Question:
Answer:
The story of the golden ram or golden fleece has only a superficial similarities with the story of Abraham.
The story involves a king who married a goddess and had a boy and a girl with the goddess. The king later fell in love with another woman and took her as a second wife. The goddess angered that the king took a second wife left him and when she did a drought fell upon the land. The second wife, jealous of her stepchildren, convinced the king that he must sacrifice his son to alleviate the drought. The goddess hearing of the plot sends a winged ram with a golden fleece to rescue her children and fly off with them. The boy is saved but the girl falls off and drowns in the ocean. The boy, grateful to be alive, sacrifices the ram and it becomes the constellation Aries.
Outside of the fact that both stories contain a child who is saved from a sacrifice and a ram is sacrificed at the end, nothing else is really very similar about the stories. Abraham did not fall in love or marry Hagar. The only reason he had relations with her was because he believed his wife was too old to conceive a child. The jealousy of Sarah resulted in the exile of Hagar and Ishmael, not a sacrifice. The attempted sacrifice of Isaac was not the result of jealousy but rather was a test of Abraham’s faith.