Thread by @_BenMyers_

If I could go back in time and change something, I would have Milton tell the story of the binding of Isaac instead of writing Paradise Regained. His talents would have been perfectly suited to the Abraham story

He would have done it as a Greek tragedy with speeches that open onto a vast & terrifying backstory of scorched cities and the men of Sodom struck blind. Isaac would be bound and blindfolded. The gigantic soul of Abraham would plunge headlong into the abyss of the divine will

And there are so many gaps in the biblical story—it is virtually all gaps—that Milton would have filled with his ingenious inventiveness.

Plus he wouldn’t have been hampered by reverence as when he tried to write about Christ in Paradise Regained. Abraham would have been the perfect subject for Milton: a sublime figure, oceans deeper and mountains higher than any mere mortal, yet not an object of worship

Although Milton would take 20 verses of the Bible and turn it into a poem a hundred pages long, when he gets to the central action he would simply follow the Bible almost verbatim without embellishment:

“Then stretching forth his hand he took the knife/To slay his son....”

When Isaac says “My father” and Abraham “My son,” Milton would make these words reverberate with allusions to other biblical and pagan stories—Laertes & Odysseus, Jacob & Joseph, David & Absalom, Jesus—until all grief and hope and longing seem encompassed in those simple words

The fact that Abraham was technically a pagan would have suited Milton right down to his toenails. Abraham has no church, no temple, no law, no sect. In this patriarch Milton would have fused pagan and biblical traditions; Abraham would have encompassed all future possibilities

He would have made Abraham the founder of great religions but not their adherent: Abraham, not a priest but a prophet; Abraham who stands before the LORD in the freedom of the spirit, peering down on earthly laws and customs as from a great height; Abraham, the Miltonic ideal

“He shows is Abraham’s attentive love for the child in the division of the burdens. He himself carries the dangerous objects with which the boy could hurt himself, the torch and the knife” (G. von Rad). Ironies like this would fill the magnificent pages of Milton’s Abraham

At the provision of the ram, “not a sound of rejoicing is audible, in keeping with the ancient magnificence of the passage, from which every sentimental characteristic is far removed.” Otto Procksch’s commentary on the passage is a perfect description of the Miltonic style

All Milton's major works have the same theme: temptation. Genesis 22 is the most perfect Miltonic text because it is the most sublime and perfect temptation: not by Lucifer or Delilah et al., but by God. "And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham..."

Certainly Milton was drawn to the Abraham stories. Books 5-8 of Paradise Lost are essentially a gigantic embellishment of Genesis 18 (Abraham's hospitality). One third of Paradise Lost is actually based on Abraham, even though the figure of Abraham is replaced with Adam and Eve