Consider the Plants, Week 3: Sacrifice Caught in a Thicket

Post Author: The Rev. Ali Van Kuiken

This is the third in a series of commentaries based on the Revised Common Lectionary texts in Year A that focus on plants. You can follow the series by clicking on the "Consider the Plants" tag at the bottom of this piece.

Prayer of the Day

Oh God-who-sees us in all our extremity and need. Open our eyes to see your provision and grace, even when it requires us to turn around and look into the thorny and prickly places. Remind us that you are no stranger to sacrifice and pain. May our seeing lead to trust and trust to action. Amen.

A decorative image of a plant with spikes on its branches

Thorns on trees and plants pose a threat to animals and humans alike.

Commentary

The near-sacrifice of Isaac is one of my favorite passages in Genesis. I find it intriguing and disturbing. Usually as a preacher, I focus on the response of Abraham to God (“hineni” – “here I am”) or the ways in which Christian tradition has tied this passage to Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. However, there are other salient details that can aid a preacher in her preparation of a Genesis 22-based sermon. For instance, Mount Moriah, Abraham’s destination, means “seeing,” and seeing appears in a few places in this passage. Abraham lifts up his eyes and “sees” the place from afar, just as, later, he lifts up his eyes and sees the ram stuck in the thicket. Plus, after finding the ram, Abraham calls that place “YHWH sees.” The repetition of seeing became apparent to me after reading this passage in the Shocken Bible translation by Everett Fox.

Another interesting feature of this well-known passage is the appearance of the ram, caught by its horns, in a thicket. If you google “ram in a thicket” among other results you will see several related to a Sumerian statue from the 3rd millennium B.C.E. depicting a horned animal reaching up to nibble on the leaves at the top of a flowering plant. The statue received its biblical name from the archaeologist Leonard Woolley who liked biblical allusions. This statue has no relation to the biblical passage other than the name given by Woolley. However, it is interesting to note the prior occurrence of horned animals in proximity to trees or flowering bushes that were present in the cultures surrounding ancient Israel at the time of the writing of the Torah books.

Ancient Sumerian statues aside, the ram is notably caught by its horns and not its fur or other part of its body in order that it may qualify as an unblemished sacrifice usable by Abraham in place of his son. Torah commentators look at the question of Abraham using an animal that is not his as a sacrifice, questioning whether he would have engaged in a possible act of theft and how that would qualify as his rather than someone else’s sacrifice. One author suggests the ram is a mouflon or a wild ram and that is how Abraham could take an animal not his own to use as a sacrifice. A particularly interesting part of that article is the video embedded in it of a jogger freeing a ram caught on a tree.

As to the “thicket” itself, not too much is known. The Hebrew word סְבָךְ (sebak) is translated “thicket” and found in three other places in the Bible: Psalm 74:5, Isaiah 9:18, and Isaiah 10:34. The Strong’s Concordance definition is “a copse, thicket” and Gesenius’ Hebrew-Chaldee Lexicon has “branches interwoven, a thicket.” When I checked my dusty BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew-English Lexicon), I discovered it is related to the verb form, which means “to interweave.” Hence we have a plant whose name indicates its tangled nature. This allows for interesting comparison to the “interwoven” crown of thorns worn by Jesus during his passion.

The exact type of plant we are dealing with here is not known. The Acacia tree is a good candidate being full of thorns yet also producing tasty leaves that attract various horned animals. In recent years, Yale scientists answered the question of where thorns come from in plants. Well-known as a plant’s defense mechanism, now that scientists have pinpointed the process by which plants produce thorns, they can genetically eliminate the regulators that lead to thorn growth. This allows for trees and plants that usually have thorns to be thorn-free; thus making the harvesting of certain fruits, such as orange trees, safer for harvesters.

The preacher can dive into these details surrounding the ram, the thicket, and the interwoven thorns, or she can use them to feel her way into the world of the text as she proclaims the Good News of God’s grace as revealed in Genesis 22.

Hymn Suggestion

Sometimes a Light Surprises.

Text: William Cowper.

Music: Bentley (Hullah)

The Rev. Ali Van Kuiken is a chaplain at a psychiatric hospital in central New Jersey where she lives with her husband, toddler, and cat.

Image by: Rafael Rodrigues (Pexels)
Used with permission