God Sold the World to Abraham for Keeping Torah

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The Pot He Set Aside for a Law Nobody Had Written

Four hundred years before anyone stood at Sinai, Abraham was cooking a dish early and putting it aside.

Rabbi Samuel bar Nahman said it in the name of Rabbi Alexandri, and it is the smallest claim anyone ever made about the man. Not the fire, not the covenant, not the mountain. A cooked dish, held back from one day so that the work of the next day would count as something already begun. The rule that governs it would not be spoken aloud for centuries. There was no scroll. There was nobody to check. Abraham kept it anyway, and kept the rest of the Torah with it, every commandment in a book that had not been written.

Heaven watched a man guard a pot for a Sabbath that had no law yet, and started drawing up papers.

One Hundred Seventy-Two Years of Knowing

Rabbi Simeon ben Lakish did the arithmetic out of one word.

Scripture says that Abraham was rewarded eqev, because he obeyed My voice. Take the word apart and it is a number. Ayin is seventy. Qof is one hundred. Bet is two. One hundred seventy-two.

Abraham lived one hundred seventy-five years. Subtract three, the years a child cannot yet know anything, and the sum lands exactly on the rest of his life.

So he was three. Standing in a house stocked with gods, at an age when a boy still falls over on his own feet, he worked out which one had made him, and then he did not stop knowing it for a hundred and seventy-two years.

The Whole World Is Mine and I Sold It

When the Holy One saw how much this man loved the commandments, He began transferring the upper and the lower worlds into his name.

The receipt is in the blessing the priest-king of Salem spoke over Abraham when he came back off the battlefield with dust still on him. Blessed be Abram of God Most High, koneh of heaven and earth. The word means maker. It also means the one who acquires, the buyer, the holder of title. Read it the second way and the sentence is a deed changing hands.

The whole world is Mine, said God, and I sold it to Abraham, because he kept My commandments.

Not for silver. There was no silver in it anywhere. A man had kept faith with an owner nobody else in the world acknowledged, and the owner signed over the property.

A Tenant in His Own House

Then the voice turns from Abraham to his descendants, and the warmth goes out of it.

You made Me a lodger. That is the charge. By your sins you turned Me into a man renting a house from its owner, and Jeremiah had to ask out loud why the God of Israel had become like a stranger passing through His own land. And when you sinned before Me, I sold you off. For no price. Nothing came back across the table.

That is what exile is in this telling. Not a defeat. A sale at zero.

Which is why the law about selling reads the way it does. When you sell a field to your fellow, or a house, or a vessel, do not cheat him. Do not put your thumb on the scale of a man who trusts you. The Holy One sold a world to Abraham on terms He is willing to have examined, and He wants the same terms used in a market stall in Judea over a jar and a handful of coins.

Aaron Was Paid Before He Ran

There is a second account in the same book, and it was also settled early.

Wrath had gone out from before the Holy One and people were already dropping in the camp. Moses turned on his brother. "Why are you standing here? Take the fire pan. Put fire from the altar on it."

Aaron did not move. "My lord Moses, do you want to kill me? My sons brought strange fire before the Holy One and fire came out and ate them. Now you tell me to take the fire pan and carry holy fire outside the sanctuary. How am I not destroyed?"

"Go. Hurry. While you are standing here talking, they are dying. Take it out to the congregation and cover them."

Aaron heard the second sentence and stopped arguing. "If I die for Israel," he said, "I am not even worth so great an honor."

Then he took the pan and ran into the middle of it, holding the same element that had killed his two children, and stood between the dead and the living until the plague stopped.

Take Aaron

Long before that, when the priesthood was first being handed out, the Holy One had given Moses a strange instruction with a strange verb in it. Take Aaron and his sons.

Take. Not summon, not appoint, not anoint. Moses asked about the word and got an answer that reads like a bookkeeper's.

I am in debt for a taking, said the Holy One. So get up and make him great with the word take, because he is going to save My children by taking, and I do not leave that kind of account open.

The wise inherit glory, Solomon wrote, and fools carry off shame, and the verse has been sorting the world since the first week: Noah against the generation of the flood, Shem against Ham, Abraham against the four kings he broke, David against Goliath. Aaron and his sons are the next line in it.

Two men were paid before the invoice was written. One guarded a cooking pot for a commandment that did not exist, and was handed heaven and earth. One was made great with a verb, and later carried fire into a plague to earn it.