Abraham the Warrior and the Three Strangers at His Tent

Most people picture Abraham as a quiet old man waiting by his tent for God to speak. The Jewish legends remember a different figure. They remember a giant tall as seventy men, striding four miles with every step, chasing four kings across the night with the planet Jupiter burning a path ahead of him. The patriarch of monotheism was also a man who went to war, and the war started over a family argument about grass.

The Quarrel Over Grass That Started a War

It began with herdsmen. The story in the War of the Kings, gathered by Louis Ginzberg in his early twentieth-century compilation from far older rabbinic sources, says Abraham muzzled his flocks so they would not graze on land that was not his. His nephew Lot did not bother. When Abraham's shepherds confronted Lot's, the answer was breathtaking in its cruelty. God promised this land to Abraham's seed, they said, but the old man is barren. Lot is the heir. We are only eating what is already ours.

Abraham heard that and made a decision. They had to separate. Lot went east and chose the richest valley in sight, the well-watered Jordan plain, and settled at the edge of Sodom, the most wicked city in the world. He did not just leave his uncle. He left his uncle's God.

Then the kings came. Chedorlaomer of Elam had subjugated the cities of the plain and squeezed twelve years of tribute out of them before they rebelled. He gathered allies, among them a king named Amraphel, who the legends insist was none other than Nimrod, Abraham's oldest enemy, the man who had once thrown him into a furnace. Their army numbered eight hundred thousand. They crushed the five rebel cities in the Vale of Siddim, the basin that would one day fill and become the Dead Sea. The defeated kings sank into slime pits. The victors looted Sodom and dragged Lot away in chains, and as they marched they boasted about who they really wanted. Not Lot. Abraham.

The Night Abraham Took the Field

It was the first night of Pesach, Passover, and Abraham was eating matzah when the news of Lot's capture reached him. He did not hesitate over old grievances. He gathered his disciples, the students he had taught the true faith, and warned anyone carrying the weight of past sins to stay home. Fearing judgment, every one of them stayed home except Eliezer. So God gave Eliezer the strength of the three hundred and eighteen men Abraham had hoped to bring.

The battle on the fifteenth of Nissan was not fought with ordinary weapons. Arrows broke against Abraham. The dust and chaff he flung at the enemy turned into swords and spears in the air. An angel named Lailah fought beside him, and the heavens themselves bent to his side. He ran the kings down to Dan and there, near the future site of Israel's golden calves, his strength finally failed him.

What happened next matters more than the victory. The grateful nations built him a throne on the battlefield and moved to crown him their king and their god. Abraham refused. "The universe has its King, and it has its God," he said, and gave back every coin of the plunder. To the king of Sodom he swore he would not keep so much as a thread or a shoelace. As a reward for that refusal, the legends say, his descendants were given the tzitzit, the fringes, and the tefillin, worn on arm and head, so they would always remember the ancestor who would not touch a stranger's shoelace.

The Covenant Cut From Doubt

The fighting left a wound. Abraham could not stop thinking about the blood he had spilled, and God came to ease his conscience. In the Covenant of the Pieces, the moment behind (Genesis 15), God lifts Abraham above the vault of the sky and tells him the thing he most needs to hear. "You are a prophet, not an astrologer." Abraham had read in the stars that he would die childless. God overruled the stars.

Then God showed him the whole future at once. Three heifers, three she-goats, three rams, a turtledove, and a young pigeon, each animal standing for an empire that would one day rule his children. Babylon, Greece, Media and Persia, the line of Ishmael, and Israel itself the undivided dove. Abraham cut the beasts in two but left the birds whole, because Israel would be broken open by exile and still remain one body. When birds of prey dropped on the carcasses, he drove them off. As the sun set, a smoking furnace and a flaming torch passed between the pieces, and a great darkness fell, and God let him choose his children's fate. Punishment by exile, or punishment by Gehenna. All day Abraham wavered. He chose the dominion of strangers, and so the four hundred years in Egypt were set in motion, counted from the birth of the son he did not yet have.

Three Men in the Heat of the Day

Three days after his circumcision, Abraham was in agony. Legends of the Jews tells how God came to visit the convalescing patriarch, and the angels balked. "What is man, that You are mindful of him," they asked, recoiling from a place of blood and filth. God answered them flatly. The smell of this blood is sweeter to me than incense, and if you will not come, I go alone.

To give Abraham rest, God made the day unbearably hot and bored a hole into hell to drive the heat up, so no travelers would come. Abraham was miserable about it. He sent Eliezer to search the empty road, and when Eliezer found no one, the wounded old man hauled himself outside to look for guests himself. That is when three strangers appeared in the visit of the angels. They were Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael in human disguise, one to heal him, one to promise Sarah a son, one bound for Sodom.

Abraham ran. He told God himself to wait, because seating his guests came first. He slaughtered three calves, sent Sarah to bake fine meal, and laid out a feast for travelers who, the legends say, did not eat at all. A heavenly fire consumed their portions. When Michael announced that Sarah would bear Isaac, she laughed behind the tent flap, and God, the rabbis of Ginzberg's compiled legends note, softened her words when repeating them to her husband, bending the truth a little to keep peace in the marriage.

The Same Hands

Hold the two pictures side by side. The hands that threw dust and turned it into blades are the hands that carved a calf for three dusty men who would not even stay to eat. The man who refused a crown from the kings of the earth is the man who chased after departing strangers to walk them down the road, because seeing a guest off, he believed, mattered even more than welcoming one in. Abraham's greatness was never the war. It was that the war never changed who answered the door.