Genesis 11:10-32
2006.Dec.17 19:43
Trudging to Abram
Read Genesis 11:10-32 | Full Chapter
You know you’re about to have fun when you read a line like this:
Two years after the flood, when Shem was one hundred, he had a son named Arpachshad. He had more children and died at the age of six hundred. This is a list of his descendants…
(Genesis 11:10-11, CEV)
Yes, my friends, it’s Biblical fast-forward time. Here we jump through about ten generations, from Shem to Abram. A few interesting (to me) notes:
Shem’s son Arpachshad is born when Shem is 100. After that, fathers are in their late twenties or thirties when the son in this line is born (not clear to me whether it’s always the first son), until Terah, Abram’s father. Terah has children "[a]fter [he] was seventy years old" (Genesis 11:26, CEV) .
Shem lives to 600; after that, there is a general trend of decreasing lifespans to Nahor, who lives 148 years. Terah jumps back up to 205, but the general trend suggests that lifespans moved towards “modern” levels somewhat gradually, but in only a dozen or so generations, after the flood.
If I did my math right, Shem was about 556 when Terah died. Arpachshad, Shem’s son, was also still alive, at a sprite 425, with 13 years left. As was Shela, Shem’s grandson, now 390. Eber, Shem’s great-grandson, was also living. The next four generations, up to Terah, had died. That’s if I did the math right, but that strikes me as interesting, and segueys nicely, to:
Abram grew up with a lot of his ancestors still alive, including Shem, who had been on the boat. That’s a pretty cool thought to me, and I like to think that is part of the reason Abram grew into the Abraham mentioned in Hebrews:
Abraham had faith and obeyed God. He was told to go to the land that God had said would be his, and he left for a country he had never seen.
(Hebrews 11:8, CEV)
In any event, it is Terah, not Abram, who first makes toward Canaan. However, he settles in Haran, and never sees his destination.
Terah decided to move from Ur to the land of Canaan. He took along Abram and Sarai and his grandson Lot, the son of Haran. But when they came to the city of Haran, they decided to settle there instead.
(Genesis 11:31, CEV)
This decision to settle is left unexplained here. But, I read this chapter with a sense of inevitable movement towards God’s next covenant. God made a covenant with the flood’s survivors in Genesis 9, and the next recorded covenant is with Abraham. This chapter bridges those generations. Certainly many things took place between those begats, but one of the major themes of Genesis is the covenants God makes with humanity, and, typically, humanity botching their part.
The covenant with Abraham has an extra sense of promise to me, and perhaps that’s why I feel something of a narrative break at this point. Genesis can certainly be read as a prolouge to the history of Israel, which is the subject of the remainder of the Old Testament, and central to the New Testament. But for me, Genesis 11 is the end of the prologue, and I think it’s because starting with Abraham, I see the promise of Christ as the head of God’s people. But, that may just be me.
