The Blood on Abraham's Hands and the Child He Once Was

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The Woman Who Came Looking for an Infant

She had been walking the valley since dawn, calling a name into the rocks, when a young man stepped out of the shade and asked her what she had lost. Abraham was not yet the patriarch anyone would remember. He was a boy grown strange and quick in a cave, and the woman in front of him did not know his face.

"A child," she said. "My child. I left him here, and I have come back for him."

"How old was this child you speak of?" Abraham asked.

"Twenty days," she said.

He looked at her a long moment. "Is there a woman in the world who would forsake her new-born son in the desert, and come to seek him after twenty days?"

The question was cruel, and he knew it, because he already understood the answer. She had hidden him to keep him alive. Somewhere a king was killing infants, and a mother had chosen the desert over the sword. Twenty days was nothing. Twenty days was a whole life. In the span of it a helpless thing had learned to stand, to speak, to reason its way past the fire and the water and the sun toward a God none of them could see.

"Peradventure God will show Himself a merciful God," she said. There was more faith in the sentence than in anything the boy had yet heard from a grown mouth.

The Son She No Longer Recognized

"I am the son whom thou hast come to seek in this valley," Abraham said.

She stared. She had left a bundle that could not lift its own head. She had come back to a man who spoke to her as an equal. "My son, how thou art grown! But twenty days old, and thou canst already walk, and talk with thy mouth!"

Time had eaten the infant she loved and left this stranger in his place. She had lost the child after all. Not to the king, but to the twenty days themselves.

The stranger did not comfort her with what she wanted to hear. He gave her the thing he had found in the dark instead. "So it is," he said, "and thus, O my mother, it is made known unto thee that there is in the world a great, terrible, living, and ever-existing God, who doth see, but who cannot be seen. He is in the heavens above, and the whole earth is full of His glory."

That was the first sermon Abraham ever preached, and he preached it to a woman who had come for a baby and found a prophet.

Decades Later, a Field Full of the Dead

The boy became a man, and the man became a name kings feared. When four of those kings dragged his nephew Lot off in chains, Abraham armed his household, rode through the night, and broke their coalition in the dark. He came home a victor. He had every reason to sleep well.

He did not.

He lay awake with the whole field of the dead behind his eyes. Among the men he had cut down, how many had been guilty of nothing worse than standing in the wrong army? He had shed human blood, streams of it, and the prohibition against shedding human blood was older than he was, older than the flood the world had drowned in. He thought of Shem, the son of Noah, still alive in those days, still walking the earth. Some of the men Abraham had killed were Shem's descendants. Surely the old survivor of the flood would curse him for it.

The Voice That Called Them Thorns

Into that sleepless dark came the voice he had first reasoned his way toward in the cave.

"Be not afraid," God told him. "Thou hast but extirpated the thorns, and as to Shem, he will bless thee rather than curse thee."

Thorns. Not men. The kings who burned cities and dragged nephews off in chains were weeds choking a field, and pulling them was not murder but husbandry. It was permission. It was also a verdict on the four kings that Abraham had not dared pronounce himself. He waited to see whether the second half of the promise would hold.

Bread, Wine, and a Blessing Instead of a Curse

It held. Shem came out to meet him, and in that meeting he wore his other name, Melchizedek, king of Salem, priest of God Most High. He did not come with a curse for the blood of his children. He came with bread and wine, the oldest gesture of welcome the ancient world knew, and he blessed the man who had wept all night over the killing.

So the father of monotheism, the one later ages would remember as unshakably certain, had spent two nights of his life undone. Once as a child astonishing his own mother with a God she could not see. Once as a warrior terrified that the God he had proved might hold the dead against him. Both times the answer arrived the same way. A voice out of a place he could not point to told him the earth was full of a glory that saw everything and forgave more than he had dared to hope.