The Book of Genesis, Chapter 12

Genesis 12:1-20

Summary

God really likes Abram. Like so much. At a ridiculously advanced age (though maybe less so, with the number of people living past 200), God tells Abram to go on one hell of a road trip in exchange for blessings galore.

Abram goes traveling, hitting up Canaan and Bethel, building an altar to the Lord in each place, and eventually a famine hits, and Abram has to go to Egypt for food. In order to prevent the Egyptians from getting jealous, he tells his wife to pretend she's his sister, but this kind of backfires when the Pharaoh takes her to be his wife. Abram says nothing and gets a bunch of stuff. I wish I was making this up.

Eventually God starts plaguing Egypt because of Sarai, and Pharaoh goes to Abram and essentially says "Dude, what the hell?" and has the whole lot of them (haha, punny) escorted out of the country.

Commentary

The beginning of this chapter is really fantastic. God takes a rather large interest in Abram, and decides to send him out with his family to settle in a new land, which God will show him. God promises blessings:

"I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed" (Gen 12:2-3)

I find this blessing very beautiful, myself, and I'm getting ahead of myself, but I seem to remember a similar sentiment when Jesus sends out his disciples in pairs. The footnote at the end of this blessing suggests an alternative wording which I find very interesting.

"In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed" might be replaced with "In you all the families of the earth shall bless themselves". I am a Christian by choice, it's true, but there's a great deal of humanism in me as well, and this speaks very much to that. Rather than blessing us, we are given the power and the strength to bless ourselves.

So, at the age of 75, with his wife, his nephew, and all of their stuff, Abram set out to Canaan. He passed through Canaan to "the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh" (Gen 12:6). The word "oak" here is sometimes translated as "Terebinth", which is a reasonably large tree related to the Pistachio family. The implication is that this is some sort of grove, and here God appears before Abram and informs him that this will be the land of his descendants. Abram builds an altar to God here. A similar event happens between the lands of Bethel and Ai.

Like every good story, though, the plot thickens. Famine strikes, and Abram and Co. are forced into Egypt to find food. Abram says to his wife:

"I know well that you are a woman beautiful in appearance; and when the Egyptians see you, they will say, 'This is his wife'; then they will kill me, but they will let you live. Say you are my sister, so that it may go well with me because of you, and that my life may be spared on your account." (Gen 12:11-13)

It's not a bad idea, really. At the time, I'm sure it made sense to fear being killed and having your wife taken from you by Egyptians. Unfortunately, it backfires. When they get to Egypt, the beauty of Sarai is a very well-known fact: She's so beautiful that the Pharaoh takes her into his household. I'm assuming this is a euphemism for taking her as a wife or a concubine or something like that.

This probably would still have happened if Abram had told the truth; assuming his fears were justified, it would probably would have gone much the same way, except with a dead Abram.

It sounds bad at first, but when you take a look at the next verse, the whole story takes on a whole new level of bad:

"And for her sake he dealt well with Abram; and he had sheep, oxen, male donkeys, male and female slaves, female donkeys, and camels." (Gen 12:16)

I hate to say, it but looks a little like Abram sold his wife. It's probably more accurate to say that Abram, under duress, gave up his wife and was well compensated for it, but it still feels very, very wrong, and God agrees.

For those of you who thought that the whole "Plagues on Egypt" thing was unique to Moses, I'm afraid to say that they're not.

"But the Lord afflicted Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai, Abram’s wife." (Gen 12:17)

That's right, folks, when Moses—with God's blessings, I might add—called down the plagues, it was at least the second time this had happened to the Egyptians. Maybe that's why the Egyptians enslaved the Israelites in the first place, they were still sore about this whole thing.

As I said in the summary, Pharaoh's reaction is relatively calm and reasonable. He doesn't have anyone killed, he just essentially says "What the hell, dude?" to Abram and sends them on their way, probably still wondering "Why did [he] not tell me [she] was [his] wife?" (Gen 12:18).