God
The voice from above that Isaac's mother takes for God.
In The Binding of Isaac, God never appears; what sets the story in motion is 'a voice from above' that Isaac's mother believes is God Himself. In the game's framing, she receives a message from God demanding the life of her son as proof of her faith, and Isaac, fearing for his life, flees into the basement.
Quick Facts
- Game
- The Binding of Isaac (2011)
- Form
- 'A voice from above', heard only by Isaac's mother
- Demands
- Remove Isaac's evil
- lock him away
- sacrifice him
Lore & Background
The voice speaks three times. It first says that Isaac is corrupted with sin and needs to be saved, and asks her to remove all evil from him; she takes away his toys, drawings and clothes. It then says Isaac must be cut off from all that is evil, and she locks him in his room. The last time, it tells her she has done well but still questions her devotion and demands that she sacrifice her son; she takes a butcher's knife from the kitchen. Until the Repentance expansion of the remake there was no clear conclusion to the story past Isaac's escape. Rebirth's endings imply the events are imagined or hallucinated, and its final ending has Isaac ascend to Heaven while a narrator, whom he calls his father, offers to tell a new story.
Reader's Guide
Edmund McMillen wrote the story out of his experiences with a family split between Catholics and born-again Christians, wanting to show how religion can both instil harmful feelings and bring about dark creativity. He also drew on 1980s Christian-right scare films about satanic cults sacrificing children, noting how many biblical stories mirrored them. The plot is very loosely inspired by the Genesis story of the Binding of Isaac.
More in story
Elsewhere in The Binding of Isaac
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