In the morning we began to move. I had sent runners out with the dawn, and they had reported that the camp of our enemy was fortuitously close to our own encampment, no doubt due to its proximity to water. They would be moving, out of enemy territory now, but they could not have gotten far. We had horses, and nearly a hundred able bodied men. The prisoners would be among the baggage train for that reason: An ambush is no time to guard a prisoner. Nor to have one of antagonistic loyalty beside you in the line of battle. It could be quick, in and out without trouble or pursuit. Or it could be a disaster. Still we headed out.

In truth, it was not that I was afraid of what might befall. Despite my current uncertainty, some part of me could not be dissuaded from believing that my life had its own protections. No, it was not that.

There are surprisingly few times in a man’s life when he must ask himself questions. Some do, more than others, and some choose to. But on the whole, it is often possible to forget to ask.

Sometimes, however, it cannot be avoided. I knew that once I had given my wife, who I loved more than anyone in the world, into the hands of an enemy. And now that it was my cousin, who I had not seen for years, I knew I was unwilling to do the same.

It was hard to imagine there could be a worse thing I could do to the person I loved most than ride out as I had.

For what could Sarai think? When we were in Egypt, I would not even risk my life to save hers and here I was leading a raiding party to save a cousin I had not nearly so much reason to love.

What else could she believe but that I was willing to sacrifice myself for his sake, and not for hers?

It was not that. It could not be that. But what had changed?

As our horses slowly ascended a bluff for its vantage point, a shout to my right alerted us. The glint of armor to the East, a surprise. Somehow, we had out paced them and not stood in perfect position to ambush them at their most vulnerable. The men around me tightened the straps of their armor. Above us, a hawk wheeled, and cried out with a sharp voice. Everything froze.

Once, what seemed like long ago, a voice had come to me and told me to leave my home, the land of my fathers, the gods I worshipped. But, as I have said, it had been years since the voice spoke to me.

There was peace to this life, but no rapture. Is this what the voice promised me when it spoke, this crowded ring of five hundred tents, this stubble of grass, the noonday sun cracking my skin? Is this where the voice had always intended to leave me forever?

Ten years had passed in the wilderness. Ten years of silence. Was that why I could not choose, could not trust, to leave Lot in the hands of this God as I had my wife?

Somehow, though I knew this was the logical answer, I did not think so. No, I thought it was something else.

I was no longer alone.

Our little encampment in the wilderness had prospered in the last five years. I was now the leader—if anyone could be called such in our fiercely independent little community—of nearly three hundred people. What did that mean?

These men who read my story years from now will believe that I was given, or invented, the only god who was alone. But this was not true. While the great empires, Assyria, Babylon, had many gods, while many gods were recognized in many places, nevertheless it is entirely true that each city has its own god. Each city of this many-citied plain had a god who was alone. Ur, as I have said, is dedicated to the moon god, Nanna.

Uruk is the city of the beautiful, fertile Inanna, Queen of Spring. Eridu is the city of Enki. Each god the sole ruler of his or her city, and our god, though He had no name and as yet no true followers but myself and my wife, was the king of our wilderness settlement. No, it is not that He was alone, only as they were alone. And if Assyria had many gods it is only because it held the gods of all those cities that were in Assyria—many, a countless many. And that, it seems to me was the difference.

No, it is not that our God was alone. It is that we were alone. I was alone.
And now I was no longer.

And here my God manifested His difference. And here at last I understand why I had been made to wait for so, so long.

Enki, they say, created man. He did it at a party, drunk, he did it so the gods would have servants. That’s the idea of gods my people grew up with. That a whole city existed, and its fat was skimmed, for the priests and their gods. That man existed for the sake of god.

And yet, though I dwelt now in the wilderness with three hundred souls, only myself and I strongly suspected, my wife had ever heard the voice of this God.

A god who needs, a god who asks, He does not send his people into the wilderness alone for few fat calf’s and few lambs can be offered to Him there. And He does not speak to two people alone, for few indeed are the prayers offered from the mouth of two.

I stood on the cliff with my men, moments, perhaps, from death, but in my mind I sat again in the crook of a hill alone. I saw again the dew sparkling like little stars among the thin tufts of wild grass, constellations of the dirt, and I heard the sound of the voice in silence, reverberating through the curtain of the wall of the sky. The world hummed around me, as it had once, so many years ago. And this god never even asked me to be alone, but bid me take Sarai, my wife, the love of my life.

To be alone, a terrible proposition. To be alone from the universe’s gigantic birth to its end, silent or molten. For the sky to be an empty home, rattling forever with the bitter laughter of all four of the winds. Why?

I had stood in the wilderness and asked what God wanted of me, but that was a ridiculous question for me to ask. If this god had wished for anything from us He would not have sent us here. He would, as Enki had done, have founded a city.

Now I prepared to go after my cousin, to rescue him from a far greater power than myself. And to do that, I needed much more help than I could ever provide. The wind shuddered again through the empty desert, and turned over, a living thing. The gates of my mind opened at last.
I stood before my men. There were just over one hundred of us who could ride, and just over one hundred horses to make a passable showing. A ludicrously small group to attempt what we would attempt. Small enough, perhaps, or too small. We would know soon.

A cloud formed on the horizon, no bigger than a man’s hand. For some reason, I couldn’t stop staring at. Then, cleaving the air with its startling rumble, the peal of thunder.

If God had spoken to me in the city of Ur, it would have been as Enlil, or Enki, and there is no falsehood there. God is Enlil, and Enki. But I would have looked for the sign which is Enlil, or Enki, I would have found it there—it is there--and I would have missed the thing I was brought into the wilderness to see.

He who, has not been physically moved by a god, who has not been touched by a god, how can he believe? And a god who needs nothing, who desires only the fat of the wilderness, how could he be served?

And a leader of men in the wilderness, how could he forebear to act on the needs of men, and how could he choose to leave them in the hands of a god when that god had delivered those men into his hands, not to serve me, who had needed nothing as my god needed nothing, but so that I might serve them?

We were going after Lot because Lot was one of us, though he had not lived with us. And these men came because they saw in our action what they would wish, and need, done for them, should they fall into similar straits, had they not vanished into the rocks quickly enough. Our god chose not to be alone to help us, and I, likewise, was no longer alone to to help them. Enki, Enlil, Ishtar, or Nanna, the name does not matter—it is the purpose.

The God is before the world and every city builds on top of him mask after mask, so that He will be dressed, so that He will appear, suitable before the eyes of the citizens. He comes to be what a citizen needs and comes to desire what the citizens desire. This is not the making of a God, it is His unmaking. For true gods are before the beginning of the world.

And mankind was born to serve mankind.

And this is something that had to be learned too, and if something new must be learned, a new place must be found lest it be called by old names, Enki, and Enlil, and lest we not understand that we are in the presence of a new and shivering and wonderful and impossible thing.
As I stood on the hill and watched the giant army approach slowly, like a copper worm, tumbling into the air great clouds of dust, I had a vision. God made man from the dust of the Earth. The nations rise from the dust and constitute themselves as man is constituted. He made the cities and the wilderness, like mirrors to reflect each other with the distortions of each. And I knew that truth comes from the dust, that only the city which rises from the dust can bear the image of its own making.

I knew then, too, that man cannot look at the face of God, not for more than a moment. If a city ever came to stand on this spot of dust, then the lesson of that dust would be the last lesson it took. Thus we must always topple the citadels we build so they never cease to be a mirror to the wilderness, the only place where every lesson is new. And we were the people in the wilderness, and we must help each other to live.

Vision returned. They were all before me, young men, hands on their horse’s reins or held awkwardly at their sides. Men breathing, and the silence of the wings of death over their heads like a black shimmer in the air. But they would live. I smiled, for I knew they would live.
I saw them standing ready to follow me, and it was as if I was seeing them for the first time. They seemed uncertain, nervous. Confused. I knew why. I remembered being a captain of a hundred at Ur. In those days, the leaders fired up the soldiers, readied them for combat, by eliminating the humanity of the foe they faced. Made of them monsters, destroyers, barbarians who opposed the true good, which we represented. The savagery this invoked drove the fear away. I saw that my men, who must have had similar experiences, were waiting for this, for me to put the fear out of them. But it was no bad thing for men to fear, on a day like this. And we faced men. I stepped down from my horse.

I said to them that it is too good to be alive to waste it in battles. But it is only good to be alive when we live good lives. And it is wonderful to spend our lives to help our brothers.

I pointed to the army, now nearly passing under our position. I told them the truth, that we were not here to fight this army, that we could not. That if they came to take our lives we had every right to defend ourselves—that they did not have to be good men—but they were many, we were few, and the war was over. And so, I told them, we get in quickly, we take what we came for, and we get out. And every one of you returns to his own campfire tonight with stories of your own courage to tell your children, and your children’s children. I smiled at them. I loved them. I told them we would survive this together.

Over their heads the sky broke like a stampede of slate-grey stallions, the clouds catching fire as the sun ascended his throne. In that instance before setting out, we see the things we love. I saw my wife. I saw my father. And I saw my unborn children. I saw peregrination after peregrination on the same theme, the human blessing, an end to being alone and the building of a world.
And as I turned away from them and took my place at the front, I put away my sword. That was not what my hands were for.

The white dust rose about us as hooves pounded the narrow mountain track, and the drums of our approach sounded sweet to me, like the music of a flute. There was something in the rhythm of my horse, a kind of lull. I had only an instant. As we charged down that hill, everything froze in place where it was, and I looked up and the thunder struck and the sky, and myself, were swallowed in blackness.