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IN MY ARTICLE, ‘Isaac, the sacrificial lamb’ (Dreifuss, 1971), I discussed those legends that emphasize Isaac's part in the drama at Moriah. In this paper I shall discuss two other central figures in the legends; namely Satan and Abraham. Both of these papers should be considered as a part of a comprehensive psychological study of Genesis 22.
As this paper deals with a psychological interpretation of a Biblical theme, a few words on the use of the word ‘God’ must be added. (Jung, 1928, p. 237, and 1951 and 1958 passim, and others, e.g. Fordham, 1963, Hurwitz, 1958, Jaffé, 1971 and Schärf, 1967, dealt extensively with this problem). When I use the term ‘God’, it has no metaphysical character, but relates to the archetypal image of God in the collective psyche at the time when the Bible or the legends were written. Yet, when discussing, for instance, the numinous experience of Abraham with God, I mean the working of the constellated archetype of the self in Abraham's soul. As Schärf (1967) points out, one cannot differentiate empirically what is a symbol of the self and what is a God-image. Psychologically, we can know nothing about the archetype per se, so we must leave assertions about God to those who have the charisma of belief and the formulation of this belief to the theologians of the different religions and confessions.
The purpose of this study is to show, in the first part, how post-Biblical Jewish interpreters of Genesis 22 were baffled by the problem of God testing man, and further how the legends tried to solve this problem by introducing Satan as a participant in the relationship between God and Abraham. In the second part, the discussion centres on the more differentiated personality of Abraham presented in the legends, compared with the earlier Biblical form.