The Man Who Would Not Flee the Furnace

A prince offered Abraham a way out, and Abraham said no.

The story begins with a test of loyalty that most people never face. Nimrod's builders were constructing their tower on the plain of Babylon, and they required every man in the land to set his name on a brick and burn it into the structure. Twelve men refused. They would not participate in any project whose purpose was to wage war against heaven. These twelve were arrested, brought before the princes, and given a choice: make bricks with the rest, or be thrown into the furnace with them.

The twelve refused again.

This is the account preserved in the ancient apocryphal sources, and it names all twelve men: Abram, Nahor, Lot, Reu, Tinuto, Seba, Almodad, Jobab, Eser, Abimael, Sheba, and Ofir. Twelve men against the entire population of Babylon, and their reply to the princes was direct: we know but one God, and Him we serve. You may burn us together with the bricks.

One of the princes, Yoqtan, was moved. He arranged for all twelve to be secretly moved to prison under his house, and then one night he called fifty loyal men and gave them their orders: take these prisoners tonight, put them on mules, load enough food for the journey, bring them to the mountains, and say nothing. He came to the prisoners himself before dawn and told them to trust God, hide in the valleys for thirty days, and wait for the anger of the people to pass.

Eleven of the twelve men thanked him. They accepted the escape. In the full account of that night, Abram alone was silent.

Yoqtan noticed and asked him directly: why do you not answer with your friends? What Abram said in reply is one of the strangest and most unguarded statements in all the literature about him. He said: today we flee to the mountains to escape the fire. But what if wild beasts attack us there? What if food runs out and we die of famine? Then we will simply be men who fled from one death to find another, and we will have died carrying the disgrace of it. He said: as the Lord in whom I trust lives, I shall not leave this place. If I am to die for any iniquity, I will die by the will of God according to His desire.

Yoqtan told him his blood would be on his own head. Abram said he would remain. He was put back in prison.

Seven days later, the people demanded the prisoners. Only Abram was found. Yoqtan told the princes the others had escaped in the night and he had sent a hundred men after them. The people were not entirely satisfied, but they had Abram, and so they built the kiln, heated it until the bricks glowed red, and placed him inside. The Book of Jasher preserves a parallel account of this same moment, where the fire burned for three full days and three full nights before Abraham was cast in, and his brother Haran was thrown in alongside him and burned to ash because his faith was not complete. Nearly a thousand people crowded around that furnace. All the women climbed onto rooftops to watch. Nimrod's astrologers recognized the man being led to the fire as the child whose birth had swallowed four stars in the sky fifty years before.

In the Jerahmeel account, God caused a great earthquake the moment Abram entered the furnace. Fire leaped out of the kiln and became a huge blaze that swept outward and devoured the men surrounding it. Eighty-four thousand five hundred men burned on that day. Abram walked out unhurt, and went to the mountains to find his eleven friends and tell them what had happened. They came back down together, happy and rejoicing. The place was afterward called The God of Abraham.

The structure of the story is exact and deliberate. Eleven men chose wisdom and survived. One man chose something other than wisdom and also survived, but differently. Abram had refused to calculate his way out of a death God had not yet decided to give him. He found it more dignified to burn on God's terms than to live on his own.

What the eleven escaped from was Nimrod's fire. What Abram escaped from was something the text does not name but makes visible: the possibility of becoming a man who survived by being clever enough to leave before things got bad. He was not interested in that kind of survival. The fire that tried to consume him consumed everyone else instead, and the eleven men who had taken the practical choice came back down from the mountains to find that their impractical friend had already won.

The Book of Jasher adds one last detail that the Jerahmeel account leaves out. After Abraham walked out of the furnace, the king and all his servants and princes came and bowed before him. Abraham told them: do not bow down to me, but bow down to the God of the world who made you, and serve Him, for it is He who delivered me from this fire, and it is He who created the souls and spirits of all men. Three hundred men followed Abraham from the king's household that day. Nimrod gave him gifts of silver and gold and two servants from his own house. The man who had refused to flee because he thought escape was worse than burning left the furnace with more than he had entered prison with.