Abraham Left Twice and Refused to Build Babel

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The Delegation on the Road

They came up the road in a group with brick dust still on their hands and found Abraham outside his tents. "Come and sit with us," they said. "You are mighty. The Holy One has seated Himself on high and abandoned us down here, so let us storm the heavens together."

Abraham wanted to know what they thought they had against Him who sits above. "Did He ever say, toil and feed Me? He makes and He bears. What is your claim?"

They had an answer ready, because they had been afraid for a long time before they ever walked out to fetch him. "Lest He do to us as He did to the generations before." Water had taken one world already, so they had stopped waiting on the next verdict. The plan was a city, a tower, an idol set above Him, and a name of their own that no flood could rinse off.

"You have abandoned a true tower of strength, the Name of the Lord," Abraham said, "and you build a name of your own?"

They went back to the brickfield, since one man refusing is only one man. The Holy Spirit was already crying against them that the wicked are like the troubled sea, and such men cannot rest easy for a single hour. Heaven laughed. The higher the courses of brick went up, the further the builders had to come down, until they were scattered and condemned out of their own counsel, dross that had tried to cast itself into gods. Abraham said that he had not sat with men of falsehood, and he went off alone toward the land he had been promised.

Go For Yourself

Alone was the cost, and alone was also the instruction. Go for yourself out of your land, out of your birthplace, out of your father's house. Three things named in that order, each one closer to the bone than the last, so that by the end of the sentence there was nothing left of him a neighbor could have identified in a crowd. The land he was walking toward went unnamed.

He had just refused a name made out of brick. What he had in its place was a road, a voice, and a promise he could not show to anyone.

The men on the plain got a name in the end, though not the one they were after. Babel is what people call the place, which in the language of that plain means confusion.

The Same Two Words on the Second Road

He would leave twice in one life, and both departures came out of the same two syllables. Decades later the voice used them again. Go for yourself, to the land of Moriah. The first time, the thing he had to leave was behind him. This time it walked beside him carrying the wood.

Isaac was old enough to do the arithmetic, and on the third morning he did it out loud. He looked at the fire in his father's hand and the wood on his own shoulder and said, "Behold the fire and the wood." Then he asked where the lamb was.

Abraham heard the question arrive at its own answer and did not stop walking. He shifted the fire to his other hand. He counted what was left of the road, because counting the road meant not counting anything else, and the two of them went on together with the boy still waiting on a reply.

Whatever else came off that mountain, the son came off it able to reason a thing through to the end while his own life hung on the result. That was not a small inheritance.

The First Gray Head in Twenty Generations

Twenty generations run from Adam down to Abraham, and in none of them does Scripture write the word old. It waits the whole way. Then: "And Abraham was old." After that the word could be handed on, since Isaac grew old in his turn and Jacob's eyes went dim in his, and a gray head stopped being a wound and became the beauty of old men.

A father can leave a son five things: beauty, strength, wealth, wisdom, and length of years. Abraham left all five. Isaac was fair as Joseph. His strength is countable in the wells he opened with his own hands, and his wealth in the plain sentence that the man grew great, and his wisdom on the Moriah road with the fire and the wood. The years came last and came measured. Isaac lived a hundred and eighty, which is five beyond his father, one added year for every gift he had been given.

The man with no merit takes five afflictions instead, and the house of Joab wore them under David's curse, because a curse counts as carefully as a blessing does. What the righteous inherit, the guilty forfeit in the same number.

The builders wanted a name badly enough to make war for it, and their bricks are under sand. Abraham kept the Name and gave away everything else he had. Isaac buried him, and then outlived him by five years, gray to the end.