The Akedah, the near-sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22), is among the most interpreted passages in all scripture, read on Rosh Hashanah and invoked in Jewish liturgy as a memory of ancestral merit. Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions each engage it deeply, the Islamic tradition generally identifying the son as Ishmael, and modern thinkers from Kierkegaard onward have treated it as a paradigm of faith, obedience and moral tension.
Rashi's commentary on the Akedah reads Abraham's silence throughout the three-day journey to Moriah, and his answer to Isaac that 'God will see to the lamb' (Genesis 22:8), as expressing simultaneous obedience and hope rather than despair, a reading that shapes the passage's place in the Rosh Hashanah liturgy as an example of merit invoked on behalf of Isaac's later descendants. Ramban's commentary, by contrast, reads the test as genuinely open in its outcome from Abraham's perspective, arguing that a trial provides God no new information about a person already known perfectly but instead brings a person's potential into actuality through the trial's completion, making the Akedah's purpose formative for Abraham rather than informative for God. The Islamic tradition's identification of the son as Ishmael rather than Isaac, reflected in the Quran's own unnamed account in surah As-Saffat, marks one of the most consequential points of divergence between the two scriptural traditions regarding the same patriarchal narrative, each tradition reading the episode as founding a central rite, the Akedah's ram anticipating the Temple sacrifices in Jewish memory, the ransoming sacrifice anticipating Eid al-Adha in Islamic practice.