Translating the Aqedah: Transitivity Patterns and the Construction of Agency in English Renderings of Genesis 22

Abstract

The Aqedah, the binding of Isaac narrated in Genesis 22, is one of the Hebrew Bible's most theologically charged and linguistically dense passages. This study offers a systematic philological analysis of the Masoretic Hebrew text of Genesis 22:1–19 (BHS, 5th ed.), focusing on verbal morphology, participant marking through the accusative particle ʾet (אֶת) and its discourse functions, the waw-consecutive narrative chain, and the lexical semantics of key verbs, especially nissāh Building on this philological foundation, the study applies Halliday's transitivity system within Systemic .)עָּקַד( and ʿāqad )שָּחַט( with attention also to šāḥaṭ ,)נִסָּה(Functional Linguistics (SFL), together with van Leeuwen's social actor theory, to examine how agency in the Hebrew source text is preserved, reshaped, or reassigned across six major English Bible translations: the KJV (1611), RSV (1952), NIV (1978), NRSV (1989), ESV (2001), and NLT (2004). The analysis shows that the Hebrew text's grammaticalisation of agency, through verbal stems, participant marking, and narrative sequencing, constrains and helps explain the divergent agency constructions found across the translations, with implications for moral responsibility, divine sovereignty, and human volition. The findings demonstrate that close philological attention to the Hebrew original is essential for understanding how translation participates in theological and interpretive meaning-making.