Abraham Watched Sodom Burn for the Heart It Hid

Ten was the last number Abraham had.

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He had opened at fifty and worked his way down in front of God the way a man counts the beams of a house he is trying to keep standing. Forty-five. Forty. Thirty. Twenty. Each time he lowered it the answer came back that the place would be spared for that many, so the arithmetic was never what stopped him. At ten he opened his mouth for nine and nothing came out of it. He stood on the road with the number still in his teeth. Then he went back toward the oaks at Mamre, because after ten there was only the morning (Genesis 18:23-32).

The Morning the Markets Opened

Down on the plain nothing about that day looked like a last one. The market opened at the usual hour. Men priced grain and argued the price until they settled it, children ran the dogs up the street, and somebody swept a doorway. Whatever had been decided in that city had been decided long before, and the hands went on working, because hands do not know what the heart has already agreed to.

The One Organ That Does Not Obey

"I made two hundred and forty-eight organs in a man," the Holy One said, "and every one of them does the work I made it for. The eye sees. The ear hears. The hand takes hold. The heart alone changes from hour to hour and twists itself, and it is crooked above all things, and who can know it?"

He was speaking to Gog, who was still generations away from sitting down in a quiet room to draw up his plans, and who would take those plans for his own private business. "Do not tell yourself that I do not know what you are thinking. Before I made you, I knew what you would think."

The kingdom of Sodom had done it first. That is what Abraham had been arguing against on the road, though nobody said so while he was doing it. He had come with a count, and a count only reaches as far as what people do. What was being weighed on the other side took in what they had settled on doing and never said out loud. Fifty men would have held the roof up, or forty, or ten, but there was no way to walk down into that market and find out why there were not ten.

Fire on the Deed and on What Chose It

In the morning the fire came down, and it fell on the deeds and on the intention that had picked those deeds and made them the policy of a town. Lot got out with his household while the smoke was still low, because two visitors took him by the hand and hauled him through the gate. His wife turned around on the road to look at what was behind her, and she stopped there.

Abraham stood where the ground looked down over the whole plain and watched with his own eyes. The heat came up the slope in waves and reached his face. He had already said his piece, all of it, and there was nothing left in his mouth but the words he had used at the start: far be it from You to do such a thing.

Ask Your Father and He Will Tell You

Sodom did not take the type with it when it went. There is no generation without men like the generation of the flood, and none without men like the generation of the tower, and none without men like Sodom, though each one of them is judged for what he actually did with his own hands.

The mouth is no help in telling them apart, either. Esau would meet Jacob on the road with his arms open and say, "My brother, let there be yours what is yours." Chiram of Tyre would send word to Solomon about the towns he had been given and call him brother in the same breath. Whichever way the wind was blowing for Israel, the greeting arrived first, but the intention stayed indoors.

Ask your father and he will tell you. The fathers meant there are the prophets, and Abraham walked back to the oaks that evening as one of them, carrying an answer he had not been able to argue down. Behind him the smoke thinned out enough to see the plain again, and the only thing standing on it was salt.