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ISAAC

(Heb. yiṣḥāq)

The son of Abraham and Sarah. The name means “he laughs,” reflecting Sarah’s response when told she would have a child (Gen. 18:12); she later celebrates the birth of Isaac with laughter (21:6). Isaac is the promised offspring through whom God keeps the covenant made with Abraham in Gen. 12:1-3, although Abraham attempts to fulfill the covenant with other “heirs” (Lot, Eleazar of Damascus, Ishmael).

Isaac, as the promised offspring, is the first to be circumcised at the prescribed age of eight days (Gen. 17:12; 21:4), and Abraham marks his survival to the end of weaning with a great feast (21:8). Isaac remains the only child of Abraham and Sarah, and after the death of Sarah he marries Rebekah, the granddaughter of Abraham’s brother. He becomes the father of Esau and Jacob, thereby continuing the line of descendants promised to Abraham. Isaac settles in the region of Beersheba, where God makes a promise to him (Gen. 26:3-5) similar to that given to Abraham. Isaac dies at the age of 180 and is placed by Jacob and Esau in the family tomb at Hebron (Gen. 35:27-29).

The phrase “Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (or Israel)” occurs 23 times in the OT and 7 times in the NT, but Isaac is clearly less prominent than the other two in the remembered tradition of ancient Israel. Isaac is mentioned by name more than 70 times in Genesis, but only 33 times outside of the book.

The stories about Isaac do not form a discrete unit within the Genesis narrative. Before his marriage, Isaac’s story is intertwined with that of his father and mother, and after his marriage his story is part of the story of his children. Isaac’s genealogy (Gen. 25:19) follows directly after the account of Abraham’s death (vv. 7-11) and directly before the birth of Jacob and Esau (vv. 21-26). The two major events in Isaac’s life are tied closely to Abraham and Jacob. In Gen. 22 Isaac is more the object of than a participant in Abraham’s test of faithfulness to God, as in ch. 27 he is again more the object of than a participant in Jacob’s deception. Only in Gen. 24:62-67, when Isaac meets Rebekah for the first time, and in ch. 26, when Isaac encounters Abimelech, is Isaac something of a central player in the narrative.

But Isaac is linked inextricably to the promises of God to the ancestors. He is Abraham’s only means of fulfilling God’s promise of descendants in Gen. 12. He is the means by which God tests Abraham’s (and Isaac’s) fidelity to God’s promises. God passes on the promise to Isaac in Gen. 25:11 after the death of Abraham, and again in 26:2-4. In Gen. 28 Isaac appears for the last time before his own death and blesses Jacob before sending him away to Paddan-aram, the home of Rebekah’s brother, to find a wife. Isaac’s words to his son are clearly reminiscent of God’s words of promise to Abraham in Gen. 12 and to Isaac in Gen. 26.

The narratives which involve Isaac have been viewed by traditional scholarship as an amalgamation of the Yahwist, Elohist, and Priestly sources. Recent scholarship suggests that the ancestral stories were originally discrete units that originated in the various ancestral groups of which the ancient Israelites were composed. The stories of Abraham and Isaac most likely come from the southern regions of Canaan, since the narrative states that they both settled in the region of Beer-sheba; the stories of Jacob come from the northern regions, since he settled in Bethel. These units were joined together to form a single story of the successive generations of the family of Terah of Ur, the father of Abraham. The briefer stories about Isaac were woven into more extensive and detailed narratives about Abraham and Jacob. Isaac thus appears as a link between two more prominent figures in the ancestral stories of ancient Israel.

Bibliography. B. Goodnick, “Rebekah’s Deceit or Isaac’s Great Test,” Jewish Bible Quarterly 23 (1995): 221-28; N. K. Gottwald, The Hebrew Bible: A Socio-Literary Introduction (Philadelphia, 1985), 149-78; H. Gunkel, The Legends of Genesis (New York, 1964); A. R. Millard and D. J. Wiseman, eds., Essays on the Patrarchal Narratives (1980, repr. Winona Lake, 1983).

Nancy L. deClaissé-Walford

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

ISAAC

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)