(Genesis 19:1 - 19:38)
In the evening the two extraterrestrials arrived at Sodom and found Lot sitting just inside the city gate. Seeing them, Lot rose to meet them and then prostrated himself before them. He addressed them "I invite you, my masters, to please stop at the home of your servant. Stay the night and wash up so you may rise early and be on your way."
"No, thank you. We will be spending the night in the city square." they replied.
Lot insisted that they be his guests. They relented and came into his house. He prepared a feast for them, and they ate the matzah (unleavened bread) he had baked for them. However, before they could go to bed, the house was surrounded by a mob, which consisted of citizens of all ages and from all quarters of the city. They accosted Lot and demanded "Where are the men visiting you tonight? Bring them out here so we can find out what they're up to!"
Lot appeared outside and closed the door behind him. "Please, my brothers, do not commit this offense. ... Listen, I have two daughters that are virgins. I will deliver them to you and you can have your way with them, but, please, do not molest these men, for they are enjoying the hospitality of my house."
"Get out of our way!" the mob insisted. "You live here as a foreigner. Now you want to dictate to us? If you do, we will come down harder on you than we do on those men." They jostled Lot violently and almost broke down the door.
The extraterrestrials reached outside, pulled Lot inside the house, and closed the door behind him. Those outside, both the ring leaders and the rabble, were suddenly struck blind so they were groping even to find the door.
The extraterrestrials asked Lot "Do you have family here -- sons or daughters or in-laws? Whomever you may have, take them out of the city at once, for we are going to destroy this place. Because its wickedness has become so extreme, Jehovah has sent us to destroy it."
Lot went out and paid a visit to the men who were engaged to his daughters. "Get up! You must get out of the city, for Jehovah is about to destroy it." But they thought Lot was only playing some joke on them.
When dawn broke the extraterrestrials urged Lot to hurry and bid him "Get up! Take away your wife and the two daughters that live with you, or else you will be killed in the destruction of the city." When he tarried, the extraterrestrials took Lot, his wife, and his daughters all by the hand, for Jehovah had resolved to spare them. They escorted Lot and his family out of the city and told them "Save yourselves. Don't look back or linger in the neighboring country, but flee to the mountains or else you will be consumed."
Lot replied "Please, my masters. I, your servant, have found favor with you and you have shown great mercy in sparing my life, but I can't escape into the mountains. I won't be able to reach them in time before the destruction overwhelms me and I am killed. But there is a city I know of, a small one and not far away. I could flee there and be safe. ... It is a small city, isn't it? My life would be safe there, wouldn't it?"
One of the extraterrestrials responded "Very well, I give you my word not to destroy the city you have spoken of. But hurry, for I can do nothing till you get there. (The name of the city was Zoar, because Lot had called it a "small one".)
It was morning by the time Lot reached Zoar. It was then that Jehovah bombed Sodom and Gomorrah from the sky with sulfurous incendiaries and thus incinerated the cities, the surrounding plain, all the inhabitants of the cities there, as well as the vegetation. (Lot's wife lagged behind and her body was transformed into salt.)
Abraham was up early in the morning and went to the place where he had lately taken leave of Jehovah. He gazed out toward Sodom and Gomorrah and the land of the plain and saw ashes rising up from the earth and a plume of smoke billowing as if from a furnace. (When Jehovah razed the cities of the plain, he remembered Abraham and, therefore, rescued his nephew Lot from being killed when he destroyed the city where he had been living.)
Because he was uncomfortable staying in Zoar, Lot and his two daughters left there and found refuge in the mountains, where they made their home in a cave.
The oldest daughter told the younger "Our father is old and there are no men around who will come to mate with us. Let's ply our father with wine, get him drunk, and then have sex with him, so that our father's family can be perpetuated."
And so that night the oldest daughter got her father to overindulge wine and went into his bed to have sex with him. He never noticed when she came into his bed or when she left it.
The next day the older sister told the younger. "I lay with our father last night. Let's get him drunk again tonight so that you can have sex with him, so that our father's family can be perpetuated."
And so that night the youngest daughter got her father to overindulge wine and went into his bed to have sex with him. He never noticed when she came into his bed or when she left it.
Both daughters were thus made pregnant by their father. The oldest gave birth to a son Moab who is the father of the Moabites that exist today. The younger bore a son as well that she called Ammon (meaning the son of my people) and he is the father of the present-day Ammonites.
Notes
1. Jehovah sends his two emissaries/associates/companions to check out the conditions in Sodom, to see if the city's inhabitants are as wicked as he has come to believe. They apparently intended to wander around the streets to size up conditions, although one wonders how they could so easily determine the city's rating on Jehovah's evil-o-meter. In any case, the two extraterrestrials are persuaded to enjoy the hospitality of Lot's house -- and a good feast, even if the unleavened bread they are offered sounds less than appetizing. (Were they really conscientious in doing the job that Jehovah sent them to Sodom to do, or were they slacking?) Extraterrestrials always seem to be attracted to good chow. One may surmise that if they are in fact interstellar travelers they would be accustomed only to synthetic food or nutrient pills and, therefore, would appreciate an occasional home-cooked, human-cooked meal.
2. Although the extraterrestrials hardly got farther than the city gates before they were taken to Lot's house, news of their arrival in Sodom apparently spread quickly around the city. These beings were apparently recognizable from other men. The text does not indicate why. Lot knew them right away when they entered the city. Would it be the clothes they wore? Or something distinctive in their appearance?
3. A mob forms around Lot's house. The citizens know the extraterrestrials are inside and demand to see them so that they can question them and, one would assume, find out what they were doing in Sodom. It can be inferred that Jehovah and his people were regarded as enemies by the Sodomites, who were rightfully suspicious of their motives in coming to the city. There is a back story here that is not revealed in the text. One might surmise that there existed some kind of feud between Jehovah and the people of Sodom. Perhaps they opposed his will in something, or refused to worship him as a god. Jehovah's portrayal of the Sodomites as evil could be a prejudiced assessment. It does not seem credible that Jehovah would destroy the people of Sodom merely because of their wickedness: the wickedness is more likely used as an excuse to punish a people with whom he had a personal grievance. --- Or else why not find some worthily sinful cities in China or India or Central America and obliterate those as well.
4. The King James Version has the mob wanting to "know" the men inside Lot's house. Since the word "know" and the original Hebrew word "yada" are both used on occasion as euphemisms for "have sex with" many have inferred that the mob were vicious gays on the prowl for victims to bugger. This interpretation, however, is unlikely, if not preposterous, although most Biblical translators seem to subscribe to it. Consider the situation: Two men, recognized as agents of Sodom's enemy Jehovah come into town. The Sodomites perhaps already know that Jehovah has it in for them. They naturally wonder what these men want, what nefarious purpose (from their standpoint) they have. They learn that the men are staying at the house of Lot, a foreigner and a Jehovah partisan. A mob forms. One gets the impression it is a large mob, and the text specifically says it is a diverse one. They demand that Lot, in violation of the revered laws of hospitality, deliver his guests to the mob. Why does the mob want the men? To have gay sex with them? Really? Would that be on their mind at this point? Isn't it more likely they wanted to interrogate them, find out why they were in Sodom and what Jehovah's plans were?
5. Lot is so insistent on observing the laws of hospitality and protecting his extraterrestrial visitors that he is willing to throw his two virgin daughters to the mob with an invitation to rape or murder them, if they wanted to. This callousness on Lot's part is really appalling. That he would think of this means of appeasing the mob certainly doesn't reflect very well upon Lot's role as a father or upon the regard his people had for women. And you wonder what his guests may have thought of him for his actions to protect them when they obviously had the power to protect themselves. Lot perhaps wanted to impress his guests how loyal a servant he was to Jehovah, how he would make the most extreme sacrifice to serve him.
6. The extraterrestrials rescue Lot from the mob and pull him inside the house. To ward off the mob they render them blind. This is interesting. Were the men of the mob made permanently or temporarily blind or was their vision merely impaired so that they could not locate Lot's door. And how was this done? Was some weapon involved, a magic spell, hypnotic suggestion? Why did they not kill a few members of the mob (those people were going to be dead in a few hours anyway)?
7. The extraterrestrials announce they are going to destroy Sodom and the cities of the plain -- probably making up their minds quickly after witnessing the actions of the Sodomite mob who seem to be out for their hide. They ask Lot if he has family. Again no omniscience: they do not know or have made no point of finding out whether he does or not. Some translations identify the heedless men Lot visits to warn of the impending destruction as his son-in-laws. Since he has two virgin daughters at home, this would mean that he has at least two additional daughters who are married and who, certainly living with their husbands, were not warned. It is more likely that the men visited were prospective sons-in-law, engaged to Lot's daughters, but not yet married to them. Therefore, Lot has just the two unmarried daughters. Nearly all recent translations agree with this interpretation.
8. The sin that sealed Sodom's doom has been much discussed and debated in the past few thousand years. There is little evidence that the sin necessarily involved homosexuality per se. In Jude the Sodomites are depicted as pursuing promiscuity and perversion ("lusting after strange flesh"), but there is no specific, unambiguous reference to homosexuality. In Ezekiel the Sodomite's shortcomings are their arrogance, indolence, lack of compassion to the poor, and insufficient attention to the laws of hospitality -- a rather low threshold of sinfulness to trigger such catastrophic destruction. All we know from Genesis is that the people of Sodom, by their riotous actions against Lot and his guests, were a rowdy, restive, inhospitable bunch. Whatever the nature of their wickedness, the divine destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah would often be sited as an object lesson.
9. The means by which Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed continues to be debated. Excluding the unlikely possibility that it is simply a story and nothing of that nature ever occurred, one is impelled to look first for an answer in natural phenomena. There is no evidence of volcanic activity in that location. The description of fire falling from the sky might occur during a volcanic eruption, but no one describing the event would omit the little detail of the erupting volcanic mountain itself. An earthquake could easily have destroyed the cities and might have ignited the tar pits that we are already told existed in the area, accounting for the fires. However, the prominent feature of an earthquake is the shaking of the ground; there is no reference to that in the account. A meteor or asteroid or comet coming from the sky and crashing to earth in that area could cause fires, but the devastation would be mostly the result of the tremendous impact. There would be a large noise, a fearsome explosion, a gaping crater. None of these things are mentioned. How could they have been ignored? No natural phenomenon could have caused anything like the destruction mentioned in Genesis. The answer obviously lies in advanced warfare. If Jehovah were an extraterrestrial visitor, a being from another planet, he would have access to an array of high-tech weaponry, and if he wanted to entirely destroy a few ancient cities, he could easily do so. An atomic bomb would have been a possible, but unlikely choice; it would have been a sledge hammer to swat a fly -- Sodom might have been a big town in those days, but it wasn't New York or Hiroshima. Incendiary bombs dropped from an aerial vehicle could easily do the job -- incinerate the place so that no one would survive and little structurally would remain. The account, in fact, describes exactly that and I have translated, accurately, I believe, the usually rendered "raining from the heavens brimstone and fire" as "bombing from the sky with sulfurous incendiaries." The incendiary bombs may not have necessarily contained sulfur (brimstone), but the ancients would not have any clear idea of their composition. (The composition of the legendary incendiary weapon Greek fire is still not exactly known.) Sulfur was always connected in ancient minds with fire; the expression "fire and brimstone" was much used and is still employed figuratively today. -- An alternative account of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is provided by the 1st Century A.D. historian Josephus who reports that the means of S & G's annihilation was a lightning bolt. The delivery of an incendiary bomb could have resembled lightning. (One must be continually reminded of the limited experience of our ancient ancestors, their small frame of reference, the inadequate vocabulary at their disposal to describe what would be unfamiliar and unexplainable to them, and also their natural proclivity to perceive as numinous and miraculous what was merely technological and to ascribe to the divine anything beyond their meagre scientific understanding.)
10. A well-noted feature of the story is Lot's wife turning to salt. The wife (unnamed in the Bible, but traditionally called Edith) was probably not of Lot's race. There is no mention of her when Lot accompanied Abraham out of Egypt or when he was held captive by the Elamites, so it is likely she was a native Sodomite. Therefore, it is probable that she was more attached emotionally to the city than Lot was, less anxious to leave it, and perhaps more influenced by its permissive mores. The text is not helpful and instead somewhat confused. It clearly states that Lot, and presumably his family, arrive safely in Zoar before the attack on Sodom begins. But Lot's wife either "looks back" or "lags behind" (as I believe is more likely). Either implies that they have not yet reached safety in Zoar. Looking at the fiery attack could not have been harmful, at least not fatal, surely. It seems more plausible that the wife felt she couldn't leave her native town, went back, and was caught in the destruction, although this is not exactly what the text says. Whatever happened, she didn't make it. Her body turning into salt is a whimsical touch reminiscent of Ovidian Greek mythology. An explanation, though, is simple. There have long existed many weird salt formations in the area. Perhaps a notable one may have resembled a woman and a myth was created that it was Lot's wife transformed. The Genesis authors probably felt obligated to incorporate this familiar myth into their narrative. At any rate, Lot's wife is another object lesson -- don't hesitate in following the paths of righteousness or look back longingly to a life of sin, or else ...
11. The lot of Lot's daughters is hardly enviable. They are first offered as rape bait to an angry mob by their own father, their fiancees are killed off in the destruction of Sodom, their mother is also killed, they are forced by their father to live with him as recluses in some God-forsaken cave, and then when they have lost hope of finding a man to have children with, they feel compelled to have sex with their drunken, elderly father. To add insult to injury, the authors of Genesis don't even bother to give the poor dears names. But they do end up being the mothers of two peoples, the Moabites and Ammonites (who would live east of the death sea in an area now part of Jordan).
Showing posts with label Lot. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lot. Show all posts
Thursday, April 4, 2013
Monday, March 25, 2013
The History of Abraham, Part One
(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.
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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