When God Brought Down Nimrod and Lifted Up Abraham

Ezekiel was speaking to Babylon about Babylon when he described the trees of the field. But the rabbis heard something else entirely.

The verse from (Ezekiel 17:24) reads: "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. And Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, the narrative midrash from eighth-century Palestine, reads each one as a specific moment in the history of the world's first confrontation between faith and power.

The High Tree and the Low Tree

The high tree, the one brought down, is Nimrod. He appears in (Genesis 10:8-9) as the first mighty man on earth, a hunter before God, the founder of Babylon and Nineveh and the empire that would eventually swallow Israel. Tradition assigned him the Tower of Babel, that monument to human ambition aimed at heaven. He represents the summit of earthly power achieved without reference to the God of Israel, power that does not acknowledge any authority above itself.

The low tree, the one exalted, is Abraham. One man, traveling from Ur of the Chaldeans, from inside the very civilization that Nimrod built. The 1,913 texts in the Ginzberg collection preserve the tradition at length: Abraham smashing his father's idols, Abraham thrown into a furnace by Nimrod's order, Abraham walking out of that furnace alive. The confrontation between them is the confrontation between two visions of what human greatness looks like. Nimrod's kind requires subjects. Abraham's kind requires only one committed person and a God who notices.

God brought down the high tree. God exalted the low one. The midrash is not reporting historical inevitability. It is making a claim about where the divine attention actually rests.

The Green Tree and the Dry Tree

The second pair of reversals in Ezekiel's verse is harder, and Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer knows it. The green tree that is dried up represents the fertile women of the nations, who had children naturally, without divine intervention, whose bodies worked as bodies were supposed to work. The dry tree that flourishes is Sarah.

Specifically, Sarah's capacity to nurse.

The passage in Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer adds a detail that the Torah itself does not include. When Sarah bore Isaac and the news spread through the ancient world, the other women of the nations brought their infants to her to be nursed. Not because she lacked milk, but because she had so much of it, because the dry tree had flourished so completely that it now had abundance to give away.

The text cites (Genesis 21:7): "Who would have said unto Abraham that Sarah should give children suck?" The answer the tradition provides is that nobody said it. It was impossible. She was ninety years old. She had been barren her entire life. The body that could not produce for decades now produced for the children of strangers.

What the Reversal Means

The rabbis who arranged this midrash were living inside a long history of reversals. They had seen the Temple destroyed, the land taken, the community scattered. They knew what it felt like to be the dry tree. What Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer insists, by reading Ezekiel's verse as a description of Abraham and Sarah, is that the reversal is the pattern.

The high comes down. The low is lifted. The naturally fertile dries up. The barren flourishes. Not once, not twice, but as a recurring structure in how God manages history. The midrash-aggadah tradition returns to this structure in dozens of contexts, always finding it freshly confirmed by another biblical story, another impossible child, another empire that seemed permanent and then fell.

Nimrod and the Tower He Built

There is one more connection the tradition preserves. Nimrod did not just exercise power. He built a monument to it. The Tower of Babel in (Genesis 11:1-9) is, in rabbinic reading, Nimrod's project, his attempt to storm the heavens and establish human supremacy permanently. God brought the project down. God scattered the builders and confused their languages and ended the empire of unified human ambition.

Then, a few chapters later in Genesis, Abraham appears. One man called out of that same civilization, told to go to a land he cannot yet see, asked to father a people from a body that should have been incapable of fathering anyone. The architectural project that Nimrod began in the sky was answered by a biological project God began in two elderly bodies traveling through the desert.

One built upward and was brought down. The other was brought low and lifted up. The trees of the field know it, Ezekiel said. The midrash spent centuries making sure Israel knew it too.