Is this a thing we're doing?

Down the pipe from Bible Gateway today: Genesis 12-15, in which Abram hits the road.

Something that becomes an obviously recurring theme early in Genesis is people moving around. God puts Adam and Eve in Eden, but they don't stay there long. Cain moves out of the presence of God in shame. All the people of the Earth try to make a home for themselves at Babel but God scatters them across the Earth. God sends waters that lift all the surviving humans and other animals right off the Earth in Noah's ark. Yesterday's selection ended with Abram's father, Terah, taking Abram, Sarai, and Lot from Ur to Harran (which, by the conventional reckoning of where these places were, in what is now southeastern Iraq and southern Turkey, would have been a journey of over a thousand kilometres, one might think into the utterly unknown), for unspecified reasons, and settling there. Today's selection begins with God telling Abram, "Go from your country, your people and your father's household to the land I will show you." So at the age of 75, he takes Sarai and all the things and people they have acquired in Harran, and with Lot tagging along, he heads south for the land of Canaan, Canaan having been the grandson of Noah whom Noah had cursed because Canaan's father Ham had seen Noah drunk and naked and had told his brothers. (The explicit formulation of the sins of the father being visited on his children for generations apparently first appears in Exodus 20.) He arrives at a place called Schechem, apparently somewhere in the middle of what is now the West Bank, close to 800 km from Harran. There God tells him that he will give this land to his seed, and "so he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him." (The root of the word for "altar", Strong's tells me, means to slay. So this is one of those things that is easily taken for granted but is also actually the case.) Abram moves on to Bethel, which is taken to have been just north of where Jerusalem is, builds another altar, "and called on the name of the Lord." ("Calling on the name of the Lord" first appears in Genesis 4:26, which says that after the birth of Seth's son Enosh, people began to call on the name of the Lord.) And then he continues on toward the Negev, the desert in the south of present Israel. But there is a famine, so he goes into Egypt. Who knows exactly where Egypt is supposed to have been, since "Egypt" names only the land of another of Ham's sons--who is somewhat confusingly called by his Greek-derived name (from which is derived the English name for Egypt, which I didn't know until yesterday, though this is not surprising, is not at all the Egyptians' name for Egypt) in the NRSV and NIV but by his Hebrew name, Mizraim, in the KJV, so that I was startled to see yesterday that Ham has a son called Egypt, which was news to me. (I am forming the impression that the "modern" translations and maybe especially the NRSV (which glaringly does this in the story of the banishment of Hagar and Ishmael) are more inclined than the KJV to help themselves to bits of the Septuagint where it differs from the Hebrew texts.) Wherever it is, in Abram's odyssey from Ur to Egypt he presumably travels around two thousand kilometres. But of course he doesn't stop there. Sarai, having been passed off as Abram's sister rather than his wife so that the Egpytians won't kill him to take her, is taken by Pharaoh[1], and Abram, as her presumed brother, is richly rewarded for giving her up. But Pharaoh discovers that God is afflicting him for taking Abram's wife (and I wonder, at this point, is Abram's god who afflicts Pharaoh also Pharaoh's god?), so he tells Abram to take her and his things and go. So Abram, now a wealthy man, goes all the way back to Bethel--even if you suppose "Egypt" is just the other side of Gaza, that's more than 150 km; from the Nile delta it would be three or four hundred kilometres--with Sarai and Lot. But Abram and Lot now each have too much livestock for their households to be able to live amicably in the same place, which they are sharing with Canaanites besides--foreshadowing the wars between kingdoms to come in Genesis 14--so Abram tells Lot to decide which way he wants to go, and Abram will go the other. Lot decides to take "the whole plain of the Jordan" to the east and settles near Sodom. God now tells Abram that he will give all the land Abram can see in every direction to Abram and his offspring, to be theirs forever. (In case anyone needs reminding: Jews and Arabs both take themselves to be descended from Abraham.) God says to Abram: "Go, walk through the length and breadth of the land, for I am giving it to you." And Abram goes to Hebron--the NIV says "near the great trees of Mamre", the NRSV says "by the oaks of Mamre" and gives a note on "oaks" that says "or terebinths", and the KJV says "in the plain of Mamre"--in the middle of what is now the southern part of the West Bank, maybe another fifty kilometres. Then come the wars of Genesis 14, as a result of which Lot is captured and taken away; Abram is told of this and takes 318 men to Dan, at the very north of present Israel, near or on the edge of the Golan Heights; he defeats Lot's captors and pursues them to the north of Damascus. And then he goes back, presumably to Hebron. And so, for now but not for good, end the travels of Abram--and in Genesis 15, in which it is said that God makes his covenant with Abram, God tells Abram that though he is giving this land to him and his descendants, they will be gone from it for four hundred years before returning.

Genesis 15 is remarkable in that it is the first time that God gives instructions on making a sacrifice. Abram asks God how he will know that the land will be his. God tells Abram to bring him a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old female goat, a three-year-old ram, a turtledove[2], and a young pigeon. Abram does so and cuts each of the mammals but not the birds in half. (This sacrifice is, apparently, not a burnt offering. So far, only Noah's sacrifice has been specified as a burnt offering.) Night falls, Abram goes to sleep, "and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him." Then God tells him that his descendants will leave and come back--and "a smoking firepot with a blazing torch appeared and passed between the pieces." Strong's says of the word for "covenant" that it is derived from a word that has the sense of cutting, and that it means "a compact (because made by passing between pieces of flesh)." Go figure! Anyway, the word "covenant" has appeared previously in connection with Noah--God tells him when he has decided to send the flood that he will establish a covenant with Noah, and then he does so after Noah's sacrifice.

[1] It seems remarkable, given how early on it still seems in Genesis, that there is already a pharaoh by the time Abram arrives in Egypt, and that when Abram heads back out of Egypt the landscape will be littered with kings. But nine generations have gone by since Mizraim/Egypt and Noah's other two sons, and that means that if you suppose that Mizraim's descendants have each had six children who have in turn had six children--which may be a very conservative estimate, given that over that time we're talking about people who have lived incredibly long (though gradually less incredibly long as we get toward Abram; his father dies at the age of 205) and have had children at incredible ages (or, at least, this is the case as far as the men are concerned; no woman is mentioned by name at all between Eve and Sarai, and Sarai will be the first woman whose age is mentioned)--by now (by my shaky calculations) there will be over two and a half million nearly forty thousand [don't ask me how I got 2.5 million] Egyptians. [ETA: and if they had eight reproducing kids each, meaning that each generation multiplies by fours, in nine generations there would be almost 525,000 Egyptians; at ten reproducing kids each, they'd be up to 3.9 million in nine generations ... unless I'm doing something stupid again. (The point here is not historical reconstruction, to try to figure out how many Egyptians there actually might have been in Abraham's actual lifetime based on a reading of the bible as historical evidence; the point is to show the plausibility of the narrative on its own terms.)]

[2] I learned the other day that "turtledove" and "turtle" are actually etymologically unrelated.

So, uh, this cannot possibly be a thing we're doing, because this has taken up quite a lot of today. I'm not really sure how else to do this bible-reading thing, though, at least for parts of it where there's actually stuff going on ... cuz if I just read through it and don't follow the threads and try to write them down (and I've had to skip some interesting stuff toward the end of Genesis 14!), it will all just slip like sand through my fingers, like it always does. Anyway, hell of a way to put off reading Either/Or, this is. (And holy shit thank Christ for dreamwidth's autosaving, cuz if it didn't do that I would've just lost this entire thing by forgetting to switch to another tab to see what the temperature is.)

Currently at Havelock: -14.1--bounced up a couple of degrees in the last 90 minutes. High today: -7.