Abram Armed His Household to Pull Lot From War

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The Man Who Got Out of the Vale

He was face down among the salt pits of the vale of Siddim while the four kings finished the work, and he stayed there long after the noise moved off, because men who stand up early in a field like that do not stand up twice. The king of Gomorrah was dead. The king of Sodom had run. What was left in the vale was wounded and would not be leaving.

When he did get up, the column was already forming on the north road. Chedorlaomer of Elam had brought Amraphel of Shinar with him, and Arioch of Ellasar, and Tidal king of nations, and they had not come for a border. They had come for inventory. Sodom went into the column, and Admah, and Zeboim, people and grain and cattle and cloth, all of it roped and counted and pointed north.

He knew one face in that line. Lot, Abram's brother's son, who had looked at the whole plain years ago and picked the green part of it, and who had pitched his tents toward Sodom because the water was good there. The green part was now a road, and Lot was walking up it with his hands tied and his household walking behind him.

Two Days to Hebron

He went south instead of north, which took some deciding, since south was away from everyone he knew.

The arithmetic was simple enough once he did it. Sodom's king was hiding. Gomorrah's king was in the salt. The cities of the plain had no one left standing who could raise a hand for anybody, so nobody in that whole valley was going to answer four kings on behalf of a captive. There was exactly one man in the country who might, and he was not a king at all. He was a foreigner camped in the oaks at Mamre with herds and servants and altars, and he was Lot's kin, and kin was the only claim anyone had left to make.

So the man ran to Hebron with a mouth full of dust and one sentence he had been shaping the whole way.

Four Words at the Tent Door

He said it standing up, because he did not trust himself to get up again if he sat. "Your brother's son has been taken captive."

Abram did not answer at once. He asked which road, and how many, and how long ago, and then he stopped asking, and for a moment there was nothing in his face at all. The old man was doing the same arithmetic the runner had done on the way, and coming out at the same place. Four kings had just emptied the cities of the plain in an afternoon. There was no army between here and Damascus that had any interest in a man from Sodom. Then Abram turned toward the tents and started naming men.

That was the whole of the deliberation. It took about as long as it takes to fill a cup.

Counting the Men Who Ate His Bread

They were not soldiers. They were three hundred and eighteen men born in his own house, herdsmen and drivers and water carriers who had spent their lives moving animals between wells, and now they were being handed spears and told to catch a victorious army before it reached Dan.

Abram armed them himself, since there was nobody else to do it, and the counting went faster than the arming. Every man in that camp had eaten his bread. That was the entire basis of the thing. No treaty required it, no city had asked for it, and no god had spoken about it that morning. His brother's son was in a rope line going north, so the household went north.

Mamre and Eshkol and Aner came with their men, because they were confederate with Abram and their word held. It still was not an army. It was a camp with weapons, moving fast, hoping to reach a column that thought nothing behind it was worth looking back at.

North

They went out before the heat, and the dust of them hung over the Hebron road for a long while after the last man had passed.

The runner did not go with them. Somebody put water in his hands and he sat down against a tent post in the shade of Mamre's oaks and drank it slowly, and watched the column he had summoned move off in the direction he had spent two days running away from.