Abraham Circumcised His Whole House on One Day

Abraham was ninety-nine years old when the command arrived, and he had the flint out before the morning was over.

Click for full size

He could have waited for spring, when the weather would be kinder to a camp full of wounded men. He could have waited a week and let the household watch him heal first. The command had come at first light, and he would not let it go cold by the afternoon.

What he had been told was not a mood. The covenant stood between the Memra, the Word of the Lord, and Abraham, and it went on standing after him, to his sons in their generations, ad le-alma, forever. Abraham would die and his sons would die. The only thing that could carry a promise that long was a mark that did not come off.

Ishmael Went First

Ishmael was thirteen. He was old enough to have heard, from somewhere in the camp, that the covenant his father kept talking about would run through a son who had not been born yet. He had every reason to stand at the back and let the servants go ahead of him.

Abraham called him first. Not the home-born servants, who were loyal. Not the men bought with money, who had no say. The son who would not inherit the promise was the first one into it. He came forward and held still, and there was no argument on either side of the flint.

Afterward the boy sat down against a tent rope and did not make a sound.

Every Male in the Camp

After that the line went on all day. Men brought up in the house. Men bought with silver from traders whose names nobody in the camp remembered. Every male among Abraham's household people, cut on the selfsame day the Lord had spoken with him.

Some of them had never heard the voice that gave the order. They had been purchased, they had learned the work of the camp, and now they bled for an agreement announced that morning to an old man they served. Nobody was left outside it, because nobody in that camp got to be a spectator. Anyone who ate Abraham's bread took the mark into his body along with the rest.

By afternoon the camp had gone quiet in a particular way. Work stopped, since almost nobody could walk properly. The few who could walk carried water to the ones who could not.

What Sarah Was Promised the Same Morning

Sarah was ninety and had never carried a child. In the same conversation that produced the flint, she had been promised a son out of her own body, and crowds descending from that son, and kings ruling over nations coming out of her.

She stood at the tent door with nothing yet to show for any of it. The women around her had stopped expecting anything from her years ago. Behind her the camp was sitting down one careful man at a time, and the whole future line of a kingdom had just been handed to a body that had never once cooperated.

Land He Did Not Own

The country came attached to the same word. All of Canaan, the land Abraham was living in as a guest, given as a holding that does not expire, ahasanat alam. Not a long lease that runs out when a stronger people arrives. And the Lord would be their God, so the land and the God arrived in one breath.

He owned almost none of it. He had walked its length, dug a few wells, and bargained with the locals for shade under their trees. The one piece of ground that would ever be his by any court in Canaan was a burial cave he had not bought yet.

By dark, every male in the camp carried the same mark, and every field around them still belonged to somebody else.