Abraham Kept God Waiting and Jacob Sent Angels to Esau

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Bread, Water, and a Soul at the End of It

The tent stood open on all sides in Haran and people came in out of the sun. Abraham put food in front of them. Sarah did the same, and she worked the women while he worked the men, so that a household walking through got taken apart and handed back in two halves.

They fed them. They gave them something to drink. They argued with them, drew them in close, and let them sleep there. And when those people walked back out into the heat they were not the people who had come in. The verse that follows Abraham out of Haran counts what he took with him into Canaan: his wife, his nephew, his property, and the souls they had made in Haran.

Made. Not gathered, not persuaded, not taught. Made.

The Gnat Nobody Can Make

Rabbi Elazar refused to let that word pass. Take every human being who has ever entered the world, he said, and stand them all together in one place, and hand them everything they ask for, and they could not produce one gnat between them. Not a gnat. And the verse says these two made souls.

The answer he gave was not a softening. Anyone who brings another person near, he said, is counted as having created that person. The credit is not partial. It is the same verb the world was made with.

And the verse is careful about who is holding it. It does not say the souls he made. It says the souls they made, which is how the sages knew Sarah was doing the same work at the same table. Later they found Isaac in the sentence too, buried in the word for the land where his father had lived, which sounds almost exactly like the word for the people his father converted. Jacob kept the trade going in his own house, walking through his camp collecting foreign gods out of people's baggage before he would let them travel with him.

The Sentence the Scribes Turned Around

The three visitors got up from that same hospitality and started down toward Sodom.

They walked away and they were still facing him. Angels have no backs to their heads. There is no direction in which an angel is turned away, so the men who were leaving Abraham were also, the whole time, looking straight at him, and the verse says that after they turned, Abraham was still standing before the Lord.

Rabbi Simon put his hand on that sentence and said it had been altered. The scribes changed it. What it said before they got to it was that the Divine Presence was standing there waiting for Abraham. God was the one being kept. A ninety-nine-year-old man three days out from cutting his own flesh stood in the worst heat of the afternoon and would not sit down, and heaven waited on him, and somewhere in the long copying of the text a hand could not bring itself to write that down and reversed the two of them.

Abraham then opened his mouth and started bargaining over the lives of a city that had never done anything for him. Fifty. Forty-five. Forty. Thirty. Twenty. Ten.

Six Hundred Thousand Dancing at the Border

His grandson came home to that country twenty years later with nothing but a limp and a frightened family, and the border was not empty.

Rav Huna taught in the name of Rabbi Aivu that six hundred thousand angels were dancing in front of Jacob as he crossed in. Not standing. Dancing, skipping, going ahead of him the way a crowd goes ahead of a bridegroom, because the Divine Presence does not settle on any gathering smaller than six hundred thousand and Jacob had said, when he saw them, that this was the camp of God. The other sages counted higher. He named the place two camps, so there were two, one million two hundred thousand of them on the ground at the frontier for one exhausted man and his children.

Angels Sent Ahead to Esau

Esau was somewhere out in front of him with four hundred men, and Jacob needed to send word.

So he took some from this camp and some from that camp, and sent them.

Rabbi Yudan said it flatly and left it there. The messengers Jacob sent ahead to his brother were pulled out of the honor guard. Whatever those angels had been dancing about at the border, they were carrying a nervous man's message to Edom by evening, going down the road with instructions about flocks and camels and how to address a man who had once promised to kill their sender.

Nobody could make a gnat. That still holds. What the sages kept finding in these three men was something else and stranger, a household that fed strangers into existence, a man heaven stood and waited on, and a fugitive who looked at a million angels and saw a courier service.