Genesis 12 Footnotes

12:1 Did God call Abram from Ur or from Haran? According to 11:31, it was Abram’s father Terah who decided to move his family from Ur in Mesopotamia to Canaan, though we are not told why. The context of 11:31—12:1-3 suggests that Abram was in Haran rather than Ur when God summoned him to Canaan, yet according to Stephen in Ac 7:2, God appeared to Abram in Mesopotamia “before he settled in Haran” and called him to leave for a new land. A possible solution is that God spoke to Abram while he was in Ur and that this formed part of Terah’s motive for moving his family from Ur. God could later have repeated his summons to Abram, telling him to proceed on to Canaan after his father died in Haran (Gn 11:32).

12:2 God’s promise to make Abram into “a great nation” was not fulfilled during Abram’s lifetime. However, his descendants apparently numbered over two million by the time of the exodus (some six hundred thousand men, plus their wives and many children; Ex 12:37). Abram is the physical father of the Hebrews; Jews, Christians, and Muslims all claim him as their spiritual father. Abram became “a blessing” by his example of proper worship and proclamation of the Lord’s name (Gn 12:8), as well as by his justifying faith (15:6; Rm 4:3). His name may be reflected in a tenth-century BC Egyptian list of places in the Negev that includes “The Enclosure of Abram.”

12:10-15 A tomb painting of Khnumhotep III at Beni Hasan from 870 BC depicts a trading donkey caravan of “Asiatics” visiting Egypt. Their beards, multicolored robes, weapons, and goods would have been typical of visitors from Canaan during the time of the patriarchs. During the first half of the second millennium BC, Egyptian kings had a northern palace in the eastern Delta region near Avaris. Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen points out that “the pharaohs were commonly partial to attractive foreign ladies, as finds and texts for the Middle and New Kingdoms attest.”