Genesis 22 is the chapter Jewish tradition calls the Akedah — “the binding” — and that Christian and Latter-day Saint tradition has read, for as long as there have been those traditions, as the central Old Testament foreshadowing of the atonement of the Son of God. The chapter opens with a single weighted line: “And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham.” The Hebrew verb nasah is “to test, to prove” — the same verb used elsewhere of God proving Israel in the wilderness — and the chapter is unflinching about what the proving costs.
The command itself is one of the most carefully constructed sentences in the Hebrew Bible: “Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah ; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.” Each clause of the command tightens the demand — “thy son,” “thine only son” (Ishmael by now sent away), “whom thou lovest,” and finally the name itself, “Isaac.” The narrative will not allow Abraham — or the reader — to soften what is being asked.
What follows is delivered almost entirely in action, with the patriarch’s interior silence as the chapter’s loudest sound. Abraham rises early, saddles his donkey, takes two young men and Isaac, cleaves the wood for the burnt offering, and travels three days to the place God has shown him. On the third day, he lifts his eyes and sees the mountain afar off. He tells the young men, “Abide ye here with the ass; and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you” — a line that contains a quiet pledge, “come again to you,” that the New Testament’s epistle to the Hebrews will read as confidence in resurrection (Hebrews 11:17–19↗, “accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead; from whence also he received him in a figure”).
The walk up the mountain is given two verses and one of the chapter’s most weighted dialogues. Isaac, carrying the wood for the burnt offering on his shoulders, asks his father: “behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” Abraham answers: “My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering.” Christian tradition has read these words — and especially their fulfillment in the ram of 22:13 — as the Old Testament’s central foreshadowing of John 1:29↗, John the Baptist’s “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.” The Latter-day Saint canon makes the typology explicit and authoritative: in Jacob 4:5↗, the prophet Jacob (son of Lehi) names the Akedah a similitude of God and his Only Begotten Son. The whole chapter, in this reading, is given as a witness aforehand.
At the place God has shown him, Abraham builds the altar, lays the wood in order, binds (the Hebrew verb is aqad, the root of Akedah) his son, and lays him on the altar upon the wood. He stretches forth his hand and takes the knife. Then the angel of the LORD calls out of heaven: “Abraham, Abraham… lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me.” Abraham lifts his eyes — the chapter has used this phrase carefully throughout — and behind him sees a ram caught in a thicket by his horns. He takes the ram and offers it for a burnt offering in the stead of his son.
He names the place Jehovah-jireh — “the LORD will see,” or “the LORD will provide” — and the chapter records the proverb that the place gave to Israel: “as it is said to this day, In the mount of the LORD it shall be seen.” The Hebrew verb yireh (will see / will provide) is the same verb in the place-name Moriah (“shown/seen by Yah”); the chapter’s wordplay binds the mountain, the patriarch’s answer to Isaac on the way up (“God will yireh himself a lamb”), and the place-name at the top into a single thread. 2 Chronicles 3:1↗ will later note that Solomon built the temple “in mount Moriah, where the LORD appeared unto David his father” — the mountain of the Akedah becomes the mountain of the temple, the place where sacrificial provision was institutionalized for the whole people.
The angel of the LORD calls out a second time, and the chapter’s closing covenant words are among the strongest in Genesis. “By myself have I sworn, saith the LORD, for because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son: That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore… and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice.” The covenant promises of Genesis 12:1–3↗ and Genesis 15↗ and Genesis 17↗ are now sealed by oath; the Epistle to the Hebrews will quote this very moment as the immutability of God’s promise (Hebrews 6:13–18↗).
For the New Testament, the chapter is foundational on two fronts. Hebrews 11:17–19↗ reads Abraham’s obedience as faith in resurrection — Isaac received back “in a figure”; James 2:21–23↗ reads it as the proof-text of faith and works together — “by works was faith made perfect.” And the verbal echo of Gen 22:16 (“thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son”) in Paul’s Romans 8:32↗ — “He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all” — has long been heard as a deliberate canonical inclusio: the Father giving His Son in fulfillment of what was here only typified.
The chapter closes with a quiet domestic notice: Abraham returns to the young men, they rise and go to Beersheba; he dwells there. A genealogical postscript reports the birth of Rebekah (granddaughter of Abraham’s brother Nahor) — the woman who will become Isaac’s wife in Genesis 24↗. The covenant moves on.
Language & Translation Notes
The wordplay that binds the chapter. Genesis 22 turns on a single Hebrew verbal root — ra’ah (“to see”) — that runs from the place-name Moriah (“seen / shown by Yah”) to Abraham’s answer to Isaac on the way up (“God will yireh — will see-to, will provide — himself a lamb,” 22:8) to the place-name at the top of the mountain (Yahweh-yireh, “the LORD will see / will provide,” 22:14) to the closing proverb (“In the mount of the LORD it shall be seen”). The chapter’s grammar carries its theology: provision is what God sees, what God sees-to, and the mountain is the place where the seeing-and-providing is made public for all generations after. The Hebrew Bible’s habit of binding a chapter together by a single root is rarely as dense as here.
The Book of Mormon’s explicit similitude. The Nephite prophet Jacob, addressing the meaning of the Mosaic law for his pre-Christian Nephite people, writes: “we keep the law of Moses, it pointing our souls to him; and for this cause it is sanctified unto us for righteousness, even as it was accounted unto Abraham in the wilderness to be obedient unto the commands of God in offering up his son Isaac, which is a similitude of God and his Only Begotten Son” (Jacob 4:5↗). The LDS canon thus makes explicit and prophetic what Christian tradition had read typologically: the Akedah is given as a similitude of the Father offering His Only Begotten. The reading does not allegorize away the historicity of Abraham’s trial; the chapter is read as both real test and given sign — the patriarch’s obedience accepted as righteousness, and the scene itself given to the generations as foreshadowing of what the Father Himself would do.
The “almost-sacrifice” and what the chapter does not say. Genesis 22 records no interior life for Isaac (the verb aqad, “bound,” in 22:9 is the only word for what Isaac undergoes), no recorded protest from Abraham, no record of Sarah at all — she does not appear in the chapter, and the next chapter opens with her death. The narrative restraint is part of the chapter’s power; it is not part of the chapter’s complete witness. Later Jewish tradition (the post-biblical aqedat Yitzchaq literature), New Testament readers, and Latter-day Saint commentary all fill in the silences differently, and the chapter has carried more devotional weight than its sparse 19 verses might suggest. The text itself stays close to the bare events; the traditions read those events as a witness given for a purpose larger than the moment in which Abraham obeyed.