When God Brought Down Nimrod and Raised Up Abraham

Four Reversals in One Verse

The verse from Ezekiel speaks to Babylon about Babylon. All the trees of the field shall know that I the Lord have brought down the high tree, have exalted the low tree, have dried up the green tree, and have made the dry tree to flourish. Four movements. Four reversals. The plain meaning addresses the cedar of Lebanon and the political fortunes of kingdoms competing for dominance in Ezekiel's age.

Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, the narrative midrash from eighth-century Palestine, does not hear Ezekiel speaking about cedars. It hears four moments from the beginning of the world, four specific people whose fates were set in motion when the God of Israel chose to overturn the visible order of earthly power.

The High Tree Falls

The high tree is Nimrod. He appears in Genesis as the first mighty man on earth, a hunter before the Lord, founder of Babylon and Nineveh, the builder of the earliest empire. Tradition assigned him the Tower of Babel, the monument to human ambition aimed at Heaven. Nimrod is the original figure of earthly power achieved without reference to the God of Israel, power that acknowledges no authority above itself, power that looks up and decides to compete.

He held that position at the summit of human dominance. He commanded armies and cities and labor and the allegiance of nations. Then God brought the high tree down. The tower failed. The languages were scattered. The empire that was supposed to reach Heaven discovered that Heaven had moved beyond reach.

The Low Tree Rises

The low tree is Abraham. One man, born inside the civilization that Nimrod built, raised in Ur of the Chaldeans, the heartland of the empire that reached for Heaven and fell. Abraham smashes his father's idols. He refuses the logic of the world he was born into. Nimrod throws him into a furnace. Abraham walks out alive.

That confrontation between the highest tree and the lowest is the exact reversal the verse describes. Nimrod is at the summit when God brings him down. Abraham is a single man from a family of idol-makers when God exalts him. The measure of the reversal is the distance between where they started and where they ended. Nimrod built empires. Abraham walked from city to city with a tent and a promise, and the promise outlasted every stone the empires laid.

The Green Tree Dries

The green tree is Sarah. She is alive, capable, at the height of her powers when Abraham enters Egypt and asks her to say she is his sister. She does it to protect him. The tradition sees in this the drying of a flourishing life, the compression of a woman's freedom and safety into the necessity of a husband's survival. She passes through Pharaoh's house, through Abimelech's court, through situations no one designed for her flourishing, and the green tree is scorched by what she had to endure.

The Dry Tree Blooms

The dry tree is Sarah too, or rather Sarah at ninety, the woman who laughs when she hears the angels' promise because the laugh is the only honest response available to her. She is dry in the way the tradition uses that word: past bearing, past the ordinary possibility of new life. And God makes the dry tree flower. Isaac is born.

The four reversals form a single story. The empire that could not be stopped is stopped. The nobody from Ur becomes the father of nations. The woman who gave up safety to save her husband is given back her body's promise. The same verse in Ezekiel, the rabbis argued, held all of it because God's reversals are not scattered events. They are a pattern, legible once you know where to look.