Abraham and Sarah (3 page)

Motioning to his men to lead the way, he started toward the gate with Sarai. Suddenly fierce-looking temple guards blocked the way, their lances drawn. At the same time everyone heard a deafening clap of cymbals and a roll of deep thundering drums. Smoke began to pour from the temple doorway. As the smoke cleared, out of the darkness emerged a figure of fearful demeanor. There was no doubt it was the high priestess of Ningal.

All talk ceased as men and women fell to their knees and bowed their faces to the ground. Only Abram and Sarai remained standing, and Sarai, terrified, cringed behind Abram and covered her eyes.

The priestess was tall and thin, with hair coiled round with snakeskins so it looked like a mass of writhing snakes. Unlike the priestess of Inanna, she was the image of power and gave off the aura of dark deeds and hidden mysteries.

Her garment was elaborately fringed, and on her head she wore a domed
headpiece decorated with the horns of young bulls. From her hands hung a magical gaggle of bones, bat wings, and dried mandrake roots.

Most frightening of all was the mask of a snake’s head she wore over her face, leaving only her eyes showing. They were glowing like two hot coals, and from behind the mask came a sound like the hissing of a cobra.

She came forward, all the time making the hissing sound and at times the sound of rattlers. Her movements were smooth and practiced, almost slithering. When Abram stood his ground, her eyes behind the mask became dark and foreboding, and as the hissing sound stopped, she raised her arm, pointed at Sarai, and demanded, “Where are you going with this woman?”

“She is my sister, and I’m taking her home where she belongs.”

“Belongs? She belongs here. She must make the sacrifice or be cursed.”

Instead of being frightened, Abram looked amused. “What or who gives you the right to curse?”

The high priestess, trembling with rage, pulled off the snake mask, revealing features hard, menacing, and feral. Her eyes blazed with indignation as she pointed one long finger at Sarai and through clenched teeth spat out her most frightening curse, “By the authority of the great goddess of Ur, I, her high priestess, curse anyone who leaves without sacrificing.”

“A curse?” Abram questioned. “What curse does Ningal give to one who has done no wrong?”

“Curse! I curse her with barrenness. Her womb will be filled with evil spirits, her arms forever empty.”

Abram hesitated only a moment while Sarai stood paralyzed, the burning eyes of the high priestess and the terrible word barren ringing in her ears.

Abram drew himself up until he towered over the high priestess and in a composed voice spoke, “We have no fear of your curses. We are not worshipers of your gods.” With that he turned, took Sarai by the hand, and proceeded to elbow his way past the astonished guards and through the crowd as they parted before him.

Only once did Sarai look back. She saw the priestess; her feet planted wide apart, her long finger pointing ominously at her as the words she spewed burned like fire.

“Barren! I curse you with barrenness! I curse you with an eternal curse in the name of the great goddess Ningal!” Again and again she shouted, then chanted the terrible words. “You will never have a child. Ningal will never
bless you. I have cursed you in her magic name.” The eyes of the priestess were wild and terrible, and Sarai knew she would never be free of them or the words she had spoken.

By the time they reached home, Sarai was hysterical. She clung to Abram and at first refused to let any of the servants near her. “It was terrible,” she shouted at the women. “You made it seem so exciting. You made it sound like an honor.”

The women backed away, and only Terah’s concubine responded. “You are back early,” she said with a twinge of accusation in her voice. “You didn’t make the sacrifice.”

“Make the sacrifice!” Sarai said, whirling around and glaring at her. “It was terrible. Nothing exciting like you made it seem.”

The concubine stood with her hands on her hips as she rolled her eyes in unbelief. “If you didn’t make the sacrifice, I can imagine it was quite unpleasant.”

At the concubine’s words Sarai burst into tears and could not be comforted. She clung to Abram’s arm and hid her face in the folds of his sleeve.

The concubine shrugged and turned to Abram. “What happened? Obviously she didn’t stay for the sacrifice.”

“I paid the price and rescued her,” Abram said as he put his arm around Sarai as though to protect her from further attack. “I can’t imagine who would do this to Sarai. She’s completely devastated.”

“Do this to Sarai!” the concubine sniffed. “Is she better than the rest of us?”

Abram ignored her challenge and turned to Sarai’s old nurse. “Here,” he said, “brew her some warm honey and herbs and put her to bed. No doubt a good sleep will help more than all this talk.”

To everyone’s relief, Sarai stopped sobbing and followed her nurse back to the sleeping rooms.

When they were gone, the concubine turned to Abram. “A sorry mess you’ve made of things,” she said. “Now the poor girl will never marry, and if she ever does, she’ll never have a child.”

Abram didn’t answer but turned and walked toward the door with long, sure strides. He stopped only once to look at all of them and to make sure Sarai had left, then he pushed through the door, letting it bang with an ominous thud behind him.

Only after Abram was assured that Sarai had finally gone to sleep did he come to face his father and the brothers. They had heard everything and were embarrassed and indignant. They felt that Abram had disgraced the family. “How can we live here among these people?” Terah said with hands out pleading. “We may not understand their gods or their customs, but we are here as strangers—guests. We must try to fit in.”

“It was only for one night. It wouldn’t have hurt her,” said Nahor.

“She could have married a rich man or a prince. Now there is no one,” said Haran.

Abram looked around at them and squared his shoulders defiantly. “We are not as the Sumerians. We will never be and we need not try.”

Terah spoke with a great effort. He seemed to have aged in the few minutes they had been engaged in the discussion. “If we don’t fit in, it will be hard to succeed at anything here in Ur. We may even have to leave.”

For a few moments Abram said nothing. When he finally spoke, it was with sadness but a note of authority that surprised his brothers. “We may have to leave but how much better to leave than have our own family destroyed by the evil around us.”

“Evil?” Haran asked with a slight smirk.

“Yes, evil,” Abram said, looking him in the eye until his brother turned away and his father left with drooping shoulders, greatly disturbed.

A fortnight later the family was still divided over the matter of the idols and Sarai’s traumatic experience. Abram had tried to explain to them an astonishing revelation that had come to him with such force and veracity that he now saw everything differently.

Terah and the brothers tried again and again to explain to Abram that it made no difference how one worshiped or who was worshiped. The moon god Nanna was in control of many things in nature and it seemed logical to worship him. It was also noised about that men and women who prayed to the little clay images had some astounding stories of answered prayers.

“Surely so many people can’t be wrong,” Nahor said.

“The images are simple things of clay made by humble men,” Abram objected.

“But who’s to say they don’t possess wonderful magic to drive away the evil spirits and bring good luck, especially when they are fashioned to the high priest’s specifications and are blessed with a touch of his oil?” Terah said.

The arguments always ended with someone reminding Abram that they had lost a good bit of business already because of his foolishness, and Sarai—in spite of her beauty—would never be married. “Our most lucrative business is in images for Ningal’s feasts. Now she will have nothing to do with us,” they said.

Abram was frustrated that his father and brothers could be so blind. Since the new revelation, it had seemed illogical that something molded out of ordinary clay could be a god worthy of prayers and worship.

He was thinking along these lines early one morning as he made his way down to his father’s warehouse and workrooms. The workrooms were at the end of a narrow lane leading into a section of the city called the Karem. Traders and artisans clustered in this section of the city. High mud walls rose on each side of the lane. Here and there were worn wooden doors that led into the courtyards, workrooms, and storage areas of the city.

When Abram came to the familiar door of his father’s shop, he found the wooden bolt still in place, which meant that neither his father nor the workmen had arrived. He was familiar with the bolt, and within minutes he had the door open and was stooping down to enter the courtyard now flooded with early morning light.

He glanced into the room where the fresh clay was kept and then into the next room where the potters’ wheels stood ready and waiting for the first work of the day. Finally he came to the larger room where the finished idols were displayed. There were smaller images that could be hidden in a man’s hand, then larger ones that would stand in a niche by a front door. A large, well-formed image of the god Nanna was his father’s prize piece and one he hoped to sell to a smaller temple for a good price.

Impulsively Abram reached out and twisted off an ear from one of the idols and held it in his hand. It was nothing but common clay, and the idol made no move to defend himself. He jabbed out the jeweled eyes of another and broke off the arm of a third. All the time he muttered, “They neither see nor hear nor speak, and none of them can feel a thing.”

In a sudden burst of frustration he flung his arm out and swept all the small idols off their shelves onto the floor where he watched them break into unrecognizable bits of pottery. Then he grabbed a stick from behind the door and jabbed and pushed one after another of the larger idols off their pedestals onto the floor where they lay in miserable heaps of rubble. A wonderful feeling
of elation swept over him as he felt justified in all that he had done. Surely now his father would understand. Surely he could see that one must be as wise in worship as in trading. A god so fragile was no god at all.

At that moment he heard his father coming along the narrow lane outside. Abram looked around and realized that it would be hard for his father to get any real lesson from the devastation. He would think only of the hours involved, the money paid to the artisans, and the profit lost. Quickly Abram reached for the stick and thrust it into the outstretched hands of the large idol he had not destroyed.

Seldom had anyone seen Terah surprised or caught off guard. Now he was shocked and dismayed. He kicked at pieces of the rubble and circled the rooms, all the while shaking his head in disbelief. It was almost as though he wasn’t aware that anyone else was in the room. “How did this happen? Who could have done such a thing?” he muttered with a glance at Abram.

“My father,” Abram replied quickly, “don’t you see? The big idol did it. The stick is in his hands.”

“What foolishness are you talking?” Terah said, turning with an accusing look to his son. “How could such a thing made of clay move at all, let alone destroy all the idols?”

Abram hesitated only a moment, then with a knowing look, he said, “No more foolish, I would say, than to expect this idol made of clay to answer prayers.”

Terah looked surprised, then a bit sheepish as he admitted, “Maybe you have a bit of wisdom there. Perhaps we have gone too far in following the Sumerians.”

“We have indeed gone too far when we offer our children to their gods and goddesses.”

“Who among us would offer a child to the god or goddess of the Sumerians?” Terah stood up straight and glared at Abram with an obvious sense of indignation.

“Have you forgotten Sarai?” Abram countered with a surprising tone of defiance.

Usually once Terah spoke, no one contradicted him. He thumped his cane on the floor in annoyance and sputtered, “Your brothers are right to be angry. You thought you rescued Sarai, but you have only placed the rope of barrenness around her neck. If we were Sumerians, she would become a prostitute. That’s
what they do with the barren ones. My poor Sarai. What’s to become of her now?” Quickly his tone changed as he sank down on the stone bench and hid his face in his hands.

“Father,” Abram said, “I plan to marry Sarai myself.”

Terah looked up in surprise. “How … I don’t understand?”

“Because she is my sister? I know this isn’t usual among us as it is in Egypt, but Sarai and I have different mothers. More important, we are all strangers here among these people. It is best if we marry among ourselves.”

Terah smiled. He realized Abram’s remark was a strike at his own marriage to a Sumerian. At the same time he saw that the marriage was right for Sarai. She wouldn’t have to leave her home and her people. To give a daughter to foreigners was risky. If they didn’t treat her right, one was helpless to interfere without bloodshed. Terah slowly got to his feet and embraced Abram. Then with genuine warmth he said, “My son, at times you are a puzzle to me, but I must admit you have gladdened my heart more than all my other children.”