1.
What was Eliezer to do?
All he could as scribe for the House of Abraham was write to the House of Terah. Hopefully the letter would reach Haran, may he be blessed with bulls potent and cows fecund, and if not Haran then Bethuel, may he be blessed with dirt and not sand, and if not Bethuel then Laban, whom surely by now has grown into a righteous and honest man, may he too be blessed with all the cows and dirt and cooperative bondsmen.
As Abraham’s healer, chamberlain, taskmaster, and scribe, tidings of the evil eye fell to him. Abraham had met the accursed fate his father Terah predicted for his blasphemously non-idolatrous son. Everyone who knew Abraham knew his inclination to see invisible things, and perhaps wisely, they exiled Abraham away to carry on his craziness in a distant land where Terah had been given a deed to an abandoned double cave far beyond the furthest borders of the Sumerian Empire.
Eliezer did everything within his not particularly distinguished healing powers to lead Abraham back to the better gods of his nature, but Abraham’s vision of an invisible, silent god was long since more vivid to him than the dwellers of his house. Year by year, the god became less silent, and Abraham conversed with it all day for fifty years.
As his faithful bondsmen, they told themselves his god was benign, and humored their master with pretense to believing everything he saw. They sacrificed three times a year to Abraham’s god in whom they didn’t believe, prayed to this god they couldn’t see every Saturday morning, gave money for some place Abraham screamed about called the State of Israel, and sent their children to Hebrew school every Sunday - where all the kids do is play sports.
A cheerful heart does good like its medicine, and all was righteousness until the invisible god commanded Abraham to kill little Isaac, burn him, and eat him. Such a scandal. Everybody loved little Isaac, though he was 37 and almost four cubits tall, so really he wasn’t so little anymore. And look, this isn’t actually weird. Everybody sacrificed their children in biblical times, but for Abraham, this was really weird because, as I’m sure you remember, he was the guy who made enemies by screaming that nobody should sacrifice their children. And it’s one thing when you get rid of them when they’re two or three, but by the time they’re 37 they should probably be left alone. Anyway, everybody liked Isaac, and even Abraham must have known they would stop him if they’d ever heard about what the voice commanded, but everybody saw that their venerated lunatic was particularly anxious for that very brief time before the sacrifice, say... seven years.
The oldest brother of Abraham was named Nahor, may his memory and cattle be a blessing. Nahor told Eliezer that upon their exile, it was imperative that Eliezer always speak his mind to Abraham at all times, may Abraham be blessed with a hole in the head balancing the one already there, to make him remember which world is the real world. After sixty-two years of this, Eliezer was half mad himself, but for the entirety of those three-score and two, Eliezer took every Abrahamic eruption from the god of anger, every attack from the god of fear, every fistblow and whiplash from that idiot in good faith. Every time Abraham heard the voice, Eliezer pretended the voice was as real as though Abraham were still the small child who once broke all the idols Eliezer just shelved in Terah’s idol store.
The problem though was that Isaac’s mother really loved him. After they left Ur: An & Enlil and Enki be praised, she spent the next twenty-five years trying to have a child and had to watch as all those concubines Abraham concupisced got pregnant - and in all fairness, it's not like Abraham brought any new women home. Almost all of them were the young priestwhores Terah procured for Abraham to lure him back to a morally righteous life of idolworship. All of Abraham’s illegitimate children were not only still alive but had children or grandchildren of their own which Sarah had to watch every day. So Sarah knew that the problem was her rather than Abraham and understandably loved her only son. Well, when Sarah heard that Abraham killed their son, she died on the spot. Who can blame her? That son was a lot of work and not just for her.
The last the House of Terah heard from the House of Abraham was thirty-eight years ago when Abraham ordered Eliezer to take dictation for a letter: stating that three angels came to him to announce that Sarah would be great with child. In this next letter, almost forty years later, Eliezer would have to tell them the truth which he never told Abraham: these were no angels. They were Canaanite healers Eliezer sent for to examine Sarah. The problem was exactly as Eliezer thought - that special diet Abraham was always such a zealot about; no dairy and meat eaten together, nobody eats shellfish or pork or most parts of the animal, and all the blood drained from the little meat they could eat ... Who'd ever want to eat at all? Eliezer explained to the healers that Abraham was a little mixed up, so just go along with whatever he says.
Well, Abraham asked immediately if they were angels. They bemusedly looked at Eliezer and what could Eliezer do but shrug? OK, so they were angels. And when the angels wanted a little butter to go with their meat, could Abraham really tell them no?
Two of the healers distracted Abraham during the day and every day fed him oranges and pomegranates by the mina, which, by the way, is a biblical word for a weight measurement. They served Abraham tea from the East they called ‘ginseng’, but while Sarah would bring them those stupid ‘ashcakes’ she always made - and everybody wondered why she was so thin… the healers cooked Sarah special meals.... They fed her boiled octopus and fish eggs, they fed her pig liver and testicles, and at first, when Sarah got disgusted with the idea of eating testicles, they ground the pig testicles into a powder and served it to her in a potion; and while Abraham ate the good cuts from the veal and lamb, they fed her the heart and the kidney. They sawed the bones of animals to get the blood inside and put the special blood in a stew. They even made a broth from shellfish. Every night they told Sarah to go to Abraham so he’d shtup her while wearing damp wool boiled in ass’s milk.
Sarah was astonishingly svelte for her age, but that was because she barely ate a thing for decades. Why? Because she fucking hated Abraham’s diet. If she could she’d have eaten fried poultry giblets every day of her life in Israel, but even had her husband long since gone insane, he still watched the kitchen tent like a hawk to make sure no member of House Abraham ever ate anything his brain deemed unclean; but Abraham was now occupied in all-day conversation with angels he could actually see, and the other ‘angel’ served Sarah the best food she’d eaten in forty years. In three weeks she looked healthier than she had in decades, and within a week of that she was clearly pregnant.
All that was nearly forty years ago. It had been well over sixty years since Ur banished Abraham and his devoted servants. Never again would they lay eyes upon Ur’s beloved mudbricks and tombs and cuneiform documents. All the members of the House of Abraham longed to return and many eagerly awaited the day when Abraham may return to sense and could convince the Sumerian government to readmit him. “Next year in Ur” they all chanted in secret as they prayed to the east, and now more than ever they awaited the second coming of Abraham’s sanity, An & Enlil and Enki be praised.
But Abraham’s good senses seemed farther away than ever. After Sarah dropped dead, Abraham too dropped to the ground and those who saw him thought Abraham too had deceased. Eliezer was slightly ashamed by his silent jubilation, as he thought of how the return to Ur was at hand by virtue of slavely inheritance to the House of Terah, but Abraham returned to them; yet upon return, he was even less Abraham. He could neither walk nor ride, and only speak from the side of his mouth. In addition to the physical maladies inflicted upon him, divine Nergal, may his spirit be assuaged with bounteous flesh from people we don’t like, took from Abraham his short-term memory, and it is only a matter of time before all memory of his offering to the silent god is no more. In a few months, were Eliezer even to tell Abraham what happened, he would forget after ten minutes and ask “Where’s Isaac?” Abraham now barely speaks, believing he was justly punished for mishearing the invisible god. Not that one should be punished for mishearing things, but one must admit the punishment isn’t at all that bad considering that he did eat his son.
So it’s only a matter of time before the Canaanites discover that Abraham is demented and Isaac is dead. The House of Abraham is leaderless. It longs to return to Ur, An & Enlil and Enki be praised, but so long as Abraham is alive, they are banished, and whether they stay or go, they are putzing around like men already dead, unable to elect a war leader or even organize for proper battle training.
It’s been roughly fifty-three years since Sarah demanded Abraham to banish Ishmael and Hagar because Abraham seemed to prefer his head bondswoman to his wife, who never bore him a son. Under cover of night at Abraham’s orders, Eliezer brought them back to Ur to live as servants in the House of Terah as Eliezer gazed upon his beloved Sumerian wheat and mud from afar, and by the waters of Mesopotamia, there he sat down and wept.
Ishmael was just a kid at the time, but the illegitimate son was already a watermirror of his father, just as was Isaac until that divinely inspired schmuck put him to death. The seed of Abraham is obviously strong even if the brain is feeble, and if the physical resemblance continues, then Ishmael must still look exactly the image of both Abraham and Isaac.
Eliezer then knew what must be done.
In the most obsequious, pleading terms, he begged the House of Terah to send Ishmael and Hagar back to Hebron, where Eliezer was positive Abraham would immediately recognize Ishmael not as Ishmael, whom he had not seen in a generation, but as Isaac. He then could marry Hagar to Abraham as perhaps she always should have been, and while everyone here would recognize Ishmael and Hagar, Ishmael will become known to people all around Canaan as Isaac, and Hagar and Abraham’s second wife. She could even live under an assumed name and continue to take care of her son, and our enemies shall be none the wiser.
Eliezer sealed the letter with Abraham’s personal seal, which he had wisely taken from Abraham’s person decades earlier without Abraham's god noticing. To send the letter, he chose Paebel and Keret, precisely the same two servants whom Abraham chose to accompany him to the sacrifice. They ran away in horror when they saw what their master had done and immediately told Eliezer, but they were chosen both by master and servant because they were reliable as mules and stupid as a pillar of salt. Eliezer ruefully included instructions to kill them both after receiving the letter so that none would know what actually happened. He knew Paebel and Keret would understand.
Two years later, a bronze scroll arrived by post with a seal from “House of Terah Global Partnerships,” written on the “9th day of the Seventh Month in the Reign of Iddin-Dagan Year 8,” addressed to the “House of Abram, cc: Eliezer: Master/Slave Representative.”
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