(BA) Genesis 13

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Abram leaves Egypt, and goes to the Negev, and then on to Bethel, to a sacred site. He and his nephew Lot find themselves involved in a conflict, and decide to go their separate ways. Abram generously offers Lot the choice of where to go, and Lot chooses for himself the best land, north of the Dead Sea. Forebodingly, the narrator tells us that Lot is living among the evil men of Sodom, setting us up for the later story of Sodom's destruction. Abram lives in the land of Canaan, which Yahweh promises will belong to him and his numerous descendants. The relations between Abram and Lot represent the later relations between the people of Israel and the Ammonites and Moabites to their east.

(13:1) This verse, for what it's worth, is proof that hanegba does not just mean "southward" in Hebrew. It's true that the Negev is in the South of Canaan, and it's true that usually -- in a book filled with stories of people dwelling in the land of Canaan -- someone travelling Negev-ward would be going South. But in this case Abraham goes north ("up") from Egypt to the Negev.

(13:3-4). Skinner sees these two verses as a "redactional addition ... bringing the narrative back to Bethel, the traditional scene of the separation."

(13:3) he moved his camp along. Hebrew wayyelek lᵉmassaʿayw, wich might be more literally translated, following Driver, "and he went by his stages". While the Hebrew does contain a pronominal ending equivalent to "his", Skinner holds that the essential meaning of the Hebrew expression "by his stages" is simply "by stages". Thus, according to Skinner, the Hebrew wording simply pictures Abraham repeatedly packing up camp, travelling a ways, and setting up camp again as he journeys -- the "his" in "by his stages" does not imply that Abram's route back from Egypt followed exactly the same series of stops as his trip down to Egypt. Rashi, on the other hand, seems to have envisioned a scenario in which Abraham was staying in a series of inns and kept those constant from one trip to the next. Less dramatically, the Vulgate reads "And he returned by the way that he came" (Douay-Rheims). But we can see that the Hebrew for "by his stages" does not imply retracing a prior route from the use of the same expression in Exodus 17:1 and 40:36 (Skinner).

(13:3) the place where his tent was at first. A reference to Genesis 12:8.

(13:3) Bethel. The ASV hyphenates the name as "Beth-el", which is reasonable, as in Hebrew it is two words: the "Beth" is Hebrew for "house", and the "El" is the name of the deity "El", who according to various passages in the Hebrew Bible is identical with Yahweh. So Beth-el would be the "House of El".

(13:3) the Ai. This is, literally, what the Hebrew says. It is not simply "Ai", but "the Ai", which suggests that "Ai" is also a common noun. According to Gesenius' Lexicon it means "heap of ruins". According to the book of Joshua, the Ai was a city until Joshua destroyed it and turned it permanently into a heap of ruins.

(13:3) his tent. Following the Qere. The Kethib has a reading which at first glance looks like "her tent", but which can be read as an unusual spelling of "his tent". Curiously, this Kethib-Qere pair is the same as the one in Genesis 12:8, for reasons I can't account for any more than I can account for the curious third person singular feminine pronoun in the Pentateuch. This is also the Kethib-Qere for "his/her tent" in Genesis 9:20.

(13:4) called upon the name of Yahweh. For the argument that this expression implies the offering of sacrifices, see qaraʾ bᵉšem.

(13:5) herds. The Hebrew term tson can include both sheep and goats.

(13:5) tents. According to Skinner, the word "tents" here "appears to have the sense of 'people,' 'families'".

(13:7) the Canaanite and the Perizzite. According to the timeline of the Hebrew Bible, the Canaanites and Perizzites were in the land until Joshua's campaigns of extermination. On the traditional view of the authorship of Genesis, Moses would have been writing Genesis at a time when the "Canaanites and Perizzites" were still in the land. So why would Moses say, "the Canaanite and the Perizzite dwelt then in the land". This note makes more sense if it was written at a time after Israel had displaced the purported indigenous peoples of Canaan. While "Canaanites" is used often of the pre-Israelite or non-Israelite inhabitants of Canaan, the term "Perizzites" is a bit less clear. Never does the Bible go into any detail as to who the Perizzites were, although there may be hints. Driver suggests on the basis of other biblical references that "the Perizzites were a people of central Palestine", and mentions an opinion that their name "is connected with perāzī, 'country-folk, peasantry' (Dt. iii. 5; 1 S. vi. 18), and denoted the village population of Canaan, the fellaḥin, or labourers on the soil."

(13:7) Perizzites appear frequently in lists of the indigenous inhabitants of Canaan, but there is not sufficient information to say more about them with any certainty. Various ideas have been proposed. See Stephen A. Reed, "Perizzites", in the Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary.

(13:8) close relatives. Literally "brother-men".

(13:9) In a society in which being older was an important source of social status, for Abram to defer to his nephew is a very humble thing to do (Driver).

(13:10) Based on the geography of the area, Driver thinks that a particular hill can be identified as the vantage-point the narrator has in mind for Lot to look out from.

(13:10) kikkar is the Hebrew word itself. I have seen "circle" (e.g. ASV marginal notes) and "oval" as the most common attempts at a literal rendering of the term, and renderings like "Plain of the Jordan" (ASV) to describe the specific region referred to.

(13:10) garden of Yahweh. Compare Genesis 2:8, in which the garden of Eden is described as being irrigated (Driver).

(13:10) as you go to Zoar. The geography of this expression has raised some interesting questions. Where we here have "Zoar", the Hebrew is ṣoʿar. The Vulgate reads Segor. The Syriac reads ṣʾn (Zoan?). Kittel held that the expression "like the land of Egypt" was probably a later addition to this verse.

(13:11) eastward. Hebrew miqqedem, a word of such unfortunate ambiguity that it gets used both for "eastward" and "from the east". This is a passage in which miqqedem simply must mean "eastward". Kittel thinks perhaps that here the text original read qadmah, which more clearly means "eastward".

(13:12) land of Canaan. The "land of Canaan", proper, refers to the land west of the Jordan. So it would seem a reasonable assumption that Lot is dwelling in land east of the Jordan. This broad division also agrees with the historical location of Lot's supposed descendants, Moab and Ammon, dwelling east of the Jordan, with Israel, seen as the legitimate successor of Abraham, on the west. This story thus provides an origin for why the Israelites and the Moabites and Ammonites live where they do.

(13:12) Sodom. For the reader who knows the story of Sodom, this little detail foreshadows that Lot's selfish choice to take the better land is setting him up for a disaster (cf. Skinner).

(13:14) This promise is given immediately after Lot's departure to underline that, in the narrator's scheme of things, Lot's decision to go east has left Abraham as the only person with a rightful claim to ownership of Canaan (Skinner).

(13:17) to you. The Septuagint reads "to you and to your seed forever".

(13:18) Elonei Mamre, meaning "oaks" or "terebinths" of Mamre. The Septuagint and Syriac have the singular. The NKJV's note on this verse, "Heb. Alon Mamre" looks like it might be some sort of poorly-worded attempt to endorse the Septuagint/Syriac reading.

(13:18) At the end of this verse is a Masoretic section break (petuha).

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