(Genesis 11:10 - 13:18)
This is the genealogical history of Shem: When Shem was a 100 years old, two years after the flood, he became the father of Arphaxad. He lived 500 more years and fathered other sons and daughters.
Arphaxad was 35 years old when he fathered Salah. He lived 403 more years, and had other sons and daughters.
Salah was 30 when he became the father of Eber. He lived 403 more years and had other sons and daughters.
Eber was 34 when he fathered Peleg. He lived 430 more years and had other sons and daughters.
Peleg was 30 when he fathered Reu. He lived 209 more years had other sons and daughters.
Reu was 32 when he fathered Serug. He lived 207 more years and had other sons and daughters.
Serug was 30 when he fathered Nahor. He lived 200 more years and had other sons and daughters.
Nahor was 29 when he fathered Terah. He lived 119 more years and had other sons and daughters.
By the time he was 70 years old Terah had fathered sons Abram, Nahor, and Haran, who was the father of Lot. Haran predeceased his father Terah, dying in the country of his birth, Ur in the land of Chaldea [in southern Mesopotamia].
Both Abram and Nahor were married. Abram's wife was named Sarai and Nahor was married to his niece Milcah, the daughter of Haran and sister of Iscah. (Sarai was childless and unable to bear children.)
Terah, accompanied by his son Abram, his daughter-in-law Sarai, and his grandson Lot, set out from Ur to travel to Canaan but upon reaching Haran, settled there. This is where Terah died at the age of 205. It was then that Jehovah communicated with Abram and told him "Leave your country, your family, and your home and go to a land that I will show you. I will make you famous and the father of a great nation. I will bless you and bless those who bless you, curse those who curse you and because of you the world will be blessed!" And so at the age of 75, Abram, following Jehovah's instructions, departed Haran with his wife Sarai and nephew Lot. With Sarai and Lot, with his household and followers, and with all the possessions he had acquired in Haran, Abram journeyed to Canaan. He traveled through Sichem and the forests of Moreh, which was inhabited by the Canaanites. Jehovah then appeared to Abram and told him "This land I bequeath to your posterity!” At the place where Abram had seen Jehovah, he built an altar to him. He then departed and traveled to a mountain to the east of Bethel. He made his camp there, with Bethel to his west and Hai to the east. He established another altar and called out to Jehovah. Abram continued traveling, now to southern Canaan. But there was a severe famine in that region, so he continued south into Egypt to settle there.
Before they entered Egypt, Abram told his wife Sarai "I know you are a good-looking woman. I'm afraid that when the Egyptians see you and find out that I'm your husband they will do away with me in order to possess you. It might be better for us if I say you are only my sister; it may save my life."
And so it happened that when they entered Egypt the Egyptians did take note of Sarai's beauty. Even the princes of the Pharaoh, when seeing her, commended her to the Pharaoh. The Pharaoh thus had her taken into his harem. Because of her, Abram found favor with the Pharaoh, who enriched him with servants, oxen, sheep, donkeys, and camels.
Because of Sarai, Jehovah put a curse on the Pharaoh and inflicted great misfortune on his house. The Pharaoh summoned Abram and questioned him "What is this that you have done to me? Why didn't you tell me Sarai was your wife? Why did you claim she was your sister instead, allowing me to take her as my wife? --- Well, here's your wife. Take her and be gone!"
The Pharaoh instructed his men to assist Abram in his departure from Egypt. Accompanied by his wife Sarai and Lot, Abram emigrated with all his possessions -- he was very wealthy with livestock, silver, and gold -- and journeyed through southern Canaan back to Bethel, the place where he had earlier pitched his tent between Bethel and Hai -- it was there he had built an altar and had called out to Jehovah.
Lot also had a great many tents, large flocks and herds so that when they both settled there the land was insufficient for both their needs. (Since their holdings were so great, they really could not live in one place together.) Disputes arose between the herdsmen of Lot's cattle and those of Abram. Moreover, the Canaanites and Perizzites were already living there.
Abram said to Lot "Let there not be strife between you and me, I pray, or between our herdsmen, for we are family. There is plenty of land for both of us. Therefore, let us go our separate ways. If you take the right path, I will take the left. If you take the left path, I will take the right."
Lot surveyed the Jordan valley and saw that as far as Zoar it was well irrigated and as fertile as Eden or Egypt (for this was before Jehovah destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah). Lot chose for himself the plain of Jordan and departing from Abram, he journeyed East. Abram, meanwhile, settled in the land of Canaan, while Lot dwelled among the cities of the plain, near Sodom. (The inhabitants of Sodom were displeasing to Jehovah, owing to their wickedness and immoral behavior.)
After Lot had departed, Jehovah spoke to Abram "Look abroad from where you now stand, to the north, south, west, and east. All that you can see I bestow upon you and upon your descendants forever. I will make your progeny as numerous as grains of dust and it will be counted only as the grains of dust can be counted. Travel through the length and breadth of the land, for I have given it to you."
Abram then packed up his tents and moved to live amid the oak forests of Mamre outside of Hebron. It was there he built an altar to Jehovah.
Notes
1. The shrinking of the human life span ordained by Jehovah after the Flood was apparently worked in gradually. Longevity decreases with each generation removed from the Flood and men are beginning to have children at normal age, in their thirties. Still, Abraham has an abnormally long life span.
2. A reading of the King James Version places the birth of Abraham (initially Abram) at 1948 years after Creation. However, the Septuagint somehow places the date at 3312. In the Jewish Torah, Abraham's birth is deemed to have occurred 2247 years after Creation. Dating Abraham's birth to a time B.C. has also been problematic. Jewish tradition usually assigns the dates 1812-1637 B.C. for Abraham's life, while Archbishop Ussher's calculations produce the years 1976-1801 B.C.
3. Abraham came from Ur (of the Chaldees or Chaldea) in southern Mesopotamia. The reference to Chaldeans is highly anachronistic. The people referred to as the Chaldeans did not exist for another 1200 years. But the writers of Genesis would not have known that. (Ur of Sumer or Sumeria would be more accurate.) There are many subsequent instances of references to countries and peoples that would not exist for many hundreds of years later than the time depicted in the account.
4. It must be mentioned at this point that most scholars and researchers have little confidence in the reality of Abraham and of most of the individuals cited in the Biblical accounts of early Jewish history. The consensus regards these as mythical figures. However, there is an argument to be made that the accounts of Abraham and the other Biblical patriarchs could have been based on real individuals or on composites of real individuals, not always accurately placed in place, time, or chronology. The facility of ancient man to create fiction out of whole cloth has never been shown to be anything but limited, while the proclivity to create legend from true events was broadly exercised. Homer's Iliad was long dismissed as a work of pure fiction, but we now know that Troy was a real place; most historians accept that the participants of the war so lavishly detailed by Homer may have been a part of history as well as tradition. It seems a great deal more likely that the Biblical accounts are not mere fiction and fantasy, but have some basis in fact, however much that history, retold and rewritten over a period of many hundreds of years, has been misunderstood by later generations, embroidered, conflated, confused, as well as refashioned to suit the needs of nationalistic propaganda and to conform to accepted tradition and religious doctrine. An example of the way in which even modern, sophisticated people such as ourselves distort the record and recast historical figures is the Hollywood period or costume movie, in which egregious anachronisms and blatant inaccuracies often abound. Sometimes these are the result of careless scholarship, sometimes there is an "agenda," sometimes there is an intent to make heroes and villains for motives dramatic, ideological, or nationalistic, often there is merely the desire to relate a better story.
5. We have the first proclamation of Jehovah's pledge to make Abraham the father of a great nation, the patriarch of numberless descendants, and the possessor of a vast land. These promises will be repeated to the point of annoying redundancy. To the Jewish people, who, at the time of the Old Testament's compilation, were in bondage in Mesopotamia, nothing was more important that securing the legitimacy of their homeland, a God-given title to the land that had been taken from them, but which they were determined to reclaim.
6. Bethel lies to the north of Jerusalem by about 12 miles. Hebron lies in the south portion of what is now the Left Bank, less than twenty miles south of Jerusalem.
7. Abraham's behavior on his family's arrival in Egypt is worthy of examination. He is fearful that the Egyptians will lust after Sarah (initially Sarai) his good-looking wife and will aspire to possess her. He is not concerned about her honor and well being, but only about his own safety. He fears that if it becomes known that he is her husband, he might be killed because of it. So he claims to be only her brother instead. (Later it is revealed that Sarah is his half-sister. It seems odd, though, that in those times a brother would not be expected to defend his sister's virtue as much as a husband would.) Here is a man of some stature, property, and, one would assume, power, even in a foreign land, and yet he is unwilling to protect and defend his wife, the most basic responsibility of a man in any society. It is hard to see Abraham as anything but a weak and dishonorable husband -- a gutless wimp! When the Pharaoh claims her as a wife, or is it concubine?, he does not protest. Instead he allows the Pharaoh to enrich him with lavish gifts. Abraham is now not only a wimp, but a pimp, for he pretty much sells his wife to the Pharaoh. The Pharaoh, though, is an honorable and forgiving man, and upon learning the truth releases Sarah and assists Abraham in emigrating from Egypt with all his loot.
8. Among the gifts Pharaoh gave to Abraham were camels. The reference is very telling. Camels, though known to the ancient Egyptians as wild animals of the desert, were not domesticated by them even in late Pharaonic history. Very few are the references to camels in Ancient Egyptian writings or depictions of them in art. The native camel, the one-humped dromedary, was herded and ridden only at a much later date. The Persians, when they conquered Egypt in the 6th Century, introduced the two-humped Bactrian camel of Central Asia, and by Roman times these were a common beast of burden on desert caravans. The anachronistic inclusion of the camel is one of many signs that the writers of Genesis had little understanding of social conditions in the previous millennium when early Jewish history took place. Just as they imposed upon their ancestors the mores and mindset of their own time, they also assumed that their society was no different from that which they knew. A real sense of history, an awareness of changing life and times, is probably only something known to people during the past couple hundred years.
9. The Pharaoh is cursed by Jehovah for unwittingly taking the married Sarah as a wife. How could it have been his fault and not the fault of the craven Abraham who lied to him and perpetrated a fraud? Jehovah continues the pattern of behavior of punishing those who are blameless or who have committed an infraction or incurred his displeasure only out of ignorance.
10. One wonders how the Pharaoh finally found out that Sarah was Abraham's wife. Did he muse, "I'm having bad luck lately, maybe I'm being cursed because one of the women in my harem is already married"? Who knows: Genesis omits that part of the story.
11. Implicit in the cursing of the Pharaoh (perhaps a foreshadowing of what will come in Exodus) is the exercise of what might be called tribalistic morality (which, unfortunately, we still see a great deal of even today). In it, my tribe is always favored, my people can do no wrong, our side is always right, we define what is good, when something bad happens guilt, shame, and opprobrium must always lie elsewhere -- an entirely subjective view of right and wrong.
12. In his inevitable dispute with Lot over land, Abraham is portrayed again as a man who seeks to avoid conflict and confrontation. Unlike the situation in Egypt when his actions were cowardly and dishonest, he is here admirably conciliatory and sensible.
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