Before Abraham was a patriarch he was a shopkeeper's son. His father Terach sold idols in Ur, and Abraham — still a boy — worked behind the counter. The customers came in believing these little stone and wood figures could hear them, protect them, forgive them. Abraham watched and burned inside.
One day an old woman came with a measure of fine flour and set it before the idols as an offering. The moment she left, Abraham took a staff and smashed every image on the shelf — every one except the largest. Into the hands of that great idol he pressed the staff.
When Terach returned and saw the devastation, he demanded an explanation. Abraham kept his face straight. "An old woman brought an offering of flour. The idols began to fight over it — each hungrier than the last. The biggest one killed all the others with this staff. He is still holding it."
The First Interrogation of Idolatry
Terach, the tradition says, did not laugh. He handed his son over to Nimrod, the tyrant-king who ran the region's inquisition. Nimrod threw Abraham into a fiery furnace — and the Holy One drew him out alive.
This midrash, preserved in Bereshit Rabbah and the Shalsheleth Hakkabalah, reads Genesis 11 and Genesis 15:7 as the silent frame around a roaring story. The Torah says only that "the Lord brought you out of Ur of the Chaldees." The Sages asked: brought him out of what? And they answered: out of the furnace his own father had chosen over him.
Superstition, the old text warns, "knows neither reason nor human affection." Even a father will feed his son to the fire before he will give up his gods.