Abraham Watched His Father's Gods Break and Then Asked About Evil

The Gods That Could Not Survive a Donkey

Terah made five idols and handed them to his son. "Sell these," he said. Abraham loaded them onto the donkey and set out toward the marketplace.

A caravan of Syrian merchants was traveling the same road toward Egypt. Abraham began talking with them. Then one of their camels groaned, a low sound, and the donkey panicked. The donkey bolted sideways and threw the idols to the road. Three of the five shattered. Two survived.

The merchants were delighted. They offered to buy the two intact idols and pay for all five, broken ones included. Abraham took the money. He gathered the fragments and threw them into the river as he walked back to report the loss. The river received them without ceremony. They sank. No omen came. The gods did not protest. The silence of the river was the first argument, and it required no words at all.

Barisat, Son of Fire

Back at his father's house, Abraham was sent to collect wood scraps for cooking. Under the chips he found a small wooden idol, its name carved on its forehead: GOD BARISAT. Son of fire.

He said nothing to his father about the find. He laid the scraps in the fire and set Barisat in front of the flames with a mock ceremony. "Pay attention, Barisat," he said. "Do not let the fire go out. If it dims, blow on it until it burns again."

When he returned, the cooking fire had eaten Barisat entirely. The son of fire had fed the fire. The god whose name invoked flames had become fuel. Abraham looked at the ash and understood the full absurdity at last. A god made of wood, placed in front of a fire, given instructions it could not follow and would not have followed even if it could, consumed by the very element it named. His father had spent his life making things like this. The house was full of things like this.

What the Smoke Taught Him

Abraham argued with his father through the rest of that day, working through every category of idol, every material, every logic. The stone gods break. The wooden gods burn. The silver and gold ones cannot save themselves from a thief with strong arms. His father eventually drove him out in anger, and in that anger lit the house on fire. Haran, Abraham's brother, ran in to save the idols and died in the flames.

The fire that killed Haran was the same logic, applied to a human being. He had gone in to protect the gods that could not protect themselves and the fire had not distinguished between the idol and the devotee. The gods could not save him. They had never been able to save anything.

History Laid Out in Advance

God took Abraham up after that day. In a vision above the earth, he was shown a picture of all the creatures, all of history, everything that would happen from the beginning through the end of the ages. The pattern was complete before Abraham could ask a question about it.

Then he asked anyway. "Why? Why does the picture look like this? Why was it made to contain the things it contains?"

God answered with a question of his own. "Why did your father not listen to your voice? Why did he continue in his idolatry until it destroyed him?"

Abraham said: "because he chose not to listen."

God said: "as your father's counsel was his own, so the counsel of every person belongs to that person. Evil exists because choice exists. The creatures whose suffering Abraham saw in the vision are not victims of a fixed mechanism. They are inhabitants of a world in which refusal is real. The same freedom that made it possible for Abraham to break the idols made it possible for Terah to keep making them. The picture contains both because freedom cannot be partial."