Concept
Isaac
Overview
Isaac is the second Hebrew patriarch in Judaism and an important figure in the Abrahamic religions, including Samaritanism, Christianity, Islam, the Baháʼí Faith, and Rastafari. Isaac first appears in the Torah, in which he is the son of Abraham and Sarah, the father of Jacob and Esau, and the grandfather of the twelve tribes of Israel.
Isaac's name means "he will laugh", reflecting the laughter of Abraham and Sarah when they were told that they would have a child at their advanced ages. He is the only patriarch whose name was never changed, and the only one who did not move out of Canaan. According to the narrative, he died aged 180, the longest-lived of the three patriarchs.
Recent scholarship has discussed the possibility that Isaac could have originally been an ancestor from the Beersheba region who was venerated at a sanctuary.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Isaac is discussed.
He was to say farewell to Isaac, to be sure, but in such wise that he himself was to remain behind; death was to part them, but in such wise that Isaac was to die. The old man was not in happiness to lay his hand on Isaac's head when the hour of death came, but, tired of life, to lay violent hands on Isaac. And it was God who tempted him.
Søren Kierkegaard, Selections from the Writings of Kierkegaard
names the idea; author linked in the graph; opens on it
From this time forth the manifold incidents of the family life become varied. Abraham still keeps strictly apart from the inhabitants; and though Ishmael, the son of an Egyptian woman, has married a daughter of that land, Isaac is obliged to wed a kinswoman of equal birth with himself. Abraham despatches his servant to Mesopotamia, to the relatives whom he had left behind there. The prudent Eleazer arrives unknown…
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Autobiography
states what it is; names the idea
It is to this method of subjecting everywhere infinity to algebraical calculations, that the name is given of differential calculations or of fluxions and integral calculation. It is the art of numbering and measuring exactly a thing whose existence cannot be conceived.
Voltaire, Letters on England
a chapter is titled for it; names the idea; opens on it
But to this a man may easily answer, and say, that though their bodies were not to ascend till the generall day of Judgment, yet their souls were in Heaven as soon as they were departed from their bodies; which also seemeth to be confirmed by the words of our Saviour (Luke 20.37,38.) who proving the Resurrection out of the word of Moses, saith thus, "That the dead are raised, even Moses shewed, at the bush, when he…
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
opens on it; names the idea
It is as if the Divinity, who loves to guide the destiny of mankind, wished to prefigure here connubial events of every kind. Abraham, so long united by childless marriage to a beautiful woman whom many coveted, finds himself, by his hundredth year, the husband of two women, the father of two sons; and at this moment his domestic peace is broken. Two women, and two sons by different mothers, cannot possibly agree…
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Autobiography of Goethe Truth and Poetry
states what it is; names the idea
Philosophers who discussed Isaac
Related ideas
- Eastern Orthodox Church
- Fresco
- Book of Genesis
- Abrahamic religions
- Abraham
- Judaism
- Jacob
- Angel
- Monotheism
- Muslims
- Mesopotamia
- New Testament
- Presbyterianism
- Early Christianity
- Jews
- Satan
- Saint
- Torah
- Tertullian
- Quran
- Baháʼí Faith
- Martyr
- Christianity
- Israelites
Place in the tradition
Part of Absurdism.