Child sacrifice is regarded with horror throughout Tanakh. There is archeological evidence – the bones of thousands of young children –– that child sacrifice was widespread in Carthage and other Phoenician sites. Two of Tanakh’s most wicked kings, Ahaz and Manasseh, introduced the practice into Judah, for which they were condemned. So did Jepthah, the least admirable leader in the book of Judges. Tanakh mentions that Mesha king of Moab did so. We know from Tanakh and independent evidence that the willingness to offer up your child as a sacrifice was not rare in the ancient world. There are four problems with the conventional reading: The reason I do so is that one test of the validity of an interpretation is whether it coheres with the rest of the Torah, Tanakh and Judaism as a whole. However, since there are “seventy faces to the Torah,” I want to argue for a different interpretation. These are the conventional readings and they represent the mainstream of tradition. Precisely because we pride ourselves on the power of reason, the Torah includes chukkim, statutes, that are impenetrable to reason. Wherever we have passionate desire – eating, drinking, physical relationship – there the Torah places limits on the satisfaction of desire. Thus the binding of Isaac was not a once-only episode but rather a paradigm for the religious life as a whole. There are times when “God tells man to withdraw from whatever man desires the most.” We must experience defeat as well as victory. Rav Soloveitchik explained the episode in terms of his own well-known characterisation of the religious life as a dialectic between victory and defeat, majesty and humility, man-the-creative-master and man-the-obedient-servant. What Abraham underwent during the trial was, says Kierkegaard, a “teleological suspension of the ethical,” that is, a willingness to let the I-Thou love of God overrule the universal principles that bind humans to one another. 
Kierkegaard wrote a book about it, Fear and Trembling, and made the point that ethics is universal. The story is about the awe and love of God. On this principle there was little argument. Rather the test was meant to establish for all time how far the fear and love of God must go. Why did God need to “test” Abraham, given that He knows the human heart better than we know it ourselves? Maimonides answers that God did not need Abraham to prove his love for Him. He would show this by being willing to sacrifice the son for whom he had spent a lifetime waiting. The conventional reading of this passage is that Abraham was being asked to show that his love for God was supreme. “Take your son, your only son, the one you love-Isaac-and go to the land of Moriah. Offer him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.” Thus begins one of the most famous episodes in the Torah, but also one of the most morally problematic.
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