Abram and Lot Part – Gen. 13:1 – 18
After reading the notes but before reading the passage http://www.usccb.org/bible/genesis/13, ask yourself our three basic questions: Who are the characters in this passage? When is the time in this story? [Do you remember the time of the author / editor?] What is the plot, the story line? Another thing to focus on might be who talks to whom and, of course, what do they say? Questions are the answers, or the questions are more important that the answers.
Assuming that you have been faithful to some or all of the first paragraph, who are the characters in this story? Before we began though Heber asked, where did Lot get all his wealth? He also observed the passage never tells us that Lot had a wife. Now here are a couple of other things to reflect on, the passage doesn’t really answer Heber’s question. So it is a real question for Heber in his world but it isn’t a concern for the author in his world. This is history. Does this fact raise any questions, comments, thoughts for you?
Ken asked a different kind of question, he wanted to know why the author included the reference to Sodom. I reminded the group that Sodom and Gomorrah, even to this day, are symbols of wicked men doing evil things; however adequately we understand that story. The towns had a similar symbolic meaning for the audience of the editor, the Israelites of the 5th c BC. As Carol was to mention later in the discussion, Lot got the better real estate but in the words of Michael, Lot was moving into a bad neighborhood. Something of this type of meaning probably was being conveyed to the original audience as it did to us, the contemporary audiences of the text.
Returning to our task at hand, Annette led the way by reminding us of the presence of the Lord but it will help also to recall when in the story does the Lord appear, to whom does he talk, and what does he have to say? [More questions.] In rapid succession the following characters were identified: Abram, Lot, Herdsmen, Canaanites and the Perizzites, the inhabitants ofSodom. (In some versions, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, occur within parenthesis.) It is quite clear that the original authors did not place these names in parentheses. The editors of our version did though. Why? Again evidence of history, the words were judged by a later person not to have been part of the original text. inserted later by someone else. Why was this done? How did we figure this out? I raise these questions to help you realize the nature of the text you have in front of you; there’s more there than meets the eye.
Before we move to the plot [next week] our group made some observations about the story itself. Mark made a keen observation that Abram, as he did in the previous passage, anticipated a problem developing and responded to it before it got out of hand; a clue to one of the many sides of Abraham’s character. His observation also reveals the power of a group studying the bible together. You may not have observed that but Mark did.
I suggested that in a nomadic culture land conflicts are common and separation is a common way to resolve them. After all, they didn’t have surveyors with GPS devices laying out the coordinates of their property, recording in at the county seat, etc. To state the obvious, they lived at a different time in a different world. We have to keep these facts in the forefront of our thinking so that we can more easily hear God’s word which emerges out of these concrete settings but transcends them to speak to us today. Such is the very power of the word of God.
The question to confronted us next week will be what does this story say to us who are immersed in the 21st c., at least 25 centuries later than the audience to whom the story was originally written and maybe another 10 centuries more for the time of the story itself. History matters if we are to hear what is being spoken then and now.
As always, our site is filled with questions but the real thing that matters are your questions, comments, etc.