Genesis 21:1-7
Laughter at last
Born when Abraham is a hundred, and named for the laugh that greeted the news. Sarah says everyone who hears will laugh with her.
People of the Bible
Isaac
The son the promise waited for, and the quietest man in the book.
Isaac is the middle link. He is born to parents past hope, carries the wood for his own sacrifice up a mountain, and is given a wife chosen by a servant at a well while he is out walking in a field at evening. He does not travel far, he does not argue with God, and most of what happens to him is done by other people. He repeats his father’s lie about his wife, reopens his father’s wells when they are stopped up, and at the end blesses the wrong son because he cannot see.
Scroll down to the storyThe movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of Isaac
- 01
- 02
Genesis 22:1-14
The wood on his own back
Old enough to carry the fire and the knife and to ask where the lamb is. He is bound and laid on the altar, and the account does not tell us what he thought.
- 03
Genesis 24:62-67
The field at evening
He goes out to the field to think, looks up, and there are camels. He brings Rebekah into his mother’s tent and is comforted after her death.
- 04
Genesis 26:12-33
His father’s wells, dug again
Prospering makes him unwelcome. He moves on rather than fight, digging one well after another until there is room, and names the last one for room.
- 05
Genesis 27:1-40
Blind, and deceived
He asks for the meal he likes, feels the wrong arms, hears the wrong voice, and blesses anyway. When he learns what happened he trembles, and does not take it back.
Why it matters
Isaac is what a promise looks like when it is being carried rather than received. Nothing is restarted with him. The covenant is repeated to him in his father’s words, and his job is to hold it through one generation and hand it on. That is why he is the least dramatic of the three and never dropped from the phrase: the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
17 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
