The picture in the vision swayed. From its left side, a heathen people emerged. They fell upon those on the right side, the people of <strong>Abraham's</strong> seed, and pillaged them. Men, women, and children. Some they slaughtered. Others they carried off into slavery.
Abraham watched them pour in through four entrances, the four world-empires of tradition: Babylon, Media, Greece, and Rome. Each "entrance" represented a century of subjugation, corresponding to the four hundred years of exile foretold to Abraham in (Genesis 15:13).
Then came the worst sight of all. They burned the Temple with fire. The holy things within it they plundered.
Abraham cried out: "O Eternal One! The people who spring from me, whom you accepted, the hordes of the heathen plunder them, killing some, enslaving others, and they have burned the Temple with fire and robbed and destroyed its beautiful things. O Eternal, Mighty One! If this is so, why have you torn my heart? Why should this be?"
God answered with the hardest truth: "What you have seen shall happen on account of your seed who anger me by reason of the idol you saw, and the human slaughter in the picture, committed with misplaced zeal in the Temple. As you saw, so shall it be."
The destruction of the Temple was not arbitrary. It was the consequence of the idolatry Abraham had already witnessed in the vision: the idol of jealousy, the child sacrifice, the corruption of the priesthood. God's own people had provoked it.
Abraham pleaded: "O Eternal, Mighty One! Let the works of evil pass by. Show me rather those who fulfilled the commandments, the works of righteousness. You can do this."
God offered a partial comfort: "The time of the righteous will come first through the holiness flowing from kings and righteous-dealing rulers, whom I created to rule among them." David, Hezekiah, Josiah. "But from these will issue men who care only for their own interests." And from those faithless sons, the cycle of corruption would begin again.