Nimrod Dreamed an Egg That Flooded His Army
Two years after Abraham walked out of the furnace, Nimrod woke from a dream with a chick on his head. It had already taken one eye.
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Terah married, and within three months his wife looked ready to deliver. Her face went pale. Her body swelled. "What ails you, my wife?" he asked. She said that every year she suffered this malady. He did not believe her. He pressed to examine her, fearing the decree of Nimrod, who hunted newborn threats after a prophecy that a child would challenge his rule.
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When Terah reached toward her, the child rose inside the womb and settled beneath her breasts. Terah felt nothing. He accepted the lie the miracle forced him to accept. Visibility returned only on the day of birth. Abraham entered the world already practiced at concealment, a secret against a king who called himself a god.
Out of the Cave Into Twelve Idols
Mother, nurse, and child hid in a cave until Nimrod's court forgot the baby it had feared. They stepped out when Abraham was ten, into a world where almost everyone except Noah's remnant had turned to wood and stone. Terah himself carved twelve massive idols for the twelve months and bowed to a different one each turn of the calendar. Powerless gods filled houses that could not speak, hear, or save.
Abraham grew among that industry of false worship and learned its hollowness from the inside. He walked streets where the king's servants, the craftsmen, and his own father measured holiness by the month's statue. The cave had kept him alive. The open air taught him what needed to die.
The Old Woman and the Stone
One day Abraham met an old woman devoted to her idol. He pressed her until she asked, "If what you say is true, whom shall I serve?" He answered with a map larger than Nimrod's palace. "Serve the God of all gods, the Lord of lords, who created heaven and earth, the sea and all in it, the God of Nimrod and the God of Terah, the God of the east, the west, the south, and the north. Who is Nimrod, the dog, who calls himself a god, that worship be offered to him?"
Her eyes opened. When thieves returned a stolen idol, she took a stone and shattered it in the street. She walked crying, "Who would save his soul from destruction, and be prosperous in all his doings, let him serve the God of Abraham." Men and women turned after her. A king who claimed divinity now had a missionary converted by a man he had once tried to burn.
Terah kept his calendar of twelve gods as if wood could outvote a son who had spoken with the Maker of months. The cave that once hid a pregnant mother stood empty. The prophecy Nimrod had tried to drown in infant blood now sat at tables and broke idols with borrowed stones.
Egg, Flood, and a Pecked Eye
Two years after Abraham rose from the fiery furnace, Nimrod dreamed near that same fire. A figure like Abraham stepped from the flames with a drawn sword and chased the king. Nimrod fled. Abraham hurled an egg. From the shattered shell a mighty stream burst and drowned the army. The king survived with three companions dressed in royal garments, each resembling him in form and stature, a row of copies made of survivors.
The stream receded into the egg again. A tiny chick hatched, flew to Nimrod's head, and pecked out one of his eyes.
He woke. His hand went to his face. Both eyes were still there. The army was still there. The furnace in the valley was cold slag. Rule continued. Sleep did not.
The Dream He Could Not Execute
Fire had already failed once in public. Abraham had walked out while the king's certainty burned hotter than the coals. Courtiers who had cheered the sentence now measured their silence. Nimrod kept his throne and lost his nights in pieces. Two years is long enough for a tyrant to rebuild pride and short enough for a survivor of fire to become a rumor that will not die.
Missionaries of the God of Abraham walked streets still lined with monthly idols. Every shattered statue was a small flood before the egg's flood arrived in the dark. When the dream finally came, it did not invent Abraham's power. It confessed it in pictures a king could not hang a man for. An egg is a small thing. A stream from an egg that drowns an army is the mind admitting what the mouth still denies. One eye gone in sleep is a preview of a rule that will never see the whole field again.
The child once hidden under a mother's breastbone had become, in a tyrant's night, a sword, a flood, and a bird that steals sight.
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