Lech L'cha

[cellio]

Last week I had the chance to study torah with Rabbi Arthur Green and a bunch of other lay people. The week's parsha was Lech L'cha, the beginning of the Avraham story, so we studied that. More specifically, we looked at a passage from B'reishit Rabbah, a midrash collection from somewhere between the third and fifth centuries (common era).
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Comments

[dvarin]

He said, this tower has no owner?

Perhaps this is something changed in translation, but it seems that a presupposition of this question is that the tower appears to have no owner, on account of being on fire. That is, Abraham walks along, sees the tower on fire, and exclaims "Has this tower no owner (who would prevent it catching fire)?!" God shows himself the owner, who apparently lives in the tower without extinguishing the fire. This seems a moment of questioning God's existence, not a moment of concluding it.

[cellio]

This is part of why I prefer the "lit up" interpretation; I'm having trouble connecting the idea that the tower (world) is in a high entropic state with the idea that someone must be in charge.

It's also possible that, in the "on fire" interpretation, the man's question is better understood as "where the heck is the owner anyway?" and the owner who responds then does something about the problem. The Hebrew in the dialogue is pretty sparse, allowing multiple interpretations. (Oh, but for some precision!)