Binding of Isaac
The Binding of Isaac (Biblical Hebrew: עֲקֵידַת יִצְחַק), or simply "The Binding" (הָעֲקֵידָה, hāʿAqēḏā), is a story from chapter 22 of the Book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible. In the biblical narrative, God orders Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac at Moriah. As Abraham begins to comply, having bound Isaac to an altar, he is stopped by the Angel of the Lord; a ram appears and is slaughtered in Isaac's stead, as God commends Abraham's pious obedience to offer his son as a human sacrifice.
"The Binding of Isaac" redirects here. For the video games, see The Binding of Isaac (video game) and The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth.Especially in art, the episode is often called the Sacrifice of Isaac, although in the end Isaac was not sacrificed. In addition to being addressed by modern scholarship, this biblical episode has been the focus of a great deal of commentary in traditional sources of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Comparative[edit]
Greece: Toneia[edit]
The myth at the Heraion of Samos is that of Hera. According to the local tradition, the goddess was born under a lygos tree (Vitex agnus-castus, the "chaste-tree"). At the annual Samian festival called the Toneia, the "binding", the cult image of Hera was ceremonially bound with lygos branches, before being carried down to the sea to be washed. The tree still featured on the coinage of Samos in Roman times and Pausanias mentions that the tree still stood in the sanctuary.[42]
Music[edit]
The Binding of Isaac has inspired multiple pieces of music, including Marc-Antoine Charpentier's Sacrificium Abrahae (H.402, oratorio for soloists, chorus, doubling instruments, and bc; 1680–81), Benjamin Britten's Canticle II: Abraham and Isaac, later adapted for inclusion in the War Requiem, Igor Stravinsky's Abraham and Isaac, Leonard Cohen's "Story of Isaac" from the 1969 album Songs from a Room,[43] and ”You want it darker” from the 2016 album ''You Want it Darker, eponymous "Highway 61 Revisited" from Highway 61 Revisited (1965) by Bob Dylan, Sufjan Stevens' "Abraham" from the album Seven Swans (2004), Gilad Hochman's "Akeda for Solo Viola" (2006), and Anaïs Mitchell's "Dyin' Day" from the album Young Man in America (2012).