Abstract

The Bible and Qur'an—the sacred books of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim peoples—focus on worship of the God of Abraham, variously named but essentially and uniquely one. While historically, the biblical God may have the qualities of an early tribal deity, the biblical prophets hammered home the singularity of God in what James A. Sanders describes as the monotheizing process.
Biblical descriptions of this process carry a variety of foci depending on the context, as for instance the story of the binding of Isaac (or Ishmael in Muslim tradition [Qur'an 37:91–110]) where the focus is on sacrifice as worship, an act of obeisance. The biblical stories of God embody implicit values that challenge the readers through successive generations to infer and convert into practice.
In Genesis 22 God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son, a theme that echoes in New Testament author Paul of Tarsus in Romans 4. Paul interprets Abraham's sacrifice as an act of expiatory faith, which renders Abraham righteous. The act of sacrifice renders to God what is precious to humans.
The present issue of BTB offers three articles describing the biblical God and one focused on sacrifice as obeisance.
All told, these articles reveal efforts to describe God. They provide insights for understanding the range and contexts of biblical characterizations of God. They also recognize the need to work out an understanding of what it means to worship the biblical God in ways that are true to the texts but at the same time address questions of how best to interpret the texts for present day practice. It is for readers of each generation to infer the values that the characterization of God signify.
