Gabriel Fed the Infant Abraham and Carried Him to Nimrod

Ten Days Old in a Cave

There was no one else in the cave. Nimrod's astrologers had read the sky on the night Abraham was born and told the king that a child had just entered the world who would one day challenge his power, and Nimrod had given the order that the child should be killed before that became a problem. Abraham's father Terah had hidden his wife and the newborn in a cave in the hills outside the city. Then he had gone back to his life, and the infant was alone.

The Legends of the Jews records what God did about this. He sent Gabriel. The angel came into the cave and found the ten-day-old child crying in the dark and the cold, and he did what needed to be done. He made milk flow from the little finger of Abraham's right hand. The infant latched on and nursed from the angel's finger for ten days, growing stronger each day in the cave while Nimrod's soldiers were looking for a newborn somewhere in the city and not finding him.

At the end of the ten days Abraham got up and walked. Not toddled, not crawled. Walked, with a confidence that had no business belonging to a ten-day-old, to the edge of the valley. He went outside and looked at the sky at night for the first time, and he saw the stars and said: "these must be the gods." Then the sun rose and he looked at the sun and said: "that must be the god." Then the sun set and the stars were back and he thought about it and concluded: these things rise and set and are therefore governed by something that does not rise and set. That is the one I will serve. The first act of monotheistic reasoning in the Abrahamic tradition was performed by a child who had been kept alive on angel's milk.

The Greeting on the Road

Years later, when Abraham had grown into the man who smashed his father's idols and stood trial before Nimrod and survived the furnace, he was sitting alone somewhere when Gabriel came again. Not with milk this time but with a formal greeting: Shalom aleichem. The traditional words of peace, offered by the angel to the human being who had first known him as a finger producing nourishment in the dark.

Abraham answered correctly, gave the response back, and then asked the natural question: who are you? Gabriel identified himself. And then he led Abraham to a nearby spring, where Abraham washed and prayed and bowed himself down to the ground. The second meeting between these two was a meeting of equals, more or less, a recognized relationship being resumed after many years.

Meanwhile, according to the Legends of the Jews, something was being arranged at court. Nimrod had heard that Abraham was out there somewhere, the child who had survived the cave and grown into an adult threat to everything the king had built.

The Shoulder That Carried Him

The order came eventually: go to Babylon and confront Nimrod. Abraham's response was reasonable panic. He did not have an army. He could not ride into the capital city of the most powerful empire in the world without support and expect to walk out. Gabriel's answer was the answer of someone who had been maintaining a child in a cave on angel's milk and had a long view of what was necessary and what was possible.

"Thou needest no provision for the way," Gabriel told him. No horse to ride. No warriors. No chariots, no riders. "Sit upon my shoulder and I shall bear thee to Babylon." The angel who had fed him on a finger now offered his shoulder, and Abraham climbed up and was carried through the air to the capital of the empire that had ordered his death on the day he was born.

He arrived without an army and confronted the king face to face and walked back out. The arc that Gabriel had started in the cave was completed not with nourishment but with transport, not with sustenance but with mission. The infant who had needed milk to survive had become the man who needed only a shoulder and a destination.

The Two Visits That Made One Story

The two appearances of Gabriel in Abraham's life are easy to read as separate stories. One is a birth narrative. One is a mission narrative. They happen at opposite ends of a life, when Abraham is ten days old and when he is a grown man challenging an empire. But the Legends of the Jews reads them as a single arc, and the reading is correct.

Gabriel who fed the infant knew what the infant would become. The milk was in service of the mission. The ten days in the cave were preparation for the years of confrontation that followed. God had decided that this particular child would live and do particular things, and the angel assigned to maintain the child was the same angel assigned to deliver him to the place where the things would be done. First on a finger. Then on a shoulder. Both times the destination was the same world, the world that needed Abraham to be in it.