God Woke Avimelekh at Night and Laban on the Road to Gilead

Click for full size

A Dead Man in His Own Bed

Avimelekh, king of Gerar, went to sleep with a new woman in his household and woke with God in the room.

"You are a dead man," God told him, "over the woman you took. She belongs to a husband."

Nobody had warned him first. He had asked, and he had been answered. Abraham said she was his sister. Sarah said he was her brother. There had been no notice served, no messenger, no dream the week before. For a man outside the covenant there is no forewarning. The sentence can arrive with the crime.

Everyone Had Told Him, Down to the Camel Drivers

Avimelekh started listing his defense while he was still lying there.

"Did he not say to me, she is my sister? And she, she also said, he is my brother."

She also. Two words more than the sentence needs, and the surplus opens into a crowd. Not only Sarah. The donkey drivers said it. The camel drivers said it. Abraham's household said it and Sarah's household said it. Every person who had come through the gate with that caravan had the same answer ready. It was not one man's lie. It was a story a whole company had rehearsed on the road.

"In the innocence of my heart and the cleanness of my hands I did this."

He brings up the hands himself. A man who never came near her has no reason to mention his hands. There had been touching, and he was putting the line exactly where it fell.

He Threw the Flood Generation Back at God

Then he stopped defending and started prosecuting.

"My Lord," he said, "will You kill a nation that is innocent too?"

Rabbi Berekhya heard the narrow version first. Kill me and You have killed a righteous man, because I did nothing. But the question runs past his own neck. If this is the standard, then think about the generation of the Flood. Think about the generation that was scattered from the tower. Maybe they were innocent as well. Maybe they also woke up one morning already inside a sentence no one had read to them.

A pagan king lies in a bedroom in Gerar arguing the whole record of divine judgment back at its author, and nothing strikes him down for it.

Rabbi Aha turned over the phrase God had used. She belongs to a husband, the verse says, and the same letters can be read the other way: she is the owner of a husband. Everywhere else the man gives the orders. In that tent, God had already told Abraham to do whatever Sarah told him.

Morning, and the Smoke Over Sodom

Avimelekh got up early, called every servant he had, spoke the whole night into their ears, and the men were very afraid.

Rabbi Hanin said what they were looking at. Sodom was burning on the horizon and the smoke went up like the mouth of a furnace, and word had already come about the two visitors who had done it. Those angels went to Sodom. Maybe they have come here next.

Then the king sent for Abraham.

"What have you done to us? How did I sin against you, that you brought this great punishment on me and on my kingdom? You have done things to me that are not done."

Rabbi Helbo heard the bitterest line last. Everywhere else you went, prosperity walked in ahead of you. Here, famine walked in ahead of you. And in the king's house every womb had closed and stayed closed, until Abraham prayed for the man who had almost died over his wife.

Laban Got the Same Kind of Visit

A generation later Laban the Aramean rode seven days after a son-in-law who had taken his daughters and his grandchildren and gone. He caught them in the hills of Gilead. The night before he caught them, God came into his sleep.

"Be careful. Not a word to Jacob, good or bad."

Not even good. Say something kind to that man and he will hear a threat in it, because it is you saying it.

Rabbi Yosei set the two beds side by side. God comes to the prophets of the nations only at the hour when people have taken leave of one another and gone to their own rooms, when a matter steals in at the edge of sleep. Never at noon. Never standing in an open field.

Rabbi Hanina bar Pappa drew the room. A king and his friend sit in one hall with a curtain hung between them, and whenever the king wants to speak he pulls the curtain aside. For the others he leaves it hanging and talks through the cloth. The Rabbis drew it harder than that. A king walks to his wife in daylight where everyone can see him. He goes to the concubine after dark, and nobody is meant to notice.

Rabbi Hama ben Rabbi Hanina listened to the verbs instead. When God calls a prophet of Israel the word comes out whole, vayikra, the word the angels use on one another when they call out holy. For Balaam it comes out clipped, vayikar, something that merely happened. Rabbi Yisakhar of Kefar Mandi would not grant it even that. Vayikar, he said, is the word Deuteronomy uses for a man made unclean by an accident in the night.

Two kings, two beds, two men who did exactly what they were told. Neither of them ever saw who was giving the order. The curtain stayed where it was.