After a few years in the wilderness, an event occurred which, though minor enough in the end, stuck with me for many years. When I say we lived in the wilderness for nearly two decades (and here we were only halfway through our first), we did not always stay there. Droughts were quite frequent then, and when they need came we would retire to settled places, or near them. We had few belongings, and no followers—all that came later. We could move, and we did, when the times required it.

That year a famine came, and the land between Bethel and Ai grew sparse and unable to support our livestock. We packed our things and made ready to move. Lot told us that he would return to Ur, but when the drought came to an end, he and his wife would join us again. To this we agreed.

Sarai and I set out for Egypt, judging that the safer bet. None of us knew how widespread this famine was—my son, my grandson would both discover as well, and at last to their great honor, how the world can push you, when it chooses, wherever it has a mind for you to go..

My wife, Sarai, was a beautiful woman, and I knew that Pharaoh, as any king in those days, would kill me for my wife. I begged and pleaded with her, told her we need not go near the major cities, need not come to the attention of the Pharaoh. But Sarai always shook her head and smiled, and would not speak. I could not prevail over her, nor could I refuse her for she it was who had chosen to come with me.

And so I told her to say she was my sister, for then Pharaoh would let us both live. I knew, too, that Pharaoh would take her as his bride in either case

Perhaps I should have died, rather than allow my wife to be taken by another man. That is not what a man would do, nor a sight a man should see while he has breath in his body. But who was I living for? And how many of them were there? My God told me he would make me as numerous as the stars in the sky, or the sands of Earth. I say I do not care about myself, though you will judge—who leaves Ur, to become a great man? But it came to me to wonder how many lives would I give up to save, not my wife’s life, but her dishonor.

Who has honor who dishonors the gods? How many lives would be outrageous in the eyes of God? And was I chosen for a word so that that word might perish under Pharaoh’s knife?

Yet if I could have chosen to resign this life rather than live through that day, and consider honorably done what broke the compact that was made between me and God, gladly would my right hand have done it, for there is no joy in recalling it. Never before, nor since save one time, was my faith in what had brought me nothing so far, so fiercely tested. I made my choice. If my choice was sinful, or cowardly it, let it be accounted me on the day of judgment.

We came to the Pharaoh and he took my wife. Those were the times we lived in, when a man like that could do as he wished. I felt my soul grow a thousand times in anger and thought, almost, that I would fight the God then knew again why I would not. For I thought of Lot, who had not followed us on this journey, and I thought of what he had asked me beneath the wall of stars. And I wanted to tell him we did not leave Ur because the things that we believed in were wrong, but that they were not great enough to reflect man—and that they surely too dishonored the gods for thinking so little of them. For how was this pharaoh different from those gods, the gods Ur claimed? He could take everything I had and keep it as surely as Enlil, Lord of the Earth. And he could do with me exactly as he wished. And was the sky, then, filled only with more Pharaohs?

But there was a thing in me that neither Pharaoh nor Enki could rule and which knew its master when He came, and if He had a thousand names it would not make him any less one thing…we did not come from nothing, we are not the only thing one could imagine the sky, but we are greater than we have so far imagined.

Let there be a thousand gods before and a thousand gods to come, I will believe in all of them, so long as together they recompose the voice I heard in the wilderness. It can. Anything can. Any name or series of names, and any dream, or composite of dreams can. I claimed, nor knew no names I only believed in what spoke to me.

Illness beset Pharaoh, until he inquired after the cause of his distress. When he learned it was because he had taken the wife of Abram the Hebrew, she was returned unharmed her arms full of gifts. Then came rain, the greatest gift of all, and we returned to our home, and though I did not know, I no longer feared.

With us came an Egyptian woman, whom Sarai had taken into her household. Her name was Hagar.