Lives of Scripture

Life Story

Isaac was born to Abraham and Sarah in their old age, exactly as God had promised, and his very name ('he laughs') carries his mother's astonished laughter at the news (Genesis 21:1-7). The defining moment of his life came while he was still young enough to be led without question: God commanded Abraham to offer Isaac as a burnt offering on a mountain in Moriah, and Isaac himself carried the wood for his own sacrifice up the mountain, asking his father only where the lamb was, before God stopped Abraham's hand at the last moment and provided a ram caught in a thicket as a substitute (Genesis 22:1-14). Scripture gives Isaac almost no words in the scene and does not narrate his own understanding or consent in detail, but the New Testament treats his father's willingness to offer him as an act of faith so complete that Abraham reasoned God could raise Isaac from the dead if necessary — receiving him back, figuratively, from death itself (Hebrews 11:17-19). Isaac's marriage came about entirely through providence rather than his own initiative: Abraham sent a servant back to Mesopotamia to find a wife from his own kindred rather than a Canaanite woman, and the servant's prayer for a sign was answered specifically by Rebekah at a well; Isaac was out meditating in a field when she arrived, married her, and Scripture notes plainly that he loved her — one of the first explicit statements of a husband's love for his wife in the Bible (Genesis 24). After twenty years of Rebekah's barrenness, Isaac prayed for her, and she conceived twins, Jacob and Esau, with an oracle before their birth that the older would serve the younger (Genesis 25:19-26). Isaac repeated his father's exact failure in Gerar, telling King Abimelech that Rebekah was his sister out of fear for his own life — the same deception, in the same region, made by the son who had presumably heard the story of his father's version of it (Genesis 26:6-11). In his old age, blind and near death, Isaac set out to bless Esau, his favored son 'because he had a taste for game,' in apparent disregard of God's earlier oracle that the covenant line ran through Jacob; Rebekah and Jacob deceived him into blessing Jacob instead, and Isaac trembled violently on discovering the deception but let the blessing stand rather than retract it (Genesis 27). Despite the family favoritism and deception surrounding it, Hebrews 11:20 counts this same blessing of Jacob and Esau as an act of Isaac's faith, since it entrusted the future to God's promise even through the two brothers' mixed motives. Isaac died at 180, and Jacob and Esau together buried him at Machpelah beside Abraham and Sarah (Genesis 35:27-29).

Family

Isaac was the son of Abraham and Sarah and the half-brother of Ishmael, sent away as a child with his mother Hagar so that Isaac alone would inherit the covenant promise (Genesis 21:8-14); the two brothers reunited only to bury their father (Genesis 25:9). His wife Rebekah was chosen through his father's servant's prayer rather than his own courtship, and Scripture credits him with genuinely loving her (Genesis 24:67). Isaac and Rebekah's favoritism toward opposite twin sons — Isaac loved Esau, Rebekah loved Jacob — set up the deception at the heart of Genesis 27 and the lasting rift between the brothers that sent Jacob fleeing for his life to Rebekah's own family in Haran (Genesis 27:41-46).