Terah Was Born Into a World the Ravens Were Eating

Before Terah became the father of Abraham, before he became the idol-maker of Ur and the man who almost sold his son to a king, before he became the patriarch who set out toward Canaan and died in Haran, he was a baby born into a world that was being systematically destroyed by birds. This is where the Book of Jubilees begins the story of his family: with the prince Mastema sending ravens and other birds to devour the seed that was sown in the land, in order to destroy the land and rob the children of men of their labors.

Mastema. The chief of spirits who had bargained with God after the flood for the right to keep a portion of his forces active among human beings. Let some of them remain before me, he had said, and let them hearken to my voice. God had agreed, allowing one tenth of the demonic spirits to remain free while nine tenths were bound in the place of condemnation. Mastema had argued that without demons active among human beings, he could not execute the power of his will on the sons of men, that these spirits were necessary for corruption and leading astray before judgment. Now, in the generation when Terah was born, Mastema was using his permitted forces to strip the fields bare.

The ravens came in clouds. Before anyone could plough the seed into the ground, the birds descended and took it from the surface of the earth. It was not a plague in the Egyptian sense, not a single catastrophic event, but a grinding, season-by-season destruction of the agricultural economy of the region. The years became barren. The fruit of the trees was eaten as well. People could save only a little, with great effort, of all the fruit of the earth in their days.

Into this world of divinely permitted famine, Terah's father Nahor, the son of Serug, had learned the researches of the Chaldees to divine and augur, according to the signs of heaven. Astrology and divination were the tools of understanding available to the people of Ur. When Nahor looked up at the sky, he was looking for patterns that would explain the desolation of the fields, trying to read in the movement of stars what the movement of birds was taking from the earth. In the thirty-seventh jubilee, in the sixth week, in the first year, he married a woman named Ijaska, the daughter of Nestag of the Chaldees, and she bore him Terah in the seventh year.

Terah was named for the ravens. The Jubilees text says it directly: for this reason he called his name Terah, because the ravens and the birds reduced them to destitution and devoured their seed. The name carries the catastrophe of its era inside it. Every time anyone called Terah by his name, they were remembering the years when Mastema's birds ate the future out of the ground before it could grow. The name was not chosen for beauty or for a patriarch's memory. It was chosen as a record of damage.

This is the man who would become Abraham's father. The man whose name meant the ravens ate our harvest. The man who grew up in a culture of astrology and divination, who was born in the years when demonic forces were actively destroying the food supply of the world he inhabited, who would later become a maker of idols and a captain of the host of King Nimrod. The Jubilees tradition is not making Terah a villain. It is explaining him. He came from a world that was being eaten from underneath, and the tools his family had for understanding that world were the signs of heaven and the practices of the Chaldees.

When his son Abram was fourteen years old, the boy did something extraordinary. He went out to protect the seed at sowing time, as everyone did, but when a cloud of ravens came to devour the field, Abram ran toward them shouting, Descend not, return to the place whence ye came. And they turned back. He drove off the ravens seventy times that day, from every field in the land where he was. Not a single raven settled. It was the first sign of what Abram carried inside him, the thing that would make him Abraham, the father of a nation: a refusal to accept that the world being eaten was the world that had to be.

Terah, whose name meant the birds ate everything, raised a son who drove the birds away. The Jubilees tradition sees this as more than coincidence. The world Mastema had damaged in the generation of Terah's birth was the world in which God was preparing the man who would defy Mastema's entire program. The famine that named Terah was the same world that shaped Abraham's refusal to submit to what was being taken. Father and son, one named for the damage, one committed to repairing it, standing in the same fields under the same sky, one learning astrology and one driving away birds.