This page was migrated in July 2022 from my older website, biblicalambiguities.net.
July 2022 - 27 August 2022
We might divide the Primary History (Genesis-Kings) into three parts. The first part, Genesis 1-11, or the Primeval History, concerns the earliest matters involving humankind, in which no "people of Israel" exist. The third part, Exodus-Kings, concerns the story of Israel. The middle section, Genesis 12-50, follows the first inklings of Israel through the lives of three patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We begin this middle section with the "call of Abraham".
After the death of Terah at the end of chapter 11, Yahweh appears to Abram and tells him to go to a new land. Abram then goes to Canaan, and engages in practices that will legitimate the later cultic sanctuaries at Shechem and Bethel. He then goes to Egypt, where he winds up in a sticky situation due to passing of Sarai his wife as his sister. However, Sarai and Abram are reunited and expelled from Egypt.
In terms of interpretation, three interesting issues are worth noting briefly. First, there is a chronological problem with when Abram leaves for Canaan that is worth exploring. Second, the chapter shows signs of being written well after the events described, likely with the aim of shoring up the sacred claims of two cultic sites in the land of Canaan. Third, the first of the wife-sister narratives appears.
The plain meaning of Genesis 11:26, I think, points of Abram being born when Terah is seventy years old. The clear function of the Genesis 5 and 11 narratives is to provide a continuous set of dates moving forward from Adam to Abraham, and the chronological passages throughout the rest of the Bible are careful to provide a continuous chronology likewise through to the end of the Judahite monarchy (see chronology-biblical). This is the broad context that these dates fall into. If 11:26 does anything but provide another such link in the chronology, this reads significantly against the grain of the biblical story, although various apologists have proposed creative readings.
11:32 tells us that Terah lived 205 and died in Haran. That is, he must have died when Abraham was 135 years old. But as we move forward to Genesis 12, we find Abram where Genesis 11 has left him, living in Haran, at which point God sends him on to complete the trek to Canaan that his father Terah began. We read in 12:4 that "Abram was seventy-five years old when he left Haran." So we are faced with a discrepancy of 60 years.
The NIV, in an attempt to resolve the problem, starts out Genesis 12:1 with "The Lord had said to Abram ...". That is, along their conservative line of interpretation, they choose to read this as indicating that the text has now skipped backward in time sixty years, and Yahweh is calling Abram to leave Haran while his father is still alive. They are following the same practice established by the KJV translators: "Now the Lord had said unto Abram ...". This must be motivated by the chronological problem, as there is nothing in the Hebrew grammar that would call for "had said"; the Hebrew has simply "said".
Another attempt to resolve the problem is to argue, as some do, that Abram was in fact born when Terah was 135 or so, and that the "seventy years" of 11:26 refer to the age of Terah at the time he had his oldest son, and that that oldest son was not Abram. But Abram is listed first among the children. And it seems a bit much to read And Terah lived seventy years, and begot Abram, Nahor, and Haran as meaning And Terah lives seventy years, and begot either Nahor or Haran, and then sixty years later he begot Abram. It stretches the text pretty hard.
The chronological problem here is not something that modern Bible readers have discovered. Rashi suggests that Abram did in fact leave Haran sixty years before Terah's death, but says that Scripture narrates Abram's leaving as if it occurred after Terah's death so as not to raise the scandalous implication that Abram had dishonored his father by leaving him behind in his old age. While Rashi is well-regarded in Orthodox Judaism, and was a brilliantly clever writer, this sort of explanation will likely prove less than satisfying for conservative Christians.
Conservative Christians, unlike Jews, have another issue to grapple with: the New Testament's treatment of the order of these events. The protomartyr Stephen takes up the issue of Abram's departure and Terah's death in Acts 7:4, where he says explicitly that Abraham leaves Haran to Canaan after the death of Terah.
Not that the Samaritan Pentateuch, which has Terah dying at 145 years old, does not face this problem.
When I use anno mundi dates on this website, I will generally assume that Abram was born seventy years after Terah, but the reader should take all these anno mundi numbers with a grain of salt because of this and other issues.
Shechem and Bethel appear as important cultic sites throughout the Hebrew Bible, and by including them in the very first story of Abram's time in Canaan, the narrator creates a precedent for future use of these sites as sacred.
The first location Abram arrives in Canaan is the "oak" of Moreh at Shechem (12:6). This word "oak" has religious overtones in the Hebrew Bible. There Abraham sees Yahweh (12:7 -- or doesn't, depending on how you read the whole complex and ambiguous issue of "seeing" Yahweh). The oak, now legitimized by the theophany, now becomes the site of an altar built by Abram himself. Along the same vein, Genesis 33 (18-19) will contain a narrative of the patriarch Jacob buying land in Shechem and erecting an altar. Jacob will later hide various sacred artifacts under "the 'oak' which was by Shechem" (35:4). The patriarch Joseph will be buried at Shechem (24:32) on the parcel of land that Jacob bought. Joshua 21:20 will make it a special possession of the priestly tribe of Levi. We could go on and discuss other passages, but if you're interested in more a place to read a bit would be the article "Shechem" in the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia, which remains a very handy, if dated, source on biblical matters. Similarly, Bethel has a good number of biblical references as a cultic center, for which see the Jewish Encyclopedia on Beth-El.
A patriarch, the ancestor of all the Israelites, is traveling with his wife to a foreign land. He is afraid that his wife will be taken and he will be killed. So he lies, and says that she is his sister. A local ruler, not realizing that she is his wife, takes her, and gives gifts to the patriarch. However, a deity intervenes, and the local ruler discovers that he has been tricked. He gives the woman back to the patriarch, angrily rebukes him, and sends him on his way.
That story, more or less, appears three times in the book of Genesis, which some variation in details, including who the patriarch is (Abraham in two versions, Isaac in one) and who the foreign leader is (Pharaoh in one version, Abimelech in two). This is part of a much broader trend within the Pentateuch, in which stories appear in doublets or even triplets: a single story told multiple times with variations in the details. For a broader treatment of this phenomenon and many others, see Richard Elliot Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible?
(12:1) From this verse one might get the idea that Abraham does not know where he is headed. But the end of chapter 11 says that the family was already en route to Canaan when they stopped, for unstated reasons, at Haran.
(12:2) so that you will. Following a common line of interpretation that takes the imperative here as expressing a consequence of God's actions. Otherwise, the most common interpretation of the imperative is as a simple command: "be a blessing". According to Skinner, someone named Griesebacht suggested an emendation here, so that instead of (literally) "and be a blessing", the Hebrew text should read, "and it (i.e., your name) will be a blessing.
(12:2) an exemplar of blessedness. See the notes to the NET Bible (available online) for the reasoning behind reading this way. While "so that you will be a blessing" might be literalistically correct, in English "be a blessing" has different connotations than what the Hebrew expression vehye braka points to. If NET's reasoning is sound here, and I think it is, then nearly every conservative Protestant translation translates here in an overly literal fashion, as do the well-regarded NRSV and NJPS. So, merely on the weight of the translators who go in another direction, perhaps I should leave room for the possibility that I'm misunderstanding this. On the other hand, the basic approach taken by NET on this verse is similar to that found in Driver, Skinner, and Dillmann, though the nuances vary a bit.
(12:3) Perhaps the contrast between "those" who bless and "he" who denigrates indicates that Abraham will have more people blessing than denigrating him. The NLT flattens this number distinction that appears in the Hebrew and makes both those blessed and those cursed plural. Instead of "he who", a few Hebrew manuscripts, the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Peshitto, and the Vulgate read "those who" (Kittel).
(12:3) denigrates you. A different word in the Hebrew from the "curse" at the end of the verse. But the KJV and some other translations flatten this distinction.
(12:3) will use you in blessing one another. That is, when blessing themselves or others, people will invoke the name of Abraham and/or his descendants, i.e., saying things along the lines of "May you be as blessed as Abraham's descendants." I'm reading the niphal verb here as something like reflexive in meaning. The KJV reads it as more of a simple passive: "in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed". This could, of course, be read in a Messianic sense by Christian or other readers, who would see here a way in which Abraham, via his descendants, will bless all nations. But considering the immediate context, it would be odd to read nbrkw as referring to a general blessing upon all nations, see how this very verse sees Abraham as a source of both blessing and cursing, as God repays his friends and enemies. I am pursuaded then to follow Rashi here.
(12:4) "seventy-five years old". See the chronological discussion above.
(12:6) place. Why would Genesis say, "the place of Shechem", rather than simply "Shechem"? Driver suggests of the Hebrew word here for "place" (maqom), means "sacred place", and in support cites a similar Arabic word and points the reader to Genesis 38:16, Deuteronomy 12:2-3, 1 Samuel 8:16 LXX.
(12:6) oak. The KJV reads "plain", but gets it wrong here. It's widely accepted now that the Hebrew elon refers to a tree. More specifically, we can say that the word has a connotation of the sacred.
(12:6) oak of Moreh. The word elon, here oak, is sometimes rendered "terebinth", although I think the exact species of tree is beside the point. Driver reads "the directing terebinth" instead of "terebinth of Moreh", thus taking the Hebrew word moreh as referring to this tree's use in giving oracles. Driver suggests that this is the same great tree as the one intended in Joshua 24:26, where the tree is said to be in "the sanctuary of Yahweh" at Shechem.
Where the Masoretic Text has ʾelon moreh, the Septuagint reads "the high oak", perhaps pointing to a reading of ʾelon marom (Kittel, cf. Brenton, NETS).
(12:6) then in the land. It is odd that the narrator here would feel the need to point at that "the Canaanite was then in the land." The most straightforward way to read this is that the writer of this phrase was producing his work after the Canaanites were no longer in the land. This clashes, however, with the traditional religious view that the book of Genesis was written by Moses, who as the Bible narrates it died while Canaanites were still in the land. Note also that, like in the Melchizedek episode, this narrative seems to paint Abraham as entirely comfortable with the pre-existing Canaanite sacred sites, in contrast to the Deuteronomistic emphasis on wiping out all the Canaanite shrines and replacing them with Jerusalem alone.
(12:7) This verse is one of several on either side of the biblical question, "Has anyone seen Yahweh?" Of particular interest for unraveling this complex issue are Numbers 12:8, which asserts that God spoke "mouth to mouth, and visibly" with Moses, and Exodus 33:19-23, in which Moses can see God's back but not his deadly face. By contrast, Abraham and Isaac seem to have a far less complicated time seeing God, and Isaiah says without any complication or evasion, "I saw Yahweh" (Isaiah 6:1). On the other hand, there is a strong tendency to de-anthropomorphize God (at least the Father) in the New Testament and see him as invisible (John 1:18; Colossians 1:15; 1 Timothy 1:17, 6:16; 1 John 4:12).
This verse is also relevant on the question of altars, as the Bible portrays a long struggle between those who endorsed Jerusalem as the only possible site for legitimate sacrificial activity, verses those who treated multiple sites as legitimate.
(12:8) mountain. Or, "hill-country".
(12:8) Bethel: an important cultic site in the Bible, whose name means, "House of El". Usually scholars identify it with modern Beitin (See the Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary, "Bethel").
(12:8) his tent. Following the Qere. The Kethib reads in a way that at first glance appears to mean "her tent", but which is readable as an unusual spelling of "his tent".
(12:16) sheep. The Hebrew term tson is a bit broader than sheep, and can include goats and well.
After the word "oxen", the Samaritan Pentateuch adds, "a great mass of livestock", followed by "and male servants, and female servants, and male donkeys, and female donkeys" (Kittel). Thus the Samaritan Pentateuch does not have the odd order found in the Masoretic Text in which human beings are listed between male and female donkeys.
(12:17) and his household. Kittel thinks these words may be a later addition to the text.
(12:19) here is your wife. Here the Septuagint adds "before you" (Kittel, Brenton).
As with other pages migrated from biblicalambiguities.net, this page may contain material paraphrased or even outright copied without direct attribution from the KJV, RV, ASV, JPS (1917), WEB, NHEB, Kittel's BH, the pre-1923 volumes of the ICC series, or the commentaries on Genesis of Dillmann, Skinner, and Driver. More details on this policy can be found here: biblicalambiguities-general-disclaimer and biblicalambiguities-translation-disclaimer.
This page is released under the CC0 1.0 license.