Genesis 20:1-18

All right, friends.
Welcome back.
On Wednesday, we are in the 20th chapter of Genesis,
back to the core of the Abram story,
and a story that’s going to
sound familiar if
you’ve been with us for a while,
this story is going to sound very similar to one that we have
already covered, and it is very similar.
And, you know, Bible scholars, when these kind of things happen,
Bible scholars argue about whether these stories come from two different traditions with
slightly different details, or whether an event like this actually happened twice.
I believe the last time we saw this,
it was in Egypt,
but now Abram and Sarah are traveling together into an
area called Gerar in the,
sort of, the Negeb Desert,
and
we see that Abram is once again,
Abraham is once again worried about his reception,
and so right away we’ll get into it here,
chapter 20.
From there,
Abraham journeyed toward the region of the Negeb,
settled between Kadesh and Shur,
while resigning in Gerar as an alien.
Abraham said to his wife Sarah,
said of his wife Sarah,
“She is my sister,”
and king Abimelech of Gerar sent and took Sarah.
But God came to Abimelech in a dream by night and said to him,
“You are about to die because the
woman whom you have taken,
she is a married woman.”
Now, Abimelech had not approached her,
so he said, “Lord, will you destroy an innocent people?”
Did he not himself say,
“She is my sister,”
and she herself said,
“He is my brother.
I did this in the integrity of my heart and the innocence of my hands.”
Then God said to him in a dream,
“You know that you,
I know that you did this in the
integrity of your heart.
Furthermore, it was I who kept you from sinning against me.
Therefore, I did not let you touch her.
Now then return the man’s wife,
for he is a prophet,
and he will pray for you,
and you shall live.
But if you do not restore her,
know that you will surely die,
and all that are yours.”
So again, this is one of those stories that’s hard to know
exactly what to do with.
It is highlighting the favored status of Abraham.
It is
troubling.
It is difficult to understand how it is that Abram can deceive a person and the person be held accountable.
If you are telling this in an Israelite context,
that’s a celebration of the
promise and how much God is on Abraham’s side.
Here,
again, we’ve seen this story.
Say you’re my sister,
a king, not a pharaoh in this case,
but a king becomes interested.
And then God, in this case, deals directly with that king and even goes so far as to say,
“I am the one who kept you from sinning,
but he has to pray for you in order for you to avoid the punishment.
You have to give her back or else.” It’s strange in that God interacts with a foreigner here.
It’s also strange in that
there is this declaration that the foreigner has acted
innocently and yet is still being held accountable.
Yeah, it’s an interesting twist on
the story that we’ve already had.
And I think,
Clint, correct me if I’m wrong on this,
is this not the first time that Abraham has been called a prophet in the text up to this point?
I don’t remember that.
I think that might.
Yeah,
that could be.
I think it’s interesting as you see
these stories in the Old Testament because the debates about what actually happened versus what
the text says are easy and quick debates to get into.
What I actually find interesting as you come
to stories like this is
what are the different layers that this story has that are not shared
in the story that we had about the pharaoh?
And I think this comment about Abraham being a prophet
is a really interesting sort of sideline because we now see this small sort of lens that points us
to even the beginning of that prophetic tradition,
a tradition that we’re going to see expanded
to a great extent as the Old Testament books continue on.
We see it here connected in the
whole lot of prophesying for or against up to this point in Genesis.
And so that we now see it
here in this story,
I think that’s interesting.
I think it’s a way that the biblical writers were
attuned to the idea that these traditions that mature later on in the Old Testament,
that they have their fountainhead, they have their beginning all the way back in the very first chapters of
Genesis.
And in this case,
the patriarch, Abraham, the one given, the blessing, the one who God has
covenanted with that, that even the prophetic gift might connect all the way back to that.
But of course,
here, you’ve got some major questions here, right?
Like Abraham and Sarah are clearly lied.
Did they do so with good cause?
You know, that’s a conversation you could have,
but they have put this foreigner in a very testy position with God.
And ultimately,
this individual,
you know, he actually very much a bimelik stands up to God in some way and says,
Hey, I did this innocently.
And God affirms that.
This is a strange sort of narrative when you figure that Abraham
and Sarah have really been tracking along the central line of this story throughout
these books in Genesis,
that now a bimelik turns out to be a person of good repute,
a person who even stands up and makes a case before God that God explicitly agrees with is,
it’s just an interesting term,
Clint. It is.
And we’ve heard a little bit of that language when
a bimelik says, would you destroy a people who are innocent?
We’ve seen a little bit of that
in the bargaining language between God and Abram.
In this instance, though, we do get kind of a
second half of the story.
And there’s some very interesting tidbits of details in here as well.
So verse eight,
a bimelik rose early in the morning,
called all the servants and told them
all these things.
And the men were very much afraid.
Then a bimelik called Abraham
and said to him, what have you done to us?
How have I sinned against you that you brought such great guilt on
me and my kingdom?
You’ve done things that ought not to be done.
And a bimelik said to Abraham,
what were you thinking of that you did this thing?
Abraham said,
I did it because I thought there is
no fear of God at all in this place.
And they will kill me because of my wife.
Besides, indeed, she is my sister,
the daughter of my father,
but not the daughter of my mother.
And she became my wife.
And when God caused me to wander from my father’s house,
I said to her,
this is the kindness
you must do me at each place to which we come say of me,
he is my brother.
Then a bimelik took sheep
and oxen, male and female slaves,
and gave them to Abraham and restored his wife, Sarah, to him.
A bimelik said, my land is before you.
Settle where you please.
To Sarah, he said, look,
I’ve given your brother a thousand pieces of silver.
It is your exoneration before all who are with you.
You are completely vindicated.
Then Abraham prayed to God and God healed a bimelik
and healed his wife and female slaves so that they bore children.
For the Lord had closed fast
all the wombs of the house of a bimelik because of Sarah, Abraham’s wife.
So interesting.
This story doesn’t get any cleaner.
It gets almost messier as we get into it.
So we’ve seen the first
part of Abraham’s explanation before.
I was afraid.
This is what he said in Egypt.
I thought you’d see
a beautiful woman and you’d get rid of me in order to keep her.
And here he goes sort of with
echoes of Sodom and Gomorrah in the background saying,
I thought this was a wicked place.
I thought there was no fear of God in this place.
And we’ve seen the reception.
We have seen the
action of a godless place in the recent past of this book.
And then he goes on to say that he
and Sarah share a father,
that they are both the children of the father.
Now this is
new information to us.
This is not, I think, accounted for anywhere else.
I don’t know what biblical scholars do with this fully.
This would be the kind of thing that is
unacceptable later in the Old Testament.
But here we have this as part of the explanation.
It’s almost as if Abraham is justifying himself a little bit.
Now,
if there’s a tradition that
says that he’s not telling the truth,
I don’t know of that tradition.
I think by and large,
people have probably taken this for his actual answer,
that he’s really giving these details.
But it justifies this action that he’s been doing.
It justifies this thing that he’s done twice now
in saying of Sarah.
She’s not saying she’s my wife and instead saying sister.
And then here we
have at the end,
Abimelech goes over the top to reimburse them and to repay for this thing that he’s done.
A thousand pieces of silver take anywhere in the land you want, herds and servants.
And again,
pretty typical of Abraham when he comes out of these situations,
just as he did in Egypt,
he comes out far better than he went in.
Yeah, there are several repeating themes.
One is that God’s blessing results in Abraham being advanced in every circumstance,
even the ones that come across as the most strange to us.
Another theme that we’ve seen before.
And I think a theme that maybe in this case is less tolerable than it was in some other places
is that idea of fundamentally Abraham being tricky.
I mean, Abraham getting,
using deception and using sort of quick
-wittedness to outsmart other people in an ancient medieval
or in an ancient context that would have been seen as a positive.
Here the idea that
he’s able to maintain sort of this ruse when in reality to us,
I think that this comes across as
nothing other than just the willingness to throw his wife under the bus,
not to be charitable.
You know, that’s not a charitable way of saying it, but so
here there’s another aspect of that.
It would be interesting to have a conversation honestly about whether this is Abraham justifying
his actions or whether we read this as the narrator justifying Abraham’s actions.
It’s probably some combination of both, but
clearly there’s been an extreme effort here to give
Abraham some sense of virtue in the midst of a setting in which it doesn’t appear to be a lot.
The revelation that, well, I didn’t actually lie.
I actually told the truth,
though, you know,
ethically it was a misleading truth at best, right?
But clearly there’s an effort here to say
that Abraham is not acting out of bad faith,
that in fact he was acting in the true heartfelt desire
to remain faithful to God,
that idea that I thought I was in a godless place.
So he was trying
to maintain his godliness.
Yeah, once again, is that Abraham’s argument?
Is that the narrator
sort of also trying to make the case that Abraham should be justified in these actions?
You know, I think this could be read lots of different ways.
This part,
this telling of this story in some ways
seems to me like it has more bumps than the pharaoh telling of it.
And I think so for that reason,
you know, for me leaves lots of open loops and just simply questions.
I don’t have answers to any of these.
Yeah, it is, I think, a more layered story.
In some ways, though both stories are messy, this one adds a level of confusion.
Though in the ancient world, not all
half
-brother and sister relationships were considered to be related.
The idea of
being born by different women in some part of the traditions held that they didn’t recognize the
idea of half-brother,
half-sister.
So it could be that one tradition that told this story in this instance,
recognized that as a connection and the older story perhaps didn’t.
Those are things that we’re not, I think, sure of and that probably are difficult to know.
This ends on an interesting note.
Again, we get a detail that God essentially makes it possible for Abimelech’s wife and female
servants to bear children again.
I don’t think we were told that they couldn’t,
but here we get the
sense that that would have been part of the punishment.
And here it says explicitly,
“God opened their wombs, healed them because He had closed their wombs.” Now,
that’s significant not only in this story,
but this is the nature of the problem Abraham and Sarah have been having.
Abraham and Sarah have struggled with childlessness.
And the very next story that we’ll
look at tomorrow is in some ways the culmination of that struggle.
And so there’s a really wonderful
transition here as we see this story end on a note of God acting to provide for childbearing.
And then we go directly into the sort of top of the mountain of the Sarah story,
which is when she actually is able to bear a child.
So that’s an interesting way to look at that,
Clint, to say that this is transitioning us into the next.
What I was going to say is I think you could actually
really consider the Pharaoh story and this story as being bookends in some ways.
And if you do so,
think about what lives in the middle.
You’ve got that whole business of Melchizedek.
You’ve got Lot and the splitting up of the land and then ultimately Lot.
Sodom and Gomorrah is the most
recent story that we’ve had.
You have Sarah and, well,
both Abram and Sarah at that point.
They are making these choices where they’re trying to secure an error even because God
hasn’t given them one yet.
When you consider that all of that is sandwiched in between the
telling of these two stories,
I think you’re right to say now we’re moving on to the fulfillment of
God’s promise that started this whole thing off in many ways.
And so what’s interesting is we both
come a long ways and ironically we’ve not gone very far at all.
Really, we’re back to the same
kind of behavior in the same kind of place that began this whole narrative.
And so there’s a way
in which I guess,
you know,
I’m walking a little bit away from the text here,
but there’s a way
in which that sort of once again puts the emphasis on God,
right, to say that Abraham has really
continued to live with some fear.
He’s continued to really try and make his own path out there.
And now we’re going to see that God is going to take that providential action.
God is going to miraculously keep the promise that God made.
And so it’s really inescapable, the outcome.
We see once again that God is the one being faithful to Abram,
Abraham, and that’s going to continue to be the case.
A hundred percent.
And we see again repeated in this short story the very simple but very common
formula that we see throughout Genesis.
To please God is to have life and to displease God is to
have death or to have punishment.
And so even in a story where that punishment maybe perhaps seems undeserved,
what Abimelech does offends God because it interferes with that covenant story.
If he has separated Abram and Sarah,
who God has pledged to make a father and mother of the nations,
of what God is seeking to do.
So an interesting story and I think of
an interesting transition as we get