The Stories of Abraham

The stories of Abraham

I appeared, once again, to the slave girl Hagar (she was lost with her son in the desert of Beersheba),

“Hagar!  What is the matter Hagar?”

She answered back through parched lips,

“The matter, Angel, is God’s injustice,

whom he has blessed and whom he has punished!” 

Fixing the heavens with a glare, she said,

“Listen!

I was taken from my home on the Nile and given

to Lot an orphan and his uncle Abram

who’d sold a wife into Pharaoh’s harem,

receiving sheep and I as a bargain. 

Abram took me from my home on the river,

that trickster, trader, that pimp and failure,

and Sarah his wife transmitted plague,

Pharaoh returned her with gold and slave,

the wealth that drives one man from another –

so, Lot took off for Sodom and Gomorrah,

while I remained with Sarah and Abram  

rich and childless in the land of Canaan.

I came down from my heights, put a hand on her shoulder:

“Hagar!  Abram is more than trickster and trader, he’s a prophet and priest, a statesman and soldier, who fought and defeated the kings of Canaan, circumcised himself and his kinsmen in a covenant with God who named him Abraham.  The stars shone a vow he’d sire a nation, though Sarah his wife was old and barren.”

Hagar aimed her son’s pale face, an arrow to my convivial gaze and said,

“Sarah sneered at your God in disbelief

then told her Abram to give me his seed;

she watched him hurry into my tent

then she bullied me when I was pregnant.

I fled but you came and promised children

if I returned to her ruthless sarcasm.

The matter for me, Angel, is God’s injustice,

whom he has blessed and whom he has punished.

Sarah bore Isaac, but despite this mercy

demanded of Abram one more cruelty:

I, still their slave despite giving birth,

was sent away to this dry desert.

Now, Ishamel my son is dying of thirst

whilst her frail Isaac inherits the earth!”

She was right of course, we had met before, and even though I had made that vow, Abraham had sent her out to Beersheba, with a loaf of bread and a skin of water. Her complaints were valid but I still considered that what she had suffered through Sarah’s anger and Abraham’s betrayal was part of God’s plan and all would be well.

“Hagar!  Abraham is a comic who is courageously standing for justice.  I will tell you how he teased God for planning to slaughter every last person in Sodom and Gomorrah. He approached Him, came near saying, ‘Lord, may I be so bold as to ask, I who am nothing but ashes and dust, should not a judge do what is just?  Will you burn innocent with evil, or hold back your wrath for fifty good people?’ And God agreed with that cunning old joker and said that for that fifty in number he would not burn Sodom and Gomorrah.  But our trickster-trader didn’t stop there. “Lord, what if there were just forty-five?’ Then knocked it down to forty, then thirty-five and finally Abraham cried, ‘Lord, for the sake of just Lot, his in-laws and children will you hold back your judgement on Gomorrah and Sodom?’

And God in unusual mercy took away the fire, as we in heaven looked down in awe at the clever irony of that saviour, Abraham – whose wife you mocked when she was barren.”

“I will mock every woman who plays a part,

in the plans of God and those patriarchs:

Abraham sold Sarah twice as a concubine,

first in Egypt, then to a Philistine;

Lot once readied his daughters for rape,

now he’s gorging wine in a cave;

his wife, a rock, weeps salt in shock

as their daughters tease the seed from Lot’s […]” 

“Stop! Hagar, please stop. Hagar, in this wilderness there is hidden water, bring Ishmael up here, alone as an archer, accurate in love as well as in anger; then take him home to meet an Egyptian – a woman of the land from where you were taken by Lot, an orphan, and his uncle Abram.”

Years later, Hagar sent Ishmael back from Egypt to Canaan to help his half-brother, Isaac, bury Abraham. But you don’t recall that loving reconciliation.  What you remember, the story that’s filled the world with wonder, is that after saving Lot’s life, Abraham complied with orders to sacrifice his own son, teasing Isaac, ‘God will provide’, before strapping him down, reaching for a knife.  He would have killed him there on a shrine … but I called out God’s punch-line just in time: ‘A ram is caught by its horns in a thicket!’  And by faith, you say, Abraham got away with it, put down the knife, became the protagonist, first Jew, perfect Muslim, Saint Paul’s prototype Christian?

Sometime later, God did set fire to Sodom and Gomorrah: as the lightning struck I leapt from heaven and became Satan, Azazel, the angel fallen. The matter was not my pride, it was God’s injustice: whom he had blessed and whom he had punished. Now decide for yourselves, travellers, where you will seek rest: in the mansions of God or my wilderness.

2013