Abraham Built Altars After the Furnace That Took His Brother Haran

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Terah Gave Up a Son to Save Himself

Terah had lied to the king and the king had found out, and standing in front of him with the charge read out, Terah folded. He admitted the deception.

"Tell me who advised you to do this," the king said. "Hide nothing, and you will not die."

Terah had two sons in reach. Haran, the older one, had been thirty-two years old on the day Abraham was born. Terah said Haran had put him up to it.

It was not true. It bought him nothing either. The king ordered both sons taken.

Three Days Inside the Fire

They stripped the two men down to their underclothes and tied their hands and their feet with linen cord and carried them to the mouth of the furnace.

Haran went in and burned, because his heart was not whole with the Lord. The flames came up out of the opening and took the men who had thrown them in, standing there with the rope still warm in their hands.

Abraham did not burn.

The cords on his wrists and ankles went to ash and dropped off him and nothing else did. For three days and three nights he walked back and forth inside the fire, and the king's servants ran to the palace to report what they had seen.

"We have seen Abraham walking about in the middle of the fire."

The Tent He Pitched for Sarah First

A man who has walked out of a furnace can go anywhere and be listened to. What Abraham did with it was pitch tents and argue.

The order never changed. He would come into a place where he meant to stay a while and set up a tent for Sarah before he set up one for himself. Then he would start on the people. He wanted them under the wings of the Shekhinah (שכינה), the divine presence, and he would not stop working a town until they were.

Every altar he stacked was a base of operations. The stones went up, the fire went on them, and the crowd that came to see what the stranger was doing was the whole point of the stones. He was after one thing everywhere he went, which was to get every man alive saying the Name out loud.

He had left a brother in a furnace and a father who had named that brother to a king. He was building a household out of strangers.

A Stranger in the Land He Had Been Promised

The country he was walking into was already occupied, and not lawfully.

After the flood, when the earth was divided out among the sons of Noah by lot, Canaan looked at the ground running from the Lebanon down to the River of Egypt and decided he wanted it. His own share lay westward, along the sea. He refused to go there. He settled on the good land instead, east and west of the Jordan.

His father Ham came to him about it, and his brothers Cush and Mizraim came with him.

"You are living in a land that is not yours," they told him. "It was not assigned to us when the lots were drawn. Do not do this. If you stay, you and your children will fall in this land, cursed, in a rebellion, and your seed will be cut down forever. Do not settle in the land of Shem. It was given to Shem and to Shem's children. We swore an oath before the holy Judge and before our father Noah."

Canaan stayed. Generations later Abraham walked in over that same border with his tents and his converts, holding a promise about ground that a cursed man was farming.

The Ten Years That Broke the Theory

The one thing he could not gather was a child.

He and Sarah had an explanation for it while they were still outside the country. They were being kept childless because they were living in the wrong place, and once they stood on the land itself the block would lift. It was a bearable answer. It had a remedy in it.

They lived ten years in the land. Nothing came.

Somewhere in the tenth year Sarah stopped blaming the map and worked out that the fault was in her body. She did not fight it and she did not turn on her husband. She went and got Hagar.

Hagar belonged to Sarah, not to Abraham. Pharaoh had handed her over, and Pharaoh was her father. Sarah had raised her and taught her and walked her along the same road she walked herself, which was the only reason Sarah considered her fit for this at all. Before she brought the girl to her husband, Sarah made her a free woman.

Then she offered her, and Abraham took the proposal, moved by the holy spirit to say yes to it.

The covenant of the pieces, where the entire future of his descendants was laid out in front of him in the dark, was cut while he still had no descendants at all.