As
he drew near to Egypt, he said to his wife, Sarai, “Look. we both know that you’re a beautiful
woman. When the Egyptians see you
they’re going to say, Aha! That’s his wife! And kill me. But they’ll let you live. Do me a favor: tell them you’re my sister. Because of you, they’ll welcome me and let me
live.”
When
Abram arrived in Egypt, the Egyptians took one look and saw that his wife was
stunningly beautiful. Pharaoh’s princes
raved over her to Pharaoh. She was taken
to live with Pharaoh.
Because
of her, Abram got along very well: he accumulated sheep and cattle, male and
female donkeys, men and women servants, and camels. But God hit Pharaoh hard because of Abram’s
wife, Sarai; everybody in the palace got seriously sick.
Pharaoh
called for Abram, “What’s this that you’ve done to me? Why didn’t you tell me that she’s your
wife? Why did you say, ‘She’s my sister’
so that I’d take her as my wife? Here’s
your wife back—take her and get out!”
Pharaoh
ordered his men to get Abram out of the country. They sent him and his wife and everything he
owned on their way.” (Genesis 12:11-20,
The Message)
At the Egyptian border, Abraham realized he has a
problem. In his mind, a lie is the
solution. Ever been there? Strictly speaking, Abraham was simply being
“economical” with the truth, correct?
Sarah was his half-sister, as he points out when repeating this
deception again later in Genesis 20:12.
(The Hebrew language uses words equivalent to brother and sister more
loosely than English does.)
Giving the impression that the lovely Sarah is unattached
will mean someone gets attached to her.
At the time, perhaps it was acceptable for Abraham to take action to
keep the family alive through the famine, but was this the point at which
Abraham needed to trust God? Did he have any right to risk Sarah in order to
safeguard his own skin? Should Sarah have refused to cooperate; could she not
see where all this would lead?
The lovely and astonishing beautiful Sarah is duly taken
into Pharaoh’s household—in other words, into his harem. Genesis delicately refrains from telling us
what happened there; maybe the epidemic intervened before anything happened to
Sarah. Nor does it tell us how Pharaoh
managed to put two and two together.
Genesis makes no comment on the rights and wrongs of
Abraham’s action, and there are several possible implications.
One is that Genesis doesn’t think the question of when
Abraham went wrong is the important one.
I know that could seem odd to our Western mindsets because of
assumptions we make about the Bible’s purpose.
Don’t we often think the Bible exists to tell us how to live, that its
stories provide illustrations of the right and wrong kind of life, and that in
order for them to function this way, they need to pass explicit judgments on
what happens? Okay, that was a long
question. But don’t we?
What if, Genesis does not tell us its stories mainly or
simply to give us good and bad examples?
What if it’s mainly about God? Is
that too hard to conceive? Could it be
about a purpose God is pursuing in the world, and now pursuing through Abraham
& Sarah? Stories about Abraham and
Sarah are there not so much to tell us about them, but to tell us how God
relates to them in fulfilling that purpose.
One way or another, this story tells us how they got into a
mess; its significance then lies in the fact that God got them OUT OF IT,
right? They had an experience a bit like
Adam and Eve’s when the weird creature showed up in the garden, or like Noah’s
when the fruit of the vine turned out to make something happen that he had not
bargained for (or maybe he did). These
things happen. Life happens, right? The GOOD NEWS is that God does NOT abandon
them.
I have to tell you, coming to the Old Testament book of
Genesis this time, at this time in my life, trying hard to lay aside my
previous biases, understandings, and possible narrow prejudices has been
difficult . . . but a “wee” bit more exciting.
Bill Crofton
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