We need to cut our gibberish down to five minutes.
I don’t know.
I think 10 minutes is too long for gibberish.
Friends welcome back.
Thanks for being with us on this Wednesday.
We are in an interesting part, Genesis 12,
still in the front end of the cycle of stories
about Abram and his wife Sarai.
This is one of those stories.
We probably won’t look at it much the second time.
It’s actually a story that
is either told twice or is changed slightly or happened twice,
however you want to look at that.
But there are two versions of this story in Genesis.
And it’s an odd one.
To preface it,
I will just say that in the book of Genesis,
and I think this is true
really in the Scriptures in general,
there are moments where God,
the primary character of the Scripture, steps front and center,
just is big and bold and involved in the story.
God holds people accountable.
God does things.
And we’ll see a little of that here.
Then there are these other moments,
these other stories that are told really with God
as a kind of background character.
And some of the characters do things that you would expect God would have some reaction to.
God would say, “Why did you do that?
What’s going on there?
You shouldn’t do it that way.
You should do it.”
And yet these stories refuse to comment on that at all.
They simply—it’s a non-factor.
And we get one of those kind of stories today,
actually.
We get almost two—we get both of those realities probably in one story.
But it can be frustrating to read those moments where you think,
“Well,
what is happening here and why isn’t God,
or why does God do this?”
And some of that’s been lost to us,
and some of it is just not what the story’s interested
in telling us.
So let me read this story to you,
and then I hope it’ll be a little clearer what we’re talking about.
“There was a famine in the land,
so Abram went down to Egypt to reside there as an alien,
for the famine was severe in the land.
When he was about to enter Egypt,
he said to Sarai,
‘I know well you are a woman that
is 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 might
be spared on your account.’
When Abram entered Egypt,
the Egyptians saw that the woman was very beautiful.
When the officials of Pharaoh saw her,
they praised her to the Pharaoh,
and the woman was taken into Pharaoh’s house.
And for her sake,
he dealt well with Abram,
and he had sheep,
oxen, male donkeys,
male and female servants,
female donkeys,
and camels.” So let’s stop here, Michael, I think.
So, Abram’s worried about himself.
They’re going into the land of Egypt,
it is a land of a powerful presence of the Pharaoh.
He knows that his wife is beautiful,
he knows that she is a foreigner,
he knows that she may attract attention,
and he’s nervous about that.
So he says,
“Maybe innocently at first,
just tell him you’re my sister.
Let’s be cautious,
let’s be careful, let’s bide our time.
When we go in there,
list for the public eye,
we will act as brother and sister.”
And the idea here is that he’s going to keep himself safe.
Yeah, and that is a reflection already in Abram’s story that it’s not always easy to
keep our trust in God.
You remember, we lauded the fact that Abram is told by God to go do this thing,
and he does so,
how often in scripture the action of faith is the thing that’s emphasized.
So we’ve affirmed that,
that this is a great thing that Abram does,
and then he progresses
by stage, this is where we ended yesterday.
Now note,
here as we begin the text today,
I just want to point out,
let’s not rush past,
we have here in verse 10,
there’s a famine in the land.
And this is the thing that sets up the action of this story,
because Abram is subject to
this larger reality that fundamentally,
he’s caring for not only his wife and his family,
but these possessions as they make their way forward in the story.
They come to Egypt,
which don’t let that pass you by.
This is a setup for a lot of Egypt’s stories to come.
We’re getting background already in how Egypt is not only a power,
but it’s also a power
that has a dark force to be considered.
Egypt to Abram is a threat.
And of course we know in the next book of Exodus,
Egypt’s power and ability has extended
to that next level,
where it is now not only a threat,
it’s a direct threat,
a literal slave holder of the people of Israel.
But here in the beginning of this story,
we have this reality where Abram has been given
a promise by God,
a promise that is for him specifically,
for the sake of the whole world,
and already as he encounters difficulty,
because of the famine of the land,
he goes to this
dangerous place that he perceives as being dangerous.
He’s already being forced to make some decisions that expose his lack of trust in the very
God who called him to make that journey.
He comes to his wife and says,
“We need to sort of do this thing on the sly.
That’s the only way I’m going to be safe.”
And in doing so,
we already see that this is some difficult ground to walk.
Right.
Some interpreters have kind of come down on Abram for being not faithful,
for not trusting God, for being dishonest.
Others have said this is a man and a woman navigating desperate circumstances,
that their life really is in danger,
and that they have to make some very hard choices about how best
to survive that threat.
I
will also say that it maybe helps to kind of understand that this story,
the land that produces this literature, that is to say the Middle East of the ancient world,
very much treasures stories about shrewdness.
The Middle Eastern literature loves the trickster and is very prone to celebrate the underdog
who pulls off a victory against a powerful person.
So the one who out-negotiates,
the one who will see some of that in the—we will see
some of that woven throughout this,
especially when we get to the Jacob kind of—the stories
about Jacob.
But when you get the best of somebody through maybe not deceit,
but maybe deceit,
this comes from a genre of literature that kind of celebrates that.
Now, that may not be what’s happening here,
but it may be in the background.
Yeah, and another token here,
Clint, is it does often mention the trappings of wealth,
right?
Not only is it the trickster who succeeds,
but there are real concrete measures of that.
And for us, however many male donkeys he has doesn’t seem that important.
But don’t miss the point,
right?
That Abram is doing well both financially and in his status by this presence in Egypt.
So not only has it turned out that he’s safe,
it also turns out that it’s turning well
for him until the turn in the story,
which is where we’re about to get to.
Yeah, I hate to put it this bluntly,
but ancient readers would be more supportive of
the fact that he sticks it to the pharaoh than they would be troubled by the fact that
he bargains with his wife.
I mean, culturally,
that’s
just probably a reality.
That’s not the way we read the text,
but in the world that inherited these stories,
this would have been seen as him,
at its very base level,
using some of his property
to expand his property by many fold,
and that’s a win.
Yeah, and the author might point out,
as we’re about to see,
that it turns out that no one’s harmed except pharaoh.
Yeah.
Yeah, so we’ll get to that.
Yeah, and no Israelite is going to be upset by a story in which pharaoh is the brunt of
the joke.
That’s not a problem for them at all.
So here we go, verse 17,
“But the Lord afflicted Pharaoh in his house with great plagues because of Sarai,
Abram’s wife.
So Pharaoh called Abram and said,
‘What have you done to me?
Why did you not tell me she was your wife?
Why did you say she’s my sister so that I took her for my wife?
Now then, here is your wife.
Take her and be gone.’
And Pharaoh gave his men orders concerning him,
and they set him on the way with his wife
and all of his possessions.”
So this is what I was saying earlier.
Throughout this story,
God has kind of been in the background, silent, watching,
not really mentioned,
and here,
with no comment on what Abram has done,
the Lord shows up,
and the punishment is merited out to the pharaoh.
The pharaoh is guilty of something.
Now, is he really guilty?
He’s been deceived.
He’s not done this knowingly.
He’s not done this purposefully.
But what he’s doing is wrong,
and God has promised to watch over Abram and his family,
and so as a result,
he brings plagues upon Pharaoh.
Now,
if you read plagues Pharaoh in Egypt and think Exodus,
you should.
Those stories echo one another.
This, again,
yes, we stuck it to the pharaoh.
We got him.
Look what happened to him.
We took his donkeys.
We took all this stuff.
He got plagues.
Abraham’s the greatest.
So what have you done?
And here,
Abram walks away,
essentially the big winner.
Yeah, and Clint, you mentioned that this could be read as a retelling or that there is a retelling.
What’s interesting in this version of this story,
regardless of how you tease that out,
Abram gives no account to the pharaoh.
Abram gives no retort or explanation as to his choices.
This is really, really fascinating to me because it’s telling that the scriptural writers,
as it pertains to this story,
didn’t find that to be the point.
In other words, it wasn’t about,
hey, look,
Abram is justified in this action because he had good reasons.
Though, you know, maybe in that later telling that that’s sort of the point is that there is good reason behind it all.
In this telling,
that is far more opaque.
It’s not clear what the moral virtues of Abram’s actions actually are in this story.
And in fact, that’s one of the things I think that the Genesis narratives do really well is they show you what happened
and they leave some of the explanations to the reader and to the community that surrounds it.
And that gives it its force because ultimately, if we’re honest,
the actions undertaken here are both good and evil.
There’s both maybe shrewdness in it and there’s also poor choice in it.
And it all lives in this muddled mess.
And that, I think, is the reflection of humanity the authors are intending to show.
They could have simplified Abram’s character.
They could have either justified him or threw him under the bus.
They really do neither.
The only person who comes out of this story really hurting is Pharaoh because Pharaoh loses the property
and he is put under, you know,
essentially a spiritual curse because of the things that have happened.
Abram walks out with that stuff to the better.
But then fundamentally, there’s also this question,
well, yeah, should have he done that?
And then will that help him?
And how will that come back around when Egypt comes back into the story?
All of them are legitimate questions, probably intended.
And all of them don’t have clear answers.
Once again, probably intended.
That’s the strength of narratives like this.
Well, and I think that this is one of those stories,
Michael, that if you read it first,
it has a certain meaning and a certain confusion.
If you revisit this story after reading ahead in the Scripture,
it makes this story very interesting.
So 38 chapters from now at the end of the book of Genesis,
we’re going to end where we start.
In Egypt,
dealing with the Pharaoh,
and because of those dealings,
wealth and success and power come to the Israelites.
As you read ahead into the book of Exodus,
you have this threat of plagues.
You have this sort of contest with the Pharaoh that develops.
It is interesting in this part of the story,
the Pharaoh has done nothing dishonorable,
but we know that’s coming.
We know that the Pharaoh here may be a kind of unwitting participant,
unwilling participant, and yet the tension that is out on the horizon informs this story as background.
So I think this is an important story to put in conversation with other stories,
and it’s a hard story to read simply on its own.
There may be desperation here.
There may be genuine fear.
There may be trickery.
There may be deceit.
There may be dishonesty.
There may be a lack of trust.
There may be all of that working together at once,
and yet we see here seeds that are going to grow into other stories and bear fruit in other stories.
And that’s important in the book of Genesis.
But, Clint, don’t miss the ending of this story,
which is that Abram does come out of Egypt with God continuing to keep God’s promise.
Remember, God said, “I will make you a father of many nations.”
Abram’s fears are not realized.
He is not in any way harmed for being the husband of Sarai.
And not to mention,
he acquires this wealth that is going to actually only be a complicating future in the stories to come.
So God has been faithful.
God is the primary character of this story.
That was surprising.
I’m sorry.
God has continued to be front and center,
and God has continued to bring along the journey of this man traveling by stages.
And God being the primary character of the scriptural text,
that is a thing that we need to track with.
That God continues to be faithful even in the midst of Abram’s choices,
regardless of any moral virtue at all.
One of the fascinating things about the book of Genesis as we go through these stories,
there are times that God is clearly the author of blessings.
God is in the background of all the blessings,
but there are times where people get what they have directly from the hand of God.
And it will tell us that God gave this person flocks,
and God secured for them a land.
There are other times where people seem to gain those things and secure those things through their own wisdom,
through their own shrewdness,
through their own abilities.
And sometimes there’s maybe a combination of the two.
I’m thinking of the Joseph stories,
where he’s both very capable and God helps him with dreams.
And so it’s fascinating in these stories that the humanness,
the sort of humanity of them,
is sometimes God is big and bold and sets the path for us.
Other times we make our own way,
and God is more of a background.
The reality of God is maybe not as obvious.
And yet,
in all those cases,
God is the main character,
and God sets the path that we’re following.
And I think if that sounds esoteric and not clear yet,
stick with us, because Genesis will give us a lot of opportunities to reflect on that.
It’s a good place to land today.
Thank you for being with us,
friends.
We look forward to seeing you tomorrow.
Thanks, everybody.