After the Furnace, Abraham Refused the Prostrations

Nine hundred thousand people watched him walk out of the fire.

The furnace had burned for three days and three nights. Terah, Abraham's own father, had reported his son to Nimrod. The king's sages and conjurors had identified Abraham as the child whose birth the stars had foretold fifty years earlier -- the one who would overthrow the empire. The court had condemned him to burn. He was stripped of his outer garments, bound with linen cords, and thrown in.

The linen cords burned. Abraham walked.

After three days, the king's servants saw him moving through the fire and reported it to Nimrod. The king came to see for himself. He called out from a distance -- the flames were too intense for anyone to approach -- and Abraham came forward and stood before him, unburned, still wearing his lower garments, the cords that had bound him gone.

This is the scene from Book of Jasher 12, the apocryphal text that preserves the most detailed narrative account of Abraham's early confrontations with Nimrod. The Book of Jasher was known to medieval Jewish readers and draws on traditions that run parallel to the rabbinic midrash compiled by Louis Ginzberg in Legends of the Jews (1909-1938).

What happened next is the moment the tradition returns to most often. The kings, the princes, all the people who had witnessed the miracle -- they came to Abraham and they prostrated themselves before him. They had just watched him walk out of a furnace that had killed twelve men who came too close to throw him in. Their instinct, entirely human, was to worship him.

Abraham said: do not bow down before me. Bow before God, the Master of the universe, who created you. Serve Him and walk in His ways. He is the one who saved me from the flames. He is the one who forms the soul and the spirit of every human being, who shapes man in his mother's womb and brings him into the world. He is the one who saves from all sickness those who put their trust in Him.

The statement is recorded in Legends of the Jews 5:51, and it contains almost everything the tradition believes Abraham came to teach. The God who saves is not a man who walks out of fire. He is the one who put the fire and the man and the miracle and the watching crowd all in existence simultaneously. He is the one whose name Abraham refused to keep to himself in the presence of the king who wanted to be God instead.

The Book of Jubilees, composed around 160-150 BCE, records that Abraham had been praying to the Creator of all things since before he had a teacher -- from childhood, separating himself from his father's idols, working out alone who the sun and the moon and the stars were actually pointing toward. The furnace was not the beginning of Abraham's faith. It was the furnace that made the faith visible to nine hundred thousand witnesses.

The contrast with Nimrod is deliberate and exact. Nimrod had received the worship of nations while sitting on his imitation-of-heaven throne, accepting prostrations, positioning himself as the divine center of the world. Abraham stood outside a furnace that should have killed him and told the prostrating crowd to get up, to turn around, to aim their reverence somewhere else.

Nimrod gave the king's gifts: silver and gold and pearl, and two of his own head servants, a man named Oni and a man named Eliezer. Three hundred men followed Abraham out of the royal precincts that day. The tradition does not record what Nimrod felt watching his court walk away behind the man he had tried to burn. But it records what Abraham did when he got home: he returned to his father's house, and he served the Lord his God all the remaining days of his life, and he inclined the hearts of the sons of men to serve the Lord.

That phrase -- inclined the hearts -- is not the language of argument or compulsion. It is the language of a man who walked out of fire and told the truth about what he saw, and trusted that the truth had its own weight, and was right.

The Book of Jasher notes that among the gifts Nimrod sent Abraham away with were two servants, one named Oni and one named Eliezer. Eliezer would become one of the most trusted figures in Abraham's household -- the servant sent later to find a wife for Isaac, described in (Genesis 24) with a fidelity and care that reads like devotion. The man Nimrod gave as a gift became one of Abraham's most loyal companions. This is how the tradition traces the reversals that God works through history: what a tyrant offers as tribute becomes the instrument of the very faith the tyrant tried to extinguish.

The Book of Jubilees, composed around 160-150 BCE and one of the earliest texts to systematize the spiritual biography of Abraham, records that even before the furnace, before the confrontations, before the smashing of idols, Abraham had been praying alone in the night, working out by himself who deserved worship. He had watched the sun and found it insufficient. He had watched the stars and found them insufficient. What was left was the invisible Creator, and Abraham had been aiming himself at that Creator for years before anyone else in his world recognized what he was doing. The furnace made it public. The refusal of prostrations made it theology. Both were necessary.