Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [35]
BIBLICAL VOICES
Now the Lord had said unto Abram, “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee. And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.” (Gen. 12:1-3 KJV)
PLOT SUMMARY: THE CALL OF ABRAM AND HIS TRAVELS
Born the son of Terah in Ur, in a direct line from Noah, Abram was also directly descended from Adam. The founding patriarch of Jews and Arabs alike, Abram—whose name will later be changed by God to Abraham—had a brother named Haran, which was also the name of a city in northwestern Mesopotamia, in what is now modern Syria. Haran died, but had a son named Lot, who was Abram’s nephew. Abram’s wife was Sarai, who was also his half sister. Terah took his son Abram, Sarai, and Lot to Haran—a little confusion here because the place name is the same as the name of Abram’s dead brother.
While in Haran, Abram is instructed by God to go to nearby Canaan, a land that God promises to Abram and his descendants. In Canaan, Abram sets up two altars and “invokes the name of the Lord.” When a famine strikes, Abram goes to Egypt, where he is afraid that the Pharaoh will kill him in order to take his wife, Sarai, because she is so beautiful.
To save his own life, Abram tells Sarai to pretend she is his sister. Sarai is taken into the Pharaoh’s household as a concubine and Abram prospers. But God sends a plague on the Pharaoh’s house, and when the Pharaoh discovers Abram’s deceit, he orders Abram to leave Egypt. Once back in Canaan, Abram and Lot decide to split up. Abram offers Lot the first choice of land, and Abram’s nephew picks out a plain near the city of Sodom. Abram goes to the hill country of Canaan, where he is once more told by God, “I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth; so that if one can count the dust of the earth, your offspring also can be counted.”
When four kings wage war on Sodom and Lot is taken hostage, Abram leads a small army to rescue his nephew. Abram—identified for the first time as “the Hebrew”—defeats the four kings and gives a 10 percent share of the booty to King Melchizedek, who is also the high priest of the Canaanite cult El Elyon—the God Most High—in Salem, the place that will later be called Jerusalem.
Where did Abram come from?
If a man gives his wife to another man to save his own neck, we consider him a coward. If he sleeps with his wife’s maid so he can have a son, we call him a pig. If he then kicks his son and that maid out of the house, we call him a deadbeat dad. And if that man were to threaten to kill his child and said, “God told me to do it,” most people would agree that he should be locked up, even if he stopped short of committing the unthinkable. But the biblical patriarch Abram does all these things, and he is considered one of the heroes of the faith for his actions.
Revered as the “father of all nations” by Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike, Abram is a great example of the fact that the biblical heroes weren’t always heroic—or even nice guys. Quite a few of them, in fact, were pretty pathetic characters. But in each case, they were singled out by God for special treatment and often extreme moral testing.
Abram is also the earliest biblical character who can be connected, rather remotely and speculatively, to recorded world history. This is not to say that we know that a man named Abram ever existed. There is no specific proof of this individual outside of the Bible. But with his arrival on the Genesis scene, there are the first clues that the biblical world he supposedly lived in was the world as history knows it.
Abram’s birthplace is questionable. From the Bible account, he was from Ur, then a major city in southern Mesopotamia. But Genesis also says he was from Haran, another key