God calls Abraham, now called Abram, to leave his father’s house in Mesopotamia and travel to Israel. He took his wife, Sarah, and his nephew Lot and I guess a bunch of servants and kind of wandered around the Middle East for a while.
A drought sent them to Egypt where Abram was worried he would be murdered because his wife was pretty so he told her to tell everyone that she was his sister. This plan worked great actually. Sarah caught the eye of the pharaoh himself who took her into the palace and treated Abraham very well, presumably because pharaoh was sleeping Sarah, but I guess it doesn’t really come out and say that per se.
Gen 12:17 says that God inflicted pharaoh’s house with nasty stuff because of Sarah and pharaoh doesn’t seem to have any trouble figuring out why. He confronts Abraham and asks why he didn’t say Sarah was his wife, then, recognizing that these Semites are trouble, sends them all off with some supplies and a stern request they leave the country. I think pharaoh got a pretty raw deal in this story, he doesn’t seem like a bad guy at all. He just got caught up in Abraham’s lies, although he very well may have killed Abraham and slept with Sarah anyway if things had gone differently, so who’s to say who’s right and who’s wrong there. I did notice, though, that nowhere does the text imply that God told Abraham to lie to pharaoh, or even to go to Egypt to begin with, so it’s difficult to discern God’s stance on anything in this story, beyond the fact that He did not care for pharaoh’s relationship with Sarah.
After leaving Egypt, Abraham and Lot are so prosperous that they cannot travel together anymore. Their herdsmen are bumping into each other and getting into fights; I guess the drought is over by this time. So they part and Lot promptly gets himself abducted after a battle between two groups of city-states.
Abraham rolls in with 300 men and rescues Lot as well as a lot of treasure from the routed army. He went by Salem, which would later become Jerusalem, and met with King Melchizedek, a priest of the Lord. Now I was taken aback by this title. I figured at this point in history, no one is closer to Got than Abraham, since he seems to be the protagonist in this story. We’ve already spent more chapters hearing about Abraham than we have hearing about Adam and Noah combined, so to have a minor character come in and turn out to be a priest of the Lord is unexpected.
Perhaps even more unexpected is how Abraham seems to kind of snub Malchazedek, refusing to accept any of the king’s hospitality beyond camp for a few days and a nice blessing. The reason he gives is because he doesn’t want Malchezadek spreading word around that he made Abraham rich once God gives Abraham all the land and riches he’s promised.
Finally, Abraham gripes about not having an heir so God tells him to cut some animals in half and then promises to give him some sons.
I’m glad that the narrative is becoming more coherent as we focus in on the adventures of just one man, but sometimes Abraham seems a little disappointing in the role of God’s chosen genetic emissary to mankind. He actually seems like kind of a jerk sometimes.
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