Abraham Asked the Customers Their Age

Abraham's first recorded act of rebellion was a question.

His father Terah sold idols in the street, and Abraham helped. When a customer came and asked the price of an image, Abraham would quote it, then ask how old the customer was. Thirty years old, the man might say. And Abraham would tell him: you are thirty years old, and you wish to worship this idol, which we made this morning? The man would walk away without buying. Another customer would come, and Abraham would quote the price, ask the age, and say: you are fifty years old, and you bow down to something we made today? Another man would leave. The business suffered.

When the story is told in the ancient Jerahmeel account, the sharpness of Abraham's method is preserved intact. He was not arguing theology. He was simply pointing out arithmetic. The idol was younger than the worshipper. If age conferred authority, the worshipper should be commanding the idol, not the reverse. This was the same logic Abraham had used when he watched the sun cross the sky from morning to evening and concluded it could not be God, because anything that sets cannot be the source of everything. The argument he made in the marketplace was the one he had worked out alone while pasturing flocks.

Nimrod heard about this and summoned Abraham. He gave him an instruction: make me a beautiful god. Abraham went to his father's workshop and had one made, finished and painted with many colors, and brought it to the king. What happened next involves a gap in the manuscript, but the outcome is clear enough: Nimrod stood before Abraham and asked, if not the gods, then whom shall I serve? Abraham replied without hesitation. The God of gods and Lord of lords, whose kingdom is everlasting in heaven and on earth and in the heavens of the high heavens.

Nimrod said: I worship the god of fire. And I shall cast you into it. Let the God to whom you testify deliver you.

A parallel account in Sefer haYashar fills in the background of Nimrod's hostility. When Abraham was born, a great star appeared and swallowed four other stars from the four corners of the sky. Nimrod's astrologers read the sign immediately: a child has been born who will inherit both this world and the world to come. They advised Nimrod to buy the infant from his parents and have him killed. Terah protected his son by producing a substitute child. Nimrod killed the wrong child and believed the prophecy had been averted. When Abraham survived to adulthood and began teaching monotheism openly, Nimrod remembered the star. He had not been protected from the prophecy. He had simply been given fifty more years to think about it.

The furnace they built for Abraham was surrounded on four sides by five hundred cubits of wood in each direction. They bound him tightly and placed him in the center and lit the fire. The whole household of Terah had been idol worshippers until that moment and had not recognized their Creator. Their neighbors came to Terah and beat their heads and said: great shame, your son whom you said would inherit this world and the world to come, Nimrod has burned him.

Then God's mercy was moved. He descended from the habitation of His glory and delivered Abraham from that reproach and from that furnace. The scripture that Jerahmeel cites in this connection is: I am the Lord who brought you out of the fire of the Chaldeans. It is the same phrase used later about the exodus from Egypt, applied here to an earlier and more private redemption. The pattern of rescue was established long before Pharaoh. It was tested first on a man who stood in a marketplace and asked idol buyers how old they were.

Abraham came out of the furnace and he and his father Terah were able to answer the generation of the Dispersion. That phrase, to answer those who reproach, is what the entire test had been about. Nimrod had reproached him by asking: if not the gods, whom shall I serve? The furnace was Nimrod's answer to Abraham's answer. The fire that did not burn was Abraham's answer to the furnace. The argument ended there, and the place was called The God of Abraham.

The furnace that could not burn Abraham had already failed once with the generation of the flood, and it would fail again. The ancient sources that record Abraham's survival also record that the place itself was renamed after the event. What had been a city furnace in Babylon became The God of Abraham. The Ginzberg tradition places Abraham's discovery of monotheism on the very day he first came out of hiding at the age of three, watching the sun track across the sky. He never went back. The idol customers he turned away in the marketplace were the last people Terah managed to sell to, because after a while no one came.