When Abraham Bound Isaac, God Bound the Princes of the Nations

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He Hid the Boy Before He Built the Altar

They reached the place and Abraham did something before he touched a single stone. He took Isaac and put him out of sight.

Rabbi Levi knew why. Somebody might come up that mountain to argue him out of it, and an argument on a mountain has a way of ending with a stone in a man's hand. One thrown stone, one bruise, and the boy is blemished and unfit and the whole three days on the road are wasted. So the father hid the son from the people who would have saved him.

Then he built. He set the stones himself, one course and another, and laid the wood in order on top, and the boy stayed where he had been put and did not call out. When the altar was finished Abraham went and brought him back into the open.

The Rope Below and the Ropes Above

Cord over the wrists. Cord over the ankles. Rabbi Hofni bar Isaac watched the whole length of that binding and said that every turn Abraham took around his son below, the Holy One was taking around somebody else above.

The princes of the nations, the angels set over the kingdoms of the earth, were being bound while nobody on the mountain was looking. Whatever they had been doing, they stopped doing it. Their hands came together behind them. Every kingdom that would ever come at Abraham's children with an army had a patron in the upper world, and one by one those patrons went quiet and stayed quiet, and no army below understood why its luck had changed.

Isaac lay on the wood. Nothing in his ears but wind and his father's breathing.

The Angels Cried Outside

Abraham put out his hand and took the knife.

Then the ministering angels broke. They cried out, and they cried out on the outside, in the open air, where the whole household of heaven could hear them, because Rabbi Azariah heard in that word for outside a second word, that a creature was doing a thing outside nature, slaughtering his own son.

And they had a case, and they shouted it.

"The highways are waste." Nobody stops at his tent any more. The traveler who used to be fed and watered and sent on comes down that road now and finds a man on a mountain with a knife.

"The covenant is broken." He said, with Isaac I will establish it. There is no covenant without the boy on the wood.

"He regards no man." Does Abraham's own merit count for nothing here?

The angels wept while they argued, which is not how a court usually behaves. Then the voice came from heaven and stopped the hand, and Abraham looked up and saw the ram with its horns caught in the thicket, and the knife went into an animal instead. He untied his son on an altar built for him.

News From Haran While He Was Still on the Mountain

Before he had come down off Moriah a messenger reached him with word from his brother's house far to the north.

Milcah had borne children. The names were read out to a man who had spent three days walking toward the end of his line, and among them, at the bottom of the list, was a granddaughter. The girl who would marry Isaac had been born while the wood was being cut.

Cold water on a parched throat is what good news out of a far country does to a man. He had come up that mountain to close his future with his own hand. He went down it with the boy walking beside him and a bride growing up in Aram.

The Day the Bonds Came Loose

The knots above held for centuries and then they did not.

In the days of Jeremiah, when Israel pulled away, God said the cold thing out loud. What do you think, that those bonds stand forever? Tangled like thorns, and drunk on their own drink, and then the ropes fall off them and they burn through the world like dry stubble.

The princes shook their hands free. Armies that had been losing their nerve for generations found it again. Nobody in Babylon knew that a rope had come off in a place they could not see, and nobody in Jerusalem could point to the hour it happened, but the hour had happened, and the walls came down after it.

What one old man tied on a mountain with his hands shaking, his children's children untied without noticing.