God Sold the World to Abraham for Keeping Torah

The boy was three, and the house was full of gods.

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Clay stood next to wood. Each figure had its shelf. Abraham looked until he knew which one had not been set there by a man's hands. Then he did not stop knowing it.

The Dish He Set Aside on Friday

Four hundred years before anyone stood at Sinai, Abraham cooked early and put a dish aside.

The rule that governs a cooked dish on Friday would not be spoken for centuries. There was no scroll. There was nobody to check. He kept the dish anyway, and kept the rest of the Torah with it, every commandment in a book that had not been written.

God watched a man guard a pot for a Sabbath that had no law yet. Then He began moving the upper worlds and the lower worlds into Abraham's name.

The Blessing That Changed Hands

Abraham came back from the battle with dust still on him. The priest-king of Salem met him in that dust and spoke a blessing over a man who had not yet washed.

"Blessed be Abram of God Most High, koneh of heaven and earth" (Genesis 14:19).

The priest used a word that means maker. In the same breath it means the buyer, the one who holds the deed. God had already said the rest of it out loud.

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

No silver crossed the table. A man had kept faith with an owner nobody else in the world acknowledged, and the owner signed over the property.

Abraham lived one hundred seventy-five years. Take away three, the years a child cannot yet know anything. The rest of his life he already knew who had made him.

You Made Me a Lodger

Then the voice turned from Abraham to his children, and the warmth went out of it.

"You made Me a lodger." By their sins they turned God into a man renting a house from its owner. Jeremiah asked out loud why the God of Israel had become like a stranger passing through His own land (Jeremiah 14:8).

When they sinned before Him, He sold them. For no price. Nothing came back across the table. "You sell Your people for nothing" (Psalm 44:13).

In a stall a man weighed a jar against a handful of coins. The instruction over his hands was older than the stall. "When you sell a field to your fellow, or a house, or a vessel, do not cheat him" (Leviticus 25:14). The Holy One sold a world to Abraham on terms He is willing to have examined. He wants the same terms used over a jar.

Take the Fire Pan

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 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."

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

I Am in Debt for a Taking

Long before that run, 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 (Leviticus 8:2).

Take. Moses asked about the word.

"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."

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.