Abraham Kept Praying for Sodom Even After the Fire Fell

Most readers of Genesis 18 think the negotiation over Sodom ended at ten. Abraham talks God down from fifty righteous to forty-five, to forty, to thirty, to twenty, and finally to ten. God agrees. Abraham stops. Sulfur falls the next morning. Four cities burn. Lot runs. Sarah's tent is waiting in the distance, and the story moves on. The rabbis who preserved the older Jewish traditions refused to let the story move on. They said Abraham kept praying for Sodom after the smoke had already risen, and the archangel Michael prayed with him, and God brought the dead back up.

The detail is in Legends of the Jews 5:308, compiled by Louis Ginzberg in 1909 from centuries of rabbinic lore. After the fire had done its work, Abraham walked up the hill and looked out over what had been four living cities the day before. Bereshit Rabbah, the great rabbinic commentary on Genesis compiled in fifth-century Palestine, says he could see the smoke rising "like the smoke of a furnace." Most men would have turned back to the tent. Abraham sat down on the slope and felt guilty. Not for anything he had done. For what he had not done. He had stopped negotiating at ten. He had not asked for five. He had not asked for one. He had not asked for none. The rabbis said the old patriarch genuinely believed he had been complicit in the destruction because he had let the numbers run out.

So he prayed again.

Ginzberg preserves the startling detail that the archangel Michael, who had been one of the three visitors at Abraham's tent a few days earlier, came back and prayed with him. Not instead of him. With him. Side by side on the ridge above the ruined plain, a man and an archangel petitioning the same heaven. And a voice answered. Ginzberg preserves the wording, which is extraordinary. "Abraham, Abraham, I have hearkened to thy voice and thy prayer, and I forgive thee thy sin, and those whom thou thinkest that I destroyed, I have called up and brought them into life by My exceeding kindness, because for a season I have requited them in judgment, and those whom I destroy living upon earth, I will not requite in death."

Read that sentence twice. God is saying that the people of Sodom were dead, and now they are not. They had been brought back. Not in the bodies on the plain, which were ash, but in another life. The rabbis read this as a declaration about the nature of divine judgment itself. The fire had been a penalty for this world. It had not been a verdict on the world to come. God, in this tradition, was telling Abraham that judgment on earth and judgment after earth do not double up. A soul destroyed by sulfur does not have to be destroyed a second time. The patriarch who had wept for Sodom had pried open a distinction in the divine court that would echo for centuries in rabbinic discussions of resurrection.

Why was Abraham capable of this prayer at all?

Kedushat Levi on Vayera, by Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, the eighteenth-century Hasidic master of Galicia, offers an answer that cuts straight into Kabbalistic anatomy. The argument over Sodom takes place in Genesis 18, which is the parsha immediately after Abraham's circumcision in Genesis 17. Rabbi Levi Yitzchak noticed that the Torah opens Vayera with the phrase "God appeared to him" rather than "God appeared to Abraham." No name. Just a pronoun. Why?

Because Abraham, at that moment, was between selves. Before the circumcision he had served God through ahavah, love. After the circumcision he served God through yirah, awe, which Rabbi Levi Yitzchak defines as the total negation of one's earthbound ego. The act of cutting away the foreskin, which he reads in Kabbalistic terms as the removal of a kelipah, a shell of spiritual obstruction, had stripped Abraham of the part of himself that could still be afraid for himself. When the Torah refers to him only as "him," it is telling you the old Avram was gone and the new Avraham had not yet fully arrived.

And here is the line that should stop you. Rabbi Levi Yitzchak says that true awe of God does not make a person passive. It makes them fearless on behalf of others. Abraham, having just lost his own ego to the knife, had nothing left to protect. That is why he could walk up to God and argue for a city full of strangers. He was not arguing from courage. He was arguing from emptiness. The man who had nothing of himself left was the only man who could stand in front of the furnace and ask the Judge to turn it off.

The midrash adds that the stakes of those numbers were higher than anyone at the tent realized. Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer 25:4, the early medieval midrash compiled in eighth or ninth-century Palestine and attributed to Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, teaches that the existence of fifty righteous people anywhere on earth is what sustains the world. Abraham was not bargaining casually. He was working a spiritual arithmetic he had been taught. Fifty was the threshold where the whole planet kept turning. Ten, the number he stopped at, was the threshold where a single city could be delivered. The rabbis of Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer said the Sodomites had everything. Rabbi Ze'era describes them as the wealthiest men in the world, harvesting gold dust under their vegetables, walking on ground so rich that the soil itself glittered. They had no tenth righteous man. They had no first righteous man. They trusted the shadow of their wealth instead of the shadow of their Creator, and the wealth did not hold them up.

Still Abraham prayed after the fire. Still Michael prayed beside him. Still a voice came down and said the souls had been recalled.

Legends of the Jews 5:308 ends the episode with a quiet postscript. When Michael came back down to bring Abraham home, Sarah had died in the tent. She had been worrying about her husband's whereabouts, and her soul had gone out of her while he was standing on the ridge petitioning for strangers. Years later, when it was Abraham's turn to die, he refused to hand over his soul to Michael at all. Michael went back up to heaven and told God, "There is no man like him on earth." God had to dress Death in beauty before Abraham would agree to go, because the patriarch who had argued the dead of Sodom back into life was not in the habit of letting anybody die on his watch, including himself.