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.