1And Abram came up from Egypt, he and his wife and all he had, and Lot together with him, to the Negeb. 2And Abram was heavily laden with cattle, with silver and gold. 3And he went on by stages from the Negeb up to Bethel, to the place where his tent had been before, between Bethel and Ai, 4to the place of the altar he had made the first time, and Abram invoked there the name of the LORD.
5And Lot, too, who came along with Abram, had flocks and herds and tents. 6And the land could not support their dwelling together, for their substance was great and they could not dwell together. 7And there was strife between the herdsmen of Abram’s flocks and the herdsmen of Lot’s flocks. The Canaanite and the Perizzite were then dwelling in the land. 8And Abram said to Lot, “Pray, let there be no contention between you and me, between your herdsmen and mine, for we are kinsmen. 9Is not all the land before you? Pray, let us part company. If you take the left hand, then I shall go right, and if you take the right hand, I shall go left.” 10And Lot raised his eyes and saw the whole plain of the Jordan, saw that all of it was well-watered, before the LORD’s destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, like the garden of the LORD, like the land of Egypt, till you come to Zoar. 11And Lot chose for himself the whole plain of the Jordan, and Lot journeyed eastward, and they parted from one another. 12Abram dwelled in the land of Canaan and Lot dwelled in the cities of the plain, and he set up his tent near Sodom.
13Now the people of Sodom were very evil offenders against the LORD. 14And the LORD had said to Abram after Lot parted from him, “Raise your eyes and look out from the place where you are to the north and the south and the east and the west, 15for all the land you see, to you I will give it and to your seed forever. 16And I will make your seed like the dust of the earth—could a man count the dust of the earth, so too, your seed might be counted. 17Rise, walk about the land through its length and its breadth, for to you I will give it.” 18And Abram took up his tent and came to dwell by the Terebinths of Mamre, which are in Hebron, and he built there an altar to the LORD.
CHAPTER 13 NOTES
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7. The Canaanite and the Perizzite. This second notation of the indigenous population of Canaan, at the moment of friction between the two immigrants from Mesopotamia, suggests that they can scarcely afford such divisiveness when they are surrounded by potential enemies. (In the next episode, Abram will be compelled to bring military aid to his nephew.) There may also be a hint of irony in their dividing up a land here that already has inhabitants.
8–9. This is only the second report of direct speech of Abram. The first, his address to Sarai as they are about to enter Egypt, reveals a man fearful about his own survival. Here we get a very different image of Abram as the reasonable peacemaker and as a man conscious of family bonds in alien surroundings. The language in which he addresses Lot is clear, firm, and polite.
9. Pray, let us part company. The Hebrew is cast in the form of a polite imperative, literally: “Kindly part from me.”
10. saw that all of it was well-watered. There is no repetition of “saw” in the Hebrew; Hebrew grammar allows the single verb to govern simultaneously the direct object (“the whole plain of the Jordan”) and the relative clause that modifies the direct object. What is significant thematically is that the point of view of the entire clause is Lot’s. The writer may well have drawn on a tradition that the whole plain of the Jordan down to the Dead Sea, before some remembered cataclysm, was abundantly fertile, but it is Lot who sees the plain in hyperbolic terms, likening it to “the garden of the LORD”—presumably, Eden, far to the east—and to the fabulously irrigated Egypt to the south. (Archaeologists have in fact discovered traces of an ancient irrigation system in the plain of the Jordan.)
12. dwelled in the cities . . . set up his tent. At least in this first phase of his habitation of the plain, Lot is represented ambiguously either living in a town or camping near one. From the writer’s perspective, abandoning the seminomadic life for urban existence can only spell trouble. The verb ʾahal derived from the noun “tent” is relatively rare, and seems to mean both to set up a tent and (verse 18) to fold up a tent in preparation for moving on.
13. Now the people of Sodom. This brief observation, as many commentators have noted, suggests that Lot has made a very bad choice. The consequences will become manifest in chapter 19.
14. And the LORD had said to Abram. Although all previous translations treat this as a simple past, the word order—subject before verb—and the use of the suffix conjugation instead of the prefix conjugation that is ordinarily employed for past actions indicate a pluperfect. The definition of temporal frame is pointed and precise: once Lot actually parts from Abram, heading down to his fatal involvement in the cities of the plain, God proceeds to address His promise of the land to Abram. The utterance of the promise is already an accomplished fact as Lot takes up settlement in the plain to the east.
Raise your eyes and look. The location between Bethel and Ai is in fact a spectacular lookout point, and the already implicit contrast between Abram and Lot is extended—Abram on the heights, Lot down in the sunken plain.
16. could a man count the dust of the earth. Unusually for the use of simile in the Bible, the meaning of the simile is spelled out after the image is introduced. Perhaps this reflects the high didactic solemnity of the moment of promise, though the comparison with dust might also raise negative associations that would have to be excluded. (The great Yiddish poet Yakov Glatstein wrote a bitter poem after the Nazi genocide which proposes that indeed the seed of Abraham has become like the dust of the earth.)
17. walk about the land through its length and its breadth. Walking around the perimeter of a piece of property was a common legal ritual in the ancient Near East for taking final possession, and the formula “I have given it to So-and-so and to his sons forever” is a well-attested legal formula in the region for conveyance of property going back as far as the Ugaritic texts, composed in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B.C.E.