The Akedah, the Binding of Isaac (Genesis 22:1–19/20), has been the subject of extensive exegesis and endless interpretation throughout Jewish history. Abraham's devotion to God, set against his love for his favored son, both affirms the Covenant and shatters the patriarch's family. His descendants, in the words of the Israeli poet Haim Gouri, are “born with a knife in their hearts.” Tikvah Frymer-Kensky described the Akedah as no less than the central text in the formation of Jewish spiritual consciousness, while Israeli authors, including David Grossman, A. B. Yehoshua, and Yitzhak Laor, among others, have argued for outright rejection of the narrative as a continuing influence on Israeli identity.
Rabbinic interpreters plumbed the narrative and its gaps for hidden clues to Israel's destiny, and their exegetical ingenuity exerted a profound influence on their textual inheritors. The Akedah played a central role in medieval Jewish life and thought—on the medieval philosophical tradition, to be sure, but also on medieval Jewish theology, mysticism, and martyrdom, as witnessed in the mass murder/suicides willingly undergone by some medieval Jewish communities faced with death or forced conversion during the Crusades. In grappling with Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac (which some interpreters see as having been carried through to completion), one can ponder the text in isolation, contextualize it in the broader arc of covenantal commitment, or trace the history of its interpretation or exegesis.
To say, then, that the Akedah occupies a central place in Jewish imagination, memory, and identity, would be to grievously understate the case. At least an overall familiarity with medieval Jewish biblical exegesis of the story is fundamental to understanding the depth and breadth of the Akedah's unceasing influence on Jewish life and thought. And indeed, excellent scholarship on individual interpreters and their exegetical approach to the story is broadly available, as are works on medieval biblical interpretation writ large. Until now, however, there have been few comprehensive surveys of medieval philosophical approaches as seen through the lens of a specific, foundational biblical narrative. This is in part because the amount of literature to access, assess, edit, translate, and contextualize is simply too vast. Tracing the influences on medieval thought over half a millennium or more, and following the many streams of that thought back to their source rabbinic exegesis, for any number of biblical narratives, would continuously reveal new sources and suggest new methods. This, along with advances in philology and linguistics, and the discovery of previously neglected editions or undiscovered archival materials, could make completion of the project impossible.
Albert van der Heide, professor in the Department of Languages and Cultures of the Middle East at Leiden University (Netherlands), has nonetheless completed just such a project. Eschewing theological interpretation or text-critical source analysis, van der Heide focuses, as the book's title suggests, on the Akedah as analyzed and understood by medieval exegetes, from Saʿadiah Gaon (ninth to tenth centuries) to Isaac Abrabanel (fifteenth to sixteenth centuries), concluding with a coda from Moses Mendelssohn's Bi'ur (late eighteenth century). His task is daunting: van der Heide provides translations of some two dozen medieval texts, and he cross-references each of them with the rabbinic and later midrashic texts that provide each medieval author's source material.
Van der Heide consults a range of sources, from rare to scholarly and critical editions of these source texts, prefacing each medieval exegete's text with an introduction providing biographical information on the author's cultural, philosophical, and historical context. The introduction to the entire volume provides valuable context on translations of the Akedah in the targumim and rabbinic literature, a review of sources and exegetical topics, and a survey of the Akedah in medieval prayer, piyyut, and philosophical-theological interpretation. The book concludes with three appendices on aspects of the chronology of the Abrahamic narrative and the Ten Trials contained therein, as well as an extensive bibliography. The result is an invaluable resource for scholars of reception history, biblical exegesis, and medieval Jewish thought—even those for whom biblical interpretation is a primary concern.
The immensity of the author's undertaking makes certain gaps and inconsistencies unavoidable. For example, as he himself notes, this is “a book about Aqedah exegesis rather than about Aqedah interpretations” (vii). This narrow focus, while necessary, causes omissions that might prevent further illumination of how the Akedah helped shape the relationship between interpretation and exegesis in medieval Jewish thought. The author has chosen to exclude almost all kabbalistic exegesis of the Akedah, including from the Zohar itself. Although van der Heide explains this deliberate omission, and although he does include some commentary that addresses mystical aspects (Bahya ibn Pakuda, the Tosafists), he focuses almost entirely on the philosophical tradition, asserting that kabbalistic exegesis “would disrupt the basic coherence of the various approaches represented in this study” (29). This approach overlooks the suggestion, elucidated especially in the work of Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, that the kabbalistic and philosophical traditions exerted significant mutual influence. Tirosh-Samuelson points out that Jewish philosophers who immersed themselves in the study of astrology and the astral arts viewed Kabbalah and philosophy as compatible epistemological frameworks with different vocabularies.
Furthermore, given the massive scale of the undertaking, van der Heide, as he himself readily admits, has created a work that is less than complete, not only because the number of available texts is so large, but because, as suggested earlier, innovations and new discoveries would cause the book to be out of date, in some respects, even before its first printing.
Nonetheless, in scope and execution, this book is a remarkable achievement: a comprehensive diachronic review of the influence on Jewish ontology, epistemology, philosophy, and exegesis of one of the most harrowing narratives in all of biblical literature. Van der Heide's work deserves inclusion in reference sections, Jewish studies guides and bibliographies, and syllabi for any course on medieval Jewish thought and biblical exegesis.
