Abraham Takes the Covenant Pieces and God Makes a Nation of Him

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He Took the Animals Himself

Abraham cut the heifer down the middle and pulled the halves apart until they lay facing each other on the ground. Then the goat. Then the ram. He set the turtledove and the young pigeon whole on the stones between them and stepped back into the smell of it.

Birds came down for the meat. He drove them off. They circled and came again, and he drove them off again, and the sun slid down the sky while he worked, and nobody came to take a turn.

He had not been given the terms yet. He guarded the pieces anyway, beating wings away from a bargain whose price nobody had named, until the light went out of the field and something heavier than sleep took hold of him.

That is what the covenant looked like from the outside. Not a man lying still while heaven arranged things over him. A man with blood to the wrist, standing watch over meat.

God Promised to Make Him, Not to Place Him

The order that started all of it had been thin on detail. Leave your country. Leave the house you were born in. Go to the land I will show you.

No name for the place. No direction. A land he would be shown once he was standing on it, which meant walking away from every measurable thing he owned on the strength of a sentence.

What he got in exchange was a verb. God did not say I will set you over a great nation. God said I will make you into one. Make was the verb from the first week, the one used when the firmament was made and the two great lights were made. Abraham was not being promoted above other men. He was being built, the way a thing is built that did not exist before.

The promise came with equipment. I will teach you, and I will light your eyes. Wisdom put inside the man, and sight handed over like a lamp, because the country he was walking toward would have looked like any other stretch of dust and thornbush to a pair of ordinary eyes.

Famine, Egypt, and Four Kings

The road did not reward him for taking it. The land he had been shown dried out under him, and hunger pushed his household down into Egypt, where the officials looked at his wife and he learned exactly what a stranger is worth at a border.

He came back up. Then four kings came down out of the north, burned through the valley cities, and carried off his nephew with the rest of the plunder.

He went after them with the men born in his own house, a few hundred against an alliance that had just flattened five kingdoms. God went out in front of him and struck the enemies down. Abraham did not so much win that war as walk into the space it opened.

Everything That Happened to Him Happened Again

A sign came with the promise, and the sign was this. Whatever reached the father would reach the children.

He had been pulled alone out of his father's house. His children would be pulled out of seventy nations. Go forth, he was told, and they would be told, I will bring you up out of Egypt. Hunger sent him down to Egypt for bread, and hunger would send ten of his great-grandsons down the same road for grain.

Egypt harassed him at the border. Egypt would sit down with its advisers and say, let us deal shrewdly with them. Four kings banded together against one old man with a household of servants, and the kings of the earth would one day take their stand against a nation.

Only the last line of the sign came out in his favor, and it read less like comfort than like arithmetic. God had gone out and fought in front of Abraham. God would go out and fight in front of the children.

Moses Counted the Camp and the Making Was Done

Centuries passed before anyone could stand up and say the promise had been kept.

At the mountain, with the smoke still on it, Moses turned around and looked at what was assembled behind him. Tribes in ranks. Elders. Children on shoulders. Herds pressed against the edge of the camp. A whole people standing in one place with law in their arms.

He had spent his life arguing with this crowd. Now he counted it, and what came out of him was not a command. And what great nation is there.

The old man who cut the animals and beat off the birds had been dust for generations. He never saw the size of the thing he had been turned into, and he never learned that the making would take that long. He only knew the afternoon, the flies, the halves lying face to face, and the wings coming down again for the meat.