Abraham Smashes Idols Then Hides With Noah

Terah bowed so low in his own workshop that his beard brushed the floor, then straightened up and pointed along the shelves. Twelve large gods stood against the wall, with the small ones stacked behind them like stock waiting to be sold. "These made everything you see," he said. "They made me, and they made you."

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Abram had asked who made heaven and earth and the children of men, and this was the answer. He did not argue in the hall, because an argument there would only end with his father saying it again, so he went to his mother. "My father has shown me the ones who made heaven and earth," he told her. "Make savory meat from a kid of the flock, so I can carry it in to them. Perhaps they will find me acceptable."

She cooked it, and he carried the trays in himself.

Two Days of Meat Nobody Ate

The meat steamed in front of twelve painted faces until the steam gave out, and not one hand came off a lap. Abram waited long enough to be sure of it, then spoke to them like a merchant working a customer he means to keep. "The meat is not to your taste, perhaps, or there is not enough of it. Tomorrow I will bring better, and more."

Tomorrow he brought better and more of it, and because that went cold in front of them too, the spirit of God came over him and he stopped being a polite son. "Woe to my father and his generation," he cried, "who serve wood and stone that cannot eat or smell or hear or speak. Mouths without speech, eyes without sight, ears without hearing, hands without feeling, and legs without motion."

There was a hatchet on the shop floor, since a man who carves gods needs one. Abram carried it down the row until only the largest god was left standing, with chips of the other eleven skidding across his father's clean tiles. Then he set the hatchet into the big one's carved fingers and walked out.

The Lie That Forced the Truth

Terah heard the crash and caught his son in the doorway with the wreckage behind him. "What is this mischief you have done to my gods?"

"I set savory meat in front of them," Abram said. "They all put their hands out for it at once, before the big one could take his share. He was enraged at them, so he took the hatchet and broke them. The hatchet is still in his hand. You can see it there."

His father's face went dark. "You are lying to me. Is there spirit or soul or power in these to do what you say? They are wood and stone, and I made them myself with these hands. You put the hatchet there."

That sentence was what Abram had gone to all this trouble for. He stepped back into the wreckage, pulled the hatchet out of the big god's grip, broke it with one swing, and asked his father how a man serves what has no power in it, whether these could hear him or deliver him. Then he ran, because a man who has just said the true thing out loud has to put the shame somewhere.

Terah took it to the king. He bowed at Nimrod's feet and asked for judgment on the son born to him fifty years earlier, and because the princes of the realm voted for fire, the furnace at Kasdim was lit and kept burning three days before they walked Abram to it. Nine hundred thousand people came out to watch. The linen cords dropped off him in the flames, and he walked around in there three days, and when the king called him out he came out.

The King Dreams About an Egg

For two years nobody troubled him. Abram spoke to the men, Sarah spoke to the women, and in prophecy she stood above her husband, which is why some called her Iscah, the seer. Then Nimrod dreamed.

Nimrod stood with his army beside the furnace in the valley, and a man who looked like Abram came out of it with a drawn sword and ran him down. The man threw an egg at his head while running, and a river came out of the egg and drowned the army, leaving three men alive beside the king with his own build and his own face. Then the river went back into the egg, a chick broke out, flew up, settled on the king's head, and put out one of his eyes.

He woke with his heart going like a hammer, so the magicians were in the room by first light, and one of them, Anoko, read it without softening: war, an army annihilated, and the king's death at the hands of somebody out of Abram's line. The stars had said the same fifty-two years earlier, on the night the boy was born. "As long as Abraham liveth upon the ground," Anoko said, "thou shalt not be stablished, nor thy kingdom."

So Nimrod sent men to kill him. Eliezer, the slave the king had once given Abraham as a gift, heard the order in court and ran the whole way with it, so Abraham was gone before the bailiffs came. He hid in the house of Noah and Shem a month, until the officers gave up and the king stopped thinking about him.

What Terah Left in Ur

Terah came to the hiding place, and his son asked him for something harder than silence. "It was not for your sake that Nimrod loaded you with honors," Abraham said. "It was for his own profit, and riches are no profit in a day of wrath. Come with me to Canaan and serve the God who made you."

Noah and Shem said the same thing, and then the room went quiet and stayed quiet. Terah had carved those gods himself and had known the whole time what they were made of, and he had still gone to a king about his own child. Standing in a bolted house with the boy alive in front of him, he said yes.

They went out toward Haran together, Terah and Abraham and Lot, with their households strung behind them. The country was pleasant and the people listened, so that men who had never feared anything invisible began to fear God. Back in Ur the workshop floor was still covered in pieces of the twelve, and the king who had dreamed about an egg still had both eyes.