Abraham

I knew, after the hut had vanished, my father with it, that I was in no mortal space. Now there was only darkness. After what could have been an instant or an eternity, a voice like thunder shaped the darkness around me: mayim.

“Water”, I said. A light flared and I beheld a young man, sitting on a rock in a shepherd’s garb held a harp in his hands. “Yes,” he said. “Mayim, in our language, water. But it is plural, as you know.”

I merely nodded. We seemed to be standing in a circle of light, as if around a fire, but I could see no source for that light. The ground under my feet was indeterminable.

He spoke again, and his voice was light: “And God said, let there be an expanse to separate the waters from the waters. And God made the expanse. And he called that expanse the sky,” the young man smiled, “the waters above it and the waters below.”

“Brother,” I said, “what is this you speak of? For your words are familiar to my ears yet I know that I have never heard them.”

Again he sounded amused. I saw for just a moment a golden crown flicker upon his brow and disappear. “I am not your brother. You are my father.”

“Your own father,” he continued, “told you, I am sure, of the creators of this universe. The great gods of Sumer, Tiamat and Abzu.” I said nothing. “There is,” he said in a dreamy voice, as if not speaking to anyone at all: “there will be at any rate a god in Egypt they will call Serapis. Not an Egyptian god, however. There will be a man, someday, named Alexander and he will rule all this part of the world, and much else besides, yes.

And he will write in his diary, oh nearly two millennia from now, that this Serapis had a temple in Babylon. Tell me, my father, for you have come from Babylon have you ever heard of Serapis?”

Dazed, unsure what he meant, I simply shook my head. No, I had never heard of such a god.

“Or then again,” he said, “perhaps you have. For if you let your own speech betray you just a little, stretch it at the corners as will happen over centuries, then perhaps you might hear the words Sar Apsi, which, as you will know would mean Lord of the Apsi or as it would be—is—in your language, Lord of the Abzu.”

“Abzu, you know, of course”.

This was the second reference he had made to this god, one of the oldest my people knew. A god or a monster, it was depended on the story, but he was once the god of freshwater, as Tiamat, the goddess known to my people as the Mother of All, was the goddess of salt water. They were wed, I knew.

But there was more to this title, as I knew. Whatever Abzu had been to my forefathers, and we had notions of these things even then, my people had replaced him with the trickster god, Enki. One of the chief gods of Sumer, creator of human kind, Enki was now the lord of the rain. And his temple, in the city of Eridu, was called the Maze Mountain. And legend spoke of it as something more. The corpse of the great monster Abzu, freshwater, sweet water, whom Enki the hero had slain.

The temple of Enki had been called after the great god whose death had laid its foundations: the Abzu, and Enki was the Sar Abzu. And yet even our myths sometimes allowed the Abzu the old god might not be dead—that perhaps, he merely slept.

“After father Sky and mother Earth removed themselves from each other’s arms,” the strange young man continued, “there was, in the beginning, two primordial voids, not one, as is common in most mythologies. Tiamat and Abzu. Freshwater and Saltwater. The sea and the cistern. The two waters. Mayim.”

“My god,” he said, “is a storm god. Your god too, though perhaps you do not know this yet. He will appear to your son, the foreigner Moses out of a flaming cloud, and so to the people Israel. He will appear to the prophet Elijah as a cloud no bigger than a man’s fist. He will appear in clouds—and in dreams. Job will hear him from a storm.”

My mind whirled at these names being given to me, so familiar and so strange. What was this place? Where was I? Did I merely dream? Something told me I did not.

“Zechariah, he will say that the punishment for those who do not go to Jerusalem—forgive me, Salem, now the throne of the man you go to see Melchizedek, someday my capital—those who do not go to my temple in Jerusalem to make their yearly obeisance, the punishment for them will be that there shall be no rain upon them. This is the weapon of our god’s punishment. Jeremiah, who has not yet been born, who is a long way from being born, who will preside over the downfall of our people and their transformation, he will say, the storm of the Lord will burst upon the heads of the wicked.”

He rose then. Something had happened to him, he was enormous, and I saw in his hand a white shield with a blue star upon it. He placed his other hand upon my shoulder, and I thought that I had never seen a human being of such majesty in my life. His speech, once the light, ruminative tones of a shepherd, now shook the space we inhabited together.

“Remember, the oldest myth is that which speaks of the Earth and Sky, and how they loved each other, and how their love suffocated life. Abzu, in the myth, was killed because he became enraged at the creation that had come from Tiamat and himself, and made to destroy it. He would not make that sacrifice. Like Chronos, in another myth, he could not stand the children that the woman he loved brought forth from the two of them. For that Enki killed him for that, and enthroned him in his own temple.”

“Some say this myth is different from the other myths, that Freshwater and Saltwater are not Earth and Sky. I say to them on the second day God said, “Let us separate the waters from the waters.” He did not call the upper waters heaven, no, He called the expanse He made the sky. The upper waters, they are above the sky. They are rain. They are the storm.”

“What, my friend, my brother, my father, is the source of Abzu, of Enki, the freshwater upon this Earth?”

“The rain, my son. The rain, which the storm god brings forth. There they sit still, contemplating each other through creation, hidden yes, but not lost. Abzu and Tiamat. The freshwater and the salt. The sea and the sky.

It is not the sky which loved the earth, but the sea, and it was not Air that they placed between the Earth and the sky, but the expanse which God called heaven, behind which he hid the waters which nurture the Earth.

"From the sea came life, and from the sky came rain. And that rain that falls, rain that could not fall when the Sky slept in the arms of the Earth, this is what gives birth to the children of the Earth. Your God did not create the waters. “In the beginning the Earth was without form and void and the spirit of God moved over the waters.”Yes, and in the end, they are all love stories.”

Suddenly he wrapped his arms around me, and whispered in my ear. It should have seemed strange, but it did not.

“The love of the first union was too perfect and did not allow for life which, dying, shows its imperfection. But perfect love is not the aim of life, it is the miracle of imperfect love. The love between two humans is a greater victory than the love of the gods because there is far more stacked against it. The process of humanity is to, with their own love, rebuild the great love, whereby they will be destroyed. To be gathered into the glorious recreation of the first perfect love is the unknown aim of each human life, and each human love strives to repair in its own world that which it does not know it came from, and cannot remember how much it misses. For in that moment of creation we are all one. And I speak to you, my father, as your son, as I am also your father and watch you all the days of your life.”

The scene vanished.