The Midrash Where Abraham Is the One Informing God

There is a verse deep in the book of Job that nobody ever footnotes to Abraham. Elihu, the young man who arrives late in Job's argument with his friends, turns to his suffering elder and says, "I will fetch my knowledge from afar and ascribe righteousness to my Maker" (Job 36:3). It sounds like a stock line of ancient wisdom. A rhetorical flourish before a long speech. Aggadat Bereshit, a tenth-century homiletical midrash compiled in Byzantine-era Palestine or southern Italy, reads that single sentence and hears Abraham.

Not a metaphor. Not a parallel. Abraham himself. The midrash insists the voice in Job 36 is the voice the patriarch used when he walked out of Ur.

The reading is audacious and it gets stranger the closer you look. Aggadat Bereshit pulls in a second verse from Isaiah to seal the identification. "Calling a bird of prey from the east, a man of my counsel from a distant land" (Isaiah 46:11). The rabbis took the bird of prey as Abraham. The land from the east as Ur of the Chaldees. The man of counsel as the one who would inform God about His world. That last phrase is the one that will not let go. The midrash says Abraham's job, the reason he was called at all, was to inform God.

Inform. The verb is deliberately jarring. A tenth-century congregation would have caught it the way a modern reader catches a wrong note in a symphony. God does not need information. God made the world. God sees every sparrow and every king. What could a man born in a city of idol merchants possibly have to tell the Creator of the universe?

The midrash answers with a parable. It says the relationship between Abraham and God was the relationship between a worker in a field and the master of the estate. The field is the world. The master plants it. But a good field hand notices things the master cannot see from the house. He notices which vines are thriving and which are failing. He notices the soil that has gone sour. He notices the ones who are stealing from the edges. And at the end of the day, the field hand walks up to the door of the house and tells the master what is actually happening out there. He is not correcting the master. He is completing the master's sight with the testimony of a man who has been on his knees in the dirt.

That, Aggadat Bereshit says, was Abraham's labor. The trials of his life were the trials of a field hand who cared enough about the master's estate to walk out into every corner of it with his own feet.

The rabbis connected this reading to the very strange verse in Genesis that says, after the covenant of the pieces, that Abraham "believed in the Lord, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness" (Genesis 15:6). Belief, in the rabbinic imagination, was not passive. It was the act of a man opening his eyes on behalf of God. Abraham had looked at the world and refused to stop reporting what he saw. Sodom was burning. He told God. The family of Lot was trapped inside. He told God. The covenant required a son and Sarah was ninety. He told God. At every step, Abraham was supplying testimony.

The most famous example is the argument over Sodom. Bereshit Rabbah, compiled in fifth-century Palestine, preserves the full force of that conversation. Fifty righteous. Forty. Thirty. Twenty. Ten. Abraham is bargaining with God, and the rabbis noticed that God is not irritated by it. God is engaged. God is listening. God is letting the man from Ur talk Him down. This, the midrash insists, is what a field hand does at the end of the day. He stands in front of the master and says what he has seen, and the master, who has been waiting for this report all along, lets him speak.

Aggadat Bereshit then does something unusual. It puts the line from Psalms 76 next to the reading of Job. "God is known in Judah" (Psalms 76:2). The rabbis read Judah not as the tribe but as the whole pattern of witness that Abraham inaugurated. Before Abraham, the midrash argues, the nations knew God only as a cosmic abstraction, if at all. A sky god. A mountain god. A rumor. After Abraham walked from Ur to Canaan, argued with kings (Genesis 14), welcomed strangers at the door of his tent (Genesis 18), and interceded for a city full of people he had never met, the name of God became attached to a history. The abstraction acquired an address. The nations could point to something that had happened, in a place, to a man, whose children were still walking around.

The rabbis called this the knowledge that spread outward from Judah. The information flowed in both directions. Abraham was reporting to God, and God was being made known through Abraham. The field hand was also the sign.

Louis Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews, published in seven volumes between 1909 and 1938, collects the many strands of this tradition. Ginzberg notes that the rabbis thought Abraham had internalized the divine will so completely that he needed no explicit instruction for most of the covenant's demands. The later verse in (Genesis 26:5) says Abraham kept God's voice, charge, commandments, statutes, and laws, and the rabbis knew perfectly well that the Torah had not yet been given. They took the verse to mean that Abraham had extrapolated the whole of the law from his relationship with the Giver. He had heard the harmony beneath the notes. He had played the whole score from a single chord.

Aggadat Bereshit finds one more gesture in the tradition. On his deathbed, in the scene preserved in (Genesis 48:15), Jacob blesses the sons of Joseph by invoking "the God before whom my fathers Abraham and Isaac walked." The word walked, the rabbis noticed, is the same word used for a field hand moving through a vineyard. Abraham walked. Isaac walked. Jacob watched them and called the whole of their lives a walk in front of God. The master had planted a vineyard, and the patriarchs had been pacing it for three generations, reporting every season.

The midrash leaves the reader with the strangest implication of the whole reading. Every prayer you say, Aggadat Bereshit is quietly suggesting, is a field report. You are telling the master what the vines look like where you are standing. You are informing God about a corner of the world He has chosen, for reasons of His own, to know through you.

Abraham was the first man to learn the job. He has not been alone at it since.