Walking home from the river, Abraham could not silence his own mind.
"What evil is my father doing?" he thought. "He carves these gods with his own chisels and lathes. He shapes them with his own wisdom. If anything, the gods should worship him, since they owe their existence to his hands. What is this delusion?"
The evidence was piling up. Merumath had fallen and could not rise in his own temple. Abraham alone could not move him. It took two men to haul the idol upright, and even then the god's head broke off. Terah simply stuck the old head onto a new stone body and called it the same god.
And the five gods from the marketplace? Toppled by a frightened donkey. Three of them shattered beyond repair. Their fragments sank to the bottom of the river Gur and never surfaced. They could not save themselves, let alone the donkey that broke them.
"If this is so," Abraham said in his heart, "how can Merumath, my father's god, having the head of one stone and a body of another, rescue a man? How can he hear a prayer? How can he reward anyone?"
The logic was devastating in its simplicity. A god assembled from spare parts. A god that drowns. A god defeated by a pack animal. Abraham was not yet ready to speak the name of the true Creator. But he was certain of one thing: whatever God truly was, it was not this.
When I was still going on the way, my heart was perplexed within me, and my mind was
distracted. And I said in my heart: [“What evil deed is this that my father is doing? Is no t h e, rath er ,
the god o f h i s go ds , s in ce th ey come in to existence th rough his chisels and lathes, and his wisdom, and
is it not rather fitting that they should worship my father, since they are his work? What is this delusion
of my father i n h i s w o r k s ? ] 1 5 Behold, Merumath fell and could not rise in his own temple, nor
could I, by myself, move him until my father came, and the two of us moved him; and as we
were thus too weak, his head fell from him, and he (i.e. my father) set it upon another stone
of
R omits.
R omits.
+ his god, K.
of the small ones: K omits.
K reads: And he cut off the head of another god of stone and fastened it upon the god Merumath which
fell before, and the head which fell down from him and the rest of the other god he shattered.
and: S K omit.
father’s: A omits.
Fandana probably = Paddan-A ram (Gen. xxv. 20).
Cf. Gen. xxxvii. 25.
K r eads: in order to buy from thence papyrus from the Nile. And I questioned them, and they inform ed
me.
S omits.
A K omit; they read instead: And I deliberated in my heart, and they gave me the value.
K reads: and he took the pieces of the broken gods and cas t t he m in the Dead Sea, from which it could
never emerge.
A K, + of the river Gur.
This passage is given by A K, but is absent from S; apparently it is a later interpolation.
another god,1 which he had made without head. And the other five gods were broken in pieces
down from the ass, which were able-neither to help themselves,2 nor to hurt the ass, because3
it had broken them to pieces; nor did their broken fragments come up out of the river.”4 And
I said in my heart: “If this be so, how can Merumath, my father’s god, having the head of
another stone, 5 and himself being made of another stone,5 rescue a man, or hear a man’s
prayer and reward him?”6
