"Now I Know": Five Centuries of Aqedah Exegesis by Albert van der Heide (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: "Now I Know": Five Centuries of Aqedah Exegesis by Albert van der Heide David Gottlieb Albert van der Heide. "Now I Know": Five Centuries of Aqedah Exegesis. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2017. 504 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000667 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 [End Page 463] 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 nearsacrifice 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 [End Page 464] 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...