The Knife of the Aqedah

By Allen Ruch

Description

In appearance, the knife is in no way unusual, except that it is remarkably well preserved for a 3000 year old artifact. It is in the style of a Canaanite sacrificial knife, one of the type used to make animal offerings. It has a blade of iron, now pitted and corroded, set into a wooden handle reinforced with bone and horn. The wood has been replaced several times; the last most likely about two hundred years ago. The bone is worn and blackened, and faint traces of Aramaic writing can be seen on it, although this looks like it was carved over an older Hebraic inscription. At the base of the blade is carved initials in Latin: M.Q.V.

Religious Significance

Aqedah is a Hebrew word meaning "binding," and it serves as the common description for the testing of Abraham by God, mentioned in Genesis 22.1 - 19; the actual knife is specifically mentioned in Genesis 22.6 and 22.10. The incident is also mentioned in the Qu'ran, surah 37.101 - 113.

According to the story, God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, on a mountain in the land of Moriah. Right before Abraham is about to plunge the dagger into his son's breast, an angel commands him to desist, and a ram is offered in the place of Isaac. The place is renamed Jehovah-jireh, and the angel bestows a blessing upon Abraham that his generations will multiply and prosper. (In the Torah, the place is named Adonai-yireh, which means "The Lord will see.")

The angel that stayed Abraham's hand is usually identified as Michael, but other traditions ascribe the feat to Metatron, Tadhiel, or Zadkiel.

History

A tool of Egyptian iron, the aqedah knife is shrouded in mystery, its origins and history hopelessly tangled up in legend and supposition.

It is an iron knife, the metal supposedly having its origins in a meteorite that fell over the Nile valley during a religious ceremony. This iron - called in the Egyptian "Ba'a-en-pet," or "Iron from the Sky," to distinguish meteoric iron from common iron -- was broken up into several pieces by the men who found it.

A large chunk of the meteor found its way into Mesopotamia, kept as a good luck charm by an Egyptian trader. In Haran, he had it forged into a sacrificial knife by a Hebrew smith as he passed through on his way to Nineveh. (Some legends claim that this smith was none other than Tubal-Cain, the blacksmith descended from Cain mentioned in Genesis 4.22, but since more than a few generations and a whole Flood separates Tubal-Cain from Abraham, this is most likely a later addition to the tale.)

In Nineveh his luck took a turn for the worse, and he was beaten and robbed by an Canaanite bandit. The knife passed with the Canaanite down into Erech, where he traded it with a Chaldean nomad in return for a slave woman.

The Chaldean held on to it for several years, finally losing it to another Chaldean while gambling in Ur . . . and this man was Abram of Haran.

It was, of course, with Abraham that the knife acquired its mythical resonance. . . .

Saved by Abraham it was supposedly passed down to Isaac, then to Jacob, then to Joseph, and so on down the line, a powerful symbol of Abraham's Pact with God. Although made of iron, it had a tremendous resistance to corrosion; this property no doubt bestowed upon it when the angel halted Abraham's hand.

After Joseph, the knife is lost to history for almost two thousand years, generating a wake of widely differing legends. Some say it was lost in Egypt before the Exodus, where it was acquired by a Roman Centurion centuries later before finally falling into the hands of an Irish monk; then to a viking raider, passing to Byzantium and on to Rome after the Crusades. Other legends claim that it was taken to Canaan and was lost when the Romans destroyed the Temple. One colorful story tells that it was thrown into the Dead Sea a few months before Masada, then miraculously raised from the depths by the angel Michael and given to the Crusaders in 1099 after the successful capture of Jerusalem, finally to be brought into Rome. Another, certainly spurious tradition, contends that the knife was in the possession of Jesus Christ -- the very knife used to cut bread at the last supper! After the Crucifixion, it passed into the hands of Peter and on into Caligula's Rome.

Regardless of the path taken, all stories end up placing the knife in Rome, where it remained for centuries under secret protection of the clergy - until 1387, when the Roman Pope Urban VI took personal possession of it to aid him in his war against the Avignon papacy. It did not help the mentally unstable pope, however, and he was swindled out of it by a phony magician from Naples. This charlatan then took the knife north, where it passed into the hands of several generations of alchemists and astrologers, tracing a path across Europe into England.

In 1501 it was acquired by a monastery and hidden away for study as a holy relic. When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries in 1536, it was smuggled out by a holy brother and taken to Western Russia, where it was secreted away again for almost three hundred years, hidden in a gold chest buried below an oak tree. In 1889 it was discovered by a young Polish girl named Eva Blazusiakowna- a Christian savant lead to the relic by a series of visions. She took it to Warsaw, where it was kept hidden in the basement of St. Magnus Church.

When Poland fell to Nazi Germany, the knife was taken away as part of the Reich's quest for holy treasures. When the allies appeared to be winning the war, the knife was stolen by SS Sturmbannfuehrer Hans Stolz, one of the officers in charge of its original acquisition. He hid the knife in the wall of a Berlin cabaret, sketching out a map and a few notes in his diary.

He was killed three days before the surrender - shot in the head by his own supervisor and left in a bathtub. The diary was found by a Russian soldier who traded it onto an American for a pack of cigarettes.

The diary -- filled with Stolz's talented sketches of Berlin -- eventually found its way into the possession of art collector George Reynolds who was brutally murdered by a thief that left him completely drained of blood. . . .

And so once again the knife rests in the hands of a descendent of Cain.

Powers

The powers of the Aqedah knife are subtle, best left up to the individual storyteller. In my campaign, it is a blade that can cause aggravated damage when used in combat, and has the power to destroy any vampire once that vampire's blood points are drained. There are also other powers, more holy and magical, but that would be spoiling the fun . . . Invent your own!

Feel free to e-mail me with possible suggestions for its powers, alternative histories, or the exploits of past owners. I would greatly appreciate it, and may post a summary of the best ideas.


This document was written by Allen B. Ruch. Feel free to use it in whatever way you wish for your personal use - mutate it, morph it, change it, etc. -- your brain is free. If you have any comments or suggestions, please e-mail me. If you pass this document on, please include this notice. I wish to get some of my stuff in print, so I reserve all publishing rights -- so please contact me if you wish to use any of this information in a printed media. Posting it electronically on whatever website or mailing list, etc, is happily endorsed, as I wish to spread my tentacles out across the Internet. . . . All hail Discordia! Allen B. Ruch can be contacted at TheQuail@cthulhu.microserve.com