1And the LORD said to Abram, “Go forth from your land and your birthplace and your father’s house to the land I will show you. 2And I will make you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great, and you shall be a blessing. 3And I will bless those who bless you, and those who damn you I will curse, and all the clans of the earth through you shall be blessed.” 4And Abram went forth as the LORD had spoken to him and Lot went forth with him, Abram being seventy-five years old when he left Haran. 5And Abram took Sarai his wife and Lot his nephew and all the goods they had gotten and the folk they had bought in Haran, and they set out on the way to the land of Canaan, and they came to the land of Canaan. 6And Abram crossed through the land to the site of Shechem, to the Terebinth of Moreh. The Canaanite was then in the land. 7And the LORD appeared to Abram and said, “To your seed I will give this land.” And he built an altar there to the LORD who had appeared to him. 8And he pulled up his stakes from there for the high country east of Bethel and pitched his tent with Bethel to the west and Ai to the east, and he built there an altar to the LORD, and he invoked the name of the LORD. 9And Abram journeyed onward by stages to the Negeb.
10And there was a famine in the land and Abram went down to Egypt to sojourn there, for the famine was grave in the land. 11And it happened as he drew near to the border of Egypt that he said to Sarai his wife, “Look, I know you are a beautiful woman, 12and so when the Egyptians see you and say, ‘She is his wife,’ they will kill me while you they will let live. 13Say, please, that you are my sister, so that it will go well with me on your count and I shall stay alive because of you.” 14And it happened when Abram came into Egypt that the Egyptians saw the woman was very beautiful. 15And Pharaoh’s courtiers saw her and praised her to Pharaoh, and the woman was taken into Pharaoh’s house. 16And it went well with Abram on her count, and he had sheep and cattle and donkeys and male and female slaves and she-asses and camels. 17And the LORD afflicted Pharaoh and his household with terrible plagues because of Sarai the wife of Abram. 18And Pharaoh summoned Abram and said, “What is this you have done to me? Why did you not tell me she was your wife? 19Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her to me as wife? Now, here is your wife. Take her and get out!” 20And Pharaoh appointed men over him and they sent him out, with his wife and all he had.
CHAPTER 12 NOTES
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1. Go forth from your land . . . to the land I will show you. Abram, a mere figure in a notation of genealogy and migration in the preceding passage, becomes an individual character, and begins the Patriarchal narratives, when he is here addressed by God, though he himself as yet says nothing, responding only by obedience. The name Canaan is never mentioned, and the divine imperative to head out for an unspecified place resembles, as Rashi observes, God’s terrible call to Abraham in chapter 22 to sacrifice his son on a mountain God will show him. Rashi also draws a shrewd connection between the triplet here—“your land and your birthplace and your father’s house”—with the triplet in chapter 22—“your son, your only one, whom you love.” The series in each case focuses the utterance more specifically from one term to the next. Thus the Hebrew moledet almost certainly has its usual sense of “birthplace” and not its occasional sense of “kinfolk,” which would turn it into a loose synonym of “father’s house” (beyt ʾav, a fixed term for the family social unit). In 11:28 moledet appears as part of a genetive construction, ’erets moladeto, “land of his birth.” Here those two terms are broken out from each other to yield the focusing sequence: land–birthplace–father’s house.
2. you shall be a blessing. The verb here as vocalized in the Masoretic Text literally means, “Be you a blessing,” which makes the Hebrew syntax somewhat problematic. A change in vocalization would yield, “and it [your name] will be a blessing.” The Israeli biblical scholar Moshe Weinfeld has aptly noted that after the string of curses that begins with Adam and Eve, human history reaches a turning point with Abraham, as blessings instead of curses are emphatically promised.
3. those who damn you. The Masoretic Text uses a singular form, but the plural, attested in several manuscripts and ancient versions, makes better sense as parallelism. The balanced formulation of this and the preceding verse are almost scannable as poetry.
5. the folk they had bought in Haran. Slavery was a common institution throughout the ancient Near East. As subsequent stories in Genesis make clear, this was not the sort of chattel slavery later practiced in North America. These slaves had certain limited rights, could be given great responsibility, and were not thought to lose their personhood.
6. The Canaanite was then in the land. Abraham ibn Ezra famously detected a hint here that at the time of writing this was no longer the case. In any event, the point of the notation, as Gerhard von Rad has seen, is to introduce a certain tension with the immediately following promise that the land will be given to Abram’s offspring.
8. And he pulled up his stakes. The Hebrew vocabulary (here, the verb wayaʿteq) in this sequence is meticulous in reflecting the procedures of nomadic life. The verb for “journey” in verse 9 also derives from another term for the pulling up of tent stakes, and the progressive form in which it is cast is a precise indication of movement through successive encampments.
10. And there was a famine in the land. The puzzling story of the sister-wife occurs three times in Genesis (here, chapter 20, and chapter 26:1–12). It is the first instance of type-scene in biblical narrative, in which the writer invokes a fixed sequence of narrative motifs, familiar as a convention to his audience, while pointedly modifying them in keeping with the needs of the immediate narrative context. The Midrash recognized that the tale of going down to Egypt at a time of famine was a foreshadowing of the sojourn in Egypt (“the actions of the fathers are a sign for the sons”). But in contrast to the versions in chapters 20 and 26, here, at the beginning of the whole Patriarchal cycle, the writer goes out of his way to heighten the connections with the Exodus story. Only here is the land of sojourn Egypt and only here is the foreign potentate Pharaoh. Only here does the narrator speak explicitly of “plagues” (though a different term is used in Exodus). Only here is the danger of the husband’s death set off by the phrase “you they will let live” attached to the wife, a pointed echo of Exodus 1:22, “Every boy that is born you shall fling into the Nile, and every girl you shall let live.” This is also the most compact, and the most archetypal, of the three versions; the other two will elaborate and complicate the basic scheme, each in its own way.
11. I know. This is the construal of yadaʿti according to normative Hebrew grammar. But the ti ending could be an archaic second-person singular feminine, and “you know” would make better conversational sense here.
13. my sister. Chapter 20 reveals that Sarah is actually Abraham’s half sister. It is not clear whether the writer means to endorse the peculiar stratagem of the patriarch in any of these three stories.
17. plagues. The nature of the afflictions is not spelled out. Rashi’s inference of a genital disorder preventing intercourse is not unreasonable. In that case, one might imagine a tense exchange between Pharaoh and Sarai ending in a confession by Sarai of her status as Abram’s wife. In the laconic narrative art of the Hebrew writer, this is left as a gap for us to fill in by an indeterminate compound of careful deduction and imaginative reconstruction.
19. Take her and get out! “Her” is merely implied in the Hebrew, which gives us three abrupt syllables, two of them accented: qákh walékh. There may be an intended counterpoint between the impatient brusqueness of this imperative, lekh, and the same imperative, softened by an ethical dative, lekh lekha, “go forth” (literally, “go you”), in God’s words to Abram that inaugurate the Patriarchal cycle.