Isaac (Old Testament)

93:9.4But Abra­ham was not long to be de­terred in his mis­sion as the suc­ces­sor of Mel­chiz­e­dek. Soon he made con­verts among the Phil­is­tines and of Abim­elech’s peo­ple, made a treaty with them, and, in turn, be­came con­tam­i­nated with many of their su­per­sti­tions, par­tic­u­larly with their prac­tice of sac­ri­fic­ing first-born sons. Thus did Abra­ham again be­come a great leader in Pales­tine. He was held in rev­er­ence by all groups and hon­ored by all kings. He was the spir­i­tual leader of all the sur­round­ing tribes, and his in­flu­ence con­tin­ued for some time af­ter his death. Dur­ing the clos­ing years of his life he once more re­turned to He­bron, the scene of his ear­lier ac­tiv­i­ties and the place where he had worked in as­so­ci­a­tion with Mel­chiz­e­dek. Abra­ham’s last act was to send trusty ser­vants to the city of his brother, Na­hor, on the bor­der of Mes­o­po­ta­mia, to se­cure a woman of his own peo­ple as a wife for his son Isaac. It had long been the cus­tom of Abra­ham’s peo­ple to marry their cousins. And Abra­ham died con­fi­dent in that faith in God which he had learned from Mel­chiz­e­dek in the van­ished schools of Salem.

93:6.5It was not long af­ter the es­tab­lish­ment of this covenant that Isaac, the son of Abra­ham, was born in ac­cor­dance with the prom­ise of Mel­chiz­e­dek. Af­ter the birth of Isaac, Abra­ham took a very solemn at­ti­tude to­ward his covenant with Mel­chiz­e­dek, go­ing over to Salem to have it stated in writ­ing. It was at this pub­lic and for­mal ac­cep­tance of the covenant that he changed his name from Abram to Abra­ham.

93:9.8The He­brew nar­ra­tives of Isaac, Ja­cob, and Joseph are far more re­li­able than those about Abra­ham, al­though they also con­tain many di­ver­sions from the facts, al­ter­ations made in­ten­tion­ally and un­in­ten­tion­ally at the time of the com­pi­la­tion of these rec­ords by the He­brew priests dur­ing the Baby­lo­nian cap­tiv­ity. Ke­tu­rah was not a wife of Abra­ham; like Ha­gar, she was merely a con­cu­bine. All of Abra­ham’s prop­erty went to Isaac, the son of Sarah, the sta­tus wife. Abra­ham was not so old as the rec­ords in­di­cate, and his wife was much younger. These ages were de­lib­er­ately al­tered in or­der to pro­vide for the sub­se­quent al­leged mirac­u­lous birth of Isaac.

93:9.5It was hard for the next gen­er­a­tion to com­pre­hend the story of Mel­chiz­e­dek; within five hun­dred years many re­garded the whole nar­ra­tive as a myth. Isaac held fairly well to the teach­ings of his fa­ther and nour­ished the gospel of the Salem colony, but it was harder for Ja­cob to grasp the sig­nif­i­cance of these tra­di­tions. Joseph was a firm be­liever in Mel­chiz­e­dek and was, largely be­cause of this, re­garded by his broth­ers as a dreamer. Joseph’s honor in Egypt was chiefly due to the mem­ory of his great-grand­fa­ther Abra­ham. Joseph was of­fered mil­i­tary com­mand of the Egyp­tian armies, but be­ing such a firm be­liever in the tra­di­tions of Mel­chiz­e­dek and the later teach­ings of Abra­ham and Isaac, he elected to serve as a civil ad­min­is­tra­tor, be­liev­ing that he could thus bet­ter la­bor for the ad­vance­ment of the king­dom of heaven.

89:6.8The spec­ta­cle of Abra­ham con­strained to sac­ri­fice his son Isaac, while shock­ing to civ­i­lized sus­cep­ti­bil­i­ties, was not a new or strange idea to the men of those days. It was long a preva­lent prac­tice for fa­thers, at times of great emo­tional stress, to sac­ri­fice their first-born sons. Many peo­ples have a tra­di­tion anal­o­gous to this story, for there once ex­isted a world-wide and pro­found be­lief that it was nec­es­sary to of­fer a hu­man sac­ri­fice when any­thing ex­traor­di­nary or un­usual hap­pened.