Free The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels by Thomas Cahill

today’s Middle East, sitting under their tent flap, hoping to catch a breeze.
        He lifted up his eyes and saw:
        here, three men standing over against him.
        When he saw them, he ran to meet them from the entrance to his tent and bowed to the earth
        and said:
        “My lords,
        pray if I have found favor in your eyes,
        pray do not pass by your servant!
        Pray let a little water be fetched, then wash your feet and recline under the tree;
        let me fetch (you) a bit of bread, that you may refresh your hearts,
        then afterward you may pass on—
        for you have, after all, passed your servant’s way!”
     
     
    Avraham, however well established in his herds and retainers, thinks himself well below the mark of these “lords,” whoever they may be, and is eager to demonstrate to them his surpassing hospitality. What he has in mind is considerably more than “a bit of bread.” Running to Sara and shouting “make haste!” he commands her to bake three cakes from their best semolina. Then he’s off to the oxen to choose a calf, “tender and fine,” for a servant to prepare. When the meal is ready, Avraham himself serves it with solicitude. While the potentates eat, they ask after his wife, whose name they somehow know:
    “Where is Sara your wife?”
    “Here in the tent,” replies Avraham with mounting suspicion.
    The lord sitting in the middle of the three says:
    “I will return, yes, return to you when time revives [that is, a year from now] and Sara your wife will have a son.”
    Avraham knows now that he is entertaining God and twoangels, 4 but Sara, who knows nothing of the previous promises (why would a man share such things with a wife?), has overheard. Perhaps she is giddy from all her frantic baking, but she finds the conversation ludicrous and chuckles to herself, “After I have become worn, is there to be pleasure for me? And my lord is
old!”
    “Now why does Sara laugh?” asks the figure in the middle, who now reveals himself as the God for whom no feat is impossible, and repeats the promise. Poor Sara, full of fear and confusion, insists she did not laugh. “No,” says God, “indeed you laughed.” Sara, who has been left out of the great relationship between her husband and God, laughs the laugh of the ancient world, of Sumer, Egypt, and Canaan, of Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Americas, the rightly cynical laugh of all those who know that a woman cannot bear children past menopause and a man cannot get it up in advanced old age. For all the tall tales of heroes and kings, the world of human experience is as predictable as the zodiac that turns in the heavens. We all know the final inevitability, how things must end.
    This episode blends effortlessly into the next. God debates within himself whether he will tell Avraham “what I am aboutto do” and decides to speak privately with Avraham because “I have known him”—while the two angels head for Sodom, where Lot lives. When God reveals his plan of destruction for Sodom and Gomorrah, Avraham attempts to reason with him: “Will you really sweep away the innocent along with the guilty?” By questioning God, who has been gradually revealing his awesome grandeur to Avraham, the patriarch exhibits striking courage, a courage that will reappear in his descendants throughout the ages to come. A verbal tug-of-war ensues, ending with God’s promise to stay his hand if as few as ten innocents are found within the walls of these cities.
    Fade-in: Sodom’s main square, where Lot, encountering the angels, invites them to stay at his house. (Though not as generous to his guests as Avraham, he’s undoubtedly a good guy.) But the men of the city surround the house like the ghouls in
Night of the Living Dead
and demand that Lot bring out the two handsome young men so they can, well, sodomize them. It becomes all too clear that there aren’t ten innocents here. There’s only