Genesis/Bereshith 12: JOURNEY OF FAITH – AVRAM

[With 3 commentaries being interspersed in these texts, readers benefit but might get confused.  Our own notes are indicated by “S6K” and “EF” stands for Everett Fox, from his translation/commentary The Five Books of Moses; “RA” for Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses.  We have separated the commentary from Pentateuch and Haftorahs in another post.
 
Please be guided accordingly; sorry if it gets confused, what readers/students are after is as much information as can be provided; it’s just that we want to give credit where it’s due and format these chapters like a bible student’s notebook.—Admin1.] 

AVRAHAM 

(Genesis/Bereshith 12-25:18)

ALTHOUGH AVRAHAM IS THE BIOLOGICAL FATHER OF ISRAEL, THE DIVERSE TRADITIONS about him which have been collected and connected to form a cycle of stories give evidence of much more.  The cycle portrays an active Homo religiosis who converses with God, sometimes with an air of doubt and questioning, who proclaims God’s name at various sacred sites, who is concerned about justice and the treatment of the oppressed, and who makes dramatic life decisions without flinching.  The stories thus reveal struggle, despite the fact that Avraham often appears to be the “perfect” man, always obeying God’s bidding and prospering.

 

Buber (1982), noting the unifying effect of the verb “see” throughout the cycle, understood Avraham as the father of the Prophets of Israel (formerly called “seers”).  He also viewed the cycle as based around the series that Avraham must undergo, tests quite different, we might add, from the labors of Hercules and other such ancient challenges.

 

Other than “see,”  a number of leading-words launch the major concerns of the Patriarchs:  “bless,” “seed,” and “land.”  At the same time the cycle contains previously encountered motifs, albeit with interesting refinements:  punishment for sin (this time with human questioning), intimacy with God (here through visions), and sibling rivalry (with more complex results than murder).  Above all we note the singling out of one man to perform the will of God, a man very different from the rather passive Noah.

 

Avraham stands at the core of the entire book of Genesis, as his experiences will in many ways be reflected in those who follow him.  At the core of both the book and the cycle looms the disturbing Chapter 22, which brings together and resolves, for the moment, the major themes encountered so far.

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[EF]  The Call and the Journey (12:1-9).  The Avraham cycle begins decisively , with a command from God to leave the pat behind and go to an unnamed land.  Prominent in this speech, clearly, is the concept of blessing, which will be realized by the gifts of land (Canaan) and seed (Yitzhak, the son).

 

The classic mythological motif of the journey, where the hero meets such dangers as monsters and giants, has here been avoided.  All that the text wishes to know about is God’s speech and Avram’s immediate obedience; as in Chap. 22, all other details of the actual trip have been omitted.

1  YHWH said to Avram:

Go-you-forth

from your land,

from your kindred,

from your father’s house,

to the land that I will let you see.

[EF] kindred: Others use “birthplace.”

[RA] Go forth from your land . . . to the land I will show you. Abram, a mere figure in a notation of genealogy and migration in the preceding passage, becomes an individual character, and begins the Patriarchal narratives, when he is here addressed by God, though he himself as yet says nothing, responding only by obedience.  The name Canaan is never mentioned, and the divine imperative to head out for an unspecified place resembles, as Rashi observes, God’s terrible call to Abraham in Chapter 22 to sacrifice his son on a mountain God will show him.  Rashi also draws a shrewd connection between the triplet here—“your land and your birthplace and your father’s house”—with the triplet in Chapter 22—“your son, your only one, whom you love.”  The series in each case focuses the utterance more specifically from one term to the next.  Thus the Hebrew moledet almost certainly has its usual sense of “birthplace” and not its occasional sense of “kinfolk,” which would turn it into a loose synonym of “father’s hosue” (beyt ‘av, a fixed term for the family social unit).  In 11:28 moledet appears as part of a genetive construction ‘erets moladeto, “land of his birth.”  Here those two terms are broken out from each other to yield the focusing sequence:  land–birthplace–father’s house.

 

 2  I will make a great nation of you

and will give-you-blessing

and will make your name great.

 Be a blessing!  

[RA]  you shall be a blessing. The verb here as vocalized in the Masoretic Text literally means, “Be you a blessing,” which makes the Hebrew syntax somewhat problematic.  A change in vocalization would yield, “and it [your name] will be a blessing.”  The Israeli biblical scholar Moshe Weinfeld has aptly noted that after the string of curses that begins with Adam and Eve, human history reaches a turning point with Abraham, as blessings instead of curses are emphatically promised.

3  I will bless those who bless you,

he who curses you, I will damn,

All the clans of the soil will find blessing through you!  

[EF] find blessing: Or “seek to be blessed (as you).”

[RA] those who damn you.  The Masoretic Text uses a singular form, but the plural, attested in several manuscripts and ancient versions, make better sense as parallelism.  The balanced formulation of this and the preceding verse are almost scannable as poetry.

4  Avram went, as YHWH ha spoken to him, and Lot went with him.  

And Avram was five years and seventy years old when he went out of Harran.  

5  Avram took Sarai his wife and Lot his brother’s son all their property that they had gained, and the persons whom they had made-their-own in Harran,

and they went out to go to the land of Canaan.  

When they came to the land of Canaan,

[RA] the folk they had bought in Haran. Slavery was a common institution throughout the ancient Near East.  As subsequent stories in Genesis make clear, this was not the sort of chattel slavery later practiced in North America.  These slaves had certain limited rights, could be given great responsibility, and were not thought to lose their personhood.

 

6  Avram passed through the land, as far as the Place of Shekhem,as far as the Oak of Moreh.  

Now the Canaanite was then in the land.  

[EF]  Place: Possibly with the implication of “sacred place.” Oak: Some read “valley.” the Canaanite: The peoples inhabiting the land at the time of the Israelite conquest under Joshua.

[RA] The Canaanite was then in the land. Abraham ibn Ezra famously detected a hint here that at the time of writing this was no longer the case.  In any event, the point of the notation, as Gerhard von Rad has seen, is to introduce a certain tension with the immediately following promise that the land will be given to Abram’s offspring.

7  YHWH was seen by Avram and said:

 I give this land to your seed!  

He built a slaughter-site there to YHWH who had been seen by him.

[EF]  was seen:  Others use “appeared to” which is more comfortable in English.  “See” has been kept here as a leading word in the Avraham cycle.

8  He moved on from there to the mountain-country, east of Bet-EL, and spread his tent, Bet-EL toward the sea and Ai toward the east.  

[EF]  toward the sea: West.

[RA] And he pulled up his stakes.  The Hebrew vocabulary (here, the verb waya’teq) in this sequence is meticulous in reflecting the procedures of nomadic life.  The verb for “journey” in verse 9 also derives from another term for the pulling up of tent stakes, and the progressive form in which it is cast is a precise indication of movement through successive encampments.

There he built a slaughter-site to YHWH and called out the name of YHWH.  

9  Then Avram journeyed on, continually journeying to the Negev.  

[EF]  the Negev: The “dry,” southern portion of the land of Israel.

[EF]  The Wife—I (1210-20):  Almost immediately upon his arrival in the promised land Avram is forced to leave it.  It will be his son Yitzhak’s task to remain there on a more permanent basis.

 

This is the first of three such stories which are practically identical (see Chaps. 20 and 26).  All pose a challenge for the interpreter.  An honored man of God seeks to save his own skin by passing his wife off as his sister; in each case the Patriarch emerges safely and with increased wealth.

 

Speiser has tried to use the analogy of Hurrian (i.e.from Harran) law in which a wife can be elevated to the status of “sister” as one element in the expansion of her status.  The legal background, however, is unclear and may not be decisive here.  Coming as it does after God’s promise to biologically found “a great nation” (v.2) through Avram, the story in its first version is probably best understood as an example of God’s protection not only of the key male figure, but of the Matriarch as well.  Harming Sarai, or even the threat of violating her sexuality, brings with it divine punishment.  In addition the story also enables Avram to expand his wealth—itself a sign of God’s favor and the Patriarch’s importance or “weightiness.”

10  Now there was a famine in the land,

and Avram went down to Egypt to sojourn there,

for the famine was heavy in the land.  

[EF] sojourn: To reside temporarily, as an alien. heavy: severe.

[RA] And there was famine in the land. The puzzling story of the sister-wife occurs three times in Genesis (here, chapter 20, and chapter 26:1-12).  It is the first instance of type-scene in biblical narrative, in which the writer invokes a fixed sequence of narrative motifs, familiar as a convention to his audience, while pointedly modifying them in keeping with the needs of the immediate narrative context.  The Midrash recognized that the tale of going down to Egypt at a time of famine was a foreshadowing of the sojourn in Egypt (“the actions of the fathers are a sign for the sons”).  But in contrast to the versions in chapters 20 and 26,, here, at the beginning of the whole Patriarchal cycle, the writer goes out of his way to heighten the connections with the Exodus story.  Only here is the land of sojourn Egypt and only here is the foreign potentate Pharaoh.  Only here does the narrator speak explicitly of “plagues” (though a different term is used in Exodus).  Only here is the danger of the husband’s death set off by the phrase “you they will let live” attached to the wife, a pointed echo of Exodus 1:22, “Every boy that is born you shall fling into the Nile, and every girl you shall let live.”  This is also the most compact, and the most archetypal, of the three versions; the other two will elaborate and complicate the basic scheme, each in its own way.

11  It was when he came near to Egypt that he said to Sarai his wife:  

Now here, I know well that you are a woman fair to look at.

[RA] I know.  This is the construal of yada’ti according to normative Hebrew grammar.  But the ti ending could be an archaic second-person singular feminine, and “you know” would make better conversational sense here. 

12  It will be, when the Egyptians see you and say: She is his wife,

that they will kill me, but you they will allow to live.  

13  Pray say that you are my sister

so that it may go well with me on your account, that I myself may live thanks to you.  

[RA] my sister. Chapter 20 reveals that Sarah is actually Abraham’s half sister.  It is not clear whether the writer means to endorse the peculiar stratagem of the patriarch in any of these three stories.

14  It was when Avram came to Egypt, that the Egyptians saw how exceedingly fair the woman was;

15  when Pharaoh’s courtiers saw her, they praised her to Pharaoh,

and the woman was taken away into Pharaoh’s house.  

[EF] Pharaoh:  Heb. Par’o. This is an Egyptian title, “(Lord of) the Great House,” and not a name.

16  It went well with Avram on her account,

sheep and oxen, donkeys, servants and maids, she-asses and camels, became his.  

17  But YHWH plagued Pharaoh with great plagues and also his household, because of Sarai, Avram’s wife.  

[RA] plagues.  The nature of the afflictions is not spelled out. Rashi’s inference of a genital disorder preventing intercourse is not unreasonable.  In that case, one might imagine a tense exchange between Pharaoh and Sarai ending in a confession by Sarai of her status as Abram’s wife.  In the laconic narrative art of the Hebrew writer, this is left as a gap for us to fill in by an indeterminate compound of careful deduction and imaginative reconstruction.

18  Pharaoh had Avram called, and said:

What is this that you have done to me!  

Why did you not tell me that she is your wife!  

19  Why did you say: She is my sister?

—So I took her for myslef as a wife.  

But now, here is your wife, take her and go!  

[RA]  Take her and get out!  “Her” is merely implied in the Hebrew, which gives us three abrupt syllables, two of them accented:  qákh walékh.  There may be an intended counterpoint between the patient brusqueness of this imperative, lekh, and the same imperative, softened by an ethical dative, lekh lekha, “go forth” (literally, “go you”), in God’s words to Abram that inaugurate the Patriarchal cycle.

20  So Pharaoh put men in charge of him, who escorted him and his wife and all that was his.

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S6K: Additional Commentary 

Chapter 12 begins with what is termed as “the call of Abram,” the details being:

1.  First encounter between YHWH and Abraham

• Go —to the land that “I will show you.”
  • Go “for yourself”
  • away from—
    • country
    • relatives
    • father’s house
• 1st mention of the Promise:
  • make you a great nation;
  • make your name great;
  • you will be a blessing;
  • those who bless you will be blessed;
  • those who curse you will be cursed;
  • in you all families of the earth will be blessed.
• Abram was 75 years old when he left Charan;
  • he took Saray, Lot and a retinue acquired in Charan
  • he passes through Shechem, to the oak or terebinth tree of Moreh
  • Canaanites were still in the land of Canaan.

2.  2nd Appearance of YHVH

• land promised to Abram’s seed
• Abram built altar to יהוה.
• Pitched his tent between Bethel and Ai
• built an altar and called on the Name of יהוה.

3.  Oppressive famine drives Abram to Egypt and that whole pretense about not being Saray’s husband shows YHWH’s continued protection of Abram despite his un-husbandly behavior to protect his wife.  As a result, he accumulates more wealth to where he and his nephew Lot resort to parting of ways, dividing and claiming their chosen portion of the land, with Lot given first choice so he goes for the visually inviting Jordan valley including Sodom where the text says men were wicked.

4.  YHVH reiterates promised land

• “for all the land which you see I will give to you and to your seed beyond the field of even time and space.”
• descendants will multiply
• Abram moves to Mamre, builds another altar.

5.  Interlude involving the war among the kings, the kidnapping of Lot, Abram’s coming to the rescue of his nephew, accumulates more wealth.

6.  Another interlude with Melchizedek, King of Salem

7.  YHVH in a vision with more promises—

• Assurance of YHWH being his Shield and Defender
• Promise of an heir through Saray
•  And he believed יהוה, and He counted it to him as righteousness.
• Unconditional Covenant while Abraham slept
• Prophecy on descendants being slaves in a foreign land for 400 years; enslaving nation will be judged; descendants will be released with possessions; death in old age; 4th generation will return

8.  Saray and Hagar, birth of Ishmael when Abraham was 86 years old.

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This first part of Abram’s journey gives us the following insights:

• He starts out not perfect, makes some unwise decisions at this early stage; that is typical of us all, until we start knowing more about God and what He requires of us.
• Like Noah, he hears God’s call, follows instructions because why not, who can refuse the incentives given by YHWH Himself.
• He’s a worshipper, builds altar after altar wherever he encounters God, evidence of the beginning of a monotheistic faith.
• He doesn’t always act honorably (Pharaoh and Saray),
• Like Adam [and probably any husband who can’t pass up an unusual offer from a wife) he listens to Saray’s alternative plan to have an heir thru Hagar instead of standing on YHWH’s promise.
• He protects his kin (rescue of Lot).
• He’s mindful and considerate of family (allows Lot to take first choice; leaves Haran after father’s death)
• He pays his respects to  Melchizedek, king of Salem and a priest of El Elyon; this figure must have been prominent in Abraham’s day, for him to not only visit but give a “tenth”.  Who the god of Melchizedek is, we can only deduce from the title “el elyon”  usually translated “God most high.”  And this is the problem with titles, they don’t really identify God by name. If Abraham who has met the True God pays his respects to this king-priest Melchizedek, perhaps Abraham knew something we don’t, the text doesn’t say.  Presumably, he thinks they worship the same God . . . but again, this is speculation.

Casual readers of the Bible have the mistaken notion that “Old Testament” figures were all “Jews.”  Some Jewish teachers call Abraham the first Jew. But if we will be true to the text at this point of the Bere’shiyth narratives, there is no Israelite or Jew yet.  The call of Abraham is the beginning of setting a man apart from whom will descend a particular bloodline devoted to YHWH.