Abraham the Carpenter and the Gold That Was Not His

Abraham the Carpenter lived in Jerusalem in the early medieval period. He worked wood, lived plainly, and over many years saved a small bag of gold. A neighbor coveted the gold, broke into Abraham's house, stole the bag, and fled down the road out of the city. Before he had traveled a mile, he dropped dead.

A young traveler found the body. He did what a pious Jew was expected to do for an unclaimed corpse: he began to dig a grave by the roadside to bury the stranger. As he lifted the body, the bag of gold fell out of the dead man's bosom. The traveler was poor. He took the gold as a fair reward for performing a burial no one else would have done.

At home he hid the gold under his pillow. That night a voice came to him in sleep. Do not touch that money. It is not yours. It was stolen from another man. The traveler, shaken, rose at dawn, took the bag to the nearby forest, and hid it in the hollow of an old tree. Then he walked on.

Months later a river flooded the region. It destroyed the traveler's home and tore the hollow tree from the ground. The tree washed downstream to a village where a woodcutter pulled it out of the water and sold it, thinking it was simply good timber. Abraham the Carpenter in Jerusalem bought the tree for a project.

Meanwhile the young traveler, now penniless, wandered to Jerusalem looking for work. He found employment as an apprentice with Abraham. One morning, sawing through a large beam, he paused and murmured to himself, This is just like the hollow tree where I hid a bag of gold years ago. Abraham, working at the next bench, heard him. What did you say?

The boy told his whole story. Abraham sawed through the beam. There, inside the hollow, was the original bag of stolen gold. The same gold Abraham had saved for years, wrapped in the same cloth, weighed against the same scales.

Abraham was staggered. He tried to split the gold with the young man as a finder's fee. The young man refused. The gold was not his. So Abraham did something better. He married the young man to his own daughter and sent him on a visit to his family, giving him a special loaf of bread into which he had baked a hundred coins of gold.

At the city gate the young man was met by the governor, who liked the look of the loaf and bought it for a few small coins. The governor, knowing it was a wedding-season journey, sent the bread as a gift to Abraham's daughter. When the loaf arrived, Abraham cut it open and found his hundred coins. He realized what had happened. When the young man returned, Abraham said, Even now the gold refuses to be yours. Seeing this, Abraham married him to his younger daughter, making him a son of the household in a permanent way, and at last the young man entered the family that matched his heart.

This story from The Exempla of the Rabbis (Gaster, 1924), drawn from diverse Gaster manuscripts, teaches the relentless Jewish doctrine that stolen gold cannot be inherited, loaned, or laundered into legitimacy. It also teaches that a man who twice refuses what is not his will be given, eventually, something better than coins.