Abraham Kept Commandments That Did Not Yet Exist

The Problem With Abraham's Obedience

The sage who wrote Ben Sira in Jerusalem around 180 BCE put the difficulty plainly. He was writing a book of wisdom in praise of Israel's great ancestors, and he got to Abraham, and he said what the tradition required him to say: Abraham kept the commandments of the Most High and entered into a covenant with Him.

No one who heard this in the second century BCE missed the problem. Abraham lived centuries before Moses. Before Sinai. Before the Torah was delivered. There were no commandments to keep. The law that Israel organized its entire life around had not yet been given. How does a man keep commandments that do not exist?

What the Title Reveals

Ben Sira's answer is inside the phrasing. He does not say Abraham obeyed the Torah. He says Abraham kept the commandments of the Most High. The title mattered. The Most High. Not the God of Moses. Not the God of Sinai. The sovereign of the universe, whose will runs deeper than any single legislative event in history. What Abraham accessed was not the law as given at Sinai but the law as it exists at its source, prior to all human receiving of it, written into the structure of things before any prophet was born to transmit it.

In his flesh, Ben Sira says, a law was cut. In his testimony, it was established. The covenant was not a document that could be lost. It was a bodily mark. It traveled in the skin of every son born into the line.

The Moment the Covenant Was Sealed

The Book of Jubilees reconstructed the scene in precise ritual detail. Abram, as he was still called, had received the promise but the covenant had not yet been formally enacted. Then came the command: take a heifer three years old, a she-goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon. He took them. He cut them in half, each animal divided and the pieces laid over against each other. Then the sun went down. A deep sleep fell on Abram. And in the darkness, a smoking furnace and a burning torch passed between the pieces.

This was the covenant cut. In the ancient Near East, walking between the divided animals bound the parties to the agreement under the curse of becoming like the divided flesh if they violated the terms. God passed between the pieces. The covenant was sealed. Abram had not spoken the terms. He had only prepared the animals, waited through the hot afternoon, driven away the birds of prey that descended on the carcasses, and then fallen into sleep while God enacted the binding alone.

The Warning He Left His Children

Years later, when Abraham was old and had seen enough of the world's capacity for forgetting, he summoned his son and the sons of his household and warned them. The warning was not gentle. He had grown up among idol worshippers. He knew exactly how it happened. A person does not wake up one morning and decide to worship stone. They drift. The images are already in the house. The neighbors have always done it. The festivals have always been attended. The drift is slow and social and entirely ordinary, and by the time a man realizes he has forgotten the covenant his grandfather sealed in flesh and blood, it feels like he never knew it to begin with.

"Do not worship them," Abraham said. "You know what they are. You have seen what I have seen. The covenant is in your bodies. Do not let your children forget what that mark means."