Abraham Feared He Had Used Up All His Merit in One Battle

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The Road Back From the Four Kings

Abraham won. Four kings were dead, nine armies had been turned around, Lot was walking beside him alive, and the recovered goods were coming up the road behind them in a long train.

And he was doing arithmetic in his head, and the arithmetic was bad.

"Woe to me," he said to himself. "I have been paid. Whatever was owed to me for the things I have done, I have just collected it here, in this world, and there is nothing left standing in my name in the world to come."

There was a second thought behind the first one. Out there somewhere were the brothers and the friends of the men he had killed, and they would gather into companies and come for him. Next time there might be no merit left in his account to draw on. He had spent the whole store of it on one battle. He would lose. And when he lost, men who despised Heaven would have his defeat in their mouths as proof.

The Thorns in the King's Orchard

There was a third fear under the other two and it was worse, because it was about the dead.

Among all those thousands he had cut down, he thought, there may have been one decent man. One who feared God. He had no way of knowing and no way of finding out, and there was nothing he could do about it now.

God answered him with a story about a man walking past the king's orchard. The man sees a bundle of thorns lying inside the wall. He climbs down and takes it. Then he looks up and finds the king watching him, and he starts backing away and trying to get out of sight.

"Why are you hiding?" the king says. "I have been trying to hire someone to clear those out. You have cleared them. Come and take your wages."

"Those armies you killed," God told him, "were cut thorns."

Then the other two fears, in order. Their sons will raise companies against you: I am a shield to you, and a shield stands no matter how many swords come at it. You have spent your reward: I made a shield for you in this world, and what is owed you is being held for the world that comes.

Two Men Afraid of the Same Meeting

There was one more thing on that road, and it was walking toward him.

Shem was still alive, the son of Noah, the priest at Salem, and the kings Abraham had just destroyed came out of his line. The two of them stood at opposite ends of the world and each was afraid of the other. Abraham was thinking: he holds it against me that I killed his sons. Shem was thinking: he holds it against me that I produced men like that.

They met on the road and neither of them said any of it. Shem brought out bread and wine and blessed him. "Blessed be Abram of God Most High." Abraham gave him a tenth of everything he had taken off the battlefield. One helped the other with a blessing and the other helped back with a gift, and they went their separate ways with nothing said and nothing settled.

Birds Over the Cut Animals

God told him to bring a heifer three years old, a goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove and a young pigeon. He killed them and split them down the middle and laid each half opposite its other half in two rows, and he left the birds whole.

Then the carrion birds came down on the meat.

They were not birds. They were the idolatrous nations, dropping out of the sky to snatch the offerings of Israel off the ground before Israel existed, and what beat them off was the righteousness of a man standing in a field with blood to his elbows and no children.

The sun went low. A heavy sleep came down on him, and inside the sleep four kingdoms stood up one after another to enslave his descendants. Terror, which is Babylon. Darkness, which is Media. Greatness, which is Greece. Decline, which is Persia, which is going to fall and never get up, and out of that fall his children come home.

The Fire That Went Between the Halves

When the sun had set, the dark came, and Gehinnam came up out of the ground in front of him. Smoke first. Then coals with the flame still on them, then flakes of fire coming off, the furnace where the wicked are judged.

And it moved. It went down the aisle he had cut between the halved animals, between the heifer and the heifer, the goat and the goat, the ram and the ram, and passed through.

What was written into the covenant that night was that his children would go down into a country that was not theirs and be crushed there for four hundred years, that God would judge the nation holding them, and that they would walk out of it with their hands full. Abraham had spent the whole day asking whether there was anything left in his name. He was shown the fire that judges, and it went past him without stopping.