Alethia (Genesis in verse, with a prayer) 3.49–3.636

And let there be signs by which, the sky shining, we may bear witness that the waters of the flood have been sent away: for when, in the dense air, light moisture is hung in thin mists and the cloud is already gathering black waters into its hollows, I will pour out my rays, and the curving image of the sun will adorn for me a beautiful bow in the highest circle, painting the vault of the sky; and, warming with its light, let it dry up the rains and scatter the showers into the air, so much so that the world in its other age may take beforehand from this sign a sample of the punishment to come, since the bow has more of glowing fire and now less of rain.” Astonished at such commands, at which all things tremble, and eager at the gracious promises, in which all things rejoice, Noah and his sons together, whose lives were sturdier, vie in cleaving with hoes the fields, glad with mud and sweet moisture, and wed the countryside with seed; now, in spring, the grass, very thick on the widely spread plains, turning from stalk to grain, its milk hardened, gives back a manifold harvest with heaped-up interest: and now the new vineyard, its shoots heavily laden, luxuriates with rich fruit, which, swelling it with sweet nectar, it brings forth, and cups are born from hard wood. It happened that, while Noah gladly celebrates the honors of the Lord, indulging in feasting and pouring sweet cups, he felt the living liquor and, overcome by heavy sleep, laid his limbs, careless of them, on the faithful couch:

and at the same time his garment, rolled back, uncovered the secret parts of his body, and the source and origin of yourself, most wicked Ham, moved your laughter, and you set about involving your brothers, Shem first and great Japheth, in the stain of your guilt. Learn what … with laughter you alone: the better judgment of the brothers thinks it an occasion for duty; for, snatching a covering and placing it behind their backs, retreating step by step, turned away, they covered their father's shame with their hands, and each of them snatched from his brother the palm of piety set between them. For after Noah's heart, freed from sleep, regained the messages of divine sense, he repays his sons' deserts with such reward: “Cursed Ham, slow to serve your father, you will be the slave of your brothers; you, Shem, eldest by birth, blessed of God, will live, and your younger brother (now by his seed) will spread as lord through the wide world, until his numerous offspring set up their seat in his brother's houses, and, mingled with kindred peoples, fill the neighboring cities and those they will build.” Having said this, the old man, when he had run through years fifty short of a thousand, which the full sum refuses, aware of the future, his breast released in death, departed and left this world and its cares to his sons:

for it was given to those free of guilt and far from vice, and, after the sin which is expiated by the first death, when God the Spirit had filled deeply the sanctuaries of a chosen mind and watered a friendly heart, to know all things at once and to behold them set before their eyes: the ages which fleeing time has snatched away, the age that is, and the age that will one day bring what later descendants will enjoy, and whatever the heavy earth, the liquid sea, the quickening air and greedy fire, which gives birth from too much fuel, pour out, conceived for the various uses of men. But after the condemned offspring lost so great a gift and nothing remained to the wretched except that their ancestors had known the secrets, each, mindful of his parents' warnings, recalling them, and turning over with himself all things, what was fitted to what ends, in what part of nature they would help, sought to store them up for this purpose in fixed letters of speech or in signs, entrusting words to a solid form. From this the arts took their beginning, which writing preserved and sent the inventions of the ancients down to late descendants, and, mingling the discoveries of the new with the studies of the old, gave hope to the astonished, and drew them, moved by vain desire, headlong to the forbidden search into the future:

whether the almighty Founder gave to the world (which some, in a fallen error, have called a bodily god) what he alone possessed, and scattered through all the members of things signs that move as messengers of the age to come, so that he may always bear witness to himself to his creatures through the whole mass, and the image of mind may confess its author, and it may be set plainly in things what the bountiful Ruler can grant to peoples, what he can take away, what he sometimes forbids his servants, for whom the kingdoms of heaven are prepared, to know; which the agate, Pyrrhus's gem, proves true as a witness, showing the Muses and Apollo enclosed within it, brought forth with the world (what should we not think God signified through all things, since he even betrayed the lies of the world in advance and marked what would later be feigned?); or whether rather the simple motion of the world brings all things; or whether the grievous inventor of death, not suffering matter that could serve fraud to lie idle, subjected all things to his malignant will, so as to bring fate upon the world. For while he counts the courses and the various returns of the stars and enjoys the wondrous diversity of the sky, he has set for himself fixed times of uncertain favor, and, producing a ready faculty and set bounds for harming with varied effect in varied conjunctions, (so as to) spread odium on the stars and lay crimes to the charge of sacred heaven and of the stars that adorn the world, since he feigns to the peoples as fated whatever he himself does.

From this comes the art of what the entrails' fibers tremble at, what the bird's wing flashes, what the lightning, as messenger, signals when the clouds are struck. For because the public enemy, having embraced with shrewd zeal all sudden motions and chances, remembers … to render, he persuaded the peoples to think the inventions of false poison divine. Not otherwise among the Ethiopians, (who) have dogs as kings, freedom is ruled by tyrants: when a judgment suited to definite matters is sought from the motion of an unknowing body, and they take chance for command. Nor does opinion, with strong conviction, presume these signs to be less on its own behalf; for Galba's Fortune refutes Pyrrhus's gem: she who could fashion a statue over so many years can also counterfeit a stone. Using these frauds he mocked those caught by the passion to know the future, and then, as the fear of overcoming fate goaded them, he brought on the anxious the crime of the magic art through their zeal, by which they would rather worship him and offer impious incense on dedicated altars, when the crowd had been betrayed by its parent. And soon Nimrod, born from an unsound stock, a giant in bulk and mind, master of the court of Babylon, an unjust hunter who captivated the minds of the Persians, led them away from the rites of the true Lord to the worship of fire.

Nor did he, the head of crimes, guilty before the world and his own enemy, mock the cares of men, too eager, only by such shrewd art, but he rushed upon their minds themselves and went down deep into all their senses, and soon into their affections too. For when a father's only child had dragged with him into bitter death the hope of the family, the unhappy father, spending nights and days in tears and drawing out his complaints in dull lamentation, while he rages and seeks his snatched-away son in everything, and holds the relics, sweet in boyish years, or, dutiful beyond death, consoles his grief with an image, so fed his love, inflamed by longing, that, setting up the whole form in Parian marble, he believed, mad, that it lived with sense shut up inside it and heard his complaints, and with dedicated altars transferred the worship of the supreme Author to shades. This man surpassed all the guilty in gravity, even that teacher of crimes who founded the magic arts. The one is guilty openly, by madness and a profane mind; the other does harm by piety. This crime defiles the more because it has the appearance of virtue; for at once all nations embraced this crime, endlessly sacrificing offerings to the shades, as the Alans now bear witness; each held their dear parents as their gods, and later their kings as well, under whose name lying

Greece, while it labors to work falsehoods in among truths, added obscure shades with vain reasonings, excusing tombs and the names buried in graves, until madness stretched even through all kinds of things and imagined that there were gods in the smallest things and in shameful members: for the inventor of death stood by in such places and, fostering errors, called forth oracles in wondrous parts of the world, using for his snares fire, or a hot spring, or caves. First Themis mocked the peoples with talkative winds as the earth breathed them out; afterwards false Apollo deceived the peoples, and then, forced to change his seats, he became the physician of the Leuci, and now, crossing the Gallic countryside as a fugitive, he troubles the German nations with harmful fraud and deceives barbarian (hearts). But I return to the main thread from which I digressed, to that line of ancestors. When Noah's offspring, multiplied by begetting, had filled all the eastern lands and saw the fields of Shinar grow too narrow, the young people, who were to be scattered through various parts of the world, broke out into these most sad words of complaint:

“Alas, how uncertain is the state of life that carries men along in the order begun, and how prosperity deceives the trust it created through changing courses, so that the sum of what we wished for turns to the opposite. Now, if it is right to say it, we are sorry that the numerous crowd of descendants, hoped for by our fathers' prayers, has grown; for the band we begot must be scattered through the world in exile: lost to its kin and losing them in turn, and, what is sharper grief, it will bring its own people a living death; and we wretched ones are condemned to a sad death, because, as old age hastens on, though the ancient age had gone beyond ten hundred years, we, already weary, scarcely reach three hundred, so that, exiled from our fatherland, we must give our bare and nameless limbs to unknown graves here and there for burial. So come, young men, while the crowd supplies strength that may survive you and not know a stern end, extend an eternal fame by deeds. Let us found a city, and in its name raise a tower so high that it breaks into the stars that paint the world and the vault of high Olympus, so that posterity, when we have left these lands, may think that we have moved to heaven.” So moved, the young men scorn rocks and whatever is cut from a cloven mountain: they bind with fire bricks shaped from the inward parts of the subdued earth, and prefer to owe the material of the future work to their own labor.

Bitumen, spread between, binds the bricks on both sides, so that the walls built around imitate solid rock. Now the tower, hurried on, rises, now with its top it leaps over the clouds and enjoys the nearer calm of heaven, when the Father speaks thus to the partners of his kingdom: “Look, what would this earthly phalanx in its madness not break open, which believes that a structure built by mortal hand can touch the lofty heavens and lead to the ether that is ours. No one clothed in an earthly body has ascended to heaven except he who descended from high heaven. But since (they are one people, with one form of speech too) the crowd followed the wicked persuaders with eager assent and did not consider what right would allow, daring lofty things which nature by itself forbade to be done, let them bear, with no further punishment, the loss of so vain a labor. Yet so that they may know that what was denied as impossible is also forbidden, let us now go down and confound hearts swollen with proud agreement with the voices of varied speech, so that what the crowd, united in crime, sinned, the better discord of confused tongues may condemn.” He spoke, and upon those intent on the work and raising the mass forgetfulness, slipped beneath, first enters their astonished minds, and there came upon them the full command of an unknown tongue.

The master builders, as zeal for the work fails, rebuke their lingering fellows: but no one answers words he does not understand, and if anyone tries to open his mouth, he hisses, or pants with the roar of broken speech, or shrieks and mimics threats with a sharp groan. So the baffled band abandons the vain labor undertaken with a perverse mind: now no one follows his kinsman, no one his father: each (joins) to himself the one he understands and gathers him to his side: all kinship perished, language makes the nation: they are scattered in equal bands and seek lands set apart under various stars. Not otherwise the birds on the soft plains of the field, which the carefree day persuaded to wander in mixed flocks and look for food, when night draws near and they seek their leafy roofs, at once each crowd follows its own kind, and they gather in rapid flight where like color or like voice has led them: so then the one people split into parts, each kind became a race, and in lands far apart they settle and fill the world with nations.

Yet this, though it is the punishment proper to the guilty, is not empty of a sacred gift; for although it was just vengeance that those whom reverence for heaven, which is the proper seat of the Parent of the world and of things, did not touch should not understand one another, such a punishment does more good to the guilty creatures: that what the persuasion to guilt of a few had brought in might not again infect all and make the wickedness common; that bloody wars and death, summoned by peoples in rabid fury, might not be forever; and that citizens, driven out, might find it grievous to leave their kin. For it is needful that the exiled crowd never long for its own, and even that it hate them: and therefore the variety of tongues sees to it that no one wishes to remember his own people. Yet the sound of the Hebrew speech and the ancient language remained among those who, free of the guilt, were a part not unjust, the sons whom Shem begot, whom the sacred care of the Parent helps (and) reverence for the true (God) touches. But after madness, stirred up through the whole world (to say nothing of the abominable crime of the magic monster), drove the mortal race to tree trunks and stones, and to hollow shapes of hard metal made by art, and figures void of light, and broke minds that looked to things above and bound them to the inert earth, the contagion of the foul stain engulfed these too.

Not otherwise do clouds of disease, stirred up from the burning lands of the Ethiopians along a corrupted path of the sky, envelop the marshes with a greedy, conquering plague, when whoever groaned, struck by the swift lightning of death, fell himself at once, and whoever saw another falling fell too, and the dire pestilence strewed heaped corpses everywhere on the plains and carried through a war: so then error, embracing all in the headlong mass of madness and going back for those it had passed over, had seized them, until the line, descending by successive steps, to which Shem had given its source and origin and its noble birth, came to Terah, who, leaving the chief seat of the Chaldean race with the whole stock of his kin, seeking another city and new ways and a new home, remained at last as a new settler in Assyrian Carrhae. And when he had completed five years beyond twice a hundred, he passed away in the manner of the fathers. But his son Abram, a man worthy of heaven, already from the very threshold of life worshipping the true God in his mind, had turned away from the rites of the Gentiles. After his father's death, when he was now free to follow God's commands without offense, the Lord deigned to approach his servant with these admonitions:

“Since we have found you alone in the whole world who delight in sincere faith and reverence for us, leave far behind your ancestral seats and the guilty lands and your polluted house: your whole kindred is profane and you must flee it. To the fields of a better land you will come with me as guide, lest you be part of an unjust race, you who can be the head of a holy one. Then I will establish sacred things which will remain for you, blessed one, and make your name great among all peoples, repaying all good things, or evil, as they deserve, to those whose will toward you has been different; through you blessing will be poured out and spread to all tribes and to the age reborn.” He spoke, and gives him a mind to serve his commands and to believe the gracious promises. No delay holds him back: with flocks of various kinds and his father's servants, with his faithful wife, with the dear child of his brother, whose name was Lot, departing by a straight path he sets out on a way unknown to him. Very soft fields offer glad paths, and the air, smiling sweetly with favoring south winds, is troubled by no storms, until he entered Canaan, the lands of the peoples whom Ham begot, and the most fertile countryside of Shechem. After he hears from God's voice that these are granted to him and to his future offspring, he raises devoted altars and, a new worshipper, renewing the old honors, increases them.

From there he goes to Bethlehem, a place chosen and hallowed by the hospitality of the blessed man, which surpassed all lands in its proud merits, since one day (to be named second only after the heavenly seat) it was seen to be more worthy to receive the pledge of God, sent into the world by the law of salvation, prepared to the world's great wonder, and to send man back to the stars. Here too father Abram raises solemn altars and sets up dwellings in the new fields that he must soon leave. For, forced by famine to change his home again, he moves camp and drives with him his whole house, servants and flocks, and, paying fair prices in trade for goods, enters Egypt. But his beautiful wife is protected by the name of sister, lest raging lust spur barbarian hearts to the murder of their holy guest. At last Pharaoh, soon drawn by the image of her radiant beauty, burns with desire and prepares marriage and fixed covenants by law; but dread, sunk wholly in terror, falls on him and suddenly shakes his wicked heart with turmoil, and black horror terrifies his mind and binds his limbs, so that the king of a sacrilegious people might perceive that God had condemned such sad wishes, God who indeed had inspired such counsel in his servants, so that the barbarian enemy might know that Abram was then safer as Sarah's husband, when he had learned by experience that he could not with impunity attack with profane iron one whom he might not even widow.

So of his own accord he restores her, unstained, to her husband, confesses his fault, and sends him back safe with a large escort and laden with much produce to Shechem and his Bethlehem: and gladly they work the fields they have regained and graze the rich pastures far and wide with their flocks mingled. But there were frequent quarrels between the shepherds; for the land lay open, divided by no boundary for anyone. So Abram, the elder, full of foresight but most observant of equal right, to settle the disputes and remove greedy quarrels, divides the fields granted to them. The younger chose the part where, with sweet waters poured out on every side, the Jordan weds the countryside, glides with shady banks and makes its rounded glades pleasant. Captivated by these, Lot, turning from his uncle's house and its just strictness, moves to the fields bordering Sodom, when God, strengthening the heart of saddened Abram with this hope, said: “Do not be troubled that, left by your brother's son, you have borne the loss of your holy father. You alone will be to me a countless people, you who will hold the kingdoms which you see toward the rising sun, which you look out on turned toward the North, and which you look back on lying under the warm south wind, and enclosed by the shore of the spreading sea. These I will grant to you and to your offspring and to the peoples of your line, living forever, for an eternal age.

so that you may now enjoy these lands far and wide, rise and survey first, as a stranger on foot, the wild lands that lie open.” So he spoke: Abram gladly obeys and, leaving his home, moves on and comes to Hebron, and under the spreading foliage of the dark oak of Mamre pitches his tents, and, a shrewd leader, adds strength to his new camp: here too he builds solemn altars to the Lord, to worship him. Meanwhile, as great tumult spreads all around, a greedy enemy is at hand, whom the land, full of all kinds of wealth, provokes: hooves pound the plains and rebound, and the plunderer roams with loosened reins. Lot bursts out with the king through the opened gates, and a neighboring band of kings bearing allied arms: they bring cavalry and infantry with them, the column extends, the lines clash, they strike down and fall alike. The invaders have help enough in this, that as they prepared to make war they had already foreseen in their minds their enemies falling in sudden defeat; the defenders are held up only by the appearance of the better cause. But the youth of Sodom, softened by shameful luxury, when the renewed war-cry blazed up again into fury, turn their backs in fear: some seek the walls at a run, some the mountains and woods, some, hemmed in by troops, stretch out cowardly hands to sad chains.

As soon as his uncle Abram learned that Lot was captured, not with weeping (for what would empty weeping avail?) but dutiful with reason, he chooses from his whole household three hundred and twice nine servants and equips them with arms, and follows gradually where he found the enemy heading, slow and heavy with plunder, and takes care to come upon them in the first night of their rest, when sweet sleep is already watering their languid hearts and binding their weary limbs. So, when the insane rage of a hungry lion has broken with a flying leap into the enclosures of cattle in a pasture, it kills them all with tooth and paw, and its wrath puts off its greedy hunger to devour, and the wondrous patience of fear shuts in the groans of bitter pain in the victims: such then was the bearing of the leader. Striking those buried in sleep and wine, they slaughter people and kings with silent wounds. No tumult throws the camp into confusion; no one hears a step, except one whom mind and voice are already leaving; no one hears the sound of slaughter, except one whom death awakens. All is wet with blood; the earth, loosened in the dry calm, clots with gore, and, as the blood slows their step, slippery footprints totter on the stained field. Yet not every age is cut down by the sword at once: some are spared as booty (so great is the moderation of the just victor), those whom it was now lawful for all to take without offense; shameful flight scattered the rest, and pressing fear pursued them as far as the fields of Hobah.

But the victor, not at all moved by the praise of so great a triumph, amid horses and herds of cattle and the people recovered or captured, and treasures that weigh down vanquished and victors with greedy weight, gentle amid such joys and pondering in his heart the fortunes of men, returns almost with the reward of the vanquished, and gives back the booty and prizes of war to the plundered peoples and to the king, showing that he had not fought for himself: yet he offers a tenth of the booty taken from the enemy, which is the true offering, to Melchizedek, who then had the dutiful care of the highest Parent, bearing witness that God had won the victory; and he deserved, already then forewarned, to receive the mystic libations of the sacrament to come. And, his course accepted for greater rewards, by the voice of so great a priest praying for all good things for him, the Lord also honors his servant with the gift of his address: “Since plunder has not subdued you, greedy, by any allurements, the price of your faith and the wage of your labors is full for you with me, and I will protect you and all that is yours to be kept for your heir, whom, born late of your own seed, from your own body, you will love as a dutiful father, whom you already long for in mind, in whose place this Damascene pleases you, adopted from among your servants, while the infancy of a sweet foster child kindles and stirs your fatherly feelings and cheats your eager love for children of your own.

Look up at the curving sky, how it glitters with dense light in the painted night, how the crowded stars are pressed together by so many stars and, set before you, refuse to be counted: take this as the pattern of your seed, and hold from here the form and merit of your future stock.” So he spoke: and Abram believed, and the sole assent of bare faith counted for virtue, and, adorned with the merits of labor by being reckoned so, it granted him the full crown of righteousness. And so here the noble virtue of holy Abram shows that it is good to believe the divine Christ, who, the living voice of the Father, spoke again thus to Abram: “I am the almighty Lord, who brought you and yours out of the Chaldean race and at last, freed from your father's vices, settled you in a better land, so that my people, begotten through you, may dwell in blessed fields and spread its line far and wide, the nations driven out whom profane rites, through the foul error of their parents, once made sacrilegious. And since you hesitate and, doubting, so sin in believing, take for me a three-year-old heifer, already fierce in brow, and with her let a she-goat of equal age, chosen from the gentle flock, (and) a ram of the same age be slain in our honor: and when a dove joined with a chaste turtledove has closed the rite and the order of sacrifice has completed the whole, let the birds offered feel no further knife.

But let the beasts be cut through the middle, their bellies opened, and let only the three bodies go into two parts each, which, divided thus, you will set apart on clean sand, so that a fourfold double row may set matching limbs against limbs on either side. Then (what) you are bidden to hope for will come of itself before your sight, and you will prove it with your eyes.” He spoke: and Abram, accustomed gladly to obey God's warnings, hastens at once to carry out his commands. But when he had laid out the pieces on the ground in the order commanded, suddenly a black flock of importunate birds swooped in, the prey inviting them. Anxious lest they violate the sacred things with profane contact, Abram guards them on every side and keeps watch all around. But when the great burden of the duty he had taken on did not overcome him, amazed at so great a work, even as the sun set, behold, black terror, horrid trembling and sleep come upon him, bearing messages commanded and shaping the ages to come. I believe he seemed to see the Nile hemmed in by the peoples of the Hebrew race, and late descendants, and to recognize crowds that count themselves up to the highest number: then fierce struggles and the camps of his people led out, the sea crossed on dry foot, columns sunk in the deep, the shipwreck, with no fleet, that came upon the army on land: then the whole kingdoms of blessed Palestine laid open to the returning people.

To him, astonished at such sights, a kindly interpreter was not lacking: “Know beforehand your own and the offspring of your own, which, born after you, will grow in foreign lands and feel the servile yoke of the tyrant of the Nile; and when it has filled four hundred years in hard servitude, I will rescue it, take vengeance on its unjust masters, and restore it to the lands which the Nile and the Euphrates enclose with their gentle flood, but only when the sins of the guilty race of the Amorites and of the peoples (that) hold these kingdoms have filled up the sum of their crimes and have become worthy to be driven from their fathers' seats. But you, before that, departing happily at the far limit of a long life, praised by your children, in peace and by our gift, will go to your holy ancestors.” So he spoke: and from on high, when night was already bringing dense shadows over the lands, he gave a sign from the mountain; for a furnace with bright fire flashed out suddenly and twisted its tresses downward and sought the divided pieces, and, carried into the middle prepared for it, the flame in its headlong course consecrated them as it tasted them. Not otherwise, hurling their bodies through the thick air, torches fly slantwise through the void and surge, flashing with nocturnal splendor, and a lying star drags its red tress, and clouds shaken by the winds shake out downward a fire to lash the earth. Meanwhile, sure of the kingdom and of future offspring,

Abram longs to hasten becoming a father, but his chaste wife refuses the duty, which her worn-out old age, the sign now having ceased, shows to be vain: but believing that her husband's sweet child and new hope, born from whatever concubine, would be hers, she puts in her place in the bed her maid, younger in age (Hagar was her name, the land of the Nile her origin), and, approaching her husband with entreaties, prevailed on him to entrust his offspring to a lowly womb. O servile wickedness! As soon as Hagar felt the burden of her womb come alive, swollen with proud disdain she despised her mistress, the mistress to whom she owed a mother's love and the cause of her own swelling, in her rage. Rightly, then, most just Abram handed her over to the lashes of his wife; driven more by shame at these, she hides herself, indignant, far off in the deserts and secret lairs of wild beasts; nor does she flee because of what she has suffered, but, feigning excessive fear of her mistress, despises her again in the only way she can, and would rather endure the perils of a hidden road, had not an angel sent from Olympus met her and restored the maid to her former duties under a gentle mistress, and, refreshing her with great encouragement, bidden her return and hope for better, and taught her the name of her son, his ways and his hand, and the countless throngs of people from the stock of her descendants.

She returns with greater hope, now sure of the future, and by giving birth was the first to make her lord a father, when he was completing six years beyond eighty in the happy spaces of his life's course. When he had added twice six summers and one more in the order begun, the kindly Father deigned to approach him again with his usual address and bade him, trembling, live in happiness: and at the same time he unfolds the promises, which were the reward of virtue (then Abram, prostrate with body bowed, adores the Lord in supplication), and after many things, in telling which he satisfied the hopes of his faithful servant, he commanded him to set himself apart from all peoples by a silent sign, so that, the superfluous flesh freely cut away, it might be readily and clearly evident that the Lord had commanded, with bodily vices cut away, the keeping of a new progeny and a future offspring. The thing itself, though silent, says this: that God gave warning to cut away the shameful parts, and that boys fresh from their mother, new to life, while the mind does not yet know pain, should be consecrated on the eighth day, stripped of the foreskin; and that whoever should dare to corrupt so holy a covenant, failing to serve the law required of him, would be disinherited of the kingdom and of the life to come. And at the same time, so that he might believe by a true proof that countless nations would be created from his own stock, he said, changing their names so that they might proclaim this very thing:

“Let a letter renew you, a full syllable refashion you, so that your wife may be called not Sara but Sarra, and you not Abram, but, brighter with your name enlarged, may be called Abraham by future peoples from now on. This promise you share with your true wife, since, as the ages roll on, she will be the mother of the race, and, when the sun has run its year round again, she will make you a father. Although you think laughable the promises of my power, to which your old age would set limits, it will be the glory of divine right that what I have accomplished should be thought to have been possible. But I will forgive the doubting, and on the boy to come I will put a name that may rebuke this fault: Isaac, who alone, with the whole stock of his line, will be my sure heir, the covenant of the pact being kept. Nor yet will Ishmael here, whom alone you embrace, be without a sacred dowry; for, upheld by our gift, he will produce many thousands of men, nations of strong stock, to be ruled likewise by twice six princes.” He spoke: and Abraham, eager to hasten the pact he had received, now knocking at a hundred years, his son now of age, sets apart from the world by the commanded sign first himself, then his son, and all his dependents and servants, and makes them a new people and the source of the pious, receiving and fulfilling God's law by one and the same act (so great is his devotion). What would such ready and swift faith not deserve? This is no longer fear, but sincere love and the full proof of a servant, to undertake any command with so calm a mind that God is pleased to have commanded it. For before he was accustomed only

to be heard, but after such merit in his minister he now allows himself to be seen, and, though just indignation spurs him to vengeance, he does not with his gentle divinity refuse mortal sight. For when he was preparing to condemn the crimes of the lands and to destroy the guilty with flames, either as he truly is or in such a form as he knew he could be seen, confessing to his creature both his divinity and his number, though he came accompanied by heavenly servants, he set himself before his eyes. For as Abraham sat by his dwelling, three suddenly stood before him, shining with august light. Abraham, stirred by the image of so great a sight, runs forward and, prostrate on the ground, adores the Lord, one, though he marvels at three, and, eager to please, prays that he may be allowed to serve with a pious mind, and that the servants will not disdain to be refreshed with tables and food as the hours stretch toward the midday heat. So far did he waver in doubt between sight and his living senses, because the form showed a man whom his mind knew to be God. Yet the Almighty nodded assent and does not scorn the service of his pious creature, and, seen to hallow the food and tables, so that his devoted minister might believe what had been granted, he meets him as the pure and clear image of a priest, to give proof that one day true man, in face and whole body, would be taken on by God, and to give signs of the Christ to come, and, unfolding wondrous promises, to utter them, and by his presence to forbid his servant to doubt.