Abraham Sold Idols Before He Smashed Them

Before Abraham became the man who smashed his father's idols, he was the man who sold them.

Legends of the Jews 5, Ginzberg's synthesis of rabbinic tradition, preserves an episode from Abraham's young adulthood that most retellings skip over entirely. He was traveling to an inn on the road between Canaan and Egypt, the stopping point for merchants from Fandana in Syria. He had goods to sell. The goods were idols. His father Terah was in the idol trade, and the young Abraham was working the family business, had not yet arrived at the conclusion that would define the rest of his life.

Then something went wrong at the inn. The text doesn't dwell on the details. What it records is the pivot: Abraham left the inn without completing his sale, and somewhere on that road, between the Syrian merchants and Egypt, the process of rethinking began. The same man who had hawked his father's carved figures would, in a later story that became one of the most famous in Jewish tradition, wait until his father left the shop and then take a hammer to every idol in the room, placing it in the hands of the largest one, and wait to see what his father would say.

The famine that struck Canaan after God had sent Abraham there was not a natural disaster, or at least not only that. Legends of the Jews 5 records that the famine affected only Canaan, and specifically at that time, specifically to test Abraham. He had already passed the test of leaving his homeland. Now came the test of staying faithful to the land he had been promised even as that land failed to sustain him. He went down to Egypt. He came back. He had not abandoned the promise or the land.

When he returned from Egypt with cattle and servants and new wealth, trouble started immediately. The herdsmen of Lot, his nephew, let their flocks graze on land that did not belong to them. Abraham's herdsmen tried to stop them. Legends of the Jews 5 records that Abraham had muzzled his own cattle before they were sent out, precisely to prevent them from eating crops grown on others' land. It was a practical ethics: he knew that wealth accumulated through small violations accumulates into something morally compromised. He preferred to constrain his own animals rather than allow a pattern of small thefts.

Lot did not see it that way. The quarrel over grazing became a quarrel over character, and eventually Abraham and Lot separated. They divided the land between them. Lot chose the Jordan plain, the well-watered territory that looked like Egypt, that looked like abundance. Abraham kept the harder land and received, from God, a promise that the harder land was the right choice.

The exile question runs through all of this. Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer 48, an eighth-century Palestinian midrash, preserves a tradition about when exactly God revealed to Abraham that his descendants would be strangers in a foreign land. Rabbi Elazar argues that God waited to deliver this terrible news until after Abraham had a child, after Isaac was born. The decree of exile was made bearable only because the one who would bear it had already been given the promise of continuity. First the son, then the news about what that son's descendants would endure.

What runs from the idol-selling young man to the patriarch who would argue with God about Sodom is a continuous education in what it means to own something. He had tried to own what was not his to own: the income from carved pieces of wood and stone. He learned to own his land without violating his neighbors'. He learned to own his grief over Lot's departure without letting it become resentment. He learned, eventually, to hold the promise of descendants lightly enough that when God asked him to sacrifice his son, he could say yes.

The man who sold idols became the man who broke them. The Ginzberg tradition does not hide the early Abraham. It starts there, with the merchant at the Syrian inn, because the tradition understood that transformation is not a rewriting of the past. It is what the past becomes when you keep moving.

What the Book of Jubilees and the Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer passage on exile add to this portrait is the full cost of the journey. God waited until Abraham had a son before revealing that the son's descendants would be slaves in a foreign land for generations. The famine. The muzzled cattle. The separation from Lot. The descent to Egypt. The long patience with a promise that kept requiring more than it seemed to give. Abraham did not know he was becoming the father of a people. He knew only that each test arrived before he had finished recovering from the previous one. He moved through them anyway: muzzling his cattle so they would not graze on others' land, praying for kings who had wronged him, feeding guests with a feast he had promised as a morsel. The pattern held. The tradition read the pattern as the man. Not the miracles. Not the covenant ceremonies. The daily practice of moving through the world as if other people's claim on the earth mattered as much as his own.