Abraham was still speaking to his father Terah in the courtyard of the house when a voice came down from heaven.
Not a whisper. Not an intuition. A voice, falling from the sky in a burst of fiery cloud, saying and crying: "Abraham, Abraham!"
"Here I am."
"You are searching in the understanding of your heart for the God of Gods and the Creator. I am He."
The words were absolute. No ambiguity. No riddle. The Creator of everything Abraham had reasoned his way toward, fire and water and earth and sun, all of it, was speaking directly to him.
"Go out from your father Terah, and leave this house, so that you are not killed in the sins of your father's household."
Abraham went. He did not hesitate. He walked toward the door of the courtyard, and before he had even passed through it, the world behind him ended.
A sound of tremendous thunder. Fire fell from heaven and consumed the house. Terah and everything in his household, everything he owned, burned to the ground in a radius of forty cubits.
The midrash (rabbinic interpretive commentary) would later say that "Ur of the Chaldees" (Genesis 11:31) really means "Fire of the Chaldees," and that God brought Abraham out of fire itself. This was that fire. The workshop of the idol-maker, the temple of dead gods, the home where Merumath lost his head and Barisat burned to ashes, all of it was swallowed by a divine blaze.
Abraham walked out. Behind him, only flame.
And it came to pass while I spake6 thus to my father Terah in the court of my7 house,
there cometh down8 the voice of a Mighty One9 from heaven in a fiery cloud-burst,10 saying
and crying: “Abraham, Abraham!” And I said: “Here am I.” And He said: 11“Thou art seeking
in the understanding of thine heart the G od o f Gods and the Creator;11 12I am He:12 Go out
from thy father Terah, and get thee out from the13 house, that thou also be not slain in the sins
of thy father’s house.” And I went out. And it came to pass when I went out, that before I
succeeded in getting out in front of the door of the court, there came a sound of a [great] 1 4
thunder15 and burnt 1 6 him and16 his house,16 and everything whatsoever in his house, down to
the ground, forty cubits. 17
S omits.
Or by (through) night.
Lit. I will investiga t e ( o r examine) before thee concerning. Th e question that follows, Who then is He?
etc., gives the subject of the investigation.
Something has to be supplied h ere.
So A K; S omits.
S K, reflected.
A K, his (i. e. Terah’s), rightly. At this point th ere follows in A K (R) an insertion which contains,
among other thin gs, a version of the well-known legen d about A braham’s burnin g of th e idol-temple, and
with it his brother Haran; cf. A ppendix I.
Lit. falleth (S); K, fell (A omits).
= LXX. Ò ÆFPLD`H (frequent as a rendering of Heb. h ~’l, “God”); cf. 4 Ezra ix. 45, etc.
K, flame.
The text of S is n ot i n or der; Sreznevsky reads: Cogu Coisya, God thou dost fear, and the Creator thou
art seeking.
A omits.
K, his.
S omits.
K, + and there fell fire from heaven.
A (K R) omit.
17
K, + and the dwellers therein, both men and beasts.
Here R ends. The Midrashic story about the burning of Te r ah ’ s h o u s e i s really based upon an
interpretation of the Biblical “Ur of the Chaldees” (Gen. xi. 31, xv. 7). Here “Ur” is inter pr et ed as =
“fire”; Abraham was brought out of “Ur” (“fire”) by the Lord.
PART II
THE APOCALYPSE (Chapters IX.-XXXII.).
Abraham receives a Divine Command to offer Sacrifice after Forty Days as a
Preparation for a Divine Revelation (Chapter IX.; cf. Gen. xv.).
