Abraham Refused to Die Until He Toured Heaven and Hell First

The Man God Could Not Simply Take

Abraham was one hundred and seventy-five years old and God needed a strategy. He had summoned the archangel Michael and given him a simple instruction: go to Abraham, prepare him for death, and bring his soul to Me. Michael descended to the Oaks of Mamre and found Abraham sitting at the entrance to his tent in the morning heat, his eyes still sharp, his bearing still the bearing of a man in full possession of himself.

Abraham greeted the visitor with the hospitality he had practiced his entire life. He killed a calf. He set out bread and oil. He washed the guest's feet. He had no idea he was washing an archangel's feet. He treated Michael as a stranger deserving of welcome, and Michael sat through the whole meal unable to do what he had come to do.

When Michael returned to heaven, he told God: I cannot do it. The man was too kind. The man is too faithful. I could not bring myself to look at him and say the words.

The Announcement That Could Not Be Made Directly

God sent Michael back a second time with different instructions. This time Michael descended with a retinue and told Abraham that his end was approaching. Abraham's response was immediate: he would not go. Not like this. Not simply surrendering at a divine instruction as if he were any ordinary man who had lived and eaten and slept and now would stop. He was the man who had argued God out of destroying Sodom if ten righteous people could be found. He was the man who had been called God's friend. He was the man who had passed ten trials without flinching. He wanted to see what he was agreeing to before he agreed to it.

God agreed. Abraham would be shown.

The Chariot of Clouds and the Celestial Court

Michael brought Abraham on a chariot of the cherubim, riding above the inhabited world, looking down at everything humanity was doing. What he saw disturbed him. He saw thieves, fornicators, murderers going about their ordinary business. At one point Abraham asked God to send down fire and consume the sinners he was watching. Fire came down. Then he asked again. More fire. God stopped the vision at this point and told Abraham: if you continue to watch, you will empty the earth of its people. You were not made for judgment. That role is not yours.

Then Abraham was brought to the celestial judgment hall. He watched soul after soul come forward to be weighed. He watched the angel sitting before the book of records, reading what was written. He watched the scales. He watched some souls go to light and others go to fire. He watched one soul on the border, exactly balanced between merit and sin, and he was so moved by this soul's precariousness that he prayed for it, and his prayer tipped the scales toward mercy. The soul was saved by the patriarch's intercession from beyond the world of the living.

The Face of Death

Abraham still would not die. He wanted to see the Angel of Death in his true form. God told the Angel of Death to appear, and the Angel came, but in a gentle and beautiful aspect, nothing frightening, nothing extreme. Abraham was not satisfied. He wanted the true form. The Angel of Death showed him: the face of fire, the heads of serpents, the swords, the terrible appearance that the dying see in the moment of their passage.

The servants who had accompanied Abraham on this vision collapsed at the sight and died on the spot. Abraham himself only survived because God had told the Angel of Death not to use his power on the patriarch directly. Fourteen thousand of the household staff died from the vision alone. Abraham asked God to restore them. God restored them. Even at the threshold of death, Abraham was negotiating.

The Soul That Would Not Be Taken by Force

In the end, God came Himself. He came to Abraham while Abraham slept, and He took the soul gently, the way a man draws a hair from milk, the tradition says, without pain, without violence, without the Angel of Death's instruments. The soul of Abraham was gathered in the divine hand and carried to the highest heaven.

The tradition records one more detail: some sources say Abraham never truly died at all. His soul was taken, but the body and the soul parted so gently, so without the usual tearing, that the distinction between death and sleep nearly dissolved. He had gone not in the way of ordinary men but in the way of a man who had argued the entire question out and finally, understanding everything he could be shown, consented.