Called to Become a Blessing

“Get thee out” is lekh lekha, literally “go for yourself”, and the phrase occurs only once more, in 22:2: “get thee into the land of Moriah”. The two hardest commands of Abraham’s life open with the same words. The three things left behind narrow as they go: country, kindred, father’s house.

“Thou shalt be a blessing” is an imperative in Hebrew: be a blessing. The root for blessing comes five times in these two verses, and scholars have long set that against the five curses of chapters 3 to 9, the serpent, the ground twice, Cain and Canaan.

The two curses are different words. God will arar, curse, the one who qalal, treats Abram lightly or with contempt. The blessers are plural and the curser is singular. Paul in Galatians 3:8 calls the last clause the gospel preached beforehand to Abraham.

Abram says nothing. He simply goes, “as the LORD had spoken”, and his first recorded words in Genesis will be the plan he puts to Sarai at the edge of Egypt. Lot goes too, of his own accord; no one told him to.

“The souls that they had gotten” are the servants of the household, people acquired in Haran. Targum Onkelos and Genesis Rabbah read the phrase literally as souls they had made, and took it of people Abram and Sarai had brought to the worship of the one God.

The “plain of Moreh” is elon Moreh, the oak or terebinth of Moreh, which means teacher: perhaps a tree where oracles were sought. Deuteronomy 11:30 places it beside Gerizim and Ebal. Ibn Ezra hinted that “was then in the land” held a secret about when these words were written.

This is the first time Scripture says the LORD “appeared” to anyone. Shechem, where the land is first promised, is where Jacob will buy ground (33:19) and where Joseph’s bones will be buried in Joshua 24:32. Abram’s altar answers an appearance, and the verse says so twice.

Beth-el is called by the name Jacob will give it in 28:19; it was then Luz. Hai is Ai, “the ruin”, where Joshua’s first attack will fail and the second succeed. Abram pitches his tent between the two and does what Enos’s generation did in 4:26.

“Going on still” is literally “journeying and journeying”, and the verb means pulling up tent pegs. “The south” is the Negev, the dry country. Abram does not settle in the land he has just been promised; he keeps moving through it.

The first famine in Scripture, and the first of three: Isaac will face one in 26:1 and Jacob’s sons in chapter 42. “Sojourn” is gur, to live as a resident alien, a ger, the very status 15:13 foretells for Abram’s seed.

“Behold now, I know” sounds like a sudden realisation at the border. On 17:17’s figures Sarai is sixty five here, and the Genesis Apocryphon found at Qumran spends a long passage praising her face, her hands and her feet, as if to answer the question the age raises.

Abram scripts the Egyptians’ lines before he has met one: “This is his wife.” “Save thee alive” is the verb used of the ark in 6:19, “to keep them alive”. His fear is that he will be killed for her; that she might be taken instead seems not to trouble the calculation.

“I pray thee” is the Hebrew particle na: Abram asks, he does not order. In 20:12 he will claim Sarai is his half-sister. Nothing here says so, and for now the reader meets the words as the Egyptians do.

From this verse to the next, Genesis stops calling her Sarai or Abram’s wife. She is “the woman”, twice, as the Egyptians see her. Her name and her marriage return together only in verse 17, when the LORD strikes Pharaoh’s house.

“Commended” is hillel, praised, the verb inside hallelujah. Pharaoh is a title, from the Egyptian per-aa, “great house”; no Pharaoh in Genesis is named. “Pharaoh’s house” is both his palace and his household of women.

“Entreated” is 1611 English for treated. The list of gifts is oddly ordered, servants set between the male and the female asses, and it ends with camels, whose date of domestication scholars still argue over. Hagar, “an Egyptian” in 16:1, may have come from this household; Genesis Rabbah made her Pharaoh’s daughter.

“Plagued” and “plagues” are naga and nega, to strike and a stroke, the word Exodus 11:1 uses for the last plague on Egypt. Nachmanides saw the whole episode as a sign of what Abram’s descendants would live through: famine, a descent into Egypt, plagues, and a release with wealth.

Abimelech will ask Abraham the same question in 20:9, and Laban will put it to Jacob in 29:25. Genesis repeatedly lets an outsider ask a patriarch, “What is this that thou hast done?” Here Abram answers none of it.

“So I might have taken her” is the King James softening. The Hebrew says “and I took her to me to wife”, which reads as though the marriage had gone ahead; commentators divide over how far. “Take her” uses the same verb as “taken” in verse 15, the taking reversed.

“Sent him away” is shillach, the verb of “Let my people go” in Exodus 5:1. Pharaoh gives his men orders about Abram, an escort to the border. The man who went down to survive a famine comes out richer, and with nothing more said.