Eliezer Walked With an Angel He Could Not See

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The Hand Under the Thigh

Abraham made his servant put a hand under his thigh before he would say what the errand was. Then he said it. Go to my land and to my birthplace and take a wife there for my son, and do not take one for him from the daughters of the Canaanites among whom I am living.

Eliezer waited for the rest, meaning the part where the old man explained how this was supposed to work. What he got was this: "The God whose throne is in the heavens on high, who took me out of my father's house and out of the land of my birth, and who swore this land to my seed, will send His angel before you, and you shall take a wife for my son from there."

Eliezer counted what was not in that sentence. No promise the girl would come. No promise her people would agree. No word about what the angel looked like, or how a man would know he had arrived. Abraham had not promised him success at all. He had promised him company, which is a different thing to carry into a country where nobody owed him an answer.

The condition was the hard part. The wife had to come from Abraham's own household, from the family of his father, so if the road bent and Eliezer bent with it, the angel was under no obligation to follow the bend. He could be accompanied and still fail. He simply could not improvise.

Ten Camels and No Sign

He loaded ten camels and went north, and the road behaved like a road. No wings crossed the sun, and no name came down out of the sky at a well or at a fire, though he watched for both. There was dust, and the animals, and the goods of his master strapped down under cloth, and long stretches where the only voice was the one in his own head running the failure in advance.

He knew what the old man had been through before this, which is why the old man could talk about angels so calmly. Abraham had stood in a dark between split carcasses and watched a furnace and four kingdoms come at his children, and out of that night he had been given a covenant: his sons would not be judged in that fire, they would be pulled out of whatever kingdom happened to be holding them, and there was a land waiting at the far end of it, from the river of Egypt to the Euphrates. A man who has been shown the far end of the fire is not easily frightened by an unmarked road.

Eliezer had not been shown anything. He had ten camels and a sentence.

The Prayer He Could Not Take Back

He stopped outside the city of Nahor at evening, at the well, at the hour the women come out to draw water. Then he did the one thing that could not be undone: he said aloud what the sign would be. Let the girl to whom he said "lower your jar so I may drink," and who answered "drink, and I will water your camels too," be the one appointed for his master's son.

The words left him and the errand went with them.

He stood there with the camels shifting behind him and understood what he had just done. Ten camels off a long road will drink until a girl's arms give out, and no stranger offers that, and now he had staked the whole house of Abraham on a stranger offering it. He could not take it back and pick an easier sign, because he had already handed the choosing away.

She came out with the jar on her shoulder before he had finished speaking, so he ran to meet her and asked for a mouthful. She lowered the jar to his hand, and then she said she would draw for the camels as well, and she kept walking down and up to the trough until the last animal lifted its head on its own.

What He Said in Bethuel's House

They set food in front of him at her father's house, and he would not eat until he had said what he came to say. He could have opened with the gold, since the gold was on the table and worked on the room by itself. He opened with the old man's words instead, quoted whole, the way he had carried them: "The Lord before whom I walk will send His angel with you and prosper your way, and you shall take a wife for my son from my family and from my father's house."

It was a strange opening in a room where the relatives were already counting jewelry, but he had carried that sentence too far to trade it now for a better one. He was telling them he had not come by his own judgment, that he had been sent on a road with a companion he could not produce, and that his master defined his God by the direction he was facing at that moment and not by anything that had happened long ago.

Laban and Bethuel answered that the thing had come from the Lord and they could say nothing to him, good or bad. Rebecca was called in and asked whether she would go with the man, and she said she would go.

The Road Back

He walked home the way he had come, on foot beside the animals, and he did not see the angel on the return road either. Nothing on that road ever announced itself. There was a girl on a camel who had said she would go, and a house behind her that had let her, and a servant who had asked for one specific thing out loud and been given it before he stopped speaking.

Toward evening Isaac came out into the field, and lifted his eyes, and there were the camels. Rebecca saw him and got down. Eliezer stopped the lead animal, and told Isaac everything he had done, and let go of the halter.