Genesis 12

Matthew Henry noticed the wording. God does not say "It is a land that I will give thee," but merely, "a land that I will show thee." So, Henry says, "he must follow God with an implicit faith, and take God's word for it."

Calvin calls this "another test to prove the faith of Abram", and imagines God saying: "I command thee to go forth with closed eyes, and forbid thee to inquire whither I am about to lead thee."

Genesis 11:31 has already said that Terah's family "set out from Ur of the Chaldeans for the land of Canaan". How could they head for Canaan if God had not named it? Calvin answers that Moses names the place ahead of time: "Moses, speaking in his own person, mentions the land, which, though hitherto unknown to them both, was afterwards revealed to Abram alone." He also allows that God may soon have "removed all doubt from his mind" (p. 345). Keil and Delitzsch think that "God gave him at the very first a distinct intimation, if not of the land itself, at least of the direction he was to take".

The command opens with two short Hebrew words: lekh, "go", and lekha, literally "for yourself". Then it names what Abram must leave: his country, his kindred, his father's household.

Calvin noticed how the words pile up, and saw a purpose in it: "God strenuously persists in his command to leave the country, for the purpose of thoroughly penetrating the mind of Abram." One word, "Leave thy country", would have been hard enough; "but Abram is still more deeply affected, when he hears that he must renounce his kindred and his father's house." God takes no cruel pleasure in his servants' trouble, Calvin adds; he tests every affection, so that nothing stays hidden in their hearts (pp. 343–344).

What Abram receives in exchange is a promise (12:2–3), not a map. The New Testament remembers his answer as faith: "By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, without knowing where he was going" (Hebrews 11:8).

The same Hebrew word, shem, "name", stands in both verses. At Babel a name was something to build and hold on to, "and not be scattered". Abram has just been told to leave his country, his relatives and his father's house (12:1). Now God promises to make his name great himself.

Keil and Delitzsch explain the promise as "the exaltation of his name, i.e. the elevation of Abram to honour and glory".

Calvin points straight at the difficulty: "We must mark the promise, that Abram, whose wife was still barren, should become a great nation." The bare promise, he says, would have been "cold" if Abram had not "wholly depended upon the word of God". Matthew Henry calls it "a great trial to Abram's faith; for his wife had been long barren".

The waiting would be long. Abram is 75 when he leaves Harran (12:4), and 100 when Isaac is born (21:5). Isaiah looks back on it: "When I called him, he was but one; then I blessed him and multiplied him" (Isaiah 51:2).

Keil and Delitzsch read the four parts of verse 2 as "an ascending climax", with the fourth "marked as a new and independent feature added to the other three": "Abram was not only to receive blessing, but to be a blessing; not only to be blessed by God, but to become a blessing, or the medium of blessing, to others."

Calvin and Henry also read the phrase another way. Calvin took it as a promise of such happiness that people would "introduce the name of Abram, as an example, into their formularies of pronouncing benediction". He kept the wider blessing to the nations for verse 3 (pp. 348–349). Matthew Henry gives both senses: Abram's happiness would be "a sample of happiness, so that those who would bless their friends, shall only pray that God would make them like Abram"; and "Thy life shall be a blessing to the places where thou shalt sojourn."

Verse 3 takes the promise furthest: the blessing will reach "all the families of the earth" (12:3).

Two words reach back into Genesis. "Families" is mishpachot, the word for the "clans" of Noah's sons, from which the nations spread out after the flood (10:5, 10:32). "Earth" is adamah, the word for the "ground" God cursed after Adam and Eve disobeyed him (3:17). Keil and Delitzsch draw the threads together: "The blessing of Abraham was once more to unite the divided families, and change the curse, pronounced upon the ground on account of sin, into a blessing for the whole human race."

Calvin explains how he understands it: in his judgment, all nations would be blessed in Abram "because Christ was included in his loins".

The New Testament makes the link itself. Paul quotes the promise in Galatians 3:8, where the BSB's note points to 12:3, 18:18 and 22:18. He concludes that "those who have faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith" (Galatians 3:9).

"Will be blessed" translates one Hebrew verb, nivrekhu, a Niphal form of barak. When the promise is repeated in 22:18 and 26:4, a different form, the Hithpael, is used, and Keil and Delitzsch weigh what the difference means. Calvin grants that "the Hebrew phrase will bear the interpretation, that Abram shall be called a signal example of happiness": people would use his name when they bless one another. "But I extend the meaning further," he says, following Paul.

Peter quotes the promise in its later form: "Through your offspring all the families of the earth will be blessed" (Acts 3:25, where the BSB's note points to 22:18).

The English says "curse" twice, but the Hebrew uses two different words. The word for the one who curses Abram is from qalal. Keil and Delitzsch explain it as "lit. to treat as light or little, to despise". God's word is from arar: quoting others, they call it "judicial cursing on the part of God". To treat Abram as nothing is to fall under God's judgement.

There is a second detail. In Hebrew, those who bless Abram are plural, but the one who scorns him is singular. Keil and Delitzsch quote a comment on it, without naming its author: "grace expects that there will be many to bless, and that only an individual here and there will render not blessing for blessing, but curse for curse."

Calvin notices that even a man of peace has enemies. Of all who have lived peaceably, he says, Abram "might be reckoned among the chief, yet even he was not without enemies". Calvin's comfort is in the promise itself: God takes his people's side.

Lot has lost his father, and Abram's wife Sarai has no children (11:30). Matthew Henry suggests that Abram "was perhaps his guardian after the death of his father", and that Lot "was influenced by Abram's good example".

Genesis doesn't tell us why Lot came, and Henry's "perhaps" is honest. What the story does make clear is that Lot's choices later go a different way from Abram's. Chapters 13, 14 and 19 follow him.

Keil and Delitzsch think Abram's age is given here "because a new period in the history of mankind commenced with his exodus".

The number also starts a clock. Genesis marks Abram's age again as the years pass without the promised son: 86 when Ishmael is born (16:16), 99 when God appears to him again (17:1), and 100 when Isaac comes (21:5). Hebrews 11:11–12 credits faith for the son born when Sarai, by then called Sarah, was "beyond the proper age".

Matthew Henry describes Abram's obedience as "speedy and without delay, submissive and without dispute". Echoing Hebrews 11:8, he adds that Abram went "not knowing whither he went, … but knowing whom he followed".

Calvin sees more than a single brave step: "in this place the obedience of faith is commended, and not as one act simply, but as a constant and perpetual course of life." Abram's whole life from now on is shaped by the word God has spoken.

Older translations say "the souls that they had gotten", as in Calvin's heading. Keil and Delitzsch are clear that these "are not the souls which they had begotten, but the male and female slaves that Abram and Lot had acquired". Calvin agrees: "Souls signify male and female servants."

Matthew Henry adds a second reading. The word "souls", he says, reminds masters "that their poor servants have souls". And he includes people who had come to share Abram's faith: "the souls which (as one of the Rabbins expresses it) they had gathered under the wings of the Divine Majesty". Genesis doesn't say which. Either way, Abram does not travel alone: a whole household goes with him.

Matthew Henry notices the echo: "They went forth to go into the land of Canaan, so they did before, (ch. 11. 31.) and then took up short; but now they held on their way." The first journey stopped short in Harran. The second arrives.

Keil and Delitzsch read the remark as setting up the promise of verse 7. It means the land "was not uninhabited and without a possessor; so that Abram could not regard it at once as his own and proceed to take possession of it, but could only wander in it in faith as in a foreign land".

Calvin feels the weight of it: "it was no slight temptation" for Abram to live among people who might, he feared, do him harm. But Calvin also sees a gift in it. Unsettled in the land, Abram learned to hope for more than the land, and "heaven itself was proposed to him as his final resting-place" (p. 353).

Hebrews 11:9 says the same: "By faith he dwelt in the promised land as a stranger in a foreign country."

The Hebrew word, elon, means a great tree. Keil and Delitzsch take it to be a terebinth. The words for terebinth and oak are sometimes interchanged in the manuscripts, they note, perhaps because "the ever-green oaks and terebinths resemble one another in the colour of their foliage and their fissured bark of sombre grey" (pp. 195–196). Interpreters have read it differently: Calvin reports that it "is by some translated an oak forest, by some a valley", and he himself takes it as a grove rather than a single tree.

The place is remembered: Deuteronomy names the Oak of Moreh again (Deuteronomy 11:30).

Calvin calls the altar "a token of gratitude". Keil and Delitzsch see Abram marking the spot "to make the soil which was hallowed by the appearance of God a place for the worship of the God who appeared to him".

The worship is directed. Calvin notices that Abram "is not said to have made an altar simply to God, but to God who had appeared unto him". The Canaanites, Calvin notes, "had their religion; they had also altars for sacrifices" (p. 354). Abram's altar answers the God who spoke to him.

Calvin also keeps the altar in its place. "The altar then is the external form of divine worship; but invocation is its substance and truth" (p. 354). For Calvin, calling on God there matters more than the altar itself.

Matthew Henry saw the pattern: "God reveals himself and his favours to his people by degrees; before he had promised to show him this land, now, to give it him."

The gift comes with a question attached. Calvin asks it plainly: "where is the seed, or where the hope of seed; seeing that he is childless and old, and his wife is barren?" God "offers him his bare word", and for faith, Calvin says, "a single promise of God is quite sufficient".

The word for "offspring" is zera, literally "seed". It is a singular word that can mean one descendant or many. Paul reads the promises to Abraham in the light of Christ: "The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. The Scripture does not say, 'and to seeds,' meaning many, but 'and to your seed,' meaning One, who is Christ" (Galatians 3:16).

In Abram's day the town was not yet called Bethel. Its old name was Luz, and it was Jacob who named it Bethel, after he woke from his dream there: "This is none other than the house of God" (28:16–19). Genesis uses the later, familiar name. Keil and Delitzsch call this naming "proleptically", ahead of time, and Calvin says the same: "there is a manifest prolepsis in the word Bethel".

So Abram worships the LORD near the place Jacob will later call "the house of God".

Calvin gives the phrase two senses, "either to pray to God, or to celebrate his name with praises. But because prayer and thanksgiving are things conjoined, I willingly include both."

Matthew Henry hears something more: "he preached concerning the name of the Lord, that is, he instructed his family and neighbours in the knowledge of the true God". The verb is qara, "call", and the same Hebrew phrase is translated "proclaimed His name, the LORD" in Exodus 34:5. However we take it, Abram's faith is not kept private. Among the Canaanites, he openly worships the LORD.

Calvin counts this as "the third removal of the holy man within a short period". Such moving, he thinks, taught Abram "that he was not only a stranger, but a wretched wanderer in the land of which he was the lord".

Yet Calvin sees fruit in it too: Abram "endeavoured, as much as in him lay, to dedicate to God, every part of the land to which he had access". His altars at Shechem and near Bethel stand in a land God has promised to his offspring (12:7), not yet to him.

Why would God lead Abram into a land that then fails him? Keil and Delitzsch answer that "the famine in Canaan was to teach Abram, that even in the promised land food and clothing come from the Lord and His blessing".

Matthew Henry notices which way Abram turns. His homeland lay north-east; Egypt lay south-west. "He did not offer to return, upon this occasion, to the country from which he came out, nor so much as towards it."

Famine will shape the family's story again. Isaac faces one (26:1), and famine finally brings Jacob's family down to Egypt (47:4).

Calvin thinks this "one little word" shows Abram's faith holding firm: "Abram, nevertheless, retained in his mind possession of the land promised unto him; although, being ejected from it by hunger, he fled elsewhere". Matthew Henry makes the same point simply: "it was to sojourn there, not to dwell there."

The words return, almost exactly, at the other end of Genesis. Jacob's sons tell Pharaoh, "We have come to live in the land for a time… since the famine in the land of Canaan has been severe" (47:4). In Hebrew, both verses say lagur, "to sojourn", and both say the famine was "heavy" in the land. What Abram does here, his descendants will one day do: "the members of Jacob's family who went to Egypt were seventy in all" (46:27).

The question is an old one. "It is asked," Calvin writes, "whence had Sarai this beauty, seeing she was an old woman?" Keil and Delitzsch answer from the lifespans Genesis gives: "as she lived to the age of 127 (chap. xxiii. 1), she was then middle-aged". Calvin gives natural reasons (people were more vigorous then, and she had borne no children), and adds: "I do not however doubt, that the perfection of her form was the special gift of God."

Calvin holds two things together: "Although Abram had sinned by fearing too much and too soon, yet the event teaches, that he had not feared without cause: for his wife was taken from him and brought to the king." The harder question, what Abram did with his fear, is taken up in the note on 12:11–13.

A failure of faith. Keil and Delitzsch grant that Abram "had reason for his anxiety", "but his precaution did not spring from faith". Matthew Henry calls it "a great fault". What Abram said "was, in a sense, true, (ch. 20. 12.) but with a purpose to deceive". Faith was the grace "Abram was most eminent for", Henry says, "and yet he thus fell, through unbelief and distrust of the Divine Providence". On this reading, what follows exposes the fault. As Keil and Delitzsch say, "the very thing he feared and hoped to avoid actually occurred": Sarai is taken, and a foreign king rebukes Abram (12:15, 12:18–19). No reply from Abram is recorded, and Keil and Delitzsch read that silence as confession: "he silently acknowledged his guilt" (p. 198).

A right aim, pursued by wrong means. Calvin sees why Abram valued his life: he reflected "that unless he lived, the benediction promised to him, and to his seed, was vain" (see 12:2–3). So, Calvin concludes, "Abram's end was right, but he erred in the way itself" (p. 360). Abram should have "cast his care upon God". Calvin is firm on both sides: "although they are rash judges, who entirely condemn this deed of Abram, yet the special fault is not to be denied". On the text's silence Calvin is more cautious: perhaps Abram accepted the rebuke; or perhaps he defended himself, and "the exculpation was omitted by Moses" (p. 365).

Both views given here find fault in Abram, and differ on how far his motive softens it. In chapter 20, Abram (by then called Abraham) answers in his own defence: "Besides, she really is my sister, the daughter of my father—though not the daughter of my mother—and she became my wife" (20:12).

This is not the only time. Abraham does the same thing later, at Gerar (20:2), and his son Isaac does it with Rebekah (26:7). In chapter 20 Abraham explains himself (20:11–13); here no answer is recorded.

What the text does make plain is where rescue comes from. It is not Abram's plan that saves Sarai, but the LORD (12:17).

Keil and Delitzsch explain that Pharaoh "is the Hebrew name for all the Egyptian kings in the Old Testament; their proper names being only occasionally mentioned". Later books do name some: Pharaoh Neco (2 Kings 23:29) and Pharaoh Hophra (Jeremiah 44:30).

Without his name, the story's attention rests on what the LORD does: he strikes Pharaoh and his household "because of Abram's wife Sarai" (12:17). As Keil and Delitzsch put it, help is found "with the Lord alone, who can so smite the mightiest kings, that they cannot touch His chosen or do them harm".

The Hebrew repeats Abram's words. "Treated well" and "for your sake" in 12:13 are the same words as "treated Abram well" and "on her account" in 12:16: yatav, "be good", and ba'avur, "for the sake of".

Keil and Delitzsch read the sheep, cattle, donkeys, servants and camels as Pharaoh's presents, "possessions which constitute the wealth of nomads". On whether he should have accepted them, they write: "These presents Abram could not refuse, though by accepting them he increased his sin."

Matthew Henry asks whether Abram meant to gain them: "We cannot think that Abram expected this when he came down into Egypt, much less that he had an eye to it when he denied his wife; but God brought good out of evil."

Calvin draws a conclusion about Sarai from the same verse: "when Moses adds, that Abram was kindly treated for Sarai's sake; we hence conclude, that she was honourably entertained by Pharaoh".

What the plagues were, Genesis does not say. Keil and Delitzsch admit that "what the nature of these plagues was, cannot be determined". They were enough, they say, for Pharaoh to see "at once that they were sent as punishment by the Deity on account of his relation to Sarai".

Calvin calls it "a remarkable instance of the solicitude with which God protects his servants". He draws two conclusions. God kept Sarai from harm: "the plague which immediately followed, sufficiently proves that the Lord was mindful of her; and hence we may conclude, that she remained uninjured" (p. 363). And God does this for his people even against the mighty.

Israel sang about this later: "He let no man oppress them; He rebuked kings on their behalf: 'Do not touch My anointed ones! Do no harm to My prophets!'" (Psalm 105:14–15).

Matthew Henry turns the story back on its readers. Abram "found Pharaoh to be a better man than he expected", and Henry warns against suspecting others "beyond what there is cause for".

What the text's silence means, and how to judge what he did, is weighed in the note on 12:11–13.

Matthew Henry laid out the parallel: "as Abram was dismissed by Pharaoh, and enriched with the spoil of the Egyptians, so were they. For God's care of his people is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever."

The Hebrew supports it. The "plagues" of 12:17 are nega'im, and in Exodus 11:1 God promises "one more plague" (nega) on Pharaoh. The verb in "they sent him away" is from the same root as Pharaoh letting Israel "go" in that verse. Israel, too, would leave Egypt with the Egyptians' silver and gold (Exodus 12:35–36).

Keil and Delitzsch add that the verb "does not necessarily denote an involuntary dismissal here". Having felt the hand of Abram's God, they say, Pharaoh gave him a safe escort.

Keil and Delitzsch explain the difference: qalal means "lit. to treat as light or little, to despise", and, in words they quote from others, denotes "blasphemous cursing on the part of a man", while arar is "judicial cursing on the part of God".

The line is not rigid. When God promises never again to curse the ground, after the flood, the word is qalal (8:21). But arar is the word of the great curses in the early chapters of Genesis, spoken over the serpent (3:14), the ground (3:17), Cain (4:11) and Canaan (9:25). In 12:3 it appears once, surrounded by blessing. The curse has not vanished, but it is no longer the main word.

In Genesis, blessing starts with life. God's first blessings give living creatures and people fruitfulness: "Be fruitful and multiply" (1:22, 1:28). Keil and Delitzsch sum up the blessing promised to Abram as "material and spiritual prosperity".

After Adam and Eve disobey God in Genesis 3, another word takes over: arar, "curse". It sounds five times in Genesis 1–11: on the serpent (3:14), the ground (3:17), Cain (4:11), again the ground in Lamech's words (5:29), and Canaan (9:25).

Then God speaks to Abram, and "bless" comes five times: I will bless you; you will be a blessing; I will bless those who bless you; all the families of the earth will be blessed through you. God has not given up on the world he blessed at the beginning.

Living as a guest runs through the family's story. God tells Abram his descendants "will be strangers in a land that is not their own" (15:13). When Sarah dies, Abraham asks the Hittites for a burial site in the land God promised him, and says, "I am a foreigner and an outsider among you" (23:4). Hebrews says he lived in the promised land "as a stranger in a foreign country", in tents, "as did Isaac and Jacob" (Hebrews 11:9).

The word itself returns when Joseph's brothers come to Egypt lagur ba'arets, "to live in the land for a time" (47:4). And Israel's law remembers those years: "You must not exploit or oppress a foreign resident, for you yourselves were foreigners in the land of Egypt" (Exodus 22:21).

In Hebrew the command is two short words that echo each other: lekh, "go", and lekha, literally "for yourself". The same two words come back only once more in Abraham's life, at its hardest moment. God tells him to take Isaac "and go to the land of Moriah" (22:2): ve-lekh-lekha. The first call asked Abram to give up his past; the second asks him to give up his future. Both times he goes (12:4; 22:3).

The verb also describes a way of life. When God appears to Abram at ninety-nine, he says, "Walk before Me and be blameless" (17:1), using a form of the same verb. The journey that began with "go" becomes a lifelong walk with God.

Joshua 7:14 shows the word at work. Israel is sorted "tribe by tribe", then "clan by clan", then "family by family", then "man by man" (Joshua 7:14). "Clan" there is mishpachah. But the word can be wider too: Amos uses it of the whole people of Israel, one of "all the families of the earth" (Amos 3:1–2).

The word looks back to Genesis 10, where the peoples are listed "by clans within their nations" (10:5) and "according to their clans" (10:20), and "these are the clans of Noah's sons" from which the nations spread out after the flood (10:32). Genesis 11 then tells how the LORD scattered people from Babel over the face of all the earth (11:8–9). The promise to Abram uses the same word for the ones to be blessed. And the phrase reaches the New Testament: when Peter recalls God's promise to Abraham, the BSB has him say, "all the families of the earth will be blessed" (Acts 3:25).

The three uses tell a small story. At Babel, a name is something people make for themselves, so that they will not be scattered: "that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered". To Abram, a name is something God gives: "I will make your name great." And at the altar, the name Abram speaks is God's own: he "called on the name of the LORD".

The builders set out to make their own name. Abram receives his as a promise, and calls on the LORD's.

The word begins in the fields: at creation the earth brings forth plants "with seed" (1:11). After Adam and Eve disobey God, he speaks of the woman's seed and the serpent's seed (3:15).

With Abram, "seed" becomes the thread of the promise. His offspring will be like the dust of the earth (13:16) and the stars in the sky (15:5). Yet the same word can mean one person. Eve calls Seth "another seed" (4:25), and God calls Ishmael Abraham's "offspring" (21:13). Paul, quoting the promise, reads it that way: "The Scripture does not say, 'and to seeds,' meaning many, but 'and to your seed,' meaning One, who is Christ" (Galatians 3:16).