible were supposed to strike the reader as miraculous. Even if some natural phenomena can be found at the heart of the Ten Plagues, the theology rather than the natural history of the plagues intrigued the biblical authors and inspired them to tell the tale of the plagues as they did.
all through Jewish history, from the Exodus to the Maccabean Revolt to the rising from the ashes of the Nazi Holocaust to the creation of the modern State of Israel, the end result was not the to-be-expected consequences. It was something that surprised even the most optimistic speculations about human capacity.
To paraphrase Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Jews do not keep their faith because of the miracles they experience. It is their faith that leads them to interpret their life as miraculous.
What really happened that night, on that day hundreds and hundreds of years ago, when the Book of Exodus tells us that
Pharaoh rose up in the night, he, and all his servants, and all the Egyptians; and there was a great cry in Egypt… And he called for Moses and Aaron by night and said: ‘Rise up, get you forth from among my people, both ye and the children of Israel; and go, serve the Lord, as you have said. Take both your flocks and your herds, as you have said, and be gone; and bless me also.’
The Pharaoh of the Book of Exodus is possessed of a ruthless and stubborn character. He is an egocentric, unemotional human being, devoid of all compassion, incapable of feeling the pain of others, shame, or guilt.
Starting with the Book of Exodus (Shemot)- and throughout the following three remaining books of the Torah- the figure of Moses is the guiding force. He is, in fact the single most central figure in the TaNaKh.
