We re-encamped on the land between the heights of Ai, that lovely city which would be burned to the ground by Joshua, and Bethel, where my grandson would see the tumbling angels.

In those days the land of Canaan was a babble of voices. The Jebusites dwelt in their citadel of Jebus, which would be Salem, which would be Jerusalem. Amalekits and Hurrians, Amorites and Perizzites swarmed the land, living in peace or minor war, in an unbending cycle of generations. In those days, there were the five cities of the plain which ruled over the land of the Canaanites. Bela, known sometimes as Zoar, Adamah, Zeboiim, Sodom, and Gomorrah.

In two hundred years time all would change. The Hittites would come from the East with their iron chariots and form a vast kingdom in Anatolia. Where the numberless cities of Sumer and Akkad had stood since time immemorial would be Assyria and Babylon, the snarling empires. A few centuries later the Philistines would arrive from the island kingdoms of Mycenae, over the great sea which lasts the coast of Israel, and Israel itself the land of my people, would form as an exodus of travelers from the lands of Pharaoh, led by another prophet, dared the great Way of the Sea. Moab, Edom, and Ammon would form. The ancient, silent cities would be gone.

There would be, again, as there always is, the idea that all of this is new, and that new is right, better. Those two hundred years would see the great Hammurappi, with his code of law on which he stands suppliant to the power of Shamash, god of the sun, called a monument for the ages. Yet it was three hundred years already since Urukagina, King of Lagash, had given the world his code which limited the power of the priests and the landowners, articulated the laws of fair dealing and the right to protection from hunger, crime, or seizure. It was far different, but it was not so distant.

There was much before this. Great Jericho where men had lived since the dawn of time, seven thousand years before and more. Mighty Byblos, sacred to the white lady, famed for is cedars. Damascus of the Arameans and Susa of Elam. Sidon of the Lebanon and Jerusalem of gold. These were cities which had known all the hands of all the people who had ever lived in these lands, long before even the pyramids of Egypt were built.

To the walls of Jericho everything that has happened from now until a time four millennia distant, is not longer than the time from now, backwards, to its founding. And we imagine that history is something we can fathom, and that we are the pinnacle of creation, never to be toppled or moved on from.

It was beginning already, however. Between Mesopotamia and Egypt to the south, between the Hittites to the northwest, Mittani to the north, and the ferocious nomads of the Arabian peninsula to the east, our Canaan would be as small man at the table of giants.

Those who came after me would raise their hands against the Midianites, the Amorites, Pharaoh and the Hittites. My own people. They would condemn the gods of these other nations, condemn the nations. But Pharaoh was not my enemy, he was merely a powerful king, acting as is only natural to powerful kings. It is from the Hittites that I bought the Cave of Machpelah, in which some day my bones will rest. I lived with the Amorites at the Oak of Mamre. And the Midianites, whom we would destroy, would be kind to my people in the desert. In those days we were many, but we lived in peace, in fact in community. Their gods were no longer my gods, but because I did not need them to be what trouble was that? Was it harm to me that they imagined a different sky?

If I was chosen for anything—a fact that, in those days, was seeming more and more remote—how it could be as anything but a messenger to those who chose to listen? If it were not so, why should He speak only to me, unless his voice could not carry among other men.

And what could I offer them? Did my faith do me, who dwelt in the wilderness, more good than that of the Hittites did them in their populace cities? I was an even smaller man, at that table of giants, and if God had not wanted it this way He would have planned it differently.

When I was a child my father told me that mankind was created by the god Enki at just such a table. At a banquet of the gods, drunk, with his hammer, as entertainment and a show of power.

At last we are defined, I think, by what we are opposed to. So Assyria coalesced from a thousand different states in response to the proposed threat of emergent Babylon, and mighty Egypt. Had the threat been only these cities of the plain, Bela, Adamah, Zeboiim, Sodom, and Gomorrah, these five maidens of civilization, how much smaller would Assyria have become? How would it have understood to dream of being a match for the mighty armies of Hammurabbi and the Pharaohs? The wolf that became Assyria could form only when the sheep became fat enough. But it was artifice: Assyria formed from a hundred separate cities whose separate histories are longer than Assyria could ever match if it lasted three thousand years. Which it will not, which it cannot. For the threat of Assyria will spawn a bigger wolf, as surely as the rising of the sun.

So it always is. The god of a thin man in the wilderness is a voice, nor does he think to make him more than that: what appears appears, and remains. In two generations time my grandson touched this God. In a thousand years, they will build him a house, for they will know then just what kind of furniture He likes. In three thousand years He will have houses all over the world.

But will He ever be as real as He was as a voice in the wilderness?

God was a breath, then he defeated Leviathan and put on scales, and then He created the world. God was a voice, and then He took me from my home. My grandson saw Him as a man, and then He gave Him a new home and made me the great-grandfather of a people. What will that people do? What of my son Ishmael? What shall we believe if God ever changes again?

When our ashes are found by generations to come, they will call us Israel, or Assyria, or Babylon. The nameless ones will fade, as the nameless ones before us already have.

But I never lived in a land called Israel. I lived in Canaan. Distant voices, they sang me to sleep.

The sun rises, as it always has, as it always will on the cities of the plain, be they mortar or ashes.What chance have we, from the god's drunken hammer born?

Years passed peacefully, on the plain near Ai. There were times I felt I had forgotten the voices either of my father or my God, and I felt myself growing old.