“Mr. Karp! Mr. Karp!” the equally excited and loud voice of Elisa Robyn interjected. “Wasn’t it the ‘Angel of the Lord’ who told Abraham that God wanted him to sacrifice Isaac?”

Zak crossed his eyes. Elisa sat directly behind him and, as he said after nearly every class, she drove him crazy. “She’s such a know-it-all, a female Giancarlo,” he once said. He swore he hated her and wished she’d leave for someplace far away . . . “like California, where they like know-it-alls.” However, Karp suspected that some of Zak’s disdain was due to the fact that Elisa, with her budding figure, wild mane of curly dark hair, and flashing brown eyes, seemed to prefer his brother.

“According to some accounts,” Karp agreed. “However, I believe that it’s generally accepted that ‘Angel of the Lord’ and God are one and the same.”

“Maybe angels are an extension of God,” Giancarlo volunteered.

“Perhaps,” Karp conceded. “But for the purposes of this story, I guess we could agree that if the ‘Angel of the Lord’ was not God personified, then the Angel was acting on behalf of God. A co-conspirator, you might say.” The last comment brought wary looks to the faces of the more conservative students. He could see it in their eyes.

“An accessory anyway,” young Miss Robyn agreed. She was not one of the conservatives and easily mixed the secular with the divine. More than once, he’d told himself to keep an eye on her; in ten years or so—if he was still in office—she’d make a hell of a good assistant district attorney for the New York DAO.

“If the evidence supports the charge,” Karp responded with a nod that he noticed bothered Zak. “Anyway, the premise of the story is that Abraham believed that God had instructed him to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. So first Abraham planned how to do it. Then he procured a sharp knife and some rope to bind his son. He led Isaac out into the desert, away from prying eyes, where he’d prepared an altar ahead of time.”

Karp looked around the room to see if they were paying attention, or if he’d lost them already. He didn’t have to worry; he’d had the boys at the mention of a sacrifice involving a knife, and the girls with the idea that a father could kill his son, who, according to every story they’d ever heard, was about their age at the time of this big event, a guy who could carry a pile of firewood up a mountainside—to them, no doubt, a hottie.

“Abraham tied up his son and placed him on the altar,” Karp continued. “He was just about to slit Isaac’s throat when suddenly God called his name. ‘Abraham!’ So Abraham stopped and answered, ‘Hineini!’”

“What’s that?” someone asked from the back of the classroom.

“It means, ‘Here I am!’ in Hebrew,” Giancarlo answered. “It’s how the old prophets and Jewish patriarchs answered whenever God called to them . . . usually for something they’d done wrong, or some tough job He wanted them to do.”

Elisa raised her hand. “Sometimes it was God who answered them by saying, ‘Hineini,’” she noted. “Like when God appeared to Moses in a burning bush, He spoke Hebrew, ‘Hineini!’ Here I am.” She looked at Giancarlo and sighed. Giancarlo smiled at Elisa, who smiled back. Zak pretended to gag.

Karp was not surprised that Elisa would be attracted to Giancarlo. There was something about the boy, with his porcelain skin, his fine, delicate features, and the dark, gentle curls framing his face, that seemed to draw women of any age, bringing out motherly instincts in the grown-ups and flirtatious behavior in his peers. There was something about him that made him look like one of the angels in a Renaissance painting. It wasn’t that he was better looking than the macho, tough-talking Zak. But Zak, with his rugged demeanor, looked more like a soldier than an angel.

Karp thought it was time to move on. “Right on both counts,” he said. “‘Hineini! Here I am!’ Abraham replied. He stopped with the knife poised above Isaac’s neck. Good thing, too, as God granted a stay of execution. Instead, he now told Abraham, ‘Do not lay your hand on the boy, or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me.’”