Myths & Sacred Narratives

The Binding of Isaac and the Sacrifice of Ibrahim

Other Myths

Citation Formats

General Reference

Divinity Atlas. "The Binding of Isaac and the Sacrifice of Ibrahim." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://www.divinityatlas.com/myths-sacred-narratives/the-binding-of-isaac-and-the-sacrifice-of-ibrahim.

APA Style

Divinity Atlas. (n.d.). The Binding of Isaac and the Sacrifice of Ibrahim. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://www.divinityatlas.com/myths-sacred-narratives/the-binding-of-isaac-and-the-sacrifice-of-ibrahim

BibTeX

@misc{divinityatlas-the-binding-of-isaac-and-the-sacrifice-o,
  author = {Divinity Atlas},
  title = {The Binding of Isaac and the Sacrifice of Ibrahim},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://www.divinityatlas.com/myths-sacred-narratives/the-binding-of-isaac-and-the-sacrifice-of-ibrahim},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

The narrative in which Abraham is told to take his son to a mountain and offer him there, saddles his donkey without argument, walks three days, binds the boy on the wood, raises the knife, and is stopped at the last moment by a voice, after which a ram caught in a thicket is offered instead. Genesis names the son as Isaac and gives no word of what either of them thought. The Qur'an tells the same test without naming the son, and adds two elements Genesis does not have: the command comes as a dream, and the father tells the son, who answers that he will be found patient. Classical Muslim exegetes divided over whether the son was Ishaq or Ismail, with the identification as Ismail becoming the dominant position in later Sunni tradition. Christian reading has treated the episode from the earliest centuries as a figure of the death of Christ.

Facts

Disputed

Scholarly Note

The Qur'an tells the same test of a commanded sacrifice found in Genesis without naming which son was to be offered, unlike Genesis, which names Isaac directly, and adds that the command came as a dream and that the father told the son, who answered that he would be found patient. Classical Muslim exegetes divided over whether the unnamed son was Ishaq or Ismail, and The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary (Seyyed Hossein Nasr, editor-in-chief, HarperOne, 2015) records that the identification as Ismail became the dominant position in later Sunni tradition, a genuine division among named early authorities reported as such in classical tafsir rather than a gap in the record. 3

The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary (Seyyed Hossein Nasr, editor-in-chief, HarperOne, 2015) examined why the Qur'an leaves the son in the commanded sacrifice unnamed where Genesis names Isaac directly, and surveyed how classical Muslim exegetes resolved the gap. Weighing the two identifications argued in classical tafsir, Ishaq and Ismail, it records the division as genuine among named early authorities rather than a gap in the record, and finds that the identification as Ismail became the dominant position in later Sunni tradition.

Meaning

Central Motif

A commanded sacrifice of a child, halted, and a substitute provided 1

History

Historical Note

Genesis names the site only as the land of Moriah, and later Jewish tradition identifies that mountain with the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, so that the same site said to bind the sacrifice of Isaac is also where the First and Second Temples would later stand. 1

Historical Note

Jewish tradition names the episode the Akedah, the binding, and reads it as the model of supreme faith and self-sacrifice invoked in the liturgy of Rosh Hashanah, when the ram's horn, the shofar, is blown in memory of the ram substituted for Isaac. 1

Sources

Primary Source

The episode survives in the Masoretic Hebrew Torah and, without naming the son directly, across a single sustained Quranic passage in surah as-Saffat, two textual traditions that developed the same core test independently within their own scriptural frameworks. 1

Text

Source Text

Genesis 22:1 to 22:19 1

Source Text

Qur'an 37:99 to 37:113 2

Scholarship and Forensics

Scholarly Note

Genesis has Abraham tell his servants before ascending the mountain that he and the boy will worship and then both come back to you, a statement some Jewish and Christian commentators read as an unwitting prophecy of Isaac's survival even as Abraham prepares, so far as he then knows, to carry out the sacrifice. 1

Controversy

Point in Dispute

The Quranic account of the near sacrifice does not name the son directly, and Islamic tradition itself is divided over whether Ibrahim's son in this episode was Ishaq, Isaac, or Ismail, Ishmael, with the majority view favoring Ismail. 3

Learn More

Three Days' Walk to Moriah

The Hebrew narrative is told in nineteen verses and is famous for what it withholds. God calls, Abraham answers with a single word meaning here I am, and is told to take his son, his only one, the one he loves, Isaac, and to offer him on a mountain that will be shown. There is no protest, though the same man had argued at length over the fate of a city not long before. He rises early, saddles the donkey, splits the wood, and walks for three days. On the third he sees the place from a distance, leaves the servants with the animal, loads the wood on the boy, and takes the fire and the knife himself. The only exchange between them is the boy asking where the lamb is and the father answering that God will see to it, after which the text repeats that the two of them walked on together.

He builds the altar, arranges the wood, binds his son, lays him on it, and reaches out his hand. The voice calls his name twice and stops him, a ram is caught by its horns in a thicket, and the place is named for the seeing. Jewish tradition calls the episode the Akedah, the binding, taking its name from the act of tying rather than from the intended killing, and it stands at the centre of the liturgy of the New Year, where the ram's horn sounded is understood as a reminder of that ram. Isaac's age, his awareness, and whether he was in any sense a willing participant are all supplied by later midrash rather than by the text, which says nothing about any of them.

The Dream, the Answer, and Which Son

The Qur'anic telling differs in ways that change the emotional centre of the episode. The command arrives as a dream, and Ibrahim tells his son what he has seen and asks what he thinks; the son answers that he should do as he is commanded and that he will be found, God willing, among the patient. The submission is therefore shared and spoken aloud rather than silent and one-sided. When both have submitted and the son is laid down, the call comes that the vision has been fulfilled, and a great sacrifice is given in exchange. The commemoration of this event is the festival of sacrifice observed across the Muslim world.

The son is not named in the passage. Early Muslim exegetes divided over the question, and the division is genuine rather than a later invention: some of the earliest authorities, including a number of the companions and successors, held that the son was Ishaq, while others held that he was Ismail, and the arguments turned on the surrounding verses and on the traditions attached to Mecca. From roughly the third Islamic century onward the identification with Ismail became the dominant position and is now the standard one in Sunni and Shia teaching alike. Christian reading has taken a different route again, treating the episode from the second century onward as a figure of the crucifixion, with the son carrying the wood up the hill, the three days, and the substitute provided by God read as a prefiguration rather than as a parallel.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

Abraham

Isaac

Named as the son in Genesis

Ishmael

Why this is disputed. The Quran's account of Ibrahim's near-sacrifice of his son does not name which son is meant. Early Muslim commentators were themselves divided between Ishaq and Ismail, and the identification with Ismail became the prevailing view only later in the tradition's own history, while Genesis names Isaac outright for the parallel Jewish and Christian account. The Study Quran's commentary treats this as a genuine difference between how the two textual traditions understand the same episode, rooted in each tradition's own scriptural genealogy, rather than as a disagreement either textual record settles on its own terms.

Source The Study Quran: A New Translation and CommentarySeyyed Hossein Nasr (editor-in-chief)

Olah (The Burnt Offering)

In the binding narrative the ram caught in the thicket is offered as a burnt offering in place of the son.

Source The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)Anonymous (multiple authors)