Isaac's name means 'he will laugh', after his parents laughed at God
When Abraham and Sarah were told that they would have a son in their old age, both laughed, and later tried to deny it. The boy was named Isaac, from the Hebrew for 'he laughs'. He became the second patriarch of Israel, the quietest of the three, and by the biblical count the longest-lived, dying at 180.
Genesis tells the announcement twice. First Abraham falls on his face laughing at the news, since Sarah is long past childbearing. Then three messengers visit, Abraham feeds them, and they promise a son within a year; Sarah, overhearing, laughs inwardly. When God asks why they doubted his power, the frightened couple deny having laughed. Interestingly, 13th-century BCE texts from Ugarit speak of the kindly smile of the Canaanite god El, but Genesis assigns the laughter to Isaac's parents.
His childhood holds the Bible's most harrowing test. After Isaac is weaned, Sarah sees Ishmael, Abraham's son by Hagar, playing with or mocking him (the Hebrew is ambiguous) and has mother and son sent away. Later, as the last of ten trials, God tells Abraham to offer Isaac on an altar at Mount Moriah; an angel stops him at the final moment and a ram caught in a thicket is sacrificed instead.
Isaac's adult life echoes his father's. A steward fetches him a wife, Rebekah, from relatives in Mesopotamia. After years without children, she bears twins, Esau and Jacob, when Isaac is 60; he favours Esau, she favours Jacob. During a famine he settles in Gerar, pretends Rebekah is his sister as Abraham had done with Sarah, and reopens wells his father dug that the Philistines had filled in. Blind in old age, he is tricked into giving Jacob the blessing meant for Esau.
He stands out among the patriarchs in small ways: his name was never changed, he never left Canaan, and no concubines are mentioned. Some recent scholars suggest he may originally have been an ancestor venerated at a sanctuary near Beersheba. His sons, reconciled, buried him at Hebron. Isaac matters well beyond Judaism, in Christianity, Islam, Samaritanism, the Baháʼí Faith and Rastafari.
Source: Isaac
