Isaac

The Righteous Isaac is the son of the promise, born to Abraham and Sarah in their old age, and the second of the patriarchs of Israel. The book of Genesis tells his story in a few chapters. The Church honours him among the Holy Forefathers of the Lord, and the Fathers saw in his offering an image of the sacrifice of Christ. The dates of his life cannot be established with precision.

The son of the promise

God had promised Abraham a son by Sarah, though both were far advanced in years. Abraham and Sarah laughed when they heard the news, and the child's name, Isaac, means "he will laugh". He was circumcised on the eighth day, according to the covenant given to Abraham. Later Sarah asked that Hagar and her son Ishmael be sent away from the house, and God told Abraham to listen to her. Isaac remained the sole heir of the promise.

Mount Moriah

When Isaac was a young man, God asked Abraham to offer him as a sacrifice, to test his faith. Abraham bound his son on the altar and raised the knife, but the angel of the Lord stopped him, and a ram caught in a thicket was offered in Isaac's place. The Epistle to the Hebrews presents this act as an example of faith and as a likeness of the resurrection.

The Fathers of the Church saw in Isaac carrying the wood for the offering a foreshadowing of Christ carrying His Cross; Tertullian draws this parallel. By the sacrifice of Isaac, they teach, the sacrifice of Golgotha was announced.

Marriage and family

Before Isaac was forty, Abraham sent his steward to Mesopotamia, to his own kin, to find a wife for his son. The steward chose Rebecca, of the family of Bethuel, and brought her to Isaac. Isaac married her, and after Abraham's death he inherited all his possessions.

Rebecca was long barren. Isaac prayed for her and she bore twin sons, Esau and Jacob, when Isaac was sixty. Isaac loved Esau more, and Rebecca loved Jacob.

Wanderings in Canaan

After his father's death Isaac settled at Beer-⁠lahai-⁠roi. In a year of famine he went to Gerar, in the land of the Philistines, where Abraham had once lived and where Abimelech was king. Out of fear he said that Rebecca was his sister, as his father had done. He reopened the wells that Abraham had dug and that the Philistines had stopped up, and dug others as far as Beersheba, where he made a covenant with Abimelech.

Old and blind, he wished to bless Esau, but Jacob, on his mother's advice, came in his place and received the blessing. Isaac then sent Jacob to Mesopotamia to seek a wife in the house of his mother's brother. Isaac died at the age of one hundred and eighty and was buried in Hebron by his sons, Esau and Jacob.

Veneration

Isaac is commemorated in the Orthodox Church with the other patriarchs and righteous men of the Old Testament on the Sunday of the Forefathers, the second Sunday before the Nativity of the Lord, between 11 and 17 December. His name remains bound to the name of God, who is called the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.