When the Casket Opened Egypt Blazed with Primordial Light

Abraham saw his wife's face for the first time in a stream.

They had been married for years. He had traveled beside Sarah, argued with kings over her, prayed alongside her in the dark. But he had been looking elsewhere, always: at the sky, at the fire his father sold, at the voice that told him to go. The stream outside Egypt stopped him. He looked down, and there was her reflection moving in the water, bright as a sun on the surface, and his breath left him.

He had never seen anything like it.

And now he was afraid.

The Road Into Egypt and What Abraham Feared

He told her plainly. The Egyptians would see her and want her. They would take her and kill him for standing in the way. He had to hide what he had seen. So he asked her to climb inside a casket, and he closed the lid, and carried her across the border with the lid fastened shut.

The tax collectors at the border asked him what the casket contained.

"Barley," he said.

They said the tax on barley would be due. He agreed to pay it.

"No," they said, looking at the casket's size and weight. "It must be wheat."

He agreed to pay the wheat tax.

They raised it to pepper. He paid.

"Gold," they pressed. He paid.

"Precious stones." He paid that too, without argument, without asking them to open it, agreeing to every charge they named and reaching for his purse each time. They had never met anyone who did this. A man does not pay the gold tax on a casket full of barley. Either the man is a fool, or the casket holds something he will not surrender for any price.

Egypt Blazed When the Lid Came Off

They pried it open.

The whole of Egypt lit up.

Sarah's beauty, when it escaped the casket, was not compared to a woman's beauty. It was compared to the light of the first day of creation (Genesis 1:3), the or-haganuz (אוֹר הַגָּנוּז), the hidden light, the radiance that shone before sun and moon existed and that God later concealed because it was too much for an ordinary world to bear. Against that light, all other beauties were as apes to men. The Egyptians who had come to collect taxes stood blinking. The servants of Pharaoh outbid each other in a frenzy, all of them suddenly certain that a radiance like this could not belong to a private man. They ran to tell the king.

Abraham had known what was in the casket. He had paid every tax they named rather than open it. The fear had been warranted.

The Wages of a Lazy Workman

A prayer attributed to Solomon turns on this moment: when a man hires a zealous worker and pays him his wages at the end of the job, what favor has he done? The worker earned it. The payment is a debt, not a gift. But if a man hires a lazy worker, and the worker fails to do the job well, and the man pays the full wages anyway, that is something else entirely. That is chesed (חֶסֶד), loving-kindness that runs past any accounting of what is owed.

Solomon brought this before God: Abraham and Isaac and Jacob were zealous workmen. They earned what they received. But we, he said, are the lazy workmen. When you pay our wages in full anyway, when you heal us and restore what we forfeited, everyone who sees it will praise you. Because it will be impossible to explain on any ordinary accounting. No one pays the lazy workman his full wages. Only someone who chooses to.

This is the shape of what Abraham carried into Egypt. Not the ability to earn what he had, but the willingness to pay whatever was asked rather than let the lid come off on someone else's terms. He did not bargain. He did not argue. He simply paid and paid and paid, until the tax collectors had to see for themselves what could not be bought at any price.

The Old Man at Hebron on Yom Kippur Eve

The community at Hebron found themselves one man short on the eve of Yom Kippur. They had done everything right. The prayers were ready, the white garments were laid out, the fast was about to begin. But a minyan requires ten, and they could only find nine. Without a tenth man, the communal prayers could not be said aloud. The holiest night of the year would pass in silence.

The sun was going down when they saw him.

An old man, silver-bearded, his clothes torn, a sack over his shoulder. His feet were badly swollen from walking, the kind of swelling that comes from days of it. He was not from there. He did not explain where he had come from. They ran to meet him before he passed, brought him inside, gave him food and water, and dressed him in fresh white garments. He went with them to the synagogue and they said the prayers.

When they asked his name, he told them: "Abraham."

The light that had blazed across Egypt from inside a casket had arrived on swollen feet at dusk, dressed in torn clothes, just in time.