Genesis 22 narrates the harrowing story that Jews call the Akedah (binding). God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, and the patriarch faithfully obeys. With the knife suspended over Isaac's neck, however, an angel intervenes, blesses Abraham for his obedience, and spares the would-be victim. All of this transpires in nineteen verses of austere prose. Literary critic Erich Auerbach famously characterized the story as “fraught with background.” Its terseness, he argued, endows it with psychic depth.

Contemporary Jewish and Christian readers of the Akedah may well feel that it is also fraught with foreground—the foreground of persistent, contested interpretation from antiquity to today. It is difficult to approach the story without assuming or reinscribing these later views. Aaron Koller's new book, Unbinding Isaac: The Significance of the Akedah for Modern Jewish Thought, contends with this fraught foreground. He focuses on the most influential interpretation of the Akedah: Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling (1843), a Christian, philosophical meditation on Abraham as a “knight of faith.” Kierkegaard's signal claim is that the Akedah models faith as a “teleological suspension of the ethical”—a circumstantially bounded abdication of ethics in service to an absolute commitment to God. Koller traces the profound influence that Kierkegaard exerted on subsequent Jewish readers of the Akedah. He does so in order to resist it. Fear and Trembling, he argues, is beset by glaring theological, ethical, and hermeneutical flaws. By situating the Akedah instead in terms of ancient conceptions of sacrifice and premodern Jewish philosophy, Koller reorients its ethical significance away from Abraham's faith and toward Isaac's individual worth and autonomy.

A Semitic philologist by training, Koller has adjusted his scholarly purview in recent years toward topics of wider exegetical and theological interest. Unbinding Isaac continues this trend, moving between eras and subfields with greater ease and confidence than most academic volumes; Kierkegaard and Carthage, Maimonides and Mesha may be found side by side. It is also the first of Koller's monographs that explicitly aims to engage a nonspecialist audience—yet without compromising intellectual rigor. Koller's ability to write clearly and compellingly while commanding such diverse material is impressive.

The book proceeds in three movements. The first sets up a contrast between Jewish engagement with the Akedah as a prism for lived experience (chapter 1), usually through poetry and liturgy, and Kierkegaard's philosophical approach (chapter 2). Koller is to be commended both for assembling a vibrant panorama of Jewish readings of the story and for providing about as lucid a distillation of Fear and Trembling as one could imagine.

The second movement addresses Jewish interaction with Kierkegaard. While there are some rough Jewish analogues in his own day (chapter 3), twentieth-century Jewish thinkers took his approach and ran with it (chapter 4). Yeshayahu Leibowitz and Joseph B. Soloveitchik applied it to the basic, everyday character of religion, not just its extraordinary moments. For them, the Akedah became a narrativization of what it means to live in submission to the divine will, over against the vicissitudes of ethics and culture. All observant Jews are “knights of faith.”

In the final, climactic movement, Koller rejects the Kierkegaardian paradigm (along with its Jewish appropriations) on the grounds that it severs religion from ethics, erases Isaac's own experience and agency, underestimates the religious significance of community, and does not do justice to the story or the ancient world that produced it (chapter 5). Koller expands upon the last point, canvasing biblical and extrabiblical views of child sacrifice (chapter 6). He confronts his readers with a destabilizing reality: “The notion that God desires human sacrifice is not absurd, not historically and not by the logic of biblical religion” (125). But if God spares Isaac not because child sacrifice is abhorrent, then what is his reason? Koller turns to a Maimonidean conception of the internal complexity of the divine will, arguing that while God does want child sacrifice as an expression of devotion, this is superseded by something else that he wants more (chapter 7). This “something else” is the heart of Koller's alternative reading. Comparing pentateuchal legal texts with their extrabiblical counterparts, he argues that ancient Israel affirmed the dignity and autonomy of the individual—and that this undergirds biblical rejections of child sacrifice (chapter 8). “And so this is the ethical teaching of the Akedah,” Koller concludes. “One person's religious fulfillment cannot come through harm to another” (147).

Koller's case for resisting Kierkegaard's interpretation of the Akedah is utterly convincing. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same about his proposed alternative. If, as Koller correctly points out, child sacrifice was not an ethical issue for the biblical writers, it is hardly clear why we should read the Akedah for an “ethical teaching” at all. But what else could the story be about? The answer is deceptively simple. God's command is problematic not because it is ethically abhorrent but because it makes no sense. It is incompatible with his earlier promise to Abraham, who cannot father a nation through Isaac if he sacrifices him before Isaac has fathered children of his own! Abraham obeys anyway. The Akedah is about Abraham's faith, but not faith as choosing God over ethics. It is about faith as trust in the integrity of God's promise, of God's word, even when God himself appears to contradict it. The angel intervenes not to teach an ethical lesson but to uphold a covenantal commitment. Koller briefly acknowledges this but insists that it “does not mean that the story is ethically irrelevant” (xxxi). I disagree.

One might object that Koller's reading may be theologically and ethically valuable even if it stretches the story. This is certainly true! However, I would respond that I am simply holding Koller to the same standard to which he holds Kierkegaard. He repeatedly says that he objects to Kierkegaard's reading not only because it is ethically problematic but also because it falls short as biblical interpretation. My point is that Koller's own reading falls short on the same issue. His approach is still basically controlled by Kierkegaardian assumptions of ethical significance—still rooted in the “fraught foreground,” despite all the valuable work he does to push past it. Koller challenges only how Kierkegaard read the Akedah for ethics. His careful consideration of the ancient context should have led him to challenge that Kierkegaard read the Akedah for ethics.

The ethical difficulties of the Akedah have loomed perilously over modern readers, not unlike the sacrificial knife in the story itself. Numerous worthy attempts have been made to play the part of the angelic intervention, steadying the blade and declaring, “This is the ethical significance of the Akedah.” Unbinding Isaac is the latest such attempt. Despite its merits, it does not deliver that intervention. I doubt that any book ever will. For difficult as it is to imagine that God should have commanded something so ethically problematic, it is somehow even more difficult to confront what becomes distressingly clear about the story when it is situated in its ancient setting and read on its own terms: it is simply not about ethics one way or another; it has no “ethical teaching.” Whether there can be a modern Jewish theological account of that remains to be seen.