Isaac is the second of the three patriarchs of Israel, the son born to Abraham and Sarah in their old age, the child of the promise, whose very name (Yitzhaq, he laughs) recalls the laughter with which his aged parents greeted the news of his coming. He is the least active of the patriarchs in the Genesis narrative, more often the object of events than their agent: sought a wife, Rebekah, brought to him from Abraham's kin; father of the twins Esau and Jacob; deceived in his blindness into blessing the younger over the elder.
The episode that dominates his story, and one of the most searching narratives in scripture, is the Akedah, the binding. In Genesis 22 God commands Abraham to offer up Isaac as a sacrifice; Abraham obeys to the last moment, binding his son upon an altar and raising the knife, and is stopped only by the angel, a ram caught in a thicket taking Isaac's place.
The text is spare and terrible, and it has drawn commentary in every generation, on Abraham's obedience, on Isaac's silence and apparent consent, and on the God who tests so fearfully and then relents.